A twenty minute interview with Debo obviously recorded in November. She talks a lot about her famous sisters, and of course the interviewer wants her to talk about the time when she had tea with Hitler. The fascination continues.
Click here and then on the image to start the video.
by Wes Davis
First published in The Nation, December 2010
At a Chelsea-to-Richmond boating party held sometime in the early 1950s, the Duchess of Devonshire, then a beautiful young woman of 30, met a dashing man, some five years her senior, who was dressed as a Roman gladiator and armed with a net and trident. It was a look she thought suited him.
The fancy-dress gladiator was Patrick Leigh Fermor, a former officer in Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a covert unit that aided resistance movements throughout occupied Europe, and an up-and-coming writer best known at the time for kidnapping a German general during the war. He had crossed paths with the duchess before and remembered her clearly from a regimental ball in 1940, when she was still Deborah Mitford—the youngest of the soon-to-be-famous Mitford sisters. She was then engaged to Andrew Cavendish, a tall naval officer and younger son of the Tenth Duke of Devonshire who had no expectation of inheriting his father’s title until the war took his older brother’s life four years later. Leigh Fermor had watched the couple dance their way through the evening, “utterly rapt, eyes shut, as though in a trance.” Mitford had not noticed him.
But when they met again—as duchess and gladiator—Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor struck up a friendship that has endured for more than half a century. In Tearing Haste, a collection of their letters newly available in this country, gives the impression that the conversation that started at a boating party so many summers ago has never stopped. Spanning 1954 to 2007, the volume reads like an accidental memoir of a disappearing world stretching from the manor houses of the English aristocracy to the olive groves of Greece, its people and places rendered with a kind of care that’s becoming scarce in our age of helter-skelter communication. At the same time, the book’s title, a phrase deriving from Leigh Fermor’s habit of dashing off messages “with a foot in the stirrup,” captures the vigor and bustle of the lives that nourished the correspondence. I once happened upon the manuscript of a chatty letter Leigh Fermor had written in 1944 to an Englishwoman stationed in Cairo. Amusingly composed and illustrated with a witty hand-drawn cartoon, it closed with Leigh Fermor mentioning offhand that he was in hiding on occupied Crete and that an undercover runner was waiting outside to receive the communication.
In Tearing Haste is engaging from start to finish. There isn’t a dull letter among Charlotte Mosley’s selections. Even her annotations, often incorporating information from the book’s two correspondents, are as surprising as they are informative. One biographical note on the painter Augustus John includes Deborah Devonshire’s recollection of meeting him in London: “He looked me up and down and said, ‘Have you got children?’ ‘Yes.’ Another long look. ‘Did you suckle them?'” More than anything else, the collection is important as an addition to Leigh Fermor’s body of work, both because his letters constitute a larger portion of the volume and because the writing in them harmonizes with the books that established his literary reputation. But let it be said that the Duchess of Devonshire is no slouch either. Her letters, though generally shorter and less frequent than Leigh Fermor’s, share his wit and many of his interests—a fascination with language, for example, or with the byways of English and European history. She puts a charming twist on these topics while adding a few bright threads of her own to the correspondence.
Deborah Devonshire’s books—beginning with The House (1982) and The Estate (1990)—focus largely on the management of Chatsworth, the massive estate in Derbyshire that she and her husband put into charitable trust and opened to the public in 1981. (The house was a stand-in for Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley in a film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and throughout the letters Leigh Fermor refers to it as “Dingley Dell,” after Mr. Wardle’s house in The Pickwick Papers.) As a writer, she is best when describing the seasonal rhythms of country life (the arrival of the year’s pullets, say) or assessing the gamut of rural arts (from drystone walling to mushroom gathering) and tilling their linguistic soil. In Counting My Chickens, a collection of notes and essays published in 2001, she remembers leaving Leigh Fermor “stumped” by the meaning of words gleaned from the glossary of a pamphlet about sheep. “One sheep disease,” she recalls, “has regional names of intriguing diversity: Sturfy, bleb, turnstick, paterish, goggles, dunt, and pedro all are gid.” On the same page she can be found rhapsodizing over “the glorious language of the 1662 prayer book, with its messages of mystery and imagination.”
She takes any opportunity to undercut the preconceived notions one might have about a duchess’s likes and dislikes. “I buy most of my clothes at agricultural shows,” she says in Counting My Chickens, “and good stout things they are.” For the playwright Tom Stoppard, who contributed an introduction to the book, this was one of her most characteristic revelations. For me, a close runner-up is her discussion of flower gardening on a grand estate, where she admits, “I prefer vegetables.” Many of her stories turn on a similar blend of unexpected rusticity and unflagging old-school civility. In an essay about the life the Mitfords led for a time on the island of Inchkenneth in the Hebrides, she describes traveling by train in the company of a goat, a whippet and a Labrador back to her sister Nancy’s house in Oxfordshire when the war broke out. “I milked the goat in the first-class waiting room,” she confesses, “which I should not have done, as I only had a third-class ticket.”
For all her modesty, the duchess isn’t embarrassed to mention boldface names that have sailed in and out of her social circle. (They range from Fred Astaire to the Queen Mother, the latter called “Cake” when she appears in the letters.) The humor in one anecdote depends on knowing that John F. Kennedy was intimate enough with the duchess to employ her nickname. This caused some confusion when her uncle Harold Macmillan, then prime minister, found himself involved in a telephone conversation with the American president about matters involving Castro, SEATO and NATO. It took him a moment to switch tracks when Kennedy asked, “And how’s Debo?” (Evelyn Waugh, a friend of hers, might well have written the scene.) In the letters, Kennedy is counted among the “bodies to be worshipped,” and several entries describe the friendship that developed between JFK and the duchess in the years between his inauguration and his death.
Her relationship with Leigh Fermor has many dimensions, its ardor fueled by humor, charisma and delight in a good tale. The revealing joke that runs through In Tearing Haste is that Devonshire is not a reader and that despite her lively correspondence with Leigh Fermor, she can’t manage to read his books. She praises one of his letters not for its vivid language but because it has instructions about which parts to skip. Leigh Fermor takes revenge in another letter, marking a set of passages with notes “don’t skip” and “ditto.” The bit he wants her to see—a foray into history by way of language—might well have been lifted from one of the books that made him famous: “The inhabitants are Koutzovlachs who speak a v. queer Latin dialect akin both to Rumanian and Italian. Some say they are Rumanian nomad shepherds who wandered here centuries ago with their flocks and never found their way home again. Others, more plausibly, say they are the descendants of Roman legionaries, speaking a corrupt camp Latin, stationed here to guard the high passes of the Pindus, miles from anywhere.” Continue reading
The Hotel Continental in Cluj (or as we know it The New York) was not only the location for a great cocktail, but outside its doors in December 1989 a massacre occurred during the Romanian Revolution.
For those of you who have followed my stories about Cluj it was a pleasant city in Paddy’s time and remains so to this day. However, like so many towns and cities in Romania, it experienced its fair share of discontent during the last days of Ceauşescu. I can’t be sure of the figures but around a dozen people were killed, mostly by the Army, and these events took place virtually on the steps of the Continental. The video below shows some of the traumatic scenes that took place twenty-one years ago this week.
On the main road out of Cluj to the south is a very interesting cemetery. Its inhabitants include not only the citizens of Cluj, but generations of soldiers from Europe’s great wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. There are Austro-Hungarian soldiers with names that seem to indicate that they came from all over that once great Empire. Romanian soldiers from the Second World War and around three hundred Russians from the struggles of the dying days of that conflict. But in a quiet corner stand some graves of those that died in the revolution of 1989, amongst them one or two young women.
As we prepare to celebrate the great gift of Christmas, let us take a moment to reflect on these momentous events, and those that continue to this day. Maybe we can give thanks for those that were prepared to lay down their lives for their friends, and for those that do so today.
This video appears to have a full Roll of Honour for those who came from Cluj and its environs who died not only in Cluj but elsewhere. It is very moving.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was a major in the Paras during the Second World War
This profile by William Dalrymple is perhaps the most well known of all the on-line pieces about Paddy. I have so far been reluctant to add it to the blog, but as my blog is meant to be a ‘one-stop shop’ for all things Leigh Fermor I have decided its time has come.
By William Dalrymple
First published in the Telegraph 06 Sep 2008
At 18 he left home to walk the length of Europe; at 25, as an SOE agent, he kidnapped the German commander of Crete; now at 93, Patrick Leigh Fermor, arguably the greatest living travel writer, is publishing the nearest he may come to an autobiography – and finally learning to type. William Dalrymple meets him at home in Greece
‘You’ve got to bellow a bit,’ Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor said, inclining his face in my direction, and cupping his ear. ‘He’s become an economist? Well, thank God for that. I thought you said he’d become a Communist.’
He took a swig of retsina and returned to his lemon chicken.
‘I’m deaf,’ he continued. ‘That’s the awful truth. That’s why I’m leaning towards you in this rather eerie fashion. I do have a hearing aid, but when I go swimming I always forget about it until I’m two strokes out, and then it starts singing at me. I get out and suck it, and with luck all is well. But both of them have gone now, and that’s one reason why I am off to London next week. Glasses, too. Running out of those very quickly. Occasionally, the one that is lost is found, but their numbers slowly diminish…’
He trailed off. ‘The amount that can go wrong at this age – you’ve no idea. This year I’ve acquired something called tunnel vision. Very odd, and sometimes quite interesting. When I look at someone I can see four eyes, one of them huge and stuck to the side of the mouth. Everyone starts looking a bit like a Picasso painting.’
He paused and considered for a moment, as if confronted by the condition for the first time. ‘And, to be honest, my memory is not in very good shape either. Anything like a date or a proper name just takes wing, and quite often never comes back. Winston Churchill – couldn’t remember his name last week.
‘Even swimming is a bit of a trial now,’ he continued, ‘thanks to this bloody clock thing they’ve put in me – what d’they call it? A pacemaker. It doesn’t mind the swimming. But it doesn’t like the steps on the way down. Terrific nuisance.’
We were sitting eating supper in the moonlight in the arcaded L-shaped cloister that forms the core of Leigh Fermor’s beautiful house in Mani in southern Greece. Since the death of his beloved wife Joan in 2003, Leigh Fermor, known to everyone as Leigh Fermor, has lived here alone in his own Elysium with only an ever-growing clowder of darting, mewing, paw-licking cats for company. He is cooked for and looked after by his housekeeper, Elpida, the daughter of the inn-keeper who was his original landlord when he came to Mani for the first time in 1962.
It is the most perfect writer’s house imaginable, designed and partially built by Leigh Fermor himself in an old olive grove overlooking a secluded Mediterranean bay. It is easy to see why, despite growing visibly frailer, he would never want to leave. Buttressed by the old retaining walls of the olive terraces, the whitewashed rooms are cool and airy and lined with books; old copies of the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books lie scattered around on tables between Attic vases, Indian sculptures and bottles of local ouzo.
A study filled with reference books and old photographs lies across a shady courtyard. There are cicadas grinding in the cypresses, and a wonderful view of the peaks of the Taygetus falling down to the blue waters of the Aegean, which are so clear it is said that in some places you can still see the wrecks of Ottoman galleys lying on the seabed far below.
There is a warm smell of wild rosemary and cypress resin in the air; and from below comes the crash of the sea on the pebbles of the foreshore. Yet there is something unmistakably melancholy in the air: a great traveller even partially immobilised is as sad a sight as an artist with failing vision or a composer grown hard of hearing.
I had driven down from Athens that morning, through slopes of olives charred and blackened by last year’s forest fires. I arrived at Kardamyli late in the evening. Although the area is now almost metropolitan in feel compared to what it was when Leigh Fermor moved here in the 1960s (at that time he had to move the honey-coloured Taygetus stone for his house to its site by mule as there was no road) it still feels wonderfully remote and almost untouched by the modern world.
When Leigh Fermor first arrived in Mani in 1962 he was known principally as a dashing commando. At the age of 25, as a young agent of Special Operations Executive (SOE), he had kidnapped the German commander in Crete, General Kreipe, and returned home to a Distinguished Service Order and movie version of his exploits, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) with Dirk Bogarde playing him as a handsome black-shirted guerrilla.
It was in this house that Leigh Fermor made the startling transformation – unique in his generation – from war hero to literary genius. To meet, Leigh Fermor may still have the speech patterns and formal manners of a British officer of a previous generation; but on the page he is a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly a single living equal.
It was here in the isolation and beauty of Kardamyli that Leigh Fermor developed his sublime prose style, and here that he wrote most of the books that have made him widely regarded as the world’s greatest travel writer, as well as arguably our finest living prose-poet. While his densely literary and cadent prose style is beyond imitation, his books have become sacred texts for several generations of British writers of non-fiction, including Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Philip Marsden, Nicholas Crane and Rory Stewart, all of whom have been inspired by the persona he created of the bookish wanderer: the footloose scholar in the wilds, scrambling through remote mountains, a knapsack full of books on his shoulder.
As Anthony Lane put it in the New Yorker, Leigh Fermor ‘was, and remains, an Englishman, with so much living to his credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely sentient – pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their scope… We fret about our kids’ Sats, whereas this man, when he was barely more than a kid himself, walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. In his sixties he swam the Hellespont, in homage to Lord Byron – his hero, and to some extent his template. In between he has joined a cavalry charge, observed a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, and plunged into a love affair with a princess. He has feasted atop a moonlit tower, with wine and roast lamb hauled up by rope. He has dwelt soundlessly among Trappist monks.’
For myself, it was the reading of his travel books while at Cambridge that inspired me to attempt to follow in his footsteps. With a paperback of Leigh Fermor’s in my backpack, I set off to Jerusalem following the route of the Crusaders during my first summer vacation. Meeting my hero for the first time at Bruce Chatwin’s house, just before the publication of my first book in 1989, was the nearest thing I have had to a formal graduation ceremony as a writer, the moment when you suddenly feel that maybe you really have passed out of your novitiate.
Foremost among Leigh Fermor’s books are his two glorious Greek travelogues, Mani and Roumeli; an exquisite short study of monasticism, A Time to Keep Silence; and most celebrated of all, an account of his journey in the early 1930s, travelling on foot, sleeping in hayricks and castles ‘like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar’, from Holland to Constantinople. On and off for nearly 70 years Fermor has been working on a trilogy about this epic walk. The first volume – and many would say his masterpiece – A Time of Gifts was finally published in 1977. The second, Between the Woods and the Water, followed nine years later. Since then, 22 years have passed with no sign of volume three, the book that should take us to the gates of Byzantium.
Leigh Fermor is now 93 and his fans are getting anxious. But travel writers have longer professional life expectancies than most – Norman Lewis, for example, produced four books between his 88th birthday and his death five years later – so we should not give up hope. Indeed, on a low table when Leigh Fermor showed me into his study, lay an 8in-high pile of manuscript, some of it ring-bound, and some in folders, on which was scribbled in red felt-tip: Vol 3.
In the meantime, Fermor fans have a small savoury to keep them going until the final course is served. This week John Murray is bringing out In Tearing Haste, a volume of letters between Leigh Fermor and the last surviving member of the Mitford sisterhood: Debo Devonshire, his close friend for nearly half a century. The letters are the nearest thing Leigh Fermor may ever get to writing an autobiography, faithfully chronicling his movements since the mid-1950s with the same detailed, painterly, highly written style that he uses in his travelogues.
