The Observer review of Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure which concludes that life was one great adventure for Paddy, with the hard part now being to separate the fact from the fiction. It concludes that Fermor emerges as a man determined to live on his own terms, if not his own means!

By Anthony Sattin

First published in The Observer, 21 October 2012.

Traveller and writer Paddy Leigh Fermor is best known for two events. In 1933, at the age of 18, he set off with a little money and a lot of nerve to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Eleven years later, with an equal amount of nerve, he led a commando group to occupied Crete to kidnap General Kreipe, the local Nazi commander. From these two events sprang the subjects and passions for his work and his life, the subject of Artemis Cooper’s new biography.

Fermor is a seriously challenging subject for any biographer, perhaps more so for Cooper, who knew him from a very early age. She was contracted to write the book in the 1990s but on the condition it did not appear before his death, perhaps wanting to spare his wife, friends and self the stories of his sexual adventures. Given his wine and cigarette intake, Cooper would have been forgiven for thinking he wouldn’t last as long as he did: he died last year at the age of 96. But not even close acquaintance with her subject and unrestricted access to his archive and friends will have made it any easier to get around the main obstacle: the man himself.

A school and army reject, Fermor was a self-made man in the most literal sense. He started, in the words of his headmaster, as “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”. With those and other qualities, he honed his character with the company of extraordinary people and the words of great writers – he had a prodigious memory for prose as well as poetry. However complex his character, it was made more so, from a biographer’s point of view, by the fact that he had already written his own version of some of his life. His books contain some of the finest prose writing of the past century and disprove Wilde’s maxim that “it is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating”.

Charm, self-taught knowledge and enthusiasm made up for the lack of a university degree or a private income. His teenage walk across Europe and subsequent romantic sojourn in Baleni, Romania, with Princess Balasha Cantacuzene are proof enough of that. But the difficulty of capturing such an unconventional and glamorous life is made harder by the certainty that Fermor was an unreliable narrator.

He was also an infuriatingly slow writer. Driven by a life-long passion for words yet hampered by anxiety about his abilities, Fermor published eight books over 41 years. The Traveller’s Tree describes his postwar journey through the Caribbean; Mani and Roumeli (1958 and 1966) draw on his experiences in Greece, where he would live for much of the latter part of his life. But it is the books that came out of his trans-Europe walk that reveal both the brilliance and the flaws. A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, 44 years after he set out on the journey. Between the Woods and the Water appeared nine years later. Both describe a world of privilege and poverty, communism and the rising tide of Nazism, and end with the unequivocal words, “To be continued”. Yet the third volume hung like an albatross around the author’s neck. As the years passed, Fermor found it impossible to shape the last part of his story in the way he wanted. Yet Cooper refers to one manuscript written in the 1960s, and a diary, and from these the final volume will be fashioned and published next year.

Fermor’s longevity also presents challenges: there is much to record of more than nine decades of travelling, flirting, writing and hard living. Cooper runs through it mostly chronologically, drawing on published work, intimate letters, unpublished notebooks, and letters and interviews with some of the many people who knew and loved him. There are places where she verifies things that might otherwise have seemed a little incredible – some of the hospitality he enjoyed on his Constantinople walk, for instance. There are other places where she shows up inconsistencies. Some were no doubt due to his writing about events from a distant past, but some were deliberate. As Cooper explains it, these came about “partly because he is condensing more than one encounter, and partly out of tact”. He was also quite happy to merge details or elaborate in order to make his story work better. Some might feel cheated by the fabricating of non-fiction but Fermor would insist he always remained true to the spirit of the event.

Fermor emerges as a man determined to live on his own terms, if not his own means, and who mostly – and mostly magnificently – succeeded. Always popping off on a journey when he should have been writing about the last one, always ready to party, he was forever chasing beautiful, fascinating or powerful women, even when with his wife, Joan. She was the great facilitator who funded his passion for travel and writing, as well as women, from her trust fund. Cooper shows that he had often had such a character in his life, starting with his earliest memories, during the first world war, when he was left with a Northamptonshire family, including an older girl he thought was his sister, while his mother and real sister returned to India to be with his father. Fermor remembered spending those first years, “said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer’s child run wild: they have left a memory of complete and unalloyed bliss”. Running wild, as Cooper shows, was one of the things he would do best during the 92 years that followed.

