Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  He and Joan planned to go back to Greece that summer, and just before they left Paddy agreed to spend the weekend at Bruern Abbey in Oxfordshire, the home of Michael Astor. Like his parents Waldorf and Nancy Astor, Michael had been a Conservative MP and moved easily in the political world of the day; but he was also a keen reader and collector of contemporary art. Since Paddy said he would be driving, Astor asked him to pick up his American girlfriend, Agnes Phillips, better known as Magouche. After her marriage to the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky who had committed suicide in 1948, she had married a Bostonian painter called Jack Phillips. They had now separated, and Magouche had decided to settle in England.

  Magouche already knew Joan whom she had met through Barbara Warner, but this was her first meeting with Paddy. He arrived at her house dressed as he had been for his great walk: in a leather jerkin with breeches and gaiters, which he told her he had had made in order to attend a fancy dress ball as Robin Hood. After several drinks they set off. Paddy drove very slowly, talking all the time while Magouche lit endless cigarettes for him. ‘He was the most English person I had ever met,’ she recalled. ‘Everything was ripping, and there was more talk of PG Wodehouse than of Horace or Gibbon.’3Since there were several architectural delights that Paddy wanted to visit on the way, they did not reach Bruern until late in the afternoon. Astor, who had expected them for lunch, was furious – and jealous of their complicity. Yet Paddy was longing to leave the English summer and get back to Greece. ‘In spite of all this green pacific beauty,’ he wrote to Lyndall, ‘it’s not my world. It’s like living in the heart of a lettuce and I pine for hot stones and thorns and olive trees and prickly pears.’4

  At the end of the month he and Joan set out for Greece in Joan’s Sunbeam Rapier, planning a leisurely drive across Europe. An itinerary set out by John Julius took them through Slovenia and Ljubljana, Zagreb and Croatia. When they ran out of fuel, they were rescued by‘a party of Persian swells, travelling back to Teheran from Claridge’s in a caravan of Cadillacs’. The next stretch took them into Bosnia and Sarajevo (‘people talk of the archduke’s murder as though it happened last week’5), Herzegovina and Dubrovnik, Montenegro and its capital Cetinje, and so into southern Serbia, where the people were Albanian. To Debo he wrote of ‘baggy-trousered women heavily veiled, and tall, raffish, guarded mountain men in red and white fezzes, all selling watermelons to each other’.6 They spent a few days exploring the frescoed Byzantine monasteries of south Serbia, before crossing the border.

  As a first step to finding a place to live in Greece Joan had recently bought a tiny house, 12 Kallirhoë Street, in the Makriyannis area of Athens, from her friend Gladys Stewart-Richardson. Miss Stewart-Richardson had lived most of her life in the Greek capital, where she had started a business in the 1920s, making fabrics of raw silk. To Diana, Paddy described the house as ‘just adequate for a Scotch spinster of austere and secluded habits, but claustrophobic for two untidy people like Joan and me’.7 They also had to live with the constant noise of pumps, diggers and pneumatic drills since a road was being built yards from their door, ‘along the semi-dried up drain which is all that remains of the ancient Ilissos river’.

  The search for somewhere to live was launched in Hydra, after a few days in Nico Ghika’s house which had been transformed since they had lived there five years before. Nico Ghika had separated from his wife Tiggy, and returned to his ancestral home with Barbara Warner, who was in the process of divorcing her husband Rex. He was in his mid-fifties, Barbara in her late forties; but they behaved like young lovers, so wrapped up in each other that they could scarcely bear being apart. ‘It made one feel protective and a bit sad,’ wrote Paddy to Debo: ‘such ages since one was in such a plight, at least overtly.’8 New terraces had been built to reveal new aspects of the bay, scented plants grew in old amphorae, and the once bare walls were covered with paintings – most by Ghika, others by his friends. Later that year, the house that the Ghikas had so lovingly restored was deliberately burnt to the ground by the caretaker, who had been with the family for years: an action prompted by his loyalty to the first Mrs Ghika and his resentment of the second.

