[1] An archaeological site, known in Roman times as Segiopolis.
[2] James Elroy Flecker, ‘Hassan’s Serenade’ (1922):
‘But when the deep red eye of day
is level with the lone highway,
And some to Mecca turn to pray,
and I toward thy bed, Yasmin. . .
Shine down thy love, O burning bright!
for one night or the other night
Will come the Gardener in white,
and gather’d flowers are dead, Yasmin!’
[3] The Royal Abbey of Our Lady of Fontevraud or Fontevrault is a complex of religious buildings in the Loire Valley, near Chinon. Henry II, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their son, Richard I, were all buried there, though it seems that their remains may have been destroyed during the French Revolution.
[4] Walter Scott’s 1825 novel The Talisman is set in the Third Crusade.
[5] Ruler of the Syrian province of the Seljuk Empire from 1146 to 1174 AD.
[6] C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888).
[7] Gertrude Bell (1868–1926), traveller, archaeologist, mountaineer and diplomat. Amurath to Amurath (1911) traces an expedition to Mesopotamia.
[8] ‘Molly’, Duchess of Buccleuch (1900–93), née Lascelles, had been one of Duff ’s mistresses, known collectively by Diana as ‘the dairy’ because their names were reminiscent of cows’ names – Molly, Poppy [Baring], Daisy [Fellowes], Biddy [Carlisle], etc. ‘Please keep out of the dairy,’ she would say to him.
[9] Gertrude Bell’s cousin Sylvia Laura Henley (1882–1980), née Stanley, accompanied GB on her last visit to Iraq.
To Diana Cooper
15 April 1981
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Diana,
I wonder if you fully realised that Harun al-Rashid [1] sent an elephant called Abulahaz as a present to Charlemagne in AD 802? I’ve just come across it in a forty-five-year-old notebook, and had clean forgotten it. I’ve looked it up in a wonderful old eight-volume book called Italy and her Invaders [2] that Freya gave me last winter, and it’s quite true. The poor creature was killed in 810, in a battle against the King of Denmark: what a shame! Up till then he lived in the park of Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle to us). I wonder which route he took? Baghdad – Palmyra – Aleppo – Antioch, then by sea, probably, to Bari, and along the Appian Way to Rome; then north, over the Alps at the Brenner, across Germany and up the Rhine? Or Venice, perhaps, then Vienna, and along the Danube? I like to think that perhaps the Caliph sent him via the Hellespont or the Bosphorus and through the Byzantine Empire – they were on fairly good terms till the end of 802. But then they would have had to cross the new Bulgarian state, reigned over by a horrible Khan called Krum, who, at banquets with his boyars, used to drink out of the skull of his defeated enemy, the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus, bisected and lined with silver. [3] They were a rotten lot. I bet if they had spotted Abulahaz, they’d have eaten him. But if they had got through Bulgaria all right (travelling after dark, perhaps), things would have been better in what later became Hungary, because Charlemagne had defeated the beastly Avars there, and scattered them eight years before. There would have been a few Slav settlers gaping in the doors of their huts as the little troop went by: Abulahaz, his mahout and grooms, and probably an escort of Bedouin lancers. The Hungarian Plain was ideal elephant country then – all swamp and forest, unlike now. (One is so prone to forget that a squirrel in the reign of King John could travel from the Severn to the Humber without once touching ground.) I do hope the elephant went that way, because it’s just the way I went, and am writing about; I could have come nose-to-trunk with his phantom on the banks of the Tisza (a Hungarian tributary of the Danube) as he squirted cool jets all over himself among the reeds. . .
I meant to start with saying how sorry I was to read about Enid Bagnold, [4] knowing what an old pal of yours she was, marbles or no marbles. Dauntless Annie says she may come here with Patrick Trevor-Roper next month, in spite of all the afflictions that beset her. I do hope things turn out all right. It really is unfair. Debo keeps me more or less posted. Annie writes that you are well, which I was pleased to hear, as never a word from source. I would like a bulletin.
Joan is back in Blighty for two to three weeks, with brother Graham, and I go for ten days, over the Orthodox Easter, to Barbara and Niko in Corfu, address (written in hope): c/o B [arbara] G [hika], Kanoni, St Stefano-Sinies, Corfu, taking one’s work with me. It’s going fine.
So happy Easter, Diana darling, and tons of fond
love from Paddy
xxx
[1] Harun al-Rashid (786–809), 5th Caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate, a vast Islamic empire comprising Arabia, Persia and much of North Africa.
