Further, apropos of morality and expediency, I once asked Dom Gabriel Gontard, Abbot of Saint-Wandrille, what the difference was between moral and ontological good. (I was dabbling in theology a bit in those days.) He thought for a moment, and said, ‘Supposons que vous voulez tuer quelqu’un. Votre bras est fort, vous trouvez votre bon homme est mort. Voilà! Votre action, est ontologiquement parfaite – mais moralement, très très mauvaise.’ [2]
This is not a proper answer to your letters, but I’ll be sending one soon. For some reason, I find it a bit hard to describe the course of things with the prototype of Angéla, but I will tell you when we meet.
Instead of going to England, Joan and I slunk off to Pylos and stayed at a small hotel there, and spent most of the time in bed reading, as it never stopped raining. It was rather nice; when one could see anything outside, the whole Bay of Navarino lay out our window, with the island of Sphakteria barring it to the west. There are points where you can still see the timbers of sunk men o’ war, deep down. [3] A few bangs and broadsides and powder magazines blowing up would have rather cheered the scene. For New Year, we went to stay with an old American pal called Hod Fuller [4] on Spetsai (an ex-Marine commando from Boston who used to be married to a great pal called Dozia Karaiskáki, gr. gr. granddaughter of the Greek klepht from the Eikosi-Ena, [5] now dead alas). Then back here, and to work. For a fortnight early in December Bruce Chatwin came to stay for two weeks, and liked it so much that he has taken rooms nearby, dining with us every night, and is now meeting his wife and mother in Kalamata, as he has taken rooms for them too. He was keen to get his mother here, as his father, with three hands, is sailing across the Atlantic in a pretty small boat. He plans to stay till March, finishing a book on Nomadism, which has always obsessed him. We go for energetic walks every afternoon.
Back to the grindstone! And all fond wishes to you and Dagmar, however belated!
Yours ontologically
Paddy
[1] See letter to RF, 22 November 1984.
[2] ‘Suppose you wanted to kill somebody. Your arm is strong, you find your opponent is dead. So, your action is ontologically perfect – but morally, very, very bad.’
[3] At the Battle of Navarino (1827), during the Greek war of independence, an Ottoman armada was destroyed by an Allied force of British, French and Russian vessels.
[4] The son of a Harvard archaeologist, Horace ‘Hod’ Fuller served with the French Army as a volunteer in 1940, and then joined the US Marines before transferring to OSS. As a special forces commando, he fought with the French resistance in the Pyrenees against the German occupiers, and was awarded both the Silver Star and the Croix de Guerre for his courage.
[5] Georgios Karaiskakis (1780/1782–1827) was a famous Greek klepht (brigand), and a hero of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans. ‘Eikosi-Ena’, meaning twenty-one, refers to the starting date of the Greek War of Independence (1821).
To Pamela Egremont
18 January 1985
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dearest Pamela,
You were a brick to leap so nobly into action! (Please thank Tony Quinton and other literary Good Samaritans for their help.) Alas, it’s not Ulrich v. Gradwitz or George Znaeym from ‘The Interlopers,’ [1] I’m enclosing the relevant page where the gap yawns (as well as the two preceding ones, as it doesn’t make sense without the run-in), and, as you see, the I’s [2] – and the marvellous ‘Wolves of Czernogratz’ [3] – are there already. The odd thing is that I thought you had quoted the line about the sniffing wolves, hence my cry from the depths, and I then remembered it – or thought I did – too. I thought the occasion for the phrase was this: Miss de Grey? or van something? the nice girl that Bassington was rather negligently wooing, goes for a ride by herself to think things over. Alarmed (for her horse) by the appearance of a travelling wild-beast show, she puts into the yard of a farmhouse till it passes. At the farm is staying a farmer traveller, whom ill health has condemned to inactivity. Here is where the missing phrase came, so I thought. X. then goes on to describe the plots and intrigues and feuds of this farmyard in terms of a mediaeval state – the cattle, flocks, poultry, dogs, cats, lurking foxes etc., a brilliant flight. But now, all of a sudden, I begin to wonder: could it have been in ‘When William Came’? Unfortunately, this too is in the lost or rifled vol. – could you bear to peer into it, when next it’s handy? Looking through the Short Stories, I suddenly thought I was on the right track in one called ‘Cross Currents’, whose main figure is called Alaric Clyde. I drew a blank. My chap is a sort of Wilfrid Thesiger, but on ice instead of sand. I started rereading the stories – they are as good as ever. Of the two recurring dandified figures, it occurred to me that Reginald is a sort of Hamish Erskine, [4] and Clovis Sangrail, Alan Pryce-Jones. [5]
We’ve just been having the worst storm for a hundred years – thunder and lightning like the end of the world, Old Testament deluges and deafening gale winds churning up the sea and uprooting trees and scattering tiles like confetti. We lost two tall cypresses last night, and a splendid olive, and have just been taking advantage of a lull to saw them up (with Bruce Chatwin, who is staying) for much needed firewood. I’m rather looking forward to being seventy in a fortnight.
