Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  This extremely immoral procedure seemed to make everything drop into place, as though preordained, especially the few fragments of conversation, even if they were uttered elsewhere. If this high-handed treatment of Wahrheit [Truth] [11] had been undertaken for base reasons – to distort history, to boast, to pay off scores or for propaganda of some kind – there would be no excuse for it. (Of course, the longing to write a successful book is bound up with writer’s vanity.) But the aims here aren’t ignoble: nor, of course, particularly praiseworthy. But my conscience isn’t very hard boiled; and I am surprised by the comparative lack of twinges, tho’ I know that one always lets one’s self down lightly for what one would condemn in others. I tell myself that a kind of transmuted Wahrheit can emerge from its combination with Dichtung in cases like this. Would it be hypocritical to plead the intervention-rights of Art? Yes, it would.

  Well, there’s my guilty secret, which you are the only other living soul to share. The trouble about Chapter VI – or the reverse – is that all who have read everything up to date like it the best, Dimitri [12] in particular, in spite of the mild demur already mentioned. My moral decline is such, that in this particular case, I am rather shocked to discover that I don’t really give a damn about my misconduct; it has enabled me to include so much I would have hated to jettison, while doing nobody any harm at all. These readjusted two days’ travel have done the trick, and I don’t think I can change it now. In fact, in very bad company, ‘ὃ γέγραφα γέγραφα’ [‘What I have written, I have written.’] [13] Do, please, consider all I have written in this letter as absolutely in confidence and sub bulla [under seal] – indeed, carburendum [burn on reading]! I would hate this evidence of wickedness to be extant. Dr Johnson says that nobody writing lapidary inscriptions is on oath. I would like to extend it to certain categories of events, under very special circumstances if they are half-a-century old . . . When Joan and I were setting off for the Far East a number of years ago, a great pal at the British Embassy said: ‘I bet you’ll want to send some things back – lamps, rugs, etc. – but the customs’ duties are frightful, so send them to me by [diplomatic] bag, but don’t overdo it; for, tho’ I’ve no principles whatever about breaking the law, I have the strongest possible principle about being found out.’

  Hear, hear.

  This book’s main difficulty has been that it all happened fifty years ago. My patchy and spasmodic notes, sometimes very full, are scattered with gaps, and my memory swings very erratically from the lucid to the nebulous and back. In some ways, I was better off with A T. of Gifts, when all records had vanished: the newness of this experience had fixed long sequences in my mind indelibly. When I started to write the book, and found myself in doubt, I would always append ‘at least I think it was so’, or ‘unless my memory fails’ to such a degree that the text became a tissue of weak and halting passages and hedged bets. The moment I cut them out – which I did, almost entirely – things went a lot better. Bold statements, every time, rather than hesitation – unless it can do harm. The part of the journey covered in Chapter VII is very blank in my diary, only odd notes and half a dozen place names pencilled in the back (I had still not shaken off the sloth of those lotus-eating weeks), and I am certain that the ill-recorded and recollected stages of the journey are probably in the wrong order, though some emerge with great clarity. . .

  TRAVAILS OF A WRITER

  This second part of A T. of G. has been an absurdly long pull, partly because of the time-gap, partly because Vol. I struck lucky, and I didn’t want the second to be an anti-climax; and partly because I was determined to try and capture the glow of happiness and excitement that suffused this stretch of the journey. I was worried – still am – about the scope having narrowed to a particular rut – i.e. Hungarian landowners, to the exclusion of so much that is exciting and interesting. This vol. is, in this matter, nothing like Vol. I, and, no doubt even less like the sequel to come: Bulgaria, Turkey, etc. (with a brief boevese [14] interlude in Rumania). Because of all your kindness, help, interest and knowledge, the one reader I wanted – and want – to please most, is yourself. I think, perhaps, the wisest course for me, rather than foisting unsolicited wads of the book on you while it was still being written, would have been to have waited till it was finished and then asked your opinion, when I could look on the thing with detachment. I was a bit concerned when – apropos of the first chapters, you wrote that it was an excellent draft (superseded in a later letter, to my relief!) but that it had somehow lost the ‘fictional’ quality of the first volume. I knew you meant the feeling of freshness and excitement which A T. of G. seemed to have – not a shift into Dichtung! – and I fully understood, and agreed; but felt rather downcast and hoped that the lost quality would return. (I don’t know whether it has or not.) Those few who have read it seem to like it; they know nothing of the subject, so their approval doesn’t cut as much ice as it should. You had done exactly what I asked – you had suggested nothing more than a final vetting for mistaken accents and obvious howlers, and unlimited help on the way; and, as requested, you gave me your honest opinion, with which I entirely agreed. One thing I am quite sure of: your help, comments, advice, generosity with time and research will have steered the book clear of hundreds of pitfalls and – if anything could – may have supplied a depth and dimension it could never have aspired to without. If it falls short of what it should have been, it won’t be from lack of help from you!