[2] Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders (8 vols., 1880–99).
[3] The Emperor Nicephorus I was killed, supposedly on a dunghill, at the disastrous Battle of Pliska or Battle of Vărbitsa Pass in AD 811.
[4] Enid Algerine Bagnold (1889–1981), a writer best known for National Velvet (1935). In 1920 she married Sir Roderick Jones, chairman of Reuters, but continued to use her maiden name for her writing. Their great-granddaughter is Samantha Cameron, wife of the former Conservative Party leader and prime minister, David Cameron.
To Ann Fleming
15 June 1981
Corfu
Darling Annie,
I’m so sorry you’ve been having such a mouldy time, [1] and wish I were on the spot to cheer you up – not, so I learn from Pat [Trevor-Roper] and Debo, that you are not reacting to all these wretched nuisances with all your indomitable spirits. Actually, I do hope to be in Blighty early in July for a short time, so there I may loom.
I wish you had been at Kardamyli at the same time as Pat. It was lovely seeing him, in spite of some very slightly lowering though sympathetic presences. We were both struggling with speeches we had to make, he to the leading eye-experts of the planet, I to a swarm of Cretans. He hasn’t told us how his went: I’m sure dazzlingly well. I followed his advice to the letter, and it seems that it did the trick, i.e. a double whisky immediately before, neither more nor less. I administered this (from a miniature bottle in my pocket) in the loo of the Defence Minister Averoff ’s private bomber, which carried us, and some ministers and ambassadors, to Herakleion. There were about 3,000 old Cretan pals roped off, a regiment of Greek soldiers, a bevy of bearded archbishops and archimandrites enclouded in incense. When the loudspeaker summoned the Def. Minister to unveil the monument, he called for me, and we paced solemnly to the ten-foot-high monument, tugged on two ropes, and down flopped the Greek flag and the Union Jack while three Scots Guard pipers blew solemn pibrochs. Then a Maori sounded the Last Post. Averoff made a short address, then waved me to the rostrum, when, thanks to Pat’s formula, I let fly with vigour and thank God, no mistakes in the Greek. Hardly a dry eye! It ended with what seemed a million whiskery embraces from my shaggy old chums and their descendants, and was followed by a giant banquet with scores of lamb roasted whole, and stringed instruments and dances and songs. Everyone clanking with medals, which was fun. I think the rather prim but nice lowland Scots Ambassador and his wife were amazed by these ogre-ish revels of old guerrilla chiefs. They were even surprised when an old god-brother of mine, next night, in the luxury hotel where he was feasting us, got up in the middle of the singing, pulled out an enormous revolver, fired four bullets through the central window-pane, then four more very neatly, in the smaller surrounding panes and then pushed the smoking gun back in his breast pocket, and resumed his seat as cool as a cucumber . . . I was almost a stretcher-case from banqueting by the time I got back to K. It was the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Crete. [2]
The day before leaving, we went to a green lawn-like plateau just under the Idaean cave (where Zeus was brought up) just under the peak of Mt Ida, still covered in snow. More feasting and lyra-playing and singing and feu de joie with all the shepherds there, all old f
riends. There was dripping mist and clouds when we got there but they all blew away, leaving nothing but clear blue planetary air and hovering eagles, and, on the green plateau below, all the ewes lining up to be milked, four hundred bells jangling as they headed across the sward to the prehistoric goat-fold. Marvellous!
We arrived in Corfu two days ago, and here we sit, opposite forbidden Albania, [3] only twenty minutes away if the channel were grassed over; but it might be 1,000 miles. The Acroceraunian mountains flash in the sun, swallows dart under the branches. We saw seven families of nearly full-grown storks on the way up here. Jacob Rothschild [4] left last night, leaving Serena; Dadie Rylands reads Phineas Redux out loud – beautifully – to Barbara and Joan, while Niko paints away in his shady studio and I sit under the criss-crossing swallow-droppings writing to you. A fine burly Croatian cook is approaching under the arbour with taramasaláta, glasses, ice and ouzo-bottles, so no more for the moment, darling Annie, except tons of love from
Paddy
and see you soon.
(Love from others here.)
xxx
My pen is breaking down, I’m so sorry about the illegibility.
[1] She was fatally ill, and died only three weeks after this letter was written.
