Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

by Artemis Cooper

  An Australian of Transylvanian origin, Fischer was language editor for the New Hungarian Quarterly, a broad-ranging journal dealing with history, politics and economics. Paddy had received a fan letter from him after the publication of A Time of Gifts, from which he gathered that Fischer’s breadth of knowledge was matched by a meticulous attention to fact and detail. Fischer had pointed out several mistakes in A Time of Gifts, and Paddy was determined that its sequel should not be published without Fischer’s eagle eye having scanned it first. In the Introduction to Between the Woods and the Water, he acknowledged a debt to Fischer that was ‘beyond reckoning’.42

  Having left Fischer with a copy of the typescript, Paddy went off to find his friend Elemér. Elemér now lived on the eastern side of Budapest, in a bleak concrete block of flats surrounded by rubbish and graffiti. Paddy had taken him out to lunch on his previous visit in 1982, and hoped to do the same now; but his friend did not answer the telephone, and at the block of flats he was told that Elemér had broken his leg and was in hospital. The following day, with the help of Fischer’s wife Dagmar who drove him all over the city, Paddy tracked down Elemér to an old people’s home in Pest, where he lay in a room with five other men.

  Elemér seemed very tired, and despite explanations and frequent references to mutual friends he could not grasp who Paddy was. ‘Greece!’ he repeated, after Paddy said he had a house there. ‘My old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor lives in Greece.’ – ‘Yes, Elemér, it’s me, it’s Paddy!’ – ‘No, no, you are much too young … But if you go to Greece tell him I’m here, I hope he remembers me.’43 Paddy felt wrung out by the visit, and knew he would never see Elemér again. Oppressed by these sad thoughts he set off for Sofia in Bulgaria, where his mood sank even lower. In the half century since he had been there last, ‘the cheery little Balkan capital [had changed into] the HQ of a dim and remote Soviet province … I had meant to explore the whole of Bulgaria in a hired car as a refresher for vol III, but caught a bus to Salonika instead.’44

  Between the Woods and the Water came out in October 1986. The glittering gold and silver winter of A Time of Gifts has given way to early summer, and this book is suffused with blue skies, and sunlight seen through a canopy of leaves. It begins with a rout of parties and nightclubs with the fast set in Budapest, before Paddy sets off on horseback to cross the Great Hungarian Plain. Then comes the series of friendly castles and manor houses he stayed in that summer, with their eccentric owners – Count Lajos Wenckheim and his bustards, Count Józsi Wenckheim and the game of bicycle polo, and Count Jenö Teleki, the passionate entomologist whose Scottish nanny had left his English peppered with Scottish phrases.

  Every house and its inhabitants are affectionately romanticized. As Graham Coster complained in the Independent, ‘Every girl is pretty, every man dashing. Horses are strong, dogs eager’, and the result is ‘a quite ruthlessly pleasant journey’.45 Paddy was aware that the people and places he described seem ‘improbably perfect … but I can only set it down as it struck me.’46

  The country-house life reaches its climax with the high summer idyll at Guraszáda with Elemér, and Paddy’s affair with Xenia Csernovits, now disguised as ‘Angéla’. To soothe the ache of parting, he leaves the road when walking south to lose himself for a while in the forested wilderness of the central Carpathians – one of the most hauntingly beautiful and timeless passages of descriptive prose he ever wrote. The book ends with a meditation on the little Turkish island of Ada Kaleh, now submerged under thousands of cubic metres of water, created by the huge dam across the Iron Gates of the Danube.

  Most reviewers agreed that the new volume was a worthy successor to A Time of Gifts. John Ure in the Times Literary Supplement wrote that ‘you never quite know what the next few pages will have in store, but you can be reasonably certain that you will be carried on by the sheer momentum of the whole unstructured performance.’47 John Gross, reviewing the American edition, agreed, adding that the book should be read ‘for its sumptuous colouring, the acuteness of his responses, the loving precision with which he conjures up people and places’.48 Almost all remarked on how long they had had to wait for this second volume of the trilogy, and expressed the hope that the last volume would follow soon. The stakes for volume III had just been raised.

