Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  As for Paddy, he worshipped Diana – not just for her indestructible beauty (though its disintegration was painfully obvious to her) but for the original cast of her mind, the flourish of her phrases, and the blind eye she turned to convention. Like him, curiosity was driven by energy: she was ready to jump into a car and go exploring at a moment’s notice.

  Joan was never threatened by Diana or any of Paddy’s women friends, since they occupied such different spheres of Paddy’s existence. She was always the magnet, the one he came home to. With her he could while away an afternoon, stroke a cat, read a book, listen to music and never be bored. Joan asked for nothing, and gave him the space in which he could work. But while she was passionately devoted to her friends, she never shared his desire for revelry.

  Diana wanted to see as much of Paddy as she could, with or without Joan, and he spent many weekends at Chantilly. ‘I hated moving off to gloomy old Paris,’ he wrote to Diana on 14 March, ‘where I wished like anything we were still sitting in front of the fire talking about slaughterhouses and public executions and other comfortable topics …’ He collected stories to amuse her. In Paris again after another weekend at Chantilly in early May, he told her about a long night’s ramble where he had ended up

  in a fairly louche place called the Café de l’Echaudé, just off the Place de Furstenberg where Delacroix’s studio is. At the next table sat five immense negroes – jet black, with beautifully shaped heads, talking quietly together in some African dialect … I scraped acquaintance, of course, and learnt that they were four Woloffs from Dakar, the other a member of the warlike Fong tribe of Dahomey, where most of Voodoo comes from. After a few fines à l’eau they were all singing, very quietly, a southern Saharan war song, and tapping the tom-tom measure with those long fingers. The Fong told me that he came from a grand family that ruled once from Abomey … to the Haute Volta river, and that on the ruler’s birthday 100 years ago, sometimes as many as a thousand tribesmen were beheaded – one after another with huge scimitars. Towards the end of the ceremony the Prince would sometimes get bored, and move off to dinner while the holocaust went on … 4

  The typescript of George Psychoundakis’s book arrived from Athens that spring, but he still had to convince Jock Murray that it would be worth publishing. To strengthen his case, he sent the typescript to Professor Richard Dawkins of Exeter College, Oxford, who – though a classicist – was intrigued: ‘This man Psychountakis [sic] writes a rather interesting and very colloquial demotic which, to be easily understood, almost needs to be read aloud … It is a style a long way off the cultured demotic of Athens.’5 His enthusiasm grew as he read on. In an undated letter which Paddy passed on to Jock, Dawkins wrote: ‘What a book! What a man! I do congratulate you on finding him and encouraging him in the right way … George’s book although without being too harrowing makes one feel all through the utter brutality of the Germans and their attack on Crete.’ Tom Dunbabin, too, was enthusiastic; and, thus encouraged, Jock Murray decided to go ahead and commission Paddy to translate ‘Pictures of our Life during the Occupation’ – called in its English edition The Cretan Runner.

  Paddy and Joan were back in England in June, where the highlight of the season was the Black and White Ball at Longleat. They stayed with Henry and Daphne Bath at their house in Sturford Mead, in a wild party which included David and Virginia Tennant, Henrietta Moraes, Xan and Paddy, Lucian Freud and Kitty Epstein.

  Paddy had first met Henry and Daphne Weymouth at the Gargoyle Club before the war, when they seemed to live in a perpetual party. After the war Henry became Marquess of Bath and inherited a debt-ridden estate – but the party went on. Evelyn Waugh described the chaotic atmosphere of Longleat as one of jazz all day, drinking all night and children running wild.6 Now the Bath marriage was crumbling. Henry Bath was seeing a great deal of Virginia Parsons, who would not be Mrs David Tennant for much longer; while Daphne had begun an affair with Xan, who was her junior by over a decade. She and Xan had spent that spring travelling around Crete, where she took photographs for his forthcoming book The Stronghold – an account of four seasons in the White Mountains of Crete.

  The ball was ‘great fun and unbelievably rowdy’, wrote Paddy. ‘Xan and Daphne had just arrived severally from Crete, looking like a couple of Mohicans, and seemed more gone on each other than ever – all very harmonious and congruent at the moment, as Henry is happily involved with Virginia. I do hope they’ve all got the sense to keep it so …’7 But Henry had married Virginia just after the ball, while Daphne married Xan the following year.

