You can listen to the programme for the next seven days ie until midday Sunday 7 August via BBC iPlayer (assuming you can receive where you are).
To listen click here.
Paddy interviewed on “Private Passions” for his 90th birthday in 2005
Malcolm Williamson turned Paddy’s 1953 novella, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, into an opera. Here is a snippet from The Musical Times review Vol. 108, No. 1487, Jan., 1967.
Paddy in a Greek TV documentary about his friend George Katsimbalis. Paddy visits a bar and sings a French song.
My thanks again to Nicolas Paissios for sending me this – and there is one more to come 🙂
Click the image to play.
Nick Hunt will be at the kick-off event tonight for his fundraising along with a bunch of other people who are raising funds through WeDidThis.
There will be drinks, and good things to look at with plenty of interesting people to talk to including Nick!
Free music, performances and wine in Dalston Heights from 6.30 to 10.00pm. Details here.
This article is from the Lonely Planet site. It is pretty standard fare, but stands out for its last line …. “The excellent https://patrickleighfermor.wordpress.com is highly recommended.” How could I possibly disagree?!!
by Tom Hall, Lonely Planet author
‘My spirits, already high, steadily rose as I walked. I could scarcely believe I was really there; alone, that is, on the move, advancing into Europe, surrounded by all this emptiness and change, with a thousand wonders waiting.’
From A Time of Gifts
It remains one of the finest adventures: Patrick Leigh Fermor, eighteen, restless and craving adventure, hops on a steamer in the shadow of Tower Bridge and, upon arrival at Hook of Holland, sets out for Constantinople on foot. It is 1933. His journey takes him through old Europe, a continent fast falling into war and never to be the same again.
Leigh Fermor’s account of what he called ‘Shanks’ Europe’ is told – though not in full – in the books he is best remembered for, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between The Woods And The Water (1985). Remarkably, the author wrote them decades after the events described, years which honed his prose but retained the sense of wonder at discovering new lands, languages and cultures, soon to be altered forever.
Nick Hunt’s appeal for funds to support his journey in Paddy’s footsteps was launched exactly one week ago. The response has been amazing with £870 raised and only £630 to go to reach his target of £1,500. Nick tells me that donations have poured on from all round the world from Australia to the Czech Republic, from the sunshine state of Florida, and even the Scots have found some change down the back of the sofa!
Many blog readers have contributed and I am asking for another big push this week to reach the target. If Nick does not reach the £1,500 all the donors will get their money back and Nick will receive nothing. This is the way that Crowdfunding works.
You can donate varying amounts and you will receive a range of items from Nick when on his journey to thank you and remind you of your support. Slightly higher donations will permit a mention of your name in his final book about the journey as well as a copy of the book.
This is a very worthwhile and very serious venture requiring a major commitment from Nick of a year of his life, so please visit the WeDidThis website and donate something. Watching his video on the site and dreaming, just for a moment, that it could be you walking that fabled route has to be worth £10!
The quality of our own link to BBC Radio Three’s Private Passions with Paddy is not the best, but still quite acceptable. However, there is now a chance to hear a repeat of the programme this coming Sunday 31 July at midday BST on BBC Radio 3.
You can find details of the programme here. You should be able to hear on FM and digital radio; possibly satellite TV and of course over the internet if the BBC permits from your location. Thanks to Phyllis Willis for spotting this one. The programme blurb goes as follows:
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, travel writer and war hero, died in June at the age of 96. In 2005 he recorded an edition of Private Passions, in which he talked about the music he loved. This is another chance to hear that conversation with Michael Berkeley.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was born in London in 1915, the son of a distinguished geologist. He was brought up in England after his parents left for India, and attended The Kings School, Canterbury, from which he was expelled for holding hands with a local greengrocer’s daughter. At the age of 18 he set off to walk across Europe to Constantinople (now Istanbul), a journey which later inspired his two finest travel books, ‘A Time of Gifts’ (1977) and ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ (1986). After further travels in the Balkans, he fought in Crete and mainland Greece during World War II. His exploits with the Greek Resistance in Crete inspired his fellow-officer Captain Bill Stanley Moss’s book ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’, later adapted as a film, with Dirk Bogarde playing Leigh Fermor. He published his first travel book in 1950, and became widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living travel writer. He divided his time between his beloved Greece and Worcestershire, and was knighted in 2004.
Patrick Leigh Fermor loved music of all kinds, from Greek folksongs to Irving Berlin. His eclectic selection for Private Passions includes an extract from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the finale of the Sinfonia concertante K364 for violin and viola; part of Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet; part of the Tenebrae Responsories by Victoria; Debussy’s Gigues (from Images); Britten’s arrangement of The Salley Gardens, and Michael Berkeley’s own Variations on Greek Folk Songs for solo viola, inspired by Leigh Fermor’s own celebrated vocal renditions.
Paddy interviewed on “Private Passions” for his 90th birthday in 2005
I doubt this has ever been seen outside of Greece. This video of Paddy is taken from a Greek TV documentary from 1999. We see scenes of Paddy working over his manuscripts, views of the library, dining room and the garden. He talks of his home and the Mani.
I am truly indebted to Nicolas Paissios for sending me this – and there is more to come 🙂
Click the image to play. Let it run for a while and you will be taken on a journey to Paddy’s house.
The following was posted as a comment in Your Paddy Thoughts by Robert Seibert. He asks an interesting question so I thought I would elevate it from deep in a comments page to the main blog site to see if it provokes some debate.
I wonder if there is any connection between PLF’s WW2 deeds and the fictional work “Guns of Navarone”, Alistair MacLean’s 1957 novel and the 1961 film starring Gregory Peck as Capt. Keith Mallory leading a team to destroy German guns on “Navarone”-said to be the real island of Leros. In the movie Mallory is described as the “world’s greatest mountain climber” and “speaks Greek like a Greek and German like a German”-but was chosen mainly because he has survived for a year and a half as a guerrilla with the Cretan resistance. The parallels with Paddy’s exploits seem obvious. Of course “Ill Met by Moonlight” was published in 1950 and the film version in 1957-accounts of the actual Gen. Kreipe abduction. Would be interested in hearing others thoughts about this.
Over to you dear readers …
A series of photographs that we have come across recently. I am grateful to Thos Henley for finding some of these.
I am not the only one who takes the opportunity to visit some of the places mentioned by Paddy in his books when travelling. Here is a nice note I received recently from Ed Ricketts …
Dear Tom,
Just writing to say that, in Budapest last weekend with some spare time before a conference, and having just learned of Paddy’s passing, I felt it appropriate to make a brief trip out to Esztergom – the town on a bend in the Danube where, on the bridge, A Time of Gifts ends and Between the Woods and the Water commences.
After a winding 90-minute train ride down a single-track line, I emerged at the end of the line, Esztergom, and into a sleepy provincial eastern European town (the fact that it was Sunday lunchtime probably the defining reason for this). After a good 30 minute walk into the town centre, past a very pleasant main square with some almost northern Italian architecture, you suddenly see the mammoth marble basilica overlooking the town on a hill. This is the seat of the Hungarian Catholic Church, and an important place of pilgrimage. Around the basilica are grouped some nice old cobbled streets and religious buildings, while the Danube flows calmly by.
I scrambled up a back way to the basilica, then climbed up onto the cupola which provides an incredible view of the Danube bend and nearby hills (see the attached photos). All the while, I tried to imagine a young and inquisitive countryman with a knapsack doing a similar thing in 1934. What I left until last was walking over the bridge (destroyed in 1944, so it’s sadly not the same structure Paddy tramped over) which now links Slovakia and Hungary. Reading the two books had a considerable effect on me, so this was quite an exciting moment. After a brief meditative pause in the middle, and a few minutes’ ambling on the Slovakian side, I returned over the bridge into Esztergom having toasted Paddy with a small cigar en route.
So a very pleasing day trip overall, with just one slight regret – that I didn’t have the two books with me at the time!
Thanks,
Ed Ricketts
Easter 1934 – Paddy reaches the Hungarian border at Esztergom
There are many keen Paddy bloodhounds out there who send me articles and information about Paddy that I would never find. One such is Hector Parra from Santiago in Chile who has sent me a number of interesting pieces, and this is the latest from London based ‘Slightly Foxed‘ which describes itself as:
“… a rather unusual book review. Friendly and unstuffy, with 96 pages of lively recommendations for books of lasting interest – books that have stood the test of time and have left their mark on the people who write about them. An eclectic mix, covering all the main categories of fiction and non-fiction. Our contributors are an eclectic bunch too. Some of them you’ll have heard of, some not, all write thoughtfully, elegantly and entertainingly.”
You can give the review a try by clicking here. They also have a bookshop which looks like just the place to spend an hour or so browsing.
On the website they have re-published an article by Tim Mackintosh Smith about Paddy’s Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece from issue no. 2 of Slightly Foxed (published June 2004) …
by Tim Mackintosh Smith
The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. I went with that indispensable aid to travel, an aunt, and with the idea that I knew quite a lot about the place. My aorists and iota subscripts, however, were useless; that crucial moment for quoting Simonides on the dead Spartans never turned up. Even the sights were an anticlimax – bones of buildings, hordes of charabancs; the glory that was.
Sex had not yet reared its head, so I didn’t have that distraction. But I remember two other excitements. One was retsina, in unsuitable quantities, the other an experience in Athens when I wandered off alone. There was a demonstration; something, I imagine, to do with collapsing Colonels. It sucked me in and swept me along – bewildered at first, trying to catch hold of something familiar, then encouraged by smiles and guiding hands – until I fell in step, into the rhythm, and ended up chanting with the best of them. When the procession dispersed, having gone nowhere in particular, I was lost, thrilled and intoxicated.
Roumeli had the same effect when I first read it a dozen or so years later; it still does, reading it again another couple of decades on. One is drawn in and immediately disorientated. Who is the outlandish figure in a hairy kilt and hobnailed Ali Baba boots who takes us into the first chapter? A Sarakatsán nomad, apparently . . . The appendix on these people gleefully offers sixteen conflicting derivations for the name. Casting around for the familiar, I plumped for ‘Saracen’, for many features of Sarakatsán life rang bells: the poetry about Turkkilling, for example; the public exposition of bloodied nuptial bed linen; the censing of mothers after birth with nasty-smelling smoke. There were more, and all may be found in the bottom corner of Arabia where I live. But what about the wearing of clothes back to front as a sign of mourning? I had come across that, too – in an account of fourteenth-century Luristan. It was all a long way from the Parthenon.
In fact it is, as Patrick Leigh Fermor admits, off all the standard maps. So too is Leigh Fermor. In 1933, aged 18, he set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (a journey which remains in a sense unfinished, for the third volume of his account of it has yet to appear). During the Second World War he took part in covert operations in Albania and in Crete, where he planned and carried out his celebrated abduction of the German General Kreipe.
He has written on places and subjects as various as the Caribbean and monastic life in Normandy. But Greece is his passion, and for nearly forty years he has lived there on the Mani, the middle prong of the Peloponnese.
Mani, his brilliant wanderings on that peninsula, deliberately involved the reader in ‘the luxury of long digression’. Digressions presuppose progression; in Roumeli – Mani ’s successor, which rambles Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth – there is none. The book visits the hills of Thrace, the monasteries of the Meteora, the cafés of Athens, the scene of Byron’s death at Missolonghi and the parched ravines of Aetolia. But these visits form no greater journey. They are disconnected probings into unknown corners, an odd-and-end odyssey, and the result is a collection of essays, a mézé of red herrings.
There is a ‘main theme’, we are told in the Introduction; but that theme, Leigh Fermor confesses, is ‘a private theory of my own’. The theory – ‘The Helleno-Romaic Dilemma’ – suggests, at some length, that the Greek psyche is a zone of perpetual conflict between the glory that had been Athens and the sorrow that was Byzantium (we can probably now add a third antagonist, the bore that is Europe). All late-night, third-bottle stuff, and hardly the normal matter of A-to-B travel books. But the delight of it all is that, via these disjointed jaunts around the mainland interspersed with mini-cruises in the glittering archipelago of Leigh Fermor’s mind, we get to know a lot about Greece.