  I would be enormously beholden to you for even something more. Could you, as it were, take a sponge and momentarily wash all our correspondence from your mind, pretend the book is by a total stranger, then report and advise? Except for major howlers or injustices, I feel I can’t rewrite large sections, and that such virtue or consistency as the book possesses might leak away in the process. I’m into the last chapter now, so please don’t worry about affecting my spirits during ‘work in progress’.

  I long for the whole book to be finished! It’s used up a lot of my life and I should have been shot of it years ago. Cyril Connolly said that all autobiographical writing was settling a debt with the past, and I pine for this one to be paid. The way ahead – Bulgaria, Turkey etc. – stretches like a mile of oakum. [15] But my feelings here are nothing like so deeply involved, so perhaps I won’t make such heavy weather of it. I may carry on after Constantinople, to Mount Athos in winter, where, immediately after (ship to Salonika), I trudged to every single monastery and kept an infinitely fuller diary than any of the earlier ones. I had my twentieth birthday in St Panteleïmon, the great Russian foundation. Then I might end up with the Venizelist revolution of spring 1935, which I followed with a squadron of Greek cavalry, all through Macedonia and Thrace, once again on a borrowed horse, this time borrowed from an old friend called Petros Stathatos, who had a large farm on the Chalkidiki peninsula. I saw him two weeks ago in Athens.

  Rudi, I apologise for inundating you with all this! I’ll stop now, as it is 3.30 a.m. I bathed till a week ago, now rain is coming down in buckets – il pleut des hallebardes [‘it’s raining spears’], as the French say. It would have been pure gold a month ago, as no olive-conscious villager fails to mutter; but too late now – only silver.

  Yours ever

  Paddy

  love to Dagmar

  Next morning

  I found the letter totally illegible, and have copied it out.

  [1] Angéla – see introduction to this letter.

  [2] PLF refers to an incident when he and his friend Elemér von Klobusiçky (disguised under the pseudonym ‘István’ in the book) are discovered swimming naked in a river by two lively peasant girls, Safta and Ileana.

  [3] ‘Y’ is Xenia Csernovits; ‘Iza’ is probably Ria Bielek; see Between the Woods and the Water, page 95.

  [4] Gyula Illyés (1902–83), left-wing Hungarian poet and novelist.

  [5] Siebenbürgisch-Sächsische Burgen und Kirchenkastelle (1900) by Emil Sigerus (1854–1947), Transylvanian ethnographer, collector, histor
ian and writer.

  [6] László Makkai and Erdély Öröksége (eds.), Erdély Története (History of Transylvania) (10 vols., 1941–2).

  [7] Broadly speaking, the original Hungarian-speaking population of Transylvania. See Between the Woods and the Water, pages 165–6.

  [8] Vlad the Impaler (1431–76/7), the historical figure upon whom the fictional Dracula is supposedly based.

  [9] Antoniu Mocioni de Foen (‘Mocsonyi’ in Hungarian) (1884–1943), Great Chamberlain to King Carol II of Rumania.

  [10] Great boyars, or ‘grand aristocrats’. A boyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal Bulgarian, Moscovian, Kievan Russian, Wallachian and Moldavian aristocracies, second only to the ruling princes or tsars.

  [11] PLF here refers to Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit.

  [12] Prince Dimitri Obolensky (1918–2001), Russian-born historian who settled in Britain and became Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford. He was knighted in 1984.

  [13] Pilate’s answer in John 19:22.

  [14] A tale of exile and return: a reference to the story of Boeve de Haumtone, known in English as Bevis, one of the most popular ballads of the Middle Ages.

  [15] Uncoiling, unravelling, unpicking and shredding ‘oakum’ (rope covered in tar) was a common form of punishment in Victorian prisons.

  As this letter and its two follow-ups to Pamela Egremont demonstrate, Paddy would go to extraordinary trouble to chase down a detail – which he might then not use.

  To Pamela Egremont

  1 December 1984

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Dearest Pamela,

  S.O.S.! Help needed! I desperately want the name of the man wolves had sniffed at, and some rotter has gone off with our copy of The Unbearable Bassington, [1] or it’s fallen behind something! He crops up in a deeply moving paragraph about the Carpathians in the last chapter of the sequel to A Time of Gifts. Thank God, the book’s drawing to a belated close, but it’s only the second of three vols. on this wretched journey, and, when it comes out sometime next year a third vol. – Bulgaria, E. Rumania and Turkey – looms like a mile of oakum. The present vol. is to be called Between the Woods and the Water (any good?), the ‘woods’ being Transylvania, and the ‘water’ being the Danube, beginning at Esztergom, and rejoined, after the Gr. Hungarian Plain, Transylvania and the Carpathians, at the Iron Gates.

