Category Archives: Paddy in the News

John Chapman’s photos of Paddy’s house

A little nugget from a friend of John Chapman (of Mani Guide fame) about the handover of Paddy’s house to the Benaki. This prompted me to ‘reveal’ John’s excellent series of photographs of Paddy and his house taken during a visit on 2005.

Hi John,

Two days ago we went to Patrick’s evening with the Benakeion Institute taking over ceremony so to speak and a kind of farewell for Paddy..The President of the institute gave a lovely speech in Greek, well thought and with very high appreciation for Fermor’s personality and character and his love for Greece..He regarded him as much more of ”kardamyliotis than British man” because he ”lived here longer and loved this place a lot”.

In any case I had a couple of British friends with me and we all enjoyed it.

To see more of the photographs click here (and scroll down a a bit).

Main Mani Guide site here.

Mani: A Guide and History

British Philhellene author, Patrick Leigh Fermor, donates Kardamyli home to Benaki

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Late author, Patrick Leigh Fermor, has chosen Benaki Museum to donate his home in Kardamily. The donation was made through Giannis Tzanetakis, while the author was still alive and his home became the property of Benaki Museum after the death of the great British Philhellene on June 10th 2011.

Last Saturday, in honor of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Benaki Museum held an event at the late author’s home in Kalamitsi, Kardamyli, gathering acquaintances and friends from Greece and the UK, among them, UK Ambassador, Dr. David Landsman, Director of the British Council, Richard Walker, the executors of his will and his biographer.

Patrick Leigh Fermor lived for many years in Mani, in his home that he personally built, based on Nikos Chatdjimichalis designs.

His relationship with Benaki Museum dated years back; he kept contact with Antonis Benakis and Irini Kalliga later, while he maintained close friendly relations with the Institute’s director, Angelos Delivorias. Several years ago, it was decided by the donor and the museum, that his home would be used for the purpose of hosting researchers, poets and writers, visiting Greece to work for a few months. At the same time, for specified time periods, Benaki Museum will have the option to rent the author’s home, to obtain funds for maintenance and hosting. In the coming months, once recording procedures for the library and archives are complete, and all necessary maintenance activities are performed, the Administrative Committee of Benaki Museum will be announcing how the building will operate.

Source: ANA – MPA

Paddy’s Gloucestershire home for sale for £2.5m

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I am trying to obtain a better copy, but here is a scan from today’s Sunday Times property section, of an article about the sale of Paddy and Joan’s house in Dumbleton.

It does in in fact focus on his house in Kardamyli (which it correctly says is going to the Benaki) but it is trying to highlight, as these sections do, that the house in Dumbelton is for sale for £2,500,000. Property particulars from Right Move and a full brochure on the Strutt & Parker website.

The troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear

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Paddy in Greece photographed by Joan

Don’t you feel like me that with the passing of Paddy as one of the last of his generation we have clearly entered a new age dominated by uncertainty; a lack of confidence in the values we once held as unquestionably true? These beliefs that bound us (in the West?) together for the latter part of the twentieth century are now unravelling at an ever-increasing pace. As we enter the End Game of the economic crisis, and as the decade of The Forever War rumbles on like the noise of a busy road in the middle distance – there only when we take the trouble to notice – we suffer a dearth of leadership and heroes of substance. Paddy and those of his generation had no such crisis of confidence; they served without question. They sacrificed themselves for the things they believed in, and they provided the leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity, and wisdom that helped rebuild Europe after almost half a century of ethnic and social strife, and destructive war. Maybe they also share some blame for the way things turned out, but who will step up now?

In this considered profile, which prompted my rambling reflection, Paddy’s good friend Colin Thubron assesses his contribution, not as a warrior, but as a writer, and I think for the first time, reveals the torment of Paddy’s troubling writer’s block towards the end of his life.

by Colin Thubron

First published in the New York Review of Books, Volume 58, Number 14

When Patrick Leigh Fermor died in June at the age of ninety-six, it seemed as if an era had come to an end. He was the last of a generation of warrior–travel writers that included the Arabian explorer Wilfred Thesiger, the controversial mystic Laurens van der Post, and the indefatigable Norman Lewis of Naples ‘44. Among these, Leigh Fermor shines with the élan and the effortlessly cultured glow of an apparent golden age. A war hero of polymathic exuberance, brilliant linguistic skills, and an elephantine memory, he was sometimes fancifully compared to Lord Byron or Sir Philip Sydney.

Two pairs of books came to exemplify his achievement. The first pair—Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966)—celebrated the Greece that held his abiding fascination and where he lived for forty-five years on a once-wild promontory in the Peloponnese. In Mani, especially, he described this backwater region as a world whose way of life had survived in a fierce and enchanted time warp.

The land he depicted is barely recognizable now—tourism, he observed, destroys the object it loves—but it was less the Greece of classical antiquity that beguiled him than the spirit and folk culture of the hinterland: the earthy, demotic Romiosyne that he once contrasted with the Hellenic ideal in a playful balance sheet of the country’s character.

In these, and in later books, the style was the man: robustly imaginative, cultivated without pedantry, unstoppably digressive, forgivably swanky, and filled with infectious learning. The impression—overflowing into elaborate footnotes and flights of learned fantasy—is one of omnivorous delight in the quirks and byways of history, art, language, genealogy, myth, song, superstition, costume, heraldry, and everything else that struck his fancy.

His literary models were Norman Douglas and Robert Byron, but his writing was more vivid than the one, more kindly than the other. Despite the richness of his prose (occasionally slipping into purple) he forged an illusion of intimacy with his readers, as if they were sharing his mind in the moment of writing. But in fact his manuscripts were worked, reworked, and reworked again with such painstaking perfectionism that his publisher (the benign Jock Murray) often had to reset his galley proofs wholesale. The apparently natural flow of words was in reality a densely worked choreography, which came at cost.

Fifteen years ago, swimming in the Ionian Sea beneath his home, where nobody could overhear us, Paddy (as friends and fans called him) suddenly confessed to me the writer’s block that would plague the rest of his life. The expectations of a now-avid public, and his own obsessive perfectionism, were taking their toll, and he could not overleap this cruel impediment.

I remember him strong into old age. He swam every morning, with a sturdy breaststroke far out to sea, the tattoo of a twin-tailed mermaid glistening on his shoulder. He still kept up a striding march in the Taygetus foothills, where he and his wife Joan had designed their own house above the ocean. It was a place of “mad splendor,” he wrote. Its sitting-room library—bookshelves banked nine feet high—opened onto a vista of cypresses and the Messenian Gulf, and was flagged with the greenish stone of Mount Pelion. In the afternoon Paddy would disappear into his study to confront—or escape—the demons of his failed writing, and would emerge to the liberation of ouzo or whiskey, generally to report some arcane piece of research—that the Huns wore stitched field-mouse skins, perhaps—or to share a passage of Ovid. We dined in the monastic half-cloister he had built beside his home, and once we visited the tiny, red-tiled Byzantine chapel where—five years before—he had buried the ashes of Bruce Chatwin.

The conflict between a natural gregariousness and the solitude of writing never quite resolved for him. In a short, intriguing study named A Time to Keep Silence (1953) he recorded his sojourn in three great French monasteries. He described this retreat not as a religious exercise, but as a need for a haven for writing, and the nature of its cleansing—”the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear”—remains suspended like a question mark in the oeuvre of a man to whom self-revelation seemed indulgence.

The second pair of books, which established Paddy’s primacy among travel writers, must be among the most extraordinary ever written. In 1933, as a youth of eighteen, he left England for a journey that would take a year and a half. As “a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly,” he set out to walk to Constantinople (as he nostalgically called Istanbul). Walking stick in hand, a copy of Horace’s Odes in his rucksack, he pursued a meandering course up the Rhine and down the Danube, across the Great Hungarian Plain, into Romania and through the Balkans to Turkey.

It was almost forty-five years before he published the first part of this journey, and another nine years before the second. A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) represent prodigious feats of memory. They record the rite of passage of a precocious, exuberant young man as he encounters the peoples and languages of a Middle Europe now littered with obsolete names: Bohemia, Transylvania, Wallachia. His story must have become the dream journey of every enterprising and footloose adolescent.

Inevitably the accuracy of Paddy’s memory was questioned, and he was frank about occasional imaginative license and conflation. (His first diary was stolen in Munich, a solitary last one recovered years later in Romania.) Certainly his recall was extraordinary. I remember the first time we met (by chance), when he quoted verbatim from my first book passages that I had myself forgotten. A year before his death we chanted verses from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám together in an antiphonal competition (which he won).

His urge to describe his epic journey more than forty years after its end was a deeply natural one. He was revisiting his youthful persona with the judgment and knowledge of maturity; yet in a sense he had remained unchanged. Despite his sophisticated learning, he retained an almost boyish innocence, as if the troubles of the modern age had bypassed him. In the Peloponnese, where he settled to live in the 1960s, he had remained in thrall to a more ancient, rooted culture than that of the urban West.

The final volume of his proposed trilogy—carrying its author through the Balkans and down the Black Sea coast to Turkey—became his tormenting and elusive project for the next quarter- century, and was never completed. Some near-finished version, however, survives him, and will eventually be published.

With his youthful trek done, Leigh Fermor’s career took off into near fable. Caught up in Greek unrest, he joined in a triumphal royalist cavalry charge against wilting Venizelist rebels. In Athens he fell in love with the artist Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, twelve years older than him, and lived with her in Moldavia for over two years, before World War II recalled him to London.

As a fluent Greek speaker he was recruited by the Intelligence Corps, and sent as a liaison officer with the Greek army first to Albania and finally to Crete, where he survived the brutal German invasion. For almost two years, while an officer in the Special Operations Executive, he lived disguised as a shepherd in the Cretan mountains, organizing the gathering of intelligence.

Then, in 1944, occurred the exploit that—more than any other—was to burnish him into legend. He and his fellow SOE officer Stanley Moss dreamed up a scheme of harebrained bravado. Dressed in stolen German uniforms, with a party of Cretan guerrillas, they ambushed the car of General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander of occupied Crete, kidnapped him, and concealed him under the back seat. Moss took the wheel, Paddy donned the general’s cap, and together they drove through twenty-two checkpoints to emerge on the far side of Herakleion and march Kreipe for three weeks over the mountains, to be picked up by motor launch and taken to Egypt.

It was during this hazardous Cretan march, as the dawn broke over Mount Ida, mythical birthplace of Zeus, that the abducted general began to murmur a verse of Horace: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum/Soracte….¹ It was an ode that Paddy knew by heart, and he completed the six stanzas to their end. “The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine,” Paddy later wrote,

—and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.

This precocious kidnapping was later reimagined in a lackluster movie named Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) with Dirk Bogarde playing Paddy. But there were other exploits too. Paddy had already engineered the defection of the Italian General Angelico Carta from Crete; and he was due to undertake a near-suicidal mission to Colditz when the war ended.

His upbeat account of these events was tempered by regret. He had planned that the abduction of Kreipe be bloodless, but his accompanying Cretan partisans slit the chauffeur’s throat, and rumors of grim German reprisals for the abduction have never quite died down. Above all, Paddy’s accidental shooting of one of his fellow guerrillas may have stained his memory of the whole period.

On June 16 Leigh Fermor was buried back in the English countryside, attended by an Intelligence Corps guard of honor, to lie beside his wife Joan, his dear comrade since 1946. This was, in a sense, fitting. For in certain ways he was exemplary of a wartime Englishness now almost gone, whose more dashing qualities merged seamlessly into the hardy stylishness of Greek leventéa.

To those who knew him, his books are hauntingly redolent of his sensibility. His conversation was irrepressibly warm and inventive far into old age, moving from arcane anecdotes to fanciful wordplay or bursting into polyglot song (sometimes singing the lyrics backward). His friends ranged from Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire—last of the six legendary Mitford sisters (his correspondence with her was published in 2008²)—to early acquaintance with a raffish interwar bohemia and his own great predecessor, the travel writer and aesthete Robert Byron, whose borrowed rucksack he bore across Central Europe as a youth.

Almost the last time I met Paddy, he had returned home after an operation for suspected cancer, and I feared he would be depleted, his old zest gone. He was growing deaf, and he suffered from tunnel vision (which he called Simplonitis). For a while, sitting over lunch, he seemed subdued. Then something struck him. He perked up, and said: “You know, there is an apple lying on a table in the hall. It’s been there all weekend. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if it cocked a snook at Newton, and simply took off into the air!”

This was typical of his boyish resilience. In the field of travel he evoked both the youthful wanderer who discovers another world and the avid scholar who melds with it. His prose was too rich and elaborate to be a safe influence on others (although a few have tried); but he brought to the genre not only the distinction of his densely brilliant books, but his innate dignity, ebullient mind, and capacious heart.

1″See Mount Soracte white with snow….”
2The correspondence, In Tearing Haste , edited by Charlotte Mosley, was published in the US by New York Review Books (2010), which has also republished the other books by Patrick Leigh Fermor mentioned in this article, as well as The Traveller’s Tree .