The mind, like the land, never fails to surprise – with ideas, and with anecdotes. The one about getting thrashed at billiards by Byron’s ancient great-granddaughter and the subsequent hunt for the poet’s slippers has been deservedly anthologized. But there are more private memories as well, wartime scenes sharpened by danger, polished by moonlight, tempered by time. He recalls an earlier battle too ‘(which I had watched from an empty stork’s nest in the top of an elm)’. I envy him those nonchalant brackets and, even more, that surreal vantage-point. It is also one he adopts when writing, some mental equivalent of the stork’s nest that enables him to see things through to their illogical conclusion: ‘It was a wonder, I thought, as we rocked along under that burning-glass of a sky, that the curling tobacco leaves didn’t catch fire and smoke themselves there and then.’
The Greeks certainly had a word for Patrick Leigh Fermor: idiosyncratic. (Although there is, as it happens, a precedent for the tobacco conceit. The fifteenth-century Persian traveller Abd al-Razzaq noted that, as a result of the intense heat in Oman, the chase became a matter of perfect ease, ‘for the desert was filled with roasted gazelles’.) If idiosyncrasy cannot by definition be imitated, it can certainly inspire. It was another traveller, Freya Stark – whose publisher was also John Murray – who lured me to Arabia over twenty years ago, but it was Patrick Leigh Fermor who led me to write about it. He will keep me writing, and always envious. The works of Freya and the other great twentieth-century travel writers may capture genius loci; in Roumeli and its companions there is something more, unconnected with place – genius libri.
The one thing I envy Leigh Fermor more than any other is his sounds: the sound of names (‘names to make the hair stand on end’; Learish names – where is the Akhond of Swat beside Polycarp of Trikke and Stagoi?); the rhythm of lists; above all, non-verbal sound. In his final chapter, ‘Sounds of the Greek World’, all three come gloriously together in an aural gazetteer of the land he knows inside out and loves to distraction. It goes not from A to B but from A to Ω, dissolving along the way into poetry. It is impossible not to fall into the rhythm and emerge intoxicated.
It is also hard, now, not to wonder what remains of Roumeli: whether the Meteorite monks still cling to their rock pinnacles and the Kravarites of Aetolia remember the old beggars’ jargon; whether the Sarakatsáns, who led us into this unexpected landscape, still live between their summer and winter pastures. Transhumant, tented nomads in the EC? Perhaps only ghosts are left, and this book.
I have never done this before on the blog, but this is actually so funny that I could not resist it. Normal service will resume tomorrow.
In fact they were hasty. If they had waited a few days they could have had Zhang Ziyi as Wendi Murdoch, and CoCo the Clown as Mr Marbles.
Don’t forget to donate even a small amount to support this project by visiting ….
Here is a very exciting venture, and one that if we only had the time I am sure many of us would want to do.
In December, a young writer, Nick Hunt, will set off from London with the aim of walking from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, seventy-eight years after Paddy commenced his own, life-changing journey.
Nick intends to report on his journey and to write a book. He is not seeking to copy Paddy as he explains below, but to create his own experience whilst comparing the Europe that he encounters with the one our eighteen year old hero stepped into with such joyful anticipation.
Such things cannot be achieved without money and I am asking if you will make some contribution to ensure that Nick does not starve on his long journey. Who knows he may even need some cash to replace a lost rucksack at some point!
We have the idea of emulating Paddy’s “One Pound a week” concept. If you would like to help Nick on his journey (for which you will receive personal reports and in good time – hopefully not forty-three years like Paddy! – a copy of the book) please visit the page he has set-up with an on-line site that helps to raise money for interesting arts projects – We Did This – and make a donation. Nick needs to meet his target of £1,500 within one month. One Pound per week for a six month journey works out at £26 but I am sure any help you can offer will be very gratefully received!
To find out more and donate visit We Did This
Please visit Nick’s website which has details of the route. And now over to Nick …..
Nick Hunt
On December 9th 2011 – 78 years after Paddy’s great journey from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul – I will set out in his footsteps. Using his writing as a roadmap, his words as a background murmur in my ear, I’ll walk the same route through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. I’m a freelance journalist and writer, and the journey will be documented through audio recordings and through writing – to produce a series of short radio programmes, and a book of travel journalism, on my return to England.
My intention isn’t to emulate Paddy – who could ever attempt that? – but to explore the ways in which Europe, and the experience of walking it, have changed since he set out. In the intervening years war, politics and progress have reshaped the continent several times over. Obviously towns and cities will have grown, villages will have been swallowed by roads, and certain landscapes will have been altered beyond recognition. But as well as these more tangible changes, I want to explore the deeper shifts in the cultures, traditions and identities of the countries Paddy passed through.
My journey will come at an interesting time, with Europe still undergoing great changes, new patterns of migration and fusions of different cultures, as well as facing great challenges – from the uncertainties thrown up by the economic crisis to the ominous resurgence of right-wing movements across the continent.
‘Everything is going to vanish! They talk of building power-dams across the Danube and I tremble whenever I think of it! They’ll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East — they would never come back. Never, never, never!’
This prediction was made by a man Paddy met in Persenbeug, Austria, in an inn overlooking the Danube (A Time of Gifts). Much of the reason for me making this journey, almost 80 years later, is to see if these words became true.
Has Europe been tamed? Has everything vanished?
Is adventure still possible in Europe?
As admirers of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water will know, Paddy managed to fund his journey on £1 a week (which works out as about £50 today). I’m asking people to support this project by funding me just £1 a week for the duration of the walk, which should take around 6 months.
If you would like to fund me, or just to get in touch with thoughts, ideas, suggestions, you can contact me at scrutiny[at]gmail.com
For a fuller description of the journey, please see my blog: www.afterthewoodsandthewater.wordpress.com
Many thanks!
Nick
Paddy interviewed on Michael Berkeley’s BBC Radio 3 “Private Passions” programme for his 90th birthday in 2005. He talks about his life and the music that has inspired him.
I am indebted to Georg Dalidakis for sending this to me.
Please click below to listen to the programme. Click to arrow to the right to download it to your PC.
Happy listening!
(PS – thanks to Richard for passing on this playlist from the programme)
Otto von Habsburg with a bust of himself at Paks, Hungary, in 2005
The funeral of the last heir to the Habsburg throne takes places today in Vienna. By family tradition his heart will be buried separately in a Bedendictine monastery in Hungary at Pannonhalma Archabbey, symbolising I suppose Vienna’s claim on the Hungarian empire. The characters in his early family life feature in Miklós Bánffy’s books. Many of the old aristocrats that Paddy came across in Hungary and Romania had served the collapsed Habsburg Empire.
First published in the Telegraph July 4 2011
Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who died on July 4 aged 98, began his public life as the infant Crown Prince of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ended it as Father of the multinational European Parliament.
Within that neatly closed circle lay all the major political dramas of the 20th century, most of which he witnessed and some of which he influenced. He was centre stage for one of them — the unequal struggle against Hitler for the survival of his Austrian homeland, which he tried to conduct as an exiled Pretender in the 1930s. Not for nothing did the Führer call the triumphant march-in of March 12 1938 “Operation Otto”.
All that seemed unimaginable to the world in which young Otto, as he was known, started life during the deceptively tranquil Indian summer of the 650-year-old Habsburg monarchy. He was born third in line to the throne on November 12 1912 in the small Vienna palace of Hetzendorf and christened with a string of names demonstrating that the blood of all the Roman Catholic royal families of Europe flowed in his veins: Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius.
His father, the Archduke Karl, was a great-nephew of the ruling Emperor Franz Josef, and was then serving as an infantry major-commander at the regimental barracks in the capital. His mother was the former Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, and their marriage the year before had been that rare event in a dynasty plagued with so many matrimonial mishaps and misalliances — a happy union of two people perfectly matched in attractiveness, temperament and lineage. Their firstborn was to follow the prescription almost to the letter in his own marriage 38 years later.
At the time of his birth, the 11-nation monarchy still seemed safe, if somewhat wobbly, and his own time at its helm still fairly distant. One Viennese newspaper hailed the newborn prince as the future monarch who “according to the human calculations, will be called upon to steer the future of Europe in the last quarter of the 20th century”.
The assassination at Sarajevo on June 28 1914 of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, alongside his morganatic wife, put a brusque end to all such calculations. Indeed, the First World War which broke out six weeks later was to spell the doom of Europe’s continental empires, that of the Habsburgs included.
Half way through the war, in the early hours of November 22 1916, the old emperor Franz Josef, who had ruled for a record-breaking 68 years, died at last.
An era, as well as a reign, was over, but the succession was smooth. Otto’s father automatically became the new emperor, and he, aged four, the new Crown Prince. His first ceremonial appearance came on November 30 1916 when he walked, a tiny figure in a white fur-trimmed tunic, between his parents behind the hearse of the late ruler at the great funeral procession in the capital.
A month later he was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the monarchy’s Magyar subjects when his father was crowned in Budapest as the new King of Hungary. The official photograph shows the young boy, dressed in ermine and velvet with a great white feather in his cap, sitting between his parents in their ornate coronation robes.
He always retained vague memories of those events, but these became much sharper when, two years later, the monarchy collapsed under the combined pressure of domestic upheaval and defeat on the battlefield.
The beginning of November 1918 saw him and his siblings stranded in a royal shooting lodge near Budapest, where an armed revolution had broken out. They were rescued by one of their Bourbon uncles, Prince René, who smuggled them across the border to rejoin their parents in the Schonbrunn Palace of Vienna. Otto had a child’s eye view of the collapse of the monarchy, abandoned by the aristocracy it had created.
On November 11 1918 the Emperor Karl, though not formally abdicating, “renounced participation in the affairs of state”. That same night they fled the deserted palace, heading at first for Eckartsau, their privately owned shooting lodge 40 miles north-east of the capital.
The winter there passed fairly calmly, but by the spring their tiny self-styled “court” was under threat from Left-wing agitators. (Austria had promptly declared itself a Republic after their flight from Vienna.)
Their rescuer now was not a family member but a British Army officer — Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Strutt, dispatched on the personal authority of King George V with orders to escort the beleaguered Austrian emperor and his family to safety. This Strutt accomplished in some style, reassembling their royal train for the journey into Switzerland on March 25 1919. Otto never forgot the experience. Whenever he heard in later life complaints about British indifference to the Habsburgs’ fate he would reply: “Yes, but there was always Strutt.”
The two and a half years of their Swiss exile were marked by the two attempts of the ex-Emperor to regain his Hungarian crown. Both were blocked in Budapest by Miklos Horthy, who had now ensconced himself in power as Regent. After the ignominious failure of the second restoration bid the family were exiled by the allied powers to Madeira, where Karl died, a broken man, on April 1 1922. That same day the nine-year-old Otto heard himself addressed as “Your Majesty” by the tiny household-in-exile. To the end of his days he remembered the shock it gave him: “Now it was my turn.”
Under the protection of their kinsman, King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the family moved to Lequeitio on the Spanish Basque coast. Otto remembered the seven years they spent there as their most tranquil time of exile. They were also, for him, the most hardworking. Under the strict supervision of his mother he took, under various tutors, the Matura (roughly, English A-levels) in both German and Hungarian. His further education was also the motive for their next move — to the gloomy castle of Hams at Steenokkerzeel, in Belgium, so that Otto could take his degree at the nearby university of Louvain. It was at Hams that Otto reached his 18th birthday and was duly declared, in a family ceremony with few outside guests, “in his own right sovereign and head of the house”.
