I’ve just finished Dame V. Wedgwood’s Thirty Years War, [8] which has always fascinated me. Such an extraordinary cast: the Elector Palatine, the Winter Queen, Maximilian of Bavaria, the Emperor Leopold, Wallenstein, le Grand Condé, Richelieu, Gustavus Adolphus, Mansfeld, Christian of Brunswick, Piccolomini, the Cardinal-Infant of the Spanish Netherlands; half-Velasquez, half-van Dyck figures, with shoulder-length hair, whiskers and imperials, and wide starched or lace collars breaking over black armour inlaid with gold. It’s rather how I’d like to go about. . .
We’re off tomorrow to stay with the Ghikas in Corfu, where I hope it’s more propre et gai [clean and comfortable] than here; will probably feast a certain amount with C. and E. Glenconner. [9] Lovely change. . .
Lots of love
Paddy
P.S. Debo and I have a desultory exchange of riddles. I’ve just asked her (1) why Diocletian, that well-known Dalmatian character, was a schizophrenic and (2) why someone might be depressed sitting down at the dining table at Lismore. The answer to (1) is because he was a split personality [10] and (2) because the outlook is Belleek. [11]
[1] See note 3 on page 197.
[2] Laura Waugh (1916–73), née Herbert, Evelyn Waugh’s widow. She died only two months after this letter was written.
[3] In 1973 Waugh’s diaries were serialised in the Observer Colour Magazine prior to publication in book form in 1976.
[4] Mark Ogilvie-Grant, a close friend of NM’s. It is not obvious why PLF thought his biography ‘idiotic’.
[5] A. D. Peters (1892–1973), literary agent.
[6] Audrey Lucas (1898–1975), daughter of the travel writer E. V. Lucas, had an affair with Evelyn Waugh after the breakdown of his first marriage.
[7] Syrinx, a chaste nymph. Pursued by Pan, she ran to a river’s edge and asked for assistance from the river nymphs, who transformed her into hollow water reeds that made a haunting sound when his frustrated breath blew across them. Pan cut the reeds to fashion the first set of pan pipes, henceforth known as syrinx.
[8] Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood OM (1910–97), who wrote under the name C. V. Wedgwood, author of The Thirty Years War (1938).
[9] Christopher Grey Tennant (1899–1983), 2nd Baron Glenconner, and his daughter Emma.
[10] A play on words: Split is the city on the Dalmatian coast where Diocletian died.
[11] A reference to Belleek china used at Lismore.
To Diana Cooper
17 July 1973
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
Here, I say! It really is about time I had some direct news! Roundabout rumours steal across Europe about adventures in Ethiopia; but nary a word from you!
All’s well here. Lovely and cool with a mild west wind off the sea which is gurgling fifty yards away. I’m scribbling away under an alfresco ceiling of rush mats raised on stilts on one of the olive terraces just under the house. I hear Joan mooching about just overhead, followed by a mewing crowd, as usual.
For three whole months today, I haven’t smoked a single cigarette! Considering I’d been smoking from 80 to 100 a day for the last thirty years: end-to-end – they could have formed a single monster cigarette (which I’d been steadily smoking my way along) stretching from Victoria Station to Brighton. Then came the death-grapple with weight. Phew! It’s swung in my favour now, very decidedly, that only by dint of being seldom off the scales: –
‘Weighing-machine upon the floor,
Say, who’s lighter than before?’
I find it is a great help to pretend as I step onto the device, that it is a lift, and attended by two Dickensian lift-boys. One is the Fat Boy from the Pickwick Papers; he touches – or rather used to touch – his cap with a collusive leer, and the words: ‘Going up, Sir?’ Thank heavens, his place has now been taken by his slender colleague, O. Twist, at his leanest, who just murmurs ‘Going down, Sir!’ in tones of respect and admiration. . .
If there are any about, I occasionally smoke a cigar in the evening, on the principle that the embrace of a black concubine, in the French Antilles, was not considered adultery. Otherwise, it’s all snuff-box and beads. . .
We both wish you would come here. Why not? Do please ponder it! It’s much easier and more comfortable now. Lela would be pleased: so would your admirer the Abyssinian cat – you could give him some home news (us too?); and we would be in seventh heaven.