This is not a perfect book. There is too little analysis of man and motives and not enough probing throughout, as though Cooper could still imagine the wild family friend leaning over her shoulder as she wrote. But then Fermor was far from perfect himself. Instead he was funny, learned, sexy, irrepressible, flawed yet much loved, remarkable and, at times, brilliant – not unlike this book. Cooper ends with the words, “it all really happened”, although by then I was in no doubt.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

The review you have all been waiting for from the Daily Mail.

By Philip Marsden

First published in The Daily Mail, 15 October 2012.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was, to his many fans, a child of the gods. He was good-looking, charming and adventurous, his conversation a stream of brilliant references, jokes and anecdotes. He could recite poetry and sing songs in more than half a dozen languages. ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely,’ suggested one of his circle, ‘if Paddy came in pill-form so you could take one whenever you felt depressed.’

He was also a war hero. He spent a good deal of time behind German lines in Crete, and was awarded the DSO for capturing the island’s commander General Kreipe.

For rest and recreation he would slip across the sea to Cairo where he was at the centre of a group of fearless officers who lived and partied at a villa on the Nile. The baths were filled with alcohol and, for Christmas 1942, they served turkey stuffed with Benzedrine.

Yet in terms of his legacy, Leigh Fermor’s high jinks are far outweighed by his meticulously crafted writing. He produced prose of such lyrical power that almost single-handedly he freed travel writing from its backwater and pushed it into the literary mainstream.

Nowhere did his life and his writing combine to greater effect than in his masterpiece A Time Of Gifts. The book tells the story, the  first part at least, of his year-long, pre-war hike from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was 18. At one moment he might be sleeping in a cave in the Carpathians, at the next in a schloss or palace.

He makes friends wherever he goes. He has a number of dream-like affairs until he meets a Romanian woman, Balasha, with whom, until the war five years later, he lives and travels – alternately in Greece and on  her family estate in the forests  of Moldova. Life for Leigh Fermor continued in much the same way after the war. But now the Soviet shadow lay across much of the old Europe he knew.

The more poignant moments of Artemis Cooper’s captivating biography come from the intertwined story of Balasha. ‘They do not want us, our education and culture any more,’ she wrote to him in 1946. Years later, Leigh Fermor slipped into Ceausescu’s Romania to find her living in an attic.

For two days they laughed and reminisced, but loss and hardship had aged her. He left undetected, and set up a postal account for  her in a London bookshop.

For most of the Fifties, Leigh Fermor was on the move – flitting between Paris and Devon, monasteries in Normandy, a  half-ruined palace near Rome  and his beloved Greece.

He wrote and read and fell in and out of love. But increasingly he found himself returning to a photographer he had first met in Cairo, Joan Rayner.

It was a strange and open relationship. They finally married in 1968, and built the house in Greece where they lived for the rest of their lives.

It is not easy writing a biography of someone who has poured so much of his own life into his books, but Artemis Cooper has done a brilliant job.

The story rips along, as Leigh Fermor’s life did, with friends and lovers, books and journeys and parties, all milling and jostling around him in a noisy and joyous throng.

And in the quieter moments we are left with something far more enduring: a man for whom the world was endlessly fascinating, and who found that he could recreate for his readers with carefully crafted words the same wonder that it gave him.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

Patrick Leigh Fermor led one of the most enviable of 20th-century lives. The usual difficulty confronting the biographer of another writer – that the subject did little but sit at a desk and write – does not apply here.

By Roger Hutchinson

First published in The Scotsman 20 October 2012

Once he knuckled down to it, Leigh Fermor loved playing around with words. He was one of our greatest stylists and he was devoted to producing unimprovable books. But writing did not come easily to him, at least partly because it was something of a distraction from the main event, which was living an unimprovable life.

The difficulty in this case is rather how to tell the story of an inimicable writer whose own published work, from the travelogues to the letters, was itself autobiographical, without producing an inferior cover version. Patrick Leigh Fermor has a legion of devoted fans who can recite the story of his wartime abduction of General Heinrich Kreipe, for instance, by rote – and often do. In describing Leigh Fermor’s life, Artemis Cooper had often to revisit a told tale while correcting detail, expounding and inserting context. It was not an easy commission, and she has delivered it brilliantly. Cooper’s biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor is subtitled “An Adventure”. That is how we will remember him, as one of the post-imperial explorers; as a man who refused to accept that there were no undiscovered cultural territories left, even within the crowded borders of Europe.