[2] The Battle of Crete lasted from 20 May to 1 June 1941.
[3] Albania was then under the iron grip of the Communist dictator, Enver Hoxha. It was the most isolated and poorest country in Europe.
[4] Barbara Ghika’s son, Jacob Rothschild (b. 1936), married to Serena Mary Dunn.
To Xan Fielding
19 July 1981
Kardamyli
Messenia
Xan παιδί μου [dear boy],
First of all, many, many thanks to you both for giving me the freedom of Bruton St! Of course, I didn’t go in the end, and there is the key waiting at White’s! Have you got another? In case not, I’ll enclose a word to the Hall-Porter asking him to hand over any small parcel addressed to me, possibly containing a key, and with a Spanish stamp on.
I was only going back to Blighty in the hopes of catching a last glimpse of Annie; but, sadly, I was too late. I can’t believe one will never see her again. . .
Jock only began to read The Winds [1] on the last morning, and cagily said ‘A very interesting idea’, as he pored over it. Of course Joan and I cracked it up like billy-o and rightly.
I’m sorry being so slow with the typescript. I hope I haven’t been too free with emendations and loppings. If I’ve knocked off any bloom or dew, simply put it back. I tackled it exactly as if it were my own stuff, disentangling and simplifying where I felt it might make things clearer. I think it’s tip-top; but there are one or two ways where it might be even tipper, and, if I may put it so, topper; and these are they. I think there is a tendency to over-explain, and stress the point when it has already been made. A succession of very short paragraphs now and then makes it a bit jerky and choppy, and I feel some of them could be merged. Perhaps illustration and quotation are piled up a bit too lavishly, and can be pruned, to the bits that are undiscardably germane. I feel ‘dwelling’ too long lets the tension drop, and your text should sail along with the unencumbered freedom of its theme. Fruitiness pops up its head for a moment now and then. I can speak with feeling about all these things, as they are exactly my own faults, and I recognise them at once. Alas, Dr Johnson was right in his advice to us: ‘Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’ I find this a very consoling thing when I feel constrained to any verbal blood-letting.
Do send any other parts where I can come in handy as a second opinion – I’m perfectly ready to go over all, if wanted. I’m so sorry about the thick pencil: it’s the only one in the house. I’ve used brackets – round or square – for passages or words that you might consider excising, and have sometimes actually erased. If entrusted with other parts, I will promise to be more systematic, and neater, and to write more clearly. I don’t know what’s happening to my writing, it gets worse and worse. I’ve just read, in the Lyttelton Hart-Davis letters, that ‘inaudible speech, like illegible writing, is the nadir of bad manners’; so I plan to reform, starting now. . .
Feel dreadfully bowed down by the loss of Annie and Philip: [2] too much for a single month. . .
Lots of fond love to Magouche and you from both of us
[1] XF’s book, eventually published posthumously by a small private press in 1991 as Aeolus Displayed: A Book of the Winds.
[2] Philip Toynbee died on 15 June 1981.
To Artemis Cooper
23 February 1982
Kardamyli
Messenia
My dear Artemis,
How very kind of you to send that review of Clive James’ about Diana. [1] It’s absolutely tip-top, and fills exactly the void I was grumbling about at that lovely dinner party. I’ve stuck it, and your letter, in the back of Philip’s book, a mild form of Graingerising [2] I’ve taken to recently, and I wish I’d started years ago: i.e., the addition of relevant things to books. My system is to cut the flap off an envelope, then stick it with UHU inside the backboard of the book, with the now un-flapped opening facing upwards, but inwards, so that the contents can’t fall out. It makes the book much more interesting later on, is great fun to do and fills one with a feeling of achievement; and it is hard to imagine a more insidious and time-wasting excuse for postponing what you really ought to be doing. Start today.
But don’t let it delay the editing of the letters! [3] They will be breathlessly awaited and just the thing to set the stagnant air blowing in the right direction again. I know the feeling about recapturing lost voices, what one would give for a few seconds of it. Lists of uneavesdroppable interlocutors leap to the mind, if such a ghastly conjunction of words were capable of leaving the ground.
Very many thanks again, dear Artemis, and much love to your dear ones from us both
love Paddy
I do envy your beautiful clear writing, mine sinks fast into Linear B. [4]
[1] ‘Mrs Stitch in Time’ (a review of Lady Diana Cooper by Philip Ziegler), London Review of Books, 4 February 1982.
