When we all got back to London [after spending Christmas at Chatsworth], we went with Ins and Michel to a party of Diana Cooper’s and ended up sitting on the floor singing to John Julius Norwich – D’s son – playing the guitar (most of the singing done by JJ, Ina and me), to Diana’s delight, who adores that sort of thing. Everyone a bit tight in the nicest possible way. . .
There was another lovely dinner at Barbara’s, where we all were, and Lucy (B’s daughter by Rex Warner,* her middle husband) and a great friend of ours called Lady Smart. (Isn’t it a marvellous name? Like something out of Sheridan.) Amy is a Christian Lebanese, ultra civilised, a painter, wildly intelligent and intuitive, captivating and maddening by turns, and has read everything in French and English under the sun. She is the widow of an enchanting man, Walter Smart, a great wartime friend of ours in Cairo, Oriental Minister at his Embassy for years and years, and, with Amy, a great friend of Larry Durrell’s – he’s the model for Mountolive, [6] transposed – Robin Fedden and, formerly, of Prue’s during her Middle East wanderings. They lived between Cairo and Gadencourt near Pacy-sur-Eure, on the edge of Normandy and the Île de France, in a rambling, book-filled, farm-like village house where I, and sometimes Joan and I, lived for two winters years ago, to write . . . After dinner, almost without meaning to, and no doubt helped on by whisky – having been slightly teased by Amy about Joan’s and my long and slightly irregular association – I said that we’d been meaning to put it right for years and years, but had both been too diffident to press the other. (Quite true! We’d toyed with it again & again, firmly planned to sometime . . . Talk about velléitaire! Now, Kardamyli made it idiotic not to.) So why not now? Huge excitement broke out, Joan and me overjoyed, everyone else too. In fact Amy became so possessive and bossy about it, in her Bashkirtzeff-like ebullience [7] (could have throttled her!), and although it was all her doing, we almost felt like calling it off! Not really, of course. But it was the fuss connected with such occasions that had subconsciously, I think, been giving us both cold feet for ages. Anyway, a mood of great rejoicing and hilarity superseded. Ins looked surprised, amused and delighted, twigged at once our fleeting moment of Amy-induced exasperation. I rather wanted to send you a joyous telegram at once, but she advised against it. . .
Getting married, even in a registry office, wasn’t quite as easy as I thought. One has to establish two weeks’ residence from the day one requests it, at Caxton Hall, Westminster. There was a certain amount of teasing from friends, when it all got about (we tried to keep it secret to avoid fuss, but no go). My line was that neither Joan nor I ‘believed in long engagements’. On the fateful morning, I waited for Joan, Barbara ( Joan’s sponsor), Niko [Ghika] and Patrick Kinross (mine) in Whites,[2] swigging brandy and soda till the car arrived with all of them in. Wheeler, the barman, dashed down the stairs with a full glass of brandy which he pushed through the window, for us to sip in turns on the way. (‘You’ll need it! All the best!’) Actually, it all went off painlessly, nearly as easy as getting a dog licence. We all went for a recovery swig in a pub round the corner, then back to Barbara’s, where she’d got a lovely luncheon – oysters, delicious champagne, a marvellous old-fashioned round of beef – and to eat it, those in the car, us, Amy, Diana Cooper, Maurice Bowra, Cyril Connolly and his wife Deirdre. No family on either side. It was a hilarious meal, very strange and pretty with everything white and gleaming in the garden under falling snow, a log fire blazing in B’s pretty house; it might have been in Cracow or St Petersburg. Maurice – you remember what a friend of Guy’s he used to be? – drove back to Oxford where he is Warden of Wadham College and vice-chancellor. (He’s marvellous. The funniest talker since Dr Johnson.) [8] In the evening, Patrick Kinross (tall, rubicund, jolly, once a journalist under his earlier name of P. Balfour, now a serious writer on Middle Eastern affairs and history, and the biographer of Atatürk) gave another feast with all the same people as luncheon plus lots more: Iris Tree (wonderful, I’ll write lots more about her another time), her son Ivan Moffat, a tremendous crony of mine, Coote Lygon, Magouche (now back from Florence), Raymond Mortimer, J. Julius, Andrew Devonshire (Debo stuck in Derbyshire, alas) and lots more. (Couldn’t find Biddy – she must have been in Scotland.) It all ended up in a golden haze with Iris, Ivan and me doing improvised turns – last of the Romans arguing with the first of the incoming Anglo-Saxons, improvising bogus Latin and A-Saxon etc. Great fun. A lovely day, much dreaded beforehand but all glorious when it actually happened.