Thank you so much, dear Pamela, for taking all that trouble about Mr X. I feel guilty at inflicting new travails!
love
Paddy
Is the envelope correctly addressed? ‘Dowager’ sounds rather stately, and the Christian name a shade fast. What happens in the unlikely case of a parish nobleman, who has married a duchess and become a duke, divorcing? Does he become Gonzalo, Duke of Plaza Toro? Or a Dowager Duke, when widowed?
[1] In Saki’s story ‘The Interlopers’, two enemies are trapped together beneath a fallen branch in the forest. Gradually they realise the futility of their quarrel and end their feud. After shouting for help, they perceive figures approaching. The story ends as one of them realises that these are wolves.
[2] i.e. the Interlopers which give the title to the story.
[3] The title of Saki’s story is ‘The Wolves of Cernogratz’. PLF misspells it here and in Between the Woods and the Water.
[4] Erskine was notoriously narcissistic.
[5] Both Reginald and Clovis Sangrail are malicious dandies in the Saki stories.
To Pamela Egremont
7 March 1985
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dearest Pamela,
I’ve just written to Mr Webb to thank him for taking all that trouble over Bassington, commenting on his interesting ‘Kipling in France’ paper and sending a Kipling Soc. application form duly filled in and stumped up for. I’m delighted to join; I’d often thought of doing so, being such an addict. All this, of course, is the result of your monster surprise envelope, which arrived this morning. You are a brick to have done so much and set so many wise and distinguished heads to work sniffing out the missing wolf-sniffed one, and finally delivering his head on a charger. Many many thanks!
You are quite right about the name Keriway. It’s simultaneously arch and lowly, exactly like a pop-drummer or Fielding ostler, possibly in league, what’s more, with a rather seedy highwayman. Or a building society: ‘Buy your home the Keriway’. I think I shall just put, ‘The broken traveller in the U.B.’ [1]
I’m so sorry to hear about the visits to Royal Marsden. I do hope all is as you say. I am full of fellow feeling whatever it is, as you can guess. It’s a wonderful place and I think of it with the utmost gratitude.
We might be coming to Blighty in April sometime, I’m not sure, all depends on finishing this book, so plans are what I believe is called aleatory (first trial run of this word, so common and useful in French – ‘aléatoire’ – but sounds awful in English so will withdraw it). But, if plans fit, do come here whenever you can. It’s pretty spartan as far as comfort goes, because the couple who have looked after the house for twenty years [Petros and Lela] have suddenl
y opened a taverna in the village, so we only get the time they can spare from their booming business. Rather a swizz. But it’s looking marvellous at the moment, clear cold blue skies, olive terraces all bright green still, covered with asphodels, anemones – Adonis blood everywhere [2] – daisies, star of Bethlehem, celandine, small geraniums, gromwell, and, up in the mountains, snowdrops and primroses that nearly make exiles like us faint clean away. Bruce Chatwin is finishing a book too, next door, and we go for huge strides across the hills every afternoon, and he and Joan concoct delicious dinners every other night or so. Joan and I are reading Dostoïevski’s Smoke [3] aloud in the evening.
Many many thanks again, dear Pamela, and tons of love from us both.
Paddy
[1] ‘An old addict, I had been re-reading Saki just before setting out . . . I had always been struck by the broken traveller in The Unbearable Bassington, “a man that wolves have sniffed at”’ (Between the Woods and the Water, page 195).
[2] When Adonis lay dying in the arms of Aphrodite, after being gored by a wild boar, she created the anemone flower from his blood.
[3] A slip for Turgenev’s novel Smoke (1906).
