Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Page 40
Two public events punctuated the year at Kardamyli. The first was Greek National Day, 25 March, always celebrated in Kalamata and Kardamyli a day earlier than in the rest of Greece, since this was where the flag of freedom was first raised. Paddy and Joan would make their way to the little square in front of the church at the top of the village, and sit with the rest of the village elders while the long service took place inside. When the service was over food and wine were brought, and everyone celebrated.
The second was Paddy’s name day. Since he was known as ‘Mihali’ in Greece, his name day fell on 8 November, the feast of SS. Michael and Gabriel. By chance, a tiny chapel dedicated to the Archangels stood on the path to Kardamyli a few minutes from the house (where the standpipe had once been), and here Paddy’s friends from the village would gather. Only the priest and his acolyte could fit inside, so people stood about talking as the chanting went on, until the priest came out to bless Paddy and the great cartwheel loaves that had been brought for the feast. Then it was open house for the whole village. Lela and her helpers would cook mountains of food, everyone would drink a lot, and the dancing spilled out on to the big terrace. ‘When they vanish we sink into bed for several hours, surface about ten for a little consommé and Debussy, then back to the depths …’7
At the same time, Paddy and Joan did not want to become too involved in the life of Kardamyli. Although they never saw themselves as rich and powerful, in the eyes of the village they were. Joan in particular was aware that for their own tranquillity they should not become embroiled in local rivalries, or be seen to be taking sides. The villagers understood and accepted their detachment. In October 1967, Paddy was made an honorary citizen of Kardamyli.
That winter they returned to England as usual, and just before Christmas Barbara gave a dinner party. Among the guests were Balasha’s niece Ina and her husband, Michel Catargi, who had left Rumania and were living in Paris; and the now widowed Amy Smart. Amy, whom Paddy described as ‘captivating and maddening by turns’, began teasing Paddy and Joan about their long and so far unformalized relationship. Paddy countered by saying that they had always meant to get married, but now they were settled in Kardamyli, ‘it seemed idiotic not to. So why not now?’8 Suddenly, without any planning, the moment had arrived and Paddy was ready. Joy and excitement broke out round the table, and Amy was so pleased with herself for having pushed him into it that Paddy was almost tempted to call it off.
They had to prove a two-week residence before they could get married in London, and as usual, they separated for Christmas. Joan joined Graham at Dumbleton where they listened to music and ignored the tinsel, while Paddy went to Chatsworth, where the feast was celebrated with Dickensian enthusiasm. They returned to London early in the new year, and the wedding took place on 11 January 1968. In a letter to Balasha, Paddy described it as being ‘nearly as easy as getting a dog licence’.9 Supported by Barbara, Nico and Patrick Kinross, they were married at Caxton Hall and immediately repaired to the pub for a ‘recovery swig’. A lunch at Barbara’s was followed by an evening party given by Patrick Kinross. Among the guests were Maurice Bowra, Cyril and Deirdre Connolly, Iris Tree and Ivan Moffat, Coote Lygon, Raymond Mortimer, Diana Cooper, John Julius and Anne Norwich, Andrew Devonshire and a triumphant Amy Smart. When Diana asked why they had got married so swiftly, Paddy replied: ‘I’ve never believed in long engagements.’
