Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  In a letter to Billy Moss, he sounds more anxious. ‘You and I are absolutely OK, we emerge as charming, intrepid chaps … It’s really the Cretans I’m worried about. They are all Cypriots, and far too shrill and agitated.’ He also regretted ‘a patronizing touch about you and me and our relationship to [the Cretans], a slight suggestion of their relegation to the role of picturesque and slightly absurd foreigners constantly in a state of agitation, coolly managed by these two unruffled and underacting sahibs.’11

  The film achieved the distinction of being spoofed on The Goon Show as Ill Met by Goonlight, but even Powell had to admit that it was not a good film. This he blamed on the tensions between himself and Dirk Bogarde. Powell had wanted ‘a flamboyant young murderer, lover, bandit – a tough, Greek-speaking leader of men’. But Bogarde, like Paddy, had served as an intelligence officer in the war. He knew how British officers behaved, and insisted on playing his role with a light-hearted nonchalance to which Powell attributed much of the film’s weakness. ‘All the other actors took their tone from him,’ wrote Powell. ‘It’s a wonder that Paddy didn’t sue both Dirk and me.’12

  Paddy and Billy Moss barely saw each other again, after their encounters at Pinewood Studios. Moss had by then written several more books, and in the year Ill Met by Moonlight was filmed he published Gold Is Where You Hide It – an investigation into what the Nazis had done with the treasure of the Reichsbank. But something in Billy seemed unable to adjust to the post-war world. Leaving Sophie and his two young daughters in London, he travelled to Antarctica, and after that sailed round the islands of the Pacific. By the time he settled in Kingston, Jamaica, he was drinking heavily. Despite the urgings of his friends he refused to seek help, and died there in August 1965, aged only forty-four.

  Keen to get on with Mani, Paddy had moved into the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford in mid-September. He often admitted that he could never have written the book without Joan – sometimes even referring to it as ‘Joan’s book’. It was to her that he read out passages and thought aloud, she had been with him on most of the journeys and taken photographs of what he described, and he relied on her encouragement to push him on.

  They both longed for a permanent base, and now they no longer had the Charlotte Street flat, Joan persuaded her trustees to let her buy a small house at 13 Chester Row in Pimlico. ‘It will be wonderful to have somewhere for both of us to assemble scattered books, clothes, papers etc,’ wrote Paddy to Diana, ‘and a proper base to be nomadic from. It’s rather demoralizing, always returning to improvisation.’13 Given the fact that he found himself incapable of any sustained work in London it might seem an odd choice. But Chester Row was never seen as a permanent home – it was, as he described it, ‘a base to be nomadic from’. They always planned to spend most of the year abroad. It also did not bring the prospect of marriage any closer. Paddy had once told his sister Vanessa that the disaster of their parents’ union had made him very wary of matrimony, and that ‘Joan and I have got into this pleasant habit of intermittent concubinage, with vague intentions of getting married sometime. We often talk of it, but then always seem to forget.’14

  From the room on the ground floor of the Easton Court Hotel where he was supposed to be working, he wrote vivid letters about the Devon woods and the wilds of Dartmoor to Diana and Debo. On a black horse called Flash he rode through the wet woods, beside banks trailing the last of the summer flowers. He described the steep hills, dark streams crossed by old stone bridges, and the wild ponies of Dartmoor. One moonlit night he watched them pour off the hill and gallop through the village, their hooves thundering on the cobbles. He joined a group of men who were rounding up ponies for the annual pony fair, their Devon accents all but incomprehensible. With the Mid-Devon hunt he rode to hounds for the first time since the war, and Flash flew over the fences. As they pelted across the country the hounds were occasionally joined by a herd of heifers and, at one point, a troop of ponies, their manes streaked and dripping with rain. The Devon he described is hardly the contemporary Britain of the late 1950s, but a rural vision of ancient walls sunk in damp greenness, with a pervasive smell of earth, rain and wet horse. Yet there are few moments in Paddy’s writing when he felt so connected to England, or described it with such delight.

  By the new year he had finished Mani, and he could not decide whether it had at last come together or still required a great deal of work. In January 1957 his frustrations spilled over in a letter to Diana Cooper, who had asked for his advice as she was about to embark on writing her memoirs. It was vital, he told her, to have a clear idea of who she was writing the book for.

