Patrick Leigh Fermor
Page 30
The thing I really dread is that the beauty of the place should prove its undoing. You’ve no idea, darling, of what a ghastly plague tourism is turning out to be; I’ve touched on it a bit in Roumeli, but it’s much worse than that. Athens has become, except in winter, a slight nightmare, and outside it, and in some of the most beautiful parts, things are happening which would fill you with horror. I hate to think of all the Greek rustic virtues being slowly eroded by creeping Western exploitation. It is still intact here, touch wood, but danger hovers. Meanwhile, one must give thanks for every day, month, year of reprieve.
I’m terribly excited by your kind words about Roumeli; [1] I thought of you very often when writing it, and I love to think of you reading it with such penetration and getting every single point. After all, one only writes, really, for about half a dozen people, and trusts to luck that some others might like it and even buy it!. . .
Niko [Ghika] is a heavenly man, tall and Stravinsky-esque in appearance, and, I think, a brilliant painter, one of the only ones who has managed to convey Greece, the most unpaintable country in the world, on canvas. Rather solemn, thoughtful, generous and kind . . . Barbara is a fascinating person, sister of Jeremy Hutchinson [2] (do you remember? Guy’s great Oxford friend, who Biddy had had a youthful schwärmerei for [crush on]? He came to Earl’s Walk once or twice), daughter of the judge St John Hutchinson and Mary H., half-Strachey, very high Bloomsbury, francophile bluestocking, a great love of Clive Bell’s for years, up to her neck in the world of Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley etc. She – Barbara – is beautiful, intuitive, full of flair, with a great gift for friendship, and side-splittingly funny; first married to Lord Rothschild, an odd, eccentric, brilliant physicist and Cambridge don; then to Rex Warner, the novelist, poet and Greek scholar and translator (a great pal of ours), and finally to Niko; setting, I may say, many hearts on fire in between whiles. The first marriage produced a tall and serious son – heir to the famous banking house in England – and two beautiful, unusual and gifted daughters. . .
How wretched about that horrid dream. But here I am! Do tell me what it was; because, oddly I was indirectly involved in a vendetta [3] – all over now – and was nearly shot at from behind a rock in Crete (all part of war-goings-on!). I know how awful such dreams can be.
No more for now, Balasha darling, as I want this interim letter to get off. There are lots of questions to answer, and lots more to say, so I’ll do better in a few days’ time. Meanwhile, tons of fondest love, and also to Pomme & Constantin.
from Paddy
xxx
[1] In a long, undated letter, BC had enthused about ‘your beautiful Roumeli’.
[2] Jeremy Nicolas Hutchinson (b. 1915), lawyer, worked on the defence team in the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 and became a QC in 1961. He was married to the actress Peggy Ashcroft (1940–66).
[3] With Yorgo Tsangarakis (see pages 311–14).
To Xan Fielding
nearly mid July 1966
Kardamyli
Messenia
Ξάν, χρυσό μου [My dear Xan],
Κακὸ χρόνο νάχω ποὺ ἄργησα τόσο πολὺ νὰ σ’ ἀπαντήσω! [Curse me for being so late in replying to you!] Things have been in such a flat spin here that I’ve kept postponing an answer to your marvellous letter, and you know how it is! But I can’t tell you how bucked I was by the nice things you said about Roumeli and I have been luxuriantly basking in the afterglow ever since. All this was squared or cubed by the thought that you were one of the very few people to read the book who were qualified to grasp scores of things that must have been double-Dutch to many readers. I absolutely agree about the v. constructive criticisms too. It’s awful the way one gets certain words or groups of words into one’s head and up they come à chaque bout de change [at every turn] irrespective of appropriateness or irrelevance! ‘Horny hands’ – it’s too awful! For many a long year I could scarcely write a page that didn’t contain the words ‘trajectory’, ‘parabola’, and ‘ambience’; now ‘h.h.’ has taken over, but I hope only temporarily. Perhaps one could switch these defaced counters round: ‘The cigarette smouldered in his parabola’; ‘The shell traversed the battlefield with a wide and horny hand’; ‘The arch crossed the back lane with its horny hand’; ‘The horny hand in the crowded synagogue was stifling’; ‘The rainbow’s ambience was taut and multicoloured’; ‘His ambience rasped on the axe-helm’; ‘Affected by the trajectory, he cupped his parabolas and stopped the ball’s horny hand in mid-ambience’, etc. Perhaps one should find two words as different as possible in every way, and try the same kind of switch e.g. an anvil and an hour: ‘I hammered the hour an anvil ago’; ‘Two and a half anvils had passed before Miss Mossop heard the clang of the hour’ – nearly all right. ‘The heavy anvils dragged past interminably before Harriet heard the negro strike the hour!’ OK . . . To hell with all this.
