Patrick Leigh Fermor
Page 49
Next weekend was with Geo. and Philippa [Jellicoe], who come here in a few days. She and I went for a tremendous long ride – looking down from the Bull’s Tail on Ham Spray, then to Coombe where Hendersons and Moores [7] were gathered under Michael Stewart’s roof for a lot of drinking. Neither of the horses had been ridden for six months, one not for three years, with the result that from the waist down I turned to stone, as tho’ a gorgon’s head had been waved. The last weekend we went to Crichel, [8] which was lovely, with a great feast at Cranborne, [9] and a dinner at Jochen’s in Peter Heyworth’s old house, [10] with Pat, Desmond, & Cressida Ridley. [11] I feel very braced, the way she keeps me on tiptoe. Then we took wing here, but not before having a long feast of oysters etc. at the Poissonière [12] with Francis Bacon, with lots of laughter; only to learn the sad subsequent news [13] when we got back . . . Magouche sent on all the cuttings which we read through slowly & gloomily, thanking our stars for that last meeting. . .
No sooner back here, I fell down that flight of stone steps, rushing for a book from Joan’s room in the pitch dark, and turning right too soon. I got quite a battering but nothing broken, so tottered to Paris leaning on the handsome gold-handled ashplant. There Editions Payot had brought out no less than three books in two weeks, which meant endless interviews and unblushingly organised ballyhoo, followed up by a monster assembly of travel writers at St Malo, with much feasting and a book fair, a vast acreage of marquee built out from the huge machicolated keep that dominates the port.
It’s rather muggy weather here, with that glare that seems to put everything a bit out of focus, spring flowers all gone, rank grass shooting up and withering but masses of birds and plenty going on in the branches: Jochen is staying, a very easy and helpful guest, and a surprisingly interesting one. Jellicoes come next week and also the still-unmet by you Gowries, [14] who are on the same prize-giving jury we all seem to do time on. I’m getting on with my work, largely egged on by a review in Le Monde which described me, because of my awful slowness in writing, as ‘L’Escargot des Carpathes’. [15] I forgot to say that Joan’s puss, Gisella, who slouched in out of nowhere last year as an unknown kitten, has just had five of her own, on the bottom shelf of the linen-cupboard. This morning I followed the cat Johnny – also a last year’s stranger – into the room on tiptoe, and caught him standing on his hind legs, rubbing muzzles with Gisella, who was leaning out. No more, except tons of love & thanks to you and Jaime from both of us.
Come soon,
Paddy
[1] ‘Darling Janetta’ was written in blue ink; the rest of the letter in black.
[2] The royal retreat of Sandringham in Norfolk, where PLF was a guest of Prince Charles.
[3] The fashionable painter Derek Hill (1916–2000); the writer and campaigner (and daughter of John Betjeman) Candida Lycett Green (1942–2014); the conservationist Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Margaret Eve Harrod (1911–2005); the sculptor Angela Conner (b. 1935) and her husband, the photographer John Bulmer.
[4] R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) and his second wife Sandra Fisher (1947–94), both American artists living in London.
[5] David George Philip Cholmondeley, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley (b. 1960), whose family seat is Houghton Hall, in Norfolk.
[6] Possibly St Benet’s Abbey on the River Bure.
[7] The diplomat Sir Nicholas Henderson (1919–2009), his wife Mary and their daughter Alexandra, Lady Drogheda, with her husband, Henry Dermot Ponsonby Moore, 12th Earl of Drogheda (b. 1937), a photographer known professionally as Derry Moore.
[8] Long Crichel House – see note 1 on page 310.
[9] Cranborne Manor, home to the heirs of the Marquess of Salisbury.
[10] Peter Lawrence Frederick Heyworth (1921–91), American-born English music critic and biographer, lived with his companion Jochen Voigt in Dorset.
[11] Patrick Trevor-Roper, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and the amateur archaeologist (Helen) Cressida Ridley, née Bonham Carter (1916–98), who excavated sites in Crete, Euboea, Greek Macedonia and Turkey.
[12] A restaurant in Chelsea, which closed in 2015.
[13] Bacon died of cardiac arrest in Madrid on 28 April 1992.
[14] Alexander Patrick Greysteil Ruthven, 2nd Earl of Gowrie (b. 1939), usually known as ‘Grey’ Gowrie, and his wife Adelheid (b. 1943).