  Between the Woods and the Water won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and the International PEN/Time Life Silver Pen Award. In England at least, Paddy was now at the peak of his fame and success, recognized as one of the great prose stylists of his generation. And since he was now approaching the status of a national treasure, the television arts programme, the South Bank Show, commissioned a documentary film about him presented by Melvyn Bragg.

  The programme took several days to make, using different locations in and around Kardamyli. Although Paddy and Joan had dreaded the intrusion and upheaval at first, they liked the crew and kept them well supplied with refreshments. (This was much appreciated: John Updike, a recent subject, had offered them nothing at all.) Melvyn Bragg came out for two days to do the interviews, which always made Paddy nervous. He was perfectly prepared to talk about his experiences, and some – like the Horace Ode shared with General Kreipe – he never tired of. But as soon as the interviewer sought to penetrate deeper and inquire into his writing, his natural tendency was to deflect the question. Bragg, however, was an experienced interviewer who had done his homework. He wanted to know how much Paddy relied on memory, how much on notes, and how much on his well-stocked imagination.

  ‘I go back to the place that memory plays in your writing,’ said Melvyn, ‘because one is struck again and again by detail remembered from thirty or forty years before. However intensive your notes, you can’t have covered everything …’ – ‘Yes,’ said Paddy. This was not a helpful answer, so Bragg suggested that in the course of the long walk, books and solitude had built up the ‘muscles’ of his memory. Gratefully clutching at the straw, Paddy replied, ‘Do you know, I’ve never thought of it – I think perhaps they might have – I hope so.’ Then he described the deliberate act of remembering in terms of an old and dusty mosaic, that cannot be seen until water has been poured over it.

  It seems to me that thinking hard about a particular part of one’s past is comparable to this pouring, flushing water onto a mosaic until everything is clear in the end. And then one can corroborate it with all sorts of other things, like a few old letters, you know, one’s diaries come in handy, a few things scribbled down which one couldn’t really put into place … 49

  Bragg also asked him how he was getting on with the third volume. Paddy admitted that the success of the last two was making him ‘a bit nervy’ about the third, but he was masking a deeper malaise. ‘Sloth in writers’, wrote Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise, ‘is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict … Perfectionists are notoriously lazy and all true artistic indolence is deeply neurotic; a pain not a pleasure.’50

  For reasons that Paddy rarely talked about and seldom confronted, he could not seem to lift volume III off the ground. Perhaps part of the trouble was that most of the final third of the ‘Great Trudge’ had already been written. ‘Parallax’, which Jock had renamed ‘A Youthful Journey’ (1963–4), stopped just short of Constantinople. He also had his original diary (1934–5), which preserved in note form his doings in the city and included the account he had written at the time of his journey to Mount Athos. He wanted to end the book with the Venizelist revolution and the gallop over the Orliako bridge, which had already appeared in Roumeli (1966). All three elements were very different in tone, and finding an overarching voice that would pull them together seemed an almost impossible challenge. Moreover, there was another thought; one so dark and bleak that it could scarcely be put into words, except perhaps to Joan. The whole subject was beginning to feel stale, barren, written out, and he feared he no longer had the strength to bring it back to life.

  Paddy had been able to wriggle out of writing any more books about Greece after Roumeli, but Betw
een the Woods and the Water ends with the implacable words, TO BE CONCLUDED. There was no escape.

  21

  ‘For now the time of gifts is gone’

  A few months after the filming of the South Bank Show, Paddy thought that the logjam he was wrestling with on volume III might be eased by another visit to Rumania and Bulgaria. He wanted to do the Rumanian part of the trip alone, and would then join Joan and Janetta Parladé in Sofia.

  Paddy was already well acquainted with the destructiveness of East European Communism. On his previous trips to Transylvania he had seen the roads going nowhere, the hunger and waste brought about by collectivization, and what Dervla Murphy described as the ‘ugly, impoverished, dispirited villages … their sturdy dwellings replaced by dreary rows of jerry-built farm-workers’ blocks’.1 But in spite of these sad transformations, Paddy’s last two visits had reaffirmed his memories and inspired the writing of Between the Woods and the Water.

