Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  On 28 October the conclave of cardinals declared that their choice had fallen on Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, and on 3 November he was crowned Pope John XXIII. In the last half of the twentieth century, incoming pontiffs reduced the ecclesiastical pomp and pageantry of their coronations; but in 1958 the Vatican could still put on a magnificent display, and Paddy was not disappointed. ‘Ah, Diana,’ he wrote, sending her a postcard of the new Pope, ‘… the silver trumpets, the ruffs, the cloaks with Maltese crosses, the morions and slashed doublets … I’m swooning …’30

  Paddy returned to England for the long-awaited publication of Mani, whose difficult gestation was rewarded by enthusiastic reviews. The Times Literary Supplement recognized the author as a ‘literary trailblazer’ in a region of Greece that few people knew anything about.31 And as Mani was promoted as the first of a series of books on Greece, the Times reviewer wrote that ‘Mr Leigh Fermor will be hard-put to keep up his own level in the sequels.’32 In a letter of congratulation, Lawrence Durrell wrote of ‘its tremendous truffled style and dense plumage. You’ve written us all (Greek Dept) into a cocked hat, by God. Bravo!’33

  The book opens with Paddy and Joan making their way from Sparta into the deep Mani, and the tone of the book is free and unconstricted. Paddy follows his inclinations, writing about the vagaries of Greek surnames, the Maniot diaspora, piracy and the slave trade, and helmets that double as cauldrons – but always he is brought back to the person who sparked off the last train of thought, and to a specific place. He is intensely aware of how few resources the Maniots have, how harsh their life is. Yet the endurance of these people, their stories and traditions, their ghosts and legends, all fill him with joy; while their violent past and rigid codes of honour are contrasted with a hospitality as simple and natural as it had been in the days of Homer.

  At the same time as celebrating the Maniots, he is yearning for another, more complete, more spiritual Greece; one that was not entirely obliterated with the end of the Byzantine empire, but had entered another dimension. This is the idea behind the extraordinary flight of imagination, sparked by a poor fisherman in Kardamyli who might have been the last of the Palaeologi: over seven astonishing pages, Paddy describes the return of the last Emperor of Byzantium to the throne of his ancestors, in a resurrected Constantinople that a magnanimous Turkey has given back to Greece. It is likewise the refrain when he describes the paintings of Mistra that seemed for a brief moment to fuse all that was best in the sacred art of Eastern and Western Christendom. If only it had had a chance to flourish, it might have given rise to another Golden Age.

  ‘This sudden shining mist of impossible surmise’, he writes, ‘is one that floats again and again before the eyes both of Greeks and of strangers who look for more in these seas and islands than the dispersed and beautiful skeleton of the ancient world.’34 He asserts his faith in this eternal Greek spirit, and if only others could share his conviction, perhaps even the Cyprus problem might be resolved. This thorny subject is finally broached as he sits in a café in Layia, among a group of old villagers. ‘“Don’t go,” one of them said, “there’s no hurry. Sit here and take it easy, like Gladstone.”’35O Gladstonos is remembered, with more affection than accuracy, as the statesman who persuaded the British government to cede the Ionian Islands to Greece.fn1 It was the perfect, oblique way to indicate Paddy’s answer to the Cyprus question: if the British government could relinquish a whole archipelago in 1863, to Greece’s lasting gratitude, surely it could make a similar gesture now by returning Cyprus to its rightful owners?

  He agreed with the old men in the café that the reason both Greece and England were in this mess was that neither country had politicians of sufficient authority and vision to deal with it, while the newspapers and radio only whipped up anger and made things worse. But in front of their quiet reproaches (no Athenian demagogues here), Paddy the Philhellene is left feeling miserably embarrassed to be English. And this, as he told his readers, was before the British government brought the Turks into the negotiations, after which Greek resentment had grown fiercer.

  The warmth with which Paddy championed the Greek cause did the book no harm: probably the reverse. Mani became the Book Society Choice for December, which meant they took 9,000 copies; by the following February further sales had earned Paddy £1,200. Flushed with cash and confidence, Paddy bought himself his first car: a dark blue Standard Companion, in which he planned to drive to Rome. Joan had had to drive it to Dover, since he had failed his first driving test; but he was allowed to drive in Europe on a provisional licence granted by the AA.

