Walking with ghosts

RORY KNIGHT BRUCE Dashing for the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor selected and edited by Adam Sisman John Murray £30

All travel writing has about it the possibility of a lie or at least an unproven truth because who, but the author, is there to witness the events described? When Patrick Leigh Fermor published A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) there were certainly some raised eyebrows that he could recall events of fifty years

earlier when many of his notebooks had been lost. But with the publication in 2008 of In Tearing Haste, letters between Paddy and Debo Devonshire, a whole new generation has come to appreciate the wit and comic writing, the incisive social observations and the sheer energy of a man who has every right to be called the father of modern travel writing. Now we have 174 letters, superbly edited and elided by Adam Sisman, of perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 letters which Paddy wrote from the age of twenty until his death, aged 96, in 2011, which now reside in the National Library of Scotland.

To Freya Stark, Leigh Fermor was ‘the genuine buccaneer’ and to Diana Cooper he was ‘Darling Paddles’, but he was far more than the courageous, brave, kind, alert, intelligent, amusing man who adorned many a souk and society drawing room of the 20th century. He made an idiotic early error by imitating Somerset Maugham’s stammer at his villa in the South of France and was asked to leave, but thereafter no door was closed to him. There were Christmases at Chatsworth, at the magical Irish Guinness lodge at Luggala, naked swimming at Lord Berners’ Faringdon House and stop-offs with Michael Astor at Bruern Abbey in Oxfordshire (‘I think Michael’s in love with me,’ he wrote to Ann Fleming).

What gives this book great dimension are the varied recipients of the letters, and the author’s eye for detail. Who but Leigh Fermor, a lifelong foxhunter, could discover that ‘Skittles’, the 19th-century hunting courtesan, was buried at Crabbet Park in Sussex. Paddy was ostensibly there to track down Lord Byron’s slippers from old Lady Wentworth, who made him play billiards for several hours, he told Diana Cooper, beating him with breaks of ‘50, 70, 90 and once 108’. It is a scene worthy of A G Macdonell’s England, Their England. Then there are searing love letters to the gorgeous Lyndall Hopkinson and the somewhat unhinged Ricki Huston. These affairs would always be hopeless because of Joan Rayner, Paddy’s lifelong companion and later wife, who provided him with love and security and settled many a pressing bill.

To read these letters and their superb footnotes is to walk with some of the great ghosts of 20th-century literature. There is his long-suffering and erudite publisher Jock Murray, the nowforgotten biographer and ladies’ man Peter Quennell, the complicated neoRomantic designer of his book jackets, John Craxton, and tales of scary lunches with the cigar-munching movie mogul Darryl Zanuck.

Perhaps the best letter of all is to his first love, Balasha Cantacuzène, written in 1968 after his marriage to Joan about his difficult relationship with his mother. ‘She is an odd creature: so bright and gifted and well-read, intelligent and gay in some ways; so terrifying and destructive in others.’

To some of Paddy’s tales, as well as his gift for energetic friendship, I can attest. Like Evelyn Waugh, he holed up in the 1960s at the Easton Court hotel in Chagford on the edge of Dartmoor, writing and hunting. He admiringly calls the master Charles Hooley ‘a tremendous shit’. Hooley, with whom I hunted as a child, later got done for stealing silver candles from a Dartmoor church, a story to which the News of the World gave the headline: ‘Hooley, Hooley, Hooley, Lord God Almighty’.

Without children, Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor’s greatest legacy, apart from his writing and her research, was the house they built together at Kardamyli in the Greek Mani in 1965. Many great figures visited them there: John Betjeman, Lawrence Durrell and the Duff Coopers; and Paddy’s writing room today is as he left it, like the study of some Dartmoor hunting farm. I have just returned from there, having first been to the village forty years ago, and it is still the same, only Paddy is missing. This book of letters – and may it be the first of many – will remind his friends and readers of Paddy’s remarkable personality. Hatchards price: £27