[15] PLF was very tickled by this appellation, which he quoted in letter after letter.
Marie-Lyse Ruhemann, née Cantacuzène, was a cousin of Balasha’s. When Paddy was at Dumbleton he would often come over to a cottage on the Sudeley Estate which she and her husband Frank rented for their holidays.
To Marie-Lyse Ruhemann
10 January 1994
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Marie-Lyse,
The book’s [1] arrived safely, and v. many thanks! It seems very well done, and it’s a very good thing that it has all been set down before it vanishes from everyone’s memory. I’ve been reading it all the afternoon in front of blazing logs in the fireplace remembered from the one at Băleni, copied out of your father’s Persian sketchbook, certainly now lost in Rumania; if so, here it survives, at two removes, like part of one of those traditions in architecture brought back from the Crusades, and subsequently slightly garbled.
I was glad to see Balasha and Pomme there – ‘Marie Blanche’ and ‘Hélène’ – but it was a sad little entry, like most of them, et pour cause. How I wish that Balasha, when told to pack at Băleni – one suitcase only, and in quarter of an hour by the people in the Securitate truck – as well as finding my old voluminous notebook, on which everything I’m writing is based, had happened to remember her own memoirs. [2] She was putting them together all through the year before the war, especially in winter 1938–39. She wrote beautifully and, if saved, it would have been a marvellous record. There were lots of memories of her grandfather ‘The Kniaz’ [prince], and all the stories she had heard for the last two or three generations. Very interesting, very moving sometimes, and often funny. I wish one could hope that they might turn up somewhere but I very much doubt it! A sudden Dark Age descended that nobody was ready for.
Many thanks again, Marie-Lyse, and all wishes for 1995
love Paddy
[1] She had sent him a book by another cousin, Jean-Michel Cantacuzène, Mille ans dans les Balkans – Chronique des Cantacuzène dans la tourmente des siècles (A Thousand Years in the Balkans – Chronicle of the Cantacuzène in the Turmoil of Centuries) (1992).
[2] On the night of 2–3 March 1949 Balasha and her sister had been evicted by the Rumanian secret police from their family home, the manor-house close to the Bessarabian border where PLF had lived with her before the war.
Another Cantacuzène, Prince Michel Cantacuzène-Spéranski (1913–1999), of the Russian branch of the family, asked Paddy to write a foreword to a memoir, The Cantacuzène-Spéranski Saga.
To Michael Cantacuzène
17 March 1994
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear Michael,
Thank you so much for your letter and that fascinating copy of the National Geographical Magazine. It reminds me very much of my prehistoric trudge along the Danube.
I’m feeling very guilty about being so slow about the foreword. There have been a mountain of things to cope with, but I think I am beginning to see daylight, then I really will buckle to! Please forgive!
What a long time since Balasha and I came to see you and your parents at Sandricourt! [1] And how charming you all were. Balasha was tremendously bucked to find such delightful kinsmen, however far away.
I think the book will be a moving tribute to your family, and especially your branch of it, and fascinating recapitulation of a great sweep of history. I wish Balasha and her sister Pomme could have seen it – too late now, alas! – as they were always fascinated by Russian Cantacuzènes, of whatever branch. Her grandfather was always known as ‘Le Kniaz’; he spoke Russian and French long before he spoke Rumanian, and a very elegant un
iform of Maréchal de la Noblesse for Bessarabia – or some of it – still hung in a cupboard. We used to use it for dressing-up parties. Just before the war, we went, largely on horseback, to see a lot of Cantacuzène and Krupensky relations beyond the Prut River along the Dniestr in Bessarabia, and feasted under the trees at Novoe Usadba, the house of a dear old General Volodia Kantakuzin – Croix de Saint Georges, quatrième classe? – before moving on to another crumbling Krupenski gentilhommière called Lamashnitza. Happy days!
Love to you both,
Paddy
[1] A nineteenth-century chateau about fifty miles from Paris; PLF and Balasha went there in 1937.
