Joan

by Simon Fenwick

  In May 1971, two days before his sixty-ninth birthday, John Banting wrote to Joan from his home in Hastings: ‘Darling Joan, I often think of you in your (I hope) glorious reclusiveness. You once said to me “I know enough people”. I too treasure my six or seven chosen ones but I do sometimes meet some good new ones – usually much younger and far more intelligent.’30 Banting had long since ceased to be the dangerous, shaven-headed young artist of his bohemian youth, and his political views were no longer so violently left-wing as they had been in the 1930s, although he still counted Tom Driberg, another ex-communist, among his friends. ‘I saw Tom D. last year in the House and his false eye was unnoticeable and he looked very well and handsome.’ In her diaries, Frances Partridge calls Banting ‘a genial slow old duck’.31 His letters to Joan are meandering and written with a shaky hand – he was frequently drunk. Joan wrote inviting him to Greece – ‘It’s blissful here & we live on our own eggs, garlic, veg. salads, bread, oil & fish straight from the sea’ and suggesting how he might get a cheap flight, but Banting pleaded ill-health and the fact that because of his youthful political affiliations his name might yet be on some list which would prevent him from ever travelling again. Less than a year later, Banting – another of Joan’s friends from the 1930s, the painter who had once offered to decorate her bedroom ceiling – was dead.

  Time continued to take its toll on Joan’s friends throughout the 1970s. In January 1976, Tom Driberg was made a life peer. His introduction to the House of Lords was a grand affair; John Rayner called it his apotheosis. In August, however, Tom died of a heart attack while in a taxi on the way to the Barbican from Paddington station – taxis played a large part in his life to the very end. The following day his obituary in The Times described him as ‘a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual [. . .] an unreliable man of undoubted distinction. He looked and talked like a bishop, not least in the Bohemian clubs which he frequented. He was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances.’32 He was the first man The Times ever outed in its obituary columns, although it would have been dishonest to write about him without mentioning the fact. The obituary writer also mentioned his wife, Ena, whom Tom had married for the sake of respectability. Joan wrote to Rayner asking him for any press cuttings about the memorial service and the funeral: ‘I wish I could be there & that I could write something about Tom, but not being a writer I find it impossible to say anything about one’s greatest friends.’33

  John Rayner administered Tom’s will, and it took him several years to settle his old friend’s affairs: his duties included the publication of Tom’s autobiography, which made no mention of Ena. (Future royalties from Tom’s books were divided between JR and the anti-apartheid movement.)

  Tom had sold Bradwell Lodge in 1971, on account of his considerable debts, and moved to the Barbican. Joan and John Betjeman were among twelve friends who were each left £50, two pictures and a dozen books. They went together with John Rayner to collect the books and pictures. ‘I did not often go to that flat of his,’ Betjeman wrote to Ena. ‘Only someone as eccentric and individual as Thomas Edward Neil would choose to live in such a frightful, lonely, hideous bit of housing. I always told him how awful it was but he didn’t seem to notice it. I collected an Edward Lear of an Italian tree, a drawing of the old portico at Euston and a Nonsuch Milton. I find Milton heavy-going and thought he might be easier in that beautiful edition.’34 Joan lost her two pictures, along with much else, almost immediately, as Paddy and she drove back to Greece via Italy together with Coote Lygon, who was then also living in Greece.

  At Brindisi Coote’s car was stolen, just before we got on the boat [?] found unharmed next morning on a vast rubbish dump outside the town (so like the beginning of Italian films) with all our cases bust open & everything new or of any value gone. We picked up some old clothes, hairbrushes, pills, papers, books, etc. out from the refuse, watched by jeering children, but the miraculous loudspeakers & amplifier, the Graham Sutherland drawing & Toulouse Lautrec lithograph, silver spoons & forks, all Paddy’s suits and shirts & new suits, all mine too & leather coats, jerseys, all those presents bought after hours of silent screams at Marks & Spencers, rugs, sheets, lamps, everything in fact that she wanted & was bringing back at last for the house disappeared for ever I’m afraid. I only have now the oldest shirt & skirt I was wearing at the time & can’t even go to Athens. Think of the hours of ghastly shopping ahead of one, I feel I shall stay here for the rest of my life.35

