from Paddy
xoxoxo
P.S. There’s been an intermittent rustling in the long grass all through this letter. I now see it is a very small tortoise.
[1] i.e. the notepaper of Le Château de Saint-Firmin, DC’s house in the grounds of the Château de Chantilly.
[2] In fact it is Crabtree, and not Sir Benjamin Backbite, who says this, in Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal.
[3] ‘That, now, to me, is as stern a looking rogue as ever I saw; an unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance!’ (Sheridan, School for Scandal).
[4] DC’s close friend Raimund von Hofmannsthal, who had been married to her niece Liz Paget, had just died.
[5] ‘Raimund von Hofmannsthal was a man of incandescent aesthetic feeling . . . His imagination was shaped by Mozart and Austrian baroque and neoclassicism . . . He seemed to have before his eyes an ideal vision of a Royal Court of unimaginable splendour, ruled by a divinely inspired princely artist, and he tended to romanticize the lives of all those of whom he was fond, which brought many of them much comfort.’ Obituary by ‘I. B.’ [Isaiah Berlin] in The Times, 26 April 1974.
[6] Raimund von Hofmannsthal owned Prielau, a seventeenth-century chateau on the shores of the lake at Zell am See.
[7] The Rainbow Picnic: A Portrait of Iris Tree (1974).
[8] ‘Fair miller-maid’: PLF refers to Schubert’s song cycle.
[9] ‘She has not been too lucky in her biographer. The Rainbow Picnic reads like a profile for the Tatler written in a hurry.’ Anne Scott-James, ‘Portrait of a Golden Girl’, Sunday Times, 14 April 1974.
[10] The sculptress Angela Conner had made a bronze of AD’s head, and would also do PLF himself; PLF refers here to Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842).
[11] Elemér von Klobusiçky (1899–1986) had been PLF’s host on his family estate at Guraszáda in Transylvania in the summer of 1934.
[12] Joachim-Napoléon Murat, Marshal of France and King of Naples 1808–15, was Napoleon’s brother-in-law.
[13] The state barge of the Doges of Venice.
[14] Baron Philipp Schey von Koromla (1881–1957), known as ‘Pips’.
[15] In fact Volume II in its published form – Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – would take him no further than the Iron Gates, on the Bulgarian frontier.
[16] Gérard de Nerval was the nom de plume of the French writer, poet, essayist and translator, Gérard Labrunie (1808–55). The quotation is from his poem El Desdichado, published in 1854. His Filles de Feu was published in 1852.
[17] St Tobias is often depicted with the fish he cleaned by order of an angel.
To Janetta Parladé
7 September 1974
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Janetta,
I did think of you last week! It was the end of the last weekend in England, Whit Monday in fact, when Annie, the Donaldsons [1] (who I scarcely knew, but liked, especially he) and I, set out to meet Francis Watson [2] on the edge of the Carrington country for a lunch in a village you must know well but whose name escapes me, with a very nice old pub, the Something Arms, where we didn’t eat, and another one, where we did; a beautiful old rosy-coloured brick watermill converted – perhaps rather spoilt – with tiles of the same hue: you can still see the old mill-race roaring under a kind of glass leper’s squint in the floor. We all got noisy and happy and a bit tight, swilling wine down, and gorging like Brueghel reapers on a row of marvellous roast things that one slashed into ad lib on a long trestle table. Afterwards, there was some competitive showing-off, jumping from one half-submerged stepping-stone to the next, across the river – the Kennet, perhaps, hallowed by crayfish memories? – that must have turned the mill-wheel of yore. After all this, A. and I drove to Gibbet Hill, parked near those gallows, and set off along the path, with a tall hedge on one side, that runs along the top of a long high ridge. After a while, though I’d never been on the top of it, I felt certain that I knew the country below: surely the great hogged mane of trees sweeping downhill was the Bull’s Tail? There was a cluster of buildings below that could only be Ham Spray. It was! Annie turned back here, to get the car and pick me up below, as I was determined to proceed; so I slogged on, not meeting a soul, except two boys flying a kite, as it was quite a windy day, sending big cloud shadows scudding over the fields below. Very few wild flowers, masses of Deadly and Woody Nightshade in the hedges, Jack in the Pulpits with burnt-up cowls turning into Lords and Ladies, and sprays of elderflower just beginning to turn, they’ll all be purple (black?) by now. Came to a crossroads, & shot steeply downhill between v. high banks and hedges, and into Ham, where I mooched about the church and churchyard for a bit, then on to a village green, near a pub (Rose & Crown?), where I fell asleep in the grass till woken up by Annie with the motor. We peered over the fence of Dove House, to see if there were any scampering Rothschildren; [3] then leant over the gate of Ham Spray, looking rather deforested and shaven and shorn; tiptoed a few yards inside and fled at the signs of movement within. We passed the small Inkpen pub where I remember buying fags with you years ago; also the house with the huge copper beech that I think you took for a spell.