  Given his delight in magnificent parties, it was no surprise that Paddy agreed to contribute a chapter to a book with the eye-catching title Memorable Balls. The editor, James Laver (who at one point had rented the flat above his mother’s in Piccadilly), asked him to write about the Creole assemblies of the French Antilles, of which the most celebrated were those of Martinique. This was the holiday task he had in hand when he and Joan, who had just acquired a long black 1932 Bentley, set off for Italy that summer.

  In Rome, they joined forces with an American scriptwriter, Peter Tomkins, and his wife Jeree and drove north to travel round Tuscany. They were staying in San Gimignano when Paddy settled down to write his chapter for Memorable Balls; but on rereading it, he found the piece dull and lifeless. So he began inventing characters, giving them names and describing their lives; and before he was even aware of it, a slim novel had emerged – he later admitted that no book had come to him so quickly and easily. Joan announced the event to Peter Tomkins by saying, ‘Paddy’s laid an egg.’8

  They left Italy and Paddy took his egg to Paris, and put the final touches to it while staying with Duff and Diana at Chantilly. ‘I’ve forgotten to tell you’, he wrote to Joan, ‘that except for two paragraphs I have at last finished the story of the Antillean ball, and I feel terribly excited about it … and I would like it to be printed as a small book. I don’t know what it’s like, really, but I think it is exciting and alive and rather odd. Did I tell you that it is called The Violins of Saint-Jacques – do you like that as a title?’9

  The story of Paddy’s only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, was inspired by the great eruption of Mont Pelée which destroyed Saint-Pierre, the capital of Martinique, in 1902. ‘The inhabitants of Martinique’, he wrote, ‘still ascribe to this event nearly all the handicaps under which the island now labours, for all that was precious morally, materially, intellectually and politically had been centralized in the old capital; and all obliterated in the space of a few minutes.’10

  The tale begins in present-day Greece, where the narrator meets an elderly woman called Berthe who tells him the story of the island of Saint-Jacques. The thunder and smoke of the impending catastrophe are, at first, merely dramatic noises in the background, while a duel and an elopement are taking place amid the splendours of a magnificent masked ball. But the force of the eruption splits the island apart, and within a few hours, nothing is left. Berthe, who was in a boat on her way to intercept the eloping lovers, could only watch as Saint-Jacques and everyone she loved sank beneath the waves. Her parting gift to the narrator is an elaborate silver spoon, the only thing that was left of an entire way of life: a detail inspired by the half-melted bits of cutlery he saw in the Musée Volcanologique that he had visited on the outskirts of Saint-Pierre.

  The experience of being the only survivor is what shaped Berthe’s life, and to a certain extent it shaped Paddy’s too. He had been cut off from his friends in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania, and most painfully, Balasha and her family at Băleni. ‘When war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened … Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all.’11


  When Paddy returned from Italy with a fully-fledged novel rather than the chapter commissioned, he thought he might be honour-bound to offer The Violins of Saint-Jacques to Derek Verschoyle, the publisher of Memorable Balls. Before doing anything he turned to Jock Murray for advice. Jock’s reply was a masterpiece of tact and reassurance.

  I am sorry you are in a dilemma. It will surprise them when they were expecting an article of 3,000 words to receive a fiction of 35,000 words. But at the same time if they liked it very much it would be very embarrassing, because we like to think of ourselves as your publisher and indeed probably have an option on your next book … However there will obviously be a way out, but do send me a copy of the typescript as quickly as you can. And then forget all about it until you have finished George’s book.12

  Paddy was also keen for Diana Cooper to read The Violins. ‘It’s about 160 pages long and needs a great deal of polishing and pruning … if you liked it at all, I’d love to dedicate it to you as a sort of present.’13

  Most of January 1953 was spent at the Travellers Club, though visits were paid to Julian Pitt-Rivers and Professor Dawkins in Oxford, for more talks on Greece. He also attended a charade party given by the zoologist Julian Huxley in Hampstead:

