Patrick Leigh Fermor Read online

  Also by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The Traveller’s Tree (1950)

  The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953)

  A Time to Keep Silence (1957)

  Mani (1958)

  Roumeli (1966)

  A Time of Gifts (1977)

  Between the Woods and the Water (1986)

  Three Letters from the Andes (1991)

  Words of Mercury (2003) edited by Artemis Cooper

  In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor (2008)

  The Broken Road (2013)

  Abducting a General (2014)

  TRANSLATED AND EDITED

  The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis

  Also by Adam Sisman

  A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography (1994)

  Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (2000)

  The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (2006)

  Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (2010)

  One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2013)

  with Richard Davenport-Hines

  John le Carré: The Biography (2015)

  Patrick Leigh Fermor

  A Life in Letters

  Selected and edited by Adam Sisman

  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

  Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor copyright © 1940–2010 by the Estate of Patrick Leigh Fermor Compilation, notes, introduction, and editorial matter copyright © 2016 by Adam Sisman

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by John Murray (Publishers), an Hachette UK Company

  Cover illustration by Nathan Gelgud

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fermor, Patrick Leigh, author. | Sisman, Adam, editor.

  Title: Patrick Leigh Fermor : a life in letters / Patrick Leigh Fermor ; selected and edited by Adam Sisman.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Original title: Dashing for the Post

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014756| ISBN 9781681371566 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681371573 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fermor, Patrick Leigh,—Correspondence. | Travel writers—Great Britain—Correspondence. | Soldiers—Great Britain—Correspondence. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Letters. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Adventurers & Explorers.

  Classification: LCC PR6056.E65 Z48 2017 | DDC 910.4092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014756

  ISBN 978-1-68137-157-3

  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

  In memory of Robyn Sisman

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  Editorial Note

  THE LETTERS

  Dramatis Personae

  Illustration Credits

  Photographs

  Index

  Introduction

  The letters in this volume span seventy years, from February 1940 to January 2010. The first was written ten days before Patrick Leigh Fermor’s twenty-fifth birthday, when he was an officer cadet, hoping for a commission in the Guards. He had hurried back to England from Rumania in September 1939, expecting to die within weeks of being sent into action, like a junior officer in the First World War. The last two were written on the same day in 2010, when Paddy (as he called himself, and almost everyone else called him) was ninety-four, a widower, very deaf, and suffering from tunnel vision, which made it hard for him to read even his own handwriting. His voice was already hoarse from the throat cancer which would kill him seventeen months later. But these last letters, like the first and most of the others printed here, exude a zest that was characteristic. From first to last, Paddy’s letters radiate warmth and gaiety. Often they are decorated with witty illustrations and enhanced by comic verse. Sometimes they contain riddles and cringe-causing puns.

  Although, as I have mentioned, he was only twenty-four when he wrote the first letter in this volume, one of the two achievements for which he is best known was already behind him. Paddy had set out at the age of eighteen to walk to Constantinople (as he called it), after a premature exit from his boarding school (which would honour him later in life as ‘a free spirit’). He left England early in December 1933, and arrived at his destination just over twelve months later, on New Year’s Eve 1934. In the course of this ‘Great Trudge’ across Europe, he slept under the stars and in schlosses, dossed down in hostels, awoke more than once with a hangover in the houses of strangers, sat round a campfire singing songs with shepherds, frolicked with peasant girls and played bicycle polo with his host. He observed customs and practices that dated back to the Middle Ages, many of which were about to vanish for ever – swept away, first by the catastrophe of war and then by Communism. As Paddy puts it in one of these letters, ‘a sudden Dark Age descended that nobody was ready for’. He would give an account of his experiences in what became a trilogy of much admired books, which remained incomplete at his death: A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and the posthumously published The Broken Road (2013).

  Paddy would spend the late 1930s oscillating between Greece, Rumania, France and England. In the late summer of 1938, before leaving for Rumania, he left with a friend in London two trunks, which were subsequently lost with their contents, among them notebooks he had kept on his walk and letters home to his mother. The loss helps to explain why there are no pre-war letters in this volume. Nor are there more than a couple from the war itself. Rather than going into the Guards, which had rated his capabilities as ‘below average’, Paddy had been snapped up by the Intelligence Corps, on the basis of the fact that he spoke German, Rumanian and Greek; and after being evacuated first from mainland Greece and then from Crete as the Germans invaded, he had been infiltrated back on to Crete to operate under cover, liaising with the local resistance. It was during this period, as Paddy made regular clandestine visits to German-occupied Crete from his base in Cairo, that he planned and executed the abduction of an enemy general, the other achievement for which he is best known. The second letter in this volume, written to the mother of his second-in-command, Billy Moss, refers to this daring exploit, albeit discreetly.