It was all marvellous, and full of happy reminders.
I’m not sending any news, as I know Joan’s written – only the above, if you call it news; proof, if needed, that you’re thought of and missed.
Tons of love
Paddy
Also to Jaime
[1] John George Stuart Donaldson, Baron Donaldson of Kingsbridge (1907–98), soldier, farmer, prison reformer, consumers’ champion and politician; and Frances Donaldson (1907–94), née Lonsdale, writer and biographer.
[2] Sir Francis John Bagott Watson (1907–92), art historian and museum director, who lived after his retirement at Corton in Wiltshire.
[3] i.e. young Rothschilds.
Paddy’s relations with his mother Aileen (née Ambler) were never easy.
To Balasha Cantacuzène
9 September 1974
Kardamyli
Messenia
Balasha darling,
My weeks [in London] were strangely and, in a way, rather sadly taken up in trying, with some success, to straighten out my mother’s affairs which she manages always to re-entangle with unerring skill, largely due to a confusion between reality and a vivid and usually rather malevolent imagination which impels her to quarrel – quarrels based on fictitious accusations, strongly believed, against absolutely everyone who she comes in contact with – except, so far, me, because I’m so seldom there. I think it’s a form of neglected creativeness which has taken a wrong turning, a sort of superannuated spoiled-ness with a touch of megalomania, hung over from early gifts and beauty and success: ‘Well, all right, if not love, hate!’ It’s agonisingly painful, and a cause of unhappiness to everyone, and helpless, frustrated goodwill, especially to those nearest to her – Vanessa and Francesca [1] (who both send their love. Francesca remembers you so clearly and romantically as a little girl, in Gloucestershire). So my time was spent between Brighton (where she has been [in] a very nice sort of hotel nursing-home for the last few years, tormenting everyone) and the Herculean task of liquidating the flat she had in London for the past forty years – but uninhabited by her for the last six – sorting out papers, getting rid of and storing furniture & pictures, cleaning the place out. One couldn’t move in it, everything was deep in cobwebs and dust and London grime, exactly like Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations: thousands of newspapers piled up, magazines, books in confusion, manuscripts and typescripts of plays [2] – some of them put on for trial runs for a few days in theatre-clubs – programmes, piles of aviation magazines from her 1928–30 passion to learn to fly; masses of dresses that should have been thrown away decades ago; skis, skates, side-saddles deep in mildew . . . moulting fans, dog-eared music, a ukulele. (I only learnt a few years ago that when she and my father set off into the jungle for camp and geological explorati
on – one elephant, several horses, endless bullock-carts, an army of servants, one bullock-cart always contained a piano for jazz, ragtime, a bit of Chopin, a bit of Rimsky-Korsakoff), countless hats, forty-year-old toques like caved-in soufflés, moth-eaten furs, an artillery busky in a case, buttons of native cavalry and infantry regiments, her brother’s and their grandfather’s sabres, a lance-pennant; and – anticlimax! – nearly 300 empty milk bottles shoved away in odd corners, and a long-dead pigeon (which must have flown down the chimney), probably from Trafalgar Square, 300 yards away. There was also a dried-up husk of a small scorpion in a tin trunk full of letters (why not a cobra’s skeleton?), thousands of them, going back to the 1830s, faded yellow, and written across twice in spidery writing, and rather fascinating albums of faded photos of endless Amblers and Taaffes [3] since the earliest days of photography: races, gymkhanas, picknicks, pig-sticking, tent pegs, garden parties, cavalcades, steeple chases, polo, my mother’s mother (who was quite a competent portrait and landscape painter, also born in India) elaborately veiled in a palanquin between four long-suffering coolies, in identical tunics and turbans, or riding with my mother and uncle, with faded white plaster mansions in the background built in a mock-moghul style, with frilly crenellations, standing among palm trees and banyans. Always hosts of servants lined-up, innumerable because caste would only let each one do one particular task, e.g., a groom couldn’t sweep, a laundryman couldn’t draw water etc.; so the humblest subaltern seems to have had a retinue like the Ban of Craiova [4] . . . Strange world, I’ll sort all these out, one day. There were lots of later photographs too, of amateur theatricals in Calcutta and Simla, round which all social life seems to have revolved, with my mother invariably playing the lead: St Joan, The School for Scandal, The Beaux Stratagem, Portia [sic] in Twelfth Night, Rosalind in As You Like It, etc.