Paddy remembered by the Marqués de Tamarón

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Long time Blog followers may remember the article written for the Spectator by the Marqués de Tamarón when he was the Spanish Ambassador to London between 1999 and 2004. The Marqués reads this Blog and sent me an article he wrote for the Spanish daily newspaper ABC. There is no English translation, but following our recently established convention, I reproduce it here in Spanish.

Por el Marqués de Tamarón

First published in ABC, 2 July 2011

GRACIAS a no haber ido a la universidad, Patrick Leigh Fermor llegó a ser uno de los mejores escritores ingleses del siglo XX. Todo comenzó porque lo expulsaron del colegio al ser descubierto cogido de la mano con la hija del tendero de ultramarinos. Luego se empeñó en ir andando hasta Constantinopla (no quería decir Estambul) y ahí empezó a completar la nada desdeñable educación secundaria recibida. Emprendió el camino con 18 años, en 1933, y dos años después llegó a Constantinopla. Dormía en albergues de jóvenes, en un pajar o en los castillos de la nobleza centroeuropea, que brindó generosa hospitalidad y amistad —y amor en más de una ocasión— a aquel guapo y simpático muchacho inglés. Después prolongó el viaje por Grecia, donde participó en una carga de caballería contra un golpe de estado republicano y, más importante aún, conoció a la Princesa Balasha Cantacuzeno, una rumana hermosísima bastante mayor que él. Se enamoraron en el acto y pasaron dos años juntos viviendo en castillos remotos, mientras ella pintaba y él traducía libros. Hasta que estalló la Segunda Guerra Mundial y Patrick Leigh Fermor volvió apresuradamente a Inglaterra para alistarse, primero en la Guardia Real y luego en el Special Operations Executive. Se había disipado para siempre el peligro de ir a la universidad y aprender a hacer auditorías o el uso del aoristo. Podía seguir aprendiendo a ver, a vivir y a escribir, sin asomo de jactancia.

Su educación fue pues verdadera y honda: enriqueció y adiestró sus ojos, su mente y su corazón. Le sedujo el mosaico de lenguas, paisajes y arquitecturas que entonces aún sobrevivían en Europa, y sus gentes, tribus y naciones. Como era generoso brindó sus recuerdos y saberes, de palabra y por escrito, a propios y extraños.

Cuando celebramos sus 85 años en Londres se pudo comprobar por el ambiente durante la cena y por la subsiguiente oratoria de manteles que la imagen que todos tenían de su viejo o nuevo amigo (las edades de los comensales oscilaban entre los cien y los treinta cinco años) coincidían en varios rasgos: su alegría y su generosidad, y también su simpatía en el sentido más hondo, etimológico de la palabra. Curiosamente dieciséis años después, en su entierro, los comentarios fueron muy parecidos. Aquella noche en Londres el primero que habló, su amigo Jellicoe, dijo de él que la virtud que en grado menos relevante lo adornaba era la castidad. El anfitrión recalcó la generosidad de Paddy (ya para entonces nadie en Inglaterra llamaba de otra manera al distinguido escritor y héroe de guerra) recordando su insólita capacidad de querer y apreciar a todos los grupos nacionales o sociales que en general se detestaban entre ellos. Paddy admiraba a griegos y turcos, magiares y rumanos, judíos y alemanes, incluso a sus propios enemigos en tiempo de guerra, como el General Kreipe al que hizo prisionero en Creta y con quien recitó la oda I.ix. Ad Thaliarchum de Horacio contemplando las nieves del Monte Ida, en latín, claro. El propio anfitrión, siempre inquieto por el riesgo de pasar la eternidad en el cielo mal colocado al lado de algún pelmazo, le advirtió a Paddy que su virtud se vería recompensada doblemente, puesto que ya en el paraíso debían de estar esperándolo tantos amigos que él cita en sus viajes y tan distintos como los turcos viejos en la isla danubiana de Ada Kaleh, o las dos muchachas campesinas en Transilvania que descubrieron a Paddy y a su amigo nadando desnudos en el río y luego retozaron felices tras un pajar, o el Hermano Peter con quien jugó a los bolos, o los rastafarios caribeños con quienes habló sobre Haile Selassie, o el sabio danubiano de Persenbeug, o Dom Gabriel Gontard, septuagésimo octavo Abad de Saint-Wandrille.

Pero quien mejor definió en aquella larga y alegre sobremesa el carácter y el estilo de Patrick Leigh Fermor fue Norwich, cantando su peculiar versión de You´re the top aplicada a Paddy, que parodiaba a la vez al popular Cole Porter y al culto Browning con versos aliterativos y de rima interna tales como You´re the bubbling bard who finds it hard to stop / which is why we murmur, Fermor, you´re the top!

Sin embargo y con ser todo esto por completo verdadero además de risueño, no era toda la verdad. Dentro de este conversador brillante, ameno y alegre había un trabajador infatigable que corregía pruebas hasta agotar a su editor. Tenía la convicción —acertada por lo demás— de que el ritmo de la prosa requería cambiar varias palabras si se cambiaba una sola, con lo cual se producían unas cascadas de longitud incalculable. Cuando se vió aquejado por esa desesperante dolencia que es la sequía de la pluma del escritor —calculo que en su caso, como en otros, eso ocurrió cuando abandonó los cigarrillos, esos mismos que lo llevaron a la tumba hace unos días— y cada vez que le preguntaban por el volumen pendiente sobre su caminata a Constantinopla se enfadaba o entristecía, y a veces se refugiaba en mentiras inocentes, como cuando algunos amigos le sugerían que no intentase, por una vez, escribir con todos los esplendores barrocos de su prosa habitual, y que fuese menos ambicioso en este su probable último libro. Pero desarmaba a todos contestando con manso y modesto orgullo: «Es que yo no sé escribir de otra manera. No puedo». No era verdad; nunca es verdad cuando un escritor viejo dice eso. Paddy escribía maravillosas cartas llenas de humor y de amor, ambos expresados con sencillez al final de su vida. Y nunca perdió la gracia, en todos los sentidos de la palabra. Por dos veces, en estos últimos y tristes días después de su muerte, una vieja y querida amiga suya que expresamente desea ser citada, Debo Devonshire, me dijo «cuando escribas sobre Paddy cuenta cuánto hemos reído ». Dicho queda, o al menos apuntado.

Eterno caminante por la Via Pulchritudinis, buscó la belleza en lo pequeño y en lo grande. El mismo adolescente que acompañaba sus primeros pasos por los caminos fríos de Alemania a principios de 1934 con una reserva cuantiosa de poesía en la memoria, recitaba a veces a Lewis Carroll y otras el Stabat Mater o el Dies Irae. Y el mismo muchacho, ochenta años después, fue despedido en un funeral de honda belleza, ordenado por él en música y textos que incluían el Protoevangelio de Santiago. El cura anglicano terminó el oficio de cuerpo presente con un «Descansa en Paz y levántate en la Gloria». En exacto paralelo —Muerte y Resurrección— un corneta de su antiguo Regimiento de la Guardia Irlandesa acompañó la inhumación con los dos toques de ordenanza, Silencio y Diana.

El entierro coincidió con un rompimiento de gloria.

The above article scanned from the newspaper as a pdf can be found here, and as it appears on the Marqués’ blog.

He’s the top

Fermor the Magnificent

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Moss, Kreipe and Paddy

By Jeremy Bernstein

First published in the Los Angeles Times. January 18, 1998

Here is the scene: The time is late April of 1944. The place is near the summit of Mt. Ida, the highest mountain on Crete. There is still snow. Gathered are five Cretans, fully mustached and heavily armed. Three other men wear German uniforms. This is deceptive: Two of them are British officers (commandos). The third, however, is something else. If you are very familiar with German military uniforms, you will see from pictures of the group that he is a general. In these photographs he is not looking at the camera. He does not smile. It is little wonder. His name is Karl Kreipe. He was, until he was kidnapped two days before, the commanding general of the German occupation forces on Crete. He was due to be promoted to lieutenant general yesterday. German patrols are looking for him.

As dawn breaks over Mt. Ida, he murmurs to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte
(“Do you not see how Soracte is shining”)….

Then, surprisingly, one of the British officers continues,

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto
(“beneath a heavy covering of snow, and how
The laboring trees can no longer hold up their burden,
And how the rivers are frozen by the sharp cold?”).

(Translation of the Latin was provided by Professor W.C. Dowling of Rutgers University.)

The officer continues through the next five stanzas to the end of Horace’s Soracte ode. Many years later, he wrote, “The general’s blue eyes had swiveled away from the mountaintop to my own — and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange as though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk from the same fountains long before, and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Readers of this anecdote may divide into two groups: both, in my view, equally fortunate. A few of you will recognize this scene as one of the mosaic tiles out of which Patrick Leigh Fermor’s (the British major was he) magnificent travel book “A Time of Gifts” was composed. (Readers intrigued by this passing anecdote who want to know more about what was one of the most daring exploits of World War II will enjoy reading “Ill Met by Moonlight” by W. Stanley Moss — he was the other British officer — George G. Harrap & Co.: London, 1950, as well as “Crete: The Battle and the Resistance” by Antony Beevor, Penguin Books: New York, 1991. Both books have photographs.) You are fortunate readers because you have discovered this marvelous author. But those of you who have not discovered him are also fortunate: When you do, you will have in front of you hours of enormous pleasure and satisfaction. I should confess that, until a few years ago, I had never heard of Fermor either. But in the fall of 1993, I went on a bicycle trip around Crete. Looking for something to read, I found “A Time of Gifts” in a local bookstore. I glanced through the first few pages and decided there and then that I would try to read everything the man ever wrote.

While all of Fermor’s books (there are not that many, only half a dozen or so by my count) are autobiographical, he has never written an autobiography. Nor, as far as I can determine, has anyone written his biography. The best one can do is to snatch fragments from his own books and from books written by people who came across him in passing. Constructing a person’s life this way, especially the life of a man like Fermor, is like trying to cross a rapidly flowing stream by hopping from rock to rock. There are lacunae for which I simply cannot account. What, for example, was he doing living in a vast Romanian country house near the Russian border for about two years just before the war? And later, how did he come to spend an almost equal amount of time in the Caribbean: an experience that resulted in the first of his travel books, “The Traveller’s Tree”? Moreover, why was that book actually written in two monasteries in France where Fermor was a resident visitor? This experience resulted in a gem of a short book, “A Time to Keep Silence,” which, he informs us, began as letters written from the monasteries to the woman who was to become his wife. We are told nothing more about her, not even her name. Why, I don’t know. But here, at least, are a few of the steppingstones in his life.

Fermor, whom friends apparently call “Paddy,” was born on Feb. 11, 1915, in London. As he wrote in an introductory letter to Xan Fielding (one of his fellow clandestine officers on Crete who was responsible for the west of the island, while Fermor was responsible for the east) in “A Time of Gifts”: “In the second year of World War I, soon after I was born, my mother and sister sailed away to India (where my father was a servant of the Indian Government) he directed the Geological Survey of India, and I was left behind so that one of us might survive if the ship were sunk by a submarine.” Fermor was deposited with a country family which “left a memory of complete and unalloyed bliss.” But, he continued, “when my mother and sister got back at last, I rushed several fields away and fought off their advances in gruff Northhamptonshire tones; and they understood they had a small savage on their hands, and not a friendly one.” Taken in hand, he was sent to a series of schools, all of which “ended in uniform catastrophe.” He explained: “Harmless in appearance, more presentable by now and of refreshingly unconstricted address, I would earn excellent opinions at first. But as soon as early influences began to tell, these short-lived virtues must have seemed a cruel Fauntleroy veneer, cynically assumed to mask the Charles Addams fiend that lurked beneath: It coloured with an even darker tinct the sum of misdeeds which soon began heaping up. When I catch a glimpse of similar children today, I am transfixed with fellow-feelings, and with dread.”

By this time, his mother and father had separated, and in locus parentis he was sent to two psychiatrists, one of whom he later found out had treated Virginia Woolf. This was followed by a stay at a cramming institution where he prepared himself for the examination to get into a public school, in this case, King’s School, Canterbury. His tenure at King’s School was abruptly terminated when he was discovered holding hands with the daughter of a local green grocer ” in the back-shop on upturned apple baskets.” He notes that his house master’s penultimate report remarked that he had made “some attempts at improvement but more to avoid detection. He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.”

While this is not necessarily an ideal recommendation for getting into a university, it does nicely for the army, Fermor’s next goal. Somehow he managed to winkle a decent letter to Sandhurst, the British West Point. The only obstacle was obtaining what was known as the school certificate (which I suppose was something like a GED), a high school degree for people who did not actually finish high school. To this end, he was sent at the age of 17 to London to live and work with a tutor. All went well, and he managed to pass the London certificate. But then the scheme came unglued. He lost interest in the army. He began to write poetry and to hang out with a Bohemian group of “Bright Young People” of whom he was the youngest. Then at 18, he had a perfectly lunar idea. He would walk (walk!) from Holland to Istanbul. As he wrote to Fielding: “I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in the summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year supplied by his father and supplemented by a £15 loan from the father of a school friend … there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!” Something to write about, indeed — except that it would happen 40 years later! The first volume of the triptych describing this incredible 18-month journey, “A Time of Gifts,” appeared in 1977; the second, “Between the Woods and the Water” in 1986; we still await the third.