  The military maxim about having only one objective for an operation is absolutely sound. My ghost objective in The Traveller’s Tree was a composite figure: Joan, a dash of Cyril … Professor Dawkins at Oxford and the shade of Norman Douglas. A Time to Keep Silence was a straight post-facto juggle of about twenty letters I wrote to Joan … The Violins had you in mind throughout. I’m making such a fucking mess, and a long drawn out and a painful one, of the book I’m finishing at the moment, because my objectives are mixed – i.e. Greece and England, the Cyprus balls-up, let’s not go into it; but it’s an excellent warning.15

  In February 1957, while busy correcting the latest typescript of Mani in the monastery of Saint-Wandrille, Paddy was summoned to the telephone. Calls to the monastery were rare, and Paddy was even more astonished to find that the caller was the film director John Huston. They had met in Ireland, probably at Luggala, and now Huston was ringing to ask whether Paddy would consider working on the script of his next film. It was based on a novel by the French writer Romain Gary called The Roots of Heaven, which had won the Prix Goncourt the year before. Darryl F. Zanuck, one of the founders of Twentieth Century-Fox, had bought the rights soon after and persuaded Gary to write the script, but Huston was not satisfied: he proposed that Paddy should take over and rewrite it.

  When consulted, Joan was strongly opposed to the idea. A project like this was a mere distraction, when he should be getting on with the companion volume to Mani. Paddy agreed, but he could not resist the combination of a fat fee plus the opportunity to spend several weeks in equatorial Africa. The first John Murray edition of A Time to Keep Silence appeared in May, and the following month he handed in the final corrections of Mani. Then, with excitement and trepidation, he went to Paris in August to take up his new job.

  The Roots of Heaven is a complex novel, in which long passages of monologue explore the economic and political tensions of post-colonial Africa. The book revolves around a maverick loner, Morel, who is determined to stop the slaughter of elephants by big game hunters and ivory poachers. He is joined by a black freedom fighter, an American journalist, a disgraced army officer, and Minna: barmaid, prostitute, and the only one who shares Morel’s real love of the elephants.

  It was not the easiest novel to turn into a film, but Zanuck put Paddy through a crash course in scriptwriting. They worked in a top-floor suite in the Hotel Georges V where the air must have been eye-watering, for Zanuck was never without a cigar in his mouth and Paddy was then smoking between sixty and seventy cigarettes a day. Here they would march up and down for hours, establishing the plot lines from which Paddy would build the script. In a long and funny letter to Debo, Paddy described Zanuck’s approach to the novel. ‘It’s a swell book, Mr Feemor … The best bit is when they bump off all those elephants. But we’ll run into difficulties here because of all that goddam humanitarian hooey in England and America. I’d like to do the thing properly and shoot a whole lot of them …’16

  The film crew made its way to Africa in the early part of 1958, with Paddy joining them in late January or February. The first part of the filming was done at Fort Archambault (now Sarh, in Chad), where they spent three weeks in suffocating heat. When it became unbearable they moved several hundred miles north-west to the town of Maroua, in Cameroon, and then to Bangui, now on the southern border of the Central African Republic.

  The
film’s leading actor, Trevor Howard, was ‘a charming man, not at all intelligent but a wonderful actor’.17 He drank nothing but whisky from morning till night, and Paddy felt he was profoundly depressed. Errol Flynn joined them in Maroua, preceded by an enormous hamper from Fortnum & Mason filled with tinned grouse and quail. ‘Errol Flynn and I have become great buddies,’ Paddy wrote to Xan Fielding. ‘He is a tremendous shit but a very funny one, and we sally forth into the dark lanes of the town together on guilty excursions that remind me rather of old Greek days with you.’18 (The third big star of the film, Orson Welles, only joined the filming in Paris after Paddy had left.)

