Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Your letters are so gloriously unchanged, morale so high and serenity intact, it’s miraculous. I think often and long of those marvellous years before the war and with enormous love and gratitude. It was really the beginning of life for me, and changed everything. How lucky I was! Now: bad news briefly. Mamie [3] died last year, having married Robert Mathias and lived very happily. Poor Prue [4] died ten years ago, a frightful loss, through that wretched illness in her back; but not painfully, and just as marvellous as she always had been. She was much beloved by a painter called Robert Beulah; but I don’t think she ever quite got over Guy. Bill [5] you know all about (I have tried to ring him once or twice, but he seems to be away). Biddy [6] lives in Scotland, but is down here quite often, and we meet whenever we are both in London, which is not very often. She is as sweet as ever and quite unchanged. I went to Weston to Sachie & Georgia’s last year, and know they would send their love, as we always talk about you a lot. I’ll be able to tell you all about Joan (not Jean!) when we meet. She’s two years older than me, fair haired, rather grave and beautiful looking, pretty shy, very intelligent, devoted to literature, music, painting – not as an executant – v. funny; beaucoup de race [‘plenty of pedigree’], as they say, and much loved by writers, painters, musicians, poets etc. She was called Joan Eyres Monsell as a girl; rather short-sighted so wears dark glasses a lot of the time, so’s not to look it! She knows all about before we first met – about nineteen years ago, isn’t it extraordinary! – and specially asked me to send her love. She left for Greece two weeks ago, as I was held up here getting a book ready for press (called Roumeli, about Greece, due out this autumn. [7] I’ll send a copy.) We are trying to build a small house there, in the S. Peloponnese, by the sea among olives and I go there when my Danubian job is over. She became a friend of Eileen and Matila [8] (he’s absolutely shattered by Eileen’s death, alas. I will see him before I set off) and liked Alexander [Mourouzi] very much. What heaven it was seeing him in Athens! Just as nice and funny and charming as ever. I’m thoroughly up to date with all your news, thanks to him, also, to a lesser extent, through Nicky. [9]

  I’m sending off all my books to you: ‘The Traveller’s Tree’, ‘A Time to Keep Silence’, ‘The Violins of St Jacques’, ‘Mani’, and a book by my Cretan guide during the war (a shepherd) called ‘The Cretan Runner’. The Traveller’s Tree, my first, which appeared ages ago, is dedicated to you.

  I won’t write any more now, my darling B., as I do want this to get off after all my false starts! Do write to me ℅ Hot. Sacher, Vienna, and write down the Greek Address, which is ‘Kardamyli, Messenia, Greece’.

  Tons of fond love from

  Paddy

  Also tremendous bessonnades to Pomme, and Ins x x x

  This is such a quick and careless letter. I wish you had got my other long one!

  How fascinating that excerpt from my youthful diary. [10] It seems such a short time ago.

  [1] Ina (‘Ins’) Catargi, née Donici, daughter of Princess Hélène (‘Pomme’) and her husband Constantin.

  [2] Bucharest.

  [3] Mamie Branch, Guy’s mother. For the Branch family, see note 2 on page 6.

  [4] Prue Branch.

  [5] William Arthur Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1893–1977), 7th Duke of Portland. His wife Clothilde, who had eloped with Balasha’s husband, later divorced Bentinck on the grounds of adultery with Balasha.

  [6] Guy Branch’s sister Biddy [Hubbard], who had visited PLF and BC at Băleni in the summer of 1938.

  [7] But not published until the following April.

  [8] Prince Matila Costiesco Ghyka (1881–1965), Rumanian novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher and diplomat, married Eileen O’Connor, daughter of a British diplomat. An English-language edition of his memoir The World Mine Oyster was published by Heinemann in 1961, with an introduction by PLF.

  [9] Nicky Chrissoveloni, an old friend of Paddy’s who had managed to get out of Communist-controlled Rumania thanks to the good offices of the Greek Foreign Minister.

  [10] See letter to Jock Murray [undated, winter, 1965], page 237.

  ‘The great news is that I went to see B, Pomme and Constantin in their village (on the back of niece Ina’s motorbike) and stayed there (only moving about outside after dark) for 24 hours,’ Paddy wrote to Joan afterwards, while he was still in Rumania. ‘Time and trouble have left visible marks on all (except Ina, fourteen when I left, now forty) but otherwise they were miraculously intact and there was lots of reminiscing and laughter. I’m so pleased I went; it was a momentous thing for everybody concerned. I haven’t quite come round from it yet, half marvellous, half terribly sad and shattering.’