  We are back from a marvellous Asia Minor journey, joining Xan Fielding & Magouche at Salonica, driving to Adrianople & Constantinople, then Nicea, Brussa, Bithynian Olympus, Sardis, Aphrodisias, Theyma, Ephesus, Smyrna, the Maeander Valley, the Troad & Troy (deeply moving in spite of the jumble). When we got to Çannakkale – the ‘Chanak’ of the Dardanelles campaign – I had a shot at the Hellespont, & just made it – would have been a lot less slow if I’d been put in a mile further upstream. There’s a frightful current amidstream and I got whirled along – behind Joan in the stern of a skiff shouting directions and sitting on her hands to stop wringing them. The normal time for proper swimmers, put in at the right place, is about an hour. I was 2 hours 55 minutes (3 or 4 miles), and crawled out into Europe in the end, exhausted but jubilant. Limbs turned to stone, back in Chanak in the afternoon, so I slunk off to a hammam and re-emerged light as a feather and settled down to a thoughtful narghilé, and bliss . . . [2]

  I hoped to come to Blighty for Christmas, but daren’t face Jock without the whole thing being perfect so will skulk here toiling, and come back some time in the New Year, and we must have a lovely feast.

  V. many thanks in advance for the wolf man’s name!

  love Paddy

  Also from Joan. How is Sachie [Sitwell]? Do give him my love, also Kisty [Hesketh].

  I sent a gloating post-Hellespontive card to Michael & Damaris [Stewart] – but all of these boast-cards seem to have been chucked away by the hotel unposted.

  [1] ‘Saki’ (H. H. Munro), The Unbearable Bassington (1912). The name PLF was searching for is Tom Keriway.

  [2] PLF was then sixty-nine.

  To Frances Partridge

  20 December 1984

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Dearest Frances,

  Thank you so much for the magnificent Country Life piece about Gerald [Brenan] and many apologies for being such a long time answering. It’s beautifully done, you do write gloriously and it hits every nail on the head, one after another. I hope it was translated and published in Spain. Bravo! In fact, arci-bravo! (i.e. double strength, like an archdeacon), as Don Giovanni rather unexpectedly says to Leporello at one point. It made me very homesick for Spain, your text and the illustrations, an emotion I’m not really entitled to, as I know it so little: but they – the text and pictures – set wickedly disloyal thoughts about Greece furtively stirring.

  I’ve been so long answering because Joan and I have been going through a minor saison en enfer [1] over paying the tax on our car, which is twice the purchase price in Greece, viz. a tidy sum. We’ve scraped this appalling Danegeld together and we humbly hang about outside office after office in Kalamata then Athens like Calais burghers trying to pay it; but endlessly interlocking formalities concatenate like a sequence of bureaucratic tortures – the Rack, the Strappado, the Boot, the Maiden, the Thumbscrew, the Scavenger’s Daughter; and it finally comes to light that some trivial but apparently vital document from the Peugeot factory outside Paris is missing. As we’d left things to the last minute (hoping to oil our way out of it all in some way), each extra day exposes us to some hideous fine, and the missing document can’t be got to us before three weeks. Yesterday, the authorities granted us a reprieve till Jan. 10th; but it’s too late. We have aged beyond recall. . .

  Rather sadly, we are lurking here over Christmas – or rather, driving to Pylos for two days – instead of returning to Blighty – because I daren’t show my face there, let alone in Albemarle Street, without my last chapter finished. Thank God, it won’t be long. The wretched book has now been split into three parts. This one is Hungary, B’pest, the Great Plain, Transylvania, the Carpathians and back to the Danube at the Iron Gates: all to be called Between the Woods and the Water. And then Vol. III looms like several furlongs of oakum.

  We had the most wonderful journey in Thrace and Asia Minor with Xan and Magouche – do give them our love – and we were surprised by the unexpected niceness of the Turks and, quite often, by the delicious food; and the beauty and wildness of the regions we traversed were totally unspoiled; you often find yourself wandering among pillars and aqueducts and forums and theatres all plumed with leaves and grazed by flocks as though you were a Piranesi figure merely placed there for scale.

  Many thanks again, dear Frances, and tons of love from us both,

  Paddy

  Riddle:

  Q: What is the slowest event in the Hellenists’ stadia?

  A: The egg-and-dart race

  [1] Une Saison en Enfer is the title of an extended prose poem by Arthur Rimbaud.

  To Rudi Fischer

  9 January 1985

  Kardamyli

  Messenia

  Dear Rudi,

  I feel very ashamed of myself for not sending enough seasonal greetings, but I do in retrospect, and I do hope 1985 turns out to be a marvellous year for you and yours. We meant to go back to Blighty for Christmas, but I felt I couldn’t face Jock without the whole book buttoned up. All sorts of things have interrupted the last chapter, but the end is in sight. I can’t thank you enough for all your corrections and suggestions. They have been of the greatest possible help, and you will see on very many pages – as you must have already – the results of your intervention. I dread to think what the book would have been like otherwise. When I’m finished, I’m going to go through all your carefully kept letters, taking notes.

  I’m so glad you took my rather shifty behaviour in Chap. 6 [1] with such tolerant understanding. It was a great relief. But please lock it in the casket of your breast; otherwise,
brutta figura [‘a bad mark’] for me! Apropos: at a grand reception in the Embassy in Paris, Diana & Duff Cooper were standing at the top of the stairs receiving guests, and he was wearing the scarlet ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur across his chest. Randolph Churchill whispered, as he shook hands: ‘Advertising Cordon Rouge, Duff?’ to which Duff whispered: ‘Mumm’s the word.’