To Diana Cooper
25 February 1980
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
You’ll never guess what I’ve been up to! At last I’ve pulled myself together and assembled all your letters. I think a few are missing, and will probably turn up, slipped down the backs of drawers or left in books etc. But there’s plenty to chew on, almost 200 pages of different sizes. Most of them were still in their envelope, so even if undated could be placed by the stamps outside, and even if the envelopes were missing, can be pretty accurately placed by the drift of the contents. As I had to go to Athens last week, I took this great stack of treasure with me and got them photostated, page by page, dishing them out to the chap in the Xerox shop, piling them up as they came out, feeling like Gutenberg or Caxton. Then I re-sorted them, and reread; and, of course, they are utter glory. I read some well-chosen ones – Coronation Nile journey, the Atlas, El Glaoui, Iris, etc. – to Joan, that is, and Barbara and Niko Ghika, and they were bowled over, just as I was: fascination, laughter, damp eyes and sighs, but always recovering into some marvellous light touch or simile – in fact your own marvellous self shines through like a beacon and illumines all. I will send this precious collection to you when I can find a suitable messenger: some time within the next two to three weeks I hope, for you to go over & select as you see fit, and let Philip Ziegler [1] borrow, if he still wants to use them – he said he did last year – I’m sure that some of the descriptions of travel, adventure etc. come into letters to other pals, as they do in mine (I dread to think of some of the near duplicate of letters of mine that must be gathering dust in scattered drawers). Anyway, darling Diana, here they are – or rather, will be. I was very moved reading them, by this record of shared delights and trust, confidence, warmth and loving friendship, and can’t believe my luck, unfaltering for all these years, and still prospering in such a marvellous, happy and treasured bond, light as garlands, [2] as lasting as those hoops of Polonius. [3]
After thoroughly embarrassing us both, I’ll charge on.
Last week, we were summoned to Athens by the Ghikas for an intriguingly mysterious evening two days ahead. We’d got a sort of an inkling what it might be from a hint or two, and it turned out to be what we’d thought, and very exciting, too; viz. getting elected to the Athens Academy, as what’s called a Corresponding member, which is the most a non-Greek is allowed to be; and as it’s the local equivalent of the Acad. Française, it’s considered a great honour. Joan, Barbara and I were waiting in the flat, when Niko telephoned to say it had gone through with thirty votes out of thirty, with one absentee blank – i.e. jolly well, and before we could say knife, he was back in their flat with a kind of Comus rout of delightful fogeys, corks began flying, beakers brimming and many embraces; ninety-year-old sages dashed at one with a hop, skip and a wince. Then lots of other friends rolled up, the cork-fusillade went on into the small hours, and there was not so much as a flicker of hangover next day. Well, that was nice. Another nice thing was the end of a long toothache. A charming lady-dentist discovered a sort of Polyphemus’s cavern in a back tooth, measureless to man, [4] in which a flock might snugly winter, but too late now: walled up. . .
No more now, darling Diana, except tons of fond love & hugs from
Paddy
P.S. I’ll find a way of getting the precious bundle of letters to you – perhaps via Michael Stewart, who is coming out in three weeks time to Athens with Mr Macmillan, who is getting a prize for being president of an Acropolis preservation committee, awarded by the Onassis Foundation to whose prize-giving committee, he and I both belong. It’s rather fun. They pay for stately travel and hotels whenever a three-day meeting crops up. G.B., the Meurice in Paris, Sachers [5] one day perhaps?
P.P.S. Darling Diana, Do go through all the letters carefully before handing over, as there are obviously lots of things not for strangers’ eyes – cheerful mocking of friends, now and then brief exasperation with loved ones, which, in cold blood to the uninitiated, might leave scars.
