Joan

by Simon Fenwick

  Joan’s anxieties, as often, were exaggerated, and Paddy and she survived them all.

  The axis of the whole house was planned so that the windows of the main room – which was referred to variously as the library, the drawing room, the great room or the salon – caught the very last rays of the sun, winter and summer. As Joan had wished they could watch the sun go down into the sea. An eight-arched gallery led from the great room to a loggia with bedrooms, bathroom and a kitchen to one side, and to the south there was another wing with two more bedrooms and bathrooms, and an outside staircase led down to another bedroom and bathroom below. (They expected a lot of visitors.) Jasmine from in the courtyard filled the house with its scent. Paddy and Joan had separate bedrooms, as he was never fully house-trained. In a letter to Lady Diana Cooper, Evelyn Waugh referred to the ‘Nicotine maniac and his girl’, and it was always possible that Paddy – who was a heavy smoker – might set his bed on fire or pour red wine all over the sheets. Or flood the bath. Joan filled her room with cats, which Paddy did not much care for, and there was even a cat flap in her bedroom door. Her bedroom had the best view, over the sea to the south. On one wall there was a Giacometti still life. She kept a photograph of Cyril and a silhouette of Patrick Kinross – people who mattered. The back of the door was covered in postcards. Both the bedroom and the kitchen were private: no one was allowed to enter unless they knew Joan well; one might have to wait for years.

  By September 1966, Paddy felt so confident that he wrote to Patrick Kinross, inviting him to come for Christmas. The house was now roofed over with tiles bought cheaply from the wreckage of a recent earthquake in Kalamata: ‘D.V. it’ll be ready by Christmas and it would be marvellous if you were here to help inaugurate a gigantic fireplace that’s now going up!’ Two months later, the house was still unfinished. Joan wrote to Kinross:

  I do hope the house will be ready, sometimes one feels it never will, but if not the hotel is charming. We rather forgot what a time the inside of a house takes & now doors, windows, floors, ceilings, sinks, baths, kitchens, plumbing, plastering are all being done at once & as we have to see to & get everything we are nearly mad thinking of door knobs, lavatory seats, taps, hinges, designing fire places, doors, shutters, etc, etc. It’s beautiful though and we long for you to come and see it.7

  He came for the New Year instead but the Greeks did not make much of the event. A year later, at the beginning of January 1968, Joan wrote to John Banting, who had sent a picture as a house-warming present:

  It’s a very anti-festive season here, I’m afraid, even in Kalamata our favourite tavern, usually full of caique captains, spivs & tarts from the port clip joints was empty. However we had lunches in the sun & lit a roaring blaze in our new fireplace with pruned olive branches in the evenings. Now we spend our evenings painting tiles as they are so hideous to buy here.8

  Some of the tiles were painted with mandala shapes, a remembrance of Joan’s interest in Tibetan studies.

  When the house was nominally finished, it is hard to say, as the building work was never-ending; in March 1968, Paddy returned to Greece after a trip to Spain:

  We found Kardamyli emerging from the worst winter in recorded history – snow a foot deep even on the island. We just missed this amazing vision, alas. Meanwhile our old pals the workmen have taken possession again. I don’t know what we’ll do when they finally clear off, and the patter of hobnailed boots falls silent.9

  By then the house was up and standing, and the limestone from which it was built, roughly cut from the foothills of the Taygetus mountains, had weathered. Standing as the focus of an untouched coastline, it looked, Paddy said, like a monastery which had been crumbling there for centuries.

  The fact that the house was finished certainly marked a staging post in Joan and Paddy’s life, and on 11 January 1968 there had been another, when they married at Caxton Hall in Westminster. Paddy likened the ceremony to buying a dog licence but Joan had broken her family mantra that while one might sleep with or have an affair with anyone, one must only marry someone in similar financial circumstances. Niko Ghika, his wife Barbara and Patrick Kinross were all present at the wedding. After a pick-me-up drink in a local pub, Barbara Ghika provided a lunch and Patrick Kinross provided the dinner. Why Paddy and Joan should have decided to marry at last is difficult to say. Probably, it just seemed the right time. In her commonplace book Joan noted down a passage from Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet.

