Caspar [Fleming] has taken himself off to a nursing home for a cure much to Annie’s relief. I’m working away hard, and we go sightseeing in the afternoons – Malmesbury the day before yesterday, Fairford yesterday, where I could willingly spend a whole day going over the stained glass inch by inch. I didn’t realise it’s the only church in the kingdom where the old glass is absolutely intact.
Dear Raymond, thank you again, and not only for a four-poster-bed and delicious board, but for being such a help with the still nameless book (World Enough and Time?). It was angelically kind, and I know what a sweat!
Love to all
Yrs ever
Paddy
[1] Ann Fleming’s house.
[2] Caleb Simper (1856–1942), English composer and organist.
[3] Violet Wyndham (1890–1980), one of the most faithful members of DC’s inner circle.
To Diana Cooper
5 November 1975
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
That was a nice feast, with you and Ran Chez Victor, [1] the night before I left. I bet it’s the first time Mandalay and the Te Deum have ever been sung there, at any rate, on the same night. I’m coming back some time next week for a few days – the tail end of my medical imbroglio – so we’ll be able to do something glorious.
Michael Stewart has sent us the Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names, which I’ve been deeply immersed in for the last two days: all their derivations, etc. Reading it is like wandering in a rambling twilight wood with ragged troops of Thor-worshipping Anglo-Saxons in most of the glades – swine rootling, watermills turning, cattle halted by fords and stepping-stones, wolves peering out of alder-clumps at peaceful grazers, a few Normans clanking about, Welshmen brooding on their wrongs beside wishing wells, Norwegians busy caulking and careening, Danes crowding round cooking pots on swampy islets, Corns [Cornishmen] digging for tin, Irish zealots repairing drystone chapels, Romans wearily forming tortoise and assembling and shipping catapults at the double while Picts make off with their poultry, parties of Britons out after flints and woad and mistletoe or hauling on cromlech-ropes, and somewhere, I suppose, huge and shadowy Beaker-men reeling and hiccupping in the bracken. Rough island story, in fact. . .
It’s my Greek name day tomorrow – SS. Michael and Gabriel and All Angels [2] – and the whole village comes up here to attend mass at the little rock-chapel. Then they troop along to the house for liqueurs and sweet cakes, followed, in due course, by meat and wine, rather like one of those Futurist meals organised by Marinetti in the twenties. Lela and some crones from the mountains are busy sweeping and garnishing the house, after whitewashing the chapel, and decking it with garlands of olive, bay and oleander.
See you next week, Diana darling. Till then, tons of fond love
from Paddy
[1] A fashionable restaurant in Wardour Street, Soho.
[2] The Feast Day of Saints Michael and Gabriel and All Angels always falls on 8 November, so presumably PLF wrote this sentence two days after starting this letter.
To Frances Partridge
28 November 1975
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Frances,
I’m labouring under two leaden layers of guilt! I was horror-struck to learn from Janetta that I had got the nights mixed up; and terribly disappointed as I had been particularly looking forward to feasting with you and Janetta and Jaime; worst of all, seeming so rude and callous. But at least, I thought next day, after many attempts to telephone – always when you were out – a letter may result in eventual forgiveness. So I did my best, put two 7d stamps on it – nothing smaller was available. Then the normal processes seemed too slow, so I drove at full speed across the park, stopped the taxi – arriving from the east – at the great pillared doorway beyond No. 15, left the letter on the hall table, and went on my way with my conscience several ounces lighter. When, meeting Janetta on Tuesday night for a drink in The Star Tavern, I learned that you had never got it, and that I must have left it at No. 14 instead of No. 16, I was convinced that there was nothing for it but the River. We peered through the glass beside the doors: no table in your house, so it must still be on the one in No. 14, which we descried but couldn’t reach, owing to all doors being shut. Well, I AM sorry, Frances, and I really will pull my socks up and do better next time, should I ever be asked again, so please don’t cross me off your list, as they used to say!
Joan and I do wish you would come and inspect this place some time. It’s not at its best at the moment, as rain is coming down in buckets. It’s the sort of weather that people posted to the Sudan used to pine for: ‘really wet green days!’ Joan’s[1] many cats slink up and down under the arches, peering at each other in wild surmise, the young ones that is. The older ones sit meditatively in front of the fire, rather like your painted one, the correct winter posture for pusses of riper years.
With many apologies again, and love from us both.
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] I spy her picking tangerines at the bottom of the garden, under an umbrella.
Dadie Rylands wrote to Paddy after the publication of A Time of Gifts in September 1977.
