Greece

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Dirk Bogarde, George Katsimbalis, Gerald Durrell, Henry Miller, John Craxton, Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niko Ghika, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Nash

Many years ago, not long after Maureen and I had got together, we went up to Edinburgh to visit her friend Moira. At one point, Moira got out a bunch of photographs she had taken while on holiday in Greece some ten years before (in other words, let me be clear, some ten years before I even knew Moira existed). In one photograph, taken on the Acropolis, the central figure, perfectly framed and in sharp focus, striding directly towards the camera, was me.

Somehow, that weird coincidence encapsulates Greece for me. It is a locus made up of coincidences and connections, it is where all things come together.

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), Study for a poster. Tempera on cardboard, 1948. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. © Benaki Museum 2018.

I first encountered Greece (if that is the right way to put it) through Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which remains one of the funniest books I know, and also one of the loveliest. This led me inevitably to the work of his brother, Larry, particularly those exquisite travel books, Reflections on a Marine Venus and Bitter Lemons. From Lawrence Durrell I moved on to his friend, Henry Miller, and The Colossus of Marousi, the only one of Miller’s books I’ve been able to read with unalloyed pleasure.

That is one set of connections. Another set sprang also from Durrell, in a way. I developed a taste for travel literature, which I kept up for quite a few years until I OD’d on the stuff while reviewing it for places like The Good Book Guide and British Book News. Along the way I happened upon a book called A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. When, as a result, I grabbed everything I could by Fermor, it was somehow no surprise that this led me back to Greece. (Although it seems only tangential to my literary discovery of Greece, I also devoured anything on TV relating to the country, such as the 1970s series like The Lotus Eaters and Who Pays the Ferryman?, and of course old films such as the Dirk Bogarde wartime adventure, Ill Met By Moonlight which seemed to be on TV endlessly when I was young. And Bogarde, of course, was playing Paddy Leigh Fermor, though it took me a little while to make that connection.)

In truth, the more I read about Leigh Fermor (and I’ve read biographies and letters and the like) the less I think I would have liked him in person. He was an incurable snob who spent much of his life freeloading on the rich and aristocratic types he fawned over. And yet I find him endlessly fascinating: he wrote like a dream, of course, and he had a genuine and admirable gift for friendship. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone in the postwar world of art and letters, and everyone loved Paddy.

Niko Ghika, John Craxton, Joan Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Barbara Ghika

Two of his lifelong friendships were with the Greek painter, Niko Ghika, and the English painter, John Craxton. (To give you a glimpse of what a peculiar world this was, Craxton first went to Greece immediately after the Second World War when he was encouraged to do so by the wife of an ambassador, who then gave him a lift in a bomber. “Of course she did,” Maureen commented, when I pointed this story out to her.) Now this triumvirate is the focus of an exhibition at the British Museum. I will probably write about this exhibition at greater length when I’ve had a chance to absorb the substantial catalogue that goes with it. For now, these are a few initial thoughts.

Although Leigh Fermor was clearly the glue binding this group together, he was strangely absent from this exhibition, or at least he was out of the limelight. He was there in photographs, in quotations from some of his books and articles dotted about the place, but the focus, rightly, was on the magnificent paintings by Ghika and particularly Craxton. Though it was amusing to see a handful of Leigh Fermor’s letters on display, all with “IN HASTE” scrawled across the top; that seemed to be the only way he ever wrote anything.

Ghika’s paintings could be, I think, somewhat disturbing. They were crowded with labyrinthine twists and turns in which the more you looked at them the more you seemed to be lost. But they were overgrown with a profusion of plants and leaves and flowers, a riot of colours, as if they were something out of a Jeff VanderMeer novel. And there, among Ghika’s friends, among the regular visitors to his home on Hydra, was George Katsimbalis, who was Henry Miller’s Colossus of Marousi, which brings us back round to tie in another set of connections.

But the work we both fell in love with was by John Craxton. Bold lines, often very few colours, and an incredible vigorous sense of life, especially in the numerous paintings of groups of men around cafe tables or performing Greek dances. I’d seen his work before, since he provided the cover illustrations for all of Leigh Fermor’s books from Mani onwards, but I hadn’t realised this until we got to the exhibition. There is something pivotal in his work, we kept catching echoes of Paul Nash in one direction, Picasso in another, and was there something Ruralist or even possibly Preraphaelite in some individual pictures? Certainly I need to see more of his work.

 

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2017 in Review

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of.

Post Haste

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Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Somerset Maugham

Patrick Leigh Fermor is rapidly turning into the sort of writer who is more prolific in death than in life. Between his first book, The Traveller’s Tree in 1950 and his death in 2011 he produced ten books, four of them in the first decade. But after Roumeli in the mid-60s the gaps between books grew ever longer, and there are numerous reports of publishers and commissioning editors tearing their hair out trying to extract something, anything from him. It is notable that the last three books published in his lifetime were all at least partly the work of someone else. Three Letters from the Andes (1991) was precisely that, three long letters that he had written during a visit to South America some years before and that someone else shaped into a book. Words of Mercury (2003) was a collection of previously published pieces edited by Artemis Cooper. And In Tearing Haste (2008) is a collection of the letters PLF and Deborah Devonshire exchanged throughout their long friendship, again put together by someone else.

Abducting a General

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General Kreipe, Patrick Leigh Fermor, W. Stanley Moss

I may have read a bowdlerised version of this before.

Back in my teens, in the mid- to late-Sixties, I used to subscribe to the occasional Purnells partwork. The two in particular that I remember were Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, which I collected in its blue and gold binders and in which I learned that the accompanying essays were far more interesting, informative and better written than the chapters from Churchill’s original book that opened each weekly part, and the History of the Second World War which came with black and gold binders. I still had both sets until a few years ago, I think they disappeared when I was redesigning my study.