  [. . .] the good marriage is rather one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude & shows him the greatest trust that he has to confer. A togetherness of two human beings is an impossibility and, when it does seem to exist, a limitation, a mutual compromise which robs one side or both sides their fullest freedom & development.

  An epigram by Jean de la Bruyère:

  Etre avec des gens qu’on aime, cela suffit; rêver, leur parler, ne leur parler point, pauser à des choses plus indifferentes, mais auprès d’eux, tout est égal.*

  And a single word from the Fuegian language of South America:

  mamihlapintafoi means ‘looking-at-each-other,-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-un-willing-to-do.’

  (Jane Harrison, Prolegomena)

  These thoughts must have echoed her private feelings. It was nearly twenty-nine years since Joan’s first wedding at Caxton Hall to John Rayner. The affairs she had had during her marriage to JR had caused her unhappiness and guilt; at the back of her mind there must have been Cyril’s comment that she would never be good at married life. Paddy and she had been together for over twenty years, so she had proved him wrong. Joan once surprised Janetta Parladé by telling her how many lovers she had once had,10 but, despite her agreement with him that they would have an open marriage, there is no trace in her papers of her ever having been tempted by another relationship, or even so much as a passing sexual encounter, with anyone other than Paddy.

  Paddy’s affairs, on the other hand, were scarcely covert – and by nature Paddy was very far from secretive. He had had a brief affair with the daughter of the journalist Tom Hopkinson, Lyndall Hop-kinson, who was working as a proofreader at the time. She was inexperienced, and the affair ended in her hurt and disappointment. In 1960, shortly afterwards, he became involved with Enrica ‘Ricki’ Huston, the fourth wife of the film director John Huston. She and Paddy first met when she rescued him from a fight after a hunt ball in the early hours of the morning, although the affair started several years later. Among Paddy’s papers was the start of a draft note or a letter to Xan and Daphne. It was written at half two in the morning as he was sitting over his drink in the Bag O’Nails, a nightclub in Soho.

  I suppose this is alright. Slight solitary gloom tonight. This is not a letter, just kakography over bumf because all the available soulmates are being wooed in flat high class tones by junkers at neighbouring tables, wretched early birds, lovely worms in their beaks . . . Most of them are like genteel Clarissas one Doone (already seized); a near-Ricky (Glory on her – on Ricky). O, the beauty of the sway of skirts, that heavy delayed-action sway after the particular movement has been completed and superseded, like a silk echo; this gratuitous corollary to the sway of dance steps. Round they go, and round, half an instant later, goes, that pleated, ironed, goffered and ruched slack that somewhere in its volutes hides bums. [but not, the way things are going so far, for me].11

  Ricki was very much in love, and although the affair did not last long they remained friends. In January 1969 she was killed in a car crash near Strasbourg while on the way to see John Huston. It was Joan who told Paddy – in a short paragraph at the end of the fourth side of a letter of six sides, as if the death of Paddy’s former lover was only a matter of passing interest. She mentioned what arrangements had been made for Ricki’s daughter by John Julius Norwich – with whom Ricki had also had an affair – ‘so she is all right but poor Ricky. It is sad.’ Many years later, when Paddy found the letter he had begun writing a q
uarter of a century earlier, he added a note, ‘The man’s drunk P.L.F. 21.7.87.’ Whatever the drawbacks of marriage and Joan’s reservations, they wanted to be with one another so all was passed over.

  Although they had lived together for years, marriage also gave Paddy and Joan an added respectability and security – perhaps useful in an increasingly paranoid Greece. In the spring of 1967 there had been a military coup. The junta – or the ‘Revolution of 21 April 1967’ as it called itself – proclaimed its mission to be the defence of the traditional values of ‘Helleno-Christian civilization’. This, of course, meant whatever they wanted it to. John Craxton was already suspected by the chief of police in Chania of espionage. The fact that such a cultivated man who had a house by the harbour had a liking for sailors surely signalled an interest in naval intelligence – this raised a laugh from the suspect. Then the fact that Johnny rescued antiquities from roadside heaps, which were about to be turned into building foundations, led to charges of looting the national heritage. During a police search, an owl he had constructed was pronounced ancient treasure. So Craxton dismantled the bird and said, ‘Look, it’s made of brick, just like this.’ He tapped the policeman on the head with one of the pieces. The policeman festered a grudge. He was promoted and eventuallly he forced Craxton to leave the country.12 Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor, however, were able to see the junta through.