To summarise his adult life: as a restless 18-year-old in 1933, Paddy Leigh Fermor crossed the Channel and then walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, as this most philhellene of modern philhellenes would always call Istanbul.

During the Second World War he joined the Special Operations Executive, who parachuted him into German-occupied Crete. There he liaised comfortably with Cretan partisans and bandits to pull off one of the war’s greatest coups de théâtre: the abduction and safe delivery to Allied captivity of a German commander, General Heinrich Kreipe.

After the war he travelled widely but was always drawn back to Greece. He built a house on the Mani peninsula – which had been, significantly, the only part of Magna Graecia to resist Ottoman colonisation since the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Before his death last year at the age of 96, he wrote some of the most acclaimed travel books of the 20th century.

Two of those books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water told of the first two-thirds of his walk through pre-war Europe. Artemis Cooper is surely right to lay great significance on that particular adventure. Wherever else he went – Leigh Fermor’s first book, The Traveller’s Tree, was about the Caribbean, and he later published three long letters from the Andes – Europe retained his fascination and Greece, the wellspring of Europe, remained his muse.

Walking from Holland to Turkey gave the young Leigh Fermor a pedestrian’s-eye view of an interconnected continent. He saw how customs and dialects changed gradually, mile after mile, from one valley to the next. He used his facility with languages to tease out links between apparently independent cultures. In Cooper’s words, he acquired a “three-dimensional panorama of Europe … both in memory and imagination”.

That panorama, that cultural and historical landscape, was Leigh Fermor’s uncharted territory. His walking companions in the hills of northern Greece would dread the sight of a lonely shepherd, for Paddy would invariably stop and interrogate the man for half-an-hour while his friends kicked their heels and looked nervously at the sinking sun. But Leigh Fermor was not passing the time of day. He was exploring.

Since their deaths, inventions, embellishments and fantasies in the travelogues of Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapusciski have become the subject of critical examination. If any modern travel writer’s experiences seem to skirt the borders of mythology, they would be those of Patrick Leigh Fermor. But Artemis Cooper acquits him of making up anything substantial. He did not in fact ride across the whole of the Great Hungarian Plain. He walked most of it. But “I decided to put myself on horseback for a bit. I thought the reader might be getting bored of me just plodding along … you won’t tell anyone, will you?”

Different characters were sometimes conflated into one person for literary convenience. “Paddy was making a novel of his life,” writes Cooper. That may be so. His working title for the transcontinental epic was Parallax, which suggests a degree of displacement from reality. But if so, it was a novel based firmly on non-fiction. Cooper is nonetheless right to query the spirit if not the detail of what has become, for male readers at least, one of the most memorable incidents in Paddy’s travels.

He was swimming naked in a central European river with a young aristocrat when – according to Leigh Fermor – two young peasant girls teased them from the bank. A chase ensued, which resulted in an orgy in a hayrick. All very Cider With Rosie, but Cooper wonders “were Rumanian peasant girls really so spontaneous and easy-going?” It appears that female migrant harvest workers of the time were “expected to oblige young gentlemen of the estate”. A carefree romp in the hay in the years before Europe burned may actually have been the cynical exercise of droit de seigneur.

If so, it was one of the last occasions that Patrick Leigh Fermor resorted to demanding sex. Peregrine Worsthorne tells of how, as a young man in post-war London, he occasionally found his chatting up of a pretty debutante abruptly curtailed by the arrival in their company of a dashing, handsome war hero, newly arrived from Jamaica or Rhodes and with the tan to prove it. Exit debutante, on Leigh Fermor’s arm.

His partnership with and then marriage to Joan Raynor was an open relationship, at least on Leigh Fermor’s side. More than that: Raynor’s inheritance subsidised his peripatetic life at least until the enormous success of A Time of Gifts in the late 1970s, which in turn created a new market for his previous volumes about Greece, Mani and Roumeli.

Like most enviable lives, it was far from blameless. Wounded women were littered in his wake. Some British visitors to Athens were less than impressed by this Englishman who posed as “more Greek than the Greeks”.