However ghostly that title appeared, it was enough to impress the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, who was manoeuvring to seize power in Germany. When in the winter of 1931-32 the young Pretender spent a few months studying in Berlin Hitler twice suggested a meeting.
The first invitation came from Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, the dim-witted Nazi son of the exiled Kaiser, and the second via Goering himself. Otto refused both times on the spurious excuse that he had not come to Berlin to discuss politics (in fact, he was doing nothing but). Hitler was incensed by the snub and it touched off a six-year battle between the two men for the fate of their Austrian homeland.
The climax was reached in February and March of 1938 when a Nazi takeover in Vienna seemed imminent, prompting a short-lived show of defiance from the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg — a monarchist at heart but without the strength of his convictions. His vacillation prompted a remarkably courageous offer from the young Pretender to return from exile to take over the reins of government in order to repel Hitler. Schuschnigg dithered but eventually rejected the idea — perhaps just as well for Otto, who was already high on the Gestapo’s wanted list.
He had moved close to the top of that list by the time, two years after the Anschluss, that German armies swept into France and Belgium. The exiled Habsburgs got away from Hams only a few hours before Goering’s bombers attacked the castle, and then they joined the vast stream of refugees heading south. They eventually reached Lisbon, where they were still being hounded by the Gestapo. President Roosevelt (whom Otto had met in Washington just before the fall of France) then honoured his offer of “hospitality in an emergency” and they were all flown by Clipper seaplane to the United States.
As Otto von Habsburg later admitted, he wasted far too much energy during those wartime years in America on the faction-fighting among Austrian refugee groups instead of concentrating on the broader political picture. But, thanks largely to his personal ties with the President, he was able to repair the image of Austria so tarnished by its supine surrender to Hitler in the Anschluss. And, in the last months of the war, he worked closely with the White House in the vain attempt to lure Horthyite Hungary over to the Allied side.
Churchill, whom he met at the Quebec Conference, warmly supported the vision of a post-war conservative federation in Central Europe. Stalin put paid to those visions, however, and it was to a Communist-controlled Danube Basin that Otto returned in the spring of 1945.
He made a brief foray into Western Austria but was expelled by the reborn Austrian Republic, which had reaffirmed the anti-Habsburg legislation of 1919. He then faced a personal crisis — without a valid passport, a home or any regular income. He solved the last problem by embarking on a career as a journalist and public lecturer. This was exhausting but highly remunerative and, within five years, he had paid off all his wartime debts and was enjoying a comfortable income.
He could now think of finding a home and founding a family. The ideal partner appeared by chance in 1950, when he visited a refugee centre near Munich. Working there as a nurse was Princess Regina of Sachsen-Meiningen, herself a refugee whose father, Duke George III, had died in a Soviet concentration camp. The ideally-matched couple were married a year later and settled in a comfortable villa at Pocking, near Lake Starnberg in Bavaria. Their first five children were all girls, and it was not until 1961 that the birth of Karl Thomas, the first of two sons, assured the line of direct succession.
This prompted Otto to renounce his own dynastic claims and pursue what had long fascinated him, a full-time career in politics. He acquired dual German-Austrian nationality, and in 1979 was elected to the European Parliament as Christian Democrat member for North Bavaria. There he stayed for the next 20 years, becoming the highly regarded Father of the House and its only member to have been born before the First World War.
He proved an accomplished debater with a fluent command of seven European languages. Though he spoke on a variety of topics, his abiding theme was the need to bridge the East-West division of the continent and ultimately to bring all the nations of the old monarchy within the new European Union. He continued to work successfully at this even after his retirement, using the pan-European movement as his principal platform. He had been the president ever since the death of its founder, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, in 1972.
On October 3 2004, Pope John Paul II beatified Otto’s father, Emperor Karl. It was an important event in Otto von Habsburg’s life, and one that perhaps softened the blow that had occurred five years earlier.
He had hoped that his son Karl would carry on the Habsburg name in the European Parliament, but in 1999 the young archduke — who had been sitting alongside his famous father as a Right-wing member for Western Austria — was dropped by his party after a controversy over the financing of his campaign funds. A subsequent attempt to launch Karl on to the Austrian domestic political scene proved a dire, if gallant, failure.
Otto von Habsburg’s wife, the Archduchess Regina, died in February 2010.
Many of you will have read the article written by Ryan Eyre recalling his meeting with Paddy in 2009.
Ryan is now traveling through Europe on his way to take up a teaching position in (Republic of) Georgia. I think he is in Kiev at the moment but he sent me these images from Iasi in north-eastern Romania. As we know Paddy spent a few happy years in Moldova with Balasha before the war and may well have visited Iasi.
The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo: Meeting Patrick Leigh Fermor
First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 2011
There was a time in the early 1950s when, upon arrival in the TLS office of a book about cannibalism or Voodoo, the editor would drop it in an envelope and say, “This is one for Paddy”. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last month at the age of ninety-six, is now best known for his connection to Greece and his youthful trek across Central Europe in the direction of Constantinople (as he insisted on calling it). But in his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, an account of a journey by schooner through the Caribbean islands published in 1950, he was in pursuit of “the whole phenomenon of Afro-American religion”. Before long, the TLS was commissioning the former mountain guerrilla fighter and Intelligence Corps Liaison Officer to write on related matters. He could open a review of a book on Haiti in 1953 by telling readers that “The bibliography of Voodoo – or Voudoun, as some purists insist, with little basis, on spelling it – mounts impressively”. A discussion of cannibalism in the correspondence columns of the TLS was just the sort of thing to elicit a contribution from Fermor: “Apropos of the recent letters about the ethical and culinary aspects of cannibalism, may I quote from a book I wrote years ago . . .”.
There followed a list of the gustatory advantages of various folk, according to the palates of the Caribs who “invaded the Caribbean chain, eating all the male Arawaks they could lay hands on and marrying their widows”. The book he wished to quote from was, of course, The Traveller’s Tree (it was by now 1980), which included this pre-Columbian version of a restaurant review:
“French people were considered delicious, and by far the best of the Europeans, and next came the English. The Dutch were dull and rather tasteless, while the Spanish were so stringy and full of gristle as to be practically uneatable.”
In later years, Paddy – as he was known to friend, reader and stranger alike – wrote for this paper on various topics, including Crete, scene of his wartime adventure. In the common run of Grub Street, there are many people one could call on to evaluate an anthology of nonsense – but Poiémate me Zographies se Mikra Paidia, which Paddy reviewed in 1977, was nonsense in modern Greek. In December 1979, he contributed a clamorous, ringing poem on the subject of Christmas:
What franker frankincense, frankly, can rank
in scents with fawn-born dawning
Weak we in Christmas week, lifetime a shriek-
ing streak – lend length and strengthen!
Poultice the harm away, charm the short
solstice day! Send strength and lengthen!
Among other curiosities we found on rooting through the archive was this plea from May 1968: “Patrick Leigh Fermor, author, traveller: biographical information, letters, personal reminiscences for biography”. The requester was J. Marder, writing from Athens. What became of it, and him? An authorized biography by Artemis Cooper is expected to appear at the end of next year.
We have received this “personal reminiscence” from a correspondent:
“In 2005, I was commissioned by a newspaper to write a profile of Patrick Leigh Fermor. A preliminary meeting took place at the West London home of Magouche Fielding, widow of Xan, PLF’s comrade-in-arms, but my editor insisted that no piece about Fermor could appear without a first-hand account of the house which he designed and helped build in the mid-1960s in Mani, at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese. So it was that, after an overnight stay in Athens and a five-hour drive to the village of Kardamyli, I rang Paddy from a seaside pension.
“‘Good Lord. You’re here already!’ he exclaimed, though all proper warning had been issued. ‘Look here. Come to supper straight away. It’ll be a rotten supper. But come to supper straight away.’ Desiring nothing more than an ouzo followed by a soft pillow, I had the presence of mind to resist. Paddy was understanding. ‘Look here. Come to lunch tomorrow. It’ll be a much better lunch.’ Suppers and lunches, it transpired, were prepared by different maids.
“At about one the following day I set off for the two-kilometre walk from Kardamyli, with directions from a villager. ‘As the road bends to the left, you take the footpath to the right. Go through the olive grove, and arrive at Mr Fermor’s door.’ What could be simpler? There was indeed a bend in the road and a footpath to the right. But there was also another, closer to the bend, up ahead. Then another. After involuntary exploration of hitherto uncharted olive groves and what seemed a sizeable stretch of the Mediterranean coast, I squelched into Paddy’s house from the shore, to find him seated on the sofa reading the TLS. ‘Good Lord. I think you’re the only creature, apart from a goat, who has come in that way. We must have a drink straight away.’ The last was among his favourite phrases.
“Lunch lasted some six hours. (Lemon chicken, with litres of retsina or red Lamia.) Songs in various languages were sung, including a rendering of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ in Hindustani. Lost lines of poems were sought. An anecdote about my lately deceased father and his claim to have seen salmon leaping in a narrow Perthshire stream, confirmed only after his death, threw Paddy into a search for the perfect epithet: ‘The corroborating salmon. The justifying salmon. The proving salmon’. Well into the evening, I prepared to leave. ‘Look here. Come to lunch on Sunday’ (this was Friday). I said I would on be on my way back to Athens. He was startled. ‘Good Lord. You’re leaving already? Then come to supper tomorrow.’ I did so, after an all-day hike in the Tagetos mountains which rear up behind the house that Paddy built, as the Gulf of Messenia opens before it. This time, I arrived punctually, to be admitted by the allegedly rotten cook (in fact supper tasted very good). She directed me to Paddy’s study in a separate building in the garden. I knocked before entering, to find him at his desk, alone in Mani on a late March evening, dressed in Jermyn Street shirt, pullover and grey flannels, reading a Loeb Horace. Towers of manuscripts could not obscure him. Among them, perhaps, was a draft of the third and concluding part of his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople – the first, though not the last, heroic adventure of Patrick Leigh Fermor.”
Jock Murray in 1983 (Mercer photography)
A review of a book about Paddy’s publishing house – John Murray. They have quite a line-up of authors, including Jane Austen, Byron, Darwin, Freya Stark and John Betjeman, as well as Paddy.
Jeremy Lewis reviews The Seven Lives of John Murray: the Story of a Publishing Dynasty, 1768-2002 by Humphrey Carpenter
First published in The Telegraph 5 July 2008.
When I started out in publishing 40 years ago, most of the famous firms were fiercely independent, and were housed in elegant if often dilapidated Georgian houses in Bloomsbury, Soho or Covent Garden.
Some, such as André Deutsch or Hamish Hamilton, were run by their founding fathers; others were still family firms, of which Collins was the most muscular, and John Murray the grandest and most upper class.
Murray was famed as the publisher of Byron, Darwin and, more recently, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, Osbert Lancaster and Patrick Leigh Fermor; and it had the inestimable advantage of being housed at 50 Albemarle Street, a treasure trove crammed with Byronic memorabilia, marble busts and gold-framed portraits of eminent authors.
Six years ago, the firm was swallowed up by a giant conglomerate and it now operates from a tower block on the Euston Road; Humphrey Carpenter’s history of the firm, completed by other hands after his death in 2005, is an evocation of a vanished age.
Like many of the best-known publishing houses, Murray has strong Scottish connections – reflected most recently in the decision to sell its archives to the National Library of Scotland.
A former Marine from Edinburgh, John McMurray bought a bookselling business in Fleet Street in 1768, dropped the “Mc” in response to an outbreak of Scottophobia, and inaugurated the dynasty that ended with John Murray VII.
As Carpenter observes, “Bookselling and publishing do not necessarily involve the intellect or the imagination; the story of the Murrays is not chiefly about the life of the mind.”
