In Paris, he met Joan for a few more days. After St Wandrille, Paddy was eager to experience another Benedictine monastery, so he went to Solesmes in the Sarthe. It was, however, much larger and more impersonal and he liked it far less. His and Joan’s letters kept crossing.
Addressed to the Honble. Mrs Rayner, Dumbleton Hall, Evesham, Worcestershire; re-addressed to Flemmings Hotel, Half Moon Street, London, W1, postmark 6 December 1948 Paddy Leigh Fermor, Abbaye de St Jean de Solesmes, Sablé, Sarthe, Tuesday
Darling sweet little mite,
Thank you so much for your letter, and please forgive me for being so slow in writing. This is going to be in a terrific hurry, as the post is leaving the village in a few minutes. I’ll write you a better one after Compline this evening.
Alas, I didn’t get here till Sunday, as there was no through train on the day you left, and I didn’t want another Rouen experience at the Mans, which sounds awful. On Friday Mr Kaye didn’t appear at his office (ate and spent day on Thursday with the Pulhams’, and bought the duffle coat for 3,000 but will send some more after your letter). Next day had lunch with Weingarten (author of ‘pas de bon monture sans croisement de cheval.’ Charming) and dinner with Lucienne. Saturday caught Mr K. But felt frightfully ill. It must have been Groddeck as I recovered at once on meeting François de la Rochefoucauld, who asked me to a St Germain-Balthus type existentialist party in his bedroom in the Montana, beginning at 1 a.m., if you please. Club St Germain then a wonderful party. He lives in a minute room with the beautiful Mlle. Schwob. 50 people came. (Please don’t hate me.) He is our stern hostess’s son, a great beauty and funny, and a capable musician. You will like him. (I repeat, rather timidly, no hatred, darling, please . . . !)
Then here. A much dourer, more forbidding place than St W. The plainsong is amazing, but, from every other point of view, it is a dungeon compared to my old home. A lovely comfy room, however, shaded lights, etc. But I don’t want to stay long. Please wire at once, my darling pet, and tell me any plans you have made, and if I have time to stay 2 days at the Trappe. I can’t bear to stay away from you much longer. What about the Betjemans?
My minute rodent, I love you and I miss you more than I can say. Do let’s get married and live happily forever. I simply can’t be without you. What a funny 3 months! You and your H., me and my abbeys, thank Heavens everything is alright now. I wish this letter were not so hurried. Did you get my short letter to Isabel Lambert’s?* I do hope it went to the right number. Write and [?] at once my dear little muskin.
All, all my love to darling muskin & mopsa
From JEMY9
Paddy Leigh Fermor, Abbaye de St Jean de Solesmes, Sablé sur Sarthe, Sunday night
My darling sweet angel,
I’m feeling so gloomy tonight, I don’t know why, and long to be with you so that we could just curl up in a ball together and snore our way through the night. It’s frightfully cold and lonely here, and I feel absolutely miserable [?] alone between these icy sheets. Boo hoo.
I hoped there would be a letter from you and pelted down to the gatehouse but only got a bill from London. I’ve been monstrously bad about writing, darling, and please forgive me. The trouble is that the post goes at 3.30 in the afternoon, and as I’m writing like anything, I always think that it’s earlier and the bloody thing has left by the time I get ready to write, so I put it off till tomorrow thinking ‘I’ll write to the Rodent a really long and fruity one tomorrow morning’ etc. After this I’ll send you something every other day at the very least, and please, please, darling, write to me absolutely constantly or I’ll only get terribly downcast, and you wouldn’t like that.
Darling, what an unmitigatedly happy time we had in Paris. Scarcely a moment of guilt or saturation or high-town-blues. Once or twice at the very most, but the rest of it sheer heaven. You were so sweet, my angel. I really could eat you.