Some Greeks shared their disdain. Revisionist historians criticised his role in wartime Crete, and warned their fellow Hellenes that for all his fluency and charm, Leigh Fermor was no latterday Byron. His unoccupied car was blown up outside his Mani house, probably by members of the Greek Communist Party which he had vocally opposed. The accidental fatal shooting of a partisan in Crete led to a long blood feud which made it difficult for Leigh Fermor to re-enter the island until the 1970s, and possibly explains why he chose to settle in the Peloponnese rather than among the hills and harbours of his dreams.

His own books have already eclipsed those incidents, not only among readers of English but also in Greece, where in 2007 the government of his adopted land made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix for services to literature.

Travel writers such as Jan 
Morris have described Leigh Fermor as the master of their trade and its greatest exponent in the 20th century.

When A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, Frederick Raphael wrote: “One feels he could not cross Oxford Street in less than two volumes; but then what volumes they would be!”

They are not for everyone. Leigh Fermor wrote that written English is a language whose Latinates need pegging down with simple Anglo-Saxonisms, and some feel that he personally could have made more and better use of the mallet. His exuberance is either captivating or florid. It is certainly unique among English prose styles.

Artemis Cooper says that “Paddy had found a way of writing that could deploy a lifetime’s reading and experience, while never losing sight of his ebullient, well-meaning and occasionally clumsy 18-year-old self … this was a wonderful way of disarming his readers, who would then be willing to follow him into the wildest fantasies and digressions”.

Those fantasies and digressions took decades to express. A Time of Gifts had arguably been 40 years in the making when it was published in 1977. Its sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, did not appear until 1986.

The third and final volume has been awaited ever since. Following Leigh Fermor’s death, a foot-high manuscript was apparently found on his desk. It will be published next year.

In the meantime, Artemis Cooper offers us an abridged version of his last leg through Romania and Bulgaria to European Turkey. He stayed a while in Constantinople, we learn, before taking a boat via Salonika to Mount Athos early in 1935.

Greece was his true destination. Constantinople – Istanbul – was by 1935 no more than the cracked shell of Byzantium. From then on his pulse was with the Hellenes. In them he found the root of the European mystery.

From their midst he set out to solve it. It was a quixotic, endless quest. Artemis Cooper’s fine biography gives colour and substance to the adventure, and a delicate, sympathetic portrait of the man who made it his life.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: his books had a devoted following. Photograph by Joan Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor once seriously annoyed Richard Burton at a London dinner table with Elizabeth Taylor. Burton was in the mood for quoting Shakespeare but the second he stopped, Paddy would cap the quote and go on for several more lines. Finally Burton kicked back his chair and said “Elizabeth, we’re leaving!” Their distraught host accompanied his star guests to the door, urging them not to mind Paddy, who was, after all, a war hero. “F*** war heroes!” roared Burton.

by Artemis Cooper

First published in The Guardian, 20 October 2012

Yet at a time when men were defined by their war, Paddy’s DSO shone with a dazzling lustre. In the spring of 1944, he led the Anglo-Cretan team that captured the German general Heinrich Kreipe and whisked him away from occupied Crete under the very noses of the enemy. There was no doubting his courage. One of the young men who had served with him recalled: “While everybody in our company pretended to be a palikari [a brave warrior], you radiated a genuine fearlessness.” He also possessed a heroic determination. The Kreipe operation nearly ended in disaster, and it succeeded because Paddy refused to acknowledge that possibility. In Budapest decades later he went looking for a sick friend, and spent two days trailing through every nursing home and clinic in the city till he found him. He wrote with painful slowness, going over every sentence again and again, often discouraged to the point of despair – yet he never gave up.

But what of the famous third volume of his trilogy, that he never finished? Did he give up on that? Not really, but in his 90s he must have known that he no longer had the energy to construct the flights of imagination and memory that had earned A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water such a devoted following. But he never admitted, to himself or anyone else, that it would never be published. If anyone asked he would reply, “I’m plugging away” – and he was.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

SIR PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR, who died last year at the age of 96, was known to everyone as Paddy, “a friendly, cheerful name with a spring in its step”, writes his biographer, Artemis Cooper. Leigh Fermor lived to the full a charmed life packed with incident and adventure, despite its unpropitious beginnings. His parents returned to India shortly after his birth and only when his mother reappeared four years later did he discover that he had been living, very happily, in someone else’s family. His parents were ill-suited and soon parted. Leigh Fermor was never close to his father, an austere, distinguished civil servant, and he found his mother’s tendency to veer between possessive love and complete neglect destabilising. “A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”, he was repeatedly expelled from school.