John Murray I’s adage that “if you are able to entertain the ladies your business is done” remains as pertinent as ever, and although Byron berated John Murray II for being “shuffling” and “time-serving”, the family manifested all those qualities traditionally associated with publishers, in that, as Carpenter says, they were both “cautious and adventurous”, and “conservative and innovative at the same time”.
John Murray II was a much more respectable figure than his rakish father. He moved west to Albemarle Street, published Jane Austen’s Emma, rejected a clergyman’s Observations on Diarrhoea, and is best remembered for his turbulent relations with Lord Byron.
He worried about publishing Byron’s more risqué verses, but more often than not the businessman prevailed, and “my sordid propensities got the better of me”.
After the poet’s death, Murray masterminded the burning of his memoirs: he hadn’t read them, but was worried that they might contain references to anal intercourse and incest with his half-sister. Carpenter suggests that putting a match to them enabled Murray to cross the great gulf that separated the tradesman from the gentleman.
Succeeding Murrays liked to think that the memoirs had somehow survived, peering into cupboards and under floorboards in the hope of finding them.
During the 19th century, Murray published On the Origin of Species and travel books by, among others, Isabella Bird and David Livingstone. Fiction received short shrift, but as the firm became ever more established, with royal and aristocratic memoirs looming large, Humphrey Carpenter’s eyes began to glaze over and he found himself writing imaginative accounts of life in Albemarle Street; these have been retained as appendices to a book that is lively enough in its own right and has no need for fictional embellishments.
The revival of the firm in the last century was thanks to the bow-tied, bustling “Jock” Murray, who persuaded his cautious seniors to take on the best-selling Story of San Michele, put up his own money (100 shares in Bovril) to secure the rights to publish Betjeman’s Continual Dew, nudged Freya Stark into print, spotted the potential in Parkinson’s Law, and modestly declared that his “main claim to fame is that I am the only publisher who has typeset in the nude”.
No mention is made of the great diarist James Lees-Milne: a contemporary of Jock at Eton and Magdalen who came to the firm late in his career, he regarded Albemarle Street as his spiritual home, and wrote entertainingly about it.
John Murray VII sold the firm partly because he felt it was increasingly difficult for independent firms to survive, and partly because he didn’t want his sons to have to take up the burden of the family firm.
The Daily Telegraph suggested at the time that “there are fears that its identity could disappear”, and the John Murray of today is less “carriage trade” than it was, and indistinguishable from any other firm of publishers.
Sir Wilfred Thesiger
The great soldier, explorer and travel writer who may have met Paddy in Egypt.
First published in the Telegraph 26 August 2003
Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died on Sunday aged 93, was the quintessential English explorer, and the last and greatest of that small band of travellers who sought out the secrets of the desert in the years before Arabia was transformed forever by the oil beneath her sands.
Thesiger’s reputation was established by two epic journeys he made in the 1940s across the Rub ‘al Khali, or Empty Quarter, the most forbidding, least known and least penetrated region of Arabia.
His motive for crossing it was not primarily to reap glory for himself, but to share the hardship of the life of the Bedu and to earn their comradeship. He was not in thrall to the desert itself but, like T E Lawrence, to his admiration of those who lived there: “The harder the life,” ran his credo, “the finer the person.”
The Empty Quarter is the largest sand desert in the world. It covers 250,000 square miles and contains ranges of dunes 100 miles long and 1,000ft high. At noon, the temperature of the surface of the sand reaches 80C.
The first European to traverse this fearsome waste had been Bertram Thomas in 1932, later followed by St John Philby, the father of Kim. But both these had travelled as well-supplied Westerners; Philby had even carried with him a wireless to listen to Test matches. Thesiger’s achievement was to make longer journeys than either, dressed like the Arab tribesmen with whom he rode and rationed to their daily pint of water and handful of dates.
It was a spare, almost monastic way of life, and one in which Thesiger found a near-spiritual contentment. “In the desert,” he wrote, “I found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions.”
Ostensibly in Arabia to search for the breeding grounds of locusts, Thesiger made his first crossing of the Empty Quarter – a circular journey by camel of some 1,500 miles – in 1946, becoming in the process the first European to see the fabled quicksands of Umm al Sammim. His second expedition, two years later, took him even further through the desert and, in constant peril from hostile Bedu, was still more dangerous.
It was also the most fulfilling experience of Thesiger’s life, albeit a humbling one; for though he withstood the physical hardship, he felt that he rarely matched the standards of behaviour the Bedu expected of themselves.
In the 1950s, as Arabia began to change, he took to the mountains, travelling in remote parts of Kurdistan, the Karakoram and later Afghanistan.
There, on the banks of the Panjshir, he and Eric Newby had the most celebrated meeting between travellers since that of Livingstone and Stanley, with Thesiger (presented in Newby’s account as the hardened professional to his own inept amateur) deriding the attempts of Newby and his companion to blow up their rubber mattress: “God,” he scoffed, “you must be a couple of pansies.”
Thesiger had made his new base, however, in the marshes of Iraq, where he lived for eight years in the 1950s, travelling by canoe and giving basic medical assistance to its inhabitants; he also became expert at circumcision.
His time there, recounted in The Marsh Arabs (1964), together with his precise yet emotionally charged account of his desert journeys, Arabian Sands (1959), gained him a new reputation in late middle age as a writer, albeit one influenced by the romanticised prose of Lawrence and Doughty.
In these books and in his partial autobiography, The Life of My Choice (1987), Thesiger set out his belief that Western civilisation was a corrupting force which had robbed the world of its diversity and stripped the primitive peoples he so admired of their finer traits. It was a floodtide from which he had spent his life trying to escape.
To many he appeared simply an arch-conservative, and critics pointed to the fact that, though Thesiger was horrified by the changes modernity had wrought on the Arab world, the Bedu themselves had not hesitated to swap their camels for cars, a harsh life for one of comfort.
Yet with the passing of time, many others came to share his distaste for the by-products of progress and, with the arrival of such concepts as eco-tourism, Thesiger’s traditionalist concerns now perversely seemed very contemporary.
Paradoxically, one modern invention gave Thesiger an edge over predecessors such as Richard Burton and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – the camera. Thesiger taught himself to become an excellent photographer and perhaps his most enduring legacy will prove to be his vast photographic record (willed to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford) of ancient races and ways of life since extinguished within a generation.
His great fortune was to see them just before they were lost from sight; his tragedy that the ones he cared for most have vanished forever.
Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born on June 3 1910 within the mud walls of the British Legation in Addis Ababa, Abyssinia. His father, a younger son of the 2nd Lord Chelmsford – commander of the force destroyed by the Zulus at Isandhlwana – was Consul-General and Minister at the court of Emperor Menelik.
Billy, as Wilfred was known in his young days, spent his first seven years in Abyssinia, absorbing a spectacle of savage splendour that bred in him his lifelong craving for adventure. At two, he saw the arrival at the British Legation of Crown Prince Lij Yasu’s 1,000-strong war band, resplendent in their scarlet cloaks trimmed with lions’ manes.
At six, he witnessed the victory parade of Ras Tafari, who had triumphed over Lij Yasu in a civil war – wave after wave of glinting spear points and captives in chains. The next year, he went tiger-shooting in India with his uncle, the Viceroy.
Such outlandish tales did not endear him to his fellow pupils at the prep school in England to which he was sent at eight, and Thesiger, already a dominant character who did not take rejection well, retreated within himself. A further blow was the sudden death of his father.
He enjoyed himself more at Eton, which proved another formative influence. Its spartan regime hardened him further and the ancient school also confirmed in him his love of the past. He afterwards retained great affection for the place and had latterly judged its annual travel writing prize, named for him.
Indeed, the simple room in the nursing home near Purley, Surrey, in which he was to live for the last few years of his life appeared almost a re-creation of his Eton study: a single tartan blanket on the bed; a shelf of books by Conrad and Buchan; a drawing of the school presented to him by the pupils.
In 1929 Thesiger went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read History, but he enjoyed greater success as a sportsman, winning a Blue at boxing from 1930 to 1933 and captaining the university team in his last year.
He spent his summer vacations working on tramp steamers and fishing trawlers, but the high point of his time at Oxford came in the winter of 1930 when he was invited to Addis Ababa to attend the coronation of Haile Selassie (the former Ras Tafari), who remembered the help afforded by Thesiger’s father during the civil war.
While in Ethiopia, Thesiger took the opportunity to plan his first expedition, a journey north into the Danakil country to search for the destination of the Awash river. This he carried out in 1933, although the Danakil had a murderous reputation for treachery and accounted a warrior’s standing by the number of men he had killed and castrated. The success of Thesiger’s enterprise began, at the age of 23, to make his reputation as an explorer and helped win him a place in the Sudan Political Service.
He served in the Sudan from 1935 to 1940, although he was too unconventional to make a success of it as a career and spent his last years there as a freelance District Officer. He used much of his time to travel as far afield as Chad, and relished the opportunities for hunting lion, which preyed on village cattle. He bagged more than 70, and raised two cubs himself. Thesiger, though, was not a sentimental man, and subsequently shot both the cubs. He did this in the belief that, having been tame, they would grow up to become man-eaters.
On the outbreak of war, Thesiger was assigned to the Sudan Defence Force, and later, under the command of Orde Wingate, helped organise the Abyssinian resistance to the occupying Italians. In May 1941 Thesiger led a flying column which marched 50 miles in a day through sweltering heat to harry a much larger retreating force at Wagidi. Having accomplished this, Thesiger went on to force the surrender of 2,000 Italian troops and the fort at Agibar. His leadership in this action was recognised by the award of the DSO.
Having been recruited by David Stirling, Thesiger later served briefly in the Western Desert with the SAS, but then saw out the rest of the war in some frustration as political adviser to the Abyssinian Crown Prince.
In March 1945 he resigned this post, and while waiting for an aeroplane back to London, was invited to dinner with O B Lean, head of the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit. Lean was looking to employ somebody to investigate locust sites in the Arabian desert; Thesiger had accepted the job before the meal was over.
After leaving Iraq, from 1968 onwards Thesiger lived for much of the year in northern Kenya, with the pastoral Samburu and Turkana peoples, although he dwelt apart from them and, unlike in Arabia, retained his English identity. In reference to this, and to his outsized ears and jutting nose, the tribes called him sangalai, “The Old Bull Elephant Who Walks By Himself”.
Occasionally, Thesiger returned to the flat he kept in Chelsea; but England was an unfamiliar country to him, and he hoped to see out his years in Kenya, with his corpse being left on the hill for the jackals. But after the death of the two Kenyan men whom he had treated as sons, he reluctantly returned to England for good in the mid-1990s, living out his days at the retirement home in Surrey, where he coped valiantly with the effects of Parkinson’s Disease.
He continued to write, publishing several more books, again well illustrated with his own photographs. These included My Kenya Days (1994), Among the Mountains: travels in Asia (1998) and A Vanished World (2001).
Wilfred Thesiger was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holder of the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, of the Lawrence of Arabia Medal of the Royal Central Asian Society, of the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and of the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
He was appointed CBE in 1968 and KBE in 1995. At the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930, he was awarded the Star of Ethiopia, Third Class.
He never married.
Thought you had read all the obits you can and learn nothing new? Well this one is worth a read for Jonathan Lorie’s account of a chance meeting with Paddy at his publisher, John Murray.
by Jonathan Lorie
First published in Wanderlust, 14 June 2011
The death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in June has robbed the travel world of its last great romantic. Here, Jonathan Lorie explains why
Which other travel writer can claim to have ridden in a cavalry and charged across a castle drawbridge with sabres drawn? Lived in a Romanian castle with a princess? Kidnapped a Nazi general and driven his staff car through 22 enemy checkpoints disguised in his uniform?
At 19, Paddy walked across Europe from Rotterdam to Istanbul. At 70, he swum the Hellespont from Europe to Asia. And in between, he lived one of the boldest lives and wrote some of the finest travellers’ tales of the 20th century.