Tons of fond love & hugs,
From Paddy
Also Joan
Paddy made his life more complicated than it needed to be by accepting commitments that he could not fulfil, and suffered torment in trying to wriggle out of them afterwards.
To Michael Stewart
25 January 1974
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Michael,
I’m in an abyss of doubt and anxiety about the Anglo-Hellenic League, and I’d do anything to get out of it. In the euphoria of setting off to hunt for antiques in the Portobello Road, I cheerfully said ‘yes’: not for glory or gain, but as one might say it to a pal, consenting to go and ad lib for half an hour – eked out with a few notes and quotations – to his wife’s Women’s Institute. (I had an ambience of buns and cocoa in mind, in some vague institutional premises . . .)
But I see from your letter that I hadn’t got the hang of it at all (my fault); that it’s a very serious affair, involving a lecture hall, publicity, a large, critical and very different kind of audience from the one I had vaguely imagined – (I’ve heard of the Anglo-Hellenic League for years but, oddly enough, never run into it: perhaps, subconsciously, on purpose) – an audience ready to weigh practised academics in the balance and find them wanting. All this doesn’t induce a failure of nerve, but a swarm of depressing thoughts. For, though I can be a terrible gasbag in private, I’m incapable of talking extempore to a formal audience; still less to one which would know a lot more about the well-worn themes of Byron than I do. So, for a slow writer like me, this would mean literally weeks putting together a written essay on I’m not quite sure what, still: ‘Byron and Common Sense’ . . .?
The thing is that I have at last got up a proper head of steam on my book, and I had been keeping all decks clear for these desperately longed-for empty two and a half months of winter ahead – before our solitary laborious winter evaporates into distracting and gregarious spring – to forge ahead like a monomaniac, and get as near as time allowed to the end of this wretched incubus of a book. I hoped to get it into Jock Murray’s hands at last for publication this winter. Unfortunately, I seem to be utterly incapable of doing two creative things at once and the preparation of a formal conference on Byron, joined with the absence in London, would take an enormous chunk out of this longed-for and vital period. I know I ought to have thought of all this before consenting so frivolously. But if there were any way of getting out of this predicament, as I now see it to be, with – not l’honneur, but without lasting shame – it would be salvation. You know it’s nothing to do with cash – it’s absolutely adequate, and, apart from the fare, I’d have done it for nothing – only time.
I have a saving suggestion. When I was in the British Council in Athens, Peter Quennell came out to lecture on Byron, with special reference to the poet’s links with Greece. It was brilliant, erudite, funny, all that a lecture should be. He’s one of England’s most distinguished Byron scholars, you’d agree. He must have text of the lecture still. Would the fee – plus perhaps, what would have been coughed up for my fare? – tempt him? I’m sure it would – he’d merely have to read out the former text, a little reshuffled and updated, perhaps. (He’s a great friend of mine, but perhaps it would be better not to mention that I had proved a broken reed on the same theme – only that I had spoken so enthusiastically of his lecture.) If not, what about Doris Langley-Moore? Leslie Marchand? – or Jock Murray: six generations of Byron publishing and links with Greece? (Monty Woodhouse . . .?) [1]
If there is no remedy, I’d have to
do it – déshonneur oblige! Of course I’d try not to let you down by producing a public fiasco (but it would be a private disaster); but that’s my fault for not going into it more thoroughly in the beginning. I’m so sorry for all this, Michael. I’m utterly to blame, mea maxima culpa, and very many apologies. Let me know if it’s thumbs up or down. . .
Yours ever
Paddy
Change of theme. Love from Joan, & to Damaris. Thank you very much for those Grass-Green-Incorruptible-Seven-League-Boots. I’ve been speeding over the sierras in them. I oughtn’t to have got them buckshee. Just read horrible news about J. Pope Hennessy. [2]
[1] Doris Langley Moore (1902–89), fashion historian and Byron scholar; Leslie A. Marchand (1900–99), editor of Byron’s letters and journals; C. M. ‘Monty’ Woodhouse (1917–2001), politician and scholar of modern Greece, who had served with SOE in Crete during the German occupation: author of The Philhellenes (1971).
[2] The biographer and travel writer James Pope-Hennessy (1916–74) had been brutally murdered in his London flat.
