So, on to all the old towns of Transylvania. There are some beautiful ‘Saxon’ ones with fortificated steep roofs, spires and Gothic churches, the houses, it is said (including by Browning: see the end of the poem), of the children who were led into the mountainside by the Pied Piper. This is where they surfaced again.
No more now, Diana darling, except heaps of fond love
from Paddy (also from Joan)
xxx
Peter Q. says a book is being done about Annie. [4] Is it a bit early? What about Hugh Gaitskell, & Caspar? [5] It’s a strange craze.
[1] A well with a hinged arm, a bucket at one end and a counterweight at the other, common on the Great Hungarian Plain.
[2] Count Józsi Wenckheim.
[3] Balasha died of breast cancer in 1976.
[4] Mark Amory was editing Ann Fleming’s letters.
[5] Ann Fleming had an affair with the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who died in 1963. Her son Caspar suffered from depression, and committed suicide in 1975.
To Michael Stewart
29 June 1982
Kardamyli
Messenia
My dear Michael,
You really are the most marvellous fulfiller of promises, however slight and uncommitting! I can’t tell you how I rejoice in this splendid quartz watch, with its handsome black case, its unfaltering needles, its mandible tick and the discreet but merciless challenge of its alarm! It arrived a week after the final breakdown of the kitchen clock and half a day after Joan had lost her wrist-watch on the beach; so its advent with Graham was timely in every sense. Very many thanks indeed.
I rang up Hará. [1] No, she hasn’t forgot Bean’s Beyond the Maeander, [2] and would love it and was tremendously pleased and touched by the idea. What a nice girl she is.
On a sudden inspiration, Joan and [I] motored to Gythion, caught the night ferry to Kastelli-Kissamos in W. Crete, and spent a week tooling all over the island. It really was terrific. They made a great fuss of us in all our old haunts – mostly high up in the mountains – and we had to have about fifteen meals a day. One or two people I hadn’t seen for thirty-eight years said, when we first arrived, ‘How thin you’ve got!’ Similar old friends, at the end of the stay, said ‘How fat you’ve got! Po, po, po!’ The car filled up with gifts – millstone-cheeses, demijohns of wine, wicker-covered gallonia of tsikoudia and mulberry-raki, raisins, almonds, walnuts, shepherd’s crooks . . . They really are a marvellous lot, quite unlike anyone else, and funnier, higher-spirited, more musical and alert and affectionate and nice-looking. My god-daughters, all matrons now, are a fine lot. The wine is delicious and, in the villages, absolutely pure, which is extremely rare, so, however much we swallowed, which was a great deal, there was no trace of a hangover next day; and the lamb is so marvellous – it almost has a thyme and heather taste from what they graze on – that it almost converted Joan – did, temporarily – into a carnivore. She adored every moment of it. At Retimo [Rethymno], the hotel sent us a complimentary bucket of champagne. We were pleased.
Corfu was very quiet and satisfactory. Barbara, Niko, Dadie Rylands, Diana Gage and us, with Dadie reading his annual Trollope aloud, this year The Prime Minister, very good, but not quite up to last year’s Phineas Redux, we thought. We were glued to the wireless for Falkland news [3] and there was great rejoicing at the upshot.
The Turkish project is very exciting and tempting. I do hope it would involve being on the move – that is what one needs after a few static gulf-tide months at Kardamyli!
I’ve just been going through old letters for Annie Fleming, requested by Mark Amory, who is doing a life of her, a bit early perhaps. I was tackled for the same thing by Mark Bonham Carter, [4] but oiled out of it, as (a) too much on hand and (b) I don’t think I could be much good at it. The letters are tip-top – full of dashing sprezzatura, exactly as she spoke, and often very funny. You get several very warm mentions.
No more now, Michael, except many, many thanks again for that smashing clock, and fond greetings from all under this roof, and to Damaris.
Yours ever
Paddy
[1] Hará Kiosse, Nico Hadjimichalis’s companion after he left his wife Vana.
[2] George E. Bean, Turkey Beyond the Maeander: An Archaeological Guide (1971).
[3] On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, in an attempt to establish its long-standing claim to sovereignty. The British government dispatched a naval task force to retake the islands. The conflict ended with the Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982, returning the islands to British control.
