Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  The person who pulled him out of the melée was Ricki Huston, a beautiful Italian-American dancer who was the fourth wife of the film director John Huston. Seizing him by the arm, she ordered Paddy, supported by Robert Kee, into her chauffeur-driven car: ‘I’m taking you to a doctor,’ she said, ‘you need sewing up.’ Her driver was bitterly disappointed to have missed the fight: ‘If only we’d known, Sir, me and the boys would have come and sorted ’em out for you …’47 They drove to Dublin, where a surgeon was woken to give Paddy three stitches on the top of his head.

  Duff’s death plunged Diana into a morass of grief and gloom from which the only escape was travel. Her first stop was Rome, where Paddy joined her for a fortnight towards the end of February. From Rome they went by train through Latium and Tuscany, where they stopped off to visit Bernard Berenson at the Villa I Tatti in Settignano, where Diana had spent part of her honeymoon. Berenson loved Diana, and wept as she told him simply how Duff had died. Paddy remembered him waving his stick majestically across the valley, telling them that this was the very landscape that appeared in Benozzo Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi.

  From Italy Diana moved on to Greece, where Paddy had given her introductions to everyone he could think of. He made his way back to England, realizing on his return that he had lost all the letters (mostly replies to condolences on Duff’s death) that Diana had given him to post. He sent her an apologetic letter from Wantage in Berkshire, where he was spending the weekend with John and Penelope Betjeman. ‘We had great fun last night looking up obscure poets – South Africans, Australians, Canadians etc – and reading them in the appropriate accents … Penelope’s Catholicism has evidently split the household. There is a certain amount of doctrinal bickering and smart rejoinders, surreptitious reading of the Catholic Herald (stuffed under a cushion if John comes into the room).’ At one point Paddy caught a glimpse of Penelope’s room: ‘a grotto of images, rosaries and crucifixes … [Their household is] a sort of microcosm of Reformation England inside out.’48

  On 22 March Paddy was once more at Crabbet, to tell Lady Wentworth about the discovery of Byron’s slippers in Missolonghi. This time he went with Michael Holland’s son Anthony, and after lunch Lady Wentworth suggested a game of billiards. They played in silence as the weather outside grew wild, with the wind roaring down the chimney as Lady Wentworth ‘scored breaks of 50, 70, 95, and once, 108 … On and on it went, like something in a terrifying Norse legend, gambling for one’s life with a man-eating witch in a dim, shadowy cave at the bottom of a fjord as the hours passed. I could see Anthony was thoroughly rattled too. We were losing by larger and larger margins with each successive game, and still the grim work went on …’49

  The news that Mary Hutchinson would be leaving the flat in Charlotte Street, which had been Paddy and Joan’s London base for the past five years, filled them with dismay. He and Joan packed up their belongings and, once again, he found himself having to beg storage space in the houses of various friends. What struck him most was the feeling that the one solid base in their lives was gone: ‘It was as if somebody had climbed a tree and beat a rookery to bits so that all of us flapped away into the dark. I’ve moved into the Travellers, where I have been for the last ten days, feeling pretty gloomy on the whole.’50

  It was not just the loss of Charlotte Street: Paddy’s father Lewis was dying. ‘We had only met twice during the last six years,’ he wrote to Diana, ‘and corresponded as little … I felt wretched at not feeling more strongly.’ Paddy had been down to see him several times, and was very upset by his appearance – ‘hollow-cheeked, grey-green, with enormous unmoving and luminous eyes, talking very slowly and almost inaudibly … The only consoling thing is that he has no idea he is dying (“Such a bore being cooped up when all the flowers are out …”)’51

  These sad meetings with his father left Paddy in a turmoil of guilt and regret that produced terrifying nightmares. ‘I had a brute last night, full of allegorical monsters … like one of those really murky zuppa di pesce’s, when your plate is a writhing mass of scales and spikes and backbones and overflowing, sucker-studded tentacles and balefully accusing eyes.’52 Paddy escaped as he always did: by plunging either into the murkier dens of late-night London or into books – at this time he was reading The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanch, and Enid Starkie’s Petrus Borel, about a strange group of Romantic poets in Paris in the 1830s. Lewis Leigh Fermor died on 24 May. ‘What a strange business Daddy’s funeral was, a sort of nightmare,’ he wrote to his sister Vanessa. ‘I’m so glad you were there too – I don’t think I could have taken it if there hadn’t been your eye to catch now and then!’53