I’m sure it’s all right with Philip Ziegler, he seems a very nice chap indeed; even so, unexpected dangers yawn. I was horrified by some of the things that appeared – and by Laura’s [6] guilty frivolity in handing them over unread – when Evelyn’s memoirs or letters appeared in a Sunday paper with clumsy and harmful editorial comments in the guise of elucidation. [7]
Letters and talk should always be free and reckless between friends, according to Castiglione in Il Cortegiano – it’s a quality he calls ‘sprezzatura’, the point being that among friends, if they are the sort he is writing about, nothing can be taken the wrong way. But outside the magic circle, in the coldness and impersonality of print, beware, is his drift; and I’m sure he’s right. P.
xxx
[1] Philip Ziegler’s Diana Cooper: A Biography was published in 1981.
[2] ‘For men acknowledged true desires
And light as garlands wore them.’
Bayard Taylor, ‘A Paean to the Dawn’
[3] Polonius’s advice to his son, Laertes: ‘Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’
[4] ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea’
Coleridge, Kubla Khan
[5] All luxurious hotels: the Grande Bretagne in Athens; Le Meurice in Paris; Sacher in Vienna.
[6] Waugh’s widow.
[7] See pages 292–4.
To Niko and Barbara Ghika
undated [probably February 1980]
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Niko, Darling Barbara,
This is not a bread-and-butter, but a Nectar-and-Ambrosia letter! What a lovely stay that was, and that miraculous red-letter day of the Academy! Unforgettable. Thank you both so much for all the immediate toils and worries that had to be contended with to make it possible at all, what with breakdowns, and dilatory plumbers and electricians; for that wonderful champagne, of which even thirty or forty beakers full failed to produce even the flicker of a headache; and above all, Niko, for the generous thought, so many months ago, of getting me hoisted into your august assembly, wreathed and blushing, and for the toils and patience of seeing that it really did come true. Not only the champagne overflowed, but hearts too, and still do. We came back in a haze of well-being, elation, and gratitude.
I wonder what it’s been like in Athens since we left? Here bright summer days are accompanied by Arctic, bone-biting cold (with nights when the stars look like chips of icicles) and very slightly warmer days, but dark with endless drizzle and forbidding grey skies. It’s like that today, and Joan’s reclining with a bit of flu – perhaps something different, as it doesn’t seem to be catching – under her manifold blanket of cats. I have meals on a little table at the bottom of the bed, a blazing fire heaving, and after dinner I’ve been reading Chaucer out loud, pronounced as modern English, with only a faint, almost unuttered ‘er’ or ‘o’ sound for those final vowels which have since dropped away, like the simian tails of our forefathers when no longer needed, and it makes it very easy to understand, especially with a glossary on the opposite page for the really difficult words. It’s a sort of private breakthrough, like my secret decision, at the age of about twenty, always to pronounce Latin, to myself, not in either the ‘old’, the ‘new’ or the ‘Erasmian’ way, but simply as Italian. It turns it into a living language at once, instead of a stone-dead inscription on blurred and overgrown marble. Alas, alas! It can’t quite be done with ancient Greek, because of the metrical quantities in scanning. They all say it was a matter of pitch, as in Chinese; but nobody has ever managed to give a convincing or even melodious demonstration.
No more now, except a billion thanks again, and bless you both forever.
With lots of love,
Paddy
To Diana Cooper
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
What a lovely evening, that dinner in your house, our last night in Blighty! (I wish I’d written next day to say so). I love Tom Stoppard [1] saying ‘It’s the sort of evening I always hope I’m going to have, but never do.’ Do you see what I mean about his having more than a hint of un- gross and un-fleshy Oscar W about him, depending largely on fine, large and friendly eyes, and a soft and many-curved formation of the mouth? He seemed quite exceptionally nice the two times I met him, the first at the Lit. Soc., [2] and the second, more protracted, thanks to you. Anyway, it was lovely, full of amusing discussion, quotation, reading aloud, and plenty of laughter, sitting up in the glow until the last possible moment, before flitting off into the night. It reminded me of many a happy evening in the black-and-white-floored chamber at Chantilly.
‘And there they loll till far into the night
Toying with heresies by candlelight’,
as I remember Peter Q. and I improvising, after innumerable glasses, just before tottering bedwards. It was snowy and frosty weather, and next morning he and George Gage [3] and I walked across the white park, had a look at the statue of Anne de Montmorency and those marvellous stables and then thought: why not a nip at the Tipperary (or was it the Piccadilly?) bar, that haunt of jockeys in the main street which you always dreaded, as it made guests late for luncheon.