As you can imagine, there was something rather harrowing about all this. All the verve, fun, looks, high spirits, talents and energy having, in the end, taken such a bitter turning. The ‘spoiled-ness’ I mentioned earlier, I think must have been due – as it is with many girls brought up in India and, as it must have been with many tiresome Gone with the Wind beauties in the Southern States in America – to being over-successful when young in a small arena, surrounded by a nearly exclusively masculine society and a different coloured population in a subject position. Well, there we are, and enough of that. All too sad! If only kindness, mellowness, a humbler interest in other people had ensued, instead of this fierce conviction that everyone is wrong and hostile except oneself . . . I’ve blown off a lot of steam. Don’t mention it too much when you write. I want to let the whole thing sort itself out clearly in thoughts. . .
*
We – though Joan was most of the time at her brother Graham’s in Gloucestershire – stayed with Patrick Kinross by the canal in Little Venice, which was nice. I got to England a day earlier, and rushed across southern England to join Robin Fedden, Annie Fleming and Michael Astor at a pub in S. Wales, for a walking tour. But when I got to Abergavenny, Michael had twisted his ankle, and Anne got the sudden news that her son Caspar had taken an overdose of some wretched drug in Jamaica, swum out to sea, been washed back to the shore, picked up half-dead and flown by helicopter to Kingston, the capital, where he was being brought round (he’s in hospital in London, on the way to recovery, thank God). So in the end, Robin and I did the walk alone, through the Black Mountains – green and russet, really – for a few days: lovely wild rolling country of bracken and mountain streams, with only shepherds there, with enormous flocks and wonderfully clever shee ogs – I think the silent, methodical skill of these animals rounding up great flocks in silence, guiding them into single file, in obedience to an occasional carefully pitched whistle from field to field, and letting them fan out over wild country, never rucking it, then wheeling them back to their byres, is infinitely more proof of an unbroken civilisation than a jet-aeroplane. (When I think of the chaotic bawling, barking, bleating, stone-throwing, crook-flourishing, rage and disorder, incomplete improvisation after thousands of years – that prevails in Greece, I can’t help feeling there has been a serious break since the times of Theocritus. But don’t tell anyone.) Otherwise, nothing but troops of ponies grazing, thick woods and deep valleys. Lovely seeing full-sized trees again. I also got away from London to Graham’s, then to Michael Astor’s where David Cecil and his wife Rachel [5] (Desmond MacCarthy’s daughter) were staying too; to Ann Fleming’s, where pale Caspar was, and a long walk through the Carrington–Strachey country; and a last glorious weekend with Debo and Andrew D., at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire – not far from Wensleydale! I thought of you and Guy [Branch] – wide rolling dales, the house standing beside a ruined Augustinian Abbey (like Fountains) on the banks of a rushing river with a Plantagenet bridge. It was for a grouse-shoot (A [ndrew] doesn’t shoot – nor do I – but he loves arranging it, like an altruistic strategist) on high dales and moors, with a party of tremendous shots led by Debo, all v. nice, with troops of loaders and retrievers and labradors with their tongues out, under a windy sky of rushing clouds casting their shadows over the dappled country below. There were great shooting lunches, with masses to drink – hamper on hamper, hot pots, mulled wine, lots of port. The fact that anyone was able to hit anything afterwards renewed my faith in providence. On Sunday, Debo and I drove over to Haworth, where the Brontës’ vicarage is now a museum; a steep bleak little town with the rather charming vicarage at the top, among tall trees and moss-covered tombstones, and the moors rolling away rather desolately beyond. Countless Brontë relics are assembled there – MSs, books, bonnets, clumsy pictures of their dogs by brother Branwell, so thick with the atmosphere of those extraordinary sisters, that one quite forgot the other pilgrims gazing beside one. (I’ve got a booklet which I’ll send.) The site of Wuthering Heights is only a few miles beyond. But the weather seemed wrong. Clear blue sky, bright sunshine! Thank God, a few clouds appeared before we left, even a few spots of rain, a draught of wind – one’s always complaining about the weather. . .
