Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  As for Paddy’s own work, it had not been a very productive year. ‘Please do not fall into the deadly sin of despair about my appalling slowness,’ he wrote to Jock, ‘though I can’t blame you if you are assaulted by it now and then. I wish I knew what slows things up sometimes, then sometimes sends them shooting forwards at high speed. I’m going through one of the former at the moment, but believe that one of the latter is looming … I sometimes regret having settled so definitely in Greece, but don’t tell anyone!’24

  By this, Paddy meant that life in Greece had created time-consuming obligations that he had not foreseen when they were building Kardamyli. One example was the plaque. Another was George Psychoundakis, who was still struggling to make ends meet and was easily swayed by malicious neighbours who told him that he was surely being cheated by John Murray. Paddy spent a lot of time trying to persuade him otherwise, and pressing John Murray to send him any royalties owed promptly. Thanks to Paddy’s lobbying, Psychoundakis’s translation into Cretan of the Iliad and the Odyssey was at last being published, and in 1981 he was honoured by the Academy of Athens, who awarded him a prize of a hundred thousand drachmas.

  Nico and Barbara Ghika were still at the heart of Paddy and Joan’s Greek life, particularly since they had now bought a property on Corfu. In the 1970s, a few years after the destruction of their house in Hydra, Nico and Barbara and her son, Jacob Rothschild, bought an abandoned olive press at Kanonas at the northern end of the island. The olive presses were restored, wings added, and two airy courtyards framed views of woodland, coastal villages and the distant Albanian coast.

  Yet Paddy’s English friends sometimes wondered whether he regretted being so tied to Greece. Andrew Devonshire recalled dining alone with him one night. He seemed very downcast, and confided that he missed London, literary life and his friends more than he cared to admit. Ann Fleming had noticed this feeling in him too, though he was still invited to the great parties of the day – one of which was Diana Phipps’ Opera Ball given at Buscot in the summer of 1978. Paddy stayed with Ann for the evening. On discovering he had forgotten the stockings that would complete his outfit as the eighteenth-century French poet André Chénier (subject of an opera by Giordano), he was obliged to borrow a pair of tights from a member of the staff at Sevenhampton. In a letter to Michael Astor, Ann wrote that she had ‘tried to prevent Paddy over-tipping the parlour maid, “but look here darling, I went to the ball in her tights, and they’re most frightfully laddered, swine that I am.” Poor Paddy hates his visits here more and more, no circle of friends in London, and somehow out of things, although still the life and soul of …’25 The circle of friends he did have was diminishing. Michael died of cancer in 1980, and Ann a year later.

  In 1982 another book came out in Greece, attacking British involvement in the Cretan resistance. This time it was Xan rather than Paddy who was maligned,fn2 but – as Joan reported to Vanessa – ‘he [Paddy] is terribly upset about it.’ It helped that they were now seeing a lot more of Xan: as Joan put it, they could ‘share the rage and the unhappiness’.26 At the same time, these new perspectives changed nothing in the villages where they were known and loved.

  Feelings towards the heroes of the Cretan resistance seemed equally warm in the wider Cretan diaspora. In May the following year, 1983, Paddy and Manoli Paterakis were guests of the Cretan Union of America. They were honoured by a tremendous round of lectures and dinners, toasts and ceremonies; but what he remembered best was seeing Manoli with a pensive expression, at the top of the Empire State building in New York. Paddy asked him what he was thinking. ‘“I’m just thinking that back in Crete it would be just about time to go up the folds and feed the ewes.”’27

  The Mani was no longer as remote as it had been, and even the Leigh Fermors’ house was under threat. Their neighbour to the south owned the little ravine leading down to the pebbled beach that Joan could see from her window. Without warning he began to cut a road right through the ravine, to link the main road and the beach. ‘A bulldozer with a 5m wide blade. Can you imagine the havoc and desecration?’ Paddy wrote to Aymer Maxwell.28 They were appalled by the prospect of what the road might bring: houses, tavernas, discos, cars, and all the terrors of Greece’s burgeoning tourist industry, unshackled by any planning restrictions. Yet they need not have worried. One or two private houses were built overlooking the sea, but the threatened nightclub never progressed beyond a concrete shell.