  14

  Friendship and Loss

  Joan’s father, Viscount Monsell, died in March 1969, aged eighty-eight. His ashes were scattered at sea from a warship. In accordance with his explicit wish there was no memorial service, but in 1974 a window was installed in his memory in the south aisle of St Olave’s Church, Hart Street, a church with many naval connections. The window displayed the Eyres Monsell arms; three woolpacks in the top right-hand quartering represent the source of the family’s prosperity. At the base of the window the text reads, ‘So much one man can do that doth both act and know.’ Graham now inherited his father’s title and became the 2nd Viscount Monsell, but he never took any active role in public life, nor did he take his seat in the House of Lords. He had already inherited the Dumbleton estate of some 5,000 acres from his mother’s trustees, and over the coming years he sold off the odd cottage and building site to provide himself with an income. In the early 1950s, the Corporation of Leicester had already acquired land that the estate also owned in the southern suburbs of the city by compulsory purchase, in order to build a greener and more attractive council estate. The family name which was created on the marriage of Sybil Eyres and Bolton Monsell is still carried by the city’s Eyres Monsell estate council ward.

  Throughout his life, Graham could be quite intimidating; if one said the wrong thing one would be made to feel a fool. He was kindly, but it was difficult to be intimate with him. While Paddy was outgoing and friendly, Graham was always fastidious and fussy. He was wary of Paddy, and it took a long time before he believed that his motives towards his beloved Joan were more than mercenary. His reserve eventually broke down, and there came to be more mutual regard and affection: Paddy was not just an adventurer and Joan was not letting the side down by marrying outside her class. Paddy described Joan’s brother as a ‘very intelligent, very retiring, literary-musical hermit’.1 But Graham was no hermit; he was loyal to his small number of very close friendships – including Joan’s first boyfriend, Alan Pryce-Jones, to whom he wrote in November 1961 after Alan’s recent move to the USA:

  It is angelic of you to ask me to come for a visit . . . [but] my dancing days are over, old rocking chair has got me and I must say I love it. I emerge each summer to plunge into the Mediterranean, hear a little music in Germany or Austria, eat some delicious food in France, and then come home to prepare, like an ageing bear, for winter hibernation.2

  One man very much outside that circle was his old school and university contemporary Jim Lees-Milne. When they encountered each other at a theatre having not spoken in years, Graham made an overture of friendship, but it was rebuffed. Lees-Milne was unforgiving, and he recorded in his diary how his feelings of resentment had not lessened over the decades:

  He held my hand and said how delighted he was to see me and would so much like us to meet and talk over old times. Old times, my foot! I was terrified of Graham as a boy [. . .] At Oxford he was considered extremely dashing, the ‘fastest’ man in the university, wore a black polo sweater and allegedly took drugs. Was exceptionally supercilious, rich and disdainful. Now he is bent, blind, sallow, dusty and diffident. How the late worm changes places with the early birds.’3

  In fact, Graham continued to lead a full life. The estate was well run and he was both active and conscientious in his duties towards his tenants; at harvest he would help out by driving a tractor. He also continued to travel a great deal. On a visit to Bali Graham wrote to Joan to tell her that he had encountered the Balinese queen in her palace at Solo. Graham bowed low, only to then feel self-conscious about the holes in his socks. Another time, Joan and Paddy went with him. On her return to Kardamyli, Joan wrote: ‘We are still in a daze with all the glories we have seen – Taiwan, Angkor even better than I imagined, Bangkok, Bali, the dancers wildly exciting & not spoilt yet with tourists, Java, Singapore, India, Nepal. Such beauty all the time, especially of people. One felt ashamed of being huge pinkoes.’4

  For most of the time Graham lived in Dumbleton, but on Wednesdays and Thursdays he came up to 9 South Eaton Place in Belgravia, his London home (the old family house in Belgrave Square had been bombed during the war). The house was theatrically decorated with dark paintwork. On the hall landing there was a golden table held up by a golden cherub, a couple of exquisite chairs, and a huge bunch of flowers standing on top, silhouetted against a window which was swathed in rich velvet curtains. The drawing room was murky red, so dark you could hardly see, and the walls were packed with pictures by Robin Ironside, including a painting called The Flaying of Marsyas, which had the god Apollo preening himself in the background.