  After the war Paddy worked for the British Council in Athens for just over a year – his only period of peacetime employment, as it would turn out, which ended in his dismissal. It became quickly apparent that he was ‘unfit for office work’. Included here is a letter written during a lecture tour of Greece undertaken on behalf of the British Council, and another to Lawrence Durrell in which he complains at being let go, prompting a rare lapse into profanity.

  The rest of his long life was spent as a writer. Before the war he was already pursuing literary projects, and had translated a novel from French into English; after leaving the British Council, he accepted an invitation to write the captions for a book of photographs of the Caribbean, a task that grew into a full-length book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950. (Paddy would invariably exceed any word limit he was given, just as he could never keep to a deadline.) From then on, though often short of money, he seems never to have considered any other form of work. His experiences in the Caribbean inspired him to write a novel (his only work of fiction), The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953). He was already working on a book drawing on his travels in Greece, part a
utobiographical, part ethnographical, which grew into two volumes: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966).

  One of the surprises of these letters is to find how much recognition mattered to him. In a letter to Colin Thubron, written towards the end of his life, Paddy admits to feeling ‘rather gloomy’ at not being included in a list of the greatest writers since the war. His habitual procrastination, and his apparent readiness to allow himself to be distracted by the smallest thing, suggests a dilettante. But the letters tell a different story, of a writer always anxious at his lack of progress, guilty at his failure to fulfil his commitments, and perpetually trying to do better. This is the refrain of Paddy’s letters to his publisher, ‘Jock’ Murray, over a period of more than forty years. At Christmas 1984, for example, Paddy tells two friends that he has deferred a visit to London because he cannot face Jock while his book remains unfinished. Even after Jock’s death, when Paddy was in his eighties, he felt it necessary to apologise to Jock’s son for his presence in England by marking his letter ‘NO SKULKING’.

  At the beginning of his career Paddy had been encouraged by Harold Nicolson to aim high, and he strove to produce the masterpiece that Nicolson (and no doubt others) thought him capable of. Some thought that he achieved this in A Time of Gifts. Yet even the acclaim this book and its successor attracted was double-edged, because it called attention to the fact that the story was incomplete. There was public as well as private pressure on him to finish the trilogy; an article in Le Monde mocked him as ‘L’Escargot des Carpathes’ (‘The Snail of the Carpathians’), a soubriquet that he ruefully accepted. The unfinished work hung around his neck to the end, weighing him down. Even in the last letter reproduced here, written long since everyone else had given up hope of the third volume, Paddy reports that he has recently resumed work on it ‘after a long pause’.

  Paddy’s domestic arrangements were unusually chaotic, even by the standards of a freelance writer. For one thing, he found it hard to resist the lure of society, and was capable of travelling across a continent for a party. He seemed unable to concentrate on work in London, and sought out retreats in order to write free of distraction. He became adept at cadging houses from friends: Lady Diana Cooper’s farmhouse in Bognor, Niko Ghika’s mansion on Hydra, Barbara Warner’s cottage in Pembroke-shire, Sir Walter and Lady Smart’s manor-house in the Eure. Being usually alone in such places, he wrote to his friends, often inviting them to stay (which somewhat defeated the object). After the war he formed a permanent bond with Joan Rayner, who became his lifelong partner, and, eventually, his wife; but they spent much of the time apart, especially in the first two decades of their relations. This of course meant that they often wrote to each other. Paddy called himself ‘Mole’ and Joan ‘Muskin’. His letters to Joan reveal an aspect of his character that he normally kept hidden, his slides into gloom and depression. He depended on her, not only for encouragement and emotional support, but also for practical and indeed financial assistance. Joan was unquestionably the most important woman in his life. It is appropriate that there are more letters in this volume to her than to any other correspondent.

  But before Joan, there was Balasha, whom he had met in Athens in the spring of 1935. Though sixteen years older than him, she was still in her prime, and they fell in love – or, as Paddy might have put it, became ‘terrific pals’. They were together almost five years, until separated by the coming of war: after 1939, they would not see each other again for more than a quarter of a century. By the time they renewed contact, Paddy was in love with Joan. Yet Balasha Cantacuzène had been his first love, and seems to have retained a special place in his heart. His earliest post-war letter to her, written over the Easter weekend of 1946, may never have been sent, for reasons we can only speculate about; but it is known that he sent her a letter the following year. She tried to escape from Rumania, but was detained and sent back, and soon afterwards she and her sister were brutally evicted from their ancestral home. Her life afterwards was hard. In 1965 Paddy was able to travel to Rumania, and visited Balasha and her sister after dark, because it was dangerous for Rumanians to be seen to consort with anyone from the West. Paddy, himself still youthful and vigorous at fifty, was shocked by Balasha’s appearance: she was now an old woman, losing her teeth and her hair, the wreck of her former self. His subsequent letters to her reproduced in this volume are written with gallantry and consideration: one has the sense that he is trying to include her in his life, even at long distance.