  Tourism was taking root in Kardamyli too. When Paddy and Joan had first travelled in the Mani in the early 1950s, hardly anyone had seen a foreigner. Now foreigners came in a seasonal influx, bringing a prosperity never seen before. Their neighbours to the north, the Ponireas family, built a hotel (partly modelled on the Leigh Fermor house) called the Kalamitsi, a few hundred yards through the olive groves. This proved very useful, for it was far more convenient to have their overflow of guests a five-minute walk away than to lodge them in the village, and in time Paddy came to rely on Nicos and Theano Ponireas for the use of the hotel’s fax and photocopier. Then Lela, who had been steadily saving money, opened a taverna in the village overlooking the sea; while the children of Strati Mourzinos, the fisherman whom Paddy had made the last Emperor of Byzantium in Mani, set up a supermarket at the other end of Kardamyli.

  From about the mid-1980s, Paddy and Joan began to think about what would happen to their house after they were gone. At first, they offered it to friends; but no one wanted the responsibility of so big a house in so remote a spot. The answer came from Paddy’s Maniot friend, the politician Tzannis Tzannetakis, who suggested that they leave it to the Benaki Museum. It seemed an ideal solution. The Benaki would keep the house as it was, for use as a conference centre or a writers’ retreat. Paddy was particularly taken with the idea, since he had depended so much in his youth on people giving him house-space.

  He wrote for the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement, and more and more people asked him to write obituaries, contributions and introductions to books. Incapable of saying no (and happy to postpone the real work in hand), he obliged – though friends often had to wait a long time for the work to appear. Among the most successful of his pieces written in the late seventies and early eighties are his portrait memoirs. There is Auberon Herbert (1979), in the uniform of the Carpathian Lancers, instructing the barman at Wilton’s how to make the cocktail that he, as a Catholic, refused to call a Bloody Mary; the art historian Roger Hinks (1984), whose scholarly prejudices were expressed with barbed humour; and a happy afternoon at the Guards Depot, drawing heraldic helmets and mantling and shields with Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk (1986).29

  Stephen Spender was sent an early copy of a book of Roger Hinks’s Journals, to which Paddy had contributed the piece mentioned above. ‘I do think you are extraordinarily evocative, vivid and moving about people you know,’ wrote Spender, and admitted to being rather surprised by this talent, since Paddy was obviously not ‘an empathizing introvert … And yet by some opposite process of seeing them from the outside – visually … [by] deducing all sorts of things about their inner workings … you can bring people to life quite wonderfully. I wish you would do a book of characters: Cyril Connolly, Roger Hinks, Ann Fleming, Greeks, Turks – all sorts of people you have known.’30

  All this time, Paddy had been working on the second volume of his book on the great walk. One might imagine that the enthusiasm which had greeted the first volume would have made the second one easier to write. He had found his voice and his style, and a devoted readership was eagerly awaiting the next instalment. But this is to forget how many metamorphoses the first volume had undergone, whilst the very success of A Time of Gifts had created the one thing he could never cope with: a sense of expectation.

  In March 1982, Paddy decided that he needed to refresh his memory about Hungary and Rumania. He flew to Budapest, hired a Volvo, and drove all over the Great Hungarian Plain. ‘Most of my halts were at places I had stayed at of old, a series of minor Bridesheads really …’31
At Körösladány, where Paddy had stayed in the spring of 1934, he met Johann (Hansi) Meran, the son of the house: Hansi had been twelve and Paddy nineteen, at the time of his visit. Count Meran had spent ten years in Siberia after the war, and returned to marry a girl in his home village and to till the communally owned fields. ‘With him, visiting from Vienna, was his sister Marcsi …“Do you [remember] that table,” they said, pointing to a rickety Biedermeier affair. I said no. “You sat writing in a big green book all the morning. We used to peep round the library door” … It was all very moving.’32 He slipped over the wall of O’Kígyós, the house bristling with turrets and finials in whose courtyard he had played bicycle polo with the Wenckheims. It was now a school, but the gardens were well kept, and the old Slovak gardeners still remembered the Wenckheims with affection.

