You may recall that I feel an especial affinity with Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (A Spy in the Family) but nevertheless I have got but never read the last (twentieth) in the series – too sad-making I was told. Fiction doesn’t have to have a sad ending but biography usually does.
I was given for Christmas Dashing for the Post, the letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and have galloped through them without a check. I enjoyed a previous volume of his letters, In Tearing Haste, and thought this new volume might be repetitive. I was wrong, almost all the 174 letters are new. It is a glorious evocation of PLF’s life as he struggles to get any writing done, tempted to stray from his desk by parties, travel and women. This may be heresy but it is more readable than his most famous books describing his Great Trudge (as he called it) across Europe to Constantinople in the 1930s.
Many of his letters are to apologise for datelines missed, commissions never carried out, other peoples’ property lost. An especially unconvincing excuse was that his bedroom at Chatsworth was too small to write in and the only other suitable room was “under repair”. PLF loved a party much more than writing. He roisters with the Prince of Wales (a weekend at Sandringham) or with Cretan shepherds and Greek peasants in his village with equal pleasure. I simply could not have enjoyed reading it more.
But all good things come to an end and, like Patrick O’Brian’s books, his letters are increasingly poignant as his closest friends die, including his wife, and he suffers bad health – cancer three times. It is a sad ending to such a rollicking good read and maybe I should have stopped when he swum the Hellespont aged sixty-nine.
I will not finish on a glum note though. His life was financially precarious until his companion, who later became his wife, inherited some money. Until then he cadged his way round Europe perching in people’s houses or sometimes small hotels for months on end. Wherever he was he wrote long, erudite and funny letters to his friends. There are descriptions of hunting on Dartmoor, hobnobbing with shipping millionaires, Onassis and Niarchos, sorties behind the Iron Curtain to refresh his memory about the Great Trudge. Each letter left me wanting to read the next one and I ended up liking him more than I did at the end of his warts and all biography by Artemis Cooper.
Now I can get back to The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, which PLF quotes from in a letter to Xan Fielding.
Slightly puzzled: A Spy in the Family, subtitled an Erotic Comedy, is by Alec Waugh. The last completed Aubrey/Maturin was Blue at the Mizzen. There was an incomplete 21st novel published after O Brian’s death.
Yes, I called the post A Spy in the Family as an oblique reference to Alec Waugh’s novel. Yes, Blue at the Mizzen is the 20th book in the series and the one I have not read. I didn’t know that there is a Broken Road/Sunset at Blandings book.
PLF is a romantic figure for sure. Have you looked at the aristocrat, artist and writer, John Verney? I am a big fan of his Going To the Wars, which catches how the Army both admired and rather disparaged Special Operations and is, also, poetic. BTW, The Cretan Runner is a very good account of the PLF sort of derring-do in WW2, but from the point of view of a local partisan who trotted messages across those extraordinary mountains. It has an Introduction by PLF.
PLF is also interesting for his love of Mount Athos. Other pilgrims included PLF’s disciple, Bruce Chatwin, and the Byzantologist, and fellow Hellenist, Robert Byron. (My own accounts of visits in the 1980s aren’t too dusty, either. IMHO, naturally.)
I have Going to the Wars and A Feast of Herbs but have not read them recently. I must do so.
In Dashing for the Post PLF describes burying Bruce Chatwin’s ashes near his house in the Mani or should that be on the Mani? Where can I read your accounts?
My main account of Athos – its history and present life – is in a book I did for Collins on Christian monasticism in 1986. “Richard D North and Fools For God” will find the online free download of the text at my website. In 1989 or 1990 I revisited Athos with the photographer and sculptor, Glynn Griffiths, for the Independent: we looked at the famous ultra-Orthodoxy issue which was dividing the monastic republic. Like Coptic monks, Athonites are an extraordinary mix of ancient and modern, and both fissiparous and solid.
Your blog is always useful as well as entertaining and no more so than the reference to “Fools for God” about Mt Athos by your fellow blogger, Richard D North. My walking party ( Rome to Istanbul) is poised to take a further week’s stage to Vergina, the birthplace of Alexander the Great. We then aim to divert to Mt Athos in the Spring of next year. “F for G” is in the London Library and I will read it with interest.
I expect you have already read it but the last chapter of PLF’s posthumous “The Broken Road” is an account of his stay on Mount Athos in 1935. It is unusual in that it is what he wrote at the time in one of his few diaries that survived.
This is directed primarily at Francis Plowden, who kindly mentions my Fools For God in the context of an Athos visit. I’m sure it doesn’t need saying, but the monkish diplomacy for visits to Athos used to be a little complicated and may still be. Planning was all, in my day. Also, I have just read that Sidney Loch and his wife – a very distinguished pair who loved Athos (she from a little distance, of course) – bought the tower in Ouranoupolis, the staging port for the peninsula and it is now a museum to their interests. It is years since I read his book on Athos, or Curzon’s or Byron’s. But I remember them all with a glow.
Thanks. All useful references for later this year.