[2] I was put down for this swanky and frivolous haunt years ago without being consulted by friends who were members, so it’s not entirely my fault. Couldn’t resist it when elected, I’m slightly ashamed to admit.
A dreaded meal next day! Knowing my mother’s unfailing knack of always trying (thank God, unsuccessfully, and almost certainly unconsciously) to make a hash of private concerns of mine – you remember how odd she was – I’d taken jolly good care to keep her absolutely separate from me and mine, though I often see her alone; so Joan and she had never met. Well next day Vanessa [9] (as nice, and as good an ally as ever. She sends lots of love. I’ll tell you all about all this in another letter), Mummy, Joan and I had a great banquet, among the Second Empire mirrors and caryatids of the Café Royal. Well, it went off splendidly. Mummy’s spiky eccentricity was in complete abeyance and she was like her old amusing, intelligent and charming self: liked Joan very much ( J. was terrified at first; same here), and J. liked her too. It wouldn’t last through too many frequent contacts – I know Mummy too well! – but spaced out, all should be well. She is an odd creature: so bright and gifted and well-read, intelligent and gay in some ways; so terrifying and destructive in others; so full of odd delusions and manias. My solution is to let her have as little to do with my real life as possible, but to be terribly nice in other ways and make her life as happy as I can; it seems to work more or less; any other course would end in chaos. It’s all a bit sad. Anyway, this occasion went off triumphantly, thank heavens.
In spite of Joan and me wanting everything to pass off normally and quietly and without fuss, the occasion was made the excuse by friends of a series of minor parties until we left. . .
At long last, after a devious journey, we got here and were greeted with hugs and kisses and congratulations by all the village; and every day, after lunch, troops have turned up, bringing loads of sticky cakes and bottles of ouzo as presents. A slightly harrowing ritual follows: on arrival, just after lunch, each guest has to be served with a sort of round meringue and a little glass of sweet emerald green or ruby red liqueur made out of bananas, followed immediately by mézés of liver and kidney washed down with retsina, a Marinetti repast. [10] But it is lovely to see the big room of the house too full of coiffed crones – rather like a claca [11] – papas in tall hats, and all the old and young of the village, all rather formal until we manage to stir them up a bit by clowning about and producing the time-honoured jokes that produce – it doesn’t matter how many times they’ve been told before! – their time-honoured responses. Yesterday, the girls and young women, and one or two old ones, ended up by dancing the Kalamatiano [Greek folk dance] to the tune of their own shrill songs. It was very pretty, all in a ring in front of the Băleni-form fireplace. [12] They are very nice – the Maniots, I mean. Not a bit like the Cretans; they are supposed to be very religious, Royalist, rather reactionary, like La Vendée or Navarrois, but this reputation is very exaggerated by non-Maniots. They are tremendously honest, which is rather nice; a bit lost; I think we must seem very odd phenomena suddenly dropping into their midst out of the blue. They have been uniformly nice to us and, I think, love having us here, and are proud of the fact that one has alighted on their village out of all the other villages in the world. I do hope so. The time’s a bit out of joint at the moment. . .
There have been scores of interruptions in the last few days, and it’s now the 29th instead of the evening of the same day I started this! So I’ll keep all else to say for my next one, wh
en I’ve explored the pyramid ahead. Lots to say, about the house etc. Meanwhile, darling Balasha and Pomme, tons of fond love
from Paddy
P.S. Stop Press! I’d walked down to the village to post this and, lo and behold, two letters from Pucioasa, one dated the 19th the other the 20th – one of them addressed to Joan, opened by me by mistake (not used to change of name yet) with both yours and Pomme’s letters to her and to me . . . Joan’s up at the house, but will be so pleased – I’ve reopened the envelope, after rushing through the letters and scribbling this in the kafeneion, but must stop it now and post it, as the postman is rolling his eyes and tapping his fingers in mock impatience!
x x x
* The writer (Wild Goose Chase, The Aerodome etc.) and Greek scholar-translator of Thucydides, a heavenly man.