Though inevitably slighter than his more polished work, the book includes wonderful accounts of some of his most celebrated adventures, such as his disastrous visit to Somerset Maugham at Cap Ferrat. Here he describes the elderly Maugham’s face as ‘so discoloured and green that it looks as though he has been rotting in the Bastille, or chained to a bench of a galley, or inside an iron mask for half a century’.
Having committed the faux-pas of appearing to draw attention to Maugham’s stammer at dinner, Leigh Fermor, who had initially been invited to stay for a week, was approached by his host at the end of the evening who offered him ‘a hand as cold as a toad, with the words “W-w-well I’ll s-s-say g-good-b-b-bye now in c-case I’m not up b-by the t-time y-you l-leave.”?’
It emerged that Leigh Fermor’s proof of the book had yet to reach the Peloponnese, so after supper I produced my own copy. He frowned: there had been a disagreement between the authors and their publisher over the cover produced by the artist John Craxton, who has illustrated all Leigh Fermor’s book since the 1950s, and the book was now covered with something more sketchy, and clearly not at all to Leigh Fermor’s liking. ‘Debo and I complained,’ he said, holding the book almost to the end of his nose and peering disapprovingly at the illustration, ‘but they kept on about business trends or some such jargon. What was it now? Market forces, that’s it. Well I never…’
As he flicked through the proof, I asked if the rumours were true: that after a lifetime of writing in longhand, he was now finally learning to type, the quicker to finish the third volume of his masterpiece.
‘Well, not exactly,’ he replied. ‘At the moment I seem to be collecting typewriters. I’ve got four now. People keep giving me their old ones. But it is true, I am planning to take typing lessons in Evesham this September.’ He paused, before adding, ‘In truth, I am absolutely longing to get down to it, before my sight gets any worse.’
Patrick Leigh Fermor was born in London in 1915 to Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, the director general of the Geological Survey of India, and the ‘sophisticated and wild’ Eileen Ambler. His mother was a bohemian and highly literate woman, who loved reading to her children and encouraging them to learn poetry by heart. She had been brought up in the wilds of Bihar, as a result of which Leigh Fermor can still sing, It’s a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindi. ‘Although I was brought up in England,’ he remembered, ‘India was a presence in the household, like voices in the next room.’
Almost immediately Leigh Fermor was deserted by his parents. It was the war, and they had to return to India; given the threat of U-boats, it was decided to leave the young Leigh Fermor in England so that someone would survive if the ship were torpedoed. The boy was sent to a farm in Northamptonshire where he was allowed to run free. ‘I think it formed me, you know,’ he said. ‘Made me restless and curious. I was constantly climbing trees and hayricks.’
When his mother and sister returned to collect him three and half years later, he ran away from these ‘beautiful strangers’. In retrospect, Leigh Fermor thinks the experience of ‘those marvellously lawless years unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint’, something that marked the rest of his career, especially at school, where he was expelled from a variety of establishments until finding happiness at ‘a co-educational and very advanced school for difficult children’.
After that school was closed down due to a series of ‘vaguely guessed at improprieties’, Leigh Fermor moved on to the King’s School Canterbury. He liked the fact it was founded during the reign of Justinian ‘when fragments of Thor and Odin had barely stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods’; but his teachers were less sure about their new pupil: ‘He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,’ his housemaster wrote, shortly before expelling him. Unqualified to join Sandhurst, the direction in which his family had been pushing him, he attended crammers in London where he began to write poetry and to read voraciously.
Patrick Leigh Fermor at school, Kings' Canterbury
One of the books he chanced across was The Station, Robert Byron’s newly published book about his travels through the monasteries of Mount Athos. A subsequent meeting with Byron in a ‘blurred and saxophone-haunted nightclub’ made Leigh Fermor, aged 18, ache to follow in the author’s footsteps and visit ‘serpent-haunted dragon-green Byzantium’. He had also read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. With nothing to keep him in Britain he set off, having first borrowed a knapsack that had accompanied Byron to Athos, aiming to walk to that living fragment of Byzantium while living as cheaply as Orwell: ‘I loved the idea of roughing it.’
On the wet afternoon of December 9, 1933, the year that Hitler came to power, as ‘a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats’, Leigh Fermor left London, boarding a Dutch steamer at Irongate Wharf. His rucksack contained pencils, drawing pads, notebooks, The Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace. He would not lay eyes on Britain again until January 1937, when he returned ‘for better or for worse, utterly changed by my travels’.
‘I thought I’d keep a diary and turn it into a book, which of course is what I did,’ he said. ‘Except I am still writing that book more than 70 years later.’ It was not just that the journey gave Leigh Fermor the subject for his lifework, it ‘broadened my mind, taught me history, literature and languages. It opened everything up: the world, civilisation and Europe. It also gave me a capacity for solitude and a sense of purpose. It taught me to read and to look at things. It was a great education. I didn’t go to university, I went travelling instead.’
The journey also led him to meeting one of the two great loves of his life, a beautiful Byzantine princess named Balasha Cantacuzene. Leigh Fermor met Balasha in Athens, to which he walked after finally reaching Athos in early 1937. She was 12 years older than him, and had just separated from her husband, a Spanish diplomat. ‘She was 32, and I was 20. We met at just the right time and fell into each other’s arms. It was instant, we clicked immediately. We went off together and lived in a watermill in the Peloponnese for five months. I was writing, she was painting. It was heavenly.’
Balasha Cantacuzene
From there the couple moved back to Balasha’s rambling country estate in the dales of Moldavia, where they moved in with Balasha’s sister. Leigh Fermor has written that the two sisters were ‘good, beautiful, courageous, gifted, imaginative, immersed in literature and the arts, kind, funny, unconventional; everybody loved them and so did I.’
For Leigh Fermor, this was one of the happiest periods of his life. For two years he lived there, savouring the last remnants of a world that was just about to disappear: ‘Her family was part of an old-fashioned, French-speaking, Tolstoyan, land-owning world: country-dwelling noblesse of the sort described by Turgenev. They were intensely civilised people. The house was an old manor house, not grand, but delightful and full of pictures and books.
There was a butler who was always a bit tight, and no electricity, so we read with lamps and wicks. I spent the time reading my way through the whole of French literature and playing chess – when I wasn’t making a hash of writing this book.’ He paused, then added, ‘Of course I wanted to marry her, but she said, “Don’t be ridiculous – I’m much older than you.”?’
Both the romance and the world in which it was set were ended for ever by the war. ‘We were aware that war clouds were looming, but didn’t realise how serious it was. We were out on a picnic, some of us on horseback and some in open carriages, when someone shouted across the fields that the Germans had gone into Poland. I made the decision at once: if war had broken out I had to join the Army. I thought it would be over in six months.’
In the event, Leigh Fermor did not lay eyes on Balasha again for a quarter of a century. With the end of the war came the Iron Curtain, and Balasha could no more get out of Romania than Leigh Fermor could get in. When he eventually managed to find a way to get in as a journalist, he found Balasha living in poverty in a Bucharest garret, surviving by teaching English, French and painting. ‘We sat up and scarcely went to bed for 48 hours, laughing the whole time: “Do you remember?” By this time I was with Joan. Balasha took it all in such a philosophical and charming way. She was an extraordinary person.’
It emerged that the Cantacuzenes had been branded ‘elements of putrid background’ and Balasha’s lands had been confiscated soon after the end of the war. She had lost everything. The day Ceausescu’s commissar turned up she and her sister had been given quarter of an hour to pack. The house had subsequently been turned into a lunatic asylum. In Leigh Fermor’s account of the reunion, he wrote how he ‘found them in their attic.
In spite of the interval, the fine looks of my friends, the thoughtful clear glance and the humour were all intact; it was as though we had parted a few months ago, instead of 26 years… [But] early thoughts of leaving Romania lapsed in the end, and they resisted the idea partly from feeling it was too late in the day; secretly, perhaps they also shrank from being a burden to anyone. One by one the same dread illness carried them away.’
The same war that destroyed Leigh Fermor’s great love affair also made his name as a man of action. From Moldavia he returned to Britain and enlisted in the Irish Guards. As a fluent Greek speaker he was soon singled out for intelligence work, and was sent first to Albania and then to Greece as a liaison officer working with the Greek army. After the fall of Greece he found his way to Crete just in time to fight in vain against the Nazi invasion. From there he was evacuated to Alexandria where he set up house with several other young intelligence agents and a refugee Polish countess, Sophie Tarnowska, who moved in with her few possessions: ‘a bathing costume, an evening gown, a uniform and two pet mongooses’.
Before long Leigh Fermor was sent back into Crete to work with the Cretan resistance. He and an odd collection of recently enlisted Greek-speaking classical scholars and archaeologists were parachuted into the occupied island disguised as shepherds and established a troglodyte existence under the stalactites of mountain caves, commanded by a Fellow of All Souls. The port from which Leigh Fermor set off was captured by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps the day after he left. ‘It was a low moment in the war: the Germans seemed to be advancing in triumph in all directions.’ It was partly for this reason that Leigh Fermor’s bosses gave permission for his wild scheme to raise morale: kidnapping the German commander of the island.
Patrick Leigh Fermor and Moss in German Uniform Prior to the Abduction of General Kriepe
In Leigh Fermor’s own account of the abduction of General Kreipe, the climax comes not as the general’s staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE partly dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the highlands and hence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as ‘a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida’.
‘We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said, “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”. It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off… The general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. “Ja, Herr General.” As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.’
It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: fabulously erudite and romantic, and just a little showy. For his greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Leigh Fermor has been responsible for some of the most brightly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.
Back in Egypt, Leigh Fermor met his future wife, and the companion for the second half of his life. Joan Eyres Monsell was then working for the intelligence department as a cipher clerk. ‘She had a house near the Ibn Tulun mosque, and was very go-ahead,’ Leigh Fermor remembers. ‘She was a nurse when the war broke out, and had lived in Spain and Algiers before Cairo. We met at a party and hit it off very quickly.’
When the war was over, Joan and Leigh Fermor remained in Greece, wandering the country and initially finding work in the British Council, whose Athens office was then run by the other great British philhellene of that generation, Sir Steven Runciman. But as ever, Leigh Fermor’s wanderlust soon got the better of him, and before long he had resigned. In 1949 they caught a ship to the Caribbean, a trip that resulted in two books: a travelogue, The Traveller’s Tree, and a fine novel, The Violins of St Jacques. Both were written partially in Trappist monasteries, an experience that Leigh Fermor turned into his third and most tightly written book, A Time to Keep Silence.
It was in the early 1960s that Leigh Fermor married Joan and settled down with her in Kardamyli, to continue his life of writing travel books, interspersed with weekly book reviews for Cyril Connolly’s Sunday Times book pages. It is this more settled phase of life that is so well captured in the new book of letters between Leigh Fermor and Deborah Devonshire. There are lovely descriptions of Leigh Fermor and Joan finding the bay at Kardamyli; the struggles to finish A Time of Gifts; Leigh Fermor’s surprise and pleasure at its rapturous reception; and the slow writing of its sequel.
The final 50 pages of the book have a more melancholy tone, as their friends begin to die, one by one: the English ones often of cancer, the Cretans, more dramatically, falling from precipices, and the like. Finally come the deaths of both Debo’s husband, Andrew, and of Joan Leigh Fermor: ‘The cats miss Joan bitterly,’ Leigh Fermor writes at the end of the book. ‘They are not the only ones… I keep thinking of things I must remember to tell Joan at lunch, knowing they could make her laugh. Letters addressed to her still arrive from distant parts, but even they are dying out now, and increasingly it’s only subscriptions to be renewed.’
Leigh Fermor enjoys a two-hour siesta after lunch – ‘Egyptian PT’ as he calls it. But on my last day in Kardamyli he emerged at 4pm, smiling from ear to ear. ‘Didn’t sleep a wink,’ he said. ‘Got quite carried away reading the book. I was rather dreading it, but was pleasantly surprised.’ He held up the proof approvingly. ‘Some passages are really awfully good.’
Paddy at home in the Mani
After our lunch we went up the mountain beside the house to see the Byzantine chapel around which the ashes of his friend Bruce Chatwin had been scattered. The chapel was very small – only a little larger than a big garden shed. It had a domed red-tiled roof and round arcaded windows. It lay in the rocky fields near the village of Exchori, high above Kardamyli, and was built from stone the colour of halloumi cheese.
The sun was slowly sinking over the hills at the end of a hot day; from the higher slopes, the tinkle of goat bells cut through the drowsy background whirr of cicadas as shepherd children led their flocks back for the night. It is perfect, beautiful, a peaceful place for anyone to end their days, and as we headed back I asked Leigh Fermor whether he would like to be buried there, too.
‘Oh no,’ he replied instantly. ‘Joan is in Dumbleton. I’d rather like to end up there.’
It’s a characteristic of so many of the greatest English travellers that they come back home in the end. TE Lawrence, for example, finally recognised ‘that I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin’, and the same is true of Leigh Fermor. For all his years in Greece, he remains almost the archetypal Englishman, in its best possible form: ‘My heart is in both,’ he said as we headed downhill. ‘England is not a foreign country to me.’ He paused and looked down over the Aegean, glinting now like broken glass far below us: ‘I do love both countries,’ he said as we headed on home. ‘I really do.’
A selection of highly sought after first editions of Ian Fleming’s legendary James Bond books were sold by Gloucestershire auctioneers Dominic Winter at a sale on 16 December 2010.
Casino Royale, the book that introduced 007 to the world, was anticipated to be a highlight of the auction. This rare first edition with its original dust-jacket was expected to fetch £12,000, but in fact went for £19,000.
Other first editions included a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s first book ‘The Traveller’s Tree’ (1950), signed by Ian Fleming. There are also a few of Fleming’s marks in the margins on Haitian Voodoo, which he used for the scene-setting pages at the beginning of ‘Live and Let Die’.
This inspiration for one of the greatest Bond books was expected to fetch up to £800. In fact it finally went for £1,700.
Patrick Leigh Fermor in Ithaka, 1946, photographed by his wife Joan Leigh Fermor
The weather in London on December 9th 1933 was typical. The sky darkened, the clouds lowered and then it rained hard. A young man walked the cold pavements towards Cliveden Place to collect a rucksack that his friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant had used on a journey to Mount Athos accompanied by Robert Byron. After stopping to buy a stout ash stick, and probably some cigarettes, at the tobacconist on the corner of Sloane Square, the young man collected his new passport – occupation ‘student’ – from the office in Petty France. He cast his eyes up to the ominous clouds and then made his way quickly north across Green Park. Now the rain splashed down as he dashed between the traffic on Piccadilly and entered the house of his landlady, Miss Beatrice Stewart, in Shepherd Market.
A former model who sat for Sickert, and Augustus John, and who is said to be the model for the bronze figure of Peace atop Wellington Arch, Beatrice Stewart’s career was cruelly cut short after she lost a leg in a road accident. She had arranged a lunch for the eighteen year old Patrick Leigh Fermor and two of his friends to wish him bon voyage before the start of what was to become one of the most famous journeys of all time, and certainly the longest gap year in history.
After lunch, Paddy said thank you and goodbye to Miss Stewart, and jumped into a waiting taxi, which drove off through Mayfair, around Trafalgar Square, up Ludgate Hill, and past the Monument towards the Tower of London. It was raining so heavily that all they could see out of the steamed up windows were hordes of umbrellas, some carried by bowler hatted men, as the rain splashed down in the dark. “Nice weather for young ducks.” said the taxi driver as he dropped the small party by the first barbican on Tower Bridge.
