***
I was delighted that Bruce Marshall’s The World, the Flesh and Father Smith (Human Adventure Press, 230pp, £12/$15) was reissued this year. It’s a novel consisting of episodes in the life of a conscientious, devout, occasionally cantankerous Scottish priest, whose social conscience is regularly troubled while serving in his inner-city parish. Marshall is an unjustly forgotten Catholic novelist of the mid 20th century. I am not suggesting that, in neglecting him, we have somehow overlooked another Waugh or Greene, but here is a writer who could ring comedy from the everyday encounters between a fallen world and the “vast supernatural machinery of the Church”. And he was also capable of unleashing lines that cut to the quick. High-ranking British Army officers lined up in a bar drinking sherry and vermouth are all “good chaps primarily because they weren’t better chaps”. That’s from The Red Danube. Encouragingly, To Every Man a Penny, is due to come back into print next year.***
I reviewed, glowingly, Dashing for the Post, the first volume of the late Patrick Leigh Fermor’s letters, for the Herald last year. So I was delighted to get my hands on its successor, More Dashing (Bloomsbury, 480pp, £30/$40), ready for another plunge deep into the vanished age of letter writing. Reading this correspondence, which stretches all the way from 1938 to 2010, means being picked up and spun round in a “Paddy”-induced tornado of diplomats and ballerinas, poets and painters, Mitfords and Devonshires; of road-trips in Bentleys and port-laden dinners; of yachting expeditions on the Med and writing retreats in French monasteries. In the author’s signature terms, it is nearly all “tremendous fun” or “unspeakably charming” – or both. My stomach for giddy accounts of toffs-at-play was, I will admit, severely tested in places. More of the prejudices of his class, tribe and time are on display here than perhaps anywhere else in Leigh Fermor’s work. All the same, his most attractive qualities still win through: the buccaneering spirit, the towering erudition, the playful wit and, above all, his insatiable lust for friendship (alongside, of course, the more familiar forms of lust). As Frederic Raphael said of Paddy, “one feels he could not cross Oxford Street in less than two volumes, but what volumes they would be”. Even when inventing excuses not to travel on a certain day, the great man remains true to form by invoking the anniversary of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It remains a joy, therefore, to trail along in his wake as he criss-crosses Europe from Lismore Castle in Ireland, all over France and Spain and Italy, to his eventual settling place in Greece – house-sponging, looking up old friends and making new ones, throwing himself into parties, locking himself away in libraries, getting into brawls, chancing his arm about money, rhapsodising about architecture, history, literature, nature, folk customs, wine, food, nightclubs – and, now and then, buckling down to some actual work. Editor Adam Sisman gets through some fantastic labour down in the footnotes, many of which become miniature entertainments in themselves. There is also a bass note of sadness running though More Dashing. The very first letter is a magnificent evocation of life at the house in Moldova of Balasha Cantacuzène, a Romanian princess, with whom Paddy had his first great love affair in 1938, at the age of 23. Later letters, though, are poignant efforts at staying in touch with Balasha, now impoverished and marooned behind the Iron Curtain. More Dashing may turn out to be the capstone on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s literary output. If so, it’s a splendid and very fitting one.
