The olive harvest is in full swing, the groves are busy with mules and sacks and ladders and huge baskets and shouting and singing, rugs and tarpaulins are spread, figures crowd the branches as the berries rain down, coiffed women from the hill villages abound, all in old and disintegrating dresses, 1,000 times laundered and faded by the sun to the most subtle and charming hues. With a bit of rain, it would have been a bumper crop, but even without it it’s pretty good, so it’s all smiles under the leaves. Before harvesting, the branches droop like those on the tree in the Willow-pattern plate; after, up they go, lopped and stripped like moulted birds. Joan’s toiling away on a lower terrace with a chorus of squaws; it’s a job closed to men – alas or hooray – except for the lopping and pruning; jealously guarded craft-secrets.
Obviously, pen-grasping’s off for you for the moment. I’ll write a bit later on and see how things are going. Joan sends love and sorrowing commiseration, and tons of fond love, plus hugs
from Paddy
xxxx
P.S. Should the Judy piece ever be used, I wish they’d use your enclosed copy with its corrections.
[1] PLF had slightly misunderstood: DC had sprained her wrist.
[2] A story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1889.
[3] Nirad C. Chaudhuri, ‘The Finest Story about India – in English’, in John Gross (ed.), Rudyard Kipling: The Man, his Work and his World (1972).
[4] Judy Montagu had died on 8 November, at the age of forty-nine.
[5] See note 2 on page 227.
[6] The Gendels’ daughter, then nine years old.
[7] Sybil, Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley (1894–1989), daughter of Sir Edward Albert Sassoon and Baroness Aline Caroline de Rothschild.
[8] A luxury steam yacht, moored in the port of Galati on the Danube. Built in 1929, Nahlin had been chartered in 1936 by Edward VIII for a cruise in the Adriatic, with Wallis Simpson and the Duff Coopers among his guests. The King had all the books removed from the library to make more room for alcohol. In 1937 the Nahlin was bought by King Carol II of Rumania; upon his abdication in 1940 she became the property of the Rumanian Ministry of Culture, and was used as a museum before becoming a floating restaurant.
Paddy was still working on his book about ‘the Great Trudge’, but as time went by the scheme seemed to become more and more complicated . . .
To Jock Murray
10 January 1973
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Jock,
I’m so sorry being such an age writing. I knew it would have to be a long-ish letter, so kept putting it off till the decks were a bit clearer of all the ludicrous nonsense that has been cluttering them till now. I mentioned mysteriously in my last letter a plan I wanted to put to you . . . I think I told you that, when I went down the Danube a few years ago, I went to see my old friend Balasha Cantacuzène (the dedicatee of The Traveller’s Tree). [1] When she and her sister were chucked out of their old home in Moldavia by the new regime, they were given a quarter of an hour to pack – a brisk deracination after three centuries – and were then herded off to the west of Wallachia, where they still are (where I went to see them at dead of night). One of the things salvaged was great lumps of my diary (covering the period I’ve written about in the present book), which I brought back here. The two versions tally pretty well, on the whole, though there are obviously divergences owing to the difference between recalling things that happened thirty-nine years ago – 1934–9 – and scribbling them down on a café table a couple of hours after. The parts covered are: Slovakia and a bit of Hungary; then a long gap, caused by an idle summer loitering from schloss to schloss in Transylvania; then quite a lot of Bulgaria, Bucharest, Bulgaria again (down the Black Sea coast); and Constantinople. The emergence of this long-lost document has been a bit of a curse and a puzzle. It should have cropped up before I started, or when it was too late. What I plan to do is take details out of it to give the text more vivifying detail where it is needed. In one or two cases fairly radical changes will have to be made. This is all to the good, as the rewritten first part (which I dealt with so cursorily in the first version) is now expanded to considerable length, and contains a lot of detail, and this new stuff will give the post Vienna-part a considerable boost, I hope.
My original plan was to finish the book on board the boat sailing to Salonica and Mt Athos, from Constantinople. Now a new idea has begun to sprout.
