Darling, I’ve asked Sandoe’s to send you a copy of Robin F’s book Chantemesle [3] – it’s about the house he lived in in France, as a child. His father was a painter, and they lived close to the Seine, near Givenchy, in Normandy. I love it, and reviewed it when it came out in the New Statesman, and will send the review if I find it.
More about Roman birds: when we got back from the Andes, I went to stay with Andrew and Debo at Chatsworth, and Harold Macmillan [4] (married to A’s aunt) was there – an absolutely charming, erudite old boy, full of Greek and Latin and the classics. On a long walk through the woods (where everyone else was banging away [shooting] the other side) he told me that the Romans had brought the first pheasants to Britain as pets, and when Honorius recalled them, [5] the birds got loose, took to the woods, and bred. They also brought the first beech trees, which have spread everywhere. [6]
There’s been some going and coming here. First of all, Xan and Daphne Fielding. I don’t know whether I’ve told you about him. We were in Crete together through most of the occupation (where he was wonderful) and he has remained my best friend ever since, also of Joan’s. He’s delightful; wandered about like me before the war, speaks perfect French and Greek & excellent German, extremely bohemian, rather rebellious, very funny, much loved by all for his looks (rather like a slim, v. neat Persian prince), charm and niceness. He’s always reminded me of Lafcadio in Les Caves du Vatican. [7] Daphne is the daughter of an eccentric Cornish peer, [8] and was married to the noble Marquess of Bath, till they separated and she married Xan (Henry Bath then married Virginia, Viola Tree’s daughter, who is very like Daphne; so everyone seems happy). She’s rather an Augustus John kind of character (and was a great friend, indeed, also of Debo’s, Diana Cooper’s and Iris Tree), v. bohemian, dashing, and reckless, admired by many. She writes books (not v. good) and Xan has become one of the best translators from French. They’ve always been v. broke and v. happy, living first in Portugal, then in the Kasbah of Tangier, now in a little farmhouse not far from the Château d’Uzès in Languedoc (once inhabited by your equestrian friend, now redecorated by La Sardine qui s’est crue sole), [9] and about ten miles from Larry Durrell – after a short terrible time in a sort of Wuthering Heights in the rockiest, windiest and snowiest slopes of the Cévennes. They stayed two weeks, and it was a great success and I’m so glad they came at last. Apart from them (RUN OUT OF BIG PAPER), Joan’s brother came, Graham. I think I’ve told you all about him – very intelligent, very retiring literary-musical hermit; then Peter Mayne, an old writer friend who has written excellent books about India and one remarkable one about Morocco called Alleys of Marrakesh. [10] At the moment Joan’s sister Diana is here – at least, not here, as Joan’s taken her to Mistra for the night, so I’m in stately solitude. She’s very nice, but has not a single interest in common with Joan or Graham, and is v. unlike: shy, tall, v. correct and well dressed in a not very imaginative Knightsbridge way, and stitching away at gros-point. I think Joan finds her heavier-going than I do! . . . Just before this, Aymer Maxwell came for a week, and made me promise to send his love to Pomme, which I do herewith! He was without his boat this time – thank God in a way! – and so everything was much less emotionally strung. In fact, nothing but laughter. . .
It’s still lovely here, all washed clean after a few days’ heavy rain (perfect for Joan’s olives!) and looking gleaming and luminous. We still bathe in the middle of the day, but may have to grit our teeth in a week or so. I’ve managed to drill myself – in spite of guests – into a sort of trance of work, and, thank God, am getting ahead. Joan and I spend a lot of time in reciprocal boasting about our travels, and the place is littered with books about Scythians, Incas, Uzbeks, Conquistadores, Tamarlane and Pizarro. . .
No more now, darling Balasha, except tons of fond love to you and to Pomme – and I will get the Peru stuff to you the moment it is ready.
Paddy
xxx
[1] An account of PLF’s Andes expedition, based on his letters to JLF, published as Three Letters from the Andes (1991).
[2] A set of eighty Goya prints, published as an album in 1799. Print No. 71, Si amanece, nos vamos (When day breaks we will be off ), shows three old hags conferring at night about how they will gorge themselves on their fellow creatures.
[3] First published in 1964.