SUDDEN STOP! Continued in our next! – time has passed, and I’m just off to Patras to meet Pomme & Ins.
Tons of love, darling Balasha,
Paddy
[1] PLF’s sister and her daughter.
[2] Aileen participated enthusiastically in amateur theatricals.
[3] The Amblers believed themselves to be descended from Sir John Taafe, of County Sligo.
[4] The Great Ban of Craiova was the Viceroy of Lesser Wallachia (in modern Rumania).
[5] Lord David Cecil (1902–86), biographer, historian and academic, and his wife Rachel (1909–82).
To Balasha Cantacuzène
2 November 1974
Kardamyli
Messenia
Balasha darling,
I wonder what it’s like at Pucioasa now? Winter has arrived here, suddenly and prematurely. Last year we could go on swimming till the 20th of November; now the sea is a great heaving mass of waves and foam, with the waves leaping to enormous heights, and completely concealing the island. Pomme, who knows the way it is, will see how huge they are. There were lovely flawless autumn days, then a sudden wild west wind with the cypresses bending double, followed by a monsoon of rain and bubbling torrents rushing down from the mountains so that when the first storm was over, there were enormous fans of ochre-coloured silt opening over the grey-green sea at the end of each ravine-bed. Thank heavens, it is just what was needed, and all the villagers, from wandering about like pessimistic spectres, are suddenly garlanded with smiles; and we, being small-scale olive-owners too, rejoice with them. The only ones who looked a bit hangdog were the people from the mountain villages, fearing that the fierce wind would have blown all the berries off the trees. But I went up to Proástion, and found everything intact. . .
The house filled up again very soon, with Raymond Mortimer and Dadie Rylands, and two other chaps who stayed three days. Some others, however, who had announced themselves, didn’t co
me, so we had a very happy time with Raymond and Dadie. Raymond announced that he was in his eightieth year, to our astonishment; he certainly doesn’t look it. Long Crichel, where he lives [1] (3 miles from Napier’s house [2] in Dorset) has always been a sort of Mecca for me; inhabited by Raymond and Eardley Knollys (painter) and Desmond Shawe-Taylor the music critic, and, until he died seven years ago, Eddy Sackville-West: all working hard, as in a lay-monastery, except for the delicious food and the funny conversation. Dadie Rylands, Fellow of King’s Cambridge for donkey’s years, is a mere seventy something, but unlike frailer Raymond, swims for hours – almost to the island, like Ins – and gallops across the mountains like a stag. Both of them constituted a strong breath of all that was most sympathetic in Bloomsbury: v. amusing and loving about ‘Virginia’ and ‘Lytton’ and ‘Ottoline’. Dadie’s a tremendous Shakespeare scholar, and has the most beautiful reading-aloud voice: so we had enchanting evening hours with the sonnets, Troilus and Cressida, Byron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Browning etc. Raymond (who has always been a great backer and encourager of mine) firmly insisted on my handing over to him some chapters of my present book (which I was too shy to show, until it is polished up, to Pomme and Ina, though I rather longed to, in spite of its imperfections. I wish I had now!) They both read it, and were tremendously enthusiastic about it (I was dreading their verdict, as no one has seen it except Joan), far beyond the call of guest-to-host politeness; so I am feeling very boosted up and encouraged!. . .
Two days ago, Joan got a telegram saying that Cyril Connolly was desperately ill with a heart attack, and that things looked very serious indeed, threatening the worst. He’s a great friend, partly of mine, but a much greater and older one of Joan’s – in fact, [she is] his closest; so she flew off with Graham two days ago. I drove them in, J. very upset and anxious, and saw them off at the aerodome. I do hope he’ll be all right, but there’s not much hope it seems. It would be a terrible loss. [3] Oh dear. . .
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