  Despite the fact that The Roots of Heaven was a plea to save the elephants, John Huston was very keen to shoot one, since he had not managed to do so while filming The African Queen a few years earlier. The back of his Land Rover was an arsenal of shotguns, rifles and ammunition, and it was obvious that he lived not for the film, but to slope off into the bush with a gun. His lack of commitment to the project had its effect on morale too: Paddy noted that Huston’s ‘lackadaisical … nonchalance is oddly un-galvanizing’.19

  The script never rose above serviceable, and Huston was notorious for demanding endless rewrites. ‘The changes in the script’, wrote Paddy to Joan, ‘can be either an exciting challenge to one’s talents and skills in marquetry; or a deadening, heart-breaking mortician’s work, rougeing and curling a corpse, when one goes over a scene for the fifth or sixth time. Apart from the pennies, I think it’s an utter waste of time …’20 His consolation was a miniature walk-on part. As Morel and his companions march down the road to what might be their death, Paddy dashes into an open-air café, shouting: ‘Listen everybody! He’s been spotted, on the road to Biondi!’

  In a company that included many different cliques and nationalities, Paddy had found a home in the French clique which revolved around Juliette Gréco, one of the most celebrated singers of post-war Paris. She was playing the part of the barmaid Minna, who in the novel is a German blonde – the exact opposite of Gréco’s dark Levantine beauty. She had been given the role because of Darryl Zanuck’s infatuation with her; his feelings were not returned and she had only agreed to take the part on condition that she could bring a large entourage of friends.

  Of the company, Paddy wrote, Juliette was ‘the most interesting by far – oddly beautiful, utterly bohemian, erratic, very well-read and brilliant, and with a tremendous sense of humour. We became great pals at once …’21 ‘Jujube’, as she was known, was equally attracted, admitting that she had ‘un sérieux penchant’ for Paddy: she describes him speaking French with an irresistible accent, while words ‘jostled to escape from his mouth, so eager was he to offer them, to throw them like flowers at the feet of a beloved. He loves talking and has lots to say in a dozen languages …’22 Juliette’s romantic trysts – with Stephen Grimes the artistic director, and possibly with Paddy – had to be undertaken with the greatest caution. Zanuck was still in the grip ‘of a wild, insane and pathological jealousy … which spreads through the whole camp from the heart like a blight’. One evening ‘he knocked her out cold, revived her by throwing a bucket of water over her, and sobbed for an hour.’23

  With the director and producer of the film so preoccupied with other concerns, it is hardly surprising that the film was a disappointment. ‘The depths of the novel were untouched,’ Huston admitted to his biographer Lawrence Grobel. ‘It became, in our hands, a kind of adventure story, a shoot-up. It could have been a very fine picture … but the fact remains, it wasn’t.’24

  Paddy spent that Whitsuntide in Spain, where Xan and Daphne Fielding, an American couple called Billy and Anne Davis, and Debo Devonshire were planning to attend the great feast of Nuestra Señora del Rocío, near Seville. From all over Spain, pilgrims and brotherhoods devoted to the Virgin of el Rocío assembled in the fields around the little village, and it had not occurred to the English travellers that every available room would be taken. The whole party was obliged to doss down in a shed with an earth floor already occupied by several other pilgrims. Debo spent a sleepless night since, despite her shoving and pinching, Paddy snored the whole time. ‘He sounded like some rusty machine, making an almost mechanical noise with maddening regularity.’25 The following day, he was astonished by the violence of the struggles that broke out among the different brotherhoods, as they fought for the privilege of bearing the miraculous statue around the village.

  From Spain he and Joan returned to Greece where, on the island of Paros, Paddy finished correcting the page proofs of Mani. Free at last of the book he had been dragging around like an iron ball for so long, and his bank balance in the black thanks to the money made on The Roots of Heaven, Paddy was in a mood of godlike freedom. It seemed a good moment to climb Mount Olympus, which neither he nor Joan had ever done. Their expedition was joined by Alan Hare, a fellow member of SOE who had spent much of the war in Albania and had been a frequent guest at Tara, and Roxanne Sedgwick, the Greek wife of Alexander Sedgwick, Middle East correspondent of the New York Times. ‘It took four days and nearly did us all in,’ Paddy reported to Debo. ‘The last day was real hand-over-hand stuff, till at last we were on the highest point of S.E. Europe, with the whole of Greece below like a map.’26 An exhausted Joan announced that if she slipped down a crevasse and died, her body was to be left where it fell. Paddy composed her epitaph:

  Bury me here on Olympus

  In the home of the lonely wall-creeper

  Don’t take me back to Athens, please

  Stretched out on a second-class sleeper.