To Diana Cooper
24 June 1974
Kardamyli
Messenia
My darling Diana,
It’s a day of joy here, thanks to your knock-out American-flight letter. And on legendary St Firmin paper [1] too. I came across a few surviving stolen sheets a couple of months ago, but can’t find them to answer in kind. How you have the nerve, Diana, to talk of ‘innate lack of confidence’, from the best letter writer now breathing, beats me! And all carried off dazzling hell-for-leather style: ‘Done in the smack of a whip, and on horseback too,’ as Sir B. Backbite said about his friend’s silly poem. [2] Apropos of Sheridan, Joanie’s [brother] Graham, suffering from the omnipresence of pictures of our recent dictator here, complained about his damned disenfranchising countenance. [3]
Owing to delay in the arrival of newspapers here, and further held up by absence in Athens and then chez Barbara in Corfu, I missed the horrible tidings about Raimund [4] until it was ages late. I knew what a shattering loss this must be for you and meant to write; then something intervened. I wish I had. I’m so glad JJ made such a moving address. Unlike you, I thought Isaiah’s piece in The Times immensely good, especially about R’s romantic and Mozartian approach to life, [5] and I thought it implied, even if it didn’t mention, his Tale of Genji side, that I only knew about from you. I’m glad you’re going to Zell am See [6] – hope it doesn’t interfere with other plans, see below – though it might be a bit upsetting. Oh dear, I can’t help wondering what will happen to Liz. I wrote her a pretty feeble line, being hopeless at such things.
Now: Daph’s Book. [7] I was vaguely against the idea, in an unforceful way, dreading that Daph might make a hash of it; but, with all its obvious shortcomings, I rather loved it once it had surfaced. It caught a lot of Iris’s point though not all; and its faults were so transparently due to D’s wild, un-earnest, enthusiastic and flapperish niceness. I selfishly felt – as I suppose dozens of others did – that I could, if asked as of course I longed to be, have brought a bushel or two of grist to the Schöne Müllerin [8] wielding the pen: bit about Rome, and the Sabine and the Alban hills, castles, feasts, trattorias, Ischia and Provence, as there wasn’t enough about her Italian life. The thing is, Iris was the sort of treasure everyone feels proprietary about, and wants a share in. But on the whole I loved it, and wrote and said so. A. Scott-James’s review of the book was detestable. It was hideously unfair to break it on the wheel for the reasons she cited. [9]
Plans. I was supposed to be mountaineering somewhere – the Pyrenees, the Tyrol or the Mountains of the Moon – with Andrew for the last half of July, but he hasn’t written so I don’t know what’s on. (At least, he has written, but only to ask what to do with my copy of that head that his Claudine of Innsbrück cast in bronze for him, [10] so I said you had consented to give it temporary shelter. I hope this is all right.) Joan and I are coming to Blighty for August, so I pray you will be there. We’ll stay at Patrick [Kinross]’s if he can have us, so will be nice and handy. I’m going to Brittany for a few days to see an old Hungarian pal called Elemér v. Klobusiçky [11] who is escaping from ghastly drudgery in Budapest to stay for a month with his escaped son, who is Napoleonically wed to a girl called Caroline Murat. [12] (Elemér was a dashing and very funny ex-hussar squire, and I haven’t seen him since he was thirty-five and I was nineteen, when we were galloping about the Transylvanian woods together, swimming down poplar-shaded rivers and leaping out to chase nymphs – at their challenge, I hasten to say – who were reaping on the banks; barefoot but dauntless over the stubble fields, till we cornered them by the ricks.) Then, back here. Any chance of your coming? You touch on being lame and halt: if there’s no attendant yacht to deposit and retrieve you in our bay – I see a Bucentaur [13] ruffling up! – it would be child’s play to arrange for a purple palanquin between here and the road. More of this when we meet.
Literary news is that my laggard Odyssey has grown to such a size that the cost of book production may compel Jock Murray to split it up into vols. I feel slightly against this, as, after this awful house-building and bone-idleness-promoted silence, I feel I ought to knock the reader out by sheer weight of pages. But I suppose he’s right.