[4] Harold Macmillan (1894–1986), Conservative politician and prime minister 1957–63, married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire.
[5] AD 410.
[6] Neither of these assertions is proven.
[7] In André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (1914), Lafcadio is a handsome, athletic young man of sixteen. His unorthodox education has made him value independence and originality.
[8] 4th Baron Vivian.
[9] PLF plays on the name of the Marquise de Crussol d’Uzès, née Amieux, the former mistress of the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier. The Crussol family owned a sardine-canning business.
[10] Peter Mayne, The Alleys of Marrakesh (1953).
To Xan Fielding
21 February 1972
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Xan,
I’m so sorry being such a sluggard with my pen! I didn’t manage to answer your marvellous letter to White’s for the same reason that I didn’t manage to write a single letter all the time I was in Blighty: viz. overexcitement, movement, excess, the pendulum swing of dissipation and retribution (milder than nanuère [formerly], but still far from heart’s desire) and general enjoyable disarray. Now, of course, when we’re safely back in our hermitage, I discover to my fury that I’ve forgotten it, with a bundle of letters to be answered, in Niko & Barbara’s flat in Athens, where I stayed on return. Damn. I’ll recover it in three weeks’ time, when we get there again; so this is only really an answer to the second one sent on the 2 Feb.
It would be splendid if you both came in late July and August, and we’ll have dictionaries & pencils and papers waiting. Any travels between now and June (when the same party as last time heads for the snowy peaks of Kurdistan) are ruled out, alas, as I have a real chance of finishing this bloody book by then if I stick to it. I’ll be in real disgrace if I don’t, specially after that fruity portrait by Derek Hill (rather good) [1] and Jock Murray’s shaming kindness and forbearance . . . I loved your Rochefoucauld-Vauvenargues [2] maxims. One might do some bogus Balkan proverbs, on the analogy of the genuine Bulgarian one: ‘An uninvited guest is worse than a Fuck.’ I’ve just thought of one! viz. ‘A cold wife is a belfry without bats, and an impotent man is a minaret without a muezzin’. . .
Alfays rememper dat Chairmany is de turd of Europe.
I loved staying with Patrick, as usual, and what luck seeing Daph for dinner the night we arrived. Joan and I diverged over Christmas, to reunite later, as is sometimes our wont: she to Dumbleton & Graham, I to Annie Fleming’s, where Diana came too. Then, still under Annie’s wing, for two nights in a draughty lough-side schloss in Ulster called Shane’s Castle, inhabited by a seldom seen son called Raymond O’Neill, [3] a halt on the drive to Donegal, where Derek Hill lives. We stopped at Londonderry on the way, where, after lunch, I made my way to the Bogside: rainy, deserted, brick-strewn with roadblocks made out of upturned cars and oil-drums; through a gap, past a republican tricolour and, in huge letters YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY, to the Bogside Inn, full of posters saying ‘Death to all Stoolies’, ‘End Internment Now’ and ‘Down with the Ruling Class’, where the nearly incomprehensible N. Ireland cloth-capped porter drinkers shied away from my Anglo-Saxon overtures with menacing looks. I managed to talk at last – for one and a half hours – with a chap called Finn, who seemed to be a local Provo spokesman. I’m going to try and recapitulate our colloquy on paper – I should have done it next day – so I won’t attempt it now. But it left me with a feeling of absolute hopelessness. Three dull thuds, two streets away, of exploding bombs (‘There they go!’) reminded me how late it was getting. ‘D
on’t open your mouth on the way out, for Christ’s sake!’, were Finn’s parting words. Schoolchildren were gathering brickbats for pelting the evening patrollers, and outside the Bogside, sections of camouflaged jacketed Gloucesters with blackened faces were patrolling cautiously, v. young and, understandably, v. wary looking. A street was cordoned off, hoses playing on a flaming Spinning Mill [a pub], Annie waiting v. anxiously at the dingy hotel – the only decent one had been bombed out – on the banks of the Foyle River. So, away over the cratered frontier post, to peaceful Donegal. When the bombs went off, all journalists in the hotel bar had streamed out, then a tip-off man had dashed in shouting ‘There’s been a tarring and feathering!’ What’s one to do where both sides are hopelessly in the wrong (or, with a change of focus, both right), though, admittedly, one side in the wrong for several centuries more than the other? If only the Normans, after beating the hell out of us in 1066, hadn’t crossed the sea and done the same thing in Ireland 101 years later! They didn’t know what they were landing us with. It’s a bugger. [4]
Just before leaving, I went to Chatsworth for the weekend – it’s utterly changed! Debo with unclouded brow, and Andrew, hurling fruit juice down by the flagon, turned from Raskolnikoff into Mr Pickwick. [5] From here I borrowed a car and went across country to Monmouth to stay with Philip [Toynbee], which was marvellous, then back to London, crawling through a snowstorm, then back here. I’ve forgotten to mention that immediately after Ireland, Joan and I went to Paris for a week and ate ourselves to a standstill.