  In reality he had been shocked to find Balasha, now in her mid sixties, worn down by hardship, ‘a broken ruin’ of her former self. Her sad state aroused in him feelings of both pity and gallantry.

  To Balasha Cantacuzène

  15 November 1965

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  IN HASTE

  Balasha darling,

  I’ve just got your letter of the 21st of Oct. – the one about Ileană Sturdza [née Ghika]. If she’s still there when I go, I’ll make a bee-line for her and do all I can – but it won’t be for about a month, alas. Athens seems about as remote from here as Bucharest did from Băleni.

  Also, by the same post, a marvellous surprise – i.e., a telegram from A. Argyropoulos [1] saying he has brought a MS from you, written thirty years ago – which must be those chapters on Greece that I laboured away at in the octagonal library [at Băleni]. You were an angel to save them. I can’t think how you managed under the circumstances. I long to get at them and see what they are like, but will have to wait for that, too, until I go to Athens. . .

  I’ve written to a very good bookshop in Chelsea – John Sandoe Ltd, 10 Blacklands Terrace, Sloane Square, SW3 – and asked them to send the two Brontë books and Chambers’ Dictionary, which I always use, and a fascinating book called Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, a positive treasure-house of amusing oddities. They are also sending the two vols. of Painter’s Life and Study of Proust, of which the second vol. is just out. [2] I know you were never an admirer, condemning him, as many people do, on the grounds of snobbery. I have read clean through all the books twice, and isolated ones many times since, and each time with greater wonder and admiration. Do give him another chance as he was so many things beside the fairly superficial defect of snobbery. The two vols. are simply fascinating; incidentally, there is a lot about Rumanians in it, also pictures – Antoine & Emmanuel B [3] (Marthe, [4] too, needless to say!), Anna de Noailles, [5] Hélène Morand; [6] but the real interest is Proust himself and the interrelation of his work and life. Do give him another chance!

  I’ve also asked Sandoe’s to send you (and of course it means Pomme too) any books you ask for, in case I’m off in the wilds somewhere; we’d better wait till I get their answer (I’m sure they will agree) but please do use them! It’s awful being deprived of books, and I’d be so happy to think I was being a help about this; and rather sad if you don’t use him.

  Joan’s back here, and sends her love. Rain and olive gathering have put a stop to building for a month or two. It has suddenly become very rough, windy and wild here, but it only lasts for a few days; then brilliant autumn days again and blazing starry nights.

  Please forgive this untidy scrawl. More later on! Lots of fond love to you all from

  Paddy

  [1] See next letter, page 237.

  [2] George Painter’s Marcel Proust: A Biography was published in two volumes, in 1959 and 1965. It was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize.

  [3] Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878–1951) and his brother Emmanuel (1874–1917). The Bibescos were close friends with Marcel Proust, to the extent that they even shared a secret language of their own devising. PLF knew Princess Priscilla Helen Alexandra Bibesco (1920–2004), the daughter of Prince Antoine and his wife Elizabeth (herself daughter of the British prime minister,
H. H. Asquith).

  [4] Marthe, Princess Bibesco (1886–1973), née Lahovary, writer and socialite, a Rumanian exile in France.

  [5] Anna, Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles (1876–1933), French writer of Rumanian extraction. Proust wrote her sentimental letters.

  [6] Hélène Morand (1879–1975), née Chrissoveloni, was Proust’s last love. After his death she divorced her husband, Prince Dimitri Soutzo, and married his friend, Paul Morand.

  By the winter of 1965 Paddy was in the final stages of work on Roumeli, the follow-up to Mani, which would be published in 1966.

  To Jock Murray

  undated [winter 1965?]

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Dear Jock,

  Here, at long and terrible last, are the Introduction and the map. I won’t describe all the upheavals that have delayed things – sudden loss of our rooms in Kalamata, shifting & storing furniture, rains at Kardamyli, breaking camp, finding rooms in the village etc., with a plague of other minor things connected with hours, workmen, architects, delays, false starts, postponements, etc. I’m dreadfully sorry about this.

  This is the fourth Introduction I’ve written. The others were long, rambling and diffuse, and it occurred to me on reading each in turn, enough to put anyone off reading the book. My reaction to any demand for writing at this moment seems to be to dig an enormous bog and flounder in it for a year. I hope this final version doesn’t seem too short.

  The number of places where the book has been worked on, at the end, is meant to be something of a joke. One might put them in tiny italics in a line running right across the bottom of the page?

  At the beginning of the ‘South of the Gulf ’ chapter, could we insert, if it’s not too late, the sentence ‘Perhaps they were after lobster too,’ just before the last sentence, describing a horrible meal in Astakos, which the cats turn up their noses at? Idiotically, I have somehow left my set of proofs with the stored luggage in Kalamata, so I can’t quote the actual words.