[1] PLF hinted that under the new regime his letters were being intercepted and read.
[2] ‘Hence these tears’ – Terence, Andria, line 126.
[3] Lucienne Gourgaud du Taillis, born Lucienne Haas (1898–1982), artist, a friend of Balasha’s in Paris.
[4] ‘The blank paper defends its whiteness.’ It was Mallarmé, not Valery, in his poem Brise Marine (‘Sea Breeze’).
[5] Balasha’s niece Ina and her husband Michel Catargi were now living in Paris.
[6] David Mountolive is the central character in the novel Mountolive (1958), the third book in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
[7] Marie Bashkirtzeff (1858–84), Ukrainian painter and sculptor, who died of tuberculosis at the early age of twenty-five. She is perhaps best known for her lively and readable journal.
[8] PLF was being charitable here. Eighteen months earlier (7 November 1966) he had complained to Annie Fleming about Bowra’s deafness: ‘I do wish he’d wear an aid, as it turns all conversation into one-way-tennis, with all one’s own balls lost in the long grass.’
[9] PLF’s older sister, Vanessa Fenton (1911–87).
[10] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published a Manifesto of Futurist Cooking in 1930. Among its stipulations were that the conventional order of courses should be abolished, together with knives and forks; that there should be no more pasta, as it causes lassitude, pessimism and lack of passion; and that perfumes should be used to enhance the tasting experience. Some food on the table would not be eaten, but experienced only by the eyes and nose.
[11] A gathering of people, usually older ladies singing and gossiping, to carry out a common task like sewing or dehusking maize.
[12] PLF had a fireplace constructed at Kardamyli to imitate those he had seen at Băleni, themselves imitations of one Balasha’s uncle had sketched on his travels in Persia.
To Balasha Cantacuzène
20 June 1968
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Balasha,
All my letters – that is about every three months in all, to anyone! – invariably start nowadays with an inundation of richly deserved apology. It’s really an act of penitence, an acquis de conscience, to assuage my own guilty conscience about being such a criminally late letter writer – and is probably utter hell and a bit tedious for the reader (who, anyway, if an old and adored friend, has probably, by the mere fact of one’s writing, half forgiven one already!); so, darling, although I’ve got an enormous amount of things I want to answer when the right moment comes – and a conscience black with guilt! – I’m going to spare you my self-lacerations this time, and simply forge ahead as though I were an angelically innocent party! Anyway, darling Balasha, I know you understand these things. . .
How strange, Balasha, that you should ask me about Iris Tree! The same day a letter came saying poor Iris had died of cancer. It suddenly started about a year ago, and galloped on to its sad close; she knew all about it and faced it with great courage. It was Diana Cooper who wrote with this sad news; sad, but perhaps a blessing too. She – Diana – was with her to the last. It was really a worse blow for her than for anyone else; they had been accomplices, rivals in a comic way, and above all, tremendous friends, ever since they were small girls. She was Iris Tree’s youngest sister. [1] I adored her. She [Iris] was so funny and gifted, a very talented poet, Bohemian to the backbone; always broke, never caring a damn, with marvellous huge blue-green eyes, a wonderful snide smile and a laugh rather like a bad schoolboy’s, flaxen hair cut like a page’s, the figure and the carriage of a young girl, right to the end. She used to dress in rather loose woven dresses, yellow or turquoise caught in at the waist with the sort of old leather belt a French porter might wear; the last time I saw her she was wearing a green tie almost as narrow as a bullfighter’s, on which [were] about a dozen butterflies and beetles and grasshoppers of jewelry or coloured glass, that looked stunning; usually bare-headed, but occasionally with a rather wide-brimmed felt hat at a musketeerish tilt, and always accompanied by a huge jet-black Alsatian called Auguri; an excellent horsewoman; a lifelong unwilling inflictor and victim of the pangs of love. Totally independent, living in studios – or derelict towers in the country – in or near Rome, Venice, Provence, Catalonia. She was first married to an American painter called Curtis Moffat – their son, Ivan, about my age, is a great