He will best be remembered for the two books that recalled his journey across Europe in the 1930s – an epic walk on foot, sleeping in barns one night and ancestral castles the next, entering an older world of peasants and forests, gypsies and counts, which stretched back unbroken to the days of Charlemagne – but was about to be engulfed by war.
The two memoirs, A Time Of Gifts and Between The Woods And The Water, were written decades later: but their vivid sense of that lost order, their boyish high spirits and their learned yet lyrical prose established them as instant classics. The distinguished author Jan Morris has called him ‘the supreme English travel writer’.
A third book was always planned, but never published. It would have told how he reached that journey’s end, fell in love with the princess and lived on her feudal estate until war separated them. But it would not have recounted his wildest exploit, when he parachuted into war-time Crete to run Resistance operations against the German occupiers. Months of hiding as flea-ridden shepherds in caves culminated in the dramatic kidnap of the enemy general, a feat immortalised in the film Ill Met By Moonlight.
He never went back to the princess, but returned to Greece to build a permanent home in Mani, which became legendary for its elegance and its house guests. John Betjeman called his library overlooking the Mediterranean as ‘one of the rooms of the world’. Travel books followed, on the Caribbean and Greece, then the memoirs in the 1970s and 80s which brought the acclaim of the world. By then, Mani had become a magnet for writers and artists – notably Bruce Chatwin – paying homage to the grand old man. In 2004, aged 89, he was knighted by the Queen.
I met him the next day, in the fading grandeur of his publisher’s office, a peeling stucco townhouse near the Ritz. He was sitting in the Byron room, a Georgian salon filled with bookcases and marble busts, where the great poet’s executors burnt his scandalous letters. It was a fitting setting for a modern writer who loved action and romance and Greece.
Paddy looked up. His handsome face was scowling, but his eyes twinkled as ever. “It’s no good,” he spluttered, jabbing at a letter he was scribbling in fountain pen. “I just can’t remember any more.” What, I asked. “I’m writing to the Spanish ambassador. A poem in medieval French. And I can’t remember the end of it.” He frowned, and then burst into laughter.
Rumours abound that the final, missing volume has been written. Ardent fans pestered him for 30 years about it. He promised he would get round to it. We can only hope he has.
Sir Patrick “Paddy” Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE
11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011
Last summer I was struck by a severe case of wanderlust. I wanted urgently to be on my own in the woods, away from the radiating concrete and steel of New York in July. So I packed my bags and set out to the coast of Maine.
By Adam Haslett
First published on National Public Radio, 10 February 2011
On the way, I stopped to see a friend, and when he heard the purpose of my trip — to step outside the daily round of distraction and obligation — he pulled a book off his shelf and suggested I might want to take it along for the journey. It was called A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I quickly fell under its spell.
At a mere 95 pages, it is a short read, yet nothing about it makes you want to rush. In the mid-1950s, Fermor, an English travel writer who as a young man once walked from Holland to Turkey, became interested in the life of monks. He decided to visit several Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France. A Time to Keep Silence is the record of those visits and it accomplishes something that few books do: It replicates in style and rhythm the very experience that it seeks to describe. The writing is spare, exactingly precise, and then occasionally quite beautiful, just as the life of the monks we hear about are pared down, highly concentrated, and every now and then sublime. In short, it’s a book about the contemplative life that delivers the reader into a contemplation of his or her own.
When he first arrives at the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle, Fermor is shown to his visitor’s cell. He writes, “a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.” He is used to the world of entertainment and distraction, as most of us are, but all that has now ceased and there is nowhere for his nervous energy to go.
But after a few days amidst the silent rituals of the monastery, his mood changes. “There were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.” Soon, “dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a lake shore.”
To read that beautiful, restful sentence is to experience a small piece of the restfulness Fermor himself found. When we say that a book transports us, this is what we mean. The music of the words themselves sing us into a different world.
I had my own time to keep silence in the woods in Maine last summer. I was lucky enough to have Fermor’s book along with me. We can’t all be monks, and most of us wouldn’t want to be, but the genius of excellent writing is that we can know something of what that other life is.
You can also listen to Adam reading the above here.
This is quite an excellent essay that focuses on Paddy’s writing more than many other profiles.
Paddy in 1966
Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor today is both an exhilarating and depressing experience, exhilarating because of the depth and brilliance of his prose, depressing because the Greece he portrays so memorably has been hammered to dust by the march of time. Fermor, who was knighted in 2003, is best known in Greece and in his native Britain, where he was born nine decades ago to Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, director of the Geological Society in India, and Eileen Ambler, who was partly raised there. His first book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950, dealt with the journey he made through the Caribbean islands in 1947-48. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature, and established him as a writer of note.
His next two books, 1952’s A Time to Keep Silence, which described his stay in various European monasteries (where he discovered in himself “a capacity for solitude”), and 1956’s The Violins of Saint-Jacque, a novel, are interesting but minor works. His literary and political importance is linked to the two books on Greece he published a decade later—Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. Established his reputation as the pre-eminent non-native writer on 20th century Greece.
Fermor’s first experience of the country dated back to 1933, when as a rebellious and untamed 19-year-old, he dropped out of Sandhurst and set out on a walking tour of Europe with Constantinople as his ultimate destination was Constantinople. Envisioning himself as “a medieval pilgrim, an affable tramp with a knapsack and hobnailed boots,” he embarked, in mid-winter, on a journey that eventually spanned three years and took him through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Rumania and, eventually, Greece. 2
Remarkably, Fermor did not write about his picaresque adventures in pre-war Europe until many years later. “So when A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977 and Beneath the Winds and the Water in 1986, the life of the mid-thirties that he described had been utterly destroyed,” his biographer Artemis Cooper has noted, “and much of the land he had walked over was in the grip of communism for years. Yet his memory recreated this world with an astonishing freshness and immediacy, and recaptured the young man he was then: full of curiosity, optimism and joy in the vibrant diversity of the world.” The concluding volume of Fermor’s trilogy is scheduled for publication (by John Murray Ltd.) in early 2007.
Fermor made it to Constantinople on New Year’s Day, 1935, and then crossed south into Greece. He spent time in a monastery on Mt. Athos, got caught up later in a Royalist vs. Republican battle in Macedonia, arriving finally in Athens, where he met the great love of his life, the Romanian Balasha Cantacuzene. They went to Poros and lived together in an old water mill, where he wrote and she painted. When the money ran out they retreated to her decaying family home in Baldeni, Moldavia.
Fermor described the house in an essay published in Words of Mercury, “Most of a large estate had been lopped away in the agrarian reform. There was little cash about, people were paid in kind by a sort of sharing system, so, in a way, were the owners; and, on the spot, there was enough to go around. Elderly pensioners hovered in the middle distance and an ancient staff would come into being at moments of need. . . .
“There was one crone there who knew how to cast spells and break them by incantations; another, by magic, could deliver whole villages from rats. After sheep-shearing, a claca, fifty girls and crones, bristling with distaffs would gather in a barn to spin; hilarious days with a lot of food, drink, singing and story-telling.
“Snow reached the windowsills and lasted till spring. There were cloudy rides under a sky full of rooks; otherwise, it was an indoors life of painting, writing, reading, talk and lamp-lit evenings with Mallarme, Apollinaire, Proust and Gide handy; there was Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and L’ Aiglon read aloud; all these were early debarbarizing steps in beguiling and unknown territory.”
Fermor was not quite the barbarian he fancied himself. Despite having rejected higher education, he was already something of a polymath, an autodidact. Not only was he conversant in five European languages (only Hungarian stumped him), he was knowledgeable about art, history, architecture, geography, sociology, religion, fashion, etymology, cartography, heraldry and many other subjects, all of which he had absorbed through voracious reading.
The importance of books in his life was discussed in a piece he wrote for The Pleasure of Reading (ed. Antonia Fraser, Bloomsbury, 1992). “When the miracle of literacy happened at last, it turned an unlettered brute into a book-ridden lunatic,” he confessed. “Till it was light enough to read, furious dawn-watches ushered in days flat on hearth-rugs or grass, in ricks or up trees, which ended in stifling torch lit hours under bedclothes.”‘
Among his favorite writers were Dickens, Thackeray (Vanity Fair, anyway), the Sitwells, Norman Douglas, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, not to speak of Kipling and Houseman; Baudelaire and Ronsard in French; Horace and Virgil in Latin; Holderlin, Rilke and Stefan George in German.
“The young learn as quick as mynahs, at an age, luckily, when everything sticks,” he continued. What also stuck were “reams of Shakespeare, border ballads, passages of Donne, Raleigh, Wyatt and Marvel . . . two Latin hymns, remnants of spasmodic religious mania . . swatches from Homer, two or three epitaphs of Simonides, and two four-line moon-poems of Sappho.”
Fermor’s list also includes “the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica … a battery of atlases, concordances, dictionaries, Loeb classics, Pleiades editions, Oxford companions, Cambridge histories, anthologies and books on birds, beasts, plants and stars.”
When Britain declared war in 1939, Fermor immediately went home to join up, leaving Balasha behind in Romania. He first enlisted in the Irish Guards, but because of his fluent command of Greek he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, serving at first as liaison officer to the Greek army fighting the Italians inAlbania. After Greece fell, Fermor was sent to Crete where he took part in the battle against the German airborne invasion. He remained on the island after the German triumph; disguised now as a Cretan shepherd, with a big handlebar moustache and a dagger in his belt, the tall, slim, Fermor cut a swashbuckling figure as he roamed the mountains to help organize the resistance movement.
It was there, in Crete’s high, wild country, that he recalled in Words of Mercury that…
“devotion to the Greek mountains and their population took root. . . . We lived in goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makers’ huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercilessly riddle the island’s stiff spine. Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks. Here, at ibex- and eagle-height, we settled with our small retinues. Enemy searches kept us on the move and it was in a hundred of these eyries that we got to know an older Crete and an older Greece than anyone dreams of in the plains. Under the dripping stalactites we sprawled and sat cross-legged, our eyes red with smoke, on the branches that padded the cave’s floor and spooned our suppers out of a communal tin plate: beans, lentils, cooked snails and herbs, accompanied by that twice-baked herdsman’s bread that must be soaked in water or goat’s milk before it is eaten. Toasting goat’s cheese sizzled on the points of long daggers and oil dewed our whiskers. These sessions were often cheered by flasks of raki, occasionally distilled from mulberries, sent by the guardian village below. On lucky nights, calabashes of powerful amber-colored wine loosened all our tongues. Over the shoulders of each figure was a bristly white cloak stiff as bark, with the sleeves hanging loose like penguins’ wings; the hoods raised against the wind gave the bearded and mustachioed faces a look of Cistercians turned bandit. Someone would be smashing shells with his pistol-butt and offering peeled walnuts in a horny palm; another sliced tobacco on the stock of a rifle; for hours we forgot the war with talk and singing and stories; laughter echoed along the minotaurish warrens.”
In 1944 Fermor took part in a bold and perilous mission that later became the subject of a best-selling book, Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, a fellow intelligence officer. 5 The British plan was to kidnap the German army’s chief of staff, General Muller, who had become notorious and hated for his brutal treatment of both Cretan partisans and civilians. When Muller was called away, the new target was his replacement: General Heinrich Kreipe, a professional soldier arriving straight from service on the Russian front.
Fermor and his team, which included Moss, Sandy Rendel (former political correspondent for the Sunday Times), the Cretan partisan Niki Akoumianakis and a dozen other andartes, had to radically alter their original plan. Fermor and Moss agreed to disguise themselves as German military policemen. That meant Fermor had to part with his Cretan moustache Without it, he looked so much the stiff-necked Teuton that Moss kidded him about being on the wrong side. They decided to promote themselves to corporal’s rank and decorate themselves with a few (stolen) ribbons.