I think I’ve shot my bolt about Greece for the time being and plan to finish your book – the one Andrew calls ‘Shanks’s Europe’ – and then try to launch out on something completely imaginary but I’m not quite sure what.
Geo K [atsimbalis] – also Janetta, who has just been here – says wonderful things about your new house. [1] It does sound heavenly. I love Uzès and all the country round, and Joan and I, as we settle down to the cold fried potatoes, the almost tasteless mullet of the Messenian Gulf and the ghastly local retsina, munch wistfully, thinking of the marvels that must be sizzling and glowing on your plates, at the same time and only a few meridian of longitude away . . . Larry [Durrell]’s house sounds amazing and enormous (I’m writing to him by the same post equally in answer to a kind Roumeli letter.) Building passion seems to have us all by the throat. The walls of ours are up, and rafters are beginning to sprout, and tiles to pile up under the olives; but it’ll be many a long month before we’re in it. Everything here is hard and slow, in spite of a heavenly master-mason called Niko Kolokotrones (!), [2] now Joan’s and my god-brother. I think the house will be terribly nice, thanks to the lovely surroundings – on a ledge of olives between a little bay and tall russet-coloured mountains – and, once in, we’ll be able to do something about the food and the drink. We long for you both to see it. There’s quite a nice little hotel in the village, rather surprisingly, which we live in until we can force an entry. Much better than our former down-at-hell 1925 jazz-Vorticist flat in boiling Kalamata, above the waterfront and an avenue of jujube trees not far from the scene of our semi-submarine feast. [3]
I ought to have written ages ago about the marvellous shower of gold [4] suddenly cascading down like Zeus in disguise on the cowering Danaë! [5] It’s really wonderful news and it has filled anyone who has ever spoken of it with unalloyed delight – a high tribute, when one thinks of the undisguisable sorrow that the good luck of others inflicts on most! It’s not only marvellous, but a singularly dashing reversal of fortune, far too bold and far-fetched for use in a novel. Amy [Smart] says there are maddening delays; hard to think of more exasperating torment, but never mind. Τοῦτος ὁ ἀνήφορος κατήφορο θὰ φέρει [This uphill will lead to a downhill].
V. v. many thanks again for kind words about Roumeli. Do begin to formulate plans about a return to Greece, and a descent here, and encourage Larry to do the same. Meanwhile tons of fond love & hugs to you & Daph
from Paddy
[1] After living in Portugal and Tangier (and briefly in the Cévennes), Xan and Daphne Fielding had settled in a farmhouse near Uzès in southern France, not far from Lawrence Durrell.
[2] Kolokotrones was the name of a famous Greek general and leader in the war of independence against Turkish rule.
[3] One very hot day in 1946 Paddy, Joan, Xan and Daphne had carried the restaurant table waist-deep into the sea and eaten there.
[4] XF had launched a court case to recover money owing on a house in Nice where he had been brought up. PLF’s congratulations were premature: the ca
se was protracted, and the shower became a trickle at best.
[5] Danaë, a princess of Argos in the Peloponnese, was locked away in a subterranean bronze chamber by her father. Her prison, however, was easily infiltrated by Zeus, who impregnated her in the guise of a golden shower. She conceived and bore him a son, the hero Perseus.
To Jock Murray
24 September 1966
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Jock,
Jane Boulenger [1] sent me two copies of the American Roumeli, asking me what to do with the others in London. The answer is, burn them. Do please write to Canfield and find out what has happened, and, above all, sever all connections that may exist between Harper’s and me and make sure that never again do they have anything to do with me or mine. They have written asking me to write something – I don’t know who or what for – about a new Mount Athos book they are doing. I’m not writing to them yet, as my letter would be too intemperate for comprehension; but I will: when the indignation and fury have simmered down to some semblance of articulacy.
Surely the only condition on which we let them publish the book, after their slovenly exploit with Mani, was that they should manufacture an entirely new book and thus be compelled to take some trouble about it. Expecting this, and waiting to hear from them, I had drawn up a long list of all the errors and misprints in an edition, also a number of deletions and additions and some important changes. I assumed that we would go through the normal routine of galley-and page-proofs. But not a single word did I get from them, and the first news of this American book reached me in this revolting fait accompli, replete with all the blemishes and blunders that contrived to find their way into the English edition: doubly glaring, and shaming here, because uncorrected; and, above all, identical; down to the off-hand shoving of the dedication to a left-hand page mainly occupied with small-type information about copyright and other trade matters. (For me a dedication is like throwing a cloak over someone’s balcony before a bullfight; it’s distressing to find it hanging, as it were, in the staff-lavatory.)