  Joan spent most of that September on Hydra, while Paddy flitted backwards and forwards to Athens. The novelist Compton Mackenzie, who had served in Greece in the First World War and was a passionate supporter of Cyprus’s claim for enosis, had been commissioned by the BBC to do a series of three programmes called The Glory that was Greece, and invited Paddy to join him for a day’s filming at Thermopylae. Mackenzie found him to be ‘a man after my own heart … He did not resemble Norman Douglas either in looks or conversation but his company brought back the mood of days spent with Norman Douglas more nearly than anybody has done.’27

  Paddy and Joan might have spent longer in Greece that autumn, using Hydra as their base; but then something happened that pulled his thoughts abruptly westwards. Pope Pius XII, aged eighty-two, died at his summer palace of Castelgandolfo on 9 October 1958. The old Pope had reigned for almost twenty years, the last few blighted by illness and nervous exhaustion, and for the Vatican his death felt like the end of a very long chapter. The election and coronation of the next pope would be a new beginning and a spectacular event, and Paddy was determined not to miss it.

  He arrived in Rome towards the end of the month, and made his way to the flat on Tiber Island where Judy Montagu lived. The only child of politician Edwin Montagu and Venetia Stanley, confidante of the prime minister Herbert Asquith, Judy had politics in her blood; but she also lived life with a gambler’s recklessness. Her friends ranged from the very grand – she was a close friend of Princess Margaret – to the artistic and bohemian. She had had a brief affair with Paddy a year or two before, which had left her broken-hearted. But her heart was now mended, and fixed on the photographer and art historian Milton Gendel whom she married in 1962.

  Gendel was irritated by Paddy’s sudden reappearance, and (as Judy reported to Diana Cooper) ‘retreated in a sombre state of green-eyed sulks … Milton is in on everything but slopes off early, while the hero and I gallivant like mad whizzing around nightclubs and jabbering – in complete purity but vast cosiness – till broad daylight (Old 7 o’clock again) …’28

  Judy formed part of a close group of three English women who acted as a magnet to friends passing through Rome. Like Judy, the other two were the daughters of illustrious parents. Jenny Nicholson’s father was the poet Robert Graves; a journalist on Picture Post and the Spectator, she was married to Patrick Crosse, bureau chief of Reuters in Rome. Whilst Jenny was the most practica
l and professional of the three, Iris Tree was easily the most eccentric. Iris had grown up in the theatre – her father was the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She was a true romantic, a poet and actress who had never allowed either comfort or common sense to interfere with her life. Her son Ivan Moffat, a film producer, had been a friend of Paddy’s since Cairo days.

  In the company of these friends Paddy met a young and beautiful woman, Lyndall Birch, who was working as a proofreader for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. She had been emotionally terrorized by her mother, the writer Antonia White; and while she loved her father Tom Hopkinson, the celebrated editor of Picture Post, there had been little room for her in his life. Men flocked around Lyndall; but having little experience or self-confidence, she found their attentions as alarming as they were flattering. She had made an impetuous marriage at the age of twenty-three to Lionel (Bobby) Birch – then editor of the Picture Post – which had lasted only a matter of months.

  She and Paddy were drawn to each other, and began meeting in her tiny flat in the Via del Gesù. He had to climb up several flights of stairs on tiptoe so as not to attract the suspicions of the landlady – ‘I did love that. It gave everything a wonderful feeling of conspiracy and romance.’29 Lyndall had never met a man who was less predatory, and whose company she enjoyed so much – although it did make her rather quiet: she was in awe of his learning and did not want to give herself away as being uncultivated. She need not have worried. Paddy was happy to do all the talking and never minded anyone’s lack of culture, as long as they responded to him with warmth and enthusiasm.

  Lyndall had never been so in love, for which her older friends gave conflicting remedies. Diana Cooper’s was brutally practical: forget Paddy, marry for money (Lyndall had a rich admirer at the time) and divorce with a large settlement. Judy also advised her to get over ‘the hero’, since from personal experience she knew that he would never leave Joan. Besides, neither of the lovers had any money, so nothing but disappointment could come of their affair. Iris Tree, on the other hand, dismissed such practical considerations. What could it matter if they had no money? Run away with him, urged Iris, find a Greek island and live for love on bread and water.