  From Hungary he flew to Bucharest, hired another car and drove to Pucioasa, where Pomme was still teaching English and French. ‘Everyone seems to like and respect her there very much; but she’s utterly lonely and lives in books and music. We talked for countless hours on end, laughed a great deal. I took her lots of things, which she wore like a child on Christmas Day.’ Again, he did not dare stay with her more than twenty-four hours for fear of attracting official attention. He flew to Transylvania, where he revisited several houses – ‘nearly all loony bins now, with wild-eyed figures mopping and mowing among the tree-trunks …’33 Among them were the Palladian house at Borosjenö, the house at Zám where he and Xenia had listened to the nightingales in her moonlit garden, and Elemér’s thick-walled manor house at Guraszáda, now an experimental plant nursery. ‘In all these places, the locals were thrilled to learn that I had been a friend of the old folks. [At Guraszáda they] said, “Have some barack made out of Mr Elemér’s plums. Please give him our respects. We feel guilty living in a stolen house, but it’s not our fault.”’34

  The oppressive hand of the state was far more stifling in Rumania than it had been in Hungary, as Paddy observed when he gave people lifts. ‘I gave lifts to about 15 people a day,’ he told Vanessa, ‘as transport is very scarce. If there were two people together, and I said, How’s everything here? (still fairly fluent!) they would say, “very well!” But if they were alone, they flew off the handle about the regime, the poverty, the cruelty and the tyranny with astonishing violence …’35 He considered going back to Băleni, but thought better of it. He knew the house had been destroyed, and the changes would be too painful.

  Paddy was very fit and healthy for a man in his late sixties. When at home he swam every day from his pebbled cove, and went for long walks into the hills. His now iron-grey hair had lost none of its thickness, and despite a prodigious intake of alcohol, his constitution and his memory were the envy of his contemporaries. There would be no more mountaineering; but there was still one physical challenge that he wanted to achieve while he still had strength and energy.

  In October 1984, at the age of sixty-nine, he decided to swim the Hellespont: the winding channel that joins the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean, and separates Asia from Europe. Joan, Xan and Magouche had come to cheer him on, and they all booked into a hotel at Çanakkale on the Asian side, overlooking the narrowest point of the Dardanelles. Leander and Lord Byron had both started from ancient Sestos, a mile or so to the north on the European side, but a Turkish military zone had put that site out of bounds. A helpful guide called Sevki Suda found a boat with a boatman to accompany him, and Paddy dived into the Hellespont just north of Çanakkale on the morning of 13 October. With Joan and Sevki in the stern to keep an eye out for shipping and shout encouragement and directions, all went well at first. Lighthouses, minarets and forts on the opposite bank ‘changed places with heartening speed, and the current didn’t seem very strong’. It only made itself felt when he thought he was about halfway, and ‘the water became ruffled, and much harder to push through. Joan and Sevki both kept urging “Ten minutes fast now and you’ll be there!” but I could see by the speed of the changing scenery how fast the current was running.’

  ‘So here I was,’ he continued, ‘floundering across the wake of the Argo, a mile north of Xerxes’ and Alexander’s bridges of boats, only a few leagues from Troy and about a mile south of the point where Leander, Lord Byron and Mr Ekenhead [who accompanied him] swam across; but too concerned with the current to think about them in more than fitful snatches …’ He was advancing, he felt, with the gait of a Victorian clergyman and at one point, as the channel widened and the European shore slid alarmingly into the distance, he thought he might be swept out to sea.

  Paddy had been in the water for over two hours and fifty-five minutes, and had swum about three miles before he felt pebbles under his feet on the European side, and Joan was shouting, ‘You’ve done it!’ He was hauled into the boat, utterly exhausted but jubilant. ‘We headed full tilt for Çanakkale and Asia, where Xan and Magouche were waiting with champagne; they had followed our course with field-glasses from a balcony, like Zeus and Hera on Tenedos.’