[4] Mark Bonham Carter (1922–94), Liberal politician and publisher.
Jessica Treuhaft, known as ‘Decca’, second youngest of the Mitford sisters, was compiling a volume of memoirs of Philip Toynbee, and asked Paddy (amongst others) to contribute his own recollections of his old friend. The book was published in 1984 as Faces of Philip: A Memoir of Philip Toynbee.
To Jessica Mitford
16 September 1983
Chatsworth
Dear Decca,
Here I am for all too brief a moment, got here last night, off tomorrow. Andrew was off to a wretched banquet in Brixton, true torment, so Debo and I had a hilarious time here, jolly tales about your youth, and some song.
This is in haste, one foot in stirrup, pricking Spainwards. About including the ‘working’ part of letters in the final text, the only thing that worries me is things that you might – or I might – think merely a lark can sometimes cut to the quick, without one’s knowing. So could you let me have a look, I promise not to hold things up, and whizz back at once to you. In a fortnight’s time will be ℅ Senor Jaime Parladé (viz. Janetta), Terre de Tramoros, Benaha – viz. Prov. de Malaga, Spain; and a fortnight after that, home.
(2) I came across this, by me, but P. T. soi-disant speaking, must date from late forties or early fifties.
‘When I was in love with a Liberal Girl
‘I was a swine and she was a pearl.
‘I’m still a swine, sir, but fancy-free
‘And many a liberal Girl loves me.’
Thought for the week.
Please forgive haste, and 1,000 salaams, as an Anglo-Indian uncle of mine used to say.
Yours ever
Paddy
Bit of a lapse here Claudewise, alas . . . [1]
Later: WRONG! He came back here from the races where his favourite steed cracked, & was put down, but NARY A SIP. NOTHING BUT NICENESS.
P.S. Decca – I brooded in the night, and felt racked with foreboding about my off-the-cuff-and-record ramblings that went into all the stuff about Philip, and wondered if I’d made clear how racked I was. So, up at dawn, I hared down to the lodge (where letters rest before departure), extorted mine from the chap who dwells there, and reopened it. Totally unnecessarily, as it turns out, so this is only to explain why the contents of the envelope have been untimely ripped, and Scotch-taped up again. [2]
Went to a marvellous sheep sale yester’een with Debo, it was wonderful, faces like the whole of Gilray and Rowlandson, and an auctioneer haranguing, in what sounded like Finnish but was just rustic north country.
This is the sort of whirl I like to live in.
[1] PLF means that Andrew Devonshire had lapsed into drinking excessively, a weakness of his. ‘Claud’ was Debo’s nickname for her husband.
[2] PLF alludes to lines from Macbeth, V, 8 (‘The Scottish play’):
‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.’
Like Paddy, Gerald Brenan had immersed himself in another culture: a scholar of Spanish history and culture, he had lived much of his life in Spain, latterly in the village of Alhaurín, near Malaga. Paddy would often call on Brenan when visiting Janetta and Jaime Parladé or Xan and Magouche Fielding, both of whom lived nearby. Brenan and Janetta Parladé shared a close friend in Frances Partridge.
In 1984 he was moved in controversial circumstances to a nursing home in M
iddlesex, but he returned to Spain after the authorities there made special arrangements to provide him with the nursing care on which he depended.
To Janetta Parladé
15 July 1984
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Janetta,
I think that snap of Gerald in The Times two or three weeks ago, with the accompanying description of the Mayor of Alhaurín coming to take him back from Pinner to his village again, and the municipality taking on the housing and nursing – in recognition of Gerald’s great services to Spanish literature – is one of the most moving things I have ever seen. It justifies all Gerald’s theories about the intrinsic nobility, style and pundonor [point of honour] of the Spaniards in a strangely satisfactory and surprising way, and seems a sort of vindication of all his life’s work. I was struck so forcibly by this that I almost wrote to The Times and said so there and then. But I didn’t, (a) because I’d recently written a letter to them about something or other, and I think it shouldn’t become a habit, and (b) because there are so many others who would be more suitable. I thought at once of Frances, V. S. P. [1] and you – v. old friends and ones who had toiled away so splendidly to help Gerald. I thought of writing to Frances and V. S. P., and suggesting they should write a letter, paying a glowing tribute to Alhaurín and its inhabitants, so that it would be translated in the Spanish press, and all should see that their magnanimous gesture has not gone unobserved.