I still can’t get over the splendours and delights of the Raymond Asquith book. [4] I bet the reviews will be quelque chose. I haven’t seen any of them yet, except a short and charming one, half interview, by Philip Howard, ending in so splendid a Danaë shower of dewdrops that I felt like standing up and cheering. I expect they’ve found someone infinitely better qualified than I to review it for the Times Lit. Supp.; but I’ve just written to John Gross, the v. nice editor, to see if they will let me do one of those ad. lib. commentaries on the middle pages, devoted to anything they want. What I’d like to point out, is the enormous amount of buried quotation there is in the letters book to K. H. [5] and to you, which must mean a vast quantity of shared poetry which was in daily use, and pointless if the other correspondent couldn’t spot it – no helping inverted commas; e.g. like R. A.’s saying a German artillery barrage had done no harm (none killed that time), seeming to aim at a million but missing one unit, which prompted us, helped by faint memories, to run it down, and read out in The Grammarian’s Funeral. [6] I remember thinking at Chantilly, looking at that girlish album of yours, with favourite poems engrossed in a careful hand, how very similar yours had been to mine; Sir Thomas Wyatt’s (my favourite of the lot) make me nearly jump out of my skin. Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Meredith are the ones I remember best. What others? Could you have a look at them – but of course, no need – and roughly let me know? Were you sixteen or eighteen when you made that amazing pilgrimage to Box Hill? [7] How astounded Meredith must have been.
It’s suddenly very hot here, but I write, I am there now, in a sort of arbour through which a breeze always seems to blow, on the olive-terrace under the window where you stay (whence I suddenly heard the click-clack of that invading helicopter); and I manage to make the thick-walled studio as cool as a sepulchre by closing all the grey shutters, so that only a restful penumbra reigns within. Cicadas scrape away on every twig. During our absence, a rumour started here, and in neighbouring villages, that I had died while on furlough. It was rather fun, for a week or two, climbing into the higher villages, and watching their jaws drop and eyes shoot out on stalks at what must have seemed like the vision of a spectre, or Lazarus risen from the tomb, and assuring them with a light laugh that the rumour was exaggerated . . . [8]
A dragon-fly has just settled on this page, of so enormous a size and with such unwieldy drooping and rainbowy wings, that I don’t see how he’s ever going to take off again.
With tons of fond love & hugs, darling Diana,
from Paddy
(Joan sends hers too)
[1] Tom Stoppard (b. 1937), dazzlingly clever playwright and screenwriter.
[2] The Lit. Soc. (normal abbreviation), founded by William Wordsworth and others in 1807, meets once a month at the Garrick Club.
[3] George John St Clere Gage (1932–93), 7th Viscount Gage.
[4] John Jolliffe, Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters (1980).
[5] Katharine Frances Horner (1885–1976), whom Asquith married in 1907.
[6] ‘This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit’
Robert Browning, ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ (1855)
[7] The novelist and poet George Meredith (1828–1909) lived at Box Hill, in Surrey.
[8] Mark Twain, ‘The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’
To Diana Cooper
9 February 1981
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
After Christmas, we – us, that is, and Xan and his mate – suddenly decided on Syria, so hastened to Athens and took wing.
Well, Damascus looks a slum at first, especially under rain and slime, but, bit by bit, its hidden splendours dawn. The Great Mosque is the eighth Wonder of the World. Out of doors, it encloses a vast courtyard full of dazzling Byzantine mosaics and pigeons; inside are endless hushed vistas of columns and acanthus leaves from the Roman temple to Jupiter that it has usurped. Dwarfed by muffling acres of carpet, little groups are dotted about, conversing quietly or prostrating themselves towards Mecca on a sudden impulse. Cross-legged, doddery, steel-spectacled Imams in snowy turbans and robes, rather like archdeacons or minor-canons of a Mohammedan Barchester, whisper the Koran to themselves from low, inlaid folding lecterns, or just roam about vaguely. On several days I sat there too, hours of vacant bliss leaning against a column’s base, lulled by the tick of a nearby grandfather clock (with Arabic numerals, but made in Coventry in 1852). Moslems love them. Rather surprisingly, they also love the head of St John the Baptist, jealously enshrined and revered in a very ornate crescent-topped tabernacle half-way down the aisle. There were marvellous temples and burial towers at Palmyra, dead beautiful cities like Resafa, [1] long, reedy moments by the Euphrates, and dramatic dawns and sunsets across the desert:
‘. . . And when the deep red eye of day is level with the lone highway
And some to Mecca turn to pray, but I toward thy bed, Yasmin. . .