To Janetta Parladé
4 October 1995
Kardamyli
Messenia
Darling Janetta,
I’m so terribly sorry about those spectacles! I can’t think how I managed to do it: viz. to pinch, and lose, the good pair, and keep the cast-off stand-by we sent back. I’ve hunted every pocket and nook and cranny and flap and lining, and cracks between chairbacks and cushions and dark bottoms of cupboards; and all in vain. Please forgive! I plan to get several brightly coloured semilunar specs in Athens – hideous, but detectable if astray, and unconfusable with anyone else’s; and I must get you a sumptuous pair, spectacles to end all spectacles. . .
We were expecting Magouche to be here by dinner time, but she rang from Athens an hour ago to say the Kalamata plane for once had left on time, so she missed it (they shouldn’t have sold her the ticket, if this could happen), so she’s bowling through the night in a ruinous taxi, and will be here for a delicious roast chicken about 11 o’clock. Then, after three days of bathing and mountain walks, off we go to Crete for poor Xan’s final scattering, [1] right up in the White Mountains, which will be much better than from an aeroplane. A few hectic days will follow, then straight to Athens, as Johnny Craxton and another chap ( John Leatham) [2] and I have to do an hour’s ‘conversation-round table broadcast’ about Niko Ghika in Greek. It sounds absolute hell. . .
Joan and I gobble up all the reviews about Carrington, [3] which, on the whole, aren’t bad at all. I long to know what Frances thinks of it, and you. I bet they’ve got Ralph wrong, as usual. I do hope we see it some time – obviously, there will be cassettes.
There was quite a healthy rain a few days ago, so Joan and I went mushrooming. Not one. I do feel guilty about cluttering your cupboard with that jacket – the tweed’s so loud that if you hear groans and oaths and sighs in the shadows, you’ll know what they come from.
8:15! Time for Famous Grouse!
love and penitence
from Paddy
[1] Xan Fielding had died of cancer more than two years earlier.
[2] John Leatham (1924–2003), intelligence officer, writer, translator and philhellene, who had lived in Greece since 1969.
[3] A film about the life of the painter Dora Carrington (1893–1932), written and directed by Christopher Hampton, and released in 1995.
Paddy generously encouraged many younger writers, as William Blacker (b. 1962) would gratefully acknowledge in an address he gave at Paddy’s memorial service in 2011. In November 1996 Blacker had written to Paddy to say that he was just setting off to spend the winter in the Maramures, a mountainous and forested region in northern Rumania close to the Ukrainian border, famous for its old wooden churches and medieval way of life.
To William Blacker
11 December 1996
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dear William – if I may make so bold –
I can’t think of anything more exciting than your imminent prospect – and well done starting in winter. (a) You have the whole world to yourself, and (b) inhabitants never take summer visitors seriously. Winter is a sort of Rite of Passage. Do take down any songs or sayings, above all descântice – spells, incantations, invocations, etc. I bet Maramures is full of them. Also, as much wolf and bear lore as possible – and remember, never drink rainwater that has collected in a bear’s footprint, however thirsty.
Happy Christmas, La Mulți Ani, and best of luck
Paddy L-F
The suggestion arose that Artemis Cooper should write Paddy’s biography jointly with her husband, the military historian Antony Beevor, whose book Crete: The Battle and the Resistance had been published in 1991. In the event she would undertake the book alone.
To Artemis Cooper
17 June 1999
Kardamyli
Messenia
Dearest Artemis,
The arm that holds this pen is stiflingly tubed in sackcloth, but you can’t pick out the warp from the woof, it’s so heavily caked with ash . . . I can’t think how many days have passed since getting your marvellous letter without blushing under my double layer of textile and volcanic dust. My only explanation is that I was fidgeting about too much in Blighty, and, when we got back here, so alarmed at the Pelion and Ossa [1] accumulation of stuff to be answered that soared on my desk, that I sort of seized up and I haven’t answered a single one; but I have a kind of a feeling that this letter will get everything on the move again. Please forgive.