Do you remember, darling, Mr Monk talking about an English trappist, ex-R.A.F. monk that he saw in Brittany?* Well, he arrived here 3 days ago, an extraordinary man, about my age, very slightly insane and absolutely enthralling. He got shot down at Danzig, imprisoned, studied for the Anglican church after his release, went over to Rome, and finally went to the worst Trappe of the lot, Thermadenc in Brittany. He was there for a year, couldn’t stand it, and is on his way to the Benedictines in the Isle of Wight. It wasn’t the dead silence for 12 months that got him down, so much as the gruelling hard work in the fields, digging up carrots, smashing stones, sorting turnips, living the life of a navvy without a single moment’s solitude; and with monastic discipline from the dark ages. No meat, fish, only veg. for meals, scarcely any sleep. He looks a nervous wreck, wild eyes, chapped hands and broken nails, talks the whole time – terribly well – and can’t believe he’s out of it. He’s a fascinating boy, extremely sensitive and well-educated, an omnivorous reader, a sculptor, a musician. He felt he had to go to the furthest extreme in the Catholic faith ‘to do penance’ for the misery of the world. His reading in Christian mysticism carries him to all kinds of miseries and ecstasies. He is at the moment gobbling up the works of St Dionysius the Areopagite, his lips mumbling away and his eyes rolling. He has the most dreadful doubts every now and then and careers into my cell to ask for my advice. He told me the dream he had last night: ‘I was in a stable somewhere, they were saddling up a horse for me. But the saddle hadn’t got any stirrups! And by God! I noticed the horse was getting smaller and smaller – shrinking and shrinking until it was the size of the dog that pulled the little milk-cart at the Trappe. I got on the thing, we set off at a gallop. No stirrups and the horse shrieking all the time. Hell of a job to stay on. Faster and faster. Then I noticed we were heading for a small hole, about the size of a mouse’s. I was still hanging on somehow, and we were going like the wind. The horse shoots through the hole and disappears and BANG! I crash into the wall, knocked myself silly, and wake up. What do you make of that?’ What do you? Has it got a psychiatrical or a mystical exegesis? Good old womb stuff, or headlong [into] the mystic’s inner chamber of one-ness with Godhead supported by a diminishing spark of faith?10
I am working like anything at the moment and in spite of Benzers feel absolutely exhausted. The books I read in the intervals are a Flemish mediaeval mystic called Ruysbroek and St Angela of Foligno who even surpasses Marie de l’Incarnation. I would like to have a year doing nothing except read in an enormous library with you somewhere. I feel I might use it properly at last, instead of mucking about in the manner I have done all my life so far. The time I have wasted makes me shudder with horror. No hope, I’m afraid! Anyway, one would need 5 years.11
Joan Rayner, Hotel Normandie, Knightsbridge, S.W.1.
My darling sweet Paddy,
Thank you so much for your two lovely letters I got this week-end what a long time they take to come. This is not a proper letter because I very much hope that you will have left before it gets to you. Of course you were quite right to stay on as we can go to the Betjemans any time, and she was so busy this weekend you would hardly have seen her anyway. Do stay if you are enjoying yourself as I don’t think you’ll enjoy London much, but of course I am longing for you to come back selfishly. I have lots to tell you about houses, flats, friends, etc but I won’t until I hear [what] your plans are & whether you are likely to get any more letters.
I’ve been really very bad about writing but I really thought you were only going to be a couple of days in Solesmes & I didn’t know where to write to & I rather hated you for not sending me one word for so long.
How fascinating the RAF monk sounds – I’m longing to hear all about the Trappe. I’m so glad you are writing so much & I can’t wait to see the Mayas. Darling, do you think you could get the book done by the end of Feb? Please try as then we could have the most wonderful Mediterranean spring (and summer?) bowling down in a tiny car to Sicily to meet Peter [Quennell] there about March 10th. Then Sicily for about 3 weeks (this is your holiday) then back slowly, you staying at all the places we
want to see, you writing articles (Mr. Weidenfelt’s[sic] idea) & me snapping. Then of course we might try to get to Greece. But if the book is not finished we won’t be able to do all this. I intend to wall you up as soon as you arrive here in some terrible flat. As soon as we come back from our Mediterranean jaunt we sink into our own Georgian country house & I shall have tiny Fermors every year (if we ever get married). Oh dear, how nice it all sounds & now I’ve got to go to the Gargoyle to meet the H., Robin C. [Campbell] & Philip [Toynbee].
Christmas is always hell, & I shall have to go to Dumbleton, which is worse but if you came too it wouldn’t be so bad & you could scribble away in comfort at least.
I may get Ian Fleming’s flat on Jan 1st & that ought to be nice, but it’s not certain yet.
My darling, darling angel I do love you so much & I am dying to see you & I don’t want to see anyone else at all.