Shower down thy love, O burning bright! For one night or the other night
Here comes the gardener in white; and gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin’ [2]
Hassan to the rescue! Aleppo was a warren of lanes and caravanserais like a tangle of Oxford colleges; Crusader castles – e.g. Krak des Chevaliers, fierce as a gauntlet, complex as The Maginot Line – scowl from many a mountain; and there were scores of wonderful and enormous ruined Romano-Byzantine basilicas. The biggest and noblest, larger than Ely, was built round the stump of a column once 60 feet high, on top of which St Symeon Stylites perched for forty years, unsheltered and unplumbed. The faithful domed him over in the end – perhaps to his rage. I hope they left him a loophole for the splendid view over the Alawite mountains. The Djebel Druze, covered in snow, looked like the North Riding, and not far off was Bosra, with the biggest and most complete and sparkling Roman theatre ever seen, embedded in a giant Saracen fort and only revealed a couple of decades ago: black basalt with an apricot Corinthian proscenium and a colonnade round the top. We had luncheon at Dera’a, where T. E. Lawrence was thrashed and violated by the Turkish bey. We peered at the building where it must have happened – if it did: it may have been wishful thinking by hindsight, if I may use the expression – and fidgeted uncomfortably. . .
Back in Damascus was an enclosed tomb with a bulbous green turban: Saladin’s! Only a month before, we had been gazing at the recumbent effigy of his foe and friend, Richard Coeur de Lion, at Fontevrault, south of the Loire; [3] and our minds flew to The Talisman [4] . . . There’s a fine old hamm
am [Turkish bath] a few lanes away, built in the same reign by Nur ad-Din el Shahád el Mansúr [5] (may his bones rest in peace!) and I slunk off there with Xan on our last afternoon. When the steam, the clanking of brass bowls, the thumping and the bone-cracking were over, we were swaddled like mummies in many layers of linen sheets and towels and finally, in mantles of cloth of gold, our heads swathed, we were led away, bobbling and nearly insensible, to recline on divans that looked up into vaults of basalt and a vast, dim dome, and down on to softly lit fountains; slowly coming to. Then, as we bubbled away at hookahs over bitter desert coffee spiced with cardamom, we could just hear, as we sipped, the muted wail of a muezzin from a minaret hard-by (recorded, of course: convolvulus-horns sprout from their balconies). Fragrant and disembodied – the cleanest people east of Suez and north of the Hedjaz – we issued forth at last into the twilit souks, followed by the black and burning glances of the Bedouin that swarm along the Street called Straight. . .
Well, it was lovely. We are now buried in Doughty [6] and the Seven Pillars and the Letters of Gertrude Bell. I found these Letters one of the most brilliant and exciting books I’ve read, and very funny too. I long to read her other books: have only read Amurath to Amurath. [7] She was Ed Stanley’s & Judy’s great aunt; also, rather unfortunately, Molly Buccleuch’s. [8] You must have known her – we all could have. Sylvia Henley [9] comes in a lot. Do write about this, what she was like, etc. She’s become a sort of craze with us: an extraordinary mixture of guts, brains, humour, and niceness too, and one can’t get better than that.
No more for the moment, Diana darling, except pining for news – nobody writes – and tons of fond love
from Paddy
P.S. What news of Annie? I’m just about to send her a very similar letter – so don’t let on!
P.P.S. The food was very good, but might pall. Ask JJ if he has kept his sense of hummuz.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 41