  As some sort of recompense, John Rayner wrote back to Joan to tell her that while emptying the Barbican flat he had found a portrait of Tom when young by John Banting, ‘in the style tho’ not so good as his portrait of Eddy Sackville-West. You will have it.’ The £50 Tom had also left her Joan spent on the complete ten-volume Mahabarata; JR also sent her, as gifts, Darcy Thompson’s Greek Birds and Fountains in the Sand by Norman Douglas. He himself bought a mourning ring. Joan wrote to thank him for the books:

  It is very kind of you to bother. I feel in a selfish rage about not seeing Tom when I came to England. He never signed our visitors book when he was here, a space was waiting. Have you a signature of his anywhere I could stick in? Otherwise Betj is very good at forging them.36

  Although Joan might claim to have ‘enough’ friends, every death was a break in the circle.

  15

  A Time of Gifts

  In 1973, John Betjeman wrote to Cecil Beaton recommending both Penelope and Joan for inclusion in a book on the history of photography which Beaton was writing. If Joan was, by then, a suitable candidate for a retrospective she would have been the last person to have pressed for it and would probably have hated the idea. The publication of Roumeli in 1966 had marked the end of Joan’s career as a photographer. Afterwards she might sometimes take photographs, but living in the Mani meant that it was no longer feasible to work as a freelance photographer. Besides, she now had her inheritance, the new house gave her other interests, and Paddy himself was making an increasing financial contribution from writing. The subject matter of Paddy’s two late works – A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – is the writer’s search for lost time, a time that was both real and imaginary. These were books which could not be illustrated by photography. The passing of time, and the violence caused by war and politics, had brought down barriers across the frontiers of lands where Paddy had wandered as a young man with a rucksack on his back. Half of Europe was virtually inaccessible. Many years later, when at last the Iron Curtain had been removed, Joan and Paddy went to Bulgaria:

  I’m just returned from our Bulgarian battering, long car journeys & sight-seeing get more exhausting, but it was well worth it. Of course Paddy looked in vain for his old towns & villages of over 50 years ago, now concrete industrial messes, & the beautiful footpath he took for days through dense forested cliffs along the Black Sea coast now nothing but high rise hotels & millions of East German tourists.1

  Joan teased him by calling him Rip Van Winkle, but Paddy was close to tears.2

  By 1976, the studio at Kardamyli was finished. It was separated from the house by a path through a small grove of lemon trees. Its single storey was square in shape, with a flat roof and vines growing up the walls. There were three rooms – a bathroom, a small bedroom just big enough for a single bed, and the main room, Paddy’s study, which was ‘lovely & large for striding up & down between sentences’.3 On two sides there were French windows, and there were further windows at the back and side. Here, Paddy could compose his sentences and paragraphs, pick out books for reference and inspiration, and turn the words around and around in his head or on the page until they were satisfactory. The books on the study shelves had an organization of sorts – even if it was only theoretical. Dictionaries in various languages, guidebooks, Oxford poetry anthologies, books on Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania and some books bequeathed to Paddy by Sir Aymer Maxwell stood on the shelves closest to him,
behind his desk. Books relating to the Second World War were placed on either side of the back window. A set of Dictionary of National Biography volumes was arranged along a low bookcase built for Paddy by a friend called Jon van Leuven. There were yet more books in piles on tables and on the floor. Foreign translations of his works were on shelves in the small bedroom, where cats slept on the bed during the daytime. Paddy’s own desk was an adventure in itself. It represented his own special kind of personalized disorder, with the drawers labelled to give some idea of the contents. Aptly, one of the labels read ‘Total Confusion’. Another drawer was labelled ‘Vol III’, but all the drafts for the successor to Between the Woods and the Water were in folders on the shelves, and the drawer’s true contents were a mixture of broken spectacles, empty envelopes, pads of paper used and unused, stray photographs, pencils and postcards. Paddy also kept wads of small printed notices saying that he was very busy and unable to answer his correspondents, although these failed to stop anyone from writing.