  … a whole room full of marvellous dressing up things, Aztec, Inca, Central Africa, the Solomon Islands etc: tremendous brainy charades, involving the coelacanth, Philemon and Baucis, the siege of Troy … It was fun seeing an eminent zoologist getting over-excited about the sit of a grass skirt, and struggling with his wife for the ownership of a Papuan mask with red parrot feathers.14

  The Queen Anne Press edition of A Time to Keep Silence was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by James Pope-Hennessy. ‘Seldom,’ he wrote, ‘if ever, can Benedictine rule have been analysed and discussed with such respect, good humour and good sense by a writer not a member of the Roman Catholic Church.’15 (It was also, he was pleased to report, considerably shorter than The Traveller’s Tree.) Paddy himself saw the book as a token of his gratitude and admiration for the monks who had been so kind to him. But in an introduction to the Penguin edition of 1982, he says that there were some reproving voices, who felt that it would have been more tactful to preserve the monks’ privacy.

  His friend Henry Coombe-Tennant, who had become a monk at Downside Abbey after the war, felt that Paddy should not be too upset. ‘There is only one requirement of guests – that they should not disturb the life of the monastery by their numbers or their demands. It did not occur to me when I read your book that you might have been a disturbing influence … but I can understand monks of the older school who might feel that it isn’t right to visit monasteries and then write a book about it.’16

  That spring Paddy went to France again, to work in seclusion at Gadencourt; but before doing so, he treated himself to a brief stay at Chantilly. ‘Being alone with you is what I like best, a delight of which I can never tire,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper, after spending a few ‘ice-bound, isolated days of lolling interminable chat and crosswords, reading aloud and trumpoil-fn1 or fireside-meals.’ But after the companionable warmth of Chantilly, the move to frozen Gadencourt induced a period of deep gloom. It was bitterly cold, and Paddy was assailed with ‘terrible onslaughts of misery and loneliness that only Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Ravel managed to thaw a bit … It was the year’s nadir.’17 The gloom had been intensified by a book called Personal Religion Among the Greeks, by André Jean Festugière. One particular passage, suggesting that those whose restlessness barred them from inner peace were doomed to take refuge in crowds, rang horribly true.

  Cheering news came in late February, when the Rank Organization expressed interest in the film rights to The Violins of Saint-Jacques. If they took the rights they would pay Paddy £1,500 – ‘nothing compared to what people got before the war, but Golconda to me’. But Rank could not make up their minds. Warner Brothers were also interested: ‘If I remember rightly,’ wrote Mrs Mary Dilke to Jock Murray from their Wardour Street office in March 1953, ‘you described it as being the story of an island which blows up, and I feel sure this has potentialities for us.’18 Her bosses would probably require a more cheerful ending than the one supplied, but in the event, Warner Brothers lost interest. Paddy was also approached by Alan Jefferson, representing George Posford – a composer of musicals whose hits had included Goodnight Vienna, Balalaika and Zip Goes a Million. Paddy liked the idea of The Violins becoming a musical, but this too came to nothing.

  Compared to the progress of most books, that of The Violins of Saint-Jacques seemed to have taken place back to front. The film rights were being fought over even before its publication in the Cornhill magazine, where it took up almost three-quarters of the issue for Spring 1953. The book itself, published jointly by John Murray and Derek Verschoyle, only appeared later in the year. Lawrence Durrell, who read it two years later, wrote to Paddy saying, ‘It is madly, intoxicatingly overwritten but the sheer barbaric wealth of material in it would furnish a dozen ordinary novels.’19

  Paddy had decided to spend that spring in Italy, and rented rooms in the Casa Sabina in Tivoli which belonged to a Miss Edwardes. ‘Tremendous weeks of work ahead, which makes me feel very excited.’20 It appears that Paddy really did apply himself, for on 10 April he told Joan that ‘I finished [The Cretan Runner] this morning, after having translated 20 to 30 pages of the typescript a day, which is a tremendous amount … It is a great weight off my mind, and now all is clear for Greece at last, and I’m about to plunge into it.’21

  Before doing so, he decided to take up Peter Quennell’s suggestion of a walking tour of Umbria. This had been discussed after a boozy dinner at the Etoile with Ann Fleming, when they had repaired to Charlotte Street and drank (as Paddy confessed to Joan) ‘over half a bottle of your Armagnac … I really will try and return a bottle.’22 The appearance of a much-delayed Sunday Times cheque made up his mind.