  From Hydra Paddy and Joan embarked on ‘a long slow golden and autumnal journey round the Argolid’. As winter drew in, Joan went back to England and to Graham, as she usually did for Christmas, while Paddy moved into ‘a charming old hotel in Nauplia which I’ve long had my eye on … Here I plan to settle for a bit in frugal, abstemious and diligent solitude.’9

  In the spring of 1961, Paddy was invited to stay in the family house of Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza, the Greek Foreign Minister. A man of literary tastes, Averoff had written Paddy a letter to say how much he had enjoyed Mani, and he hoped Paddy would use his house in Metsovo as a place to write. ‘It’s what they call an ancestral Epirot house,’ he told Debo, with ‘huge rooms surrounded by divans, with carved wooden ceilings giving one the feeling of being inside a cigar box, jutting out in storey after storey, overlooking the snow-covered roofs of the highest village in Greece …’10

  Coote Lygon and John Craxton both came to stay with them in the ‘cigar box’, but the guest he was happiest to see was Ricki Huston, with her Madonna beauty and her New York accent, her fantasy and originality. It had been six years since she pulled him out of the fight he had started at the Kildare Hunt Ball; and while they had seen each other now and again, their mutual attraction had intensified over recent months.

  The whole party set off on an expedition to the Thesprotian mountains of western Epirus, where they were the guests of a Sarakatsan family called Charisis. Life for the Sarakatsans had changed considerably since that traditional wedding in 1950. Now their stiff black and white costumes were brought out only for big celebrations, and though no longer purely nomadic, they were just as hospitable and keen to produce a feast. Joan and Paddy, who were soft-hearted about animals, persuaded them not to kill a kid: after all, it was Lent. This was a disappointment to their hosts for whom meat was a rare treat, but they were impressed by the piety of the foreigners.

  In the description of this visit in Roumeli, Joan and John Craxton are mentioned but not Ricki: although her marriage to John Huston was over in all but name, discretion was called for. As for Joan, she accepted Ricki’s presence as easily as she had accepted Lyndall’s. Paddy had explained to Ricki in advance that Joan would pose ‘no hindrance to anything, as I’m sure you’d like her and she you’.11

  Joan returned to England, leaving Paddy and Ricki to drive south and catch the ferry to Bari. Heading for Rome, they stopped for the night in Naples. As they were eating dinner a fierce wind blew up, sending the street rubbish spiralling into the air. Coming out of the restaurant, Paddy and Ricki pretended they were in a surrealist gallery. As a page of Il Messaggero flattened itself against a wall Paddy exclaimed, ‘I’ll have that, even if it ruins me!’ Ricki clutched him and hissed, ‘Don’t touch it! It’s a FAKE.’12 They did not part company till they reached Rome. Paddy then drove with Diana, Judy, and the painter Balthus to Paris, skimming over the new Autostrada del Sol and ‘blessing those gentle lessons of the Pindus passes’.13 Ricki’s efforts to improve Paddy’s driving had given him a new élan at the wheel.

  At this point, Ricki’s main base was St Clerans: a graceful eighteenth-century house in Galway, which she and John Huston had bought in 1953. Paddy contrived to get himself invited to Lismore in May, and once there, he and Ricki set up a clandestine meeting in a Dublin hotel. Ricki was very fond of Paddy, and impressed by him as a lover. To a friend in Rome she said, ‘Most men are just take, take, take – but with Paddy it’s give, give, give.’14

  Paddy spent June and July in a little cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast belonging to Barbara Ghika, ‘on the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep coombe full of gulls and guillemots and puffins’. Paddy remained hard at work while Joan came and went, but on Barbara’s insistence they had to pretend to be married. Paddy liked the Welsh: ‘I’m fascinated by their Eurasian accent in English,’
he told Ricki, ‘and wish I knew some of their language, which they all talk among themselves here.’15 He thought of her often, remembering the ‘fierce moon-flaunting grapples in what seem like half-lit palaces, tents and caves; and gentle and loving recoveries with my hands full of dark silk and warm alabaster’.16 Ricki was not going to let him get away with that, and sent him a gently mocking reply: ‘I tell myself there’s been many and many a handful of multicoloured silk, and a good few chunks of alabaster, for after all aren’t you a poet, and a loving, grateful man?’ she wrote. ‘But it can’t quite spoil the music of it.’17

  He left Wales in July, and a month later he was commissioned to write a full-page article on one of the Seven Deadly Sins for the Sunday Times. The other six were shared out among W. H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson and T. S. Eliot, which put Paddy in an impressive pantheon.