Anyway, Patrick Leigh Fermor was originally commissioned to write about the abduction of General Kreipe from Crete for the History of the Second World War. What I have learned, from reading as much about Fermor as I seem to have done over the last few years, is that if you wanted 5,000 words from him it was probably wise to commission 500. The editor of History of the Second World War asked for 5,000 words; sometime after the deadline, Fermor delivered 30,000 words. The editor, exasperated, as I am sure he must have been, slashed the article down to the required 5,000 words and published it. This book is the first time the original piece has been published in full.

Peace and rumours of peace

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John Le Carre, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding

I have just finished, very close together, Hide and Seek by Xan Fielding and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré. At first glance, you’d think they have nothing much in common. Fielding’s book, first published in 1954, is primarily an account of the years he spent on Crete as an SOE agent and guerrilla leader during the war; Le Carré’s novel, first published 20 years later in 1974, is one of the finest spy thrillers ever written. Fielding’s prose is crisp, matter of fact, undecorated; Le Carré’s prose is richer, more discursive, full of digressions; both are effective, but they work in very different ways.

True

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Artemis Cooper, Dirk Bogarde, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Artemis Cooper’s superb biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor begins with an extraordinary evocation of his childhood.

 The local children taught him how to run his hand up the dried stems of wild sorrel, and feel his palm swell with the kibbled seeds that he threw to the wind. They scrambled into half-used ricks and jumped; it was prickly but soft, so you sank into the sweet-smelling hay. They helped him clamber into the saddles of old apple trees, but soon he would be able to hoist himself into tall trees like the bigger boys. Then he would climb into the topmost branches, invisible, hidden by leaves, and no one would be able to find him. For now he hid in sheds and barns, and sometimes behind the big double doors leading into the yard of the Wheatsheaf, and people shouted, ‘Paddy-Mike, where are you?’ while he hugged himself because no one could see him, and no one knew where he was.

It was the last summer of the Great War. Patrick Leigh Fermor was not quite four years old and living with family friends in rural Northamptonshire. By the summer of 1919, before he was five, his mother would have returned from India and taken him to live in London. He would never return to that rural idyll.

Fowles and Fermor

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John Fowles, Patrick Leigh Fermor

I must have first read a novel by John Fowles back in the mid-70s. It would have been The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the first time I ever encountered the tricks of construction and perspective that have since become common currency among postmodernists, though they have seldom been done better. Then, later, I picked up a paperback of the revised edition of The Magus before it was officially published, which gave that magnificent novel an illicit thrill to my younger self. Since then I’ve become, inevitably, a fan of his work. (Though not unquestioning: The Aristos is unreadable, and Mantissa is self-indulgent.) Now there’s The Journals, Volume One (Cape, 2003), which takes us from Oxford in the late-40s to Lyme Regis in the mid-60s. Right from the word go he is clearly a man determined to be a writer (and very sure of his own talents), but we are three-quarters of the way through the book abefore he finally manages to sell The Collector to Tom Maschler at Cape, and when the diaries end he has just sold The Magus, though it hasn’t yet appeared.

He comes across as arrogant, often uses the word ‘priggish’ about himself (with some justification), behaves at times abominably towards his wife Elizabeth, and spends an awful lot of time bemoaning the fact that no-one recognises his genius. And yet, in flashes, genius is there. The writing, rather mechanical and uninvolved before, suddenly comes alive in the early 50s when he goes to Spetsai for two years to teach (the setting, eventually, for The Magus). His observations of nature are superb; his comments on the passing political and artistic scene amount to little more than a grumpy old man avant la lettre; and the life story of grinding poverty and sudden wealth would in most people be uninteresting. But this is a large book that I read remarkably quickly for me. I’ve never yet read the journals or letters of a favoured writer that did not reveal feet (and often shins, knees and thighs) of clay; but they also reveal what makes him a writer I so love to read.

As for Patrick Leigh Fermor, I first encountered his work in the late 70s when a book club had a special offer on A Time of Gifts. I was enchanted by this story of a 19-year-old who, in 1934, set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, and who, as the journey went on found himself taken up by the last pre-war remnants of the landed aristocracy of central Europe. The story, continued in Between the Woods and the Water but still not completed, is a fascinating glimpse of Ruritania. And it was marked by a precise, old-fashioned writing style that was clearly in love with words, and a way of capturing the social and cultural context of everything he saw. It turned me, for a while, into a fan of travel writing, so that when I started reviewing professionally I often found myself doing travel books until I discovered how rare were Leigh Fermor’s particular skills. (It was a long time after I fell in love with his writing that I discovered it was Leigh Fermor who kidnapped the German general on Crete, the true story behind Ill Met By Moonlight.)

Now there is an anthology, Words of Mercury (John Murray, 2003), that includes extracts from his various books, but also various articles, book reviews, letters etc that have not been collected elsewhere. It’s like sinking into a hot bath of words, wonderful, rich, idiosyncratic, vivid, colourful, enchanting. He is, of course, a dreadful snob, dropping names like Louis MacNeice and Nancy Mitford as if everyone had them coming round to tea. And the precision of his writing, the formality of it, feels more old-fashioned than ever; it’s almost impossible to read without affecting a crisp, upper-class accent. Yet he clearly has an enviable ability to get on with everyone he meets: there is a glorious description of a night he spent in a cave with Bulgarian shepherds and Greek fishermen, with bottles of raki going round and wild music and suggestive dances.

If you’ve never read Leigh Fermor, then you’ve never discovered what good travel writing is all about. This is a brilliant introduction.

First published at Livejournal, 2 February 2004.