The Violins of Saint-Jacques Read online

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (1915–2011) was an intrepid traveler and a heroic soldier, widely considered to be one of the finest travel writers of the twentieth century. After his stormy school days, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues through Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and The Broken Road (published posthumously in 2013), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek archipelago. His books A Time to Keep Silence (1957), Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. Leigh Fermor lived partly in Greece—in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive grove in the Mani—and partly in Worcestershire. In 2004 he was knighted for his services to literature and to British–Greek relations. Artemis Cooper’s biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, was published by New York Review Books in 2013.

  JAMES CAMPBELL is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Invisible Country: A Journey Through Scotland, Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank, and Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark. He writes the weekly NB column in the Times Literary Supplement under the pen name J. C.

  ALSO BY PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  The Traveller’s Tree

  Introduction by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

  A Time to Keep Silence

  Introduction by Karen Armstrong

  Mani

  Introduction by Michael Gorra

  Roumeli

  Introduction by Patricia Storace

  A Time of Gifts

  Introduction by Jan Morris

  Between the Woods and the Water

  Introduction by Jan Morris

  In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley

  Abducting a General

  Foreword by Roderick Bailey

  The Broken Road

  Edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper

  Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters, selected and edited by Adam Sisman

  TRANSLATED AND EDITED

  The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis

  THE VIOLINS OF SAINT-JACQUES

  A Tale of the Antilles

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  Introduction by

  JAMES CAMPBELL

  Decorations by

  ROBIN IRONSIDE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1953 by the Estate of Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by James Campbell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: John Craxton, adapted from the original artwork for the cover of

  The Violins of Saint-Jacques

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  First published in Great Britain in 1953 by André Deutsch Ltd and John Murray (Publishers), an Hachette UK Company.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fermor, Patrick Leigh, author.

  Title: The violins of Saint-Jacques / by Patrick Leigh Fermor ; introduction by James Campbell.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059861| ISBN 9781590177822 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781590177952 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: West Indies—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6056.E65 V5 2017 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059861

  ISBN 978-1-59017-795-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  THE VIOLINS OF SAINT-JACQUES

  INTRODUCTION

  The Violins of Saint-Jacques is an unexpected presence in the history of Caribbean literature. Kenneth Ramchand’s pioneering 1970 study, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (revised 2005), fails to mention it. Patrick Leigh Fermor had no deep connection with the region: his novel can be regarded as an interloper, but interlopers are often fascinating characters, even welcome ones. The Violins of Saint-Jacques appeared in 1953, one year after A Brighter Sun by Samuel Selvon, a Trinidadian herald of what would be a prodigious decade for Caribbean fiction. In the same year as Leigh Fermor’s book, George Lamming from Barbados published In the Castle of My Skin. V. S. Naipaul, another Trinidadian, was on the point of getting started. All were reacting to the colonial predicament, each in his own way, fueling what Ramchand called “the explosion” in West Indian literature. There was little reason to regard Leigh Fermor’s Euro-centered excursion as part of it. He had, however, recently written a well-researched and entertaining book, The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands, which was admired by Lamming and others. Two years after its successful publication in 1950, Fermor began the story that would grow into this, his only work of fiction.

  Like many novels, The Violins of Saint-Jacques began life as a short story. “Except for two paragraphs,” Leigh Fermor wrote to his future wife, Joan Eyres Monsell, early in 1952, “I have at last finished the story of the Antillean ball, and feel terribly excited about it.” The original piece had been commissioned for an anthology, Memorable Balls, but had now grown to 20,000 words instead of the 4,000 requested by the editor, and Fermor hoped it might make “a small book.” The 20,000 words swelled to 35,000—in shape and development, a perfect example of a nouvelle. The story includes romantic intrigue, male rivalry, and a grand catastrophe to close things off—what E. M. Forster called, in respect of the ending of A Passage to India, “a lump.” But the central event is the Mardi Gras ball on the imaginary island of Saint-Jacques des Alisés in February 1902 (les alisés or alizés are the trade winds).

  The Violins of Saint-Jacques is a story within a story. The main tale is spoken by an elderly French Jacobean—Leigh Fermor’s way of referring to Saint-Jacques residents—now living on the island of Mitylene, better known as Lesbos. The events are related to a narrator presented to us as a youngish Englishman in Greece, not long returned from a Caribbean sojourn. He and Berthe de Rennes enjoy each other’s company; they dine on the terrace of her house overlooking the Turkish coast; inside, our narrator observes a painting of a volcanic island signed “B. de Rennes” and dated 1902; wine flows . . . and Berthe begins her tale.

  Being the story of a Shrove Tuesday ball, it is naturally one of disguises. But many of the principals in The Violins of Saint-Jacques are in other senses not what they seem. The local aristocracy are attached to French splendor but proud of their Caribbean stronghold. The Negroes, as Leigh Fermor usually calls them (or, when the dialogue breaks into French, les noirs), have absorbed a fair patterning of European blood through the generations. A group of potentially deadly lepers appears at the ball, in hooded cloaks, disguised as “dominoes” (the reference being to Dominican monks). An elopement is being schemed, although the male conspirator is ineligible to carry through with his side of the bargain. Even Berthe has a secret self, which perhaps explains her present choice of home. And of course the ball, the description of which occupies the bulk of the action—Leigh Fermor was at his best with elaborate ritual—is a masked
ball.