First published in The Economist, 20 October 2012.

Aged 18, precocious and disillusioned, he set out to walk from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He explored eastern Europe, fell in love with a Romanian princess and lived with her in a Balkan idyll until the outbreak of war. Back in England he was commissioned in the intelligence corps and sent to the Middle East. After escaping from a defeated Greece he returned to Crete to help organise the resistance and made his name with the capture and evacuation to Egypt of a German general. Thereafter he was widely regarded in Greece as a hero second only to Lord Byron. The affection was mutual and 20 years later he built and settled in a house in the south of the Peloponnese. After the war Leigh Fermor continued to travel widely and he used his facility with languages, scholarship and extraordinary memory to good effect as an author. Easily distracted and notoriously slow to complete a piece of writing, he published fewer than a dozen works. But his two books on Greece and, most especially, “A Time of Gifts”, the first of two volumes recounting the story of his pre-war walk across Europe, established him as an acclaimed and bestselling travel writer.

Leigh Fermor was a man of legendary charm with a great gift for friendship. As a young man, footloose with rucksack and notebook, he was readily welcomed into houses humble and palatial. In his company people felt livelier and more entertaining. A friend wished that he could come in pill-form to be taken whenever one felt depressed. He was amusing and amused, quick to burst into song, ever the last to leave a party. Energetic, attractive and susceptible, he regularly fell in love but was devoted to his wife, Joan Eyres Monsell. Despite smoking 80 to 100 cigarettes a day and drinking prodigious amounts of alcohol, he remained remarkably fit. At the age of 69 he emulated Byron and swam the Hellespont in Turkey.

It is not easy to convey the flavour of a man whose fame to a large extent rests on his ebullient personality and conversation but Ms Cooper succeeds admirably in this readable and entertaining book. Nor is she shy of admitting his shortcomings and his bouts of depression when he would retreat to a Trappist monastery in France.

Leigh Fermor was not to everyone’s taste. Some found him insufferably bumptious; his enthusiasm and noise could be “wearing”. Essentially, though, he was well loved, a man of action and a self-taught intellectual, who brightened the lives of his many friends and readers.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

Yesterday evening a small group of some of Britain’s best travel writers, the odd actor and even your blog editor were invited by Heywood Hill bookshop to an evening tour of Paddy’s Mayfair led by Artemis Cooper as tour guide in chief. This event was a pre-cursor to the official launch of Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure at Paddy’s old club, The Travellers.

James Naughtie from Radio 4’s Today programme was there to record a package for this morning ‘s programme which will be broadcast in the next hour (probably before 8.30 am). It will probably include an interview with Nick Hunt who is making good progress with his book.

One thing is certain. In the coming days I may bore you with reviews of Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, but this is one that merits reading as it is more thoughtful. Just wait for the Daily Mail review which I will offer in our mission of complete on-line coverage!

By Philip Mansel

First published in The Spectator, 13 October 2012.

Xenophilia is as English as Stilton. Despite a reputation for insularity, no other nation has produced so many writers who have  immersed themselves in other countries. From Borrow to Lawrence, Byron to Auden, the list is impressive. In one of the wonderful letters quoted in this perceptive, haunting and highly readable biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor called living in England ‘like living in the heart of a lettuce. I pine for hot stones and thorns and olive trees and prickly pears.’ In the opinion of his biographer Artemis Cooper he had an ‘entirely European sensibility’. In the house he built in the mountains of Mani in the Peloponnese, between olive groves and the sea, however, he sometimes missed London.

This is a book about the use and operation of charm, written, as Victorians might have said, by One Who Knew Him Well. Artemis Cooper defines his charm as a combination of ‘happiness, excitement, youth, good looks, eagerness to please and an open heart’. She might have added skill with languages and a driving literary and historical curiosity, not always apparent in the works of Norman Douglas, the Italophile travel writer to whom he was sometimes compared. At least ‘eight languages existed in his head in a state of perpetual acrobatics’. His high spirits — he once described himself as being ‘in a coma of happiness’ — and kind-heartedness helped him to understand other countries — to get under their skin — at least as well as more cynical writers.