Paddy had first met the Byzantine historian Steven Runciman (1903–2000) in Sofia in 1934. Afterwards he remembered Runciman and his companion Roger Hinks as ‘impeccable in Panama hats and suits of cream-coloured Athenian silk and their bi-coloured shoes were beautifully blancoed and polished’. To Paddy, still only nineteen, their conversation seemed ‘dazzlingly erudite and comic’. In contrast, Runciman remembered Paddy as ‘a very bright, very grubby young man’. Their paths crossed again after the war in Athens, where Runciman, Paddy’s boss, dismissed him from the British Council, complaining of ‘Paddy’s little irregularities’: too many parties, too few repaid loans. But Paddy could not hold a grudge long, and in later life the two men were friendly, though not close.
To Steven Runciman
5 April 1985
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Steven,
Thank you so much for the paper about Byzantine ladies – which I have sent on to Niko Ghika – and for the very nice joke about Leandrine feats. [1]
I am on the last bit of the sequel to A Time of Gifts. It ends at Orsova and I am in a bit of a fix. I had written breezily about Sigismund’s crusaders advancing down the Danube from Belgrade, and suddenly thought: what were they treading on? I made a dash for The Kingdom of Acre, page 458, [2] and every encyclopaedia and history book I could find, and all agree. But, as far as I can remember, on the right bank, the rock falls sheer all through the Kazan defile, with only those slots in the rockface for the brackets or whatever they were, that supported the planks over which Trajan’s army marched to the bridge at Turnu-Severin. On my two visits to it, the only way along the left bank was that marvellous road engineered out of the rock by the orders of Ct István Széchényi (I suppose in the 1840s). As far as I can remember, the rockface of both banks drops sheer several hundred feet, and for quite a few miles. The only alternative, on that bank, would be N. to Temesvár, Lugos, Caransebeș, then round the Banat Carpathians, and finally, down the Cerna to Orsova; or perhaps by some mountain passes closer to the river. If the Hospitallers had come to ferry them downstream, it would solve all. I wonder if I have gone blind retrospectively and there is some obvious solution . . . [3]
Isn’t it horrible to think that the whole of Kazan pass, Orsova, Ada Kaleh and the Iron Gates have all been plunged many fathoms underneath by that wretched dam, like Ys, [4] or Kitezh, a city near Nizhni-Novgorod that vanished during Batu’s invasion, whose bells can still be heard at the bottom of a lake. [5] Dimitri Obolenski is my source for this.
I am on the last stretch of this sequel to A Time of Gifts, and hope to return with it inside a month. What a relief. I daren’t think of Vol. III – Bulgaria, Wallachia, Bulgaria again, Turkey and END. . .
Καλὸ Πάσχα [Happy Easter ] I feel very guilty bothering you with all the above – there’s probably no answer anyway!
Yours ever
Paddy
P.S. I have reopened the envelope to copy a bit out of my 1905 Baedeker: ‘The Danube (in the Defile of Kazan), here 180 ft in depth, is confined to a width of 180 yards by huge perpendicular cliffs. Before the construction of the Széchényi Road, the defile was unpassable on either bank.’
[1] SR had written to PLF to say that he had been ‘fascinated and awe-stricken by the story of your swim. It’s a heroic tale (no, perhaps Leandrine rather than heroic), and I am delighted to have your account of it.’ This is a play on the word heroic – alluding to the story of Hero and Leander in Greek mythology. Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite; her lover Leander would swim the Hellespont every night to be with her.
[2] SR’s A History of the Crusades, Vol. III, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954).
[3] ‘The long and winding procession of the Crusaders . . . levitated just above the turbulent currents by sorcery. There was no other way’ (Between the Woods and the Water, page 273).
[4] A mythical city on the coast of Brittany that was swallowed by the sea.
[5] A mythical city beneath the waters of Lake Svetloyar in central Russia. In 1238, during the Mongol invasion of Europe led by Batu Khan, Kitezh is believed to have submerged before the attackers could take it. Old Believers say that the life of the city continues beneath the water: in calm weather one can sometimes hear the sound of chiming bells and people singing; the most pious individuals may see the lights of religious processions and glimpse buildings in the deep.