The diary, after Constantinople, goes on to Mt Athos, in considerable detail, monastery by monastery, covering about a month in mid-winter, ending just after my twentieth birthday. The whole of the diary, I hasten to say, is extremely immature, ignorant, awkward, pretentious and inhibited by turns, an odd mixture of pseudo-sophistication and naïveté, and also wittingly and unwittingly comic, often embarrassing. This summer, as a joke and an experiment, I read long passages out loud to people staying here, who insisted on more, so I read the lot. They would agree with all my comments above, but said that nevertheless it had a sort of immediacy and freshness that later reminiscence lacks, obviously. So last time I went to Athens, I got someone to type it out, to have a better look; and a rereading suggests this: that I might shorten some of these passages, cut out the awkward or embarrassing bits, and dock the repetitions, but leave the style unchanged, and insert them, here and there, after telling the story of the diary’s untimely recovery, as a sort of counterpoint to existing text. It’s an odd idea, and presents the difficulty of entire discrepancy of style (because, although I’m the 1934 diarist’s descendant, I could also be his grandfather); but, if handled with skill, it might give a sudden new dimension to the book which would be all to the good; and the clash of the two styles might have a special point of its own. [2]
Well that’s the first idea. The second is this. After Mt Athos, [I] went to stay with some people in Macedonia, and the Venizelist revolution broke out, which I managed to accompany on horseback, on a borrowed steed, and attached unofficially to a Royalist cavalry squadron, across Macedonia to Thrace; when it was over, after a week or two, I rode back to the Chalkidiki alone, returned the horse, and continued my interrupted walk south, through Macedonia and Thessaly to the Meteora, to Boeotia, through Attica to Athens, where the walk stopped for good, and an entire new life began, which I can’t write about – Rumania etc.
I’ve long been wondering what I should do about this first introduction to Greece, which, after all, has been far more important to me than any of the other countries the book traverses; and now the following solution looms: to prune and cut down drastically, to about an eighth of its present length, the Mt Athos diary; write another chapter on the revolution, and final chapter covering the month it then took me to walk to Athens – possibly ending at the first distant glimpse of Athens from Eleusis; then writing THE END. [3]
With considerable trepidation, I’m sending you a few random pages of the central European diary, and the whole of Mt Athos. Bear all my strictures in mind, I implore! Whatever else you think about it I can guarantee a few laughs, however unintended.
No more now, as this has been quite long enough. It’s 11 p.m. and pouring with rain, a steady windless downpour – music to our ears, thinking of all the trees – your plane is prospering beautifully – and the masses of rosemary hedges we have been planting.
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] The original dedication had referred to Balasha merely by her initials. PLF added a note to this letter as follows: ‘In any future reprints, should they be made, it would now be OK, it seems, to put her name in full, viz. BALASHA CANTACUZÈNE. I think she’d be touched.’
[2] This was essentially the strategy adopted by the editors of the posthumous volume of the trilogy, The Broken Road (2013), where PLF’s account of his visit to Mount Athos was published.
[3] This intention was never realised.
To Aymer Maxwell
1 March 1973
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dea
r Aymer,
I ought to be writing this in sackcloth with a rope around my neck, like a Calais burgher. How this delay has occurred is a mystery; but please forgive me for being such a swine in not writing till now. . .
I enclose a letter from Charles Rutland, [1] whom I scarcely know. It suddenly occurred to me: why not Katounia? So I’ve written to him, cracking it and Dirk [Hatterick] up like anything, saying he’d better be quick off the mark, because of Bill Sterling’s [2] yearly descent, and the panting queue of other aspirants. So I expect he’ll be getting in touch with you. I gave him your address and telephone number. You probably know him well. My first vision – there have been few others – was of a very unruly night on King’s Guard, where I was Ian Moncreiffe’s guest, and everyone got enormously tight, and a great deal of breakage and baying for broken glass took place, and in the middle of the wreckage C. Rutland was dancing furiously by himself, wearing one of the lampshades, which entirely masked those lean features.