The two companions, one a young girl wearing a mackintosh over her head like a coal shifter, stood in the rain to watch Paddy descend the stone steps down to Irongate Wharf. With a final wave, he strode up the gangplank of a Dutch steamer bound for Hook of Holland.
This was the start of Paddy’s journey down the Rhine and along the Danube which he so memorably describes for us in his book A Time of Gifts. This part of the story ends on Easter Sunday 1934 as Paddy stood on the long bridge over the Danube, in no-man’s land, between Czechoslovakia and Hungary at Esztergom, just as the Easter celebrations started in earnest.
A Time of Gifts is almost universally acknowledged as a masterpiece of English literature; Sebastian Faulks is a dissenter, but he would be. Described by some as a travel book, it is essentially the journal of a young man with a superb gift of memory, for languages, and for making friends, written with the benefit of a lifetime of amazing experience and learning, forty years after the events it describes. It is embellished by anecdotes and essential historical background, making it a rounded piece of literature and no mere travelogue. It should be compulsory reading for all seventeen year olds; it is truly inspirational. The sad part is that the very reason for the ending of Paddy’s ‘gap year’ whilst with his lover Balasha Cantacuzene in Romania in September 1939, resulted in the destruction of many of the towns and cities he passed through, and certainly ended the way of life of the peoples of Europe that he describes so well.
I have no doubt that today, aged ninety-five, Paddy will pause for a while to recall that day, reflect on the events that followed during his amazing and full life, and the friends and lovers who have gone before him.
Perhaps Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE, the Greatest Living Englishman, will pen a short letter to Debo?
It may seem strange but Crows are some of my favourite birds and never before have I seen so many as when in Cluj.
I first wrote about them during a visit to the city back in September 2010. There were thousands of them, flying in their squadrons in two streams. They took many minutes to fly past and I wondered from whence they had come and where they were flying to. During my last visit I was told that they spend their days at the city rubbish dump and fly back into the city in the evening. So the mystery was solved, and indeed confirmed by others in the pictures below.
This morning we had some crows in our garden and I thought of those Cluj crows once more. To my delight I found some photographs after a Google search and thought I would share them with you.
The poetry of Ted Hughes is also amongst my favourites. His 1970 collection Crow includes a number of dark poems where the crow is often portrayed as a dark protagonist. In 1985 Hughes explained his inspiration for Crow:
“Crow grew out of an invitation by Leonard Baskin to make a book with him simply about crows. He wanted an occasion to add more crows to all the crows that flock through his sculpture, drawings, and engravings in their various transformations. As the protagonist of a book, a crow would become symbolic in any author’s hands. And a symbolic crow lives a legendary life. That is how Crow took off.”
You can listen to Ted Hughes’ wonderfully soft Yorkshire voice as he reads from Crow in this You Tube video.
The copyright of the photographer’s below is acknowledged.
Crows over Cluj-Napoca by Dragos Ludusan
Crows across Cluj by theophilus_austin
Between the Woods and the Water
I am very fortunate to be able to visit Cluj quite often. We all know a little about the city from Paddy’s visit here during his brief love affair with Angéla in the summer of 1934. Today I find myself here again after a busy week in my company office. It is a cold overcast day, and the low cloud seems to make the sounds of the city travel a long way; the squeals of children playing, dogs barking and the famous Cluj crows cawing as they weave their way between the apartment blocks and the spires and domes of Cluj’s many churches.
Romania is not a country that many people visit on holiday, and Cluj is almost certainly not on many lists. I fail to understand why this is. You only have to visit the (open to public) Facebook page of Visit Romania and look at some of the incredible photographs to see that this country has varied and stunning scenery, and enough history on offer, from the Roman site at Parolissum, the artistic beauty of the painted monasteries of Bukovina or the wooden churches of Maramureş, and the castle of Hunyadi that Paddy visited during his walk south in the area of the Retezat on towards the Danube and the end of his journey as described in Between the Woods and the Water.
At its heart Cluj has wonderful Baroque architecture which dates from its heyday under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of these buildings have fading, crumbling facades. The absence of western chain stores means that the streets are not despoiled by those so familiar signs. I may be wrong, but this general absence of branded outlets means that many Romanians (but to be fair probably only those that can afford it) still have a very individual sense of style.
The statue of Matthias Corvinus
When one wanders just a few yards from the main roads in Cluj one enters a maze of smaller streets, many cobbled, with a myriad of bars, cafes and restaurants which all offer excellent value. Today I walked from the newly restored and very splendid statue of King Matthias Corvinus, past St Michael’s Church, towards Corvinus’ house. It is only a one minute walk. Paddy and Angéla stayed somewhere in those back streets within the sound of the bells of the church; quite where we shall probably never know. I too heard them ringing this evening as I walked to dinner.
Cluj is a very sociable place, possibly because there are something like 100,000 plus students here (an incredible number but that is what I have been told). It is also somewhere that makes you feel quite safe. I am sure it has its moments, but I have never encountered any problems and one feels safer here than in many places in England, particularly late at night.
What started out as just a short article about Cluj today, seems to have ended up as copy for the Romanian Tourist Board, and that is fine. In these difficult financial times, Romania offers a tremendous holiday alternative, and it remains low cost. So when making your plans for 2011 you could do worse than visiting this country, and possibly walking in some of Paddy’s footsteps. Romania could also do with the income. I call that a win win outcome.
Angéla, Paddy, István and Tom in Cluj-Napoca
Angéla and Paddy’s visit to Cluj-Napoca with pdf describing his visit
This title from a book by the German author Michael Obert hits the spot for me. Like Michael I am also engaged in a ‘search’ for Paddy and I know from your comments and emails that many of you are finding your own ways to follow in Paddy’s footsteps and to understand and enjoy his works.
Following the publication of the Wolfgang Büscher video just a few days ago, I was contacted by Christian from Koln (Cologne) saying how pleased he was to see the video and at the same time sending me a couple of other articles from German newspapers and magazines. Christian made the point that in recent years there have been many features and articles published in Germany about Paddy, including Michael Obert’s book which provides the title to this article. Chatwins Guru und ich: Meine Suche nach Patrick Leigh Fermor by Michael Obert is available from Amazon.
I have pdfs of two more articles and those of you who followed the blog in its early days may remember that I have previously featured a further article by Wieland Freund. Therefore, perhaps for the first time in one place, a collection of German (and Swiss) material about Paddy.
Der letzte Byzantiner by Wolfgang Büscher, first published in Die Zeit 24 May 2006
Wolfgang Büscher discussing A Time of Gifts video
Mit der Feder im Rucksack durch die Welt by Georg Sütterlin, first published in Der Bund 30 Aug 2005
Besuch beim Haudegen des Peloponnes by Wieland Freund first published in Welt Online 8 July 2007
“When God had finished making the world,” say the natives of Mani, “he had a sack of stones left over and he emptied it here.” Petroprolific Mani is the middle tine of a twisted three-pronged peninsular fork that jabs into the Mediterranean from Greece’s Peloponnesus. About as remote from the 20th century as the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Maniots dwell in a kind of telescopic time capsule that includes Homer but little more than a hint of the Industrial Revolution. Few Maniots read or write. They have no radios, movies or telephones, and the family vehicle is the donkey. Matching the man of Aran in his barebones existence, the Maniot is scorched black by the fierce summer sun and lashed in win ter by the tramontana, a fearsome wind that tosses marble slabs about like pebbles.
First published in Time magazine, July 18 1960
From the Tower. Other Greeks shudder when they mention the Mani, and few ever go there. In his mad-dog-and-English-man way, Britain’s Patrick Leigh Fermor not only went but also brought back a fascinating traveler’s account of this bypassed pocket of civilization. Author Fermor, a passionate philhellene, has roamed Greece for 20 years, including a stint as a British commando, and his book is steeped in myth and history, which sometimes slacken the pace but rarely dim the interest of his chronicle.
Maniot girls are shy, grave and graceful, with large, luminous black eyes that reminded Fermor of the Madonnas in Byzantine icons. The men shave once a week, and some of them sport the black, eight-inch handlebar mustaches of their piratical forebears. Descendants of the
Spartans, the Maniots are famed for their blood feuds. From the iyth century on, they built tower dwellings resembling the Italian campanile, and the status symbol of the day was to have the highest tower. It was also a key vantage point from which to rain down rocks on an enemy neighbor’s marble roof. As soon as one member of a family was killed, clan warfare was declared, with the towers as citadels. When gunpowder was introduced, cannon fired away at point-blank range across the narrow streets, and not a move could be made by day without a fusillade of gunshots. Food and ammunition were smuggled into the towers by night, and since the feuds sometimes went on for years, each newborn boy was hailed as “another gun for the family.” Meanwhile, entire families of innocent bystanders resignedly moved out of town.
The Moles of Fate. The legendary patriot leaders of Greece’s struggle for independence from Turkey—Theodoros Kolokotronis and Petrobey Mavromi-chalis—campaigned from the Mani. Indeed, Mavromichalis was a Maniot who, in countless forays against the Turks, lost 49 relatives. He nailed the heads of Turks whom he killed around his own tower until it was studded with skulls. In the light of their rebel heritage, the Maniots of today are remarkably royalist. In private homes, Fermor found pictures of Greece’s King Paul and Queen Frederika right next to those of George VI and Elizabeth II. In one Maniot home, such pictures were flanked by a 1926 fashion advertisement of the “Be Smart Tailors of Madison Avenue.”
This probably seems like the height of modernity to a people who like to point out the island where Paris took Helen the first night after he stole her from Menelaus, and who still retain the purest links of Greece’s pagan past. Old Maniots are convinced that Nereids haunt the local fountains, and mothers believe that the three Fates hover over an infant’s cradle to write invisible destinies on the child’s brow (moles are known as “writings of the Fates”). Seafarers claim that Gorgons grip their caiques in a storm and ask in ringing tones, “Where is Alexander the Great?” If the captain shouts, “Alexander the Great lives and reigns!”, the sea turns calm. Otherwise, the Gorgon tilts the boat toward sea bottom, and all hands drown.
Couplets for Hector. Mani’s most cherished art form is the miroloy, the dirge with which keening womenfolk usher the Maniot out of a harsh world that neither man nor God seemingly made. More a lament for a hero being taken to the underworld than for a Christian going to his reward—even as she makes the sign of the cross, the grieving widow will say, “Charon took him”—the miroloy mirrors in its 16-syllable line the lament of Andromache over the body of Hector. At graveside, the chief mourner’s voice becomes a howl of hysteria (“Oh, my warrior! The arch and pillar of our house!”), her hair tumbles in disorder, and she tears at her cheeks with her fingernails till they are crisscrossed with red gashes and running with tears and blood. In the mesmeric half-trance of the dirge, the singer has been known to drift far out and lament high taxes, the price of salt, the need for roads, and the Bulgarian frontier—all in faultless couplets. Sans couplets, but with 20/20 sight and insight, Author Fermor has fashioned a durable portrait of the enduring people who inhabit the mythical rock garden of the gods.
The Germans remain keen fans of Paddy’s work. I don’t know if that is because he travelled through their land, or because of his fame from the Kreipe kidnap, or perhaps because they just appreciate good writing.
For those who speak German here is the German writer Wolfgang Büscher talking about Paddy and his work.
“He mentions the decision of PLF to change his life by taking the tour of Europe at barely 19 after having quitted (“flo”wn” out of) school, the fact that he wrote the two volumes forty years later from memory (having lost all notes from that time). One of the most wonderful books he knows. First volume “A time of gifts” is reporting Germany and Austria, second volume Hungary and Romania.”
A further profile of Büscher in French!
A young and beautiful Debo
First published in The Guardian 12 September 2010
By Stephen Moss
The 90-year-old Duchess of Devonshire talks about her famous Mitford sisters, meeting Hitler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and why she doesn’t like change.
‘Oh, you’re punctual – how very unusual,” says Deborah Cavendish (AKA the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) as she enters the drawing room. I’m not sure whether I’m being congratulated or castigated; either way, I feel she has the advantage, one she never loses. I was already nervous about this encounter. The duchess has just published her memoirs, and journalists are not spared. She describes how, after she had talked about the deaths of four close friends in the second world war, a particularly dumb interviewer asked her, “So, did the war change you?” She also says in the book that you should never believe anything you read in newspapers. As well as representing the dodgy fourth estate, I’m also wondering whether I’m supposed to call her Your Grace.
The duchess says she embarked on her memoirs because she felt her family, and her parents in particular, had been portrayed unfairly in the media, with journalists working from ancient press cuttings. At 90, she wanted to put her version of her upbringing on record. And what an upbringing it was. Debo, as she is called by people who eschew titled formalities, is the last surviving member of the six Mitford sisters, an afterthought (or so she implies in the book), dismissed because her parents had wanted a second son, patronised by her glittering sister Nancy, overshadowed by the fame (or notoriety) of Jessica, Diana and Unity. Her memoir – called Wait For Me! because she says she was always running to catch up with her older, longer-legged siblings – is a touching, funny memorial to a vanished age of debutantes, balls and young men with fancy titles making the ultimate sacrifice on the battlefield. She only started to write in her 60s – first about the ancestral seat of Chatsworth, then more generally – but belatedly she is catching her writerly sisters up.
Her life has been remarkable, and only her languid, laconic, matter-of-fact style allows her to shoehorn it into 370 pages. There is enough here for a dozen books. She must be one of the few people to have met both Adolf Hitler and John Kennedy, has been a familiar of the Queen for her entire reign, and was related by marriage to Harold Macmillan and used to go shooting with him. “When he became prime minister [in 1957, having previously been chancellor],” she tells me apropos of nothing in particular, “he told me it was wonderful because at last he had time to read.” She laughs. Her sense of humour and recognition of the absurdities of life are apparent throughout both her book and our conversation, bearing out her friend Alan Bennett’s remark: “Deborah Devonshire is not someone to whom one can say, ‘Joking apart . . .’ Joking never is apart: with her it’s of the essence, even at the most serious and indeed saddest moments.”
She may have deemed my punctuality worthy of remark because she lives in the middle of nowhere, in a hamlet called Edensor on the Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire. The duchess occupied Chatsworth itself, perhaps England’s finest country house, until the death of the 11th duke in 2004. Soon afterwards she moved about a mile away, to a vicarage on the edge of the estate, far enough from the house to give her son Stoker (nicknames are important in these circles – his real name is Peregrine), the 12th duke, and his wife Amanda, the new duchess, room to breathe. Dowagers have to know their place, and recognise their moment in the sun has passed. Nothing, she emphasises, belongs to the person; it all goes with the title. “I’ve lived in furnished rooms all my life since I was married.”
The duchess with her beloved chickens at Chatsworth in the 1990s. Photograph: Christopher Simon Sykes/Getty Images
Her final set of rooms are in the Old Vicarage at Edensor, which she occupies with her butler Henry, who has been with the Devonshires for almost 50 years, an ultra-efficient secretary called Helen, who has been with her for almost 25, and large numbers of chickens, pictured on the cover of her book. She enumerates the several breeds she keeps, and seems a little disappointed that I am unaware of the differences. Another dumb journalist who will probably confuse a Derbyshire redcap with a Scots dumpy.