To George ‘Dadie’ Rylands
10 December 1977
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Dadie,
It was cheering, getting your letter on the night of the party, and I feel very sustained by the kind things said. Yes of course you are right about the second line of Petronius. [1] It was all right on the last proofs. What demons of destruction can have appended that meaningless ‘-es’ on to ‘major’, ruining sense and scansion in a blow? Thank goodness I didn’t notice it at once; I was already writhing and groaning about misprints – turning Grendel’s mother from a ‘water-hag’ to a ‘water-hog’, ‘ghostly’ into ‘ghastly’, ‘prince’ into ‘price’ to name a few – and I think ‘majores’ would have done for me, I don’t know what to do about my habit of ‘than’ with the accusative, I thoroughly disapprove. I don’t like it when I see others do it; but seem cruelly blinded to this beam in my own eye. I would like to be a staunch maintainer of the decencies – like that Roman soldier in Sir Arthur Poynter’s picture (‘Faithful unto Death’?) standing impassive among the falling lava and Scoriae of Pompeii [2] – and here I am, the fugleman of drift. [3] I wish I could have an instrument like those frogs’ legs of Galileo or Volta, wired to a battery, which would make my right hand leap painfully from the page each time, until I was cured. But I do plan to reform.[1]
It’s pouring with rain here at the moment, & wind, waves half a mile high, thunder and lightning, rather splendid. I’ve got the first cold of winter. Joan said this morning ‘Have you been taking your Redoxon?’ I said ‘Ad absurdum,’ quick as winking. It was an opening I had been waiting for for ten years, and it has put me thoroughly on the mend.
We go to Barbara and Niko for Christmas. What a pity you won’t be there! It would be a great joy if you came here whenever you were able. Joan sends much love and joins me in wishes for a Happy Christmas – premature ones, on the New York Rabbi principle (see P.S.) – and every kind thought from
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] Also the equestrian Duke, on page 203, is Newcastle, not Manchester. The fact that this is my fault – confusion between unvisited industrial cities – makes it all the more bitter. But I should have remembered the V. Woolf ’s essay [Virginia Woolf ’s The Common Reader (1925)] on the bluestocking Dss of N [Duchess of Newcastle].
P.S. It seems that a young New York Rabbi is in the habit every year, weeks before the Day of Atonement, of promenading before his synagogue with a sandwich board which says REPENT NOW AND AVOID THE YOM KIPPUR RUSH.
[1] PLF had quoted some lines of Petronius as one of three epigraphs to A Time of Gifts.
[2] PLF is thinking of (Sir) Edward John Poynter’s painting Faithful unto Death (1865).
[3] A fugleman is
a highly trained soldier posted as a model before soldiers conducting exercises.
Following the publication of A Time of Gifts, Paddy received a letter from a stranger living in Budapest: Rudi Fischer, a naturalised Australian of Transylvanian origin who worked as a languages editor for the New Hungarian Quarterly. Fischer’s letter was appreciative, but not uncritical, and he drew attention to several mistakes in the text. It was obvious from his comments that Fischer’s wide knowledge was matched by meticulous attention to detail. Paddy determined that the book’s sequel should not be published without Fischer’s scrutiny.
To Rudi Fischer
7 July 1978
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Mr Fischer,
Thank you very much indeed for both your letters and please accept my humble apologies for being so late in answering them! What happened was this – I went to stay with friends in Corfu in April, so missed your first one, which somehow got stuck here without being reforwarded. From Corfu I went on to England, and only got back to my base here the day before yesterday, and found your second letter waiting alongside the first.
I hate the idea that you thought I might have been offended! On the contrary, I’m deeply grateful for all your very useful and constructive suggestions, all of which I will most joyfully take into account when a reprint is due. I have corrected a few already. Your emendations about the difference between a Reichstadt and a Kaiserstadt will be particularly useful for the German translation, which is being made by Dr Richard Moissl of the Müller Verlag in Salzburg. It is nearly finished, and he will be sending it to me for vetting.
Your researches in Slovak-Magyar toponymy were fascinating and rewarding – especially your triumphant running to earth of Nagy Magyar and the location of Tövecces. I must certainly get hold of the Austrian 1:200,000 map – I believe it is the one I had, given me by Baron Schey; but the few tatters that have survived the passing of decades are quite useless now. . .
I wonder if I am right in assuming from your name that you are a Siebenbürgischer Sachser? [1] I have always wondered what history-co-mythological basis – as apart from the real historical one – there was for the Hamlin origin of the Transylvanian Saxon in the closing lines of Browning’s ‘Pied Piper’. [2]
I particularly regret not having got your first letter when I should, as I stayed on a few days in Budapest on the way to England – mainly to see my old friend – not seen by me since August 1934 in Transylvania, but recognisable at once even after forty-four years – Elemér Klobusiçky, who now lives by translating government scientific documents, in 127 Pasareti Ut. I hired a car and we drove on a rainy Sunday, with him and his sister Ilona and a nice ex-sculptress called Mrs Strásser – to Esztergom & Visegrad, spending hours looking at the pictures in the palace I hadn’t seen for nearly half a century. I also gazed at my old Buda abode – 15, Úri Utca – and looked up a more recent friend, you may know, Dr István Gal, a charming man, and a great authority on historical, especially Renaissance, Anglo-Hungarian links. Another more recent friend, Géza Kepes, very good on both modern and ancient Greek poetry, was in London, but I saw him for a moment when I got there.
As you can imagine from the above, your letter gave the greatest possible pleasure and help. If I get stuck in my detail about Hungarian history, I hope I may make so bold as to write and ask your help. I also plan to plague my other Hungarian friends on their particular fields – but as you are all polymaths, it will be a hard choice!