Taking up positions outside the isolated Villa Ariadne—the headquarters for the German army had been built above Heraklion before the war by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans—Fermor and Moss flagged the general’s car down at 9.30 pm.
“Is dies das general’s wagon?” he asked.
“Ja, ja,” came the muffled answer from inside.
With that assurance, key members of the band attacked from all sides, tearing at the doors of the car. The beam of a flashlight showed the startled face of the general and the chauffeur reaching for his automatic. There was the thud of a bludgeon; the chauffeur keeled over and was dragged out of sight.
The general, who offered no resistance, was brought to Anogia, the largest village on Crete, located on the northern slopes of Mt. Ida. “Famous for its independent spirit, its idiosyncrasy of dress and accent, it had always been a great hideout of ours,” said Fermor in an account written in 1969 for the Imperial War Museum.
Fermor related that a note had been left in the general’s car stating that he was safe and “would be treated with the respect due to his rank,” and that the kidnap had been carried out by British officers and Greek nationals serving as soldiers in the forces of His Hellenic Majesty. “The point was to give the Germans no excuse for carnage and reprisals in the Knossos area.”
The next day, however, a single-winged Feiseler-Storck reconnaissance plane circled above Anovia and dropped a steady snowfall of leaflets. “To all Cretans,” the message read, “last night the German General Kreipe was abducted by bandits. He is being concealed in the Cretan mountains and his whereabouts cannot be unknown to the inhabitants. If the General isn’t returned within three days, all rebel villages in the Heraklion district will be razed to the ground and the severest reprisals exacted on the civilian population.”
The general was not, of course, returned to the Germans; he was smuggled off the island and delivered by submarine to British army headquarters in Egypt, and the Germans exacted their promised revenge. Fermor deals with this in circumspect fashion in his official report, asserting that “most untrue to form, there had been little violence, few arrests, no shooting on the part of the Germans.”
Fermor’s statement is disputed by Dr. Michael E. Paradise, a Midwest-based Greek-American whose father and two brothers were members of the British intelligence group on Crete. Though in his teens, Michael himself was often used as a courier. “Attacking in the darkness of one night,” he wrote in the April 10, 1997 edition of The Greek American (a now-defunct, New York-based newspaper), “the Germans proceeded to destroy several villages with the utmost brutality and ferocity. I was witness of the destruction of one of the villages, Ano Meros, on Mt. Kendros in Amari.”
The kidnapping of Gen. Kreipe, Paradise asserted, “contributed to the unnecessary death of hundreds of men, who were hunted down like wild animals in the streets of their villages, then, while some were injured and still alive, they were burnt in the houses of the villages, and buried in them when the dynamiting of the houses followed.”
Most Cretans, though, have not held a grudge against Fermor and his gung-ho confederates. As one veteran Cretan commando said at the time of Kreipe’s abduction, “So they’ll burn down all the houses one day. And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks. Let the Germans burn it down for a fifth time! And they killed scores of my family, scores of them, my child, yet here I am! We’re at war and war has all of these things. You can’t make a wedding feast without meat.”
After the war—and his brief Caribbean sojourn—Fermor realized that his love of Greece had tied himself forever to the country’s fortunes. He lived for a time on Evia, then Ithaca and Hydra (in the house of the painter, Niko Ghika). Soon after he began his travels in the far corners of the Greek mainland which led to the publication of his two masterpieces, Mani and Rozemeli. Accompanied by the photographer (and his wife-to-be) Joan Rayner (daughter of the Conservative politician and First Lord of the Admiralty in Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition government, Belton Eyres Monsell), whom he had met in wartime Cairo, Fermor set off with this goal in mind: “To situate and describe present-day Greece of the mountains and islands in relationship to their habitat and history.”
Mani is the southernmost part of Greece, an isolated, mountainous and forbidding peninsula known for its stark, sun-blistered landscape and warlike, feuding inhabitants. Despite having been warned not to attempt to penetrate into The Deep Mani— “the Maniatis are dangerous”—”they are Jews”—”they fear and hate foreigners”—”they live on salted starfish”—Fermor and Rayner defiantly set out on foot and mule, bus and caique, in search of an authentic Greek world.
What they found and reported on was a revelation to one and all. The Mani was a strange, combative place, to be sure—most people lived in pyrgi, stone towers that were more fortress than domicile—but it was fantastical at the same time, rich in history and bravery (no part of Greece played a more conspicuous and valuable part in the War of Independence). With its code of honor and hospitality, its love of freedom, the Mani was also pulsing with life, colorful in speech, custom, ritual and superstition.
The book that came out of this expedition into the heart and soul of the Mani became an instant classic. Fermor’s prose and Rayner’s photographs (sadly dropped from subsequent editions) won plaudits from critics and readers alike. The British artist (and longtime Greek resident) Polly Hope has said, “Mani was one of the books that brought me to Greece. When my husband and I first read it we knew instantly that this was the world we wanted to go to. It told of magic and fury and history and people and landscape. Completely breathtaking. We read it and reread it and read it again until our heads were full of towers and feuds, cucumbers like slices of ancient pillars, and ouzo. Donkeys and heat. And the dark sea that because of the extraordinary Greek light stands up vertically as far as the horizon. We had to go. And immediately. “We did, and remained, though not in Mani. Still all these years later it is the book that tells about Greece as it is. It is still right and as clear and informative as that first reading. Although tourism has spread its ugly veil over most of Greece the people are still there, the feuds and cucumbers, the vertical sea and broiling sun.”
Similar praise was bestowed on Roumeli when it was published eight years later. Fermor and Rayner’s portrait of the northeast corner of Greece, including Messolonghi, where Lord Byron (one of Fermor’s heroes) fought and died for Greece, is as vivid and compelling as anything in Mani. Whether writing about the sarakatsans, the nomadic shepherds—”self-appointed Ishmaels”—who inhabited the mountaintops, speaking in a secret tongue; or the origins of the local Karayiozi puppet shows; or the Meteora monasteries; or the “stone-age banquet” (celebrating an arranged marriage) to which they were invited, Fermor’s prose shines and shimmers like beaten gold.
Historian John J. Norwich believes that Fermor “writes English as well as anyone alive.” 7 He also praised ‘the preternatural copiousness” of Fermor’s two books. Jan Morris seconded the statement, adding that Fermor was “beyond cavil, the greatest living travel writer.” In November, 2004 the British Guild of Travel Writers concurred, bestowing on Fermor its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Fermor won another important prize in 2004: the second Gennadius Trustees’ Award for his support of things Greek. At the ceremony in Athens, the previous recipient of the award, writer/translator Edmund Keeley, said, “I look upon Mr. Fermor as one of my first mentors, a man of letters who taught me, perhaps more than any other Philhellene, the best way to write about the second country we have both come to love and to celebrate in our work.”
After lauding Fermor for his “imaginative projection of Greece,” Keeley offered a specific example of the kind of “special insight” that Fermor brings to his writing about Greece. “A scene in his superb book on the Mani . . . not only captures the essence of Greek hedonism . . . but demonstrates his easy and subtle understanding of the Greek sensibility.”
The scene took place in “the glaring white town” of Kalamata where the Feast of St. John the Baptist was being celebrated. Fermor, his wife Joan, and their friend the writer Xan Fielding sat down to eat their dinner set out at the water’s edge on flagstones “that flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off.”
Suddenly they decided to pick up their iron table, neatly laid out, and set it down a few yards out to sea, followed by their three chairs, then by the three of them sitting down with the cool water up to their waists. Quite sensible, the only slightly odd thing about this was that all three were fully dressed. Yet the really significant moment, the epiphany, came when the waiter arrived on the quay, gazed in surprise at the space they’d left empty on the burning flagstones, and then (quoting Fermor) “observing us with a quickly masked flicker of pleasure,” stepped without further hesitation into the sea and “advanced with a butler’s gravity” to put down their meal before them, three broiled fish, “piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling.”
As Keeley pointed out, “It is Fermor’s seeing both that flicker of pleasure and the quick masking of it that says so much, more even than his report that others on the quay sent their seaborne fellow diners can after measuring can of retsina, and a dozen boats gathered around to help them consume the complimentary wine, and a mandolin arrived . . . to accompany rebetika songs in praise of the liberated life. Only those who have often taken apart and savored a broiled tsipoura or fangri . fresh from the sea and amply bathed in an olive-oil-and-lemon sauce would recognize why no representative Greek citizen given to pleasure would think of disturbing, except in a celebratory way, any table holding such a succulent, earthy gift from the Gods. And only a writer with Fermor’s precise vision and brilliant skill in expression would choose to show our hedonistic waiter appropriately masking his pleasure and assuming the gravity of a butler as he entered the sea on his mission to deliver the gods’ gift.”
It is, alas, harder and harder to find such raffish scenes in 21stcentury, tourist-choked, EU-regimented Greece. Even Fermor, in a recent essay, had to admit that much of what he first encountered and experienced in Greece has disappeared. “Progress has altered the face and character of the country,” he commented. And as for tourism, “it destroys the object of its love.” 10
That said, Fermor still continues to write about Greece. In his 90s, living alone in the pyrgos he built in the Outer Mani—Joan died in 2000, of injuries suffered in a fall—he toils away on the final book of his Hook of Holland to Constantinople trilogy, the one that deals with his first years in Greece, working from notebooks, maps and memory. In a way Fermor is a chronicler of a bygone age, a rememberer of things past. The Greece he reveres may have died, but he battles with the last strength in him to keep its spirit alive.
Notes
1. ‘Only two of Fermor’s books are in print in the United States: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. They are New York Review of Books Classics. In the UK, most of Fermor’s books are published in hardbound and paperback by John Murray Ltd., but Penguin has published a few of his titles as paper reprints. The following are his major publications. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. Photos by Joan Eyres (London: Murray, 1958); Translation of George Pyschounadkis, The Cretan Runner: His story of the Germany Occupation. (London: J. Murray, 1978, c1955); Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London & NY; Penguin, 1983, c1966); Introduction to Kostas Chatzepateras, Greece 1940-41 Eyewinessed (Anixi Attikis {Greece}: Efstathiadis Group, 1995); Text with Stephen Spender of Ghika: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture (London: Lund Humpries, 1964); A Time of Gifts; On Foot to Constantinople, from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (NY: New York Review of BooKs, 2005).
2. Quotations is from a review from “Scholar in the Woods,” a review by James Campbell in The Guardian, April 8, 2005.
3. ‘James Campbell, Words of Mercury.
4. A11 quotes regarding Fermor’s reading tastes are taken from his essay in
the anthology The Pleasures of Reading edited by Antonia Fraser, Bloomsbury,
1992.
5. ‘The details of the kidnapping are taken from Ill Met by Moonlight (London:
Harrap, 1950). In the movie of the same name released in 1958, Fermor is
played by Dirk Bogarde.
6. Letter to the author sent in 2004.
7. Copy written for the dusk jacket of the paperback edition of Between the Woods and the Water.
8. Ibid.
9. This and subsequent Keeley citations are from a 2004 letter to the author. Date?
10. See Fermor’s essay in A Time of Gifts.
Justin Marozzi
Door-stepping a 91-year-old knight of the realm, second world war hero and one of the finest writers in the English language is an awkward business. Particularly when he is hard at work in his home in the southern Peloponnese trying to finish the elusive third volume of what would be among the greatest trilogies in modern literature.
First published in the Financial Times February 2 2007
Yet this is no time for reticence. A man who kidnapped a German general on Crete in 1944 and then drove through 22 checkpoints impersonating him, before spiriting him on to a Cairo-bound submarine – having first bonded over a shared passion for Horace’s Odes – probably favours the direct approach. This, at least, is what I tell myself on arriving in the fishing village of Kardamyli in the Outer Mani, armed with all sorts of introductions to Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.
In the event, Leigh Fermor, known to English friends as Paddy and to Greeks by his nom de guerre Mihali, could not be more charming when I ring him from a nearby hotel. He suggests lunch. I accept faster than you can say hero-worship.