A casual remark — ‘castles were seldom out of sight’ — expresses one effect of his charm. After 1934, aristocratic acquaintances entertained and housed him as he walked or rode along the Danube, across the Hungarian plain and into the mountains of Transylvania, on the travels described in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Wherever he went, arms opened, barriers fell. He ended up in the embrace of Balasha Cantacuzene, descendant of a princely dynasty, living in a manor house in Moldavia. He left in September 1939 to join the British army.

He had chosen well. Diaries, papers and letters recording his journey, lost by Harrods Depository, in his words ‘ached liked an old wound in wet weather’. Throughout the horrors of war and communism, however, Balasha Cantacuzene guarded a  ‘green diary’ which Paddy had left behind in 1939. She returned it at their last meeting in 1965. It was invaluable for writing Between the Woods and the Water.

‘Useless as a regular officer, but will serve the army well in other ways,’ a perceptive commanding officer wrote of Paddy in 1940. Among other feats, our hero delivered, for interrogation in Cairo, a German general whom he had captured in Crete. After 1944 he lived, mainly between Athens and London, in an Anglo-Greek world as distinctive as the Anglo-Florentine world of the 19th and 20th centuries. He particularly enjoyed the ‘louche and delinquent’ dockside tavernas of the Asia Minor refugees in Piraeus.

One of his girlfriends called him ‘the most English person I have ever met’. Perhaps because of his security about his identity, he could step out of his English skin. In the 1950s he supported Greece over ‘the Cyprus question’. In contrast, his fellow Anglo-Greek Lawrence Durrell, who  called him ‘the most enchanting maniac I’ve ever met’, was compared to a Gauleiter by the poet George Seferis for working for Britain in Cyprus.

The books started to appear: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966), which includes an enquiry into the clash between the ‘Hellenic’ and the ‘Romaic’ aspects of Greece, between private ambition and wider aspiration, which would interest European bankers today. But it was A Time of Gifts (1977), about his walk across Europe, that made him famous. He was admired in the countries about which he wrote, as well as his own. Not for him the horrors of academic publication, where ‘a few experts stand to attention and salute in half a dozen periodicals; an art historian presents arms here and there. And the rest is silence.’

This is not just the life of a charmer. It is also a book about the process of writing. Cooper, whose admiration does not blunt her critical sense, shows how Paddy blurred the frontiers between truth and fiction. Imagination often replaced memory. In parts of some books he was ‘making a novel of his life’.

His style — described by Cooper as ‘sumptuous, precise and acute’ — was all the more enjoyable for its contrast with the bare prose of postwar Britain. Farewells were ‘shattering deracinations’. In Germany there was ‘hardly an interprandial moment’. The account of Germans eating and drinking in the Munich Hofbrauhaus is a tour de force, over several pages:

Their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder, while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed rolls and pretzels bridged all the slack moments, but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened.

Inevitably there were snipers on the sidelines. Dismissing him from the British Institute of Athens, Steven Runciman complained of ‘Paddy’s little irregularities’: too many parties, too few repaid loans. ‘A middle-class gigolo for upper-class women’,  was the verdict of Somerset Maugham.

Indeed this biography could also be a handbook on how to live with a writer. Joan Eyres Monsell, whom Leigh Fermor married, took and labelled photographs as a visual reference for his books. She read them once a year, and was generous with her money. As she put down a handful of notes when leaving a restaurant, the immortal words — ‘here you are, that should be enough if you want to find a girl’ — were overheard by a friend.

Paddy’s only novel, The Violins of Saint Jacques (1953), is one of his finest works. Brilliantly plotted and playfully written (tree roots are ‘like dancing partners in a waltzing forest’), at a faster pace than later books, it is a portrait of a vanished French colony, Saint Jacques des Alises, ‘the glory of the Antilles’, in 1900. It is also a novel of aristocratic decline, which anticipates aspects of  Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy and Lampedusa’s The Leopard. It describes  the impact on a private love affair  — between a Count’s daughter Josephine de Serindan and the governor’s son Marcel Sciocca — of the political feud between French royalists and the Third Republic. It culminates in one of the most dramatic ball scenes in an English novel, which ends in an eruption: ‘It looked as if the volcano was conspiring with the Count to add lustre to his rout.’ In the end, with ‘a deafening clap of thunder as if the world had been blown in two’, the volcano destroys the island. All that remains is the sound of violins, heard every carnival from beneath the waves.