  Now, the map. Johnny [1] left me a roughly traced outline and the map he traced it from. On the tracing paper I have put the regional names – provinces, mountain-ranges, islands, seas etc. – which ought to be shown, and on the map I have underlined the place names which ought to come in, and, on a sheet of foolscap, the spellings where the map ones differ from the books. ROUMELI, and also KRAVARA should be shown in a very vague way, I think, and the difference between plain and mountain indicated; but I don’t think many details are needed. I’ve talked a lot about it in Athens and Johnny’s ideas seemed very good. I love his cover.

  Alas, Abyssinia is out, I’m afraid. I daren’t move away from here for long while the house is being built – they have such strange and erratic ideas. My plan is to come home just before Christmas and stay three to four weeks, then back here. My immediate plan is to finish my Danube article now – long overdue, and as you can imagine, much, much too long, and the delay bringing much airmail obloquy across the Atlantic ocean – and then at last, give the death blow to Shanks’s Europe (Walking Back? Parallax?). [2] I wonder if the heroine who was struggling with the MSs has finished it (I’m in a fine position to ask questions like this). I ask with especial sympathy as I’m teaching myself to type and frequently find myself flummoxed by a thicket of indecipherable text, corrections, and balloons. It used to take me an hour per page, it is now down to thirty-five minutes – copying, I mean, I could never do it direct – so she has all my sympathy. However well she has done it, it is bound to be full of mistakes so I implore you not to look at it. I fondly hope that this is going to change everything. In future I will type out each day’s work in the evening, and hand over a corrected typescript to a proper pro when each book is finished.

  An extraordinary thing happened when I was in Rumania. My old friend Balasha Cantacuzène (dedicatee of T’s Tree) managed to salvage, when she was turned out of her house in Moldavia by the communists in the middle of the night at the end of the war, an inch-thick diary [3] I kept on the Great Trudge, covering Bratislava to Bucharest, the Iron Gates to Vidin, all Bulgaria, Bucharest, and the Black Sea Coast as far as Constantinople, including a month in the city. I am surprised how close my reconstruction of it is to this jotted – sometimes very extensively – account, and fascinated by the occasional divergences and lacunae. Nevertheless, I think I’ll let the later version stand, though the last bit will be a help for the part that remains unwritten – so have no qualms! Now, suddenly this evening, comes a telegram from Argyropoulos, the retiring Greek ambassador in Bucharest, that Balasha handed over to him an enormous wad of manuscript, which must be chapters of a work I began to write in Rumania about crossing Macedonia and Thrace on horseback during the Venizelist revolution, [4] when I was twenty. I must have written them in 1939, before coming here. I don’t think there’s much to be done with them, but I long to see them as a curiosity. Strange, these sudden resurrections, and a bit disconcerting.

  Well no more for the present, Jock, except great contrition for being such a terrible stumbling block. Do let me know that the enclosed have arrived safely – I had a slightly anxious time about the fate of the proofs, for which the postal strike here was entirely to blame.

  We broke camp three weeks ago, owing to the rain, and are now in the little hotel at Kardamyli. It is pouring with rain, the sea pounds away outside, the Milano Sierra butane-gas lamp hisses at my elbow.

  Yours ever

  Paddy

  Many greetings to your son John.

  I can’t bear the photo on the back of the cover. I wish we could find something better, and I will have a hunt.

  [1] The neo-romantic artist John Craxton (1922–2009) travelled extensively in Greece after the war, particularly in Crete, where he would eventually settle. He painted the covers and prepared the maps for PLF’s books.

  [2] The book about PLF’s ‘Great Trudge’, eventually published as A Time of Gifts.

  [3] ‘ [I]n Rumania, in a romantic and improbable way too complicated to recount, I recovered a diary I had left in a country-house there in 1939’ (A Time of Gifts, page 248).

  [4] An attempted coup d’état against the Greek government in March 1935.

  Though Paddy’s affair with Ricki Huston had ended some years earlier, he would remain in intermittent contact with her until her sudden death in a car accident in 1969.

  To Ricki Huston

  undated [1965?]

  as from Olympic Palace Hotel

  Athens

  Darling Ricki,

  Many thanks for both letters, which arrived two days running, a tremendous treat for Kalamata, a town nobody writes to. I think people are subconsciously repelled by the letter K. It’s the reverse of the letter X, which always goes to people’s heads. Perhaps if sex were spelt seks or segs there wouldn’t be half so much fuss about it: nothing very glamorous about segs kittens or seksual intercourse but write ‘sex killer slays six’ and you’re in business. . .