  The need for a semi-permanent base was met by their friend, the painter Nico Hadjikyriakos-Ghika. The most celebrated Greek painter of his day, he had studied in Paris and was happy in a handful of languages; but his work was grounded in the landscape and traditions of Greece. His seafaring family’s house in Hydra had been built in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the craggy rocks on which it was constructed had given it a series of nine terraces. Nico and his wife Tiggy spent most of their time in Athens, and only used the house for a few weeks a year. Paddy and Joan had stayed the previous summer, and now they were urged to make themselves at home for as long as they liked. The offer was gratefully accepted.

  The pair moved in in June 1954. ‘It’s a great white empty thing,’ wrote Paddy, ‘on a rocky, cactussy hillside among olives and almonds and fig trees. Thick wall and wooden ceilings, full of charm. The only drawback is that it’s ten minutes down to the sea, fifteen or twenty up, and jolly steep …’54 Sometimes Paddy felt as though he were living in a colossal, three-dimensional Ghika painting: ‘The eccentric terrain really does tilt towns and panoramas to the angle of those Byzantine backgrounds stretching upwards in height instead of receding in depth … Likewise the sea, which should fade as it recedes and induce a feeling of the earth’s roundness, does the reverse. Equally intense at horizon and shore, it stands bolt upright …’55

  The galley proofs of The Cretan Runner appeared in July, and he worked on them in between bouts of energetic entertaining. ‘Patrick K[inross] came for three days,’ Paddy wrote to Jock Murray, ‘then Cyril Connolly and his bride [Barbara Skelton], which was not as difficult going as it might have been. The great Eroica Rawbum’ (an anagram of Maurice Bowra, who was accompanied by Ann Fleming) ‘comes out next month.’56 He was not sure he was going to get on with ‘Rawbum’, and the feeling was mutual. ‘Dear Paddy will be there,’ Bowra told Billa Harrod, ‘and I have decided to be angelic to him and treat him like a great writer.’57 Next came Diana Cooper, Freya Stark and his pre-war friend Tanti Rodocanachi, among others. ‘Don’t be disturbed about this,’ Paddy continued in his letter to Jock, ‘as I seclude myself for seven hours a day in my hermitage in the bowels, and am working like anything, and allowing nothing to interfere. My diligence fills everyone with awe. I’m allowing myself a week’s hol at the beginning of Sept, but till then the grindstone and my nose cohere.’58

  Joan went back to England towards the end of August, having limped through southern Italy with Maurice Bowra in a car that kept breaking down. He was not the easiest of travelling companions, and by the end of the journey her nerves were in shreds. ‘God how I loved Hydra,’ she wrote to Paddy. ‘Do let’s always live in Greece with a mule and caique … I really hate anything else now and love being with you most, in spite of everything, always.’59 Joan’s idyllic vision assumed that they would always be welcome in Greece, and as individuals, they were. But as the struggle for Cyprus intensified, Anglo-Greek relations were strained to breaking point – a situation that the two of them found very hard to bear.

  16

  Cyprus

  In the years after the war, Britain took a long time to adjust to the fact that it was no longer a world power. Although it had little empire left and had lost its grip on Palestine and Egypt, it was still bent on keeping a huge garrison in the eastern Mediterranean, and the focus
of this effort was the island of Cyprus.

  The British had taken control of Cyprus from the Ottomans in 1878 and in 1925, by the Treaty of Locarno, it became a British Crown Colony. Turks numbered about eighteen per cent of the population, but the Greeks who made up the rest were in no doubt about the island’s identity: Cyprus was culturally, ethnically and incontrovertibly Greek. It had been so since prehistoric times, while the Orthodox Church on Cyprus – founded within fifty years of the death of Christ – was one of the oldest outposts of Christendom. This conviction was shared by every Greek on the mainland. Sooner or later, they thought, Britain would be forced to accept the Cypriot claim for enosis, union with Greece.