We talk in the drawing room, silent save for the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. Her piercing blue eyes unnerve me, though she tells me towards the end that, because of macular degeneration, she can barely make out my face. That also makes reading virtually impossible, and it is remarkable that she has managed to write this book, scribbled in bed early in the mornings (“I wake up very early – I love the shipping forecast at 5.20”), with Helen typing it up. Her hair is steely grey and voluminous; she is elegantly dressed in high-necked blouse, lemon cardigan and sensible skirt; on her left wrist, beside her watch, she has a band with a small red disc that I mistake for a bracelet; she tells me it is an alarm in case she has a fall, but that she likes to pretend the red button she has to activate is a ruby.
I begin by asking her to recount her meeting with Hitler in 1937, when she, her mother and her sister Unity (who was besotted with the Führer) took tea with him in Munich. In the book she recalls him noticing they were “grubby” after a journey from Vienna, and showing them to the bathroom, where he had brushes inscribed “AH”. She has a passion – and a talent – for details. “I didn’t know Hitler,” she tells me. “I only went to tea with him once. He was very fond of my sister Unity.” She starts recounting the meeting Continue reading
There are many authors of articles that stake a claim to follow in Paddy’s footsteps (I have even written my own!), but I never tire of the new perspectives that people bring to these places, some of which I doubt I will ever have the time to visit. They also are standard bearers for Pay’s work, bringing his wonderful work to the attention of a new generation who may be inspired by the man who is The Greatest Living Englishman.
First published in The Boston Globe, October 17, 2010
By Heidi Fuller-love
Areopoli (above) is a tiny town in Greece that helped inspire author Patrick Leigh Fermor to write “Mani.’’
KARDAMYLI, Greece — Named for Phrygia’s mythical king, Pelops, who is said to have conquered this savage region before his father had him chopped to pieces and fed to the gods, the Peloponnese region stretches a fat hand out from the bottom of Greece and points bony stone digits toward the Cyclades, Turkey, and Crete. “When God had finished making the world he had a sack of stones left over and he emptied it here,’’ the Maniots are fond of saying.
Passionate philhellene Patrick Leigh Fermor, the Irish adventurer-turned-travel-writer played by Dirk Bogarde in the classic war opus “Ill Met by Moonlight’’ (later called “Night Ambush’’) visited the middle “finger’’ in the 1950s . Impressed, he wrote “Mani,’’ his fascinating account of a journey by foot, mule, and “caïque,’’ or wooden boat, to the heart of this arid peninsula cut off from the world by the Taygetus mountains and dotted with stark stone towers inhabited by fiercely feuding locals.
Hiring a car at Kalamata to follow in his footsteps, I arrive 60 years later, via lush countryside spiked with cypress spears, at Kardamyli, where Fermor settled with his wife, Joan, after his Mani adventure. Fermor, now in his 90s, still lives in the pretty village that was once a major Spartan port.
Giorgos Giannakeas, the son of Lela, Fermor’s former housekeeper, runs a seaside taverna. He tells me that the sprightly writer is often seen striding down the main street lined with driftwood-decorated cafes. “Our village attracts hikers who come to climb the peaks of Taygetus mountain range, but our main visitors are British people who come seeking the great man,’’ he says, doling out a fragrant ladle of Lela’s moussaka .
Half an hour’s drive from Kardamyli, the tiny harbor of Gytheion, once the main seaport of ancient Sparta, bears little trace of its former glory. Worn marble steps climb to a warren of alleys where cats prowl hungrily and storekeepers sell feta cheese from grime-rimmed buckets.
Unable to feed their families, countless Maniots traveled from here to find work in the New World at the turn of the 20th century. “Our fathers had no choice. It was that or die of hunger,’’ says Zafeirakos Zafeiris, who owns a hotel overlooking the Laconian Gulf.
On leaving the port, they would have passed the Kranae peninsula where Paris and Helen shared that epic night of love whose belated climax was the Trojan war. As the sun descends over this weed-blown strip of land, fishermen beat squid like laundry and ink spurts out, staining the rocks.
Gateway to the Mani, Gytheion signals a dramatic change in scenery. Climbing steeply into the fierce sun, my rental car groans and spews clouds of cheap Greek diesel. At a gas station where I stop to fill the tank, pump attendant Adonis Grigorakakis, who, like many Maniots, grew up in the United States, tells me. “The thing you have to understand is it’s all mountains here, see? The only way you could get to one of the villages here was with a boat. And it was like that right up till, say, 20, 30 years ago.’’
I climb higher until the sea looks like shards of a broken mirror and I’m surrounded by scree-strewn slopes spiked with purple-flowered thyme where scrawny sheep, their udders ripe with the raw substance of the pungent local Sfela cheese, jingle fist-sized bells. It is the bleak scenery described so lovingly in Fermor’s book.
Just outside Areopoli — named for Greek war god Ares, I spot my first “pyrgospita.’’ Tall and square, these eyeless towers were once strongholds for a vendetta-loving local aristocracy. “Feuds lasted for centuries and were ended either by the destruction of a whole family in battle, or by the surrender of an entire clan who were then required to kiss the hands of the victors who had lost ‘guns’ (male children) in the battle,’’ a leaflet at the village’s eclectic war museum explains.
When Fermor arrived in Areopoli 60 years ago sporting rucksack, shorts, and a charmer’s grin, he met people who had never seen anyone from outside the Mani before. Nowadays, this atmospheric jumble of towers and tavernas woven together by skeins of bougainvillea attracts a multinational rag-bag of visitors who stop for “meze,’’ or snacks, before visiting the Diros grotto, a subterranean wonder world of salmon stalagmites sheltered in a booming sea cave beneath the village.
Vathia, farther along the coast, has changed too. The lively village where Fermor was teased by a shepherd girl is a ghost town where one or two renovated pyrgospita glitter, amid a brooding huddle of ruined towers. I peek into one of them. Cramped as a windmill, dank as a cave, it’s easy to imagine the misery of those feuding families who, as The Earl of Carnarvon reported in 1839 : “. . . have been born and married, have lived for 20 or 30 years, and in some cases . . . have even spent their whole lives within the enclosure of these gloomy walls.’’
High above a deeply indented coastline littered with shrines erected in the memory of those who lost control of their vehicles on these perilous roads, I reach the mule track leading to the remains of the Temple of Poseidon where sailors, about to round the dangerous Cape Matapan, once prayed for a safe passage. One of the mythical entrances to the Underworld, this is where Fermor ended his trip.
As a wind shrieks across the Taygetus’s scrub-covered shoulder blades, I contemplate the darkening stretch of sea where Fermor came in a caïque more than half a century ago. I imagine him jumping overboard and swimming into the tiny cave in pitchy blackness, hands feeling the splintered walls, seeking the crack that led down to Hades, and I suddenly feel very cold.
In the gathering gloom I drive back to Areopoli along a road lighted only by the flickering candles of accident-victim’s shrines. Entering a taverna I order Fermor’s favorite tipple as a pick-me-up.
Raising my tumbler of Retsina I drink a silent toast to the man who braved the capture of German General Kreipe during WWII, but was perhaps braver still in choosing to settle in this stunning, yet still savage region, whose history is one of constant strife.
Heidi Fuller-love can be reached at heidi.fullerlove@gmail.com.
The careful conservation of pre-industrial villages in Transylvania is Europe at its best, guarding the relics of its diversity
by Simon Jenkins
First published in The Guardian Thursday 1 October 2009
Between the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in December 1989 and the spring of 1990, half a million indigenous so-called “Saxons” fled Romania for West Germany. It was the most astonishing, and little reported, ethnic migration in modern Europe. In the seven towns and 250 villages of Saxon Land in southern Transylvania, no less than 90% of the German-speaking population packed its bags and committed eight centuries of history to memory. They drove west to a country few of them knew, enticed by the notorious “return to the fatherland” speech of the German politician, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
The exodus left behind a deserted landscape the size of Wales, hundreds of square miles of rolling beech woods, bears, lush pastures and wild flowers, once home to the Dracula legend. Across it are dotted medieval grid-planned villages, with Lutheran churches, schools, dignified houses, barns and smallholdings, their customs and exclusivity reminiscent of the Pennsylvania Dutch. For 800 years since being invited by the Magyar kings to form a bulwark against the infidel, the Transylvania Saxons guarded their Germanic tradition. They spoke a High German said to be similar to ancient Luxembourgish. They embraced the Reformation and resisted Ceausescu’s concrete communism. All this ended abruptly in 1990.
While the people have almost all gone, the villages remain, colonised mostly by Romania’sbooming Gypsies. It is estimated that as many as a million may now occupy this part of Transylvania, possibly rendering it one day the only majority-Gypsy province. The result is the most exciting and daunting cultural challenge in Europe.
The village of Archita is lost in a Carpathian valley near the 17th-century town of Sighisoara, whose medieval walls and nine towers lie at the heart of Dracula country. The village’s fortified church stands like a castle in its midst, encircled by not one but two high walls, with musket holes and archers’ galleries intact. It was built to protect the citizens against Tartar raids and still has its ham loft with hooks numbered for each house, an insurance against sudden siege. The interior displays its galleries, Protestant pulpit and baroque canopy. The churchyard is overgrown with unpicked plum and apple trees. From the rickety church tower the geometrical village plan reaches out into the surrounding woods. Wide streets and lime-washed, two-storeyed houses reflect the equal plots allotted to each Saxon family in the middle ages. Records show continuous family tenure from the 13th century to 1990. Just three Saxons remain.
The 18th-century town hall and school of Archita have fallen into dereliction. Since the families employed few servants there are no poor houses or suburbs. There is no water or sewerage and no tarmac roads. The village well and a few desultory horses and carts are attended by attractive Gypsy youths.
To the new inhabitants of these villages, the vanished Saxons represent an alien culture. But their ghosts flit round buildings that in most cases are unaltered since being converted from wood to stone in the 17th century. They are like the hill-station residences of British India, holding its genius loci in absentia.Ghosts linger too in the countryside round about, ironically preserved by Ceausescu’s order forbidding development beyond the confines of existing settlement. This yielded one of the most effective green policies in Europe, protecting miles of meadow and forest, now vulnerable to exploitation. The roads are already littered with loggers carting away loads of walnut, beech and oak.
Unesco has designated some of the Saxon churches as world heritage sites, as has the Romanian government, but not the villages. With no money for repairs and no enforcement, such designation carries little weight. There is thus a race to save the most endangered pre-industrial landscape in Europe from poverty-stricken newcomers understandably eager for modernity. One day these villages will be as treasured as those of the Cotswolds, Provence or Umbria, but until then they must pass through the valley of the shadow of possible death.
The response of the outside world to Saxon Land’s plight is uncertain. Money is seeping back. Some departed families have returned, some unhappy in exile, some as so-called “summer Saxons”, holidaying in their former homeland and hoping to capitalise on rising property prices.
I encountered one dedicated young German, Sebastian Bethge, in the dramatic hill village of Apold, labouring alone to restore the church interior with money raised in Berlin and elsewhere. A visiting pastor had just held a Lutheran service for a congregation of nine – four Romanians, three Hungarians and two Germans.
The EU is bringing infrastructure to some villages, even as it devastates their markets for milk and hops. Unesco has its designations. The Transylvania Trust has restored the castle home of the novelist, Miklos Banffy, whose Transylvanian Trilogy is so evocative of this region’s other, Hungarian, past. Britain’s Prince of Wales has bought and restored two Saxon village houses. But most international effort goes on hands-clean “awareness-raising”, on drawing up lists, holding conferences and restoring an occasional showcase palace. The most impressive venture is the London-based Mihai Eminescu Trust (Met), chiefly supported by the American Packard foundation. Its “whole village” concept is tailored to Saxon Land, yielding more than 600 projects in the past decade. A leading citizen is engaged in each village to glean what locals – now mostly Romanians and Gypsies – would like restored if money and expertise were available.
This is exemplary conservation practice. Work is carried out by local contractors, with some 130 craftsmen trained to restore Lutheran and Orthodox churches, schools, houses and barns. Nothing is too small, from patched barn roofs and re-plastered street facades to empty properties converted to guesthouses. Plastic bus shelters and concrete bridges have been replaced in wood.
A truly minimalist venture had a Gypsy in the village of Floresti asking for, and getting, a tiled roof over an appalling hovel shared with his wife, two horses and a mountain of manure. Virtually next door is a restored Evangelical church, its sun-bathed interior one of the most serene of any church I know.
In the 13th-century village of Viscri, the Met has undertaken 160 restorations led by its local leader, Caroline Fernolend, winning it the EU’s premier conservation award. Sewers were installed and a new kiln built to supply handmade tiles, operated by a local craftsman. The trust is even reinstating apple orchards and relaying a local narrow-gauge railway.
No such conservation can work against the grain of local consent or in the absence of local skills. Imported from outside, it will stir resentment and obstruction. The root cause of the Saxons’ exodus was starvation of the modern benefits of civilisation. These cannot be denied their successors.
Yet the conservation of town and village cultures across the sweep of Europe proves that ancient and modern can co-exist to the advantage of both. Such is the disregard of the past by other world continents that these survivors will one day be respected, valued and celebrated.
The Transylvanian Saxons ranked with the Mennonite Amish, the Patagonia Welsh and the Volga Germans among the dislocated tribes of Europe. They lasted a phenomenal eight centuries, leaving intact monuments of a culture distinct and yet integral to European history. If modern European union cannot guard such relics of its diversity it is not worth the name.
November 8th is the Name Day for Saint Michael in the Greek Orthodox church, and as the Greeks have a paucity of saints called Patrick, the tradition is that Paddy celebrates his name day using his second name Michael. The name day is considered to be more important that the birthday, and is marked by parties and gifts. So, with today being the 8th November we wish Paddy all the best. I hear that he is well so I hope that he is able to join in with all the celebrations, but perhaps they will be a little muted from previous years.
Some of you may recall that the New Zealand writer Maggie Rainey-Smith happened to be in Kardamili a few years ago and somehow ended up at Paddy’s house and was able to join in the party.
Patrick Leigh Fermor in 2005 - Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
“By 10.30am the service in his private chapel was over and we were seated in his lounge – books lining the walls from floor to ceiling: Nancy Mitford, Henry James, James Joyce – eating olives, meatballs, feta and drinking local wine.
On a person’s Name Day you are required to take a gift, and all I had with me was a copy of my first novel About Turns, which I gave to Paddy. He signed my copy of his own book with a personal inscription and a small drawing. We talked about Crete and my dad and his book on the Mani. I gushed, he charmed.
Then the singing began and Paddy was surrounded by adoring local women who toasted him with traditional Name Day songs.
At the end of the singing, Paddy stood and pretended to fire a pistol into the air (an old tradition where real pistols were once used). He is of English and Irish descent. Although his name is Patrick, his Greek Name Day is the day of Michali. Michael is the name he assumed while fighting for the Greek resistance.”
You can read Maggie’s complete article about her visit here.
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
THE first two-thirds of “The Roots of Heaven,” which opened at the Palace last night with a benefit première for The Lighthouse, looks like a highly potential adventure film. An odd situation as been uncovered in French Equatorial Africa, some interesting characters have been assembled and some delicate lines have been drawn.
A grim Trevor Howard has been presented as a zealot with the annoying idea that men should do something insistent to stop the hunting and killing of elephants. These large beasts are the symbols of freedom and dignity in a world that’s too full of nonsensical killing, he has vainly preached at the pub. And then, with the authorities yapping at him, he has gone off into the hills with a tiny band of disciples to try to rally a full-scale crusade.
In his band are a couple of weird-beards from the far intellectual fringe and a violent pan-African organizer, whom Edric Connor plays. (The latter is against killing elephants only because he hopes to gain support for his political organization; he treacherously defects toward the end.) The band is later joined by Juliette Greco as a hotel “hostess” with a past and by a rapidly disintegrating boozer, blowzily played by Errol Flynn.
