Joan, of course, is Joan Leigh Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s wife. Stylistically, I don’t think Simon Fenwick is a great writer, but he makes up for any lack in that department with his attention to detail. Joan, the Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor is packed with so much detail, so many names! Joan was intelligent, adventurous and fiercely solitary, and declined to live on her domineering father’s allowance. She developed a career as a freelance photographer and lived life on her own terms. For me, the book is largely a description of the life and times of fashionable literary/artistic/aesthetic strata in Britain, commencing with first, life in London in the 1920s and 30s, and then tracing the set’s adaptation to the second part of the 20th century, albeit from the perspective of Joan’s life with PLF, who she met in Cairo during WW2. Life in the between the wars (and during WW2, too, at times, in both London and Cairo) was clearly exciting. Joan was introduced to this by her first lover, Alan Pryce-Jones and to a life of parties, affairs, infidelity, divorces and re-marriages. To quote, “In the circles in which Paddy and Joan moved divorce and remarriage were commonplace….. . Homosexuality was also regarded as a perfectly acceptable way of life.”
The book is full of names and details about their lives: their eccentricities, affairs, marriages, sexual preferences and so much more. Evelyn Waugh was in this set, and the book identifies both the aristocrat who Waugh based Lord Marchmain on in Brideshead Revisited, as well as the the lady on whom Julia is based. So many names are mentioned (too many for me to keep a close track of), sometimes I wondered who the book was supposed to be about. I imagine that anyone knowledgeable about with the era would be familiar with many of these people.
There are some interesting insights, although perhaps no great surprises. It’s stated explicitly that PLF “was always clueless about money” and “… he was never fully house-trained” (apparently a reference to smoking and drinking in bed). And Joan, too, such as “…her accent was old fashioned and upper class”, as well as “…Joan was always an English countrywoman at heart”..
The author, Simon Fenwick, was the archivist who went to sort out PLF’s papers in Kardamyli after his death, before they were returned to England. He makes a case for Joan to be considered the proper foundation of Paddy’s existence; his muse and ‘greatest collaborator’, whose wealth and talent as a sounding board underpinned his career as an author. ‘Joan made it possible for Paddy to write.’
I picked the book up because of my interest in Patrick Leigh Fermor and his era. However, much as I like his writing, on reflection, I’m not sure that I can say that I really like PLF as a person. Taken overall, and having read a number of books by and about him, he was clearly very indulgent. That said, it doesn’t matter does it: we don’t need to like the authors of the books we read.
Musings and Mutterings 