  Here’s another Eh, soul ill, oak we? [1] I fear there may be one or two minor differences as I haven’t got the original text – tegst – handy. . .

  No more now, as I want this to get off. I leave for Athens in a few days and then London, within a week or two, so see you and pretty Allegra [2] then.

  Lots of love from

  Paddy

  P.S.

  The Oracle

  When shall I meet her after dark?

  When the clothes horse neighs and the fire dogs bark.

  When will she love me all her days?

  When the fire dogs bark and the clothes horse neighs.

  When will my handsome Pete come back?

  When the batsman’s duck begins to quack.

  When shall I know how she really feels?

  When the fishplates swim and the pig iron squeals.

  When shall I know who loves me best?

  When the dockside crane constructs its nest.

  When shall I see my darling Dick?

  When Crompton’s mule [3] beg
ins to kick.

  When shall I hear from my pretty Jo?

  When the dog leg lifts and the ballcocks crow.

  When shall I and my true love meet?

  When the battering ram begins to bleat.

  When shall I make her mend her ways?

  The day when the donkey-engine brays.

  When shall I be in bed with her?

  When the cat o’ nine tails starts to purr.

  How shall I tell the stroke of Doom?

  Bow Bells’ bang and Big Ben’s boom.

  and so on . . .!

  [1] A soliloquy.

  [2] Allegra Huston (b. 1964), RH’s daughter from her affair with John Julius Norwich.

  [3] A machine used for spinning cotton.

  To Balasha Cantacuzène

  3 July 1966

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Post leaving! please forgive this uncorrected screed.

  Balasha, darling,

  I feel so awful not having written for so long – not through not wanting to (far from it!), but waiting for the right moment to settle down and write a proper answer to your lovely ones; so do please forgive and don’t think me faithless or callous, because it’s exactly the opposite really – just a very bad case of le mieux étant l’ennemi du bien [the perfect being the enemy of the good]. I must cure myself of this, because, judging by me, what one wants is news and a sign, however brief; lovely long letters if possible, but not silence and neither. I seem to get fixations about letters – I mean letters to people one adores – longing for the time, the place and the state of mind all miraculously to coincide and join forces in producing exactly the kind of letter one wants to send and thinks would please at the other end; especially with you. I remember so well how seriously you read, think about, and enjoy them: all the characteristics, in fact, that make you such a good and thoughtful letter writer. So my periods of seeming pen-paralysis are perhaps prompted by subconscious vanity, which is absurd. So to hell with that, and here goes, sitting under an olive with masons charging up and down ladders, hammers thumping all round, stones crashing and mortar sloshing and Niko Kolokotrones, the master mason – and, since three weeks, Joan’s and my koumbaros [god-brother] (godson is called Yorgo-Mihali) – dashing up every now and then with questions. I do hope the house turns out all right. The stone, chopped out of the mountainside a quarter of a mile away, and brought here by mule, as there’s only a goat path, is such a lovely colour, that it can’t be ugly. We’ve managed to find a lot of old and faded tiles, discoloured russet; so with luck, the whole thing will melt into the surroundings and almost disappear. We have got two beehives, and Joan disappears just like Pomme at Băleni with mask – not a fencing one, alas! – and smoke gun. I don’t know when we’ll be able to move in. Everything takes such ages. Meanwhile, we are installed in the tiny hotel in the village, but have lunch under an archway of the house, bathe, sleep, then I try to do some work, and when the workmen go, and everything’s quiet, we drink and talk and sometimes play the gramophone and watch the sun set across the Messenian gulf and then go back to the village when it’s dark, and have an awful dinner in the local taverna washed down by the worst retsina in all Greece. But the village and the country are so beautiful that it doesn’t matter a bit. I think the villagers are beginning to like and trust us. After the first delighted welcome, which one always finds in Greece, a period of méfiance [suspicion] reigned: what on earth were we up to? Spying? Lunacy? Planning some dreadful scheme? They are very suspicious of themselves and each other and everything in the Mani, and the mountain villages are a network of feuds – no longer mortal ones, thank God, slander, claustrophobia and the feeling of isolation, changing values and abandonment, as most of the young people emigrate to Germany, temporarily, to work in factories, or permanently to Canada and Australia and, if they are allowed in, America. As all they long to do is to get away, no wonder they are puzzled by seemingly sophisticated Europeans settling in what seems to them so wild and God-forsaken a place and all our talk of beautiful mountains, sea, rocks and light must sound like madness. But, thank God, the initial distrust is slowly evaporating and we are beginning to be taken for granted and I hope even liked.