What makes a great writer? I find this as difficult to characterize as trying to characterize what makes a woman beautiful. In both cases, it is something we feel in our guts. One thing, it seems to me, that great writers have in common is an obsessive love of language: words, words, words. In Fermor’s case, it was a love for all languages. When he left England in 1933 for his walk, Fermor had, it appears, schoolboy French and some Latin and classical Greek. By the time he enlisted in the Irish guards in 1939, the Latin had turned into Romanian and the classical Greek into modern Greek of sufficient fluency so that he could pass for a Cretan shepherd during the three years that he was in the resistance. In addition, he had acquired enough German so that after Gen. Kreipe was abducted, he could pass for a German soldier when they drove the general’s car, with him in it, past the sentries who were guarding the complex in which he lived.

But that is not all. Everywhere he went he absorbed languages. Here is a passage from “Between the Woods and the Water,” in which Fermor has come upon a strange enclave of Orthodox Jewish woodcutters high in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania. He was as taken in by them as he was taken in by nearly everyone he encountered. They were curious about him and he about them, although they were initially wary of such an odd visitor. Then, he wrote, “everything took a different turn when scripture cropped up. The book in front of the Rabbi was the Torah, or part of it, printed in dense Hebrew black-letter that was irresistible to someone with a passion for alphabets; especially these particular letters, with their aura of magic. Laboriously I could phonetically decipher the sounds of some of the simpler words, without a glimmer of their meanings, of course, and this sign of interest gave pleasure. I showed them some of the words I had copied down in Bratislava Fermor kept diaries and this one miraculously reappeared after the war, sent by the people with whom he had left it on the continent from shops and Jewish newspapers in cafes, and the meanings, which I had forgotten, made them laugh; those biblical symbols recommended a stall for repairing umbrellas, or ‘Daniel Kisch, Koscher Wuerst und Salami.’ How did the Song of Miriam sound in the original and the Song of Deborah; David’s lament for Absolom; and the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley? The moment it became clear, through my clumsy translations into German, which passage I was trying to convey, the Rabbi at once began to recite, often accompanied by his sons. Our eyes were alight; it was like a marvelous game. Next came the rivers of Babylon, and the harps hanging on willows: This they uttered in unfaltering unison, and when they came to ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,’ the moment was extremely solemn. In the back of my diary are a few lines in Hebrew, utterly indecipherable to me; and underneath them are the phonetic sounds I took down from his recitation of them.”

And Fermor continues: “By this time the otherworldly Rabbi and his sons and I were excited. Enthusiasm ran high. These passages, so famous in England, were doubly charged with meaning for them, and their emotion was infectious. They seemed astonished — touched too — that their tribal poetry enjoyed such glory and affection in the outside world; utterly cut off, I think they had no inkling of this. A feeling of great warmth and delight had sprung up and the Rabbi kept polishing his glasses, not for use, but out of enjoyment and nervous energy, and his brother surveyed us with benevolent amusement. It got dark while we sat at the table, and when he took off the glass chimney to light the paraffin lamp, three pairs of spectacles flashed. If it had been Friday night, the Rabbi said, they would have asked me to light it; he explained about the shabbas goy. This was the Sabbath-gentile whom well-off Jews — ‘not like us’ — employed in their houses to light fires and lamps and tie and untie knots or perform the many tasks the Law forbids on the Seventh Day. I said I was sorry it was only Thursday (the Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday) as I could have made myself useful for a change. We said good night with laughter.” Considering the kind of world war he would fight (after his tour of duty in Crete, Fermor joined an airborne reconnaissance force that considered rescuing prisoners from a concentration camp just before the war ended), he knew, as well as anybody, what the fate of these woodcutters must have been. Part of the beauty of his writing is that here, and elsewhere, he allows us to fill in this blank for ourselves. We read these books knowing, as he does, that the world he is describing no longer exists. There is no need for him to tell us.

As Fermor wrote in his letter to Fielding, his original intention had been to walk across Europe, sleeping in hayricks and barns. It didn’t quite work out that way: He often slept in castles and mansions and, sometimes, instead of walking, he rode horses and fast motor cars or sailed on barges. It is clear that he was, and is, a man of extraordinary charm. A photograph of him taken in 1943 in Crete would pass for the photograph of a film star. His army contemporaries describe him as being Byronic. I am not sure what that means, except that at one point he seems to have swum the Hellespont. On his walk he made friends with nearly everyone he met. Some were Central European nobility with wonderful castles and libraries that he haunted. There were Gypsies and shepherds. There was a family of Czech acrobats he encountered in Vienna when he was trying to supplement his pound-a-week allowance with sketches in pencil. He couldn’t sell them a sketch, but they ended up giving him an autographed picture of themselves, which he kept as a remembrance. All of this is described in a language that is so rich and precise that, after reading a few pages, one shakes one’s head in wonder. (Reading Nabokov has the same effect on me.) If you are a writer, you either want to rush to your laptop or jump out of a window.

After his sojourns in the Caribbean and France, Fermor chose Greece as his permanent home. He lives, it says on the jackets of his books, in a house he designed and built himself. He has written two wonderful books about Greece, “Mani” and “Roumeli.” He ends “Roumeli” with a prose poem based on Greek place names. Here is a small part of it:

Chalcis is the flurry of the tide, Naxos the boxwood click of a rosary muffled by a nun’s skirt; Ossa is a giant’s tread, Pelion the beat of centaurs’ hoofs through glades of chestnut, Tempe a susurrus of plane trees, and Rhodes a flutter of moths.

Santorini zigzags to the sky at dawn like a lark singing but dies at sunset with the Dies Irae. Komotini is a muezzin’s call, Patmos the faraway trumpets of the Apocalypse.

The Dodacenese is a sea-song by twelve sponge-fishers, Antikythera a mermaid forsaken; Skopelos, a lobster’s and Poros, a mock-turtle’s song, Aegina a tambourine.

The Sporades are the sea’s whispers through olive trees.

And Patrick Leigh Fermor is a treasure and delight.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor – Memorial Service

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Paddy’s Memorial Service will be held in London, at 11am on Thursday 15 December, at St James’s Piccadilly. I will update you as soon as more information is available.

Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ:«Πατρίδα είναι εκεί που έχει κανείς τα βιβλία του»

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Paddy contemplating a fine read

It roughly translates as “Patrick Leigh Fermor – Homeland is where one’s books are” and it is about “Unknown details of life, action and work of British writer of travel literature, as recounted specific ‘Tribune’ reporter Joy Kiosse”. You can enjoy in the Greek or if appalling at it like me use Google Translate. It is quite a good article. I like the first paragraph ….

In mythology, heroes were not immortal, and some are in today’s life. The memory but Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paddy’s, like shouting his friends, the Sun-Michael for Mani and the Cretans, will remain immortal. Written with a broad humanitarian education, self-taught, untamed, hero, kind and generous friend peculiar humor, fearless and bold, persistent traveler with an insatiable thirst to discover the world, polyglot and general man with deep knowledge of the classics and history, the Fermor took all these elements to the end of his life.

by Joy Kiosse

First published in Tovima on 2 July 2011.

Από την Πέμπτη 16 Ιουνίου ο σερ Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμοραναπαύεται στο μικρό κοιμητήριο που βρίσκεται στον περίβολο του ναού του Αγίου Πέτρου στο Ντάμπλτον της Αγγλίας, δίπλα στο μνήμα της συζύγου του Τζόαν. Είναι μια ήσυχη πράσινη πλαγιά περιτριγυρισμένη από ψηλά δέντρα.

Στη μυθολογία οι ήρωες δεν ήταν αθάνατοι- και κάπως είναι και στη σημερινή ζωή. Η μνήμη όμως του Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ, του Πάντι, όπως τον φώναζαν οι φίλοι του, του κυρ-Μιχάλη για τους Μανιάτες και τους Κρητικούς, θα μείνει αθάνατη. Συγγραφέας με πλατιά ανθρωπιστική μόρφωση, αυτοδίδακτος, ατίθασος, ήρωας, καλός και γενναιόδωρος φίλος με ιδιότυπο χιούμορ, άφοβος και παράτολμος, επίμονος ταξιδιώτης με ακόρεστη δίψα για να γνωρίσει τον κόσμο, πολύγλωσσος και γενικότερα άνθρωπος με βαθιά γνώση των κλασικών και της Ιστορίας, ο Φέρμορ κράτησε όλα αυτά τα στοιχεία ως το τέλος της ζωής του.

Ακόμη, είχε το χάρισμα να σαγηνεύει τους συνομιλητές του και ήταν εξαιρετικά αγαπητός σε όλες τις παρέες. Την τελευταία ημέρα του στην Καρδαμύλη, το μεσημέρι στο τραπέζι απήγγειλε με τη βραχνή πια φωνή του ένα μεγάλο ποίημα του Γουίτιερ. Ναι, είχε μνήμη! Οχι όμως μηχανική. Ακούγοντάς τον να απαγγέλλει και ταυτόχρονα να υποδύεται τον ήρωα του ποιήματος είχες τη βεβαιότητα ότι γνώριζε σε βάθος το νόημα κάθε στίχου, κάθε φράσης, κάθε λέξης.

Στο νοσοκομείο της Αθήνας την πρώτη φορά βαφτιστήρια και φίλοι από την Κρήτη και τη Μάνη βρέθηκαν δίπλα του, λες και είχαν ειδοποιηθεί με σήματα μορς. Ανάμεσά τους υπήρχε μια αυθόρμητη σχέση αγάπης και σεβασμού- όπως και εκείνος αγάπησε και σεβάστηκε την Ελλάδα. Ναι, το σπάνιο στοιχείο αυτής της σχέσης του με την Ελλάδα ήταν ο σεβασμός που έδειξε στον τόπο.

Μετά την πρώτη επέμβαση επέστρεψε στην Καρδαμύλη, ελπίζοντας ότι είχε ξεπεράσει για κάμποσο καιρό το πρόβλημα της υγείας του και ότι θα πρόφταινε να τελειώσει το βιβλίο του. Τρεις εβδομάδες αργότερα, την ημέρα που ο δήμαρχος της Καρδαμύλης θα του έδινε το χρυσό κλειδί της πόλης, χρειάστηκε να επιστρέψει εσπευσμένα στο νοσοκομείο. Και ύστερα από μια δεύτερη επέμβαση πήρε την απόφαση να γυρίσει στην Αγγλία, γνωρίζοντας πως δεν θα επέστρεφε ποτέ πια. Το ταξίδι είχε τελειώσει.

Ο Πάντι τιμήθηκε στη ζωή του όσο λίγοι συγγραφείς ή ακόμη και ήρωες. Την πρώτη φορά που θέλησαν να του απονείμουν τον τίτλο του ιππότη (ΟΒΕ), αρνήθηκε, λέγοντας ότι δεν τον άξιζε. Τελικά έγινε σερ το 2004, «κα θώς δεν θα ήταν… ευγενικό να αρνηθεί δεύτερη φορά». Πάντως ποτέ δεν ακούστηκε κάποιος να τον αποκαλεί «σερ». Ολοι τον φώναζαν Πάντι και στην Καρδαμύλη και στην Κρήτη «κυρ Μιχάλη»- ήταν το ψευδώνυμό του στα βουνά της Κρήτης και το δεύτερο χριστιανικό του όνομα, που κανείς δεν το ήξερε, παρ΄ όλα αυτά όμως οι Ελληνες το γιόρταζαν.

Διακρίσεις, διπλώματα- όσα δεν πήρε στα μαθητικά του χρόνια-, ασημένιες πλακέτες και πάλι διακρίσεις υπάρχουν στη Μάνη, περισσότερο ως έργα τέχνης, καδράκια σπαρμένα στα διάφορα δωμάτια. «Κυρ Μιχάλη, πρέπει να πιείτε αυτό το φάρμακο», «Κυρ Μιχάλη,έξω περιμένει ο τάδε, να έρθει;», «Κυρ Μιχάλη,ήρθε η βαφτιστικιά σου η Αγγλία»… Και ο κυρ Μιχάλης έγνεφε καταφατικά.

Του άρεσε να έχει κόσμο όταν δεν ήταν σκυμμένος στα χαρτιά του. Κατά βάθος του άρεσε και το «κυρ-Μιχάλης», καθώς στο πίσω μέρος του μυαλού του υπήρχαν πάντα η Κρήτη και οι συναγωνιστές του. Βαριά άρρωστος στο νοσοκομείο, τις νύχτες έβλεπε πως ήταν στη σπηλιά στα Ανώγεια και έτρεχε στο μπαλκόνι να το σκάσει, και άλλοτε πως τον κυνηγούσαν και έτρεχε για να μην τον πιάσουν.