  Paddy and Peter Quennell met in Siena on 22 April. From there they went by train to Perugia, where they bought knapsacks and began a walk (broken by the occasional train ride) that took them to Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, Todi, Gubbio and back to Perugia. As they made their way south into the foothills of the Apennines, Quennell’s borrowed boots became more and more uncomfortable; while Paddy ‘was usually a hundred yards in front, leaping from rock to rock, and chanting a wild Greek song, like Byron on the field of Waterloo’.23 On arrival in a town at dusk, Paddy would stop passers-by to ask whether they knew of a modest restaurant serving surprisingly good food and wine, preferably set into the ancient fabric of the walls and commanding a magnificent view.

  Paddy had been afraid that Quennell’s expensive tastes would demand grander hostelries, but Quennell proved an easy and congenial companion. Settled in some approximation of Paddy’s ideal trattoria after a day of torture in his boots, Quennell wrote:

  I immediately received my reward … His capacity for enthusiasm, one of his greatest gifts, is supported by a huge supply of miscellaneous knowledge; and, when we talked of buildings we had just seen, his conversation would revolve at dragon-fly speed around a vast variety of favourite subjects – now the difference between Guelf and Ghibelline battlements; now the use of the acanthus leaf, particularly the ‘wind-blown acanthus’, in the sculptured capitals of Byzantine churches. Umbria, he reminded me, was the dark-green motherland of the mysterious Etruscan people … 24

  On parting from Quennell in Perugia in early May, Paddy took a bus to Sulmona in the Abruzzi where he came across an old friend of his, Archie Lyall. Like Paddy, Lyall had travelled in the Balkans and served in the Intelligence Corps during the war. He had also written books on the Balkans, Rome and southern France. When Paddy found him, ‘he was drinking his tenth solitary grappa in the Piazza del Duomo.’25

  Lyall had been looking for Paddy, with whom he wanted to go to the feast of St Dominic of Sora in the village of Cocullo, just inland from Ortona on the Adriatic coast. St Dominic protects his devotees from snake-bites, and for we
eks before the event still-hibernating snakes had been collected from the surrounding countryside. Their venom drawn, the snakes – dropped from windows, draped round people’s arms, and coiled in great loops round the statue of St Dominic – become the focus of a great procession, which attracted hundreds of pilgrims as well as sightseers like Paddy and Archie Lyall.

  Once the saint was back in his niche, the snakes were sold off. Paddy wrote that one quack from Bologna bought a whole sackful, which he was going to boil down and make into an ointment for rheumatism. Paddy bought one too, for 400 lire – ‘a beauty, speckled grey and green, one and a half yards long, with clever little black eyes’.26 Archie Lyall drove him back to Rome with the snake writhing all over the car and Lyall complaining, ‘Your bloody puff-adder’s getting up my arse.’27

  In Rome, Paddy’s wallet was stolen with fifty pounds worth of traveller’s cheques – a disaster he could ill afford. With cash borrowed from various friends he headed north-west to Porto Ercole, where he found a perch in the bowels of the massive Aragonese fortress that dominates the peninsula. ‘I live in two rooms – rather dark hell-holes – for 1,000 lire a day, which isn’t bad. About thirty peasants live a troglodytic life in various dungeons and holes dotted about the castle, and the whole thing is owned by a hunchback spinster – a schoolmistress from the Abruzzi – who acquired it twelve years ago in settlement of a debt.’28

  He found it hard to work in these uncongenial surroundings, and was depressed by how difficult it was to pick up the threads of the Greek book, which he had abandoned for months while working on The Cretan Runner. Another worry was his mother, who relied on his sending her five pounds a month, a sum that had (he hoped only temporarily) dried up. He wrote an apologetic letter to Vanessa, who was now the only breadwinner in her family, since her husband had become an alcoholic and lost his job. She had worked in the administrative side of Heal’s department store till head-hunted by the firm of Josiah Wedgwood, and her salary was as good as a woman could expect at that time. But she had two children to raise; she could not be expected to support her mother as well.