There were a tremendous number of misprints in the English edition which were quite non-existent in the final page proofs; they even invaded the running captions – I was particularly longing for the ridiculous BAR RUINED CHAIRS [2] to be redeemed. (Perhaps compositors are not expected to know the Sonnets by heart; but surely they might have thought there was something odd here?) But here they all are, all the ludicrous slip-shod errors, punctiliously, slavishly and illiterately reproduced in this repulsive book; every single one. I went from page to page with growing dismay and fury and when I got to Bar Ruined Chairs, pitched the book from the top of the cliff as far out to sea as I could throw.
Why didn’t they give me a chance to correct all this? Why didn’t they rectify some of the obvious howlers themselves? Have they merely photographed the English edition? If so, this is a direct breach of the one condition on which we let them have it. The alignment, pagination, type, etc. look suspiciously similar. If so, what can we do about it? The whole thing is a disgrace, and I am delighted to think that this disaster rules out any further connection with these callous, and, it seems to me, underhand people. Cold comfort. I begin to understand why they didn’t write.
The whole thing is mysterious and shattering. Do, please, throw some light on it if you can and suggest what we ought to do.
Yours ever, but in bewilderment and disarray,
Paddy
P.S. Perhaps it would be best to send them a copy of this letter to prepare them for the more lucid one which is beginning to take shape in my mind.
P.P.S. George Bonthorpe [3] writes that the income tax people need £50 quickly, and I owe them £20, it seems. He also says you have got about £100 in hand for me – so could you please hand them over to him for these two noble causes . . . Do, please, for heaven’s sake let the Bank have anything that comes in as they are kicking up a terrible fuss. It’s rather urgent. Forgive haste!
[1] Originally John Murray’s secretary; then in charge of foreign rights.
[2] The running head on page 93 of Roumeli should have read ‘Bare ruin’d choirs’, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:
‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.’
[3] Presumably PLF’s accountant.
To Ann Fleming
7 November 1966
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Annie,
The state of play about this place at the moment is like Dr Johnson & the Giant’s Causeway: worth seeing, but not worth coming to see. The house still has not a safe roof and few walls. If you were coming to Greece I’d be awfully sad if you didn’t come here, but there is too little to offer at the moment, except the heavenly view, to inflict the trip on anyone. There is a nice little hotel with an awful loo, whatever food one can find in the village is pretty hopeless ( Joan did some heavenly cooking in a rush hut). Some parts of Greece, and this is one, are so backward they don’t know the difference between nice and nasty. I long for you to have another excuse to come to Greece, as I can’t wait for you to see this place, however unfinished. The hotel will be empty any moment now, or you could doss down in Joan’s tent, and we could live happily like neighbouring sheikhs. So, if you have the faintest urge to head for Greece, it would be the greatest possible treat for me. If you did, the decks will be clear any second now as far as work goes, and we could go for a lovely spin in the Mani or Peloponnese. The weather is lovely, with a hint of autumn after the blaze – and then the unprecedented short deluge, cruel to tent-dwellers – of August. . .
I think the house will be very pretty, in its rough Maniot way, chiefly because of the simple, solid, rather noble local style and the great beauty of the rock out of which it is built – a mixture of light grey, gold, pink and russet, wonderfully harmonious and happy in juxtaposition. So far, there is only a huge cistern 12 feet deep, over which a loggia with three, I must say, massive and beautiful arches sheltering the well head, roofed with many beams and reed; a thick-walled room, and a cool and roomy cellar with an arched vault, and, outside, an outdoor staircase running across one side, over a steep arched entry to the cellar – later to be filled with barrels – to where one wing of the eventually L-shaped house will rest on top of what is already built, the other wing extending across a rocky olive terrace. So what we now have is below the ultimate ground level. Here’s a v. rough sketch of what it may look like in the end.
The part filled in in ink is the only part which is actually up; not much, as you see. It looks big, but will, eventually, have only 3 bedrooms, perhaps 4, a nice kitchen, 1 bath, 2 or 3 showers, 3 loos, a gallery – & in picture, a nice wide corridor, and a nice big drawing room (X to X) with a square jutting bay window B. As you see, the wall has a stone circular window in it, cribbed from those oriels at Stanway. [1] We’ll have to add another room and a studio, if it can be managed; but a bit later. The ceiling is about to go on the part already built. The outside walls are about a yard thick, which makes lovely slanting window embrasures, and, we hope, cool as a tomb in midsummer, heatable in the mild winters. The masons and workmen are marvellous chaps, terribly excited about what they are up to, and enormous fun; all from the nearby hill villages. My regime is Spartan since Joan left three days ago, but helped out by figs, which I pick on rising between five and six, marvellously cool; and by cantaloupes which cut like Cuban sunsets.