Do you think you could possibly write with this suggestion to F [rances Partridge] & V. S. P.? I mentioned it in a letter to Stephen [Spender], about something totally different, and if the letter needed signatures to give it body, as it were, I bet he would like to append his, as an old Hispanophile (ours too, and yours, unless you do the whole thing). I do hope there are not wheels within wheels, and that all that glows here really is gold. I really think it is the most extraordinary and inspiring event.
It would be simply lovely if you sat down and wrote us all the details of the Gerald saga after we separated. We pine to know!
No more now, darling Janetta, except tons of love from both of us, and to Jaime,
Paddy
Exchanges in the Press between foreign countries – and often between England and Spain – are so often bitter & sneering that to have something that is exactly the opposite would be a glorious change. What I find so nice about it is the Mayor and Corporation realising what a treasure they have been nursing in their midst!
[1] Frances Partridge and V. S. Pritchett.
In writing his account of his ‘Great Trudge’ half a century later, Paddy was obliged to confront several problems. One was the issue of authenticity. Which should he strive for: the truth, or what he remembered of his walk so long after? Because the two were not always the same. He outlined his thoughts on this subject in a letter to Rudi Fischer in 1979. ‘Yes, I did go back to Esztergom last year, and noted the forlorn state of the Bridge. I had already written the next bit – also Esztergom – before going there, and certain details had changed, both in fact and in my memory. I don’t think I’m going to change them, certainly not the actual changes, which not only don’t matter, but nor will I clean up the inaccuracies of memory, unless they become ridiculous and flagrant. One’s first glance at something, one’s age, and make-up at the time, have their rights too, and also the way the first glances have matured since or even gone off the rails here and there, have claims which might make later rectifications tantamount to doctoring! It’s a delicate point; but there is a case to be put . . .’
Another issue was discretion. Paddy mentions fleetingly meeting a ‘very pretty and altogether unusual’ young woman called Xenia near the Transylvanian village of Zám; and describes several encounters with ‘a pretty and funny girl in a red skirt called Angéla’, with whom he has an affair. In fact these two were the same: a young Serb woman called Xenia Csernovits, unhappily married to a Hungarian husband.
To Rudi Fischer
22 November 1984
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Rudi,
I wish I could think of an attractive name for ex-‘Angy’ [1] – thank you for rescuing me! I’ll call her ‘Y’ for the time being; ‘X’ and ‘Z’ are both unsuitable. . .
You know that ‘Y’ is just what she seems, but the uninitiate reader doesn’t; hence, there’s no anomaly about Zám and its incumbent, followed by Y’s entry. But perhaps I should say a bit more about Xenia, as I do want her to come in: I didn’t know it then, but Zám was my first Transylvanian sojourn, & she was kind to me and I want to set it on record. Y must appear as a totally different person, as, under a different name, she can; hence the infliction of schizophrenia.
You wrote: ‘I think you ought somehow to overcome the problem that there is honest-to-goodness sex with Rumanian peasant girls, [2] but only minnedienst [courtly love] where ladies (your italics) are concerned. If the ladies are unrecognisable anyway, why can’t they be tumbled in feather beds, if not the hay?’ Well, nobody who has read these chapters so far has been in any doubt that sex was involved, both with Y and Iza, [3] and with Safta and Ileana it wasn’t much more explicit, and they thought the passages were well managed, neither wallowing nor evasive. The thing about ladies and feather beds in country houses is that it is very predictable and humdrum, and usually pretty fatuous in the telling. (A. Devonshire says that in his grandfather’s day, there used to be a 5 a.m. ‘sorting bell’ rung at Chatsworth every day during house-parties & shoots so that adulterous couples, flitting along the passages like discreet ghosts, could re-cohere before daybreak.) There was more hanky-panky on my journey than I have mentioned; omitted for the reasons above. As for the distinction between the literary treatment of ladies and peasant girls, for once, surely class-war has no excuse for rearing its ugly rear. It was those two nice girls who made the running! As we were stark naked we weren’t discernibly members of any class. They had no idea who Elemér was, let alone me. The encounter was equal on both sides, set off by their teasing, furthered by our response, starting up as a sort of impromptu spontaneous joke; great fun, absolutely charming, and, it seems to me, exempt from all sociological blemish, however deplorable to a moralist. Nothing to do with droit de seigneur, or any rot of that kind. Gyula Illyés [4] would have acquitted us on the spot.