That brings us up to date. It is now the second day of Orthodox Lent and all the Kardamylians are creeping about like spectres under a giant blanket of Shrovetide hangover, which includes us as, in the morning, Grigori Khnarakis [6] of Thrapsano and three other Cretan warriors followed their whiskers through the door with a γαλόνι [gallon] of tsikoudiá [Cretan raki]. . .
Joan sends fond love to you and Daph; also Lela and Peter [Petros] and I.
Πολλὴ ἀγάπη σὰν πάντα, καὶ ὁ Θεὸς νὰ φέρει ὅλα δεξιά! [Much love, as always, and may God bring everything to a happy conclusion!],
Paddy
[1] Jock Murray had commissioned portraits of several of the firm’s authors from the artist Derek Hill.
[2] François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (1613–80), author of Maximes (1665); Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–47), friend to Voltaire and author of Réflexions and Maximes (1746).
[3] Ann Fleming’s son from her first marriage to Baron O’Neill, who was killed in action during the Second World War.
[4] ‘Bloody Sunday’, one of the worst incidents of the ‘Troubles’, took place here in the Bogside only a few weeks after PLF’s visit: British soldiers from the Parachute Regiment shot twenty-six unarmed civilians taking part in a demonstration against the policy of internment without trial, killing fourteen.
[5] Andrew Devonshire had given up drinking.
[6] A member of the Cretan resistance who had taken part in the operation to abduct General Kreipe.
Billy Moss had married Sophie Tarnowska, his former housemate in Cairo, at the end of the war. After living in London for a while, they set up house in Ireland where she raised their three children while he pursued a career as a writer; but they separated in 1957. Moss never really settled in the post-war world, and he died in 1965, at the age of only forty-four.
To Sophie Moss
4 May 1972
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Sophie,
I’ve been meaning to write for years and years – but you know what the Road to Hell is paved with! Anyway, here we go!
I’ve just got back from Athens after the most extraordinary encounter with – guess who? General Kreipe, and all his captors! We had all been summoned there by an extremely enterprising Greek TV personality [Niko] Mastorakis. So there we were all gathered together: Manoli, George, [1] me and all the rest of the survivors – two, including poor Bill, were dead, one had been killed a few months after the operation. Then, onto the stage where the cameras were slowly ambles the General, but walking very well (present age seventy-seven), white-haired, but otherwise unchanged. The greetings all round were terrific, wringing of hands, slaps on the back, and, between me and the Cretans, wild kisses. After the show we all went to an Athenian taverna with twenty more Cretans, where there was tremendous singing, and lyre-playing and Cretan dancing, all ending up pretty tight, and many tears being shed for old times’ sake. I had three more meals with the General before leaving, and we talked for ages. I’m very pleased about all this, as the whole odd story seemed unfinished, somehow. I think this reunion was a kind of exorcism. He has a very nice wife, married for fifteen years, and I think she was pleased, too. After all, the old boy hadn’t managed to do any harm in Crete before his capture, and I always liked him more than Billy did. I think their froideur was largely the result of misapprehension because of the extreme language difficulty. Anyway, they flew back to Hanover last night, and this peculiar chapter has somehow been rounded off.
Manoli and George asked lots about you and asked me to send their love, which I do, along with mine. I’ll tell you more details about all this when I come to England in a few months, as it’s been far too long. Joan and I suddenly decided to marry five years ago, and, not believing in long engagements, did so within the week, and are living happily ever after here, where I’m busy writing a long book about my early troubles, which goes on getting longer and longer. . .
