‘The intellect of man,’ Yeats famously wrote, ‘is forced to choose between perfection of the life, or of the work.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has just died aged 96, managed to refuse this choice and achieve both.
‘The intellect of man,’ Yeats famously wrote, ‘is forced to choose between perfection of the life, or of the work.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has just died aged 96, managed to refuse this choice and achieve both. He was what is now called a role model — a war hero, an intrepid traveller, a witty guest, a man with whom women fell in love, a Byronic romantic without Byron’s unkindness — but he was also a writer with the most exacting standards and unique imagination. His highly wrought prose was not affected: it expressed his delight in and minute attention to life and art, places and people — the stranger the better; and it inspired that delight in others. All the letters I have from him overflow with enthusiasms. There is a silly idea for a cartoon he has sketched out in which a spherical man and a thin one with a hawk on his wrist stand outside a castle gate, staring disconsolately at a castle gate on which is pinned the notice ‘No Hawkers, No Circulars’. There is a poem called ‘Message to Skopje’: ‘Your claim to the name “Macedonia”/Could scarcely be flimsier or phonier/If you want an old name/ For your state, what a shame/ Not to bring back the real one, Paeonia’. He writes about ‘marvellous girls in tricornes’ hunting in France, and to recommend (he was always generous in advancing the careers of others) a self-taught village boy who has translated the whole of Homer into ‘wonderful Cretan rhyming couplets, taking just about the same time over it as Pope in his villa at Twickenham’. Paddy was the best companion. Once, when he was already well into his seventies, we had him to dinner in London. As he was reciting a comic poem, his chair leg snapped. we were horrified that our furniture might have done for him, but Paddy managed an athletic parachute roll and ended up in the corner of the room with his back against the wall, laughing like a boy.
‘What is the biggest danger for Britain in Libya now?’ I recently asked someone much involved in the policy. ‘Comprehensive success,’ he replied without hesitation. What he meant was that the allies were not ready for the sudden collapse of the Gaddafi regime. There was a risk of looting, revenge killing and the interruption of power and oil supplies, as in Iraq. Most of the British media still assume that the campaign against Gaddafi will fail. This does not seem likely. The challenge is to win in the right way.
‘Let’s twist again’ is 50 years old. The song is the first pop hit which I can remember being new (I was four). It is nostalgic to hear it revived, but the original is, itself, a work of nostalgia. It invites the girl to twist again ‘like we did last summer’ and asks her ‘Do you remember when things were really hummin’…?’. The suggestion, from the start, is that life was better in the past. Half a century later, this seems to be the dominant emotion about all rock music. Rock will go on, of course, but its golden age, like that of jazz or the steam train, has passed into history. The press sometimes unkindly describes a person as an ‘ageing rock star’, but really there is scarcely any other kind left.
It is proverbial that everyone remembered where they were when they heard of the death of John F. Kennedy. In the second volume of Harold Macmillan’s diaries, recently published, the then Prime Minister records that he was about to dine at Petworth, with the Wyndhams, the Rumbolds, Sir Martyn Beckett, Lord Plunket and Lady Diana Cooper, when the news — ‘overpowering, incredible’ — came through. I checked what Margaret Thatcher, then a junior minister of pensions, was up to that day. She opened a charity bazaar in her Finchley constituency and then spoke at the Finchley Rotary Club dinner. This difference gives a perfect snapshot of the history of the Tory party in the second half of the 20th century.
Last week, I was standing at the corner of St James’s and Jermyn Street, talking on my Blackberry, when a bicyclist — lean, fit, crash-helmeted, repulsive — whizzed past. ‘Don’t ever cross the road while talking on your mobile,’ he hissed, and was gone. Since Jermyn Street is one-way, crossing it while on the phone is not dangerous, but what incensed me was that I was NOT crossing the road. I was standing beside it, waiting for Mr Lycra to ride through. What reserves of self-righteousness the man must have to upbraid people for what he thinks they may do. That night, I met a keen cyclist who told me that people like my verbal assailant are a well-recognised and much detested group in the cycling community. Like extreme evangelical Christians in relation to other believers, they are convinced that they alone are saved.
Although affecting a disdain for newspaper awards, I am naturally always delighted to receive one. This pleasure is doubled if the awards are foreign. One likes to believe that the judges abroad are untouched by the backbiting and back-scratching of our own dear Fleet Street. So I feel honoured to have been given the venerable Luca de Tena Prize in Spain, run by the newspaper ABC. The wind was taken out of my sails, however, by a call from Lord Garel-Jones, the Conservatives’ former deputy chief whip in the Commons. Tristan, who has a Spanish wife and Spanish businesses, was eager to tell me that he, too, had just been given a prize by ABC. It is awarded, he said, for the best article in favour of bull-fighting, and last year was won by the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. He emailed me the piece, which attacks the British tendency to turn animals into people, and writes disparagingly about our obsession with ‘El osito Paddington. Peter el conejito. Mr Toad (Señor Sapo) and Ferdinand el toro’, and exalts bull-fighting as being ‘contra la dominación de mi cultura sajona sobre el resto del universo’. All very dashing, and, for any British legislator, almost suicidally brave.
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