The following day, the housekeeper waves me down a vaulted stone gallery, cool air ruffling through the arches, an architectural reminder, perhaps, of Byzantium, which, in a sense, has always been Leigh Fermor’s true north. It was to Constantinople – never Istanbul – that the 18-year-old set out on his serendipitous, marathon walking tour, a journey immortalised half a century later in the densely beautiful prose of A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986).
His stint at King’s School Canterbury, where his housemaster diagnosed “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”, had just come to a premature end with his expulsion for fraternising too closely with the town’s female population (women have always found him irresistible). Leigh Fermor notes proudly that Christopher Marlowe was another King’s man who got into high-spirited scrapes. His education after that – and all his books display the dazzling range of his erudition – was that of a freely roving autodidact.
From Byzantium I step back into England into the sort of room to make a writer swoon. Betjeman called it “one of the rooms in the world”. Whitewashed walls, stone floor and panelled wood ceiling frame a space that is both sitting room and library. Bookshelves rise from floor to ceiling. Light streams in from tall windows thrown open towards the sea. Piles of books jostle for Lebensraum with armchairs, cushions, icons, sculptures, maps, kilims. Browning, James Joyce, John Betjeman, several feet of dictionaries, atlases, Greek-English lexicons, pictures by the late Greek artist and Leigh Fermor’s friend Nikos Ghika. In Leigh Fermor’s words, “Where a man’s eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also.”
For a moment, I think the man who stands up to greet me in this literary Elysium must be a house guest, since he looks no more than 70.
“How very nice to see you,” he says. His English is polished gravel, the voice of a more civilised generation. He is clasping a Loebb edition of Herodotus and is alarmingly handsome, which means that this must be the nonagenarian Leigh Fermor, no youthful house guest. In various letters despatched to Greece I have asked, rather clumsily, if we can talk about Herodotus for a book project.
“You’ve kept me up till 1.30 in the morning with this,” he says breezily. “I’ve been reading about the battle of Marathon.”
I apologise for inflicting the Father of History on him. “Absolutely not. He’s rather engaging. Now what would you like to drink? My sight’s not very good so do help yourself.”
We walk over to a table lost beneath a shimmering forest of glass bottles. Leigh Fermor has an enviable head of hair and is crisply dressed in blue checked shirt, russet tie, a blue jumper and corduroys. Red socks betray a note of flamboyance. A more debonair specimen of the literary man of action would be difficult to imagine.
“I’ve already had a vodka and tonic so I won’t have anything,” he says. I pour myself a drink from a very large, obviously much used, green bottle with the handwritten legend “OUZO”. He draws alongside and joins me for a second vodka. His constitution is said by friends to be as robust as his wartime record.
So what news for Leigh Fermor devotees awaiting the third volume, which would see him reach his beloved Constantinople after all these decades?
“That’s the plan, of course,” he says. “I’ve been rereading my notes and getting things in order. Clearing the decks. But it’s all a bit grim. I’m finding writing rather difficult.” He says he has developed tunnel vision and at the moment is confronting the disconcerting sight of an interviewer with two pairs of eyes and four nostrils. He does not type, has never been very keen on dictating and has no secretary. We must keep our fingers crossed, while looking forward to Artemis Cooper’s biography.
“Charge on,” is the cue for lunch. We leave the library and return to the world of Byzantium, taking our places in the gallery at a table set for two. An arch encircles a sunlit scene of bougainvillea amid a diaphanous blaze of green foliage. Four well-fed cats hover expectantly and a squadron of buzzing flies makes merry around us. Centre stage is a large carafe of chilled white wine. In fact, it is retsina, for which my host apologises when I ask what we are drinking.
“I’m terribly sorry. Dreadfully rude of me. I didn’t ask you. I have some proper wine next door.”
Absolutely not. I have developed a taste for the stuff. He nods his vigorous approval. “I’ve been drinking it for 50 years and it’s done me no harm.”
In Mani, his celebrated travelogue on the southern Peloponnese, published in 1958 and described by this newspaper, together with Roumeli, its counterpart on northern Greece, as “two of the best travel books of the century”, he dwells on the improving qualities of retsina. He offers the delicious observation that “one of its secrets is drinking it with unstinted abundance. It seems to have an alliance with the air in the promotion of well-being. Many people think that it bestows the gift of bodily health as well; a belief I accept at once without further scrutiny.”
We set to our lunch of Herculean pork chops luxuriating on a bed of garlic and onions with spinach, potatoes and tzatziki. The retsina in the carafe descends with the winter sun. We talk about his latest honour from the Travellers Club, which last December presented a bust of Leigh Fermor, now sitting in pride of place alongside Sir Wilfred Thesiger, another of the club’s favourite sons and fellow soldier-writer.
“It’s all rather terrifying,” he says. Flattering, too? “Oh, rather!” The eyes twinkle.
In fact, Leigh Fermor has been serially honoured for his many achievements on the battlefield and in print. His typically dashing exploits in the Special Operations Executive, rubbing shoulders with David Stirling, Fitzroy Maclean and Wilfred Thesiger, above all the audacious kidnapping of General Kreipe on Crete, were recognised with a Distinguished Service Order. An OBE followed. He is an honorary citizen of Heraklion, Kardamyli and Gytheio. His first book, The Travellers Tree (1950), won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. In 2004, he was knighted for services to literature and Anglo-Greek relations.
Ice cream arrives. I ask him whether he shares the feeling of nostalgia and regret, so pervasive in Greece, at the loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. His writing seems to reflect this pain.
“Only in a romantic sense,” he says. “You can’t just forget 2,500 years of history and call it Istanbul. I deplore the Turkish role in eastern Europe, but of course you can’t blame them. It would be like blaming the laws of hydrostatics for flood damage.”
Though he is not a political man, preferring to remain above or beyond the fray, he is, above all, a European. In the confrontation between east and west there seems little doubt as to where his sympathies lie. Does he feel the western world and its way of life are under threat?
“It does rather feel like that, though I haven’t been keeping up on it as much as I should have,” he replies.
Back to the library for Greek – not Turkish – coffee. There is a splendid photograph, taken recently, of Leigh Fermor and Earl Jellicoe, wartime comrade and commander of the Special Boat Service. Both men wear dark suits, their chests a riotous patchwork of medals. Leigh Fermor’s left hand rests jauntily on his hip. Even in his tenth decade, there is an unmistakable poise and swagger.
After coffee, we walk outside into the garden. Across the water to the west lies the rump of Messenia. Beneath us is Leigh Fermor’s private little cove and steps down to the sea. This is the house that Paddy built, with his late wife Joan, in the mid-1960s. He sits for a few photographs while we swap notes on travel writers young and old.
Bruce Chatwin was a frequent visitor to the Mani in the 1980s. “People have said I was a guru to him. It’s absolute nonsense. Bruce would have been appalled.” He considers him a marvellous writer and is a fan of Jan Morris, too. He abhors being called a travel writer, regarding it as a lesser category, “rather like being called a sports writer”.
I have trespassed on his time long enough. On our way out, he suddenly leads me to another building, half hidden by the olives and cypresses. A fleeting glimpse into his inner sanctum: papers everywhere, more zigzagging stacks of books, a towering blue and white ceramic light from Portugal. His hero Byron stares at us from a plate in the centre of a broad chimneypiece.
“Do drop in again if you’re ever in the area,” he says. I may have to leave my wife to become his amanuensis.
This man, I reflect, as I drive away from his secluded haven, who has walked across a continent, fallen in love and run away with a princess, fought for his country, kidnapped a general, built a house, written books of dreamlike brilliance, joined a Greek cavalry charge and lived long and exceedingly well, is a true knight. Quite possibly one of the very last.
Justin Marozzi is the author of a number of travel books his latest being the acclaimed The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus which includes the account of a lengthy retsina fuelled lunch with Paddy.
There is often a debate about Paddy’s ability to recall so much of his journey with accuracy so long after the event and often without his precious notebooks. Benedict Allen put him to the test at the Red Ox Inn in Heidelberg and the Romanian spa resort of Baia Herculene: Paddy passed that test with flying colours.
During one of my recent trips to Cluj I was able to enter the famous Hotel New York (now the Continental) during a small exhibition as part of the Transylvanian Film Festival. Immediately I reached for my copy of Between the Woods and the Water and turned to page 144 …
“An hotel at the end of the main square, called the New York – a great meeting place in the winter season – drew my companions like a magnet. István said the barman had invented an amazing cocktail – only surpassed by the one called ‘Flying’ in the Vier Jahreszeiten bar in Munich – which would be criminal to miss. He stalked in, waved the all clear from the top of some steps, and we settled in a strategic corner while the demon-barman went mad with his shaker. There was nobody else in the bar; it was getting late and the muffled lilt of the waltz from Die Fledermaus hinted that everyone was in the dining room. We sipped with misgiving and delight among a Regency neo-Roman décor of cream and ox-blood and gilding: Corinthian capitals spread their acanthus leaves and trophies of quivers, and hunting horns, lyres and violins were caught up with festoons between the pilasters.”
… and given the costume display, this next paragraph came to life for me as Angéla tries to disguise herself with a scarf Paddy and István suggested it might be better to turn into someone else:
“King Carol, Greta Garbo, Horthy, .. Groucho Marx … Queen Marie, and Charlie Chaplin; Laurel and Hardy, perhaps; one of the two; she would have to choose, but she insisted on both.”
For those of you who like to do a little first hand research, you may like to know that Paddy’s wartime file (1939-1946) has just been released for public viewing at the National Archives in Kew, London.
If you are interested I suggest some online research first and then get in contact with the staff to ask about access to his files. Please do tell us about anything of interest that you find!
The Traveller's Tree
Patrick Leigh Fermor, by turns youthful adventurer, linguist, classicist, and war hero, was the quintessential “gifted amateur” when he set out with two companions, in the late 1940s, to journey through the long island chain of the West Indies.
By Don Ryan
He was the ideal traveler, inquisitive, humorous, interested in everything. His budget, and curiosity for the lives of the Creole, disposed him to live among them, but introductions from home afforded him also time among the governors and administrators in colonial manor houses. His sense of history runs deep; he encountered 450-year-old cultures which he calls young. He reminds us how everything is connected by time’s threads and sinews.
Fermor was observant of architecture and of fashion and influence. He knew how to notate music and sings us overheard melodies and recites the latest Calypsos. He shows immense empathy for the Negroes and gives a long and sympathetic description of Haitian Voodoo – but is skeptical about Jamaican Rastafari. His ear for language heard the connections with West Africa.
This is a complete and evocative a description of a culture, of an archipelago of cultures, as I have ever read. But a word of caution: if you are planning a trip to the Caribbean, this is not a guidebook to take. This is to read if you will never be able to go. – Don Ryan
Geographically, the Caribbean archipelago is easy to split up into component groups….
No such brisk summing-up can be formulated for the inhabitants of these islands: the ghostly Ciboneys, the dead Arawaks and the dying Caribs; the Spaniards, the English, the French, the Dutch, the Danes and the Americans; the Corsicans, the Jews, the Hindus, the Moslems, the Azorians, the Syrians and the Chinese, and the all-obliterating Negro population deriving from scores of kingdoms on the seaboard and hinterland of West Africa. Each island is a distinct and idiosyncratic entity, a civilization, or the reverse, fortuitous in its origins and empirical in its development. There is no rule that holds good beyond the shores of each one unless the prevalence of oddity, the unvarying need to make exceptions to any known rule, can be considered a unifying principle. The presence of religious eccentrics like the Kingston Pocomaniacs and the adepts of Voodoo in Haiti and the survival of stranded ethnological rock-pools like the Poor Whites in the Islands of the Saints or the semi-independent hospodarate of the Maroons of the Jamaican mountains – all this, and the abundance and variety of superstitions and sorceries and songs, of religious and political allegiances, and the crystallization of deracination and disruption into a new and unwieldy system, almost, of tribal law – all this excludes any possibility of generalization.