Υπό τους ήχους μιας γκάιντας

Εκείνη την Πέμπτη ο καιρός ήταν χαρούμενος στη μικρή πολίχνη του Ντάμπλτον. Ο ήλιος μπαινόβγαινε στα σύννεφα πάνω από την εκκλησία όπου συγκεντρώθηκαν φίλοι και συγγενείς και παλιοί συμπολεμιστές του. Οταν έφθασε η σορός σκεπασμένη με τη βρετανική σημαία, ο ιερέας βρισκόταν στην άκρη του φράχτη περιμένοντας να δώσει την τελευταία ευχή. Μετά προχώρησαν μαζί στην εκκλησία, όπου στην πόρτα περίμεναν να αποδώσουν τιμές βετεράνοι της Ιρλανδικής Φρουράς. Μέσα στον ναό η τελετή ήταν σύντομη, χωρίς λόγους.

Η σοπράνο Σάρα Γκάμπριελ τραγούδησε ασυνόδευτη ένα απόσπασμα από τον «Ντον Τζιοβάνι» του Μότσαρτ, το εκκλησίασμα έψαλε δύο ύμνους, διαβάστηκαν δύο σύντομα αποσπάσματα από την «Κήπο του Κύρου» του σερ Τόμας Μπράουν και από το «Απόκρυφο Βιβλίο» του Πρωτευαγγελιστή, και το εκκλησίασμα ακολούθησε τη σορό στον περίβολο της εκκλησίας υπό τους ήχους μιας γκάιντας. Κοντά στο μνήμα ένας μουσικός της Ιρλανδικής Φρουράς σάλπισε το σιωπητήριο. Αυτό ήταν. Η σημαία διπλώθηκε, η σορός κατέβηκε, ενώ την έραιναν ροδοπέταλα και μια χούφτα χώμα που ήρθε από την Ελλάδα. Μετά σιωπή.

Δίπλα στο μαξιλαράκι με τα παράσημα- ανάμεσά τους ξεχωρίζει ο ελληνικός Φοίνικας- βρίσκονταν τα στεφάνια. Εκείνο από την Ελληνική Πρεσβεία στο Λονδίνο (άλλωστε ο πρέσβης κ. Α. Σάντης παρέστη στην κηδεία), ένα δάφνινο από το Μουσείο Μπενάκη με την ευχή «στο καλό Πάντι», ένα από τον αρχηγό του Γενικού Επιτελείου Στρατού της Ελλάδος, ένα από τους Βυρωνιστές, άλλα από την οικογένεια του συναγωνιστή και φίλου του λόρδου Τζέλικο, από την Αδελφότητα των Ελλήνων Βετεράνων, από το Βritish Council της Αθήνας, από βαφτισιμιές… και πολλά μικρά μπουκέτα αγριολούλουδα από φίλους.

Καρδαμύλη, «το σπίτι του»

Τους τελευταίους μήνες της ζωής του ο Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ τούς πέρασε στην Καρδαμύλη της Μάνης. Εκεί ήταν «το σπίτι του». Οταν τον ρωτούσαν οι δημοσιογράφοι ποια από τις δύο χώρες θεωρούσε πατρίδα του, ποιο από τα δύο σπίτια ένιωθε περισσότερο δικό του, εκείνο της Αγγλίας με τον παλιό μύλο, το ρυάκι και τα πανύψηλα δένδρα ή το άλλο, της Μάνης, «Πατρίδα είναι εκεί που έχει κανείς τα βιβλία του» απαντούσε. Και η αλήθεια είναι ότι τα βιβλία του Ντάμπλτον δεν μπορούν να συγκριθούν με τις βιβλιοθήκες της Καρδαμύλης. Εφέτος, στις αρχές του χρόνου, ο Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ επέστρεψε στην Καρδαμύλη, όπου προσπάθησε απελπισμένα να τελειώσει τον τρίτο τόμο της τριλογίας του. Πρόκειται για το τελευταίο μέρος του οδοιπορικού ενός 18άρη που ξεκίνησε από την Ολλανδία για να διασχίσει με τα πόδια όλη την Ευρώπη, ως την Κωνσταντινούπολη. Οι πρώτοι δύο τόμοι που εκδόθηκαν με τις αναμνήσεις αυτής της περιπέτειας, «Α time of Gifts» (1977) και «From the Woods to the Water» (1986) – έχουν μεταφραστεί στα ελληνικά-, γνώρισαν μεγάλη επιτυχία.

Σε αυτό το ταξίδι ο Φέρμορ μόλις που πρόλαβε να γνωρίσει έναν κόσμο ο οποίος, με τον Β΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, θα χανόταν για πάντα. Ενα συστατικό γράμμα σε κάποιον ευγενή στη Γερμανία άνοιξε τη μία μετά την άλλη τις πόρτες των αρχοντικών και των κάστρων της Μεσευρώπης με τις πολύτιμες συλλογές έργων τέχνης και τις παλιές βιβλιοθήκες. Λίγα χρόνια αργότερα, μετά τον Πόλεμο, τίποτε από αυτά δεν υπήρχε. Ολα είχαν χαθεί, μαζί και ο τρόπος ζωής των φεουδαρχών αρχόντων και του αγροτικού πληθυσμού. Οι βομβαρδισμοί και το σοβιετικό καθεστώς έσβησαν έναν ολόκληρο κόσμο από τον χάρτη της Οικουμένης.

Οι Βρετανοί είχαν από καιρό ανακηρύξει τον Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ τον μεγαλύτερο ταξιδιωτικό συγγραφέα τους- ίσως τον κορυφαίο σε ολόκληρο τον κόσμο. Ο Φέρμορ δεν ήταν όμως μόνο ένας εξαιρετικός ταξιδιωτικός συγγραφέας. Οι περιγραφές του δεν περιορίζονταν στη διαδρομή. Τον ενδιέφερε η φύση, αλλά και ο άνθρωπος, οι ιστορίες που έλεγαν οι πέτρες και τα κτίσματα. Τον σαγήνευαν οι μικρές αφηγήσεις που άκουγε στα καφενεία. Τον βοηθούσαν να καταλάβει τους ανθρώπους και να κατανοήσει ό,τι κράτησαν από τον πολιτισμό τους. Σε αυτό τον βοήθησε πολύ και η ευκολία του στην εκμάθηση ξένων γλωσσών. Ακόμη και πρόσφατα διόρθωνε εκφράσεις και λέξεις συνομιλητών του στα ρουμανικά. Και εκείνοι δεν πίστευαν στα αφτιά τους…

ΓΙΑΤΙ ΔΕΝ ΕΠΕΣΤΡΕΨΕ ΣΤΗΝ ΚΡΗΤΗ – Η ΑΠΟΚΑΛΥΠΤΙΚΗ ΒΙΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ

Ο Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ καταγόταν από προνομιούχο οικογένεια.Ο πατέρας του,ο σερ Λούις,ήταν διευθυντής του Γεωλογικού Ινστιτούτου στην Ινδία,με αποτέλεσμα αυτός και η γυναίκα του να κρατηθούν για ένα πολύ μεγάλο διάστημα μακριά από τον γιο τους.Παιδάκι τον εμπιστεύθηκαν σε μια αγροτική οικογένεια και μεγάλωσε ελεύθερος στη φύση.Σε αυτή την ελευθερία οφείλεται ίσως ο ατίθασος χαρακτήρας του,αλλά και μια περίεργη,αυστηρή πειθαρχία,προσαρμοσμένη όμως στους δικούς του όρους.

Οταν,μετά τον Α΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, μαζεύτηκε η οικογένεια,στο σπίτι γινόταν πολλή κουβέντα για πουλιά,για λουλούδια και για τόπους μακρινούς.Η μητέρα του,θέλοντας να του ανοίξει τους ορίζοντες- αφού το ένα μετά το άλλο τα σχολεία τον έδιωχναν-,του διάβαζε ποίηση και κλασικούς.Η οικογένεια τον προόριζε για στρατιωτικό.Γι΄ αυτό και εκείνος αποφάσισε να φύγει για την Ευρώπη.Χωρίς χρήματα,χωρίς χρονικούς περιορισμούς,σχεδόν χωρίς πρόγραμμα.Στο σακίδιό του είχε την κλασική ανθολογία ποίησης των εκδόσεων Οξφόρδης,τις Ωδές του Οράτιου,ίσως και κάποιο έργο του Σαίξπηρ.

Για να κρατά συντροφιά στον εαυτό του, όσο περπατούσε απήγγελε ποίηση,με αποτέλεσμα να τη μάθει απέξω,ενώ επαναλάμβανε όσα πρόφταινε να αρπάξει από τη γλώσσα κάθε τόπου από τον οποίο περνούσε.Κοιμόταν σε καπηλειά και αχυρώνες με την ίδια άνεση που έμενε σε πύργους και άκουγε τις ιστορίες των ανθρώπων που συναντούσε αναζητώντας τις ρίζες και τους μύθους των τόπων τους.Για να κερδίζει κάποια χρήματα έκανε ό,τι δουλειά έβρισκε- ενώ σχεδίαζε και προσωπογραφίες.Κάποια στιγμή έφθασε στον προορισμό: την Πρωτοχρονιά του 1935 τη γιόρτασε στην Κωνσταντινούπολη.Αλλά κάπου κατά τη διάρκεια του ταξιδιού οι σημειώσεις είχαν χαθεί.

Εφυγε από την Κωνσταντινούπολη με ένα ακόμη συστατικό γράμμα στην τσέπη.Αυτή τη φορά ήταν από τον έλληνα πρόξενο προς τον Πέτρο Σταθάτο στο Μόδι της Μακεδονίας.Υστερα από έναν σταθμό στο Αγιον Ορος,προχώρησε στο Μόδι.Η ατμόσφαιρα ενός ελληνικού σπιτιού και η αρχοντιά του οικοδεσπότη τού άνοιξαν τις πόρτες της Ελλάδας.Με ένα άλογο τριγύρισε στη Μακεδονία.Πλησίασε τους Σαρακατσάνους- για τους οποίους και έγραψε-,ώσπου κατέληξε στη Θεσσαλονίκη,όπου βρέθηκε στη μέση μιας σύρραξης ανάμεσα σε βασιλικούς και βενιζελικούς.Καθώς οι Σταθάτοι ήταν βασιλικοί και το άλογο ήταν δικό τους,προσχώρησε- πού αλλού;- στο στρατόπεδο των βασιλικών.Πάντως ο Φέρμορ δεν ήταν πολιτικοποιημένος.Αλλά ακόμη και αν ήταν,το έκρυβε τόσο καλά,ώστε κανείς δεν μπορούσε να τον τοποθετήσει σε «στρατόπεδο».

Το περιστατικό που τον σημάδεψε

Για τη ζωή και τις περιπέτειές του έχουν γραφτεί πολλά και έχουν ειπωθεί περισσότερα.Για την ιστορία της Κρήτης ο ίδιος έχει μιλήσει πολύ λίγο,ενώ δεν έχει γράψει τίποτε.Επρεπε να βρίσκεται παρέα με πάρα πολύ στενούς φίλους και να έχουν πιει πολύ κρασί για να πιάσει τη διήγηση.Και πάλι όμως,έκανε την ιστορία του ελαφριά,σχεδόν διασκεδαστική και εξωπραγματική.

Υπάρχει ένα τραγικό περιστατικό σε αυτή την ιστορία,που χάραξε τη ζωή του Φέρμορ και για το οποίο ο ίδιος δεν μίλησε ποτέ,ενώ ούτε ο υπαρχηγός του,στρατηγός Στάνλεϊ Μός,το αναφέρει στο βιβλίο του «Ιll met by moonlight» («Κακό συναπάντημα στο φεγγρόφωτο»),που είναι αφιερωμένο στην απαγωγή του στρατηγού Κράιπε.Το έψαξε η βιογράφος του Αρτεμις Κούπερ στα αρχεία του υπουργείου Πολέμου.

Στη Μάνη ο Φέρμορ διάβαζε και ξαναδιάβαζε το χοντρό ντοσιέ με τα χειρόγραφα και τις δακτυλογραφημένες σελίδες που ήταν γεμάτα διορθώσεις με τα τρεμουλιαστά και όπως πάντα δυσανάγνωστα γράμματά του.Ο τόμος είχε σχεδόν τελειώσει.Ηθελε ίσως κάποιο «χτένισμα» και υπολογιζόταν να κυκλοφορήσει πριν από τα Χριστούγεννα του 2011. Την επιμέλεια είχε η Αρτεμις Κούπερ,η οποία είχε επιμεληθεί και την έκδοση του «Words of mercury» το 2003.