  He and Joan were too exhausted to eat on their return. They slept for hours, after which Paddy hobbled off for a Turkish bath and a massage to ease his aching and petrified limbs. They all celebrated that night with a feast and many bottles of wine; after which, feeling light as air, Paddy sat and smoked a narghile in a coffee shop. ‘I knew I was only the last in a long line of copy-cats; but I felt sure I had beaten all records for slowness and length of immersion; certain, too, that this was a wreath no future swimmer was likely to snatch at. Serenity was complete.’36

  That winter the writer Bruce Chatwin came out to Kardamyli, to finish a book he had been struggling with for seventeen years. Originally called The Nomadic Alternative, it would finally emerge in 1987 as The Songlines (Paddy reviewed the book in the Spectator). The Leigh Fermors had first met him in 1970, through Magouche Fielding, and Paddy described him as a ‘Very very extraordinary, highly gifted, rare person’.37 Like Paddy, Chatwin was an omnivorous reader and interested in everything; but there was an intensity about him, a need to find the essential and strip it free of everything else, that made him seem more restless and driven. Over the course of his life Bruce had many mentors, and Paddy was one of the last and most revered. He admired the breadth of his knowledge, and the agility of his mental cross-referencing that enabled him to link divergent subjects in astonishing ways. In literary style, however, they were aiming for opposite poles. While Paddy’s prose was a rich and elaborate tapestry built up in layers, Chatwin was aiming for an austere simplicity that used as few words as possible to maximum effect.

  After staying with Paddy and Joan for a few days in early December, Chatwin moved into the Kalamitsi Hotel. He stayed there for the next seven months. He often strode down the path to eat, drink and talk with the Leigh Fermors, and he and Paddy went for long walks in the hills. Solvitur ambulando, said Paddy – it is solved by walking. Bruce, who passionately believed that walking constituted the sovereign remedy for almost every mental travail, was delighted and immediately wrote it down in his Moleskine notebook.38 Another bond was the anguish of writing. The construction of The Songlines gave Chatwin a lot of trouble, and as a fellow perfectionist, Paddy could understand only too well the struggles he was having to pull it together.

  They talked incessantly, feeding off each other’s knowledge and curiosity, and after Bruce’s death Paddy described the scale of his conversational range to his biographer: ‘Abstruse art-forms and movements of thought, history, geology, anthropology and all their kindred sciences were absorbed like breathing … There was always John Donne or Rimbaud to think about, paleontological riddles to brood over, speculation on the influence of Simonides of Ceos on the memory techniques of counter-Reformation Jesuits in China, and the earliest whereabouts of Mankind.’39 Four years later, in February 1989, Bruce’s widow Elizabeth brought his ashes to Kardamyli. He had asked her to bury them near the tenth-century Byzantine chapel of St Nicholas in Chora, built on a promontory among the rocky hills that tumble down to the sea. Pa
ddy, Joan and Elizabeth left his ashes under an olive tree, and made a libation of wine to the gods.

  By July 1985, Paddy had almost finished the second volume of his great walk, Between the Woods and the Water – a title that echoed what Saki referred to as ‘those mysterious regions between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea’. A month later, he received the cover design by John Craxton.

  Their partnership had begun decades before, when Craxton drew the illustrations for A Time to Keep Silence. Craxton’s style sprang from the English romantic tradition of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. He had been in Greece almost as long as Paddy and had settled in Chania, where he drew its waterfront bars full of cats and sailors, as well as the goats and the stunted, thorny trees of the Cretan mountains. Paddy and Joan had collected several of his paintings, and Paddy had insisted on a Craxton jacket for every one of his books published by John Murray. But he did not like the image John produced for Between the Woods and the Water, and was disappointed with the figure on horseback that represented his younger self. Whereas he had been fair-haired on the cover of A Time of Gifts, now he had been given ‘a cropped dark head like a match-stick’s, narrow champagne-bottle shoulders, and arms like sausages …’40 He felt that it should have been the cover to a book called ‘Pony-trekking in Cumberland by Wendy Brown’,41 but his complaints were overruled and the cover remained unchanged.

  In October 1985, Paddy and Joan set off on a tour of German Baroque churches with Xan and Magouche, after which they followed the Danube as far as Vienna. Here the party split up, with Paddy carrying on to Hungary. He had with him a typescript of Between the Woods and the Water, parts of which he wanted to show to two friends in Budapest. The first was Elemér von Klobusitzky, his Transylvanian host in 1934. Called ‘István’ in Between the Woods and the Water, it was Elemér who had introduced Paddy to Xenia Csernovits. The second was Rudolf Fischer.