When Patrick Leigh Fermor turned up at the gates of the monastery of Saint–Wandrille de Fontenelle in Normandy, he was trying to finish a book: a feeling with which he would become increasingly familiar. The years he had spent as an under-cover officer of the Special Operations Executive in Crete, the high point of which was the celebrated Anglo-Cretan capture of General Heinrich Kreipe in 1944, seemed like a lifetime away. After a brief spell in Greece after the war, he and his companion Joan Eyres–Monsell had undertaken a journey through the islands of the Antilles in 1947, with the photographer A Costa.
This journey was the subject of his first book, A Traveller’s Tree, but the encouraging start he had made in the summer of 1948 had fizzled out. Since then he had immersed himself in the cafés and nightclubs of Paris, while his hungover days were spent fretting over a heavy suitcase of notes and his few miserable pages of text. Then someone told him that the monastery of Saint-Wandrille in Normandy welcomed all guests, whatever their reasons for coming.
Was it true? He had no idea, but escaping Paris was vital if he was ever going to do any work. He took a train to Rouen, a bus to the village of Saint-Wandrille-Rançon, walked the rest of the way and knocked on the door one Sunday afternoon in late September. He was shown to a cell on the ground floor, overlooking a courtyard with a fountain. It contained a bed, a kneeler, a crucifix and a table – as well as fresh paper, pens and ink.
Guests ate in the refectory with the monks, drinking nothing but water and observing the rule of silence. From a pulpit high above, a brother read in a steady monotone, regardless of whether the text was religious or a passage from French history. By nine o’clock, just when his friends in Paris were thinking about where to spend the evening, the whole monastery was asleep.
Over the first day or so he was lonely, gloomy and bored. He finished the bottle of Calvados he had smuggled in. The white paper on his table stayed resolutely blank. As for the monks, with their waxy faces and downcast eyes, they could not be more different from the monks he had know during the war in the Cretan resistance – “pouring out raki, cracking walnuts, singing mountain songs, stripping and assembling pistols, cross-questioning me interminably about Churchill…” Compared to them, these men seemed like ghosts, half-dead already. Had they really tied up all their human passions and lusts like snakes in a sack and set them aside? Could that be done without causing irreparable damage to the human mind?
As the days passed in unaccustomed tranquillity, he found himself sleeping more and more. Later he described this as an “accumulation of tiredness”. No longer kept awake by his restless cravings for wine and company, he slept for over 12 hours a day – a sleep so deep he might have been drugged. When that passed he found himself utterly refreshed, able to work with a concentration he didn’t know he possessed. He no longer had to waste energy and effort on useless chatter and the pointless bustle of city life. His writing flowed and when he wasn’t working, he explored the surrounding countryside, or studied in the library. Here he read the history of the monastery, and pondered over the visions of St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross and Marie de l’Incarnation.
The monks, too, came to life. They spent three and a half to four hours a day in church, the rest in private study and manual labour; but when they did talk their conversation was easy and cultivated, marked by a gentle calm and lack of haste.
At this stage in his life, Paddy was very much drawn to the richly textured, visual style of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). Most famous for his decadent novel À rebours, Huysmans was also a devout Catholic, despite his contempt for the soft pieties of modern Catholicism. It was probably through his works, as well as his conversations with the abbot and guestmaster, that Paddy began to grasp the purpose of constant, unremitting prayer. Generated by the collective effort of the monastery, dedicated to reducing what Paddy called “the moral overdraft” of mankind, he began to appreciate what commitment and strength was required of those who devoted their lives to this work – so often dismissed by outsiders as a complete waste of time. He developed a great respect for the monks and their renunciation of the world. The spiritual rewards are great, yes; but no monk is ever free from restlessness, despair and doubt, nor the urgent lusts and fantasies that poison the long silent watches of the night.
Why was such a free spirit like Paddy so drawn to the religious experience? The answer goes back to the three years he spent at the King’s School, Canterbury. One of the oldest schools in Europe, its buildings are joined to the great cathedral by a network of courtyards and passages. Paddy’s vivid historical imagination responded eagerly to its medieval beauty, its stained glass and shadowy chapels and Norman crypt. He imagined it as though the Reformation had never taken place, with its services in Latin and the bones of St Thomas the Martyr still in their golden reliquary. His feelings were more romantic than religious, but they awoke his curiosity, as well as a sense of the life beyond that never left him.
His first experience of monasteries were those of Mount Athos where he spent over a month in early 1934, having walked across northern Europe. To a young Englishman barely 21, the unfamiliar Orthodox liturgy struck him as “mystical, sinister and disturbing”, but as he walked from one monastery to the other, the monks were unfailingly kind, and helped with his demotic Greek. There are many days of fasting in the Orthodox calendar, but on non-fast days, Paddy was a good excuse for an impromptu party in the monastery kitchen, with wine and peasant songs.
Orthodoxy, for all its antiquity, was too different from Paddy’s experience of Christianity to exert much hold on his imagination – unlike Catholicism. During the Second World War, he wrote “Roman Catholic” on all his army records so that if he died in action, he would receive a Catholic burial: an unlikely scenario, since the most dangerous parts of his war were spent in Crete. But on some level he wanted to be part of the historical continuity of the Roman faith, although he had never taken formal instruction and never would.
Reading his descriptions of prayer and contemplation in A Time to Keep Silence, published in 1953, you can feel his yearning for religious experience, while knowing he would never achieve the steadfast faith it required. The book includes descriptions of two other French monasteries. Saint-Jean de Solesmes on the river Sarthe, where monks were just as hospitable but the long passages and swing doors with frosted glass reminded him of school. He also described his days at La Grande Trappe. Here the monks, bound to silence, spent seven hours a day standing or kneeling in their 19th-century church, which Paddy described as “a great, dark, north-
Oxford nightmare”. Like many people who only tap into their spirituality now and then, he needed a beautiful setting to get a sense of God.
The beauty and peace he had found in Saint-Wandrille remained a touchstone. When he and his partner and later wife, the photographer Joan Eyres-Monsell, came to build their house in Greece many years later, they chose an isolated spot in a breathtaking setting. Here, outside the small town of Kardamyli on the Mani Peninsula, they made what was effectively a monastery built for two – Paddy was so gregarious and easily distracted, he could only work in isolation.
The approach is forbidding. A pair of stout doors with grilled gatekeeper’s windows are set in a wall that might guard an order of discalced Carmelites. Once inside, you feel you have stepped into an earthly paradise, with views of the sea at the end of a terrace fragrant with lavender and jasmine. The bedrooms off the arcaded gallery (two sides of a cloister) were as simple as monastic cells, but more comfortable. At the heart of the house was the library, which was also the dining room and sitting room. Here you were more likely to find works of French and English literature and European history than theology, although handbooks on the Apocrypha, the Early Church and dictionaries of saints appear among his vast collection of reference books.
Joan died in 2003, leaving him desolate. He lived on, battling with tunnel vision, for another seven years, but he never wanted to move from the house they had lived in for so long. Set between the craggy Taygetos mountains and the great sweep of the sea beyond the terrace, its beauty never ceased to sustain him, even when he could barely see it.
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