Οι Βρετανοί έχουν από καιρό ανακηρύξει τον Πάτρικ Λι Φέρμορ τον μεγαλύτερο ταξιδιωτικό συγγραφέα τους- ίσως τον κορυφαίο στον κόσμο.Ο Φέρμορ δεν ήταν όμως μόνο ένας εξαιρετικός ταξιδιωτικός συγγραφέας.Οι περιγραφές του δεν περιορίζονταν στη διαδρομή.Τον ενδιέφερε η φύση,αλλά και ο άνθρωπος,οι ιστορίες που έλεγαν οι πέτρες και τα κτίσματα.Τον σαγήνευαν οι μικρές αφηγήσεις που άκουγε στα καφενεία.Τον βοηθούσαν να καταλάβει τους ανθρώπους και να κατανοήσει ό,τι κράτησαν από τον πολιτισμό τους.Σε αυτό τον βοήθησε πολύ και η ευκολία του στην εκμάθηση ξένων γλωσσών.Ακόμη και πρόσφατα διόρθωνε εκφράσεις και λέξεις συνομιλητών του στα ρουμανικά.Και εκείνοι δεν πίστευαν στα αφτιά τους…

Patrick Leigh Fermor remembered by Colin Thubron

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When I was asked to select a passage from his work that encapsulated the spirit of Paddy Leigh Fermor, who died last Friday, a crowd of images leapt to mind, from his encounter with the grotesque burghers of Munich in A Time of Gifts to the eerie vespers of A Time to Keep Silence, to the gongs of Byzantium and the gambolling of dolphins in Mani.

By Colin Thubron

First published in The Spectator, 18 June 2011

Almost any page of his work glitters with the ebullience and precision of his style, and its almost choreographic way with sentences. And his writing was the ideal instrument for his omnivorous love of things: his encyclopaedic delight in history, genealogy, heraldry, costume, the quirks and byways of folklore and language.

This was a man who seemed to embody panache. From boyhood he was a renegade. The housemaster at his public school, from which he was predictably sacked, called him ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’. In his youth he walked across Europe in the first year of Hitler’s coming to power, and during the war lived for over two years in the Cretan mountains disguised as a shepherd before famously abducting the German military commander of Crete. Later, during the Greek civil war he joined a royalist cavalry charge, and at the age of 70, in emulation of Lord Byron, he swam the Hellespont — with his wife in a boat behind him — sitting on her hands (he wrote) in order not to wring them.

I believe he was erudite rather than intellectual — he embraced and celebrated experience more than he analysed it, and his descriptions even of obscure history and customs were lit up by a playful vitality. He wrote, of course, at a time when the world seemed less accessible than now and when to plunge into the Taygetus mountains of the southern Peloponnese, for instance, was a more remote experience than an Andean trek today. In this he seems the product of an earlier age, as he does in his wide learning, his immersion in his chosen subject, and his eschewing of the psychological.

Always there was this zestful inventiveness and cultivated pleasure in fantasy — not whimsical fantasy, but rather the product of a full-blooded imagination. Almost the last time I saw him, he had returned from hospital after an operation for suspected cancer. I was worried that I’d find him depleted and his old flare gone. At first he was indeed a little subdued, eating lunch. Then suddenly he perked up and said: ‘You know, there is an apple lying on a table in the hall. It’s been there all weekend… Wouldn’t it be marvellous if it cocked a snook at Newton, and simply took off into the air!’

Then I knew he was himself again.

He had few disciples. It was hard to emulate such writing, and rather dangerous. He was a master of that rich and sculptured style: but I think nobody else was. What he gave to travel writing was less a specific following than his unique personal stature: as near as we are likely to come to a Renaissance man. He bestowed on the genre his innate dignity, his literary brilliance, his polymathic mind, and his generous heart.

Erudiete avonturier leefde zijn eigen boeken

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The leading Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad has published a short article to mark Paddy’s death written by Bruno Braak. Yours truly was interviewed for this and apparently I said ” He was so much more than a travel author”, says Tom Sawford, who made a website about Leigh Fermor. “Paddy expected a lot of knowledge from his readers. He wrote in-depth about history and parts in Latin, French or German untranslated”.

The title translates as “Erudite adventurer lived his own books”.

Gone for a walk in Greece

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“YOU had better look out if you are going up to Anavriti.” The familiar words sound wonderful when spoken aloud in this cavernous, haunted and as yet sunless gorge. I repeat them, savouring their powerful energy.

Suddenly, I picture the streets of “roasting Sparta” and the Greek barber who, encouraged by his colourful customers, issued the warning as he clipped the dusty hair of a man now regarded as one of the world’s finest travel writers.

The barber’s words subsequently provided the opening salvo of what many believe is the best book in English about Greece.

by Ian Robert Smith

First published in The Australian 30 July 2011

Published in 1958, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese is a dense, erudite and hugely entertaining account of the author’s peregrinations in a region that, at the time, was remote, untamed and singularly archaic. Mani is also, more broadly, an affectionate portrait of a rural Greece where centuries-old customs were fast disappearing — “hammered to powder . . . between the butt of a Coca-Cola bottle and the Iron Curtain” — and for which today’s traveller hunts in vain.

I, too, am going up to Anavriti. And like Leigh Fermor when he came this way with his partner (later wife) Joan in the mid-1950s, I intend to use the village, perched on a spur of the Taygetos range, as a stepping stone into the Mani.

A battered copy of Leigh Fermor’s book resides in the top flap of my rucksack, both talisman and inspiration. Handily within reach in the side pocket is the Anavasi map of the region. Its bundled contours, crossed by the black-dotted lines of footpaths, reflect the momentous regions that await overhead.

Rich in myth and history, the Taygetos dominates the Spartan plain over which it looms like an impenetrable barrier. The northern foothills rise in the wilds of Arcadia. They shoot upwards into a vast, serrated ridge that culminates in the peak of Mt Profitis Ilias — at 2407m, the highest point in the Peloponnese — before dropping away through the Mani Peninsula.

Foothills clad in oak, hornbeam and black pine and daubed with villages buttress the eastern slopes. But the west is wild. Ancient gorges provide means of egress into this planetary world.

Some say this gorge is where the ancient Spartans left unwanted children to die. The rumble of plunging water resounds along its length.

In a large cave, a frescoed chapel, painted ox-blood red, crouches among icons and vases of the white Madonna lilies that grow wild on the slopes. Climbing further, past a sudden and terrifying drop, a curious sound wafts towards me; incoherent initially, it develops into an ethereal chanting that, echoing off the cliffs, sounds strange and beautiful in this wilderness. Bewilderment turns to rapt appreciation as I recognise the monks at Faneromeni Monastery, high above, conducting a Sunday morning service.

Beyond the monastery and a couple of antique threshing floors, Anavriti appears. Dwarfed by the glittering and snow-streaked Taygetos, several belfries and a cluster of stone houses adorn a hillside plumed with walnut, plane and cherry trees.

Not so long ago Anavriti had a thriving tanning and leather-goods industry and a population of several thousand. Nowadays, like most mountain villages in Greece, it is barely inhabited.

I amble along the main street, seeking wide balconies reached “by boxed-in staircases on wooden stilts”. In one such edifice, Leigh Fermor and Joan spent the night. Something similar faces a solitary taverna. Light-headed at finding myself in Anavriti at last, I lunch on spaghetti with rooster and abundant rose wine and, as a jovial crowd materialises, observe clouds thickening around the mountaintops. The taverna owner shrugs when I inquire what they portend, then asks, unhelpfully, whether I have a raincoat, before advising: “Go towards the good.”

This I attempt, only to become drenched, then unpleasantly steamed when the sun reappears, conjuring wondrous aromas from the glistening earth. The experience is chastening and, toiling upwards through fir forest, I conclude that following in the footsteps of literary legends can be tricky. Writing in Mani, Leigh Fermor gives fair warning.

“Feet became cannonballs,” he recounts, “loads turned to lead, hearts pounded, hands slipped on the handles of sticks and rivers of sweat streamed over burning faces and trickled into our mouths like brine.” I arrive, similarly challenged, at the author’s “unattractively alpine wall of mineral”.

It is the flank of Spanakaki Peak and also a crossroads. Intent on the Mani, Leigh Fermor bypassed Profitis Ilias and headed off to the right. Determined to tackle the summit, I veer left, up over a spur with a derelict sheepfold and across a meadow that, as thunder rumbles and rain buckets down, tilts vertically to the watershed. I reach this, hand-over-foot, but discover the view of the Messenian Gulf beyond obscured by thick mist breaking over the ridge.

Visibility shrinks to nothing as I’m engulfed, precipitating a tedious descent, followed by a forced march to the EOS refuge, where I meet a group from Athens who provide food, wine and spirited conversation. Occasionally the talk turns to Greece’s economic troubles and, predictably, as these are young people from the capital, nearly everyone has a sobering tale. They are related simply, without rancour and often with humour; but beneath the levity, disappointment and uncertainty are palpable.

The evening proves unexpectedly affecting and our farewells the next day, when I renew my assault on the summit, are heartfelt. I ascend through meadows thick with ferns, thyme and wildflowers, which give way to barren, stratified limestone, before an opening leads over the watershed. It might well be a door into another world.

Jagged pinnacles roll away to the north. Westward, rumpled slopes sundered by ravines plunge to the shores of the Messenian gulf. Silence reigns. Nothing moves except the clouds rolling across the peaks. I climb through them, tentatively over scree, on to a desolate platform scattered with stone huts and a roofless chapel dedicated to the prophet Elijah and crammed with icons, melted candles and votive offerings left by midsummer devotees.

The moment evokes a heady elation, tempered by disbelief that I am here, alone, atop the Peloponnese. Finally the sight of Kardamyli, fathoms below, reminds me it is time to catch up with Leigh Fermor. A headlong descent begins. Nightfall finds me in the Viros gorge. It is the ancient route to the coast: a massive, 14km-long canyon enclosed by fir-tufted cliffs and paved with boulders worn smooth by winter torrents, and not particularly restful.

Escaping next morning to Exochori, I locate a small chapel with a battered turret astride cicada-haunted olive terraces looking out to sea. In this lovely place, appropriate for a man who wrote so beautifully, the ashes of author Bruce Chatwin are scattered. I pause to pay my respects.

Kardamyli appears, its blond towers jutting above the sea. A cobbled path curls below the ancient acropolis. Nearby, adjacent to the reputed tombs of Castor and Pollux, I fall into conversation with a friendly English couple. Inevitably the name of Leigh Fermor comes up. We are speaking of the blood feuds in Mani when the woman says abruptly: “We’ve heard the funeral is on Thursday.”

Seeing my uncomprehending look, she adds, “You didn’t know? Paddy died last week.”

It was the day before I set out, ostensibly in his footsteps. The news fills me with sadness coupled with bewilderment at the workings of providence. I enter Kardamyli in a valedictory mood, passing through an arched gateway into a dusty square flanked by byzantine towers and a church.

In Mani, Leigh Fermor writes that Kardamyli was “unlike any village I had seen in Greece”. He and Joan loved it so much that they returned several years later and built a house in an olive grove.

Kardamyli remains laid-back and relatively unspoilt, with a long pebble beach, pretty stone houses, a small fishing harbour and friendly people. It is popular with trekkers who tackle the hinterland trails. But my walking days are over for now and my stay is marked by restlessness and an odd nostalgia. Each morning I swim to the wooded islet with the fortified wall and ruined chapel, a few hundred metres offshore. I scribble in cafes, drink with other travellers and dine out every night, once at Lelas, the waterfront taverna owned by the woman who was Leigh Fermor’s original housekeeper. Everyone, it seems, has a Paddy story to tell.

One morning, a strange impulse takes me. Just outside town, a path leaves the road and winds downhill through olive groves throbbing with cicadas. It continues, away from recent development higher up the slope, into a wilderness of trees and yellow grain fields where I pass a whitewashed chapel and, just beyond, a long stone wall, above which a mottled tile roof protrudes. Finally I come to a beach.

It lies just over the rocks, a hermetic cove enfolded by cliffs. A shiver sweeps through me when I realise: this is the place. Pushing through a wooden gate marked Private, I climb a stone staircase that zigzags up to a sprawling garden. Olive trees bestride ancient terraces.

The aromas of rosemary and cypress mingle in the hot, pulsating air. Paths of pebble mosaic thread between judiciously placed tables and benches of slate and a rambling house, built of golden stone, empty now, yet with the accumulations of a long and abundant life in place. An air of recent abandonment prevails. Leigh Fermor died in England.

Standing on the clifftop, beside one of those tables where so many delightful moments must have unfolded, I gaze out past the island to the distant peninsula, a smudge on the horizon. An age passes before I tear myself away.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese was first published in 1958. The acclaimed war hero and travel writer died on June 10, aged 96.

A Prince of the Road by Colin Thubron

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This is a major essay about Paddy by his good friend Colin Thubron. Perhaps worth printing and reading at your leisure.

Use the Print Friendly facility.

by Colin Thubron

First published in the New York Review of Books, January 17 2008.

To suggest that Patrick Leigh Fermor is the greatest travel writer alive is to omit a great deal. In Britain and Greece he is a near legend, celebrated not only for his books but for his wartime exploits as a guerrilla leader in occupied Crete, where his abduction of a German general has passed into folklore. He is, perhaps, the last of a breed of writer-travelers whose reputation has an aura of genuine action and courage.

The qualities suited to the travel writer’s trade have always been contradictory. The mental (and physical) robustness necessary for ambitious travel often excludes the sensitivity to record it, and vice versa. So there are travelers who write, and writers who travel—and they rarely converge in the same person.