The joint book by you and Antony is a wonderful idea, and it’s most brilliant and generous of you both to think of it. I’m rather pro lives not being done in the person’s lifetime, and I think you both are too. Look at Diana’s! [2] I’ll try and put together a sort of curriculum vitae with dates and movements, parents, family, schools, travels, friends, adventures, mishaps, war, etc. And, of course, books. There are quite a lot of letters which have mounted up. A huge pile of ones to Diana, of course, which you angelically dealt with and returned and even, when illegible, made spotless fair copies of. There are lots of articles that might need a glance, any amount of oddments, bits of verse, jokes, etc. There’s quite a lot of Diana’s correspondence at The Mill House, which I’ve often meant to have Xeroxed, haven’t of course, but will. Also many to and from Joan. Some amusing ones from Annie Fleming, and various other friends. These are in some sort of order, the main ones, anyway: otherwise, rather higgledy-piggledy. It’s rather a curse that both Joan and I are very untidy. Things are often mislaid, turning up after a year. The only thing which consoles me is the memory of a photograph – I don’t think I ever actually saw it – of Iris Murdoch’s & John Bayley’s interior set-up, which was as though tossed by a hurricane. But I will try and get things a bit more in order. Joan and I have given this house to the Benaki Museum, [3] after we vanish, so we’ll give them great instructions for you to have the run of the place, and all that’s in it, if we’re both suddenly run over, or eaten by sharks. But I hope you’ll both be here lots of times before.
Anyway, it’s a splendid plan.
One day, at Asolo, I was reading a marvellous book in her [Freya Stark’s] library, Italy and her Invaders, eight vols., hefty ones, by Thomas Hodgkin, Vol. I starting – after Rome from the time of Augustus – with the Visigothic invasion, and goes on through the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, the Huns, etc. ending up with the Empire of Charlemagne – literary atmosphere of the Court, Alcuin of York,[1] etc. Seeing how much I was enjoying the book, she said, ‘I’ll leave it to you in my will.’ Then said, ‘No, perhaps I’ll go on living for ages.
[1] To give an idea of the cheery atmosphere of Charlemagne’s Court, where they all had nicknames. Charl, one day said to Alcuin, who was sitting opposite ‘Quid te separat a stulto?’ [‘What makes you different from a stupid man?’] Quick as lightning, Alcuin answered ‘Stultus’ [‘He’s stupid.’] But you must come and get it.’ So I did. She wrote in it: ‘Handed on to Paddy with love, Freya. Asolo 6/12/1980.’ She was v. keen on my handing it on, so I’ll write in it ‘Handed on to Antony and Artemis with love from Paddy and Joan, 17/6/1999.’
(pause of three minutes)
In fact, I’ve just done it, and will slip it back into the bookcase, duly earmarked, in the classics corner, on the terrace side of the drawing room, second bookcase on the left, just before the pillars, seventh sh
elf from the bottom. At the bottom, remembering what was written in each of our cubicles at school, I have added NUNC MIHI, MOX HUJUS, SED POSTMODO NESCIO CUJUS? [4] It occurred to me, putting it back, that it’s more John Julius’s period than yours – but perhaps he’s got it and you could borrow it. Further inspiration! We’ll leave him the two wonderful leatherbound Nonesuch vols. of Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey, marvellously printed on special paper and given by Diana in memory of Duff – allowed to choose – with that lovely new moon bookplate. [5]
I must dash down with this in the hopes of catching the last Friday post – à la recherche etc., with knobs on to both, love from Paddy and Joan
[1] Pile Pelion on Ossa – an expression originating in Greek mythology, meaning to add one difficulty to another.
[2] See note 1 on page 338.
[3] The Benaki Museum in Athens, established and endowed in 1930 by Antonis Benakis in memory of his father, houses a collection of Greek art from prehistoric to modern times.
[4] ‘Now mine, soon to be his or hers, afterwards who knows whose?’ – see the footnote on page 38 of A Time of Gifts.
[5] Duff Cooper’s bookplate, designed by Rex Whistler, depicts a bust of his wife surrounded by flounces, champagne bottles, scrolls and boxes.
To George Jellicoe
7 September, 199 [9?]
The Mill House
Dumbleton
Dear George,
I’d meant to write ages ago, but I’ve plunged into such an Augean stable, clearing away all the literary impediments, causes of delay, mental blocks, prefaces, obituaries – beginning to stand thick as time wanders on – and all the things that have stopped me doing what I ought to be doing – viz. finishing a book – that I haven’t been able to move an inch. No feasts, no Chatsworths, no Tidcombes, [1] nothing! It’s morally rewarding – halfway there! – but otherwise pretty constricting. Most of my letters begin with an apology. So please forgive.