  A tin trunk contained typescripts of Roumeli, some travel brochures and a copy of Architectural Digest. At the very bottom of the trunk were two pennants from General Kreipe’s staff car, snatched as trophies, and on a table stood a box marked ‘KARDAMYLI. A CHAOS OF PHOTOS. & GENERAL MANI. Work for a rainy day. (Mostly Crete).’ A rainy day which never arrived.

  In one corner of the room stood a tall, narrow set of drawers. These were full of blue airmail envelopes into which letters had been sorted by correspondent in alphabetical order. (Previously the letters had been stored in the roof space of the house, but the mice had found them.) All manner of people used to write to Paddy, so many that sometimes he did not bother to open the letters. The correspondents varied: there were old and intimate friends, unknown fans, an academic researcher who wanted a detailed analysis of Barbara Skelton’s charms. There was an Austrian who, using a multicoloured pen, kept sending instalments of a long, somewhat manic account of his own walk across Europe, until Paddy eventually wrote back and asked him to stop. Paddy also kept scores of coloured files on shelves built on either side of the back-wall window. The files were arranged in no order whatsoever, but stood up against one another, leaning this way and that. The information written on the covers as to what they contained may or may not have been accurate or helpful. One said ‘Interesting papers on Items’. On another was written, ‘Prints, reproductions, can’t bear to throw away’. The file contained early-nineteenth-century prints of molluscs, a random Christmas card and a watercolour drawing of an Indian scene. A green file, ‘Mummy’, was full of letters from Paddy’s volatile but loving mother.

  The bedroom cupboards were also filled up – boxes of files and letters, two typewriters (one bought by Jon van Leuven in Kalamata, the other Bruce Chatwin’s, although Paddy never really learnt to type), pairs of sandals, photographs, a broken lamp, a pack of tarot cards. Here and elsewhere there were piles of books and bundles of papers. Somewhere, amidst all this disarray, was the story of Joan and Paddy and their lives together.

  One January day, after surveying the state of the studio, Joan wrote to Patrick Kinross that, ‘It rains more here than it does in England & Paddy can’t work in his studio for the soaking walls. I’m writing a piece called “Portrait of the Artist as a Bower Bird”.’4

  Paddy’s income as a writer had been satisfactory but not more than that. In April 1959, Hambro’s Bank informed him that they had received ‘a cheque for £1,217.17.4d from your publisher, John Murray [. . .] I trust you are having a happy and profitable time on your present journey.’ But gross royalties from 1976, 1977 and the first months of 1978 were only £1,417.87. Between Roumeli in 1966 and A Time of Gifts, eleven years passed. ‘We used to be famous once,’ Joan complained. In early 1976, Paddy at last handed over the manuscript of A Time of Gifts to Jock Murray – ‘What a sigh one heaves when that barrier is passed! It’s like going through the Looking Glass, and all looks different. I wish I were a better concentrator: feel like a grasshopper harnessed to a plough’5 – but he continued to make endless changes to his text to the very end. Murray once showed Jim Lees-Milne one of Paddy’s manuscripts. ‘A spider’s nightmare of corrections which he goes over and over again,’ Lees-Milne said. Murray told him that Lord Byron’s were just the same.

  Over the years Paddy produced a considerable flow of articles, essays, obituaries, book reviews and pen portraits. They were less hard work than the slog of writing full-length books, and probably what he enjoyed doing best. Whatever Paddy wrote, Joan heard first. Joan was a good listener and a good reader, and she became Paddy’s sounding board. Paddy would bound triumphantly back into the house straight from his desk in the studio with papers in his hand and give them to her. Not immediately, but perhaps two or three hours later, Joan might say, ‘Haven’t you missed out the part about . . . and isn’t that the point of the story?’ Paddy would mouth an ‘oh’, turn round again and go back to work. For all his writings, it was Joan who provided judgement. She had an innate expectation of excellence, both for Paddy and for others. She was always encouraging and always tried to get the best out of people. Without Joan, there would have been even less writing.