[2] Named after the Scottish doctor, poet, translator and collector, James Grainger (c.1721–66), who is credited with introducing the idea of interleaving the printed text of books of history and topography with prints.
[3] AC was editing her grandparents’ letters, published in 1983 as A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper, 1913–1950.
[4] A script used for writing Mycenaean Greek, dating from about 1450 bc, notorious for being indecipherable: though discovered in the late nineteenth century, it was not deciphered until the early 1950s.
To Diana Cooper
28 May 1982
Kardamyli
Messenia
My darling Diana,
I’m just back from such a queer journey. I suddenly felt I must have a glimpse of the country I travelled through in 1936 in Hungary and Rumania (for Vol. II): one remembers the foreground and the storyline, but the middle distance gets a bit blurred. So, I took wing to Budapest, hired a car, and set out over the Great Hungarian Plain.
I had ridden over the first 150 miles of it (of yore, I mean) on a borrowed horse, and, retracing the journey it all came flooding back, the vast rolling fields, the bits of bleak heath, the swing wells, [1] the processions of poplars, white cattle with nearly straight horns, the lilac everywhere, and hollyhocks and peonies in the villages, storks on the chimneys and cuckoos everywhere . . . I caught glimpses of castles and gentilhommières where I had dossed down on my original trip, with the families of the grafs and freiherrs, all vanished long ago. At least, all except one, at a place called Körösladány, which used to be inhabited by a morganatic Habsburg called Ct Meran, with a beautiful wife and three charming children. I had stayed a few days in the large and rambling baroque kastély. Well, the village was still the abode of one of the children, Hansi Meran. He had
been twelve when I was last there; he’s now sixty, a huge, grizzled handsome chap in a loden jacket, married (and widowed) to a peasant girl, after returning from the war, and being arrested for no reason by the Russians and sent for ten years to Siberia. I found him in a cottage with a visiting sister from Vienna (thirteen years old when last sighted, now a gr. grandmother). I was surprised by how clearly they remembered my ancient visit! ‘You see that table?’ they said, pointing to a Biedermeier desk salvaged from the castle (now a school). ‘You used to sit at it all day writing in a big green book’ – (I’ve got it beside me now). He was now a retired pensioner, after working as a farm-labourer on his own confiscated acres. There were a few rescued odds and ends, portraits of gr. gr. gr. gr. grandma Maria Teresa, and aunt Marie Antoinette. We all sat sipping whisky and reminiscing in the dusk, with cattle mooing past the windows. . .
I climbed over the walls of several minor Bridesheads and slunk about the grounds. The largest, O’ Kigyós, was now a school, but all the exotic trees were as I remembered, box hedges neatly trimmed, magnolias and tulip trees shedding their petals and millions of doves . . . No need for secrecy in any of these cases. Here the old Slovak gardener remembers the Wenckheim [2] I had played bike-polo with, practically, [with] tears in his eyes.
Back in the capital, I flew to Bucharest, as it was difficult to take a Hungarian hired car into Rumania, and hired another, and went and stayed twenty-four hours with Pomme (sister of Balasha Cantacuzène, [3] loved by me of yore), talked day and night, then sped on to Transylvania, to follow my old tracks along the leafy and beautiful valley of the Maros, beset with more Bridesheads – nineteenth-century, baroque, Palladian, one late Renaissance – where landowning Hungarians had stayed on after Transylvania had been handed to Rumania after the Great War. They, too, were turned into loony-bins, so I found myself strolling along shady paths, and up branching balustraded stairs surrounded by vague figures who smiled and mopped and mowed like characters out of the last scene of The Duchess of Malfi. The last one I saw, and the oldest, formerly owned by a friend called Elemér von Klobusiçky, was now a nursery plantation for bamboos, and other experimental growths. Great thick walls and steep tiles and pillared balconies and vast chestnut trees covered with moulting pink and white candles. I spent a month there in July 1934. It was dusk, so I tapped on a lighted window, and a v. nice peasant woman came out with a nice daughter. I said I was a friend of the former owner and they were very excited. I said I’d seen him in Budapest the week before. They had heard all about what a dasher he had been, and what fun. ‘Come and have some brandy made from Mr Elemér’s plums.’ We sipped on the terrace, looking out over the overgrown tennis court, nightingales starting up in the forest, the Maros curving away. ‘We feel guilty living in a confiscated house. Please send him our respects . . .’
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