The skipper heaved the sloop’s bowsprit round and pointed it at the fading silhouette of St Eustatius. The wind was piercingly cold, and as the ship leapt forward, we dug out a half-empty bottle and lowered comforting stalactites of whisky down our throats. Night fell, and the rain stopped. The heads of the Negroes, who had all taken refuge under a tarpaulin like some tremendous recumbent group of statuary before its unveiling, began to appear again round the edge. The two nearest to us were talking to each other in an incomprehensible language that was neither pidgin English nor Creole. Many of the words sounded like Spanish, but the flow of the language was suddenly thickened by noises that were guttural and uncouth. Seeing that I was listening, one of them whispered, |Papia poco poco bo tende?’ and their voices dropped. But I understood, with excitement, that they were talking Papiamento, that almost mythical compound of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English and African dialects evolved by the slaves of Curacao and the Dutch islands of the Southern Caribbean.
More posts about The Traveller’s Tree
Sir Geoffrey Chandler
An extract from the obituary of a man of action and a champion, before it was fashionable, of business ethics and human rights. When Chandler ‘faced the disdain of his peers, … he insisted that companies had a moral responsibility to make human rights and protection of the environment as much part of their bottom line as profit.’ He worked with Paddy in SOE in the war and last saw him in Alexandria in 1945.
By Phil Davison
First published in The Financial Times, 15 April 2011.
Born in London in 1922, Chandler was educated at Sherborne school in Dorset and Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of 19, with the second world war raging, he joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, where he became a captain before being assigned to Force 133 within the SOE, nicknamed “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. There he met the now-legendary SOE agent and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
“The last time I saw Paddy was in Alexandria towards the end of the war when he and I were loading a jeep onto a caïque (a Greek fishing boat) athwartships,” Chandler once told a friend. “The jeep was full of gold coins to pay off the partisans.” Chandler was parachuted behind Nazi lines as a saboteur in Greece, where he learnt fluent Greek. He related his experiences in his book The Divided Land: an Anglo-Greek Tragedy, published in 1959. In it he criticised Britain for not imposing the rule of law in Greece after the defeat of the Nazis. A rightwing backlash to communist atrocities after the war resulted in bloody civil conflict in Greece.
After the war, Chandler remained in Greece as a British press and information officer, when he pushed for aid for the war-stricken Greek population. He returned to London to work for the BBC External Services in 1949 before joining the Financial Times as leader writer and features editor. In 1955, he married Lucy Buxton, a Quaker.Born in London in 1922, Chandler was educated at Sherborne school in Dorset and Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of 19, with the second world war raging, he joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, where he became a captain before being assigned to Force 133 within the SOE, nicknamed “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. There he met the now-legendary SOE agent and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. “The last time I saw Paddy was in Alexandria towards the end of the war when he and I were loading a jeep onto a caïque (a Greek fishing boat) athwartships,” Chandler once told a friend. “The jeep was full of gold coins to pay off the partisans.” Chandler was parachuted behind Nazi lines as a saboteur in Greece, where he learnt fluent Greek. He related his experiences in his book The Divided Land: an Anglo-Greek Tragedy, published in 1959. In it he criticised Britain for not imposing the rule of law in Greece after the defeat of the Nazis. A rightwing backlash to communist atrocities after the war resulted in bloody civil conflict in Greece. After the war, Chandler remained in Greece as a British press and information officer, when he pushed for aid for the war-stricken Greek population. He returned to London to work for the BBC External Services in 1949 before joining the Financial Times as leader writer and features editor. In 1955, he married Lucy Buxton, a Quaker.
It is all too easy get overly romantic about Romania, which is said to have come second only to Greece in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s affections. Whilst I can agree wholeheartedly with William Blacker when he describes the Romanian people as some of the most charming and civilised he has ever met, his story of his many years living in Transylvania is likely to polarise opinion about the necessity and pace of development in the Romanian countryside, but it is unlikely to disappoint as a tremendous read.
By Tom Sawford
What can be more evocative to us than hearing the word Transylvania, and stories about a land that is still populated by wolves and bears that live in huge beech forests? Where many of the farmers still practice a form of agriculture that has changed little since the Middle Ages? A land where true Gypsies live chaotic lives dominated by music, dancing and the many local variants of clear sprit distilled from plums or pears? This is a frontier land where the kings of Hungary gave land to German Saxons in return for their promise to defend Hungary, and indeed Christendom, from the Tartars and the Ottomans, where even now the churches in the high Carpathian villages of Transylvania are also fortresses and places of refuge from deadly warbands and villains.
It was this world that William Blacker stumbled into in 1989 just at the time of the Romanian revolution, which, of all those dramatic events in that cold dark winter, was the bloodiest, ending with the summary execution of Ceausescu and his wife by firing squad after a quick trial. No drawn out Hague justice here.
After his first two relatively short visits Blacker made a decision in 1993 to move to Romania for an extended period and lived there pretty continuously until the late 2000’s. In that time he lived with a proud and hardworking peasant couple called Mihai and Maria in the fertile valleys of the Maramureş, a land that is 80% forest and is in the north of Transylvania near the border with Ukraine. It seems he was like the son they never had.
Willam Blacker demonstrates his scything skills
It was there that William bought his first scythe and learned to cut grass to make hay, stopping frequently during long working days to sharpen the scythe with a whetstone. Maria would carry lunch out to the fields and he enjoyed the opportunity of leisurely talk as they ate in the shade of a tree or a hayrick whilst they drank the local fiery spirit called horinca. A short nap always seemed to follow lunch and then it was back to work until sunset.
This pattern to his daily life in the Maramureş was only interrupted by the onset of the bitter cold, and the snow and ice of winter, which was a time when little work could be done, and was dominated by evening visits to neighbours, the downing of innumerable tots of horinca, and engaging somewhat self-consciously and half-heartedly in the formal courting processes of the countryside.
Natalia
In the end Blacker did not find a wife in the Maramureş but further south in the Saxon lands of Transylvania. He had walked through those vast and dark forests many years before and met a young Gypsy girl called Marishka. Some years later he returned to the village and encountered Marishka again, now a young woman, and her beautiful but flirtatious sister Natalia. Blacker fell in love with, or at least was under the spell of, Natalia and eventually they lived together for a brief but chaotic period. But it was the brave , uncompromising, and superstitious Marishka that he later ‘married’. She bore him a son called Constantin who still runs with the Gypsy children chasing chickens and cuddling lambs in the village of Halma where he has a home.
This book cannot be described as a biography. Indeed, its subtitle ‘A Romanian Story’ states clearly what Blacker is trying to achieve: to tell a tale. This he does convincingly with great charm and simplicity. However, we learn little about William’s other activities beyond farming and his somewhat turbulent love-life during his time in Romania.
We do know that he was concerned about the state of the buildings in the old Saxon villages following what can only be described as a mass migration of the Saxon people when Germany offered them citizenship in 1990. After 800 years of caring for their homes, village halls and churches, many wanted to seek what they thought may be a better life for themselves in the Fatherland. The twentieth century had not been kind to them as in turn they were forced to fight for the Germans, were taken away as forced labour by the Russians, and then continued to suffer under the Communist regime. The plaster on the walls of their homes crumbled; the roofs of their fortress churches leaked; and many Gypsy families occupied these buildings but in general failed to maintain them.
In Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes this Saxon village architecture as ‘… made to last and adorned here and there with a discreet and rather daring frill of baroque.’ The churches as ‘ sturdy … squat … with a tough defensive look’. In 1996 William Blacker published a pamphlet to highlight the plight of this unique heritage. This led eventually to the creation of a charity focused on the preservation and renovation of Saxon buildings. The pamphlet attracted the attention of HRH Prince Charles who is now Patron of the Mihai Eminescu Trust which supports the maintenance of this heritage.
Viscri church
Prince Charles has since purchased two properties which have been renovated, which when not being used by the Prince on his annual visits to Transylvania, are available for rent as holiday homes. Whilst Blacker makes some mention of his campaign, and tells us about one or two specific projects that he undertook in the village of Halma, he could have mentioned more about his work in this field. Clearly Blacker was leading a double life at the time; living and working amongst the country people, but also writing regularly to friends in England about this issue and most probably traveling backwards and forwards. However, he fails to tell us about this in any detail, and perhaps gives a slightly false impression of the Romanian focused continuity of his life at that time. It was and remains an important part of his life and the story.
Prince Charles’s guesthouse in Zalánpatak, Transylvania
What Blacker does not shy away from is some aspects of the darker side of life in Romania. Whilst his time in the village of Breb in the Maramureş was perhaps the most idyllic, village life was frequently punctuated by tragedy. Death was not far away, whether by lightning strike, freezing to death in the long winter or drowning; tragedies that were often attributed by the deeply religious but also superstitious local people to magic and curses.
The rapid change in the lives of these villagers as economic development advanced is viewed negatively by Blacker. In his opinion they exchanged the hard work and seasonal cycles of their simple but ‘happy’ lives on the land for the unceasing demands and bondage of paid employment, and new forms of tragedy as tarmacked roads brought their own forms of death to the village.
Is it quite as simple as that? He fails to mention the crude outside toilets, the domestic abuse which is common in Romania, and the inability of the people to access medical facilities quickly in an emergency. He mentions a visit to a local vet where he obtains some penicillin for Mihai citing that the absence of a doctor, but the availability of a vet, demonstrated the priorities of the local people. Was that really the case?
His descriptions of the outright racism, exploitation, crude violence and corruption of the ex-communist police towards the Gypsies dominates the last period of his life in Halma (a name he has created to preserve the anonymity of his Transylvanian village). This is not unlike Miklos Bánffy’s descriptions of how some educated Romanian magistrates, tax collectors, and estate managers exploited the Romanian peasantry in his Transylvanian Trilogy. In the end Blacker is forced to make a stand resorting to the courts and a new generation of Romanian lawyers who fought for better rights and equality for peasants and Gypsies.
‘A Romanian Story’ is a love story: of Blacker’s own loves, his love of Romania, and, with the exception of the corrupt, its people. It is full of romance and beautifully woven images of a way of life that is quite unknown to us in the West: one that has enormous attractions for us as many seek a simpler way of life. However, he also describes a country that is undergoing huge and increasingly rapid change.
Blacker is convinced this is to the detriment of the people of the Romanian countryside. My own limited experience makes me unsure. What I do know is that even those of my friends who are highly educated, and have what we might describe as good if still lowly paid jobs by Western standards, look upon their own country with enormous disdain and frustration as they experience widespread corruption, and poor standards in the delivery of public services. My answer to them is always that it is their generation that must remain in Romania and work for change. This may not come as rapidly as they would like, but they may be able to gift a better country to the next generation.
William Blacker has lived, loved and worked for change in Romania. ‘Along the Enchanted Way’ is a hugely enjoyable book that I highly recommend. In that I am in good company; Paddy described it as ‘a book close to my heart’. He was very supportive of William’s work which helps us to understand some of the many attractions of Romania and the challenges that remain. Read the book but remain aware that this is one man’s view, and that of someone who was able to make the choice to leave in the end.
For all that has changed the fact is that many of the agricultural practices that Blacker describes are still utilised; bears, wolves and lynx still roam in the vast forests; and the people are indeed charming, cultured and civilised. Perhaps we can all help Romania by visiting the country to marvel at its beautiful countryside, the unique flora and fauna, the mix of Baroque and Saxon architecture in Transylvania, and the famous painted monasteries? By supporting these rural communities we may enable enough people to remain in the countryside in improved circumstances to help preserve what remains of one truly unique part of Europe’s cultural heritage.
Patrick Leigh Fermor 