In Leigh Fermor, they do. The richness of his prose, his polymathic exuberance, and his cultural allusiveness render him less immediately accessible than some of his contemporaries, such as Peter Fleming or Norman Lewis. But his six travel books—one for each decade of his adult life—have secured him a readership drawn to a voice that is omnivorous in its tastes and curiosity, learned without condescension, cultivated but never effete, curiously innocent, occasionally swanky, infectiously joyous. If he is less known in the United States than he is in Britain, it is because Leigh Fermor is deeply European.

His reputation rests, above all, on two pairs of books—about his youthful walk across pre-war Europe, published in 1977 and 1986—and about Greece, published in 1958 and 1966. But then there is A Time to Keep Silence. In the oeuvre of a traveler whose books are full of worldly curiosity, this short reflection on the monastic life sits like a troubled question mark. First published in Britain in 1953, it now appears in the US for the first time. In less than a hundred pages it records the author’s stay in the ancient French monasteries of St. Wandrille, Solesmes, and La Grande Trappe, with a brief excursion to the deserted Byzantine chapels of Cappadocian Turkey.

Yet there are readers for whom A Time to Keep Silence is Leigh Fermor’s finest—if most uncharacteristically elusive—book. In her introduction, the religious historian (and ex-nun) Karen Armstrong writes:

The monks’ monotonous way of life has been deliberately designed to protect them from the distractions of, and the lust for, novelty: they do the same things day after day; they dress alike and shun individuality and personal style. They keep almost perpetual silence….

Nothing could be more antipathetic to everything that Leigh Fermor’s books project and embrace. His persona as a writer brims with “individuality and personal style.” So, of course, does his prose. He is famously gregarious, and a dazzling raconteur. For a traveler so tough, his books are rich in pleasures: in leisure, in wine, in company. History and landscape bring a visceral exhilaration.

In 1952, aged thirty-seven, Leigh Fermor arrived at the Benedictine abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontenelle, near Rouen, in quest not of religious retreat but of somewhere cheap and quiet in which to write his first book, on the Caribbean. The regimen of the monastery—the bloodless gloom of Vespers, the sepulchral mealtime recitations while the monks ate in silence—filled him at first with revulsion:

As I sat at Vespers watching them, now cowled, now uncovered, according to the progress of the liturgy, they appeared preternaturally pale, some of them nearly green. The bone-structure of their faces lay nearly always close beneath the surface. But, though a deep hollow often accentuated the shadow under the cheekbone, their faces were virtually without a wrinkle, and it was this creaseless haggardness that made their faces so distinct from any others. How different, I thought, from the fierce, whiskered, brigand-faces of the Greek monks of Athos or the Meteora, whose eyes smoulder and flash and twinkle under brows that are always tied up in knots of rage or laughter or concentration or suddenly relaxed into bland, Olympian benevolence.

There is no doubt about where Leigh Fermor’s sympathies lay. As for writing, he retired to his cell on the first day in the quiet, and picked up his pen:

But an hour passed, and nothing happened. It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.

For three or four days, little changed. He was prey to insomnia and a flat depression. Then he started to sleep. He slept until a few meals and church services a day were his only lucid moments. Then the pattern changed again. His lassitude dwindled away and was succeeded by a “limpid freshness.” He now slept only five hours in twenty-four. It was as if a profound tiredness, rooted in the outside world with its demands on nervous libido and instant response, had overswept him, then receded in this quietude to release a flood of unimpeded energy. “Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away.”

From the monastery’s library—a magnificent repository of the sacred and secular—he was able to borrow even those heretical books placed on the index or locked in the depository (named the Enfer) as destructive of monastic calm. And as he grew to know them, the monks became, to his charitable and indulgent mind, almost uniformly attractive.

Moving on, he was delayed only two weeks by the abbey of Solesmes, guardian of early Church music, before he reached the great Cistercian monastery of La Grande Trappe in southern Normandy. Among this grimly disciplined and silent order, the cycle that Leigh Fermor had experienced in St. Wandrille—the same tension between tenderness and revulsion—repeated itself more gently. Here the Benedictine dedication to the efficacy of prayer was reinforced by a notion of ferocious penance:

A Trappist monk rises at one or two in the morning according to the season. Seven hours of his day are spent in church, singing the offices, kneeling or standing in silent meditation, often in the dark…. There are no cells. All, from the Abbot downwards, sleep in cubicles in a dormitory on palliasses of straw stretched out on bare planks. Heating does not exist…. A special deaf and dumb language for cases of necessity has been evolved and codified, and the entire lifetime of a lay-brother, who does not participate in the singing of the offices, may pass without the uttering of a word beyond the confessional or his spiritual consultations with the Abbot. A monk on the point of death is removed from his infirmary bed and laid across a bed of straw which is scattered over a cross of ashes. There, after the last ghostly comforts in the presence of the assembled monks, he expires. His body is exposed for a while in the church. No coffin is used at his burial; his face is covered by his hood, and he is lowered into his grave with his habit folded about him.

A Time to Keep Silence evolved, sometimes word for word, from the letters written to Leigh Fermor’s future wife from these brief sojourns in monastic cells. They are touched by the unease of the doubter or atheist (he is never specific) who has intruded into the midst of pious conviction, and by his subsequent gratitude for the monks’ discretion which allowed him to escape any awkward challenge.

But for all the revolution in his feelings—and his brief excursions into the nature of prayer or temptation—it is less the inner journey than Leigh Fermor’s descriptions of monastic life that linger in the memory. He is a master of externals. The somber glamour of ritual and the drama of architecture rise naturally to his pen. In Roumeli, his book on northern Greece, he celebrates the pinnacle monasteries of Meteora with a gusto more immediate to him than the arcane inner lives of the sober monks of Normandy. His brief chapter on the rock chapels of Cappadocia, with which A Time to Keep Silence ends, relaxes into descriptive ease as it portrays a hermit city redolent of the dawn of monastic Christendom, whose human inhabitants have long gone.

Leigh Fermor’s sumptuous and sometimes complicated style has won him many admirers, barely one successful imitator, and a handful of disgruntled critics. When he writes that the quietude of St. Wandrille and his limited contact with the monks “compelled me again and again to seek my parallels in painting,” it sounds less like a limitation than a joyful release. The memory of Old Masters is never far away. In the muted light by which they worship, the monks evoke the canvases of Zurbarán and El Greco. The towering pinnacles of Solesmes remind him of the Rhenish castles of Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo. The wintry landscapes around La Trappe blend with those of Breughel and Bosch.

Sound itself turns visual. Leigh Fermor, in an act of nostalgic remembrance, conjures the ruined English abbeys lifting up their broken arches and emptied rose-windows “as though some tremendous Gregorian chant had been interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever since”; and the complex chanting of the conventual High Mass elicits an image of the Gregorian notation—with its comet tails and arabesques—printed in the monks’ missals.

These stylistic flourishes would be woeful in lesser hands. But with Leigh Fermor they rarely fail. His early models include Alexander William Kinglake and Norman Douglas, but most potent perhaps was the influence of his precocious near-contemporary, Robert Byron, who died at sea in 1941, and who in The Road to Oxiana, an account of travel in Persia and Afghanistan, interleaved humorous vignettes with some of the most precise and beautiful architectural descriptions in the language. Continue reading →

Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor, travel inspiration

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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.

The Times Literary Supplement: Patrick Leigh Fermor

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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.”

Wanderlust magazine obituary: Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

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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

Honoring Patrick Leigh Fermor: Review Essay

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This is quite an excellent essay that focuses on Paddy’s writing more than many other profiles.

Paddy in 1966

by Willard Manus

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.

Economic Times of India: Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor’s next room relationship to India

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Patrick Leigh Fermor

One of the most original of Paddy’s obituaries, with a real Indian perspective. It discusses his relationship with his parents and India, where Paddy’s father, Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, was director of the Geological Survey of India.

by Vikram Doctor

First published in Economic Times of India, 28 June 2011

Patrick Leigh Fermor , who passed away recently at 96, was the most incomparable of travel writers. Yet his reputation rested on relatively few books, which hardly seemed to cover the geographical range that might have been expected of a writer of his reputation and lifespan.

Fermor’s first published book, The Traveller’s Tree, about a Caribbean trip, got an unexpected endorsement from Ian Fleming , in Live and Let Die, James Bond’s Caribbean caper, as one of the great travel books. He wrote two books, Mani and Roumeli, set in Greece, where he was to live most of his life. There was a short book on an Andean trip, another short one on monastic life and a single novel, based on that Caribbean trip.

And then there were the two books that he was most celebrated for, based on his decision in 1932, aged just 18, to walk across Europe from the coast of Holland to Constantinople, as he romantically still referred to Istanbul. The first, A Time of Gifts, took him to the Hungarian border, and the second, Between the Woods and the Water, across Eastern Europe to the edge of the Islamic world. Fermor did make it to Istanbul, but never finished his proposed trilogy.

But this was it really – no North America, no Africa, no Middle East, no Far East, no India. Of all these omissions, India stands out because it was the one that might most likely have happened. Fermor had, as he put it in A Time of Gifts, a “voices-in-the-next-room relationship to India” thanks to his father, Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor , a geologist who devoted his life to India, becoming director of the Geological Survey of India, president of the Indian Science Congress and of the Asiatic Society of Bengal .

His obituary, written by another distinguished geologist, M.S. Krishnan, credits him with pioneering the scientific study of geology in India, and in particular with identifying the manganese ore deposits of central India, the coal deposits of Bokaro, the chromite and copper deposits of Singhbum and the iron ore deposits of Goa and Ratnagiri. (Coincidentally, Sir Lewis is not the only Indian geologist with a famous writer in his family. John Auden , the older brother of poet W.H. Auden, also worked as a geologist in India and there is a pass called Auden’s Col in Garhwal named after him).

As Fermor acknowledged, he could easily have become like Kipling, with a glorious Indian childhood, then exile back to a lonely, dreary life in England. It didn’t happen that way because he was never taken to India at all. Perhaps jokingly Fermor wrote that after he was born, his mother and sister left him back in England to ensure that in case their ship sank, someone in the family would survive. He was left with a family on a farm, where he had such a glorious childhood that he never really took to conventional family life when his mother came back.

Her return was also a separation from his father, and this must have been the other reason why, unlike the children of other Empire families, Fermor never made it to India. His father only came ‘home’ on furloughs every three years. Fermor did recall, in A Time of Gifts, a trip with his father to the Italian Alps: “Laden with his field glasses and his butterfly net, I would get my breath while he was tapping at the quartz and the hornblende on the foothills of Mount Rosa with his hammer and clicking open a pocket lens to inspect the fossils and insects of the Monte della Crocea¦ What a change, I thought, from those elephants and the jungles full of monkeys and tigers which I imagined, not wholly wrongly, to be his usual means of transport and habitat.”

This holiday apart though, Fermor’s father hardly features in his work. He made sure that a letter to his father was only sent after he set off on his trip across Europe, with the hope that he would accept his son’s fait accompli and send the occasional infusions of money to help it along. “I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a yeara¦ there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!”

Fermor doesn’t record Sir Lewis’ reaction. He was, for all that he wrote of his own journeys, not an autobiographical writer. While one gets a vivid sense of his personality, as reflected through both the high spirit and sensitivity of his writing, actual personal details are sparse. The few given in A Time of Gifts are only to set the context of the journey, and Fermor never wrote about perhaps the most amazing episode of his later life – of how during World War II, while living and fighting with the partisan resistance to the Germans in Crete, he organised the kidnap of the German general in charge of the island.

This almost impossibly dashing episode was made into a film, Ill Met By Moonlight, yet Fermor himself only referred to it once, in a footnote. There was clearly much more in his life he could have written about – his three-year relationship with a Romanian princess and his participation in a Greek cavalry charge, both after he finished his trip to Istanbul – but he didn’t, and no one else dared tread on such a superb writer’s turf while he was alive. A biography will now presumably come soon, and some version of the last book in his trilogy – both much anticipated.

A biography might explain more about his relationship with his father and India, but at least one link could be made. Fermor’s exuberant style often runs the risk of becoming too lush and self-indulgent, yet it is saved, each time, by detailed description and a focus on facts. Perhaps it was this love of observation, a precision that grounds the poetry and puts the object observed, rather than the observer, in focus that he picked up from his scientist father? His father used facts to build theories about the forces that formed the Deccan, and his son used facts too, gleaned from conversations with everyone from innkeepers to aristocrats, to build his picture of a Europe both ancient, yet soon to vanish forever.

Fermor doesn’t labour the point though, and it is one reason why he is such an attractive writer. You know the fate, between Nazis and Communists, that would come to the Jewish woodcutters and Hungarian counts that he meets, but these tragic ends don’t have to define their lives, and it is their happier vitality that he enshrines. Perhaps it was best that he never came to India where the rigid hierarchies of Raj life would have constrained him in a way that he never had to be, walking across Europe, voyaging through Caribbean or Greek islands, living and writing of a life that we can only envy and enjoy through his books.