  Yet the British were in no mood to relinquish their sovereignty over Cyprus, which they wanted to hold at all costs as a ‘Commonwealth Fortress’.1 Any local protest at Britain’s rule and its reinforcement of the island was ruthlessly suppressed. When the Greeks took the case for enosis to the United Nations in September 1954, Britain’s protests gained little sympathy. But since the Turks were against enosis they voted with Britain, and the Greeks failed to get the support they needed. On 19 December, Greek students rioted in Athens, Nicosia and Limassol.

  Paddy arrived in Athens just before Christmas 1954, in a bid to persuade the King of the Hellenes to come to Crete to unveil a monument dedicated to those who had lost their lives during the occupation. He stayed with the new Ambassador, Sir Charles and Lady Peake. Whilst the Ambassador could not support enosis, he felt that his government’s refusal to discuss a measure of self-determination for Cyprus was, to say the least, unwise. Paddy, on the other hand, was in no doubt. Scribbling his thoughts in a notebook for a possible article, he wrote: ‘Greeks right and we are wrong. Up to us to make step.’

  For Paddy, a direct descendant of the Philhellenes – those passionate young men from all over Europe who ‘went off to serve the cause of Greek freedom with copies of Byron in their pockets’2 – Greece and Britain were bastions of freedom who had always been on the same side, and in occupied Crete this conviction had underpinned his everyday survival. He had been willing to die for both Greece and England, and now he was forced to watch these two countries throwing away two centuries of goodwill. But while he had no doubt that Britain was in the wrong, he was enough of an Englishman to deplore the threats and bombastic demands made by the Greek government, and the way the Greek newspapers compared the British administration of Cyrus to the Nazi occupation of Greece. ‘I do wish the whole [Cyprus] thing was settled,’ he wrote to Lawrence Durrell. ‘It makes both the English and the Greeks conduct themselves like complete lunatics, and grotesque caricatures of themselves.’3

  Progress on the book ground to a halt as he embarked on fresh avenues of research and fretted about Cyprus. George Seferis was worried that he had been at it far too long already. He confided his fears to Joan, ‘my last friend in England’ as he called her. ‘I was rather uncomfortable when I saw a letter from Paddy in the Kathimerini … asking the readers of this paper to send him information about the [manghes],’ he wrote. ‘I’m afraid he is too much PENELOPEIZINGfn1 with that book.’4 He wrote to the compulsive rewriter as well. ‘Stop writing letters to Kathimerini or you are going to be submerged by letters like this … Paddy, Paddy, I am certain you don’t need any more material for your book. Shut them off and even shut the windows.’5

  Paddy had no intention of doing either and never regretted his letter to the newspaper, which put him in touch with a scholar called Kosta Papadopoulos.

  Since then we have been in constant correspondence, and the last letter is 50 pages long, answering questions about Lazi, Pomaks, Kitzilbashi in Thrace, the Paulicians, the Cumans and Pechenegs [patzinaki] and the possible Jewish origin of the Lacedaemonians (see Chapter 12 Second Book of the Maccabees in the Apocrypha – but don’t worry, I’m keeping it dark!), the Trapezuntine crypto-Christians, the crypto-Muslims of Asia Minor, the Pelasgo-Phrygian descent of the Tsebekides etc. etc. He seems to know Ancient Greek as well as Turkish, Persian and Arabic. George K. is absolutely enthralled, as he’s a complete mystery man. He’s asked everywhere, and discovered that he is a well-known scholar (according to someone in the National Library) married to a ‘well-known actress’ that no one has ever heard of.6

  In January Stephen Spender – poet and current editor of Encounter magazine – came to stay in the house in Hydra with his wife Natasha. They were there at the same time as the art historian Roger Hinks. Hinks had been involved with the disastrous cleaning of the Elgin Marbles in 1939, after which he had resigned as Assistant Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. His attitude to the Greeks made Paddy squirm with anguish and embarrassment. ‘The Greeks bore him stiff, and he says so without any inhibitions at all … He and George [Katsimbalis] no go of course. When George mentioned the Marbles, I begged him to keep it dark, but, of course, he’d had lots of fun with it already …’

  Paddy had been afraid that Roger would not get on with the Spenders either, but all went well – ‘in fact nothing but jokes, laughter and fun the whole time, Stephen twinkling away like an overgrown Peter Pan’.7 Before setting out by car for Hydra that January, Joan had written that ‘I find myself doing the fatal thing of saying vaguely to lots of people do come and stay. I expect we shall be fuller than ever. Warners, Harrods, Campbells all seem iminant [sic]. And Maurice wants to spend the whole of next summer there. I will keep them all at bay if you don’t want them …’8 But neither she nor Paddy were very good at keeping friends at bay.