  I was given the choice between Gluttony and Lust, and chose the former because Lust is too serious a matter … Apart from this I have been, thank heavens, in the throes of creative frenzy, and the pages are mounting up … This is a great relief, as I was beginning to suffer from faint unavowed despair about this book; I’d left it too long and it was beginning to go cold on me; but I seem to have breathed it back again to life at last.18

  Sadly this burst of progress fizzled out, and the book that was to become Roumeli gave Paddy just as much trouble as its predecessor. Paddy thought Brittany might provide the ideal environment, and after a few days of Lust and Gluttony with Ricki in late October, he settled down in a hotel in the little town of Locronan. It was profoundly depressing, particularly on All Hallows Eve and All Saints’ Day. The hotel was empty. All the inhabitants of the town, dressed in black, processed through the rain to the graveyard with soggy chrysanthemums, while the church bell tolled for hours.

  From his little room, which looked on to a rain-soaked backyard and a few slate roofs, Paddy wrote to Lawrence Durrell in Nîmes, longing for Provence. Did Durrell know of ‘a huge and sympathetic room, with plenty of striding space, a large work table, a shaded lamp, a bed, and a view plunging away into the distance, costing practically nothing?’19 (The sum he had in mind was between £30 and £40 a month.) He had to finish his chapters on Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly within the next three months, before going to Mexico with Joan in February. The Mexican trip would be a fresh departure, and a new place to write about.

  Paddy set off for Nîmes without waiting for a reply, and Durrell was away when he arrived – but it had been an interesting journey. At La Rochelle he made friends with the curator of the local museum, and they sat talking over whisky in the curator’s library till four in the morning. In Bordeaux, he quoted two lines of Verlaine to the slim, pale maid who was helping him with his luggage, and to his surprise she recited the rest of the poem. The following day, her day off, the maid – whose name was Annie – took Paddy round the sights of the city. They visited Montaigne’s castle, and he took her to lunch in Saint-Emilion. She told him the lonely story of her life. Her fondest memory was of a holiday she had spent alone by the Garonne estuary with her dog, swimming out to gather oysters from the oyster beds that lay offshore. When Paddy left the following day, he found a Mozart record in his car, and a note from Annie saying that he had given her ‘the happiest hours of my existence’.20 He was haunted by the image of this young woman, eating oysters alone in the pearly light of the estuary with her dog, and wrote about her in letters to Diana, Debo and Ricki. Like him she was a changeling, living in a world she did not feel part of. But whereas he had managed to escape, she was still trapped.

  Paddy’s article on Gluttony was a light-hearted tour of food in various cultures, with a glance at church teaching, cannibalism, the punishments of overindulgence and the Baroque’s debt to pasta. It appeared on 31 December 1961, neatly sandwiched between Christmas at Chatsworth and a riotous New Year ball, at which Magouche’s ex-husband John Phillips threatened to beat him up.

  Jock Murray was worried about Paddy. To him it was

  quite obvious that PLF had gone stale on the original idea of a sequel to Mani. I don’t think he will ever finish it in the form originally planned. He is genuinely depressed about his inability to do so and feels a sense of guilt and despair. On the other hand, he is longing to get onto a novel and to try fresh fields in Mexico, for which journey he could probably get financial support from the Sunday Timesfn2 … As a way out of the impasse, I suggested that we should publish a small book using the material to hand, including parts that could easily be finished … At the end he seemed enthusiastic about this plan and promised faithfully to get on to completing it immediately.21

  Paddy repaired to Chagford after the winter feasts, inspired by Jock’s less ambitious plan for the book. At first things went well. On 4 February he told Jock that ‘I’ve been striking oil, from a literary point of view, such a gusher that it’s hard to keep pace with it … spells like this have something of the insane buoyancy of a love affair.’22

  A month later he was still buoyant, despite having sustained a multiple fracture of his left wrist in a hunting accident. Jock had warned Paddy about getting bogged down with the story of Byron’s slippers, but ‘the whole thing got out of control and covers many pages … it’s full of things I’ve been longing to write for years, especially about Ld Byron, and I’ve been enjoying it like mad … Remains the beggar chapter, let’s wash out the phallic one at the moment, and use the beggars to complete our revised interim volume …’ What had been holding him up, he said, was ‘that great khaki obstacle of Macedonia’.23