All Leigh Fermor’s books are love letters to foreign lands — Caribbean islands, France, Austria, Hungary or Greece. The loss of his projected books on Crete and Romania is, for admirers, a tragedy. Hopefully it will soon be mitigated by the publication of more letters, his portraits of friends, and his 1963 account of ‘A Youthful Journey’ from Orsova to the Black Sea.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

I have disliked the cult of Paddy Leigh Fermor ever since reading Between the Woods and the Water, the first book of his pressed into my hands. It had won all sorts of travel awards, but seemed to chronicle a life of effortless ease moving from one country-house party to another, fuelled by intricate aristocratic connections and coloured by a frankly unbelievable glow of back-lit romance – like being trapped in a grown-up version of The Sound of Music.

By Barnaby Rogerson

First published in The Independent, 13 October 2012.

I began to question the 50 years of unstinted hero-worship accorded him by my elders and betters, alongside his irritating lack of regard for either Turks or Islam, as well as the breathless accounts of two generations of British travel-writers who have sought to measure their shadow against that of Paddy’s over a glass of ouzo on the terrace of his house overlooking the Aegean.

But, fortunately, I find myself to be totally in the wrong. Artemis Cooper’s funny, wise, learned but totally candid biography reveals Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) to be an adventurer through and through. The artifice of effortless gentility is blown away and Paddy is revealed as a much more interesting character, a fascinatingly self-made and self-educated man. He is also placed in the pantheon of literary liggers, a consummate lifelong freeloader, a prince among sponge-artists, which he paid for with his unique energy, talent and enthusiasm for song, dance, talk, memorised verse, drink and other men’s wives.

Freya Stark, describing her first meeting, left an impression of him “looking in this wine-dark sea so like a Hellenistic sea-god of a rather low period, and I do like him. He is the genuine buccaneer.” Steven Runciman complained how in his office in Athens “all the girls were love with him… and how he used to borrow money from them”. Somerset Maugham, with his customary acerbic malevolence, labelled him a “middle-class gigolo for upper-class women”. That can be balanced (not exactly contradicted) by the fond memories of an old lover: “Most men are just take, take, take – but with Paddy it’s give, give, give.”

So the first third of the biography is bowled along by an inner tension, for the reader cannot but suspect that the sexy young man who occupies the centre of the stage isn’t about to be exposed and fall very heavily from grace. Paddy consorted with the very grandest British families, at their country homes and in London, but yet had no money, no work, no home, no prospects and not much of an education, having been expelled from a number of prep schools and his second-rate public school.

Even his double-barrelled name is revealed to be a fake, one of the many deluded affectations thought up by his snobbish mother: the daughter of a prosperous Irish quarryman, unsuitably married to a brilliant scholarship boy from south London. Cooper gives us a grounding to Paddy’s adventurous life by providing occasional glimpses of the parallel middle-class story of his elder sister, Venetia.

The making of Paddy was a decision, one hungover morning, in 1933, to hang up his borrowed tail-coat and abandon the Bright Young Things, buy some army surplus clothing, catch a ferry to the Hook of Holland and start walking to Constantinople. He took just three books, a German dictionary, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a present from his mother, a copy of Horace inscribed “leave they home, O youth and seek out alien shores”.

She had lived this advice, abandoning him as a baby for four years to return to her geologist husband in India. But frustrated by her marriage and gifted with restless misdirected energies, she would return and teach Paddy to perform, while coping with her mood swings, before packing him off to an unsuitable prep school at a tender age.

Paddy loved life on the road, and all his life was genuinely fascinated by history, literature and architecture. He also had an extraordinary ear for languages, and lived with an intensity that attracted everyone he met, be it bargees giving him a lift after getting spectacularly drunk at a bar or Bohemian landlords astonished at the interest and encyclopaedic but disordered knowledge of this handsome tramp. The final making of him as a man was the love of Princess Balasha, who having been abandoned by her own husband, took Paddy off to live with her in a manor house in Moldavia.