  Later that spring, they spent several days travelling by bus round the Peloponnese with ‘the Gas-Bag of Attica’, as Paddy called George Katsimbalis. The journey began in Tripoli, ‘a lightless, drizzling, potholed Balkan town, block-house built of ferro-concrete’. Their spirits rose only when they found a restaurant where George unearthed a wine so rare that the bottles they drank were probably the last in existence: ‘it was like shooting the last dodo.’ They followed the road south as far as Sparta, then west to Mistra, made a loop round the Messenian peninsula, before they moved northwards to Pylos, site of the Battle of Navarino and guarded by a great Venetian fortress. They made their way back along the west coast for two final days at Olympia, ‘escorted all the way by George’s unstaunchable and, I must say, wonderful story-telling’.9

  The following month (May 1955) Paddy went to Cyprus, where Lawrence Durrell had persuaded him to give a lecture for the British Council. By now the anti-British guerrilla organization EOKA,fn2 under the leadership of Colonel Grivas, was increasing its activities, bombing and attacking British targets and service personnel. Paddy joined Durrell in Paphos, to witness the trial of a group of EOKA rebels who had been captured while waiting for a caique loaded with guns and ammunition. The crowd outside was smashing windows and shouting for the release of the accused. Paddy doubted the British would ever win, though Durrell did not think that the Cypriots ‘by themselves would have the stamina for a long conflict’.10 Either way, it was very depressing. ‘Cyprus was detestable,’ Paddy wrote to Diana, ‘the Cypriots sullen and, in a wet way, disaffected, the English the sweepings of the Colonial Office, well-intentioned, unimaginative, blundering, stubborn and fifth-rate.’11

  He and Joan travelled on to Beirut, where George Seferis was then serving as Greek Ambassador to Lebanon. Spurred into action by his accusations of ‘Penelope-izing’ at Christmas, Paddy had come to ‘read great lumps of my book out to George … whose opinion I value more than anyone else’s about literature dealing with Greece’.12 To his relief, the great poet’s reaction was encouraging.

  He did not go to London for the publication of The Cretan Runner in May, but followed its progress closely. Thanks to early and enthusiastic reviews by Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times and Peter Quennell in the Daily Mail, it sold over two thousand copies in the first two weeks. But an interesting review by Rodis Roufos, which appeared when the book was published in Greek, showed a very different response. Whilst Roufos admitted that Psych
oundakis was a courageous patriot, ‘unfortunately, he cannot write’; his style, as one might have expected from a poor islander of limited education, is influenced ‘by bad journalism and popular serials’. Paddy the Philhellene, wrote Roufos, saw only a primitive storyteller unfolding his tale with dazzling immediacy. Roufos recognized that his motives were good, but he felt Paddy had done no service to the Greeks, who appear as ‘quite nice native servants to the Allied officers they were called on to serve during the war’.13

  June was a busy month. The run of visitors on Hydra included Patrick Kinross, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, Coote Lygon and Nancy Mitford. ‘The house became a carilloning belfry, [Nancy’s] private peal fortunately harmonizing with the goat bells outside. She was in tremendous spirits, and very good at ragging Nico [Ghika] (which he loves) …’14 One of their last guests that summer was Cyril Connolly, alone this time, for his wife Barbara Skelton had eloped with the publisher George Weidenfeld; ‘the poor chap looks pretty glum and more like a wounded football than ever.’15

  Jock Murray and his wife Diana also came to stay on Hydra, though Jock’s real purpose in coming was to prise a manuscript out of Paddy’s hands. Originally, Paddy’s outline for the book went as far as Constantinople, and included almost every island in the Greek archipelago. It was probably in Hydra that Jock began to argue that the Greek book would only become manageable if it were divided into two volumes, and from the work so far, the first would be the one about the southern Peloponnese. He left with a great sheaf of manuscript, to begin the long task of turning what was already a labyrinth of amendments, additions and corrections into a book. Its working title was The Dark Towers, but a book with a similar title appeared just before Paddy’s went to press. Instead, Paddy decided to call it by a single, resonant name: Mani.