With very many thanks again, and all kind wishes,
Yours ever
Patrick Leigh Fermor
[1] One of the ethnic German (and German-speaking) minority in Rumania.
[2] ‘And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people who ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why, they don’t understand.’
Robert Browning, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’
To John Julius Norwich
Twelfth Night, 1979
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear John Julius,
V. many thanks from both of us for the smashing Cracker! [1] I love the Strachey description of Cardinal Wiseman. [2] I read somewhere that Manning hated Newman so much that he went to great lengths to get a butler called Newman, whom he was constantly calling for: ‘Newman! Newman! What can that idiot be about? Newman? The man’s a cretin’, etc. I wish I knew where I’d learnt this. Apropos of the splendid epitaph of Dr Horne, here’s an odd non-scanning epitaph – ‘a quaint epitaph’ quoted by Horace Walpole, and found among the MSs of Sir T. Carew of Ushington, on a member of the great Genoese family of Pallavicini, who made a fortune by collecting funds for the Pope in the Reign of Q. Mary (of Calais memory), some of which he gave, later, to Q. Elizabeth, and bought a prosperous manor at Babraham,[1] where he died, a knight, and presumably Protestant, in 1600:
[1] ‘ . . . Strong men have cried like babes, bydam
To hear what happened at Babraham . . .’
[From Robert Bro0ke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’]
wore Persian dress, even at the English Court. There are two charming Van Dyck pictures of them at Petworth, in full eastern fig.
Here lies Horatio Palavazene
Who robbed the Pope to lend the Queene,
He was a thiefe. A thiefe? Thou lyest,
For whie? He robb’d but Antichrist,
Him death with besom swept from Babram
Into the bosom of Old Abram.
But then came Hercules with his club,
And struck him down to Belzebub.
You will be glad to hear that Theophilus Field, Bishop of Hereford, later contributed to a compilation called ‘An Italian’s Dead Bodie stucke with English Flowers, Elegies on the Death of Sir Oratio Pallavicino’.
You may wonder how I come by all this abstruse lore in the depths of the Mani. Last year Jock Murray suddenly told me that about £200 had mounted up from Violins (opera) [3] royalties; so I blew the lot on the DNB [Dictionary of National Biography] which is still coming out here in dribs and drabs, almost complete: so give me a few minutes’ notice, and I can be pretty knowing about almost anyone in England – (before 1900) – up to William Tytler (1711–1792); but am still steeped in murk about Petruccio Ubaldini . . . It would be hard to find a more fascinating and time-wasting acquisition.
I long to know more than the DNB can tell about Sir Robt-Shirley’s distant relation, also Robt (1581–1628) who spent years at the Court of Shah Abbas, married a Circassian, and always thereafter
I’m becoming illegible. Must pull myself together.
Three or four years ago, in a book by Mary Stewart [4] called The Ivy Tree (thriller, hotly recommended, like all her books) the following quotation comes: ‘Time hath his revolutions, there must be a period and an end to all temporal things, finis rerum, an end of names and dignities and whatsoever is terrene, and why not of De Vere? For where is Bohun? Where’s Mowbray? Where is Mortimer? Nay, which is more, and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality!’ No author was mentioned, and these haunting lines started a fruitless search through quotation dictionaries, Urn Burial, Religio Medici, The Anat. of M., [5] Milton’s prose, Sydney’s Defense of Poesy, Donne’s Sermons, etc. – till at last, in despair, I wrote to the author, and, at last learned that the quotation is from the closing speech of Lord Justice Coke, in the reign of James I, in some claim concerned with the all-but-extinct Earldom of Oxford. [6] In order to avenge myself, I made up a spurious seventeenth-century page concerning judges, and slipped it nonchalantly in my answer; an
d she went through a similar torture, till I owned up. I was pleased. (She must be extremely nice, lives in Edinburgh, married to a geologist called Sir Somebody Stewart and is née Rainbow.) I was doubly bucked when Dadie Rylands asked whether it was a missing fragment of Hydriotaphia; perhaps to give pleasure, which it did.
Anyway, the Cracker is a great delight, and if I’m burdening you with these enclosures, it’s your fault for starting hares! V. many thanks and love from both of us, and Happy New Year, a trifle late, to you and yours.
Yrs ever
Paddy
P.S. I am writing this in a grey-green Harris tweed jacket, good as new except for leather sleeves, which Leslie and Roberto made for your father in June, 1936. You must be almost coevals – perhaps the coat a bit younger. [7]
[1] JJN’s annual Christmas Cracker, ‘a personal collection of quirky quotes and literary odds and ends’, which he sends to his friends instead of a Christmas card.
[2] In Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918).
[3] PLF’s novel The Violins of Saint-Jacques was turned into an opera, with a score by Malcolm Williamson and a libretto by William Chappell, first performed on 29 November 1966.
[4] Mary, Lady Stewart (1916–2014), née Mary Rainbow, developed the genre of romantic mysteries. She married the geologist Frederick Stewart, who was knighted in 1974.
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