  Ironside himself was a sort of fin-de-siècle figure. He painted two pictures of Graham: in one, the more conventional, he is lying on a sofa, a music score laid out before him; the second, en grisaille, mimics a Roman tombstone. He also drew decorations and a map of the imaginary island for the endpapers of Paddy’s 1953 novella The Violins of St Jacques.

  Eventually Joan, who inherited Robin’s pictures, gave them to the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery, but the gravestone portrait always hung in her bedroom at Kardamyli.

  From 1967 onwards there were hundreds of entries in the calfbound Kardamyli visitors’ book; it reads as both a catalogue of the owners’ rich lives and a who’s who of mid-twentieth-century society. The first name to appear is that of Magouche Phillips. Magouche was born Agnes Magruder, and was the daughter of an American naval officer. Her first husband was the Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, and it was he who called her Magouche, an Armenian term of endearment. After his death she married Jack Phillips, an American painter who came from a family of Boston Brahmins. She had two daughters with each husband. When her second marriage failed she came to live in Europe with her children. She was very beautiful and had thick dark hair, a low, rich voice, a warm smile and large eyes. ‘Quelle belle invention!’ said the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, when she was introduced to him in Paris by Alexander Calder. Soon, this beautiful invention became very much part of Paddy and Joan’s innermost circle.

  Both the company and the location doubtless made invitations hard to refuse. On 1 September 1968, Freya Stark wrote to Gerald Brenan from Kardamyli:

  Here I have been for three days, & three days more, just breathing air & sea. The mountains are dove-grey in the sky & red like foxes as they run along the shore. They push & shoulder one another till the sea wraps them in light & here, among the cypresses & olives, Paddy & Joan have built themselves a house of the hillside stone, quite unimaginably solid & beautiful. Arcades & a great roomful of books & steps down to their little pebbly bay. They are very ha
ppy & theirs is a lovely atmosphere of leisure with space & sunlight running all through it.5

  The very last signatures of all were written in the summer of 2011, just after Paddy’s death. Across the intervening decades, visitors had included: Niko and Barbara Ghika; Nancy Mitford; Diana Cooper; Tom Driberg (who forgot to sign his name, so John Betjeman was asked to forge it); George Seferis; John Betjeman and Elizabeth Cavendish; Cyril Connolly; Ann Fleming; Bruce Chatwin; Janetta Jackson and her new husband, the Spanish decorator Jaime Parladé; Xan and Daphne Fielding; Gerald Brenan; Isabel Rawsthorne (Isabel had married Constant Lambert’s friend, Alan Rawsthorne, in 1954); John Craxton (who had a beautiful signature but whose spelling was appalling – he boasted that he had never passed an exam in his life); Jock and Diana Murray; Frances Partridge; ‘Billa’ Harrod and Dorothy ‘Coote’ Lygon, who usually travelled together; Stephen and Natasha Spender; Roy and Jennifer Jenkins; Steven Runciman; Deborah Devonshire; Joan’s sister Diana Casey (who Paddy described as ‘very nice, but has not a single interest in common with Joan or Graham, and is v. unlike: shy, tall, correct and well dressed in a not very imaginative Knightsbridge way and stitching away at gros-point. I think Joan finds her heavier going than I do!’6); and very many others.

  Annie Fleming visited Kardamyli in the summer of 1969. She wrote to the diplomat and writer Nicholas Henderson from Greece about dining on the terrace, ‘where Paddy’s experiments with lighting coincide with peasants bearing food, and we are all suddenly plunged in Stygian dark,’ while Joan shrieks ‘Oh, Paddy’. On her return to England, she also wrote to Aline Berlin, the wife of Sir Isaiah Berlin. ‘The Leigh Fermors’ house is a triumph. Paddy is a much better architect than writer. The stone, the wood, the water, and the marble come from vast distances and a mini Xanadu constructed. It includes stone tables under shady olives designed to inspire a spate of writing but Paddy is only inspired to further visits and fountains, and Joan wails at approaching bankruptcy.’7