With a handful of natives toting rifles, these people have come down out of the hills, spanked a boastful female big-game hunter and spread leaflets proclaiming their aims. They are ready to defy the ivory-poachers when an intermission is announced on the Palace screen.
After the intermission, the final third of the film goes down the drain.
This is the more disappointing—and strangely surprising, indeed—because the elements, up to this point, have seemed so beautifully under control. While the screen play by Romain Gary and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, based on M. Gary’s book, could be firmer and less elaborate and garrulous in spots, it is studded with sharp dramatic incidents that accumulate and play extremely well, Under John Huston’s fine direction, the action moves along in splendid style.
More conspicuous is the rich production that Darryl F. Zanuck has arranged. There is an embarrassment of riches, as far as pictorial features are concerned. Most of the vivid outdoor action has been shot in Africa, in Cinema-Scope and color that catch the heat of the sun. And the cast is so large that Paul Lukas, Olivier Hussenot and Orson Welles—the last as an American television broadcaster—can be beautifully squandered in small roles.
Everything seems to be in order, until that final third.
Then the screen play just goes to pieces. The ivory-poachers do appear to raid a mammoth herd of lumbering elephants that the zealots are watching with glistening eyes. A battle takes place, the poachers win out and charitably let the zealots go free. And what do they do? They stumble off into the wilderness to an ending that is utterly vague.
Maybe some sort of allegory was intended to run through this film. Maybe the elephant lover was meant to be a modern Messiah, followed by feeble disciples and a Mary Magdalene. If so, the symbols are flimsy and the ideas are never firmed. There is no real dramatic implication, except that the elephant’s jig is up.
And the performances, which are forceful in the first two-thirds of the film, run progressively to twaddle as the survivors stagger toward the end. Mr. Howard appears to go crazy, Miss Greco slips into a drab decline and Mr. Connor, who has the one role with beef in it, is saved when he takes it on the lam. Eddie Albert comes in late as a news photographer when things are going to pot. He adapts quickly to disintegration.
“The Roots of Heaven” does not go deep in sandy soil.
THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, screen play by Romain Gary and Patrick Leigh-Fermor; based on the novel by M. Gary; directed by John Huston; produced by Darryl F. Zanuck; distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox. At the Palace, Broadway and Forty-seventh Street. Running time: 131 minutes.
Forsythe . . . . . Errol Flynn
Minna . . . . . Juliette Greco
Morel . . . . . Trevor Howard
Abe Fields . . . . . Eddie Albert
Cy Sedgewick . . . . . Orson Welles
Saint Denis . . . . . Paul Lukas
Orsini . . . . . Herbert Lom
Habib . . . . . Gregoire Aslan
Governor . . . . . Andre Luguet
Peer Qvist . . . . . Friedrich Ledebur
Waitari . . . . . Edric Connor
Baron . . . . . Olivier Hussenot
Major Scholscher . . . . . Pierre Dudan
De Vries . . . . . Marc Doelnitz
Madjumba . . . . . Dan Jackson
Haas . . . . . Maurice Cannon
Cerisot . . . . . Jacques Marin
Korotoro . . . . . Habib Benglia
Yussef . . . . . Bachir Toure
A. D. C. . . . . . Alain Saury
N’Dolo . . . . . Roscoe Stallworth
Inguele . . . . . Assane Fall
Father Fargue . . . . . Francie de Woff
By Peter Terzian
November 27, 2005
On the telephone from his home in Greece, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes what he does as “travel writing” but adds “I hate the phrase.” Indeed, calling him a travel writer is a little like calling Proust a gossip columnist. Rather, Leigh Fermor is a great writer whose subject is travel.
In “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and “Between the Woods and the Water” (1986), he narrated two-thirds of what he calls his “great journey” – an 18-month walk he took across Europe in the years before World War II. (New York Review Books has just reprinted both volumes.). Readers have been waiting for the concluding book ever since, and some interviewers write that he is “pained” when the subject arises. But in the first few minutes of our conversation, Leigh Fermor, now 90 (“Unbelievable!” he says; “I never thought I would attain this dignified age”), volunteers that he is currently working on the journey’s end. “At the moment, I’m going down the Black Sea coast, the Bulgarian coast, halfway down it.” He is, he says, “the opposite of a Deadline Dick,” and a rigorous self-editor. “I cut like anything, because I’m inclined to overwrite a bit.”
Leigh Fermor “got the sack from school early,” he says, “because I was sort of useless. I was rather undisciplined.” At “18 and 3/4,” he pulled on a pair of hobnailed boots, packed a rucksack with some clothes, an “Oxford Book of English Verse” and a volume of Horace (both soon lost), and crossed the English Channel by ship to the Hook of Holland.
From there, on foot, he followed the Rhine through Germany and into Austria, where he met the Danube. After a detour to Prague, he resumed the river’s course through Slovakia and Hungary. His youth and openness brought him into contact with peasants, students, rich country gentlefolk and fellow vagabonds.
Almost without exception, Leigh Fermor describes the men and women he encountered as hospitable and generous, amused at his adventure and happy to provide him with conversation, lodging and bundles of food for the road. In a cafe in Stuttgart, Germany, Lise and Annie, two flirtatious students, picked him up for a weekend of parties and dancing. In a town on the banks of the Danube, over bottles of Langenlois wine, a polymath mapped for him, on the back of a newspaper, the tribal wanderings of Huns, Visigoths and Vandals. (“This was the way to be taught history!” Leigh Fermor writes.) In Slovakia, he stayed with Baron Pips Schey, who introduced him to Proust’s work. As they sat up late in armchairs and walked through the spring countryside, the older man unraveled “an entire mythology” of fin-de-siècle Central Europe.
Walking alone, the teenage Leigh Fermor passed the time by reciting poetry. In “A Time of Gifts,” he details his memorized “private anthology”: “a great deal of Shakespeare … most of Keats’ odes; the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge,” Kipling, “some improper stretches of Chaucer,” mastered chiefly for popularity purposes at school, Carroll and Lear and “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The list continues, through French, Greek and Latin, for three pages. (When he exhausted his repertoire, he declaimed verse backwards.) “I think people are absolutely wrong not making children learn things by heart at school,” he says. “Because if they learn it at a very young age, it’s with them for life.”
In “Between the Woods and the Water,” Leigh Fermor tramps through Mitteleuropa. It was “a season of great delight,” he writes, in which he hopscotched, via a series of introductions, among the castles of learned aristocrats. He rode horseback through Hungary and hiked the mountains of Romania (where he met a family of shepherds, gold-panning Gypsies, a rabbi at a logging camp and a nest of enormous eagles). The book leaves the 19-year-old at the Iron Gates gorge, between the Carpathian and Balkan mountains.
Much of the books’ appeal lies in Leigh Fermor’s exuberant, witty voice. He shares his delight in every piece of historical knowledge uncovered, every medieval castle stumbled upon, every alien language heard. At one point, he reflects on 16th century German painting (“The severe Bürgermeister’s features of the Holy Child have the ferocity, sometimes, of a snake-strangling infant Hercules”). Elsewhere, he attempts to locate “the coast of Bohemia,” a setting in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” long thought mythical.
During his trip, Leigh Fermor took plentiful, detailed notes and transcribed conversations. “I scribbled away like mad every night,” he tells me. Why did he wait 40 years before writing about his walking tour? “It’s a mystery,” he says; “I think it’s possibly I was putting it down for the right time, like putting down a wine to drink.” After the journey came a romance with a young painter – “a bit older than me, terribly nice” – and two idyllic years in Moldavia at her family’s “very tumbledown old country house, full of books. … I did a tremendous amount of reading there, more than writing.” When the war broke out, he says, “I didn’t realize it would take so long a time, and I left all my notes there like an idiot.” After the war, the Communist regime forced the family out of their home. Each member was allowed to bring one suitcase, and one of them thought to salvage Leigh Fermor’s diary. It took, in all, 26 years for him to be reunited with his notebook.
He visited Greece after his great walk, and his connection to the country deepened during World War II, when he was stationed on the island of Crete as a member of the British Special Operations Executive. The organization assisted the Cretan resistance after the Germans occupied the island, and Leigh Fermor spent much of his time hiding in remote caves dressed as a shepherd. In 1944, he led the kidnapping of the commanding German general, spiriting him off to Egypt by submarine. In “A Time of Gifts,” he recalls the moment when his captive began to recite a Horatian ode, and Leigh Fermor chimed in to complete it. “For a long moment, the war had ceased to exist.”
He feels so strongly about his time on the island that when asked whether he feels he’s achieved all he wants out of life, he replies quickly, “I should have written more about Crete.” His second in command, William Stanley Moss, published a book about the escapade, “Ill Met by Moonlight,” in 1950. (Dirk Bogarde played Leigh Fermor in the 1957 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressberger film based on the book.) “It would be rather old hat if I did it again,” Leigh Fermor says. “But there are lots of Cretans that I’d have liked to mention because they were so extraordinary.”
He wrote about other regions of Greece in “Mani” (1958) and “Roumeli” (1966), to be reissued by New York Review Books in May. (He has published three other books about his travels: “The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands,” in 1950; “A Time to Keep Silence,” about his sojourns at two French monasteries, in 1957; and “Three Letters From the Andes,” in 1991.)
Leigh Fermor has spent the past four decades living in the southern Peloponnese, in the house that he designed with his wife, Joan, an architectural photographer, who died two years ago. They built their home using limestone blocks carved out of a nearby mountain range, hiring a local mason they met “purely by chance in the road. … He was a wonderfully inventive chap. He said to me, ‘For seven generations we’ve all been master masons, and we’ve all played the violin.'”
Together, Leigh Fermor and Joan had a life of “undiluted happiness,” he says. “We had the same ideas. She was highly literate, very charming and amusing, and a marvelous companion.” They traveled to the Far East and throughout Europe, “but mainly we lived here, and we’ve got thousands of books, so one’s got everything one needs here, and the sea handy to jump into.”
He takes great pleasure in describing the art-filled main room and the gardens, with “a descending staircase of olive groves with a lot of cypresses scattered among them” and “shady places where you can sit and write and read.” He is a consummate host to the many friends who come to Greece. “Do you know, we’ve been here for about 38 years. I went through the visitor’s book last week and counted up – spread over this period of time – 1,220 people have stayed under the roof.” I express astonishment. “I don’t know … It sounds like a milling mob, but it’s never that way.”
Shelves of reference books line Leigh Fermor’s dining room. He paraphrases T.S. Eliot, who told a mutual friend that “you must have books of reference handy for mealtimes, because that’s where questions crop up about history or literature, and these problems, one always thinks one will write them down and remember them after, but one doesn’t.” He lists the titles of some of his favorites: the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” “Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary,” “the ‘Oxford Companions to Literature’ in various countries, and art, religion and so on,” and “the thing that’s absolutely invaluable, ‘Chambers International Biographical Dictionary’ … It’s tip-top.”
Leigh Fermor laments that his “great traveling days I suppose are going downhill a bit,” in the same breath that he mentions recent trips taken to France, Spain and Morocco. (He also lives a quarter of the year in England.) I ask him if he’s traveled much in America. “No! I’ve spent a fortnight only. It’s most extraordinary. I’ve always meant to do it. And that fortnight was a very curious one, because I was invited there by the Pan-Cretan Association of America, and they all live in Long Island. So I went there and I saw really nothing but Greeks!”
An article Paddy wrote for The Spectator about his alarm at hearing of the possible piecemeal sale of the The Trumbull Papers and their subsequent salvation. The Trumbull Papers are an archive including letters from James I, Charles I and II, Sir Francis Bacon, John Donne, Samuel Pepys, John Locke, John Dryden and Alexander Pope, 29 letters from Philip II of Spain, secret correspondence about the Council of Trent and much concerning the British colonies in the New World long before the American War of Independence.
First published in the Spectator on 28 September 1996.
An image like a god’s I gazed on as I slept, Which a resplendent throne full richly did upraise,
While foolish multitudes, from need or pleasure, crept
To serve, or stand on guard there; and my gaze
Saw how, in the true God’s despite, it did accept
Hungry, but never fill’d – vows, offerings and praise,
And how its lightest whim spared some, but others reaped,
And joy’d in punishment, revenge, and wickedness.
To smite this ingrate image down did Heaven oft-time
Assemble all its stars in many a sign and wonder,
Yet still this idol’s voice rang out more loud than thunder,
Until at last, when pride did the high zenith climb,
A flash of lightning struck the shining form asunder
And all vainglory chang’d to worms and stink and slime.
Years ago, chancing on this sonnet in an anthology, I was fascinated by the metre – the extra foot at the end of each line and by the strange and ambiguous vision it conjured up. `Dream: on the D. of B.’, it was called, or rather `Traum: von dem H. von B’, for the poem was in German, and a footnote explained that the initials meant ‘H(erzog) von B(uckingham)’. I made an immediate dash at translating it, so the creaks, the faulty rhymes and the Wardour Street syntax are not the poet’s fault, but mine. (The poem in its original is given at the end of this article.)
Ever since reading The Three Musketeers, we have all been haunted by the Duke of Buckingham; haunted and dazzled by the satin and the diamonds and the strings of pearls, the starched lace zigzag ruff, the preposterous splendour and the panache; and when we learnt later on how this Phoebus Apollo had been stabbed to death at Portsmouth with a tenpenny knife, the horror, eerily laced with relish, was almost too much to take in.
And here, in the sonnet, was a contemporary foreign poet smitten by the same astonishment: ‘G. R. Weckherlin,’ the anthology said: ‘1584-1653’. I had never heard of him; nor had anyone else.
Georg Rodolf Weckherlin by Daniel Mytens, 1634.
In the German-speaking world, I learnt, Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, from Swabia, was thought second only to Martin Opitz, `the Father of German Poetry’, and though some writers call him `early Baroque’, both of them really belonged to a group of late Renaissance German poets (akin to the Pleiade in France a couple of generations earlier, with Ronsard and Du Bellay as their brightest stars).
He was also a scholar, a diplomatist and a courtier at the Duke of Wurtemberg’s palace at Stuttgart and travelled widely in France. Some time after 1602, he was three years at the Court of St James, and was sent on missions to Central European states and the Empire. In England again in 1616, he must often have been under the same ceilings as Buckingham. He entered the royal service and accompanied Charles on his expedition against the Scots, and soon afterwards he married Miss Elizabeth Raworth, of Dover, and took root in England. He seems to have changed sides at the Commonwealth: he became Latin Secretary, then Secretary of Foreign Tongues, to the Joint Committee of the Two Kingdoms, and held both posts until he was replaced by Milton, perhaps because of ill health. Paradoxically, he often helped the older poet when his eyes began to fail; then he succumbed to his adopted country’s distemper and died of gout.