I – we – wish you had come down here on your flying visit. Since Niko, Barbara and Father Levi, [3] our only visitor has been Coote Lygon (who had been knocked over by a car a month before in London, so was on two sticks) hobbling about the terrace like a wounded admiral on his quarterdeck. Did you see a remark of Osbert Sitwell quoted in one of the Sunday papers, about Dame Ethel Smyth: [4] ‘Ethel would look exactly like Wagner, if only she were more feminine’? The other item I’ve enjoyed most recently is the refusal of Miss Schneider [5] of a large offer by a butter firm for permission to reproduce her picture on every packet. (Could one stamp it on pats?)
It’s suddenly freezing cold here.
Keep in touch, and please come here as soon as you get to Greece.
Fond love from both of us.
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] Charles John Robert Manners (1919–99), 10th Duke of Rutland. It seems that he had written to PLF asking about places to stay in Greece.
[2] Unidentified: perhaps Lieutenant Colonel William Joseph Stirling of Keir (1911–83).
[3] Peter Levi, S.J. (1931–2000), poet, writer, traveller and scholar.
[4] Ethel Mary Smyth (1858–1944), composer and suffragette. She had several passionate affairs, most of them with women. Virginia Woolf said that being loved by her was ‘like being caught by a giant crab’.
[5] In the Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris (1972) the actress Maria Schneider is sodomised by her co-star Marlon Brando, using butter as a lubricant.
To Balasha Cantacuzène
soon after Orthodox Shrove Tuesday, 1973
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Balasha,
Phew! (I never know how this is spelt, except it’s not ‘Pshaw!’, which expresses another mood). I’ve just finished correcting 26,000 words of my new book for a typist in Athens. As I can’t read my own writing, it nearly killed me. I had to copy out whole pages for the poor girl, and even the uncopied ones are a cobweb of erasures, balloons, and additions; and I’ve now got to tackle another 15,000. So this is in the nature of a wave between the bars of my own literary prison! I’ll try and write more clearly than I’ve done in my own MSs. I do envy you, Balasha darling, to have such a lovely clear and decorative hand. If I manage to change my writing now, I wonder if it would drag my whole character with it into a different – perhaps better – shape?
I wonder how this book will read? Impossible to tell, but it doesn’t seem too bad. The part I have been correcting is Germany and a part of Austria: the Dutch frontier to Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz, all up the Rhine till I branched off along the Necker to Heidelberg; then down through Baden and Württemberg to Stuttgart, across Swabia to Ulm and Augsburg, then into Bavaria to Munich; S.E. to Salzburg, over the Austrian border, N.E. till I join the Danube again (which I had crossed at Ulm) at Linz. From there, along the river to Vienna, which I’ve not yet reached (I’m halfway between Melk on the Wachau, and the castle of Dürnstein, where Richard Coeur de Lion was imprisoned on his way back from the Crusade). The odd thing about this book is that I began it years ago, as an article for an American magazine, to be called ‘The Pleasures of Walking’. I dashed across Europe, as far as Arad, in ten pages (it’s now, in the revised version, about 200 till Dürnstein!). Then I got so fascinated and carried away that I chucked the idea of the article and let it rip. So all Transylvania, Bulgaria, Bucharest, the Black Sea Coast of Bulg., Turkey, and Constantinople (where the book ends) is written out in full – another 200 pages; so now I’m struggling on to join hands with myself in Arad. This I did ages ago, and will have to change, here and there, in the light of that diary which you so nobly rescued from Băleni. So the book will have had a very odd genesis, and should be very long; I hope not too long! I think there’s another three months’ hard work on it. This rainy winter solitude with only Joan and her pussies has been a great help. I can’t think what to call it. While you’re reading, do please keep your eyes open for any short phrase that might do. Shakespeare’s poetry is a goldmine – ‘Brief Candles’, ‘All our Yesterdays’, ‘Antic Hay’, ‘Handful of Dust’, etc.
What a selfish screed! Darling, I do hope your health is not giving you hell. You know how we wish we could do something. It’s awful to be so powerless . . . You write so stoically about it all. . .