  He drove with the handbrake on all the way from Le Touquet to Chantilly, which Joan would have prevented had she been with him. But she was driving out to Greece with one of her oldest friends, Janetta Jackson. As a protégée of Ralph and Frances Partridge, Janetta had absorbed many of the values and tastes of the Bloomsbury circle, but not its high-minded austerity. Once her second marriage to Paddy’s friend Robert Kee was over, she had married Derek Jackson, one of the great scientists of his day who had ridden in the Grand National three times. That marriage too ended in disaster; but despite her turbulent emotional life, there was a clear-eyed tranquillity about Janetta, and a diffidence that resembled Joan’s.

  Joan and Janetta were driving through Kent to the coast when, in heavy traffic on the outskirts of London, Joan ran into a pram. The baby was unhurt; but because Joan was full of concern for the baby and had offered to pay for a new pram, the mother saw her as a soft touch and took her to court, which upset Joan terribly.

  Paddy had made no secret to Joan of the fact that he was yearning to see Lyndall again, and wrote ‘… this entire journey was strange and marvellous … there was not a hitch, not a scratch, not an unkind word from the moment I set off from Le Touquet, as if everything were in league to shelter a love affair that couldn’t last, all the world loves a driver …’36 He had often thought of Lyndall in the three months they had been apart; but while she had written several letters to him, he had written only one to her – and having been sent with a heavy packet of papers (draft chapters of Mani), it did not reach her for several more weeks. Still, he was sure he would be forgiven in the joy of their reunion.

  Lyndall had taken time off from her work at the UN to play the part of a young novice in the film of The Nun’s Story, starring Audrey Hepburn. Filming was taking place in Rome, but Lyndall suggested they go to Assisi for the Easter weekend. She seemed more reserved than he had expected; and it was on that gloomy Good Friday that she told Paddy their affair was over. She had been deeply hurt by the fact that he had never written; and in the face of what looked like a humiliating rejection, she had found other company and had no wish to resume their relationship. Stunned, he could scarcely believe it: the disappointed Paddy now felt that he was as much in love with her as she had been with him the previous October.

  A few weeks later, Paddy wrote Lyndall a long and revealing letter.

  You know – you must know – how much I loved our October life. But, in illogical contrast to my vanity and conceit in other ways, a sort of deep-rooted ill-opinion of myself (linked, as far as I can make out, with the … knowledge of how little, as far as a life-time goes, I can offer anyone) makes me the most laggard of mortals in thinking anyone could be in love with me.

  He goes on to admit to a ‘rhinoceros-hide obtuseness’, and a ‘lack of sensitiveness and lack of twigging about what happens to others … I had no idea what harm and unhappiness I was unconsciously inflicting.’ He also tried to explain why her letters had been answered by nothing but silence:

  silence caused by the thought that I would be in Rome again almost at once; and by the vanity of waiting for inspiration to write a letter … of immense length and loving tenderness and brilliant wit and imperishable splendour … You know how ashamed and sorry I am about all this; how bitterly furious with myself, you can’t know.37

  The letter was written from the castle of Passerano, near Palestrina, some
nineteen kilometres east of Rome. He had first set eyes on the castle on a picnic with Judy Montagu, when it struck him as ‘one of the most beautiful and romantic places I had ever seen, a triangular, Guelph-battlemented castle on top of a green hill plumed with oak trees …’38 Paddy borrowed it from the owner, Count Paolo Quintero, who dismissed any question of rent: the castle had no water, electricity, plumbing, or even glass in the windows.