He had been equally at home in German, Latin, French and English and almost certainly knew some Italian and some Greek. It was he who brought the sonnet and the sestina to Germany and he left a mass of poems, strongly influenced by his friend Samuel Daniel and his fellowdiplomatist, Sir Henry Wotton. (As I read about him a dignified figure began to take shape, with a kindly blue eye gleaming above a pale fog of beard and a wide collar fastened with tassels breaking over black broadcloth and silk: half-Van Dyck, halfHonthorst, lyrically wreathed, perhaps, in a chaplet of bays . . . )
Completely English by now, his daughter Elizabeth married Mr William Trumbull of Easthamstead in Berkshire, whose deer park was part of the King’s Chase. The latter served in several diplomatic posts, most notably in the Low Countries; and his son, Sir William Trumbull, followed him in his career. Beginning as a youthful Fellow of All Souls, he made the Grand Tour with Christopher Wren, visited Tangier with Pepys, sat in Parliament for a Cornish borough, became Charles II’s ambassador at Constantinople, then Principal Secretary of State to William III, and retired at last to his Berkshire library and the company of his friends. It was Sir William who first prompted Dryden to translate Virgil, and he performed the same office for Pope by suggesting Homer to him. Kneller painted him and Pope wrote the verse epitaph on his fine tomb at Easthampstead, where he still reclines in his full-bottomed wig.
I forgot all about them. But in the Times a few years ago, Miss Sarah Jane Checkland announced, with infectious alarm, the imminent sale of `the largest and most important collection of English state papers to be offered at auction this century’. They were the Trumbull Papers! The archive included letters from James I, Charles I and II, Sir Francis Bacon, John Donne, Samuel Pepys, John Locke, John Dryden and Alexander Pope, 29 letters from Philip II of Spain, secret correspondence about the Council of Trent and much concerning the British colonies in the New World long before the American War of Independence.
Perhaps the most exciting of all [the column went on, to my growing emotion] is the hitherto unrecorded series of papers belonging to William Trumbull’s relative, the German poet Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, Charles Is secretary from 1624 until the Civil War. These include letters, signed but not sent, from Charles to Louis XIII, Gustavus Adolphus and Marie de Medici, as well as many Royalist letters intercepted during the Commonwealth. Finally, there is a beautiful calligraphic manuscript of a still unpublished verse-translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, which Sir John Harington, Elizabeth’s `witty godson’, prepared and presented to James I, in 1604, for the young Prince Henry.
(Harington was also the author of a racy disquisition on water-closets that he punningly called The Metamorphosis of Ajax. When cross with him, the Queen used to catch him by the belt, even when he was grown up, and give him a good shake as she taxed him with his misdeeds.)
What a haul! And what a tragedy if such an Aladdin’s cave were to be ransacked! The contents had come down in a direct line of a dozen generations from Weckherlin and the Trumbulls to their present-day descendant, the Marquis of Downshire. The heritage lobby was in despair. There had been talk of a private sale to the nation; now it seemed that the open sale was to go ahead. The total price predicted – two million pounds — sounded enormous, but it was very little more than the damages which had been awarded in the recent Cossack libel action. If – albeit ludicrously – ordinary people were thought to be capable of forking out sums like this, there ought to be some public fund or government organisation to deal with such emergencies; but there isn’t, and things looked black. `In a few days’ time,’ the article had said, `this unique and wonderful collection comes under the hammer at Sotheby’s. Once split up, it will be scattered to the winds.’
At this point I was overcome, as though by an onslaught of heady gas, by dreams of grandeur. I would try to help save the Papers! After all, not every millionaire was an illiterate philistine. My mind’s eye evoked a rich, unknown and hypothetical humanist, steeped in concern for the country’s treasures. As he was only conjectural, the approach would have to be indirect.
Emulating Miss Checkland, I wrote two stirring pages and sent them to a famous weekly (this one, indeed) which I felt sure the unknown saviour was bound to see; on publication morning, kind fate and my wishful thoughts would waft him up the steps of clubland and lead him to the table where the weeklies were spread, and then guide his hand. Next, this not impossible he would be deep in an armchair with his glance halted at the right page. He would finish the piece with a pensive ‘H’m’; and a few minutes later my mind’s ear would detect a finger ruffling through the telephone directory; then dialling: `Lord Downshire? Good morning, this is – I’m so sorry to bother you. Could you spare me a few minutes, if I came round?’
It all ended happily, and fast, but not at all as it was planned. News suddenly came that the owner had solved the whole problem with impeccable generosity and public spirit, and all the treasures were safe. The piece, of course, never came out, the putative benefactor dissolved into the shadows and I suffered from a touch of the flatness Raleigh might have felt if the Queen had preferred a convenient plank. The anticlimax, bit by bit, gave way to exhilaration at the thought of the brimming deed-boxes, the crackling tiers of parchment, the faded pink tape, the hundreds of broken seals and all the mystery and the dust. The improper jokes of Harington cheered the air, and Buckingham’s ruffling plumage, and the thought of classical tags bandied by candlelight round Sir William’s table. I was buoyed up, above all, by adumbrations of Weckherlin, backed by youthful memories of the arcaded castles of bookish Stuttgart, and the vineyards and the ricks and the beetling oakwoods of Swabia: the landscape, after all, of the earliest sonnets and sestinas ever to be heard beyond the far bank of the Rhine and to the north of the Black Forest and the Danube.
Traum: von dem H. von B. Ich sah in meinem Schlaf ein Bild gleich einem Gott,
Auf einem reichen Thron ganz prachtiglich erhaben,
Auf dessen Dienst und Schutz, zugleich aus Lust und Not,
Sich die torichte Leut stets haufenwies begaben.
Ich sah, wie dieses Bild, dem wahren Gott zu Spott,
Empfing – zwar niemals satt – Gelubd, Lob, Opfergaben,
Und gab auch wem es wollt das Leben und den Tod
Und pflag sich mit Rach, Straf und Bosheit zu erlaben.
Und ob der Himmel schon oftmal, des Bilds Undank
Zu strafen, seine Stern versammlete mit Wunder,
So war doch des Bilds Stimm noch lauter dann der Dunder,
Bis endlich, als sein Stolz war in dem hochsten Schwang,
Da schlug ein schneller Blitz das schone Bild herunder,
Verkehrend seinen Pracht in Kot, Wrm und Gestank.
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When I first published the article about The Roots of Heaven, Jasper Winn wrote to me suggesting that we look at the film closely to see if Paddy made an appearance. This week Tim Todd made a comment suggesting that he had spotted Paddy.
In the 12th ‘episode’. around 5.25 in, a character comes around a corner and calls to those seated around “Listen everybody, they’ve spotted him…” The character looks to me like it is being played by Paddy! I don’t notice the character in any other scenes, and Paddy is only mentioned as the script writer from what I can see – but it looks so like him on my screen. Anyone any thoughts either way?
Patrick Leigh Fermor's run-on part in The Roots of Heaven
Well, I had a further look and I am absolutely sure it is Paddy with his good looks, immaculate hair, clipped voice and the watch which features in the photograph on the back of Words of Mercury. I froze an image; no doubt in my mind (click on it to enlarge). To see for yourself go to Patrick Leigh Fermor scriptwriter for The Roots of Heaven episode 12 of the You Tube embeds and then to time section 5.25.
Patrick Leigh Fermor scriptwriter for The Roots of Heaven
Paddy recalls his time on set with Errol Flynn and Orson Welles for The Roots of Heaven
Errol Flynn in The Roots of Heaven
In 1958, Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote the script for the film The Roots of Heaven, produced by Darryl Zanuck and directed by John Huston. In 2001, he recalled some of his time spent on location, during the shooting of the film:
‘The heroine of the film was Juliette Gréco, to whom Darryl [Zanuck] was deeply attached. I had seen her earlier, spinning round dance floors like a beautiful raven-haired mermaid in caverns full of jiving existentialists in St.-Germain-des-Prés. She was very well read, loved literature, and was full of interesting and amusing stories about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. She was a friend, too, of Raymond Queneau, whose books I had a passion for, and we shared a taste for the poems of Jacques Prévert. We became close friends, and still are.
After three weeks, we flew to Bangui, in what was then still French Equatorial Africa but was soon to become the realm of the wicked Emperor Bokassa. The little town clustered on the north bank of the Obangui River, a tributary of the Congo, and on the edge of a dense rain forest full of elephants—our main theme. A race of intelligent smiling pygmies dwelt there, armed with bows and arrows, twangling cheerfully on strange stringed instruments known as equatorial pianos.
John Huston and Darryl Zannuck on location
One day a small party of us were waiting for a canoe to take us somewhere, when a large crocodile was spotted, basking on an island in mid-stream. John [Huston], on the alert at once, dashed to his quarters and returned with a weapon about the size of a Bren gun, opened the front struts, flung himself down, took careful aim, and fired. The bullet kicked up a puff of sand just above the reptile, which leapt into the water and swam vigorously downstream. John got up, ejected the shell, and said, “Well, he’ll thrash around for a quarter-hour or so, maybe twenty minutes. But that’s a dead croc, kids.” The phrase gained immediate currency, sometimes altered to “That’s a dead kid, crocs.”
There were a lot of late parties, and at one of them—the last, as it turned out—I remember John singing “Johnny, I Hardly Knew You” and “The Streets of Laredo” with captivating verve. In the end, oblivious of forest dangers, I fell asleep under a baobab tree and woke up at dawn criss-crossed with hundreds of spiders, like the captured Gulliver in Lilliput.
On the last day of filming in the forest, enormous black clouds gathered and then broke in a deluge. Instantly soaked to the skin, we drove slithering and sliding back to Bangui and its one hotel, a modern skyscraper soaring above the treetops like an upended mouth organ. Indoors, the lights fused as we entered, and the floor was nearly a foot deep under a gleaming mattress of broken-off termites’ wings. A hundred termite-eating frogs were leaping in parabolas among their prey, and Juliette’s mongoose was whisking about in this sudden abundance with frogs’ legs sticking out of its jaws on both sides, peering round for more. The thunder sounded as though the sky were breaking in half, and the shuddering flashes of lightning lit up a vision of diluvial apocalyptic pandemonium.
Juliet Greco, Errol Flynn and Trevor Howard
The next day we were back on the Champs-Élysées and the rue de Rivoli.’
-recorded in ‘A Visit with Patrick Leigh Fermor,’ by Ben Downing, in The Paris Review, no. 165. From this website.
Maurice Cardiff worked in the SOE and headed-up the British Council in Athens after the War which is where he first met Paddy. It was the start of a life-long friendship. In 1997 he published “Friends Abroad: Memories of Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, Peggy Gugenheim, Freya Stark and Others” which is an first class read.
First published in The Independent May 20, 2006
by Artemis Cooper
Maurice Cardiff combined long service with the British Council with a parallel career as a writer. As “John Lincoln” he was the author of books including One Man’s Mexico (1967 – modestly subtitled “A Record of Travels and Encounters”), which was described by Graham Greene as “the best book on Mexico this century”. Cardiff worked for the British Council from 1946 to 1973, during which time he was posted to Greece, Italy,Cyprus, Mexico, Belgium, Thailand and France. For a compulsive traveller, endowed with infinite curiosity and acute observation, it was the perfect job. As Cultural Attach to the British Council he enjoyed the advantages of both diplomatic and academic life, without the formal restrictions of either.The youngest son of an army officer, he had been brought up in Herefordshire and educated at Eton, then Worcester College, Oxford. He fell in love with a young actress called Leonora Freeman, and since his parents disapproved of the match they eloped to Gretna Green and were married in April 1939. He was 23. They spent their honeymoon in Greece, where he began to learn Greek. When war broke out, he joined his two elder brothers in the Scots Guards.
Cardiff’s knowledge of Greek brought him to the attention of SOE (the Special Operations Executive). He was attached to the Political Warfare Executive in Cairo in 1943, and he spent the last months of the Second World War working with the Communist resistance in the Aegean Islands.
When the Greek army retook control, Cardiff was told to report to Athens, where Colonel Kenneth Johnston wanted to see him. He had known Johnston while training in Cairo, but was not prepared for what followed. As Johnston emptied his desk, he briefed Cardiff on the aims and management of the British Council. At the end of an hour Johnston got into a car and drove away. Cardiff was left in sole charge of the British Council’s branch in Athens.
The “British Committee for Relations with Other Countries” had been established in 1934. Two years later it was renamed the British Council and in 1938 it set up its first overseas operations in Egypt and Portugal. Its purpose was asserted in its Royal Charter of 1940 as promoting a wider knowledge of Our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the English language abroad and developing closer cultural relations between [the UK] and other countries for the purpose of benefiting the British Commonwealth of Nations.
Cardiff’s first task was to find a building to house the council’s activities, and make it ready for the staff who arrived a few months later. Among them was the young Patrick Leigh Fermor: still unknown as a writer, but idolised as a war hero throughout Greece. They remained friends for the rest of their lives, and Cardiff’s memories of Fermor appear in his last book, Friends Abroad (1997).
All his working life, Cardiff spent as little time as possible with the ex-pat community that orbited round embassies and country clubs, preferring to forge links among the writers and journalists, musicians, artists and teachers of whatever country he was in. He took great satisfaction in promoting young talent, and helping them organise courses of study, concerts or exhibitions in England. His favourite postings were the farthest-flung, those that gave him a degree of freedom. He was not so happy in Brussels or Paris, where the social round was relentless – in Brussels he even became a vegetarian for a while, to spare his overworked digestion.
It was also his job to welcome and entertain British artists passing through – though they weren’t always British. On one occasion, Cardiff discovered that Louis Armstrong was coming to Italy, and nothing had been laid on to welcome or celebrate his arrival. He immediately arranged a party of Italy’s finest musicians, all eager to meet the great man – who even sang a few songs towards the end of the evening.
When not in his office or entertaining Cardiff travelled as widely as he could, as often as possible. He never kept diaries as such, but into a succession of notebooks and poems he poured the full range of his interests, his curiosity and his observations. The notes became books. Heaven for Horses (1957) was a novel about post-war Italy’ he described his wartime experience in the Aegean in Achilles and the Tortoise(1958).
All the books he wrote in the course of his professional career were published under the pseudonym of John Lincoln. Only the later Friends Abroad, subtitled “Memories of Lawrence Durrell, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peggy Guggenheim and others”, appeared under his own name. There he recalls how the art collector Peggy Guggenheim – although fabulously rich – appreciated the scrupulous equality that he brought to their friendship. Cardiff insisted on paying his way, and often had her to stay (though he did have qualms about her sharing their bathroom in Cyprus with his three small boys).
Perhaps his most successful portrait is of Lawrence Durrell. He was a genial man, and excellent company’ but Cardiff saw a destructive streak in the way he treated his wife Eve’ over time it alienated Durrell from most of his friends and family, and eventually destroyed him.
In retirement, Cardiff and his wife settled in Oxfordshire. They continued to travel, but not to their old posts – they preferred new ground, which included Tibet, India and Ceylon. Cardiff had had a keen interest in Buddhism since his friend Osbert Moore rejected the world and retired to a Buddhist monastery -a strange, uneasy story that makes up the last chapter of Friends Abroad. Leonora died in 1997, and, six years later, Cardiff had to suffer the death from leukaemia of his middle son, David, a media historian, who shared his father’s love of poetry. In Maurice Cardiff’s last months he moved to London, to Highgate, where, despite increasing illness, he remained independent and self-reliant till the end.
George Psychoundakis in 2004(?)
A bond deeper than blood. The friendship forged in wartime Crete between Patrick Leigh Fermor and shepherd George Psychoundakis was commemorated in George’s memoir about the Resistance, The Cretan Runner. With the book republished, it was time to meet again.
by Allison Pearson
First published in The Daily Telegraph, Saturday 13th June 1998
Two old men sitting at a table talking about the war. A Cretan and an Englishman. A voluble eye-popping tenor and a growly teddy-bear bass. “Remember the sick doctor we disguised as an old woman and carried for miles to get help?” “Yes, and remember when you dressed up as a general and kidnapped a real one!”
