Poet, dandy and visionary
David Pryce-Jones
The following is the address given at Peter Levi's memorial service at St Maly the Virgin, Oxford on 16 May Occupying the best part of one of my shelves are 28 books by Peter Levi — by no means his whole output — and a dozen or more of those desirable items described in dealers' catalogues as v. scarce. The titles of the latter say something about him: Pan- cakes for the Queen of Babylon, The Shear- waters, Comfort at Fifty (with an annotation in his hand 'Five anti-platonic sonnets'), In Memory of George Seferis, Orpheus' Head, Music of Dark Tones. Here's a reprint from the Heythrop Journal of an article on the Podgoritsa Cup, a clear glass patera appar- ently of uncertain origin. In an off-hand footnote Peter likens it to one similar signed by Acaunissa who 'probably worked at Vichy under Hadrian'. Another reprint, this time from the Classical Review, opens, If we had Cyriaco of Ancona's full and original journals and drawings, his immense importance as an archaeological traveller would be even more obvious to everybody than it already is.' Cyriaco's numerous journeys, Peter continues in his own manner, 'are as hard to unravel as very old cobwebs'.
Who else combined such natural gifts with such learning? Of course he knew the classical languages from schooldays, and he had to learn at least some Hebrew. He had a crack at Arabic — or was it Aramaic? He taught himself Russian to translate Yev- tushenko and to write about Pasternak. His modern Greek was idiomatic, and he trans- lated that too. Certain Serbo-Croat poems, he held, occupied an essential place in the history of the epic, and he came to trans- late them. As for French, he once took a troop of boy scouts from Stonyhurst to the Auvergne, and sent me a postcard with the news that he had led them to sing out of the train-window at some station, '11 est cocu, k chef de gare.' As in that remark about cobwebby Cyria- O, Peter really did think that everybody knew what he knew. What often got him into trouble with pedants was a belief that learning mattered not for its own sake but for the illuminations and excitements which emerged from it. A scholar, he once said, is someone who claims to know more about some tiny thing than the only other man to make the same claim. On another occasion, someone to whom I had sent a book of mine had returned a list of its errors. Peter brushed this off. 'Mistakes are the plums in the pudding.'
He was a poet. I see him as he was when a young man for whom handsome is too dull a word and beautiful too feeble. With those dark, profound eyes and the eye- brows with a right-angle in them, the inten- sity of his face expressed the inner spirit. Peter and his looks went beyond the full romantic image of the poet. A bus had knocked him down and almost killed him. In the streets passers-by turned to stare at this ethereal El Greco figure, and of course to wonder at the dog-collar. A dandy, out to surprise and shock, he was at the same time a visionary on a mountain-top.
The house of his childhood, in Ruislip, was a place like any other, but it concealed impenetrably the origins of his parents and their many relations. On his father's side they were originally Jews from Con- stantinople and Baghdad, settings far more exotic and far-flung than the Middlesex from which his mother, a Catholic, came. Somewhere in the surrounding suburbs, he told me, he had had a revelation that God called him not just to be a Catholic but a Jesuit priest. To a man of reason, faith was `axiomatic' — the adjective was as unusual as the thought behind it: Father Levi of Campion Hall as a match for Evelyn Waugh's Father Rothschild S J.
A group of close friends tried to per- suade him not to take final vows. A kind of mediaeval disputation occurred. In self- protection, he slipped lower and lower in his chair, until he was hiding under the table. There were as many bohemians as believers in the church at Eastbourne when Peter was finally ordained, a lonely figure face down on the floor, arms extended.
Peter reached maturity at a moment when high culture still meant to quite a lot of people what it meant to him, and there was no pressure to apologise for what is now called elitism. The great Judeo- Christian tradition held art to be an act of rightful worship of God, for purposes of enjoyment and fulfilment and renewal. Peter found in David Jones perhaps the one living artist with a natural affinity. David Jones was also a visionary, and Peter praised him in a wonderful, almost raptur- ous sermon he preached after David Jones's death, because 'what he accom- plished in his art was a direct projection of what he was as a man'. It is not an accident that one of David Jones's most magnificent works of lettering is the ordination card he designed for Peter, with the name of Melchisedek in Greek capitals coloured an unimaginable flamingo pink right across the centre of it, and at the very bottom the dedication in Welsh, 'From David the painter to Peter the poet.'
An early challenge to Peter's high cul- ture came in the surprising form of the Beat Poets, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who exploded into Oxford one fine day shouting that has-beens and the walk- ing dead were all around. Impressed as he undoubtedly was, Peter would never have made the sort of concessions they demand- ed, nor the even simplest concessions inherent in the popular culture of the rest of his lifetime. Too intelligent for nostalgia or regret, he had no interest in fame and fashion. His art was also a direct projection of the man he was.
Peter's poetry was religious in the sense that he celebrates the natural creation. Earth and stone, water and fire, are central to his imagery. Some of his finest poems are addresses to friends, sometimes com- memorations of their death, in the form almost of biographies. Other poems tell stories, while several of his travel books are really poems in praise of nature and land- scape, in Greece and Afghanistan and Eng- land. The shape of hills, the colours of the seasons, the evocation of history, the mor- tality inherent in the word 'bone,' inspired his special lyricism.
Peter left the priesthood to marry Deirdre Connolly. Theirs was love at first sight. 'Such a relief,' Peter said. They lived in a country cottage, appropriate for a story with a happy ending. Peter was proud of Cressida and Matthew, the children of Deirdre and Cyril Connolly. Shade Those Laurels was a comic novel which Cyril Con- nolly had begun, and Peter was to complete and publish it. Like Cyril, he had a taste for good food and champagne with friends, and the wanderer from the mountain-tops bloomed into a family man. But Peter actu- ally enjoyed writing, making extraordinarily few corrections on the pages of thick note- books. Concentration led to fluency. From the cottage came poems, reviews, biogra- phies of Horace and Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson and Lear. Peter seemed the last true man of letters, always consis- tent, and sure that this precarious way of life would turn out all right in the end.
I see him head tilted back for one of his long delighted laughs. I see him in a café in Athens one hot summer afternoon, with Nikos Gatsos and another Greek poet, talking about Pausanias. I see him in that favourite tweed three-piece suit, as green as pea-soup. I see him in the enchanted garden of his own imagination, where all the great things ever made by God and the hand of man are there to be enjoyed. Finally I see him walking in Frampton-on- Severn to post a letter on the evening before he died, which I received only two days afterward. Diabetes had robbed him of almost all his eyesight. Looping large over the page, the last words he wrote also say something about the man: We are both terribily sorry to hear of your father's death. He was a great favourite of ours and to me an early friend and a bright star that never faded . . . I share with R. S. Thomas the distinction of being his discov- ery... I write this without help so the process is very queer, like going downhill backwards with your eyes shut.
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