friend, very gifted also – then to a v. tall, amazing-looking Austrian called Graf Friedrich Ledebur, known as ‘the Uhlan’ [cavalryman]. They were divorced and he remarried, but nevertheless he was always rejoining her for months on end. She had a slight, very engaging Petrouskaesque clown quality, cultivated rather as a joke. Marvellous mimic, a wonderfully funny, original and unexpected conversationalist. She always had the same leather bag slung over her shoulder, full of paper and pencils, and spent a great deal of time writing in cafés. A great noctambulist. I often spent hours wandering from café to café with her, talking all night. Friends with everyone and completely classless. She had the gift of causing, unwillingly, comic, charming or unusual events. About ten years ago, I camped in a colossal half-ruined Orsini castle in the Roman Campagna I had managed to borrow (all rats and owls, and uninhabited for 200 years) in order to write. She said she would like to come out of Rome for a few days to do some work, and cooked the most marvellous meals. I was driving her back to Rome after sunset when all of a sudden my battered car ran out of petrol. There were nothing but dark fields for miles, till at last we spotted a faint light. I took a lane through the corn, and at last reached a farmhouse, where a whole family were swallowing spaghetti by lantern-light. I asked if they had any petrol, and a boy called Silvio, about eighteen, said he would siphon some out of his motorbike. On the way to the car, he said that while ploughing the week before, his ploughshare had bumped against something hard – a headless stone lady, he said, and a pair of stone feet ‘una signora di pietra senza testa ed un paio di piedi’ [‘a stone lady without head or feet’]. He had hidden them in the cowshed. I got Iris, we walked back, made our way through the horns and the munching of the shed with the lantern, to where he had covered up his troves with hay. We put them under the pump, scraped the mud away, and a beautiful seated statue of headless Cybele [2] emerged (2 feet high), enthroned, holding her disk, with two lions at her feet, beautifully carved folds of drapery; and a ravishing pair of marble feet (half-lifesize) on a plinth, one with a heel lifted, beside the stump of a marble tree on which the vanished statue must have been leaning her elbow; also a handful of coins from the reign of Domitian. You can imagine our excitement! Silvio asked if I’d like to buy them. I said, like mad I would, but neither of us had anything like [the] very low price he wanted for both (about £8). But I got them a month later & smuggled them to England where they stayed ten years (Iris didn’t want them – no fixed abode). Now they are here, in rough niches, and look glorious. I’ve told all this only to illustrate how odd and unexpected things always happened in her company.
A couple of years ago, she, Joan and I were all in Marseilles by chance. One day we went to the Camargue and rode for miles, to try and catch a glimpse of the flamingoes that nest there. The day ended at sunset with us all strolling along the b
attlements of Aigues-Mortes, a strange town in the delta, its fortifications reflected in the mere – and gazing down at the quay where the 5th (?) Crusade had set sail. [3] There was a statue of St Louis (the commander) on a pedestal, holding a sword and wearing a narrow crown of fleurs de lys on his bobbed hair. Iris stopped and exclaimed ‘Oh look! Aren’t they kind? They’ve put up a statue of me!’ It did look rather like her!
I do hope this is legible, Balasha darling, as I’ve got to get it off without rereading or correcting as the postman is chafing. I’ll write again soon. All my love to Pomme – do both keep in touch about her later plans.
With tons of love
Paddy
from Joan too, who will write
[1] PLF means that relations between Diana Cooper and Iris Tree were like those between an older and younger sister. The next sentence refers not to DC, but to Iris Tree.
[2] Cybele, mother of the gods, goddess of fertility and mistress of wild nature, symbolised by (tamed) companion lions.
[3] Louis XI departed from Aigues-Mortes on the Seventh and Eighth Crusades.
For at least five years Paddy had been working on a book based on ‘the Great Trudge’, his pre-war journey across Europe, undertaken largely on foot. This had begun as an article for an American magazine on ‘The Pleasures of Walking’, and had become steadily more ambitious as time passed.
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