I wish I had written to you before setting off for Turkey, because the ‘Y’ business does need some explanation, and, as we know, there is more to follow. I very much wanted to bring all this in, as it seemed the high point of that extraordinary summer; I don’t want to lose myself in all the subterfuges and hazards due to the need for secrecy, but wanted to bring out the amusing aspects that were caused by this necessity. The most salient points – a fugue in a borrowed car, the dodging of familiar faces, a borrowed house, a race with the train and then goodbye to Transylvania – are, mutatis mutandis, as told, see below.
As this point of the story approached, I realised how urgently I wanted to write some more about Transylvania. It had always been a mysterious name to me, and it still is. Until we started corresponding, I had thought – all these years – that I had been in Transylvania ever since crossing the frontier at Curtici (Decebal!); then learnt from that I had only been in Arad and the Banat; the actual sojourning in Transylvania being only while I was at Zám and Gurasada. Your letters, Sigerus’s Siebenbürgen, [5] and Makkai’s History [6] made me long to write about the region, to touch on the Szeklers, [7] strike a blow against the cheap exploitation of Dracula – Vlad Tepes; [8] and to write something about the Saxons and their history because they are going through a bad time now, and, very much, because your belonging to that community has made it seem so much more real. In autumn 1934, after arriving in Bucharest, I spent a week at Sinaia with some of the people mentioned in Chapter V, as Toncsi Mocsonyi’s guests [9] . . . We drove to your birthplace and on, through Fagaras, which I failed to take in properly, to Hermannstadt, having marvellous meals in Gasthäuser that might have been in Bavaria
or Austria.
These places were all I had seen of Transylvania (bar Z and G and a bit further in) when we parted at the aerodrome two years ago when I left for my Brideshead Revisited journey. I was tremendously smitten with Alba Iulia, Torda, Kolozsvár, M. Vásárhély, and, above all, Segesvár and the Saxon villages and churches, the latter seen for the first time since those fleeting glimpses in autumn 1934. I was determined to drag all this into the book. But how? After all, when this part of the book was finished, I would have shot my bolt, and the chance wasn’t likely to occur.
At this point my literary guardian angel – or rather Satan wearing his mask – whispered in my ear the solution which you see demonstrated in Chapter VI. Dichtung [literally, Poetry, here used to mean Art], as you very charitably put it, intervened. I knew that if I wrote ten or twenty pages into the book about Transylvania, based (as it would have to be) on hearsay and mugging up, it would have had no life in there and would probably have to be cut, in the end. The highly improper idea occurred to me of planting my 1984 Transylvania into the 1934 triple fugue, as a means of recapturing my latter-day journey, while drawing on many conversations, your letters, Sigerus, and my own many memories of Rumanian pre-war travel – fairs, etc., trusting to luck that they tallied – and backdating it all from the very drab and rundown externals of life that I met in 1982, to the much livelier, more colourful and certainly happier, ambience I recollected from old wanderings in Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia and Bucovina – before the deluge – even Bessarabia, tho’ that hadn’t much relevance. My 1982 route was pretty well what we – ‘E’, ‘Y’ and I – had planned in 1934, until that telephone conversation came and buggered it up; which was why I went the way I did on the later solitary journey. The landmarks of our v. limited 1934 journey – the borrowed horse already mentioned, ‘Y’ wrapping her hand in a scarf, bathing in the Maros and the final hectic dash to Deva – fitted the later journey, as now narrated, like a glove. (The ducklings in a basin, the electric weather and the storm, all belong to the later trip.) The Hotel New York (now boringly rebaptised Continental) was where I stayed, hence the wealth of detail about the décor. (It looked as unchanged – not that I had seen it – as was Capsa’s in Bucharest, except, in the latter, commissars had replaced boieri mari). [10] Sighişoară is the place I would have been most loth to omit. It fitted in perfectly with the mood of our escapade and furnished the ideal excuse to digress on your fellow Saxons. I do hope I haven’t misrepresented them, and that you will put me right if I have gone astray.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 43