  Undaunted, Paddy borrowed some furniture, ordered some headed writing paper and hired glaziers to put frames and glass in the vast embrasures. Nuns from a convent in Tivoli were commissioned to make a huge fabric hanging with armorial bearings to cover one end of the banqueting hall, and a flag for him to fly from the topmost tower. He imagined it as the flag of ‘Don Patrizio, the Black Bastard of Passerano … I like to think that when the Black Bastard unfurls his dread gonfalon from the machicolations, all the peasants … cross themselves and dowse their rush-lights, hide their cattle and bolt up their dear ones,’ he wrote to Diana – and, a little later, in an almost identical letter to Debo.39 But since he spent quite a lot of time driving the locals to market and little girls to their First Communion, perhaps ‘The Black Sucker of Passerano’ was more accurate.

  Yet even the romantic beauty of the castle and its surroundings could not make up for its discomforts. The weather that summer was unusually wet. Despite stuffing the cracks with pages torn from the Daily Mail, the Times Literary Supplement and Il Messaggero, cold and damp seeped in through the walls. Few people came to visit him from Rome, although Paddy tended to drive there once or twice a week for a dinner or a party. He did not like the aristocratic Romans, particularly since one of them was the new man in Lyndall’s life. He complained of their ‘breath-taking, staggering vapidity of chat. They are like cooking with the salt left out.’40 To Joan, Paddy confessed that taking the castle was ‘one of the most foolish things I’ve ever done. It’s lovely during the day, but I feel terribly depressed in the evenings … I’m getting less good at solitude than I used to be, and my struggle with Volume Two [the first stirrings of Roumeli] has been little more than a series of skirmishes and frontier incidents.’41

  Paddy was now in his mid-forties, and in the gloomy evenings the castle must have looked like an allegory of his life at that point: a beautiful and romantic structure viewed from outside, but damp and chilly on the inside. He was still brooding about Lyndall, and cursing himself for handling the affair so clumsily. He might even have thought about children, or his lack of them. In a letter to Vanessa a few weeks later he writes, ‘I envy you having children and grandchildren, and feel a bit of an outcast in my mossless state.’42 These momentary regrets should not be taken too seriously; he did not often wish for a pram in the hall. What his weeks in the castle had revealed was that he had reached a point in life where he longed for some form of permanent home: not ‘a base to be nomadic from’, but a place where he could live and work. Ever since Hydra he and Joan had imagined a house in Greece, and now he pined for Greece like an exile.

  Iris Tree came to visit the castle in May; and while he was giving her a lift back to Rome a few days later, the car ran out of petrol. It was getting dark, and Paddy stumbled across a cornfield to a lamp-lit farmhouse. A young man called Silvio agreed to help. As he was siphoning off some petrol from his Vespa, he mentioned that he had turned up two odd fragments of marble, while ploughing a field. Would the Signore like to see them? One was a headless statue about fourteen inches tall, roughly carved, of a seated Roman goddess flanked by a lion, later identified as Cybele-Astarte. ‘It was very exciting’, he wrote to Joan, ‘to see her all clogged up with the earth of two millennia, in the lamplight at the kitchen table.’ The other piece was the base of a statue, of which nothing remained but the stump of a tree and two delicately carved marble feet – ‘a hauntingly romantic object’, which then inspired a poem: ‘On Two Marble Feet and a Marble Tree dug up by a Ploughman in the Roman Campagna’.

  Paddy bought the two pieces for sixty-five thousand lire. He gave them to Joan (‘I know I’m always doing this, “giving” you things that I derive an equal delight in’).43 But the poem, which gives voice to a beautiful statue of which only a fragment remains, was dedicated to Lyndall.

  He had been longing for Joan’s comfort and company, and needed her to coax him out of his depression. She came in July, the weather improved, and soon it was uncomfortably hot. The castle’s vermin grew bolder. Paddy watched a rat breaking through the defences Joan had erected round a pat of butter, and hurled a book at it (Arthur Bryant’s The Age of Elegance, as he noted to Debo). The rat was not much discouraged, and launched another assault on the butter a few minutes later. Within a month the proliferation of rats, ants and scorpions had driven them away. On Iris’s recommendation, they decided to spend the rest of the summer on the island of Ischia.