The next day, they had lunch at the Café Royal with Paddy’s mother and Vanessa. They had been dreading the meeting with Æileen, but ‘Mummy’s spiky eccentricity was in complete abeyance, and she was her old, amusing, intelligent and charming self … It wouldn’t last through too many contacts: I know Mummy too well.’10
There was a great deal of speculation as to why Paddy and Joan had married in such haste. Some people thought it was to smooth out administrative and financial arrangements, while others thought it might be because their traditionally minded Greek neighbours did not approve (though they had been living in Kardamyli for three years with no complaints). Some even thought that Joan had given Paddy an ultimatum. Paddy’s explanation to Balasha is still the most likely: they had always planned to marry, and now that they were so well settled in Greece, the time was right. The news flew ahead of them to Kardamyli. On entering the house they were greeted with hugs and congratulations from Petro, Lela and several other friends and neighbours, while Joan was embarrassed and amused to find that her bed had been covered with rose petals and sugared almonds. For days they were visited by a succession of neighbours and villagers ‘bringing loads of sticky cakes and bottles of ouzo’.11
Paddy was still working on ‘Parallax’, which had started life as an article on ‘The Pleasures of Walking’ five years before. In March he had told Jock Murray, ‘some bits are dreadfully overwritten, and will have to be bled. But I feel that something respectable will emerge.’12 Nothing did emerge, and by May the pressure from Jock Murray was mounting. ‘Your urgent but kindly worded pleas for haste could not fall on less deaf ears,’ wrote Paddy on 10 May.
I’m at it all the time, and have been for weeks … The only damnable interruption has been the constant presence of the builders. The trouble is we have no architect (we had one, but he has only been here six times in all), with the result that again and again during the day I’m reft from my table for orders and consultation … They work fast and well, so that conundrums are cropping up all the time and one is constantly being summoned.13
Ironically, the builders were then at work on Paddy’s studio: a large, high-ceilinged room with a bedroom and bathroom attached. Once it was finished Paddy was sure the work would forge ahead, but the industrious workers he had had in May were slacking off by late July. ‘About twenty different people are doing to me exactly what I’m doing to you,’ he told Jock.
I know it’s no consolation, but if I am causing anguish, anger, sorrow and disappointment in Albemarle Street, the same difficulties are being visited on me here twenty-fold … The studio for writing in, the power-house for prose about thirty yards from the house in sequestered silence, was supposed to be finished three months ago. The shell is up, but carpenters, tile makers, plumbers, electricians, glaziers – every single artisan whose combined efforts would make the thing habitable is doing a Leigh Fermor on me …14
And of course there were guests: Peter Quennell and his wife in April, and the new Ambassador, Sir Michael Stewart, with his wife Damaris in June. George and Maro Seferis came for a few days in August, followed by Freya Stark and Patrick Kinross. George Jellicoe came with Philippa, and they loved the place so much that they took the house every summer from then on. George used to jump into the sea from a great rock that jutted out over the water – it was known ever afterwards as Jellicoe’s Leap. One person whom Paddy and Joan would have loved to see at Kardamyli was Iris Tree, but she died of cancer in May.
Later that year, Paddy went to France to meet up with Pomme Donici, who was in France to see her daughter Ina. He took Pomme down to Grasse to see their old friend Costa, who had taken the photographs for The Traveller’s Tree. From there they went to stay with Xan and Daphne Fielding in Uzès. Paddy was worried about Xan, who was under tremendous strain. He was embroiled in a court case of Byzantine complexity, which concerned the palatial villa in Nice overlooking the sea where he had been brought up. It had been torn down years before to make way for the Corniche; but the family felt they had a claim to a considerable sum in compensation, and if it were upheld, Xan stood to make a fortune. He spent a huge amount of money on the case, which was being handled by his brother-in-law.