  This time, something went very wrong. When Paddy arrived in Sofia, Joan and Janetta were dismayed to see how downcast he looked, with scarcely a word about where he had been or what he had done. As they set off in their hired car to explore Bulgaria, things did not improve. Apart from a fleeting visit to Sofia in 1985, Paddy had not travelled in Bulgaria since before the war; he was ‘utterly crushed’ by what he saw, so Janetta reported. Rudolf Fischer pointed out that the changes in Bulgaria were very similar to those he had seen in Rumania, yet according to Janetta, he seemed dismayed and disoriented. ‘He kept saying “Just around the next corner we’ll see such and such”, and it never appeared. Most of the best things he remembered were Turkish, but all the Turkish buildings and every vestige of Turkish culture had been demolished.’ At one point they came to a place which he said he knew would be untouched – ‘and there were four hideous tower blocks in the middle of a wilderness: one could not imagine why they had been built.’ Farming was still largely unmechanized, and Paddy was comforted by the sight of so many horses and carts, and people out in the fields with scythes. Joan teased him for being a Rip Van Winkle: ‘she said it was as if someone had come to England still expecting to find people in smocks and gaiters, sucking on straws.’ Sooner or later, they hoped, something would come along to jog a memory or evoke an image, but the drab concrete horror of it all seemed to do the opposite. ‘As if’, said Janetta, ‘his own memories were being eradicated as we watched … The whole thing had been a terrible mistake.’2

  The opportunity to visit Rumania again came in February 1990, when the Daily Telegraph commissioned him to write about the new, post-Ceauşescu republic. The December Revolution had started in Timişoara, when thousands of demonstrators surged on to the streets in the teeth of the Rumanian security forces. The uprising spread to Bucharest, and on Christmas Day 1989, after an abortive attempt to escape by helicopter, the Ceauşescus were sentenced by a hastily convened tribunal, put up against a wall and shot. Paddy arrived on 22 February, to be met by Alec Russell, the Telegraph’s correspondent in Bucharest, and Clare Arron, the photographer who was to accompany him. It was only six weeks since the fall of the most brutal regime in Eastern Europe, and with the future so uncertain and the present in a state of flux, Russell described it as a time ‘when every moment was spent in the present, not the past’.3 Russell was struck by what a good listener Paddy was, open to every idea and insight while diffident about putting forward any of his own. Yet Alexis ‘Bishi’ Catargi, an old Bucharesti friend of Paddy’s, remarked a few weeks later that Paddy had seemed very sad and depressed at this time.

  Leaving Russell in Bucharest, Paddy and Clare Arron hired a car and began driving around the country. Petrol, food and places to stay were all hard to find, but Paddy had come prepared. He had several bottles of whisky in his suitcase which he decanted into a hip flask kept in his coat pocket, and bars of chocolate for the children. But since huge stale loaves of bread were often all there was to buy in the shops, they ate most of the chocolate with the bread.

  They visited Timişoara, and saw Cathedral Square with its forest of crosses and candles. In Cluj he had a long conversation with Doina Cornea, who had stood up to the regime and suffered for it at the hands of the Securitate: ‘Her interviews with the public prosecutor’, wrote Paddy, ‘must have resembled Cauchon’s with St Joan.’4

  As they entered Moldavia, Clare lost control of the car on the icy road and it slewed into a tree. ‘Now if I had been driving,’ said Paddy reassuringly, ‘we’d have done that long ago.’5 For a while they thought they might have to spend the night in the freezing car, but they were rescued by a teacher of mathematics who took them to Suceava, arranged for the car to be mended, and gave them breakfast next morning. That night they went to a concert, given by Moldavian musicians from north Bukovina, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944. This was the first time they had been able to cross the frontier, and the audience and musicians wept as they sang their traditional songs together. Paddy knew a good many of the songs as well, and wept too. ‘At moments like these,’ he wrote later, ‘it is hard not to feel that things will get better.’6