His years in Romania with Balisha were his university, but more vivid. For here history smelled of blood, and pride in ancient chapels and mythology came alive in the spirit-possessed dances of the peasants.

Paddy only came back home in order to fight for Britain when war had been declared. Despite his ambition to serve in the Irish Guards, he was rightly judged “quite useless as a regimental officer but in other capacities will serve the army well”. Those capacities, most especially as an SOE liaison officer with the Cretan resistance, have deservedly become legendary. Paddy’s charm, his infectious delight in company, his ear for language, his physical strength and bravery, were matched by something much, much rarer in war: an innate sense of empathy, humanity and compassion.

The final touch to his birth as a writer was the unconditional love and financial support of the photographer Joan Rayner. She could cope with his fits of depression, his absences, his habitual philandering and was his travelling companion, editor and occasional restrainer. She was the enabling hero of the second half of Paddy’s life, who shared his love of Greece and the open road, and provided the supporting mother and father that Paddy had so completely lacked as a child.

Paddy for his part would try to give back to the world all the many gifts he had received as a man: his books on Greece, first and foremost, but also by entertaining a stream of visitors, holidaying friends, translating for Cretan colleagues, denouncing British policy over Cyprus, writing reviews and forewords, and encouraging young writers. As Dilys Powell wrote, “a wandering scholar but with a difference; unlike the celebrated travellers of the past, he has become part of the country he describes”. And since my reading of Cooper’s page-turning biography, he has acquired yet another fan.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure will also be the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week from 19th November onwards.

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

Don’t forget to visit Artemis Cooper’s Facebook page for further information.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Patrick Leigh Fermor’s legendary life is that it lasted as long as it did. He died in 2011 at the age of 96, having survived enough assaults on his existence to make Rasputin seem like a quitter. He was car-bombed by communists in Greece, knifed in Bulgaria, and pursued by thousands of Wehrmacht troops across Crete after kidnapping the commander of German forces on the island. Malaria, cancer and traffic accidents failed to claim him.

By Robert Macfarlane

The Guardian, Friday 12 October 2012.

He was the target of a long-standing Cretan blood vendetta, which did not deter him from returning to the island, though assassins waited with rifles and binoculars outside the villages he visited. He was beaten into a bloody mess by a gang of pink-coated Irish huntsmen after he asked if they buggered their foxes. He smoked 80 cigarettes a day for 30 years, and often set his bed-clothes ablaze after falling asleep with a lit fag in hand. He drank epically, and would “drown hangovers like kittens” in breakfast pints of beer and vodka. As a young SOE agent in Cairo in 1943, the centrepiece of his Christmas lunch was a turkey stuffed with Benzedrine pills; at the age of 69 he swam the Hellespont – and was nearly swept away by the current.

Yes, Leigh Fermor was an insurer’s nightmare, an actuary’s case-study, and his longevity was preposterous. He might best be imagined as a mixture of Peter Pan, Forrest Gump, James Bond and Thomas Browne. He was elegant as a cat, darkly handsome, unboreable, curious, fearless, fortunate, blessed with a near-eidetic memory, and surely one of the great English prose stylists of his generation.

In 1933, aged 18, he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, passing through a Europe on the brink of calamity. Decades later, he published two books recounting his wander through that enshadowed land, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1985). Both were instant classics, celebrated for their evocation of a since-shattered world, and for the tendrils and curlicues of their language. In between that walk and those books, Paddy (as he was mostly known) was the lover of a Romanian princess, took part in a royalist cavalry charge in Greece, parachuted into occupied Crete to co-ordinate the resistance, spent months in silent retreat in monasteries, became the most famous English Hellenophile since Byron, was played by Dirk Bogarde in a Powell and Pressburger film, and transformed travel writing.

He lived an inspirationally heterodox life that combined adventure and reflection in unique measure. His story has hitherto been known only in parts, and mostly through the refractive prism of his own tellings. At last his biography has been detailed in full, in Artemis Cooper’s tender and excellent book. Reading it is an odd experience: there is the melancholy of having one’s hero humanised, joined with renewed astonishment at the miracle he made of himself. Continue reading →