Fermor’s work is studded with passages of stunning writing, but many are too long or need too much explanation of context to give in short. This passage though, from A Time of Gifts, marks one of the few times he took the train on his trip (for an off-route visit to Prague) and, quite casually, it paints a vivid image of a train in motion: “A goods train at another platform indicated the sudden accessibility of Warsaw.

PRAHA – BRNO – BRESLAU – LODZ – WARSZAVA. The words were stencilled across the trucks; the momentary vision of a sledded Polack jingled across my mind’s eye. When the train began to move, the word BRNO slid away in the opposite direction then BRNO! BRNO! BRNO! The dense syllable flashed past the window at decreasing intervals and we fell asleep and plunged on through the Moravian dark and into Bohemia.”

In search of a hero and friend of Greece

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Patrick Leigh Fermor, outside his Greek home in 2001 where he and his wife lived for more than 40 years before her death in 2006

PATRICK Leigh Fermor, who died last weekend at the age of 96, was regarded by many as the greatest travel writer of the 20th century. But he was so much more. A distinctive prose stylist with deep reservoirs of erudition unclouded by self-regard, he was blessed with two qualities that no one ever taught at creative-writing school: a talent for friendship and a taste for hardship.

By Luke Slattery

First published in The Australian, 18 June 2011

Contemporary literary people tend to live rather sedentary lives. Paddy was different. He played a key role in the Greek resistance against the Reich, and was awarded the DSO for heroism. After the war he settled in Greece, on the barren western shore of the Peloponnese, and scratched out in longhand a brace of poetic and highly charged books about journeys rather than destinations.

A little less than a decade ago I called on him at the pretty fishing village in southern Greece that had for many years been his home. But arriving late in the day at Kardamyli, a warren of stone towers at the foot of Mount Taygetus, I discovered he was in Britain.

I was given a London number, which I called from a public phone amid piles of unwashed tomatoes and wilting lettuce outside the village store: “Should I wait in Kardamyli for your return?” I asked.

With scant appreciation of the nature of long-haul air travel – 28 hours from Sydney to Athens via Heathrow – he replied in a bright yet fragile tone: “Next visit.”

In his 88th year and recently bereaved, he explained he was “all awhirl”. His reticence was understandable. It was not a good time. But it had taken an age to get here!

Paddy lived from 1964 with his wife Joan just south of this sleepy seaside sentinel at the entrance to the Mani: a region of rust-coloured hills silvered by olive groves, which erupts here and there into insular hilltop villages that not long ago festered with clan feuds and rang with rifle fire. The writer found the place in an age when electricity was uncommon south of Kalamata, and saw it flourish into a favourite of middle-class British and German tourists.

His first sight of the village is evoked in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, one of his two famous Greek books (the other, Roumeli, relates his adventures in the north):

“Several towers and a cupola and a belfry rose above the roofs and a ledge immediately above them formed a lovely cypress-covered platform. Above this the bare Taygetus piled up.

“It was unlike any village I had seen in Greece. These houses, resembling small castles built of local stone and medieval-looking pepper-pot turrets, were topped by a fine church. The mountains rushed down almost to the water’s edge with, here and there among the whitewashed fishermen’s houses near the sea, great rustling groves of calamus reed 10 foot high and all swaying together in the slightest whisper of wind. There was sand underfoot and nets were looped from tree to tree. Whitewashed ribbed amphorae for oil and wine, almost the size of those dug up in the palace of Minos, stood by many a doorway.”

My fascination with Leigh Fermor began some time in the late 1980s when I read A Time of Gifts, the first of two mesmerising accounts of a journey on foot across pre-war Europe. His youthful memoirs have a distinct flavour imparted by the circumstances of their composition: worked up from long-lost diaries discovered by chance when the author was middle-aged, they are as much a celebration of lost time as anything by Proust or Anthony Powell.

His journey began on a wet December day in 1933. Paddy was just 18. Putting school troubles behind him (he’d been a good scholar but a free and untamed spirit) he set out for Constantinople on foot with only a rucksack and an old army greatcoat to keep out the snow. A boat took him overnight from London to Rotterdam, and his trek began at first light: “My spirits, already high, steadily rose as I walked. I could scarcely believe that 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 … I halted at a signpost to eat a hunk of bread with a yellow wedge of cheese sliced from a red cannon ball by a village grocer.”

A Time of Gifts is shot though with a sort of double-barrelled nostalgia. The writer remembers himself as a youth, and the 18-year-old he recalls is already full of remembering. Young Leigh Fermor registers the presence of the past keenly and so senses, in these pre-war years, that an ancient pattern of life is disappearing.

On the road from Cologne he spies the fringes of the Ruhr: “a distant palisade of industrial chimneys”. Dark clouds loom on the horizon. From the side street of a small German town files a column of SS troops. And the song that keeps time to their crunching tread? People to Arms!

The prose style is often ornate, yet the sensibility shaping Leigh Fermor’s verbal arabesques is robust, never prissy. The next instalment of his trek across Europe is titled Between the Woods and the Water. It leaves him at the door of Romania. I’m still waiting for a final leg of the trilogy, which promises to deliver both writer and reader to Constantinople in 1935. Paddy had been working on it for years, and his publishers have guaranteed posthumous publication “in due course”.

From Romania and Bulgaria, Paddy journeyed down the Black Sea coast, spending a night among piratical Balkan cave-dwellers.

Legendary Hellas beckoned, and he began to dream of Greece and the Greeks. He spent his 20th birthday in a monastery atop Mount Athos, his curiosity about such haunts later bearing fruit in a book about monastic life titled A Time to Keep Silence. He discovered an aptitude for Greek, took part in a minor military skirmish, roamed the country and fell in love with it. In 1940, as Mussolini bore down on the Albanian frontier, he was working as a liaison officer to Greek forces. When the Germans entered Greece he was dispatched by British special operations to Crete to organise local resistance.

By the spring of 1944, when the order went out to kidnap Hitler’s man on the island, Paddy had been on Crete for two years. General Karl Heinrich Kreipe was comfortably installed in the Villa Ariadne, (home to Arthur Evans during his excavations at Knossos), and drove there each day from German HQ. With a band of Cretan “brothers-in-arms” brandishing rifles, glinting eyes and ferocious whiskers, Leigh Fermor (by now a 29-year-old captain) abducted the general from his staff car and made off into the hills.

On the third morning the captive and his captors wake among the crags, the sun cresting over Mount Ida. The general smokes, gazing over the valley below, and murmurs the melancholy lines of Horace’s ninth ode, a lament for youth, inspired by the sight of another mountain range far away.

Leigh Fermor picks up the thread when the general leaves off, intoning the remaining five stanzas. Paddy later recalled the moment when Kreipe’s blue eyes “swivelled away from the mountain top to mine and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

An academic recording oral history in western Crete heard a version of the Kreipe story sung in 1953. A mere nine years after the events it narrates, the tale had become a celebration of patriotic derring-do. Cretan folklore credits local guerilla Lefkaris Tambakis (not one of those responsible) with the heroic kidnapping, diminishes the British involvement, and inserts a fiction about a beautiful Cretan girl who sleeps with Kreipe solely to procure for the guerillas his itinerary.

While Leigh Fermor in this re-telling of his story is combined with another British officer and relegated to almost observer status he would not, I think, have been disappointed by its mythical afterlife. In Greece before the advent of mass tourism he found a place alive to the past, and to myth – and simply alive!

This passage from Mani is celebrated for its effervescence:

“Soon the delighted cry of ‘Delphinia!’ went up: a school of dolphins was gambolling half a mile further out to sea. They seemed to have spotted us at the same moment, for in a second half a dozen were tearing their way towards us, all surfacing in the same parabola and plunging together as though they were in some invisible harness. Soon they were careening alongside and round the bows and under the bowsprit, glittering mussel-blue on top, fading at the sides through gun-metal dune-like markings to pure white, streamlined and gleaming from their elegant beaks to the clean flukes of their tails. They were beautiful abstractions of speed, energy, power and ecstasy leaping out of the water and plunging and spiralling and vanishing like swift shadows.”

Soon after reading A Time of Gifts, in the late 1980s, I asked Leigh Fermor’s publishers about the possibility of an interview: nobody even knew of him. So when, in 1995, I met a retired Greek general of Leigh Fermor’s generation at a waterfront restaurant in Sydney, I was keen for news. Yes, he knew Paddy. The two were old friends, having met in Palestine in 1941. They had both, I later found out, helped blow up a bridge over the Gorgopotamos in 1942 in an early strike for special forces.

I left that meeting with a phone number and what sufficed for an address in Kardamyli. I called and spoke to Paddy briefly. He asked me to pass on a curious message to the general, whom he called Themi (short for Themistocles): “Tell him I’ve got the maps.” He was referring, I believe, to charts of Gorgopotamos.

I sent a letter to Paddy and received a reply, written on the back of a photograph of the author’s open-air study with a cat sitting beside his writing desk, as artfully posed as an Egyptian funerary decoration. This was Tiny Tot “who has gone to a better world and is now mousing above the clouds”, he explained, and went on to fill in a few details about the war. I still have that note. And it led me in time to his home.

Having finally arrived, I was in no great hurry to leave. I rented a cottage by the beach with a view of the millpond Messenian Gulf. I got burnt. I went brown. I swam half a kilometre out from the pebbled beach and starfished on my back gazing at the sun.

While shopping one day for provisions, the store owner cried that Leigh Fermor had returned after his convalescence in London. My admiration for the writer was genuine, and I had come a long way. And hadn’t he once been gracious enough to write? So I should surely try one last time to arrange a meeting.

But then I caught myself. I looked down at my dusty sandalled feet, and up at the line of gums and power lines surmounted by bald-headed Taygetus.

Leigh Fermor’s life had been a procession of adventures. My journey to Kardamyli had been a much more modest quest, but then I lived in an unadventurous age. I was grateful for Kardamyli, and to Paddy.

I returned from Greece with that phone number in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing the day I decided, finally, to be content with the man I knew from the writing I loved.

Sir Wanderlust – Portrait von Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Here are two more articles from Germany supplied to me by Christian Peters from Koln.

Sir Wanderlust vonWolf Reiser, first published in Travellers World

Travellersworld-Sir Wanderlust-1

Die Heimat der Nomaden, first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung

SZ-MANI-REISER

Paddy’s memorial service

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Just a very quick update to inform many of you who have enquired about a date for Paddy’s memorial service.

It is likely that this will not take place until late 2011, perhaps even in December. When I know more I will update you all.

In the meantime there may be a service in Kardamyli but nothing is set yet.

Leigh Fermor’s hidden letters to see the light

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It has been 15 years in the making but at last Artemis Cooper’s official biography of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor has got a publication date. Cooper was first contracted to write an account of the life of her friend, the great travel writer, back in the Nineties but Leigh Fermor had requested that it was not to be published until after his death, which came last Friday at the grand age of 96. Cooper, wife of historian Antony Beevor and daughter of John Julius Norwich, is now expecting the book to come out late next year with John Murray, also Sir Paddy’s publisher. The delay is believed to be down to a number of private letters — possibly to his late wife, Joan Leigh Fermor— which he did not want to be in the public sphere while he was still alive. Sir Patrick was in his eighties when the book was commissioned and friends confess that they did not expect such a long wait. As a young man he walked across Europe and swam the Bosphorus. He lived for many years in the Peloponnese. Recently, his correspondence with the Duchess of Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley, was published.Cooper, administrator of the Duff Cooper literary prize in memory of her grandfather, is still holding back the exciting details of the book. “It’s not finished yet,” she tells me, dodging questions about the content. “We’ll do it in time for Christmas next year.” Leigh Fermor’s funeral will be held on Thursday in the village of Dumbleton in Gloucestershire, where Joan is buried.

From the Londoner’s Diary in The Evening Standard, 14 June 2011

Economist obituary: Paddy Leigh Fermor

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Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, traveller, writer and war hero, died on June 10th, aged 96

First published in the Economist, Jun 16th 2011

ONE evening in the spring of 1934 19-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor, making his way on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, found himself taking tea under flowering horse-chestnut trees at the kastely of Korosladany, in Hungary.

“We sat talking until it was lighting-up time, and indoors pools of lamplight were being kindled with spills along the succession of lavender-smelling rooms. It lit the backs of bindings, pictures, furniture which had reached exactly the right pitch of faded country-house shabbiness, curtains laundered hundreds of times over and music open above the keys of a piano. What music? I can’t remember; but suddenly, sailing into my mind after all these years, there is a bowl on the piano of enormous white and red peonies and a few petals have dropped on the polished floor.”

Wherever he went, the dusty young traveller stumbled on scenes like this. His hosts in the oddest corners of central Europe dressed in black tie for dinner, played ferocious bicycle polo in the courtyard, or catalogued their butterfly collections in cavernous libraries where he could lose himself deliriously among folios, almanacs and scrolls with dangling seals. They lent him pearl-handled pistols and a superb chestnut horse “with more than a touch of Arab to his brow” to take him across the plains. Long Turkish nargileh were indolently smoked, Tokay swigged from cut glass; while, upstairs, staff would be neatly laying out on his bed the rumpled canvas trousers and thin tweed jacket which were the smartest clothes he had, purchased for his odyssey from Millet’s army surplus in the Strand.