All my love from Joan.12
After leaving Solesmes, Paddy made for the austere Cistercian monastery of La Trappe, which he found far stranger. His curiosity had been aroused by its history but also by the ex-RAF postulant. A place of almost Kafkaesque inaccessibility, he was taken there through dark, drenching rain in a butcher’s van which broke down twice in the middle of a moor. When he arrived, his cell was freezing cold and, apart from a bust of St Bernard, quite bare. The monks, including the abbot, slept in cubicles in a dormitory on palliasses of straw stretched out on wooden planks. They led lives of the utmost harshness and often, in the morning, High Mass was replaced by the Office of the Dead. ‘In the daylight that followed my arrival,’ Paddy wrote, ‘the pale grey Trappe resembled not so much an abbey as a hospital, an asylum or a reformatory. It dwindled off into farm buildings, and came to an end in the fields where thousands of turnips led their secret lives and reared into the air their little frostbitten banners.’13
Monks communicated in sign language, but there was a special dispensation from the rule of silence for the monks who dealt with the abbey livestock when they were addressing their dumb charges. As the winter air grew colder and the puddles creaked with the first ice of winter, their world – ‘Nordic, haggard and frightening’ – became like that of Grünewald. Of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, Paddy felt that of chastity must be the hardest – although he was told by a Benedictine monk that hair-shirts, which were intended to quell desires, fell into disuse largely because they sometimes encouraged the dangers they were supposed to allay. Paddy did find, however, that all seemed quiet and peaceful, and the privacy of the individual silences was bridged by an authentic, brotherly love. Despite his initial revulsion at the ‘sepulchral sadness’ of outward appearances, the abbot and the two monks Paddy was able to speak to seemed disconcertingly normal and friendly. All had an indefinable air of benevolence and happiness. At the end of his stay he accompanied the abbot by bus to Paris, said his goodbyes to this dignified and completely unaffected man outside the doors of the Convent of Notre Dame de Cluny, then headed – profoundly mystified – through the rainy streets towards the Hôtel de la Louisiane in the rue de Seine.
‘You are a beast not writing even a post card before,’ Joan wrote to Paddy. ‘I was beset with doubts & gloom & thought you must be concocting some appalling letter saying you never wanted to see me again. London is hell, of course, but I’m seeing a lot of nice people, although I feel very anti-social and really only want to settle down in the country.’ Cyril had held a dinner party for the French artist Jean Hugo, whom Connolly had commissioned to do work for Horizon; afterwards they had a ‘nice bitter conversation about religion’. He also gave a great party for Stephen Spender’s return from America and T. S. Eliot’s Nobel Prize. Seventy people were present (Paddy had been invited).
Darling angel, I am longing to see you again so much and I do think it would be lovely to get married awfully soon – I don’t think we will ever get anywhere the way we live at the moment and I’m sure that we shan’t feel any more tied than we are already. So please come back soon – I’m very lonely without you. Could you send me a telegram so that it arrives not later than Monday morning c/o Betjeman, Farnborough, Wantage, saying when you think you will be coming back and I’ll try to have somewhere nice for us to stay.14
In December, Joan went to stay with her sister Patricia at Upham Cottage, her new house in Hampshire (which despite its name had eight bedrooms). She was married to Peter Kenward, the former husband of the society columnist Betty Kenward, and Patricia’s first son, Robert, was now a few months old. When Joan left she put simply a question mark as her address in the Upham Cottage visitors’ book. It would be another twenty years before Joan and Paddy married, and Joan never found a house in the country. However many she saw, there was always something wrong: they were on a railway line, or beside an aerodrome, or too poky. Although they always had a home in Dumbleton, from 1949 on Paddy and Joan lived either in London or Greece. And although both a caring aunt and an affectionate godmother to the daughters of John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly, Joan was never to have children of her own. Some years later, when long past child-bearing age, she was introduced by Maurice Bowra to Alan Pryce-Jones’s son, David, at a cocktail party. ‘You could have been mine,’ she said to him.
11
Family Affairs
Even if he was yet to earn much money, Paddy was at last beginning to make a name for himself. In the summer of 1949, an article by him about the monastery of St Wandrille appeared in the Cornhill, a magazine edited by Peter Quennell and published by John Murray, and a second article, ‘From Solesmes to la Grande Trappe’, appeared in the new year. After his visits to the French monasteries, he wanted to visit monasteries further afield, and this became possible in 1950, when he and Joan were in Greece.