Vol. I would take us across Holland – snow all the way – in December 1933, then up the Rhine and across Swabia and Württemberg to Munich; Salzburg, Upper Austria, along the Danube through the Ledebur-country, cowsheds and castles all the way, and snow; nineteeth birthday in a beetling Childe Roland keep near the Vienna woods; Vienna and the Feb. 1934 revolution and sketching from door to door. Then, the river again, to Bratislava (with an illicit sidestep by train to Prague); across Slovakia (snows melting, spring beginning) and a long stay with Minka Strauss’s father [14] (a charming Swann-like figure) in a snug manor beside a Danubian tributary. Then back to the great river; arrest and release on suspicion of smuggling while slumbering among the rushes (Vol. I drawing to a close now . . .); crossing the huge bridge between Slovakia and Hungary, on Easter Sunday evening, all Hungary waiting the other side, and the bells of Esztergom cathedral peeling across the flood. Dreamy halt at midbridge – CUT!
Vol. II would thus open with scores of Magyar noblemen, like a crowd of Prince Igors, in green and scarlet hessians, fur-edged dolmans, and scimitars, and fur hats with plumes like escaping steam, with the Cardinal-Prince-Archbishop, Primate of Hungary, clattering up to the cathedral behind six white plumed greys . . . Then Budapest; the Great Hungarian Plain half trudging, half on borrowed steeds, social ballooning alternating still with social frogmanship in castles and hovels; Transylvania for the nymphing season; W. Rumania; S. to the Iron Gates; into Bulgaria, crossing and recrossing the Great Balkan Range and north over the river again to Bucharest at the turn of the leaf; down the Black Sea coast, arriving at Constantinople in a light snowfall at the end of Ramadan, viz. New Year 1935. End of Vol. II. [15] I’m now toying with the idea of an unwritten Vol. III – I’d meant to conclude with the Bosphorus. This hypothetical vol. would start with arrival by sea at Mt Athos, and January and February (twentieth birthday) in all the monasteries in deep snow, and not another soul except the monks. The 1935 Venizelos revolution; then, two months accompanying the Royalist Cavalry, again on a borrowed steed, through Macedonia and Thrace. Back to Salonica on it through the Rhodope Mts, then S. via Thessaly, till the book would end with a distant prospect of the Acropolis. I am working very hard on the end of Vol. I. There would be a pause between I and II – the latter is complete except for the final chapter.
I’m writing this on the lower terrace that you remember, under a charming and shady pavilion Petro and I have built; 5 yards square, with pillars of peeled cypress poles, supporting a roof of that criss-cross trellis work I have such a passion for. It spreads a cool checky and lozengy carpet of shade, like tartan underfoot, that turns dogs as they trot through into momentary leopards and bipeds into harlequins. This autumn we’ll plant vines and
roses that will surge up the poles to form a Gérard de Nerval [16] canopy, la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie [‘the trellis where the rose and the vine are entwined’]. I reread his Filles de Feu two years ago. It’s a very moving and romantic story, all in the St Firmin neighbourhood, La Route de Flandres, Senlis, Ermenonville, etc. But you probably know it by heart.
Petro and Lela scull out every morning to take in the nets they spread overnight, ascending the sea-steps with baskets full of tangled Breughel-and-Bosch-like fins, tentacles, spines, gills and accusing eyes. Shoals are changing the whole time: blue, green, buff, scarlet orange, deep purple; striped, and fancy. Lobsters are infrequent enough to be a great treat when they turn up rattling their castanets. Sometimes there is a dentice [sea-bream] – synagrida to us – fit for Tobias to be painted with. [17] So it’s fish for luncheon every day. Heaven knows what it does to the brain.
Cicadas v. loud to-day . . . I spy Joan, three terraces down, filling a colander with apricots, the ones from the branches for lunch, those on the ground for jam – pretty dull, she says, but there are so many one can’t just leave them. Also small plums the size of a penny, green-gold, translucent and delicious.
Apropos of Ledebur country, Friedrich comes for a few days in a fortnight, on his way to some prosperous Embericoes on an island, bringing a tall son d’un autre lit [from a previous marriage] and his chum. He likes Daphne’s book. We’re both looking forward to it, and I’ll grill him for details about Upper Austria.
Darling Diana, this was meant to be a brisk paragraph or two about plans, so disregard extraneous matter. Your letter was a true delight to both. One suffers from an intermittent Crusoe-complex on this headland, scanning the waves for bottles with messages and yours was half-genie, half-hippocrene. Joan shouts many tender messages from the apricots and tons of fond love, Diana darling,
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 36