Do write, Sophie, and tell all your news (I do hope this address is the right one, but I’m sure they’ll forward it, if you’ve moved). It’s such an age, and all my fault, owing to living in such a Bacchic whirl on rare visits to England. But I plan to set that to rights. So no more now – this is really just to re-establish contact, and bring, dear Sophie,
lots of fond love
from Paddy
[also from Joan]
Have I addressed this correctly? Do instruct.
Balasha’s cousin, and my old friend Constantin Soutzo, [2] who I saw two years ago, tells me that a son (or daughter?) of his is now married to some kind of a niece (or nephew?) of yours. [3]
I saw Balasha a few years ago in Rumania, and we are in constant correspondence. She’s just as nice in every way as she always was, though fallen on hard times. . .
[1] Manoli Paterakis and George Tyrakis, members of the team that had abducted the general.
[2] Prince Constantin Soutzo (1912–2004), whom PLF had known in Rumania before the war. He managed to escape when the Communists took over and made a new life in Canada.
[3] His stepdaughter Iona had married Jan Tarnowski, the nephew of Sophie Moss’s first husband Andrew, whom PLF had known in Cairo.
To Diana Cooper
25 November 1972
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
I’ve just heard from Annie about your poor hands. [1] I can’t think of anything more horrible, maddening, frustrating and, I bet, painful too. 1,000 wishes from Joan and me for a lightning recovery, and I wish I were in London to come and read aloud to you of an evening. I’ve just been through a bout of Kipling stories, which made one think of reading ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ [2] to you in your room in Chantilly, so I could have inflicted more of the like on you. (This was set off by a collection of essays on him, out recently, of which by far the best – on Kim – is by your lover Chaudhuri. [3] It’s packed with lovely illustrations, and I recommend it strongly.)
I still can’t quite take in the Judy tidings. [4] (I’ve written one of those tributes for the Times, but far too late, and it probably won’t get in,[1] so I enclose a copy. I hope it doesn’t look as if I mean that her death was caused by burning the candle at both ends; though, perhaps, indirectly, it might have helped. Colin [Tennant]’s and Ivan [Moffat]’s pieces were excellent, I thought.) She’d been meaning to come here from Patmos. We got an unsigned
telegram from Istanbul, thought it was Freya (who was also impending, from S. Turkey), wired back ‘Come!’; and of course she never got it; nor Freya . . . When we got back here, three weeks ago, a jaunty card was waiting, sent from Rome (‘Missed you! BUGGER! Might you both come here en route for Blighty?’ etc.); also an amazing drawing of one of those verbal misunderstandings between SS. Augustine and Gregory, our age-old joke. [5] I was just writing back in similar terms, when Milton’s telegram arrived. One will miss her frightfully. I wonder what will happen to Milton – (Rome? twin-life?) – and poor little Anna? [6] She’s a marvel. It’s all bewildering, abrupt and upsetting in the extreme. . .
[1] I wired to Frank Giles to get his backing for this late offering.
Our journey out here – Joan, Graham and me in a new station waggon – was glorious. At first, sitting behind them both listening to their blended groans – one alto, the other tenor – about traffic, rain, etc., I felt almost hysterical; but as we headed S.E. from Paris, the blasting and bombardiering dwindled and a marvellous and stimulating seventeen days’ sightseeing-plus-gastronomic concatenation began forming, link by glowing link: Carolingian kings, stone crusaders and their ladies in Romanesque undercrofts and cloisters, ombles chevaliers [Arctic char], crayfish tails, pulled in half-mourning, Lombardic frescoes, white truffles (as at Sybil Cholmondeley’s), [7] little-known Bergamask painters, exploding roast turkey, gorgonzola washed down by Valpolicella, then Dalmatian ham and slivovitz; Diocletian’s choked palace that you gazed at from the Nahlin; [8] streets of pearl and ivory between symmetrical palaces; scores of Ragusan oysters, broken minarets, skewered kebabs, and many barbaric delicacies: Balkan and Byzantine kings – then over the Greek border into S. Macedonia, Delphi and home, where one is still bathing twenty days after Guy Fawkes Day.
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