To Joan Leigh Fermor
5 November 1985
Grand Hotel
Sofia
Darling Joan,
I suddenly had the notion of getting out for a night at Eisenstadt in the Bussenland (seeing it in the railway map in the Westbahnhof [station]) and having a look at the great Esterházy palace there, and the houses of Haydn & Liszt; but it wasn’t allowed, so I went straight through to Budapest where it was pouring with rain. I tried to get onto that nice woman I stayed with last time, but she had changed her address, another lady Dr of Economics said on the telephone, and so I drew [a] blank. After one or two shots, I found a rather dilapidated Hotel Metropole in the Rákóczi Ut., a semi-brothel with endless passages, the rooms giving out into a bleak rainy well of moulting walls. Took a sleeper [a sleeping-pill].
Next morning the search for Elemér began: ringing every ten minutes, but no reply. The only thing was to take a taxi. His address was at a complex of workmen’s tenement-rookeries, almost in the fields on the extreme eastern edge of Budapest. The monoglot driver had never heard of it; but we got there in the end. Everything was shut and unresponsive to my battering on the shutters. There were two other names on the door in paint, and Elemér’s, hand-written and blurred on a bit of peeling adhesive tape, below. It was rather desolate. Threadbare trees, a pram without wheels, and graffiti, and nobody there. At last an old woman from a nearby block appeared, also only speaking Magyar; the name Klobusiçky didn’t mean anything to her but she brightened at his Christian name – ‘Elemér bácsi’ – viz. ‘Uncle Elemér’. I gathered he had broken his leg in July and been taken to a hospital. Which one? She’d no idea – there were dozens. So I gave her Rudi’s telephone number, and set off – in the gloaming by now – for sodden Budapest, wondering what to do. I rang up Rudi, and he came dashing to the Metropole, and I told him about it all, and he started telephoning everywhere, but in vain. Then, in a pause, Dagmar (Rudi’s wife – like him, she’s a Transylvanian Saxon, and very nice) rang saying that they had telephoned from Elemér’s complex – it was a v. pretty girl from the next flat, secretary to the local Communist cell, Elemér had told me, and utterly devoted to E., in spite of his constant jeering at her tenets. I had taken her out to luncheon with the two of us at Gödölló, last time I was there – a treat for her – at Elemér’s request, so she knew all about me, and said he had been for weeks and weeks in a military hospital (as
a honvéd [‘defender of the Fatherland’] hussar from the Great War, presumably!). Dagmar said she would drive me there when she finished work, in a little car she has. Rudi and I had a cheerful dinner together, talking late and drinking lots of red Médoc from Eger till late.
I pottered about, saw the Bornemisza–Thyssen exhibition [1] up in the palace, had something to eat in a bar full of Arabs, smugglers it is thought, or terrorists, where Dagmar picked me up, and we drove miles to the west of Budapest, nice leafy hills, as far from his quarters as Hampstead is from Gravesend. I took lots of goodies, also flowers and pears, whisky and all spare books – only to learn that he had been shifted to an Old Folks’ Home in Budapest, as far away this time as Fulham. We gave three nurses a lift into town, they all knew Elemér well and loved him – (Uncle E., again) – and they thought his leg was on the mend, but said he couldn’t really look after himself. In the rain, the place looked like a Victorian prison, but was not nearly so bad inside. Dagmar and I found his room, which he shared with five other old boys (all rather nice). It was dark again. E. was asleep, so I had difficulty in finding which he was. When I woke him, he looked v. drawn, top teeth out, white stubble, but still recognisably good looking and aquiline. The sad thing was he didn’t recognise me but when I talked about Greece, he said ‘In Greece lives Leigh Fermor, my good friend.’ ‘But Elemér, it’s me!’ ‘No, you are too young. You give him my love.’ Dagmar had stolen off by now. We talked a long time, but he wasn’t absolutely sure it was me, and kept referring to me in the third person, as though I were absent. I asked about his sister Ilona, who lives in Szatmár. I’d forgotten her married name – so had he – and her address, and his son Nicholas’s, in Düsseldorf – he has changed address – I’ve only got his old one. He [Nicholas] hadn’t been to see him, but his French daughter-in-law (‘Caroline Murat, a wonderful girl’) had. (I got their addresses later from the Communist girl by telephone, via Dagmar and Rudi, and will write.) Poor Elemér wasn’t taking in much, so I had to tear myself away after a time. We embraced and he hung on to my wrist; but I felt I was tiring him so had to bugger off, feeling terribly wrung. The eclipse of a honvéd hussar. I have a terrible feeling that he won’t emerge, or last very long. Alas! I’m so glad I saw him. The nurses were v. nice.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Page 45