  Joan recognised the sentimental importance of Balasha to Paddy, and wrote to her affectionately as if to a member of the family. She also tolerated Paddy’s lovers, and even his casual encounters with prostitutes, confident that he would never leave her. Included in this volume are love letters (some quite frisky) to two younger girlfriends, Lyndall Birch and Ricki Huston. One hilarious letter to the latter refers to the potentially awkward subject of infestation with ‘crabs’ (pubic lice).

  As well as such love affairs, Paddy maintained several long-term friendships with women, conducted largely by letter. Though platonic, there was an element of courtly love in them; it is significant that his ladies were all well born. Among his best letters are those to Lady Diana Cooper (twenty-three years his senior) and to Ann Fleming (twenty-nine years), both of whom he always addressed as ‘darling’. In 1980 Paddy dug out his letters from Diana Cooper and reread them, a correspondence that by that time had lasted almost three decades. He was very moved, he told her, ‘by this record of shared delights and trust, confidence, warmth and loving friendship, and can’t believe my luck, unfaltering for all these years, and still prospering in such a marvellous, happy and treasured bond, light as garlands, as lasting as those hoops of Polonius’. Another long-term correspondence was with Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire (‘Debo’), youngest of the lively Mitford sisters, five years his junior. Some believed that Paddy and Debo had once had an affair, but those who knew them best doubted this. In 2008, the correspondence between them over the previous half-century was published as In Tearing Haste, edited by Charlotte Mosley. In one of the two subsequent letters published here for the first time, Paddy tells her that he has been ‘dipping furtively into In Tearing Haste, and enjoying it almost as if it was a total stranger and laughing at all the jokes’. Also included are three letters from that book – apart from the two letters to George Seferis, the only letters in this volume that have been previously published in full, though extracts from some of them have been quoted in Artemis Cooper’s authorised biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2012). The witty parody of John Betjeman’s verse on pages 85–6 has appeared in a specialist journal, but this is the first time it has been made more widely available.

  In the late 1940s, when writing The Traveller’s Tree, Paddy sought sanctuary in a succession of monasteries in northern France, an experience which itself would provide a subject for a short book, A Time to Keep Silence (1957). Reproduced here is a series of letters from these monasteries which gives a vivid picture of monastic life. Writing the letters, and observing how the monks lived, prompted Paddy into reflections on spiritual questions, unusual subjects for him, at least in correspondence. He would return to his favourite monastery, Saint-Wandrille, several times over the next decade. Another, more temporary refuge was the ‘stupendous’ castle of Passerano, inland from Rome (from its battlements the dome of Saint Peter’s was just discernible on the horizon), which he took for the summer of 1959. Paddy had sewn ‘a vast heraldic banner, several yards square’, to adorn one wall at the end of a large banqueting hall. He was tempted to fly it from the highest tower, as he admitted in a letter to Jock Murray. ‘Then, when the Black Castellan of Passerano displays his gonfalon from the battlements, the peasants of the valley can hide their cattle and douse their lights and bolt up their dear ones!’ To balance this attack of folie de grandeur, he explained that the living conditions were primitive, since the castle had not been inhabited for five hundred years. ‘There is no sanitation at all. It’s all fieldwor
k under the trees, and the only lighting is by oil-lamp.’

  Yet another refuge was Easton Court at Chagford, an hotel on the edge of Dartmoor run by an unconventional American woman and her English beau. Easton Court had been discovered by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote several of his books there; other writers had followed, including Paddy’s friends John Betjeman and Patrick Kinross. From the late 1940s until the early 1960s Paddy stayed often at ‘Chaggers’, from which he wrote several of the letters included here. He went there to write; though another attraction of the hotel was that it offered the possibility of riding to hounds over the moor with the local hunt three times a week. Here and elsewhere, are lyrical descriptions of nature – riding home at dusk, striding along a ridge, driving into the dawn.

  As all this suggests, Paddy rarely stayed in one place long. In fact, he did not have a permanent home until he was almost fifty, in 1964, when he and Joan bought a piece of land overlooking the sea in the Mani, beneath the towering Taygetus mountains near the village of Kardamyli, and began building a house. Letters included here describe the search for a site, negotiations to purchase the land, and plans for the house itself and the surrounding garden. For the first year or two at Kardamyli Paddy and Joan bivouacked in tents as the land was cleared and the house was built. Paddy took a keen interest in every detail of the design and construction, a further distraction from his writing, as he acknowledges in an apologetic letter to Jock Murray. Work on the house would not be complete until the end of the decade.

  Letters provided a lifeline from this isolated spot. In an era when international telephoning was difficult and expensive, Paddy and Joan kept their friendships in good repair by correspondence. And, at least for Paddy, it went further than this. Letters were a means of reaching out to those whose company he enjoyed, of making convivial connection across the void. Paddy seems to relish the contact with those to whom he is writing, even if it is only on paper. He is psychologically and often emotionally engaged with his correspondent. At times one senses that Paddy is writing to raise his spirits, as if he knows that his imaginative construction of those of whom he is fond will bring him comfort and cheer.