  Among the visitors to Kardamyli that summer was Antony Beevor, who was researching a book on the Battle of Crete and the campaign of resistance that followed. Its publication was scheduled to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, in May 1991. Because it was the first to give an overview of the Cretan resistance, both Paddy and Xan went through the proofs with considerable care. And though Joan and Xan both urged him not to over-correct, Paddy could not resist altering any passage that might cast the Cretans in an unfavourable light. Coming across one grisly detail he wrote in the margin, ‘Oh dear … I wish this bit of dirty linen could remain in the basket …’7fn1

  It was not until two years later that Paddy was at last given a glimpse into the German view of their occupation of Crete, and the Kreipe Operation. Billy Moss’s daughter Gabriella Bullock was going through some old papers of her father’s when she came across a letter in German, dated 27 September 1950. It had been written by a Dr Ludwig Beutin, who had just read Ill Met by Moonlight. He pointed out such details as Billy’s giveaway puttees, the General’s impatience with roadblocks, and his unpopularity – ‘many units were jokingly accused of having abducted the General themselves … and many a raki was drunk to your health.’ Paddy was fascinated by this view from the other side, and bitterly disappointed that he had not known about it forty years earlier. With Dr Beutin’s help and contacts, so much more could have been learnt about the last days of the occupation; but Beutin had died in 1956, and now it was too late.

  ‘Paddy is very well,’ Joan wrote to Janetta in early 1991, ‘tremendously busy with everything except his book. I daren’t mention it but I fear he’s badly stuck still. It’s sad and worrying …’8 There was one glorious moment, when it looked as if the block might have burst. Paddy was working feverishly in his study at all hours of the day and night, and finally emerged clutching a sheaf of paper. ‘I knew it could be done!’ he told Joan, and just as she was about to congratulate him he added: ‘I knew P. G. Wodehouse would translate into Greek!’9 He had just translated ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ from The Inimitable Jeeves.

  Every year now seemed to bring the death of a friend, though 1991 seemed particularly hard. Graham Eyres Monsell was developing Alzheimer’s, which plunged Joan into despair when she heard the news. At the same time, Xan Fielding was dying of cancer. He was strong enough to make one more visit to Crete, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the German invasion, in May 1991. This anniversary was particularly significant, for it would be the first time that both Allied and Axis veterans had attended and commemorated their dead together. On the night before the main service of remembrance in Heraklion, the Greek prime minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis (a Cretan who had served in the resistance, and been imprisoned by the Germans) gave a dinner near Chania, at which the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the guest of honour. At one point Mitsotakis, who was sitting opposite Kohl at o
ne of two long tables, told the Chancellor that the man sitting immediately behind him was Patrick Leigh Fermor, the kidnapper of General Kreipe. The affable Kohl immediately turned round to greet him. Paddy, taken by surprise, exclaimed ‘Ah! Herr Reichskanzler!’ Germany had not been a Reich since the fall of Hitler; but the Bundeskanzler roared with laughter, and gave Paddy a hearty slap on the back.10

  After the public ceremonies were over, Paddy and Joan, Xan and Magouche went to visit their friends in the mountains of western Crete. Xan had not been back for many years, and seemed, according to Paddy, ‘tremendously fit and well – apart from all hair having vanished – and it was a glorious success’.11 Yet Xan knew he would not be coming back. He died in Paris on 19 August, and some of his ashes were scattered in the White Mountains. Paddy and Xan had met at the most intense and dangerous moment in their lives, and the bond made in the caves of western Crete had given their friendship an extraordinary complicity. Although they had spent most of the intervening decades in different countries, they had lived their lives in parallel, never losing sight of each other.

  In July, Paddy was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Kent, the investiture taking place in Canterbury Cathedral. He revelled in the scarlet robes and black Holbein hat he was given to wear for the occasion, and basked in the eulogy of his achievements – ‘I must get a copy to read when feeling depressed,’ he wrote to Debo.12 He was also offered an even greater honour. George Jellicoe had spearheaded a campaign to award him a knighthood, and Paddy was asked whether he would be willing to accept the title of Knight Bachelor for his services to Anglo-Greek relations. With many misgivings and considerable regret, he declined. Joan had always scoffed at titles, and he knew how much she would loathe being addressed as Lady Fermor.