  Patrick Leigh Fermor himself was a creature of disguise. Born in 1915 to middle-class parents who were based in India—his father was a geologist, his mother an amateur playwright—he was raised in the English countryside by foster parents of modest means. “My mother returned to India after I was born, leaving me with a family in Northamptonshire,” he told me in 2005. “I spent a very happy first three years of my life there as a wild-natured boy. I wasn’t ever told not to do anything.” The unencumbered state was one he aspired to inhabit ever after. During much of his now celebrated war service on Crete—“commanded some minor guerrilla operations,” is how he put it in Who’s Who—he dressed as a Greek shepherd. Harold Nicolson wrote that he had “in his veins the ardour of the buccaneer.” Leigh Fermor never had a permanent home in England—most of his adult life was spent in Greece, where he remained until the eve of his death in 2011, at the age of ninety-six—but he pulled off the disguise of “Englishman” to perfection.

  The island of Saint-Jacques is a figment. The event that inspired the novel is a real one, however. On May 8, 1902, the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique, said to be a splendid arrangement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French architecture and design—“the Paris of the Caribbean”—was destroyed by the eruption of the volcanic Mount Pelée. Only two people out of a population of 30,000 are thought to have survived, and those as a matter of accident. Martinique is mentioned in The Violins of Saint-Jacques as if it were a neighboring island, in a passage that takes in Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, Antigua, Saint Lucia, and others, but the atmosphere the author sought to create in the novel derives from there. In The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor writes of the eruption of Mount Pelée: “Everything that the colony boasted in the way of fine buildings, private houses, pictures, furniture, silver and works of art . . . vanished in the conflagration.”

  It is perhaps because he was never able to meet anyone with firsthand experience of the doomed town that some of the characters of The Violins of Saint-Jacques have a wispy quality. An exception is Berthe, the Lesbos-based storyteller. And in a passage describing Sosthène, who is courting her—“an odd and contradictory mixture of youthfulness and extreme precocity”—readers familiar with the personality of Leigh Fermor might glimpse the author:

  Was this the sad young man that lay all day under the mango trees of Beauséjour with a volume of Vauvenargues or Seneca? The prospect of action had swept away the cloud of doubt, of melancholy and abstraction in which Sosthène had seemed to be wandering and turned him in a second into something swift, determined, and mercurial.

  This is a novel untroubled by political concerns, both of the orthodox kind and in the twenty-first-century sense of identity politics. Leigh Fermor regarded the aristocracy with a kind of awe, and by virtue of his erudition, wit, and urbanity was able to fit in almost anywhere with ease—another disguise. He appreciated domestic splendor and respected custom sanctioned by time, even where it might seem to modern eyes to enfold a species of oppression. Rank and entitlement—in England, in France, and in the imaginary community of Saint-Jacques—were aspects of social life he accepted without anxiety.

  Leigh Fermor was a multifaceted character, however, and in Crete it was the shepherds and mountain warriors, alongside whom he had fought in situations of grave danger, who formed the aristocracy in his eyes. His loyalty to them never slipped. In The Traveller’s Tree, he wrote of the poet Aimé Césaire that he “has a consciousness of his colour which goes, as his poems illustrate, far farther than a complex or a persecution mania; it is a constant and burning sense of the sorrows and injustices of the African race in the Antilles. . . .” It was perhaps to stabilize the wild-natured boy in himself that Leigh Fermor sought solace in the paraphernalia of heraldry and genealogy. The Negroes in his travel book are as he found them, often beguiling, sometimes disheartening. The idea of inserting into his novel first-world notions of equality and fraternity that had gained currency even by 1953 would have struck him as absurd, not to say anachronistic. There is mention in the novel of the Count de Serindan’s droit de jambage—the right to take his pick from among the island women—and it is allowed to pass without censure. It was the way things were. Leigh Fermor was out to tell a story, not to change the world.

  The word “creole,” much seen here, can lead to confusion. It has taken on different meanings over the decades. Leigh Fermor’s use of it is plain from his early description of the Count de Serindan, “in company with the other creole landowners,” as “exaggeratedly vain of his family’s long history in the island and its total freedom from any coloured admixture.” The storyteller Berthe suggests that the latter point is to be treated skeptically, but it nonetheless makes clear how “creole” is to be understood here. The Violins of Saint-Jacques is probably in a minority of West Indian novels in giving a place to “the fierce Caribs” who populated Saint-Jacques and other Antillean islands before “Columbus . . . annexed [them] to the Spanish crown.” Leigh Fermor himself encountered communities of Caribs and described them vividly in The Traveller’s Tree. There is a trace of symbolism, surely, in his decision to introduce them into The Violins of Saint-Jacques near the end, only in order to allow Berthe to say, as catastrophe overwhelms everyone and everything, “The Caribs . . . were allowed to escape.”