I’m so glad you both enjoyed the Virginia Woolf book; [1] and I agree with all your verdicts. But, with all their appalling faults, they [2]
fascinate. I’m very glad to have one or two tenuous links with it all – through Barbara and Mary. [3] Our friend Janetta (now married to the Spaniard Jaime Parladé) . . . was pretty well brought up by Ralph and Frances Partridge, and I often went to stay at Ham Spray, [4] full of Lytton’s things, and with Carrington’s paintings everywhere. Gerald Brenan, [5] now eighty, but haring up and down the mountains like a roebuck, came here for ten days last year, with a beautiful girl, [6] v. well read and terribly nice (‘no sex, alas!’ he told me, rather ruefully) and then back to the little Andalusian village where they live. He writes marvellously about Spain, specially his history of Spanish literature. We used often to see Clive Bell, when we lived in the flat above Mary, in Charlotte St, and Bunny Garnett, [7] frequently in England now, as he has developed a passion for our friend Magouche. . .
No more now, darling Balasha. John Donne says, ‘letters, more than kisses, mingle souls’ [8]. . .
Tons of fond love to you and Pomme,
Paddy
[1] Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (2 vols., 1972), had won several prizes, including the Duff Cooper Prize.
[2] PLF is referring to the Bloomsbury Group.
[3] Barbara Ghika and her mother, Mary Hutchinson (1889–1977), née Barnes, who owned the flat in Charlotte Street where PLF and Joan lived in the early 1950s. Lytton Strachey, Mary Hutchinson’s cousin, introduced her to the Bloomsbury Group. She became friendly with Virginia Woolf, and was also close to Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot.
[4] Their house near Hungerford, Berkshire. They lived there for almost thirty years until 1961, when Frances sold it following her husband’s death.
[5] Gerald Brenan (1894–1987), writer and scholar of Spanish history and culture.
[6] Lynda Nicholson-Price (1943–2011), poet and translator, who had been Brenan’s companion since 1968.
[7] David ‘Bunny’ Garnett (1892–1981), writer and publisher associated with the Blooms-bury Group.
[8] ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’ (slightly misquoted).
To Nancy Mitford
20 April 1973
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Nancy,
There’s a horrible scirocco blowing here – ashen sky, mewing cats, slamming windows, and hearts of lead. The villagers, reduced to nervous phantoms by Lenten fasting, with several days to go still – we’re halfway between Greek Palm Sunday and Easter – get snappier and snappier; worse than Moors at the end of Ramadan. By the time the paschal lambs are on
their spits, they will be beyond everything except gnashing and scowling.
Derek Jackson [1] has just left, after four days here; all alone, which was nice; and you were talked of with great fondness (hence this pen suddenly being put to paper). He was very bland and easy; but, my word, he’s very far from usual. Last night I had dinner nearby (they telephoned, but, as they were with a mob of descendants, refused to come here) with Laura Waugh [2] and her sister Bridget. I complained bitterly about the inadequacy and the indiscretion of the diary in the Observer [3] – particularly about the idiotic brief biography of Mark [4] – and Laura agrees, saying it was all the fault of Peters, [5] E. Waugh’s agent, who had complete rights. She hadn’t even read most of it. It all sounds very rum to me, and a bit wet, I must say. All this having been said, it makes fascinating reading. We guess who most of the asterisks are, but one or two are elusive. Laura said ‘Audrey’ was someone called Audrey Lucas, [6] which rings a faint bell, but v. faint. . .
Joan is a sort of Queen Canute in a rising tide of kittens. I think of little else except yards and yards of rosemary hedge I planted earlier on, and five poplar trees, and am seldom far from a hose. I almost feel that those leaves and shoots are springing from my own elbows, hands on ears, like a nymph seeking refuge in the vegetable kingdom from some lustful pursuer, e.g. Syrinx. [7] When shadows fall, a marten steals down from the mountains, craps on the terrace and steals up into the mountains again. A lot of wild geese flew overhead last week, on their way north from Africa. Hoopoes, golden orioles and bee-eaters are beginning to appear and one often nearly measures one’s length over a tortoise; so spring’s here at last.
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