Xan’s brother-in-law is either very crooked or a lunatic [Paddy told Joan], and this delay and worry over the case … has driven Xan nearly mad; terrifically nervy and frowning and anxious. The bugger-in-law’s false promises have nearly landed them in terrible soup, from which Derek Jackson nobly rescued them two months ago … Daphne, in spite of her several drawbacks and a dash of arrested development, is very good and calming and kind … 15
On top of all this, Xan had made an extraordinary discovery. The woman he had always thought of as his mother turned out to be his grandmother. Her daughter Mary had married a Captain Alexander Wallace of the 52nd Sikh Frontier Force in Calcutta, and had died giving birth to Xan. So he had been adopted into his grandparents’ family, his father had never been mentioned again, and he had grown up with several brothers and sisters who were in fact his uncles and aunts. ‘He … tells the still only half-comprehended tale with considerable humour and bewilderment.’16
Larry Durrell lived not far away from Uzès at Sommières, so Paddy and Pomme, Xan and Daphne went over to visit him. He lived ‘in one of the ugliest and gloomiest Charles Addams houses I’ve ever seen,’ wrote Paddy, ‘ingeniously uglified still further by all sorts of recent changes. But Larry was better than ever, not nearly as circular as they say, ebullient and full of beans and ideas, waiting when we arrived with a giant magnum.’17
They did not go back to England that Christmas, but spent it at Kardamyli with Barbara and Nico Ghika. Then in the New Year they set off for the Far East, leaving on 20 January, accompanied by Ian Wigham and Joan’s brother Graham. The journey, which was to take several weeks, began in Formosa, now Taiwan. Hong Kong was a mere staging post to Cambodia and Angkor Wat, followed by Bangkok, ‘which has become a tangle of Edgware Roads from a sort of tropical Venice in ten years’.18 Bali was all the more beautiful by comparison. They flew to central Java to see the great Buddhist shrine at Borobudur, and then to Madras where they said goodbye to Graham. After visiting any number of temples, they flew north to Bombay where Ian left them. Paddy and Joan then went on to the great painted caves of Ajanta, and the carved ones of Ellora. ‘Dealing with us, the Indians have a chip on one shoulder, a bunch of forget-me-nots on the other; and so, we began to notice, have we …’19 From Delhi they flew to Nepal and Katmandu where, in a car belonging to a Nepalese prince with whom Joan had danced barefoot in Bombay three decades before, they drove into the terraced foothills of the Himalayas.
They were back in Greece in March, just in time to hear George Seferis’s denunciation of the Colonels’ regime. It had been recorded in Athens, smuggled out of the country and broadcast on the Greek language service of the BBC. Over the coming days the statement was reprinted everywhere, even in newspapers loyal to the Colonels. There was much criticism from official sources, but Seferis stood his ground, and no one dared touch Greece’s first Nobel prize-winner. In contrast to this triumph came news that left Paddy feeling very shaken: Ricki Huston had been killed in a car accident. ‘I feel dreadfully upset,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper. ‘Nothing but sweetness, kindness and fun, and long years ago in Ireland, dashing protection from massacre by wild fox hunters.’20
Among their guests that summer were Paddy’s sister Vanessa, and John Betjeman – toothy, crowing with laughter and delighted with everything. In his letter of thanks to Joan he wrote:
Oh, I did enjoy myself at Kardamyli. Of course that big room, as I’ve written to Paddy, is one of the rooms in the world. It is the thought in everything you look at which delights me about the house … I’ve never seen you so beautiful, not even when with eyes as big as your cheeks and downy soft and straight, you stood in the Ritz. I’ve written Jock a long letter giving him news of George [Seferis] and telling him also about the house – how it is really a book of Paddy’s and more lasting.21
The last sentence must have given Jock a wry smile.
‘It was marvellous having John B. here,’ Paddy told Jock. ‘He was funny, absolutely perfect, lots of reading aloud from Dickens and Tennyson. He left us a beautiful rather maiden-auntish watercolour of a bit of the house, entitled “A Glimpse of Old Mani: John Betjeman, 1904.” I’ll get it put into an Oxford frame.’22 But the main subject of his letter to Jock was not Betjeman but George Psychoundakis, who wondered whether there were any Cretan Runner royalties waiting for him at John Murray. George had not made a single drachma in six months, and his credit with the grocer had reached its limit. On top of that, because so many foreigners came to visit him (thanks to the success of The Cretan Runner), he was widely suspected of stealing a valuable cross that had disappeared from the village church.
One of the reasons George was so poor was that he had begun a new project that was taking up a great deal of time: he was translating the Odyssey into the Cretan tongue, using the metre of the Erotokritos. Paddy was enthusiastic and encouraging, and hoped he could interest George Seferis in it too. ‘It would be splendid if something came of it,’ he wrote to Seferis. ‘He is an angelic chap, and seems to have been dogged by ill-luck while the unjust prosper.’23 Seferis was unimpressed, and thought Psychoundakis’s project overambitious. ‘The best solution for your friend’s problems is to find for him a good regular job which can allow him to nourish his children’, was his blunt conclusion.24 Paddy sent George some money, and so did Jock; and, undaunted, Psychoundakis carried on with his translation.