  They settled in the town of Forio on the western side of the island, in a flat with a balcony. It looked out over orange trees to the dome and belfry of the cathedral, ‘which looks so mosque-like that it’s a surprise to see the crosses on top’. Ischia did not succeed in filling him with energy and high spirits ‘as most Greek islands do’,44 but at the same time work was going well and he was deep in a chapter about Turkish Thrace. Among their neighbours were Janetta, who was then in Ischia with her lover, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. Paddy and Joan also invited a succession of friends to stay, including Ann Fleming, Iris Tree, Debo and Diana Cooper.

  Lyndall came at last in late September. Paddy had hoped she could come earlier, but the spare room in their rented house had been occupied by Diana, whose stay was extended by a paralysing bout of depression. Lyndall was astonished at how warmly she was welcomed by Joan, and with what ease and equanimity. Paddy had told her that there was no sexual jealousy between them, and she could see it was true: he and Joan were more like siblings or old friends than lovers, and their private words and phrases were merely the visible surface of a long and deep-rooted companionship.

  Just before Paddy left Ischia, he heard that Mani had won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize. This had been set up by Duff Cooper’s friends after his death and the panel of five judges did not include Diana, but Paddy felt he could detect her influence. ‘I bet you lobbied like Billy-oh for your old pal,’ he wrote, ‘and a quadrillion thanks.’45

  When Paddy had set out for Rome that February, he had been in a mood of youthful joy at the thought of seeing Lyndall again. With that dream shattered he had retired to Passerano, and in the weeks of loneliness there had realized how much he needed Joan and how much he missed Greece. From Ischia he headed back to London, knowing that he and Lyndall were free of their ill-synchronized passion for each other – though he continued to write her long affectionate letters and never wanted to lose her as a friend. About her latest admirer, he observed that ‘I can watch all this now with an affectionate detachment that will be much more use … than the obsessive and gloomy commitment that has dogged my footsteps most of this year.’46

  18

  A Visit to Rumania

  Paddy spent the Christmas of 1959 with Debo and Andrew Devonshire, who had now moved into the ducal seat at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The house had been under dustsheets since 1944: Andrew’s parents, heartbroken by the loss of their eldest son, had avoided it after his death. When Andrew inherited, millions were owed in death duties and it was doubtful whether the estate could survive at all. But survive it did: Chatsworth was made into a trust, the family moved back in, house and gardens were opened to the public, and there was much to celebrate.

  Joan’s Christmas that year was as sad as Paddy’s was cheerful. Joan, her brother Graham and their sister Diana Casey were all in London, where their mother Sybil died at her house in Weymouth Street on Christmas Day. Since Sybil had been divorced from her husband, the 1st Viscount Monsell, for the best part of a decade, her fortune passed directly to her three surviving children and their heirs.fn1 The house at Dumbleton had already been sold to the Post Office for the use of its eld
erly and retired workers, but the land and farms on the estate were left to Graham. The rest of her fortune, which in today’s terms would come to some six million pounds, was equally divided between the siblings.

  Joan would not come into her inheritance all at once, but her and Paddy’s dream of buying some land in Greece at last looked possible, and in the new year she was in a position to give Paddy a large cheque. He wrote to her from the Easton Court Hotel in Chagford, where he had settled down to work after Christmas. ‘I’ve been thinking so much about that tremendous sum of money. It really is an act of superhuman kindness and generosity … I can’t tell you what a difference it makes, and will make, blowing away dozens of guilty, nagging and haunting worries, all utterly my fault through neglect, idleness and oblomovstochina. (That’s the word. I asked Isaiah Berlin.)’1

  Mani was going from strength to strength. Although Cass Canfield of Harper & Row had been doubtful of its prospects, he had had to print another fifteen hundred copies. Paddy and Joan spent the next few months in England: she based in her house in Chester Row, with Paddy dropping in between visits to friends and efforts to get on with work at Chagford. His writing was interrupted by the occasional outing with the hunt, and incidental literary capriccios such as translating ‘Widdecombe Fair’ into Italian: ‘All shortcomings of rhyme and scansion are richly compensated for by sheer exoticism, if sung with spirit,’ he wrote to Jock Murray.2 He also wrote occasional reviews for the Sunday Times, and finally passed his driving test in Newton Abbot.