Passing through Turkey some time after this expedition to the Trappe, I learnt that the remains of the old monastic community of Urgüb were only a few days’ journey away. The site had been abandoned for centuries but, having always longed to see one of these desert monastic establishments of the Levant – so different from the convents of Western Europe but from which, after all, the whole of monasticism stems – I decided to see what it was like. The friend with whom I was travelling was equally eager for the journey, so, postponing a dozen alternative plans, we caught the train and set off.1
The ‘friend’ was Joan, and her photographs of the abandoned monasteries and the harsh, bleak landscape in which they were situated accompanied a third article, ‘The Rock Mountains of Cappadocia’, when it appeared later in 1950. Having at last abandoned the professional title of Joan Rayner, they were accredited as being the work of ‘Joan Eyres Monsell’. She was delighted to have her work accepted but she would have liked to have been paid more: ‘I had lunch with Peter yesterday after arranging about the snaps for the Urgub article, they are printing ten of them. It is rather maddening to think that if they were published in Picture Post I should be getting about £150 instead of £20.’2
In December 1950, The Traveller’s Tree appeared at last, to considerable acclaim – it won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. When Joan wrote to Paddy in early January 1951 the book was already being reprinted, and Costa was going round rubbing his hands, saying he was going to be a millionaire. Harold Nicolson in the Observer called Paddy ‘a natural romantic, having in his veins the ardour of the buccaneer’.3 According to Alan Pryce-Jones, the review in the Times Literary Supplement was all the more extraordinary, as it was the only complimentary review its writer, Edward Cunard, had ever written – he was always ‘crabbing’.4
Joan and Paddy fell into a way of living which required them to be separated for long periods. Paddy rarely seemed to stay anywhere for more than two months at a time at this period of his life: he seemed to need this stimulation. And so Joan was leading her own life. However in the summer of 1949 Joan found a flat to rent at 76 Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia. Her landlady was the mother of Barbara Warner, who was married to Rex Warner, Paddy’s old boss in Greece. She felt she had a
home there for the first time since leaving both her marriage and her flat in Palace Gate six years earlier. No doubt Joan found the long separations harder to accept than Paddy but she respected his urge to travel, which she shared, and his psychological need to write. And she wanted to encourage him. She wrote to Paddy who was in Cyprus with Lawrence Durrell:
What are you up to? I am dying of envy thinking of you all staying with Larry – drinking in the sun – while I shuffle up and down Charlotte Street in the rain with my shopping bag. Do let me know how long you think of staying as I wouldn’t mind at all coming there myself a bit if I wouldn’t spoil all your fun . . . Should we take a great house together somewhere or have you other plans by this time? I do long for a huge library & not to have to pack every week. I really think I wouldn’t be too bad-tempered & nagging if we had enough rooms to ourselves & it would be a good thing for you to have somewhere to settle down and write. We could always try and see anyway. I’m all for the country but Greece or England? I feel like staying 6 months in one place & then travelling. Anyway my darling, will you please promise that you won’t get tied up with journalism with the Sun. Times. Everyone thinks that is sheer madness – that you write far too well – it’s the one thing that you should try and avoid – how do you think Sir Thomas Browne would have written if he had spent his days composing ‘Leaving soonest Athenwards etc.’5
Although willing to support Paddy’s writing, Joan was still a professional photographer. In 1952, her pictures for Peter Quennell’s Spring in Sicily were published. ‘A good number of excellent photographs,’ wrote Edwin Muir in the Observer, but neither Rose Macaulay in the Listener nor the anonymous reviewer in the TLS mentioned them. A group of pictures Joan took of fire dancers at the Anastenaria festival in northern Greece – old ladies and men holding bibles dancing on hot coals – also found a publisher, but some of her photographs seem to have been done speculatively. A batch of photographs of dusty statues taken in a cemetery in Genoa probably did not find a buyer, despite the scene catching Joan’s eye and imagination. The rather wonderful oddness of a roadside junk dealer in Normandy, who sold uniformed mannequins, clearly delighted Joan, but unfortunately she does not seem to have found an outlet for their sale.
Joan Page 19