They interrupt each other. They sigh for the dead. They laugh for dear life, knowing exactly how much it can cost. Although one of the men speaks only Greek, I think I can detect a rhythm to their reminiscing: the Cretan talks everything up and the Englishman plays it right back down again. The sudden memory of one “bad Greek” acts on the Cretan’s weathered face like a drawstring, pulling it taut to a scowling walnut. But the Englishman, all silky diplomacy, jumps in and offers a more optimistic assessment of the fiend in question: “I think he just lost his head a bit.”
Later, when the Cretan mentions the Englishman’s name in the course of what sounds like a pretty fulsome tribute, his friend stops translating for me altogether. What did he say? “He was more than kind about me.” Yes, but what did he say? “Oh, I couldn’t possibly repeat it.”
The bashful Briton is Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, traveller, scholar- gypsy, war hero and writer of genius. His fiery friend is George Psychoundakis, author of The Cretan Runner, an extraordinary account of the anti- Nazi Resistance on the island, which was translated by Leigh Fermor and is now republished.
The Cretan Runner
There have been other memoirs of wartime Crete, such as Xan Fielding’s Hide and Seek and Ill Met by Moonlight, W Stanley Moss’s record of the kidnapping of General Kreipe (later made into a movie, with Dirk Bogarde assigned to fill Leigh Fermor’s dashing boots). But those were visitors’ books. George’s story, as Leigh Fermor points out in the introduction, is unique. It is no longer the locals who are colourful aliens, but the Allied officers and their wireless operators – good sorts and good sports in the main but, none the less, foreigners with some very dodgy customs. “A most peculiar man,” George says of one buffer. “He had pyjamas and a washbasin.”
Even more baffling for the Cretans, who think Nature is a place where you go and shoot things, the buffer turned out to be an amateur botanist and geologist: “He was not only in love with different kinds of weeds but with stones as well.”
Paddy and I have been sitting in the front room of George’s small vine-clad house, outside Khania in western Crete, for more than two hours now. At least one of us is reeling under the bombardment of Cretan hospitality. Celestial cheese tarts made by Sofia, George’s wife, have given way to nuts, glistening sweetmeats and, as if that weren’t enough, shots of tsikoudia, a spirit so lethal it feels less like drinking a liquid than sipping scalded air. After three of these, I am not entirely sure whether the spools on my tape recorder are going round: after four, I don’t care.
George – one eye sleepy, the other coal black with embers of mischief – is joking about whether he should have given lessons in sheep stealing (a local speciality) to one of the wireless operators. “So when he got back to Scotland he could have organised sheep rustling.” Paddy pretends, unconvincingly, to be shocked.
Through the window behind them, you can see the White Mountains – a range so towering and snowy, even on this May day, that it is hard to tell where rock stops and cloud begins. More than half a century ago, those slopes were Paddy and George’s stamping-ground. “George’s life was dangerous and absolutely exhausting,” explains Paddy. But George is having none of it: “I felt as if I were flying. Running all the way from the top of the White Mountains to Mount Ida. So light and easy – just like drinking a cup of coffee.”
George has difficulty walking now – at 78 he leans on a stick as gnarled as himself – but his mind can leap from memory to memory, as if he were still flying. I ask George what he thought the British had learnt from the Cretans and vice versa. “What they learnt, because there was very little to eat, was to drink a lot and to dance and to shoot for joy in the air. We saw how much they loved our country and it made us love it still more. The fact that they loved Crete so much gave us even greater courage.”
The first time George Psychoundakis met Patrick Leigh Fermor he thought he was very tall. The young Cretan had just crawled on all fours through thick bushes into the heap of boulders where the officer was hiding. In fact, the Englishman was not especially lofty (a touch over 5ft 9in, according to his passport). It was the Greek who was tiny. “As fine-boned as an Indian,” recalls Leigh Fermor. “Lithe and agile and full of nervous energy.”
Anyway, height didn’t matter much back then. It was the July of 1942 in occupied Crete and the stature of men was not measured in inches, rather in a bewildering range of abilities. These included: keeping cool when a member of the Gestapo approaches your mule while it is carrying a combustible load of wheat and wireless; keeping warm in a cave-bed with a canopy of stalactites; and finding the courage to tuck into a dinner of local produce – grass cooked with snails. “We took the grass blade by blade, picked off the broken shells and ate it with much laughter,” recalls George.
Psychoundakis was a runner for the Resistance – a vertical postman, he delivered messages and equipment at barely credible speed. On a map, Crete doesn’t look too daunting – a sirloin steak beaten to a succulent sliver by a butcher. But it rises so sharply into such broken-toothed cragginess that it is pointless to measure it in miles: the islanders calculate distances in the time taken to smoke cigarettes. George’s wartime business was mainly conducted at eagle-height, or as he felt his way down the vertebrae of his homeland towards some hiding place where even goats didn’t dare.
He was 21 years old when he first met the 27-year-old Leigh Fermor. George addressed Paddy as Michali (all the Allied soldiers had Greek nicknames) or sometimes Mr Michali in half-amused respect (irreverence being the key to the Psychoundakis psyche). Paddy, meanwhile, code- named George either the Clown or the Changeling, for his cockeyed wit, his impish insubordination and a magical ability to spirit himself out of trouble.
Patrick Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss
The two men were not just worlds apart: a glance at their biographies suggests you would need to hire a time machine to bring them together. Born in Asi Gonia, a village with a long history of giving invaders a hard time (asi is Arabic for uncommandable), George lived the kind of peasant life that had not changed for centuries. His family slept together in a single room with a beaten earth floor. After a scratchy education at the local primary school, he followed his father on to the mountains as a shepherd. By the time German parachutes blotted out the sky in May 1941, he had visited only two of Crete’s towns and had never seen the capital, Heraklion.
By contrast, Leigh Fermor was born into a smart Anglo-Irish family and educated at prep school and King’s, Canterbury. [Just like someone else we know] By 1939, he had walked across every country between London and Constantinople – a stroll commemorated in his two dazzling volumes, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water – and also appeared to have drunk in most of their national literatures.
Scrape through what Leigh Fermor called his “Fauntleroy veneer”, though, and you find a rougher grain. With his parents abroad for the first four years of his life, Paddy was entrusted to the family of a small farmer and, left uncultivated, he ran wild. The experience, he later wrote, “unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint”. His behaviour at a flurry of schools led to his being sent to two psychiatrists, although it is unlikely that either rivalled Paddy’s clinical diagnosis of himself as “a very naughty boy”. He was finally expelled from King’s for crimes that included “trying to be funny” and holding the hand of a greengrocer’s daughter. His housemaster’s report noted: “He is a dangrous mixture of sophistication and recklessness, which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.”
Almost 70 years later, I find it hard to improve on that verdict, save to replace the word dangerous with delightful. As it turned out, his influence on other boys was all to the good, and the most remarkable boy of all was George Psychoundakis.
While Paddy was in Kent writing “bad and imitative verse” and lapping up ancient Greek because it was a passport to a world of heroes, George was scavenging books from the village priest and the doctor, and occupying the long woolly hours by the sheepfold composing patriotic poems and beady skits on local life. (An early effort entitled Ode to an Inkspot on a Schoolmistress’s Skirt sounds distinctly Paddy-like in its high- flown cheekiness).
Although George’s father, Nicolas, was illiterate, he could recite by heart the whole of the Erotocritos, the 17th-century Cretan epic poem that comprises 10,000 lines of rhyming couplets. And the rhythm lodged in the son’s head and on his tongue: poetry to these people was not the object of solemn study but a spur to the spinning of legends and the cue for a bloody good song.
George Psychoundakis during the Resistance
Which is to say that when the ragged and practically barefoot Cretan wriggled into the hiding-place of the Englishman in 1942, they had more in common than an enemy. George spoke only one perfect sentence of English – “I steal grapes every day” – but Paddy soon extended his repertoire. On long marches to the coast to meet supply vessels or during the dark hours awaiting a parachute drop, the Britons taught the Greeks folk-songs and the Greeks taught them mantinadas – waspish local couplets with a sting in the tail.
On their first trek together, Paddy recalls how George recited a poem he had written on the unambitious theme of The Second World War So Far. “It covered the invasion of Poland, the fall of France, the German invasion of Greece and Rommel’s final advance. It lasted more than two hours and finished on a note of triumphant optimism and presage of vengeance, which he emphasised by borrowing my pistol and firing it into the sky with the remark that we would soon be eating the cuckolds alive.”
Leigh Fermor, meanwhile, attempted to satisfy Psychoundakis’s ravenous curiosity about the world. What was Churchill like? Why do the Scots wear kilts? How about astronomy, religion, trains? How many sheep does the average Englishman own?
The task of the British Special Operations Executive in Crete was to assist the local Resistance. Having spent centuries in revolt against the Venetians and the Turks, the islanders didn’t actually need much encouragement. During the airborne invasion in 1941, when many young Cretans were away on active service, descending parachutists were met by old men, women and children – by anyone, in fact, who could point upwards and shoot. “Aim for the legs and you’ll get them in the heart,” ran the local wisdom. Four thousand Germans died. Those who survived took swift revenge. Reprisals, read one Wehrmacht memo, “must be carried through with exemplary terror”. Between May and September of that year, 1,135 Cretans were executed.
The Cretan Runner begins with the invasion. “Out of the sky the winged devils of Hitler were falling everywhere … the aeroplanes came and went like bees in a bee-garden.” One grounded plane is set upon by furious locals till it resembles “a bit of bread thrown on to an ant-hill”. From the opening pages, you get a pungent impression of the Psychoundakis style – a vertiginous mix of the epic and the demotic, the Homeric and the homely. Of the enemy, George writes: “They reached to our very bowels and provoked a storm in the soul of the race like the hiss of a poisonous snake about to strike.” No British account of the battle of Crete could contain a sentence like that. Too purple. Too embarrassing, frankly. But it feels utterly true to George and the hot-blooded rhetoric of his race.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of a book that documents the burning of villages, the casual slaughter of comrades and a life of mesmerising danger is how often it makes you smile. No stranger to hardship anyway, George embraces discomfort as though it were a shy friend with a lot to offer. We see George at the end of a knackering three-day trek using pieces of wood to mime someone hobbling. We hear him enthusing over yet another dank hiding-place as though he were writing for some actionable travel brochure: “The cave was perfect. We collected our drinking and washing water from stalactites. We arranged luxurious couches for ourselves from the branches of various shrubs that were better than the softest mattress!”
Best of all, there is George richly enjoying his British friends, not least their congenital inability to walk over the rocky landscape. (In one incident, Leigh Fermor threw himself pluckily at a high stone wall in emulation of local bravado, only to fall off backwards: the Cretans in the party walked around the side of the wall, shaking their heads and laughing.)
SOE officer Ralph Stockbridge (centre, in the spectacles) with some of his comrades in Crete
“It was plain that George was enraptured with the excitement of our secret life,” says Paddy. The same could be said of all of them, I think. As a boy Leigh Fermor confessed to being guilty of “a bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature”. In this case, the literature was Greek. The Cretans, for their part, seemed all too willing to live up to the legends the Englishmen had imbibed at school. Most battles look romantic only in retrospect, if then: Crete was different. It seems to have struck its leading men as touched with an air of romance, even as the drama was unfolding. As they approached by boat on a moonless night, the first the soldiers knew of the island was perfume, the scent of wild thyme that wafts miles out to sea.
Once on shore, they changed into local costume – breeches, black bandanas, embroidered waistcoats and spiffy jackboots. There were lessons in how to curl their new moustaches. They were an extraordinary bunch – poets, archaeologists, free spirits thirsty for adventure. SOE chose them because they had some knowledge of ancient Greek. But, as Leigh Fermor explains, since Greek was no longer compulsory at school, those who opted for it had already marked themselves out as “a perverse and eccentric minority”.
I cannot get enough of the photographs of the Resistance taken through those years in the mountains. Remember, these are snapshots captured at a time when to have a likeness of yourself in existence was itself a threat to that existence. There is the legendary Xan “Aleko” Fielding, looking uncannily like the young Hemingway. Gimlet-eyed and bare- chested, he regards the lens with Olympian amusement. And there is Yanni Tsangarakis, one of the bravest and most trusted guides, slightly woebegone behind a Zebedee moustache, and the redoubtable Manoli Paterakis, whose unforgettable profile suggests he may have been the love-child of Montgomery of Alamein and a peregrine falcon. [I think he’s trying to say he was nasally overendowed]
Looking at the smiley countenance of Tom Dunbabin – a fellow of All Souls in peacetime – you can see why he inspired such love; ditto the gaunt saintly faces of Aleko Kokonas, the schoolmaster of Yerakari, and his wife, Kyria Maria. And then, of course, there are Paddy and George: the first as debonair and unfeasibly handsome as Errol Flynn casting about for a galleon to capture; the second apparently auditioning for the role of Puck.
In Louis de Bernieres’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, set in wartime Cephalonia, there is a posh Englishman who lives in a cave and comes out declaiming ancient Greek. He is a bit of a joke. And, to be sure, there is something potentially laughable about the Boy’s Own aspect of all this dressing up and blowing stuff up. What redeems it from absurdity, what transforms it into real rather than fantastical heroism, is the nagging presence of death, which circled above these lives like a hawk. There was nothing comic-book about Anton Zoidakis, captured by German soldiers, tied to their vehicle and dragged along the road until his face and his life were wiped away. And even George’s account of merry scrapes is pulled up short when 20 Gestapo visit Asi Gonia: “They said I was wanted for interrogation and if didn’t go to Retimo before January 17 they would set fire to the whole village.”
Three of George’s fellow runners were executed, two after what the Wehrmacht would probably have considered exemplary torture. In his superb book Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, Antony Beevor points out that the penalty for a shepherd caught whistling to warn of the approach of a German patrol was death.
War had transformed George Psychoundakis’s life. In February 1943, it enabled the former shepherd boy to travel abroad for the first time. He was spirited off to SOE headquarters in Egypt, where he was knocked sideways by wonders, not least the grass in the Gezira gardens: “Fat, short grass like green velvet carpet.” As for the zoo, “I could almost have deemed that I was in the middle of paradise”. The most misguided character in the whole of The Cretan Runner is the soldier who advised George not to climb up the Pyramids because it was “very tiring and tricky”. A short hop later, the Cretan runner got out his stiletto and “cut my name and fatherland” into a stone at the top.
Moss, Kreipe and Paddy
On the day the war was over, a “high-spirited Mr Leigh Fermor” bought a dubious Mr Psychoundakis a lot of drinks. “If I drink all that I’ll be drunk,” protested George. “But my child, what is drink meant for? It’s no use for anything else,” replied Paddy.
Soon after, in a school where a whole village was gathered together, George recited a heart-stopping poem he had written on the lovely village of Yerakari, now destroyed, where once “white houses lay like doves asleep along the sill of heaven”. He had survived, but for a while it was hard to see what for.
Fortune, who had smiled on George in a time of insane adversity, appeared to doze off once the shooting stopped. Because of missing documents and in spite of his British Empire Medal (awarded in 1945), he was arrested as a deserter and imprisoned for several months. One can scarcely imagine the wound inflicted on his pride. Over three days, that great shaggy helmet of hair all fell out. Subsequently, he had to do two more years of fighting in the civil war. Returning at last to Asi Gonia, George found all the sheep stolen and his family in gruesome poverty. The Changeling had run out of magic.