  —JAMES CAMPBELL

  THE VIOLINS OF SAINT-JACQUES

  TO

  DIANA COOPER

  Infelix domus . . . sonitu tremibunda profundi.

  Valerius Flaccus

  Little distinguishes the history of the small island from that of the other French Windward and Leeward Isles except that less is known about it. Saint-Jacques was originally inhabited by the Arawak Indians, later by the fierce Caribs who mounted the island chain in dugout canoes, defeated and devoured the Arawak men and then married their widows in their usual brisk way. Columbus discovered it on his second voyage and annexed it to the Spanish crown. The Carib name of Twahleiba – the Snake – derived from the terrible trigonocephalus that infested it in swarms – was changed, and the island was christened in honour of the great Spanish saint of Compostella on the vigil of whose feast the island was captured. Santiago de los Vientos Alicios, they pricked it down on those early charts; Saint James of the Trade Winds. (Later on it was facetiously known, in the cant of the English filibusters who haunted the inlets of the northern coast, as Jack of All Trades and occasionally, in chanties that are seldom heard nowadays, as Tradey Jack.)

  The name appears on few of the old Spanish charts preserved in the archives at Seville, and on French and English maps of the time even less. Cartographer and historian unconsciously conspired to ignore it. Father Labat never called there and the only monkish chronicler to mention it is an obscure Franciscan missionary from Treviso, Father Jerome Zancarol. The Father enlarges in queer jargon on the island’s richness in sugar-cane, rum, molasses and indigo but says little that is complimentary to the inhabitants. Insula Sancti Jacobi, he writes, tantis opibus, tanta copia, tantaque pulchritudine ornata, sicut angulus coeli ipsius videtur, sed, ob mores improbos pravosque incolarum, ob jactanciam, luxuriam et gastrimargiam et Gallorum et nigrorum, insula Sancti Jacobi pessimam insularum aliarum omnium justius, immo, verum angulum Gehennae putanda est;[1] and no more.

  The small island was neglected by Spain, settled by a certain chevalier Hippolyte-Hercule du Plessis, an illegitimate kinsman of Richelieu, and annexed to France. Plessis, after whom the capital was named, exterminated the stiff-necked Caribs, imported the first slaves from Africa and summoned and enfeoffed a swarm of penniless cadets of noble French families from Normandy, Brittany, Gascony and the Vendée to colonise the island; and, in its small way, Saint-Jacques soon rivalled Sainte-Domingue and Martinique in prosperity. Rumbold and his West Indian Light Fencibles captured it in the Seven Years’ War, and, until the Revolution, the Union Jack flew from a beautiful little Palladian government house, built by Sir Probyn Scudamore and later enlarged by Governor Braithwaite, in the capital w
hich was now rebaptised Jamestown. The English were thrown out at the time of the Convention. During the Terror the guillotine was set up in the Place Hercule, but, when the bright blade descended and the first royalist head fell into the basket, a cry of horror burst from the silent throng of negroes. Breaking through the cordon of guards, they tore the instrument to bits, and the guillotine was never re-erected in Saint-Jacques.[2] A tumultuous period ensued. Order was restored during the Consulate and Saint-Jacques des Alisés thereafter followed the same quiet course as the other French Antilles.

  The islet seems to have been less affected than its larger neighbours by the decline of the sugar plantations after the Emancipation Act of ’48 – perhaps because of its remoteness, perhaps because the island squirearchy lived on better terms with the negroes. At all events, by the turn of the century, Zancarol’s accusations of wickedness would have seemed exaggerated. Little was known about Saint-Jacques in the rest of the archipelago, in fact the very name – except for the fabulous beauty of its mountains and forests, the elegance of the old buildings, the charm of the inhabitants and the brio with which they availed themselves of the slightest pretext for enjoyment and celebration – seems to have slipped the attention of travellers. It also appears that Saint-Jacques was distinguished by more than a tincture of polite learning. The works of Aimable Bruno, the mulatto poet of the island, are unfortunately lost to us. Lost too are the many portraits of Jacobean notables by Hubert Clamart (a pupil of Liotard), which adorned the private houses and the public buildings of Plessis. It is a little mysterious, all this being so, that Lafcadio Hearn should never have visited Saint-Jacques during his Caribbean sojourn. How brilliantly he would have described those vanished Jacobean festivities! As it is, alas, the data are few. About the absence of the name of Saint-Jacques from the atlas page – a few leagues windward from the channel that flows between Guadeloupe and Dominica and well to the south-east of Marie Galante, where it hung like a bead on the sixty-first meridian – there is, tragically, no mystery at all. But so formidable are the obstacles in the path of research and so complete the decay of the archives in the European Capitals that writers on the Caribbean have all been forced, through ignorance of its history and, all too often, of its former existence, to omit it.