Drink Time!

Durrell, Leigh Fermor, their world

Prospero’s Cell, Blue Thirst and Antrobus Complete by Lawrence Durrell; The Violins of Saint-Jacques, A Time    to Keep Silence and Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor; and Drink Time! by Dolores Payas, translated Amanda Hopkinson

You are meeting a friend for a drink. Antrobus is a veteran of the diplomatic corps. He has seen everything. Been everywhere. Dealt with oh so many foreigners. You would not believe how many. And in a life of useful, obliging service (i.e. a life wasted), Antrobus has seen a lot. He sits across from you at his London club. He’s a man who knows himself. As you talk, he tells you a few stories about his diplomatic days. That train journey through the Balkan capital for Workers’ Day, for example, with a congregation of proud delegates of the nation’s socialist labour.

Or the one about the psychopath he encountered in the other embassy. The psycho talked about travelling across a snowy waste in a sleigh with a party of colleagues in the back. And if wolves approached from behind, he said, he would throw his fellow travellers, one by one, to the pack. They are small worlds, diplomatic villages. Antrobus coughs a little, looks briefly abashed. One does meet such funny people.

It isn’t his best work but Lawrence Durrell’s character is illuminated very well by Blue Thirst, a small collection of what started out as lectures to students at an American university. Durrell says that, when the publisher approached him, he considered polishing the talks up — but he thought again. Why make an expression of the heart, a statement of how one felt false and worked-out? Better leave the record as it is. More than individual thoughts, what the book really shows of Durrell is that he was eager to discourse with anyone on the subject of Mediterranean civilisation, on travel more broadly, on those things that matter. His collections of letters indicate the same thing. He had to work as a diplomat in some backwaters over the years. Those places that mattered to him were far away when the boredom came. They mattered a good deal to him.

A documentary I saw from the 1970s had Durrell return to Corfu, the subject of Prospero’s Cell, and to Rhodes. The film has Durrell swimming in crystal clear water and telling stories in the shade of ruins about the old Greek men who wore traditional clothing and saturated their rough bread in olive oil. It shows a traditional marriage ceremony, somehow happening in 1975 as it would have done many decades earlier. No wonder places like this catch the eye and steal the heart. It was the same moon, Durrell elsewhere wrote, visible in Corcyra as the one gazed upon by Odysseus.

Durrell is best known as a novelist but Patrick Leigh Fermor, a fellow travel writer, is not. That is understandable. He only wrote one book length work of fiction, a very brief confection called The Violins of Saint-Jacques. A complete fantasy, set in a wholly invested place in the Caribbean, filled with a class system where there are amusing Francophone aristocrats with cweole lisps and endless servants and feudatories. And there is about to be a most marvellous party. It’s candyfloss — doomed lovers, a doomed ancestral home, a doomed social world. A slice of cake, not a slice of life. So self-consciously operatic that it was made into an opera. Some colour for a post-war wold covered in charcoal and pale dust.

Other works of Leigh Fermor’s were more serious. Before his famous trilogy, he wrote of monasteries and Greece. A Time to Keep Silence is simply wonderful: a brief collection of what feel like long letters to friends about sojourns the author made in monastic life. It is a convivial approach to, for instance, the doctrines of the Trappists, but does not skip for even a moment the stony seriousness of what they thought they were doing. The monastery as a place assailed by devils, filled with men praying almost alone for a weary, sin-drenched world. Only Leigh Fermor could communicate this in such a way. Mani, meanwhile, is so filled with incident, so vivid, that envious authors have cast their green eyes in its direction. It must be fiction; it must be phoney, so many have said. Some vain latter-day travel writers have claimed to have burnt it ceremonially. We’ll never know. That’s the trouble. The places, the people, the ideals, all that is discussed has long gone. The ethnic admixture, the folklore — how much of it remains? Most of Durrell’s own writing is about this fact. Its irresistibility.

At the close of Leigh Fermor’s long life he lived in Kalamitsi, on the Mani peninsula. Dolores Payas, herself an itinerant traveller, saw him there and followed the very old man as he rambled through his home filled with books and bottles, watched him stride, stick in each hand, across the treacherous paths near where he lived. She saw the end of a long story — a life obsessed with living.