Paddy too, after a fashion, was preparing for work. ‘Good news – the studio is finished at last,’ he told Jock.25
With generous shelves and bookcases, a huge desk and plenty of room to pace over the stone floor, by November 1969 the ‘power-house for prose’ at Kardamyli was ready at last. Sunlight streamed in through the windows that overlooked the garden, while in the conical Băleni fireplace set into the corner, the logs were laid ready for the cold weather. ‘I’m in it. There are … pens, paper, no guests, a winter ahead. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, hoping the veil of sloth and procrastination and distraction may lift and the Muse tiptoe in. Not a word …’26
The image of luring the Muse into this beautiful space would work only if Paddy was then willing to sit down and pay her some attention, but having a big room of his own gave rise to a new set of delightful distractions. His books and works of reference had to be arranged and revisited. He had subscriptions to most of the literary magazines in English and French, as well as a number of smaller literary journals, all of which suggested more books that he wanted to read. Letters, both reading and writing them, took up a considerable amount of time – particularly those whose replies had been put off too long, and began ‘In sackcloth and ashes’.
Above all, there was the creative exercise of playing with words. Looking over his letters and notebooks, it becomes evident that Paddy’s most beguiling distraction was always his own mind, filled with poems and songs, puns and riddles, limericks, sonnets, lists of hats and stars, and verses by the yard. All were composed in a mood of kaleidoscopic energy and inventiveness, drawing on the vocabulary of at least eight languages which existed in his head in a state of perpetual acrobatics. The best of his poems and pastiches were polished with care and often given as presents to his friends. In the winter of 1969, he was in the mood for verses. ‘Voix d’outretombe’ is a Victorian ballad about a friendly old mass-murderer; while ‘O Gemme of Joye and Jasper of Jocunditie: Soho Thoughts from Abroad’ imitates the alliteration and rhythm of a poem by William Dunbar, ‘London thou art the floure of cities all’.
As a dedicated practitioner, Paddy was very interested in the work of other writers in this anarchic branch of letters. In a later review of George Seferis’s verses for children, Paddy wrote that while the English were naturally more playful, the real skill seems to have developed in French. In this language, tightly laced into its grammar and controlled by the dictates of the Académie française, ‘genius triumphed over the vetoes into dazzling feats’. He mentions the liberties with rhyme taken by Victor Hugo and Mallarmé; Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, and how he had devoted an entire edition of the journal Oulipo to translations of ‘Jabberwocky’. Paul Cerdan, Laforgue, Apollinaire, Tristan Derème, Léon-Paul Fargue had all been experimenters. And among an infinite variety of constructions Paddy cites holorimes, anagrams, spoonerisms, back formations, artificial malaprops, portmanteau words, and the ‘verses in transition’ of Eugene Jolas, ‘which relied entirely on improvised onomatopoeia’.27
In the spring of 1970, Paddy and Joan set off on a journey round western Turkey with Michael and Damaris Stewart. Michael Stewart was a scholarly diplomat who had taken up his position as Ambassador to Greece just as the Colonels took power, and he and his wife had already been to stay twice at Kardamyli. They knew Turkey well since Michael had worked in Ankara for four years, and both spoke Turkish. The party travelled by road in the Stewarts’ open-topped Land Rover, an odyssey that Paddy listed using the Hellenistic names: Caria, Lycia, Pisidia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Karamania, Lycaonia, Iconium, Ephesus and Smyrna. He could not get over the magnificence of the sites they saw, nor their remoteness: ‘Vast theatres with cornfields running into the orchestra stalls, huge cities in folds of mountains overlooking mythological rivers, colonnaded Byzantine harbours at the end of small estuaries, as overgrown with jungle as Yucatan or Angkor …’28