George took a job as a navvy working on a road. At night, he sheltered once more in a cave and by the light of an oil lamp began to fill notebook after notebook with a furious, cramped hand. “I think he undertook this task as a kind of exorcism of the gloom of his circumstances, ” says Paddy. When they met up again in 1951, George gave his friend the completed work: Pictures of Our Life During the Occupation. Better known as The Cretan Runner.
Leigh Fermor, now living on the Greek mainland, took the precious grime-covered manuscript home to translate. George, meanwhile, was working to help his old friend, too. In 1943, with a German patrol approaching, Paddy, who was checking what he thought was an empty rifle, accidentally shot Yanni Tzangarakis in the leg. He died soon afterwards, but not before absolving his friend of all blame. Paddy was devastated: imagine killing the proud son of a country for which you were willing to lay down your own life.
This wretchedness was deepened by foolish rumours that eventually led to a vendetta being declared by some of Yanni’s relatives. This was only laid to rest after years of delicate negotiation by George, who found a very Cretan solution to the Englishman’s impasse: Paddy Leigh Fermor became godfather to Yanni’s great-niece. In Greek society, this bond is deeper than blood.
Two old men sitting at a table talking about the war. A Cretan and an Englishman. “We’d better censor that, George, it’s libellous,” says Paddy, trying to sound stern. As usual, he fails.
George goes off into the bedroom and comes back with a rifle. It is nearly as tall as he is, and its working parts are in similarly creaky order. As George poses with the gun, the photographer asks him to smile. George scowls and spits out a guttural retort. “Oh dear, oh dear,” says Paddy, shaking his head and laughing. What did George just say? “He said he won’t smile because he’s killing Germans.”
At the front of A Time of Gifts, Leigh Fermor quotes from Louis MacNeice’s great poem:
For now the time of gifts is gone
O boys that grow,
O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill.
Since the war, both men have found satisfactions. Leigh Fermor, though unfairly saddled with the label of travel writer, has become one of the greatest exponents of English prose.
Psychoundakis, meanwhile, has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad into Cretan and been honoured by the Academy of Athens. Still, I can’t help wondering whether the time since their great adventure had been an anti-climax.
“To some extent all our lives were in those years,” admits Paddy. “Of course, one went on to do interesting things, but … ” George has come up now and stretches out his fingertips to reach the shoulders of his friend, the tall Englishman. “Ah, George says to tell you that those years up in the mountains were the best years of his life. He’ll never forget it. Never. And that’s why he wanted to commemorate our days together.”
Just as we are getting ready to leave, George gives Paddy a photograph. It is of George himself and Xan Fielding, taken somewhere in the mountains. You can just make them out. The emulsion is breaking up and great snowy specks of it are blizzarding them into oblivion. Yet looking back at the Cretan resisters, we see only a thrilling clarity. Their existence was both mortally serious and a great wheeze – perhaps a definition of the best kind of life you can hope to lead.
Years after the war ended, George Psychoundakis sang for his friend Patrick Leigh Fermor a mantinada. This is what it said:
With patience first and patience last, and doggedness all through,
A man can think the wildest thoughts and make them all come true.
The obituary of George Psychoundakis aka The Cretan Runner
Many visitors to the blog are interested not so much in Paddy per se or his writing, but the activities of the Allied forces and the SOE in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean in World War Two.
This new website that I have stumbled across is devoted to these activities in the Balkans and the Levant which is Paddy’s sphere of operations. A quick glance however fails to turn up anything on Paddy, a big mistake, which I am sure will soon be corrected! However, it does appear to be a very useful archive for people conducting research into this theatre of operations.
If you have a particular specialised interest in the SOE then I would recommend joining the Yahoo Group Special Operations Executive which is updated daily with some fascinating and very detailed information. It would be a great starting point for research.
The woods and the water lie between us,
But we gaze at the same silver moon,
In cirrus mottled sky of iron blue.
Zinc galvanized; fashioned by the gods.
Some may not be aware that Paddy was pressed hard by Darryl F. Zanuck to be the scriptwriter for the 1958 film The Roots of Heaven, an adventure film made by 20th Century Fox, directed by John Huston and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay was by Romain Gary and Patrick Leigh Fermor and is based on Romain Gary’s 1956 Prix Goncourt winning novel The Roots of Heaven (Les racines du ciel).
The film had a fine cast and starred Errol Flynn, Juliette Gréco, Trevor Howard, Eddie Albert, Orson Welles, Paul Lukas, Herbert Lom and Gregoire Aslan. Paddy describes the negotiations and some of his time on set in Chad in letters to Debo Devonshire published in the book In Tearing Haste. I think Trevor Howard was drunk most of the time and Paddy appeared to be quite struck by the beautiful French actress Juliette Gréco. It was Errol Flynn’s last film
Set in French Equatorial Africa, the film tells the story of Morel (Trevor Howard), a crusading environmentalist who sets out to preserve the elephants from extinction as a lasting symbol of freedom for all humanity. He is helped by Minna (Juliette Gréco), a nightclub hostess, and Forsythe (Errol Flynn), a disgraced British military officer hoping to redeem himself.
I have a Spanish produced copy on DVD (English with Spanish subtitles available on eBay or Amazon) but the whole film (bar one scene) is available on You Tube. The quality is very good and you may like to watch it. It is scene eight that is missing.
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I think this is a rare treat, even for those of us who have read much of Paddy’s work. This introduction to In the Trail of Odysseus
“The whole region seemed an enormous and mysterious antechamber to the whole Mediterranean, unbelievably remote and enigmatic, and ever so soon in danger of fading.”
It is the story of Yiankos Danielopoulis who died in 1987 at the age of 88. As a Black Sea Greek living through the 20th century his life was uprooted time after time, until at last he was able to settle in Mount Hymettos in mainland Greece in the 1950’s.
I have been sent some scanned copies of Paddy’s introduction, by blog corespondent James, to the English translation to the book which I hope you will enjoy and inspire you to purchase the last few copies of the book from Amazon!
To help you further, here is a short synopsis by John Colvin Body which appears to have been published in the Daily Telegraph in 1994.
“In the Trail of Odysseus by Marianna Koromila tr by Nigel Clive Michael Russell, L14.95 this modern-day “Odysseus” is Yiankos Danielopoulos, one of 12 Thracian children born in Vasiliko, a whitewashed Greek village of the Ottoman Empire in 1899, and dying in Attica 88 years later. His life has been compiled by Marianna Koromila from a privately printed family record that she acquired from his daughter. It reflects the turmoil of that region in the 20th century. Born under the Empire, Yiankos lived in Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Greece, surviving two nationalities, seven homes and 13 professions, all imposed by “the gale of the world”. Bulgarian violence, Bolshevik revolution, civil war and Communist take-over were his Eumenides. As a child, he “listened to the rattle of the pebbles as they were washed up by the waves”; saw woods, vineyards, wheat fields and boats unloading below his window on return from fishing. The Thracian traders and shipowners, with relations in all the Black Sea ports, he described as the seagulls which followed the fish. In winter, wolves descended from the mountains, threatening the village. “Union is strength,” said Yiankos’s father when the horses drove them off.
The Great Powers then changed lines on maps. Vasiliko came under the Bulgars, and life became untenable. Yiankos and his brothers moved to Constanza in Romania and opened a grocer’s shop. An admiral’s wife fell in love with one of the brothers. The shop received the navy’s warrant. Funds accumulated. Bulgaria then invaded and the family fled to Galatz (also in Romania) with their assets – 50 cases of macaroni. Yiankos dealt profitably in foreign exchange; money was made. But Galatz became an impossible place, what with bombing and Cossacks shooting holes in wine-cases and drowning in the alcoholic flood. The Danielopouloses escaped to Russia, packed like sardines in a stinking refugee train. Life in their new Russian home, Berdiansk, was lucrative until the Bolshevik and Anarchist massacres began, when the family escaped to Novorosisk in 1917, where the Russian fleet had scuttled. They steered clear of politics, which preserved them, but chaos came. The family escaped by tug back to Constanza, having profitably run cafe, shop and currency exchange in the middle of a revolution. Back in Romania, they enjoyed “party-time” – the annees folles of the 1920s – until the Crash of 1929. Thanks to family unity, they picked themselves up again, flourishing even during the German occupation of 1940.
But later, in 1950, when Soviet theft and odious oppression became intolerable, Yiankos, his wife and daughters left for Greece. They arrived in Mount Hymettos penniless, but went on to farm pistachio, orange, lemon and tangerine trees, cows, hens and vegetables. Yiankos had survived once more. Nigel Clive’s sparkling translation of Koromilos’s book is richly enhanced by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s introduction to that legendary world of the day-before-yesterday.”
Buy In the Trail of Odysseus
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The mystery of The Black Sea Cave
This is a fairly academic article about the views of Hungarians towards Britain prior to the Second World War. I thought this worth of publishing on the blog as it rhymes with a lot of what Paddy tells us in Between the Woods and the Water, and he of course gets a mention.
First published in the Hungarian Quarterly.
In a Hungary on the threshold of war, committed to Hitler’s side, “Pro-English: by 1939, at the latest by 1940, this adjective would encompass many things: liberal, democratic, humanist, pro-Jewish, even Catholic on occcasion, anti-Nazi in every case.”1 Those who sympathized with the English had other characteristics in common, such as a respect for tradition and disdain for demagoguery of all kinds. Between the wars, sympathy for England was palpable especially in the aristocracy, in the upper middle classes and amongst the educated. Sympathy for English traits and behaviour offers an explanation, as does what was felt for Shakespeare, English literature and English culture in general.
There was also a remote historical parallel, occasionally stressed by the post-1919 counter-revolutionary regime: the near contemporaneity of Hungary’s Golden Bull (1222), the East European document resembling England’s Magna Carta (1215), the crown as an institution, and the role of the aristocracy. Needless to say, scant heed was paid to such matters in England by politicians or public opinion. They were curious at most. Hungary was a small and distant country. However, in Hungary this sympathy was deep and widespread, showing itself, among others, in the reception given to some contemporary English fiction, such as the novels of Somerset Maugham and Aldous Huxley, which enjoyed an extraordinary popularity here at the end of the thirties. The reasons were not purely literary, though. Sándor Hunyadi, a writer, wondered why in an article, and many readers wrote in to say they were fond of Maugham because they liked the English. Not the writer, or his works, but the English. In Hunyadi’s words: “Surely a good many British passports could be issued to people who are not British subjects, perhaps they cannot even speak English but, deep down inside, they sympathize with the English.”2 This sympathy is all the more noteworthy since, by the end of the thirties, the economic and military might of Nazi Germany had made its mark abroad, and the openly fascist Arrow Cross had made its presence felt in Hungarian politics. Against this, Great Britain was seen as the paradigm of parliamentary democracy, liberal and masonic ideals, and the City of London was believed to embody the power of partially Jewish capital. Centuries old institutions, along with British traditions, stood for the past, for all that which was said not to be modern or “of our time.”
Nevertheless, numerous intellectuals and politicia Continue reading
Count Miklós Bánffy
To complete my very own trilogy on Banffy, here is an article, not just a review, by the always readable Charles Moore from the Daily Telegraph. I am so very much looking forward to the arrival of the first volume so that I can make a start!
By Charles Moore. First published in The Telegraph 11 Jan 2010
This sequence of books began publication in 1934, so I have been rather slow to get round to it. The trilogy was first published in English between 1999 and 2001, so even in this country it is not new. But perhaps because of the smallness of the publishers, or perhaps because people here know little and care less about Transylvania (unless vampires are involved), these books are not well known. But their reputation has been spreading by word of mouth, so much so that it can be hard to find the volumes because they are often reprinting.
This growing acclaim is deserved. Bánffy’s trilogy is just about as good as any fiction I have ever read. I think of it this week because of snow. If you flick through the book, you will see that the author almost always places events in their weather and season. The hero, Balint, has estates in Transylvania which he is constantly attempting to manage on better and more enlightened lines. He is also in love with Adrienne, who is married to a sinister, possibly sadistic and increasingly insane man.
Balint visits his estates and tries to range as far as possible into their remote forests to stamp out local corruption, usually making an unintentional mess of things as he does so. The author walks with him, as it were, observing nature intently, and relating it to Balint’s private thoughts. In the depth of winter, Balint climbs down to a hidden waterfall which still bursts forth despite the frost: “Even when in the air it was degrees below zero steam would mingle with the spray to form icicles which hung from every bough and every overhanging rock, so that the fall itself was framed with great pillars of ice.” To Balint, “Adrienne’s image was conjured up by the beauty and restless movement of uncontrolled nature”.
Part of the point, the better for not being directly stated, is that Adrienne, at this time, is frigid, loving Balint, but fearful of all physical contact. The waterfall in winter naturally impresses itself on his mind. In late July, Balint climbs a mountainside which is shimmering with forest life, and sees “a little bird, smaller than a quail, with a strange swooping flight. It rose in the air, and then dropped again, and Balint saw that it was a young snipe, barely more than a fledgling and still very awkward. For a moment Balint watched the little bird’s efforts as twice more it flew up and then came to earth again, cowering in the grass as if too tired to try again.” The party passes quickly onward “so as not to frighten, or tire further, the little snipe in its first efforts to fly”. Once again – and once again without clunking overemphasis – the image of fragile new life relates to the couple’s love.
Count Miklós Bánffy, who wrote these novels, was a public man. He was the Hungarian foreign minister just after the First World War. Like Balint, he was a Hungarian who owned vast estates in Transylvania, where, in numerical, though not financial terms, Romanians predominated. His position, therefore, was rather like that of a benevolent Protestant landowner in Ireland before Partition. He loved the wider nation, indeed Empire (Austro-Hungarian), of which he was a part, but also his unusual little bit of it, though many of the inhabitants viewed him with suspicion.
Such an insider/outsider vantage point is a good one from which to view the politics of a great civilisation, especially of a civilisation in crisis. The titles of each book in the trilogy – for example, They Were Found Wanting – are taken from the writing on the wall that appeared, according to the Book of Daniel, at Belshazzar’s feast. The books are set in the years running up to 1914. They are full of love for the way of life destroyed by the First World War, but without illusion about its deficiencies.
One of the best scenes is the duel between László, Balint’s best friend and cousin, a handsome, hopeless, drunken man, and his rival in love. It is as good as Pushkin at describing the fear, the pointlessness, the idea of honour. It is also precise about the rules of duelling and how they were interpreted and disputed. The author fully inhabits the world he describes, without being enslaved by its values.
He has a good comic touch too. He is writing about a culture which worships England without knowing it very well. One young fellow is thrilled because he has managed to buy a pink English hunting coat (of “a marvellous material as hard and stiff as zinc”), but is then mortified that hunting etiquette (also derived from England) means that he cannot wear it at a meet of harriers. So, though everyone else is in black and white evening dress, he wears it to a ball, where his old breeches and boots smell so bad that the ladies will not go near him.
These novels are not well served by a puff on their covers which says they are “swashbuckling”. They aren’t remotely. Although they are very funny, they are deeply serious. They are like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction – all are here.
Paddy’s Introduction to the Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklos Banffy
You may be interested in Paddy’s introduction to the trilogy written by Miklos Banffy. I have been able to find it on the web for you to enjoy. Paddy wrote this whilst staying with the Devonshire’s at Chatsworth, Christmas 1998.
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Andrew Nurnberg to handle world rights for Miklos Banffy’s The Transylvanian Trilogy
Patrick Leigh Fermor 