  A Time of Gifts was finally published in September 1977, over a decade after Paddy had started writing what he had intended to be a 2,500-word magazine article. The title, suggested by Sir Aymer Maxwell, came from ‘Twelfth Night’, a poem by Louis MacNeice: ‘For now the time of gifts is gone – / Oh boys that grow, oh snows that melt, Oh bathos that the years must fill’. The cover illustration by John Craxton depicts a young man in the foreground, his feet in snow while black birds wheel about him. He watches while the sun rises over distant peaks, Schlösser yet to be visited and a golden River Danube yet to be conquered. (The original sketches were actually made on Hampstead Heath, and young ‘Paddy’, the archetype of youth, was Craxton’s partner, Richard Riley.) From its first publication, A Time of Gifts was a tremendous success. ‘This glorious peregrination across Europe,’ wrote Philip Toynbee in the Observer, ‘is a reminder that the English language is still a superb instrument in the hands of a virtuoso skill with words, a robust aesthetic passion, an indomitable curiosity about people and places; a rapturous historical imagination. A writer, in fact, who is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.’ Gabriele Annan in the Listener was equally effusive: ‘This is very rich stuff [. . .] It is rich, not like chocolate truffles, with a homogenous texture, but like a terrine of game where resilient chunks of bird and beast alternate with layers of creamy pâté and fortifying jelly, and where you come upon the occasional crunch of an exotic pistachio nut or a spicy juniper berry.’

  In November, Jock Murray reported to Paddy that ‘all goes spiffingly (forgive schoolboy language, but I am just back from giving a lecture to undergraduates at Oxford, where I rather overdid it)’. In 1978, A Time of Gifts won the W. H. Smith Prize, which was worth £2,500 and not taxable. Paddy’s income rose accordingly. His work was published overseas: A Time of Gifts even had a Norwegian translation. Among his financial papers there is a note to say that, after commission, his Dutch publishers had brought him an income of £73.76 for The Traveller’s Tree and £1,087.55 for Mani. Before long, all of Paddy’s back catalogue was republished and was to stay in print.

  It was another nine years before the publication of Between the Woods and the Water. After the publication of A Time of Gifts, Paddy received a fan letter from Rudi Fischer, who lived in Budapest. A polymath, linguist and historian, Fischer was born in Kronstadt in Transylvania, the son of a Hungarian-Jewish father and a Saxon-Lutheran mother; he was, however, raised in Australia, where he was taken as a youth to avoid conscription in the Second World War. In his letter, Fischer pointed out a number of inaccuracies and misspellings, which he hoped was constructive criticism. Paddy was delighted, and a long friendship resulted. Rudi Fischer’s erudition was remarkable, and his knowledge of both Transylvanian history and the genealogies of Hungarian families was vast. In many ways, Between the
Woods and the Water is the fruit of the friendship of Paddy and Rudi. Paddy wrote in his introduction, ‘My debt to Rudolf Fischer is beyond reckoning. His omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency have been a constant delight during all the writing of this book.’ But all the poetry was of Paddy’s own making, and his portrait of the Hungarian aristocracy just before their way of life was about to be obliterated, is a wonderful piece of literature.6 Just as with A Time of Gifts, the sequel was met with tremendous enthusiasm; it received the Thomas Cook Travel Award and the International PEN/Time Life Silver Pen Award.

  In many ways, Paddy’s greatest collaborator was always Joan, and her influence on his next book would be even more direct than usual. In 1971, Paddy had gone to Peru with a group of friends in order to walk and climb in the Andes: Andrew Devonshire; André Choremi, a French lawyer; Carl Natar, who had been manager of Cartier’s in London; and Robin Fedden, who was now the deputy Director General of the National Trust, and his wife Renée. Twenty years after this expedition to South America, Paddy turned the letters he wrote to Joan in his absence into a slim book, Three Letters from the Andes. The book begins:

  CUZCO August 3, 1971

  At last the morning of departure arrived in Little Venice, but no sign of the ordered car. We dialled and dialled for a cab, everywhere was engaged, so in despair I started lugging my stuff to the pavement while Patrick Kinross stood in the middle of Warwick Avenue in his Persian silk dressing-gown waving and to some purpose. A taxi stopped at once.7