  Mexico was postponed. Paddy and Joan spent that spring in Rome and Sicily, where Paddy floundered in bouts of depression. ‘The main cause of all this gloom is my slowness at writing. I wish I could get a move on,’ he wrote to Joan from Montepulciano. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’ve got almost half that wretched chapter done, with the utmost fuss and bother, sometimes pacing up and down, putting on the gramophone and mouldering in my chair. I hope I haven’t done my brain in with smoking …’24

  That summer, with Joan still in England, Paddy resumed the search for a place in Greece. With him he took Ian Wigham, a friend with houses in Italy and England whom Paddy described as ‘one of the funniest people I’ve ever met’.25 They set off in a car from Athens, to look at the possibility of converting one of the old Maniot tower houses in the village of Kardamyli. But the tower had no privacy, and one of the two women who owned the land ‘spoke, without a single comma, for one hour and twenty minutes, in a shrill mad terrifying scream, embracing in her discourse the atom bomb, the wickedness of the Turks, the end of the world, the vice of foreigners, the Beast of Babylon with the Harlot on its back, with a cupful of abominations, fire and brimstone. I felt dead at the end of it, grateful to slink away …’

  They had driven about two miles south of Kardamyli, on their way to the next village of Stoupa, when they spotted a little headland between two valleys ending in crescent-shaped beaches. Later that day they went back to the spot to go bathing. Paddy told Joan how they had left the car on the road and followed a mule track to the sea, ‘walking down into a gently sloping world of the utmost magical beauty … The view is an enormous sweep of sea, bounded by the headlands … The sun is visible until its last gasp.’26 It was called Kalamitsi, the place of the reeds.

  Paddy first saw the land at Kalamitsi on a Tuesday at the end of June. By Friday, he had asked a lawyer friend, Tony Massourides, to begin the long, delicate work of trying to buy it.

  Purchase of the land was complicated by the fact that four people had to be in agreement before it was sold, although only one of them lived on the spot. Angela Philkoura occupied a tiny hut on the property with her goats and poultry. She told Paddy and Massourides that she would be willing to give them a long lease and they could build whatever they liked, but she would never part with the land. ‘Money’s just bits of paper,’ she said. ‘It flies away like the birds. But if you have land and
olives and vegetables and chickens, you’ll never starve.’27

  These negotiations had been watched with interest by a young couple called Petro and Lela Yannakea, who lived in a tiny whitewashed house nearby. Lela urged the old lady to accept: bright and energetic, she immediately understood that the arrival of (relatively) well-to-do foreigners in this remote spot would present opportunities that might ease their lives considerably. Paddy too felt that the proximity of Petro and Lela was one of the major attractions of the place.

  Joan suggested that they should lease the land for fifty years, which would see them both out; but Paddy was set on buying it, ‘rather absurdly, because of the possibility of descendants, unless my absolute idiocy has done for this! … not being married seems steadily more ludicrous – and the very possibility of this paradise brings this out in sharper and sharper relief.’28 – ‘Don’t make me cry about my descendants,’ replied Joan, ‘but yours might well be there …’ Yet she felt that leasing the land might solve everything, ‘as I feel really most of the trouble is the Greeks’ hatred of selling land …’29

  There was little time for Paddy to dream about leaving land they had not yet bought to children they had not yet conceived. In January 1963, at the age of fifty, Joan went into hospital in London for a hysterectomy. She had long given up hope of having children but the operation left her miserably depressed, and the long-anticipated trip to Mexico was put off yet again. Paddy toiled on, dragging his manuscripts from Gadencourt to Ann Fleming’s house at Sevenhampton, and the village of Branscombe in Devon. ‘Please don’t despair about [Roumeli], in spite of the damning evidence,’ he wrote to Jock. ‘Miss John sent me back another 70 pages of TS just before Xmas which needed a lot of correcting and a new lick of paint …’30 But then Paddy’s attention turned to a new project, which was to push Roumeli into the background for a while longer.