He had set out on his great walk for a jumble of reasons, but mostly to have fun. He felt “preternaturally light”, as he left London, “as though I were already away and floating like a djinn escaped from its flask.” Formal education didn’t suit him; the wild, noisy boy couldn’t bear to be hemmed in with rules or bounds, and had been expelled from King’s Canterbury for holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter. Yet he loved books, especially the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Kingsley’s “Heroes”, and could now see himself as a knight or a wandering scholar, going from castle to castle or, just as happily, sleeping in woods and barns or under the stars.

In his rucksack he carried, besides pencils and notebooks, poetry. As he went he recited Keats, Marlowe and Shakespeare, astonishing the rustics he met—just as he would later amaze his dinner guests, in Worcestershire or in his Elysian house by the sea in deepest Greece, with non-stop recitations, arcane facts, stories and songs, not infrequently ending with “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” sung in Hindi.

He was a compulsive autodidact, wanting to know the names and nature of everything. Entering a strange region, he would grapple with its history, rifling through the Encyclopedia Britannica and Meyers Konversationslexicon to trace the movements of tribes and the collision of cultures, producing in his books whole page-lists of Klephts and Armatoles, Kroumides and Koniarides, Phanariots of the Sublime Porte and boyars of Moldowallachia, until his readers swooned. With the same high-spirited eagerness, and a flask full of local fire-water, he would run into taverns, caves, shepherd huts and gypsy camps, hungry to pick up the unknown language and join in. Dashing and courteous, splendidly handsome, he wished often for the strange hats he saw, bowler or thin-brimmed, foot-high or scarlet-plumed, in order to flourish them high to all the people who wished him well.

Critics of his two best-loved books, “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and “Between the Woods and the Water” (1986), complained that he swanned through 1930s Europe without noticing the clouds. His visit to the Munich Hofbräuhaus mostly described the enormous girth and appetite of ordinary Bavarians, barely mentioning the black-clad SS men in another room. An encounter with orthodox Jews in Transylvania focused on a reading, which thrilled him, of the Song of Miriam in Hebrew. Though both books were written decades after the event, he added no politics to them. Culture, beauty, romance and laughter were what he saw and cared for.

By the same token, he never wrote about his wartime experience as a liaison officer with the partisan guerrillas in Crete—except to mention the swagger-black boots and mulberry sash of his disguise, and the evenings of drinking raki and cracking walnuts outside their mountain hideouts. He earned his DSO for crazily kidnapping a German general; but the moment he remembered was when that general, one dawn of his captivity, suddenly quoted a line of Horace, Vides ut alta stet nive candidum/Soracte; and Captain Leigh Fermor, aka Michali, finished the next five stanzas for him.

He refused a knighthood almost to the end, pointing out that he had written only a slow handful of books. This was true. He had become famous largely for chronicling a Europe that had been swept away, and had spent a charmed life without a regular job, fed—as he liked to put it—like Elijah, by the ravens. But he had done more. His wandering, writing life evoked the essential unity of Europe, the cultural and linguistic intertwinings and layer upon layer of shared history; and all with a lightness, and an infectious joy, that inspired many others to set out in the same way.

Traveller’s Rest

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"I have been lost again in a forest of whiskers for about three weeks, and my old mountain chums are down in the plains now, looking incredibly wild and shaggy"

From the personal blog of John Stathatos, who knew Paddy well and is a photographer based in the Greek island of Kythera.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Paddy’ to his many friends as well as to the numerous readers for whom he became an admired and much-loved figure, died on June 10th at the age of 96. He had fallen gravely ill in Greece towards the middle of May; when the end became inevitable, he asked to be flown back to England, arriving with less than a day in hand.

Paddy was loved as much for himself as for his writing, not only in England and Greece, his adopted second country, but seemingly also everywhere in the world his books had penetrated. It is almost impossible to think of an equivalent public figure of whom it could be said that throughout a long life lived at high physical and intellectual intensity, he showed true malice towards none, encountering little if any in return.

This delightful sketch of himself in Cretan dress was penned at the top of a letter to my mother dated 17th November, 1944; as he explains, “I have been lost again in a forest of whiskers for about three weeks, and my old mountain chums are down in the plains now, looking incredibly wild and shaggy”. Ελαφρύ το χώμα που τον σκέπασε.

John Stathatos

Constantinople on foot, Antibes in a Jaguar – interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Nearly twenty years ago I interviewed Patrick Leigh Fermor when he was awarded a small but lustrous French literary prize by the town of Antibes in the south of France. He died today at the age of ninety-six and this account is reprinted here in tribute. To paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, our count of enchanting witnesses has diminished by one.

By Julian Evans

First published in The Guardian, October 1992. Republished on Julian Evan’s website 10 June 2011.

The first time I rode in a Jaguar was as the guest of a Bordeaux wine merchant who had invited me to lunch at one of the family châteaux (his sister’s, I think). His idea of le chic britannique was to drive with one hand on the wheel and his foot on the floor, down roads lined with broom that swept the flanks of the dusty, hurtling car.

The second time was a few weeks ago, in Antibes. I had an exhibition to go to, followed by lunch and later an award ceremony and dinner for a literary prize.

I had dawdled in my hotel room, wondering how to get to the exhibition. Eventually I decided to order a taxi and took the lift down to the hotel reception. On the apron outside, the sun bouncing off the glossy declivity of its bonnet, a Jaguar was waiting.

The French possess a unique ability to appropriate elements of other nations’ identity and recreate them as their own. Their skyscrapers, their tweed caps and their seasides once belonged somewhere else, and now they’re completely French. In Britain the rakish Jaguar XJ6 is a serious (which means class-conscious) reward of mercantile or political labour. Owning a Jaguar is something a company director rises to. In France a Jaguar is ultimately a toy; a plaything, no stranger to amusement. One begins to suspect the French of a certain income of giving each other Jaguars for Christmas. I say this because, in my experience, there are conventions to the awarding of literary prizes and the provision of chauffeur-driven Jaguars for visiting journalists is not one of them.

The Prix Jacques Audiberti de la Ville d’Antibes, worth 50,000 francs to the laureate, was set up four years ago to honour a writer with a special interest in the Mediterranean. In four years, it has twice been awarded to a British writer, the first time to Lawrence Durrell, and this year to Patrick Leigh Fermor. (The other two laureates, Jacques Lacarrière and Jacqueline de Romilly, have been French.)

Audiberti was a playwright and poet. He was born into the artistic community of Antibes, a cosmopolitan list which, apart from Picasso and Graham Greene, includes Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Scott Fitzgerald, Nicolas de Staël and Nikos Kazantzakis. Audiberti is one of that long roll of second-division writers whom the French enjoy and do not forget. They stay in print, and have streets – and prizes – named after them.

The willingness of this small seaside town to honour foreign writers is one of its obscurer virtues. From the perspective of a country that pays only lip service to literary internationalism (the Booker’s Commonwealth entry requirements are, after all, based on an imperial notion of extended British citizenship), it is interesting.

As Michel Déon, the president of the jury – an Academician and a hugely successful novelist in France and continental Europe – said to me at the award ceremony that evening: ‘I lived in Southend before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place of villas and tennis courts. I think I am the only person to have written a novel set in Southend. But I think I will wait a very long time if I wait for an invitation to go back.’

Antibes is a rich, old town, top-heavy with money and reserve. The villas on the Cap, lived in all year round, are bounded by high white walls inset with electrically operated gates. Behind the walls, massed pines lead down discreetly lit drives to houses and cupolas of shiny stucco: Belgravia-on-Sea. Antibes is a place where, if you step off the tourist rack, you feel you are likely to be asked your business. This is generally a less difficult question to answer if you are in the back of a Jaguar.

The association of literature with the very rich makes it suspect for some, but the town has little to gain from literary huckstering. It has the Musée Picasso in the Château Grimaldi; more wealthy tourists than it can carelessly accommodate; more than enough literary associations. (Graham Greene made it his home for twenty-five years before his death in 1991.) The Jacques Audiberti prize gives the impression of being itself a serious plaything for the town: a chance for it to indulge in some culturally-minded Mediterranean generosity.

Such questions of wealth and vanity would not occur to Patrick Leigh Fermor. He has spent almost sixty years adventuring outside England. For the last twenty-seven years he has lived on the edge of the Taygetus mountains in the Peloponnese in a house he built with his wife, Joan.

He describes this retreat with a flash of pleasure. ‘No social duties, no cocktail parties, no visiting!’ He says it as if reading from an embossed plate outside his front door.

He regards his success in France, where two of his books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, have recently been translated for the first time, as an incredible stroke of fortune. A linguist, scholar and soldier, he was stationed with resistance forces in Crete for two years in World War Two because he had learnt ‘obsolete Greek’ at school; he organised and carried out the kidnap of the German commander on the island, General Kreipe (who thus became the only German general to reach Cairo).

Fifty years later, he has not lost the diffident speech habits of the officer class. ‘Total delight,’ he says, raising his eyebrows high. ‘Frightfully pleased and honoured. A miracle, really….’

In fact the lightness Leigh Fermor conveys in person predates the war: it goes back to the fag end – the closing bars – of the Jazz Age, when he lived in bohemian circumstances in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market. It is also misleading as a clue to his books. His chronicles of a young man trudging across Europe to Constantinople are a lengthy essay in cheerfulness. Their greatest charm is that he mines every scene for positive impressions, even a Bierkeller in Cologne packed with Brownshirts or a Bratislavan brothel.

There is also an unstudied erudition to his writing. In the case of the brothel, he can name four authors – Lucian, Juvenal, Petronius and Villon – that it conjures up. He has a fascination for language, for its passage through history and dialect; he is able to winkle out in his later book of wanderings in northern Greece the seesaw of fortune that has the Greeks proud to call themselves ‘Romios’ at one era, then turns it into a term of abuse in the next, post-Byzantium. Few writers have explained, as he does in Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, a love for a country more eloquently than this:

‘I had begun to grasp, in the past few weeks, one of the great and uncovenanted delights of Greece; a pre-coming-of-age present in my case: a direct and immediate link, friendly and equal on either side, between human beings, something which melts barriers of hierarchy and background and money and, except for a few tribal and historic feuds, politics and nationality as well. It is not a thing which functions in the teeth of convention, but in almost prelapsarian unawareness of its existence. Self-consciousness, awe and condescension (and their baleful remedy of forced egalitarianism), and the feudal hangover and the post-Fall-of-the-Bastille flicker – all the gloomy factors which limit the range of life and deoxygenize the air of Western Europe, are absent. Existence, these glances say, is a torment, an enemy, an adventure and a joke which we are in league to undergo, outwit, exploit and enjoy on equal terms as accomplices, fellow-hedonists and fellow-victims. A stranger begins to realize that the armour which has been irking him and the arsenal he has been lugging about for half a lifetime are no longer needed. Miraculous lightness takes their place.’

Leigh Fermor was born in the second year of the Great War. He roamed free on a Northamptonshire farm for four years as a foster-child, and when his mother and sister came to fetch him they got a small savage back.

He was tamed by degrees, but the lawless years stamped him. Schools couldn’t hold him; a psychiatrist recommended a very advanced school for difficult children near Bury St Edmunds, an exotic paradise where children and staff performed nature-worshipping eurhythmics naked together in a barn. Later he ran away from prep school, and he was sacked from the King’s School in Canterbury after being discovered, at the end of a chain of reckless behaviour, making love to a shopgirl on some upturned apple-baskets.

His gallant and long-suffering mother made attempts to settle him, but her greatest gift was the imagination to see that he had to be allowed freedom. His first wanderings across Europe would nowadays be a stunt for a professional travel writer. Leigh Fermor walked because he was poor, he was young, and he wanted to go as slowly as he could. His rule was that he would only accept lifts in bad weather. He met Robert Byron in a nightclub: ‘dragon-green Byzantium loomed serpent-haunted and gong-tormented’. He set out on 9th December 1933 and did not come back to England until 1937.

Books came later. An illuminating story connects the delay to his close and lifelong attachment to women. (In print these adventures are delicately recounted. A sentence from a description of an affair with a married Hungarian girl in a red skirt sums them up – ‘All had marvellously changed of a sudden… during the next two nights and days, all unentwined moments seemed a waste.’)

This story comes up in a roundabout way when I ask him if Greece is the place where he has been most happy. He begins to talk about Moldavia. When the walk came to an end, he became friends with a family who had a rambling country house there: he stayed for two years.

‘I was very attached to one member of the household, a girl, and we were having an idyllic time, picnics and riding, watching the reaping and all the hayricks being made. We rode all over northern Moldavia and Bessarabia. Suddenly war broke out, and I had no prescient feeling that the war was going to last as long or tear everything up by the roots, so I left a lot of things there, including my great fat battered green diary which had all my travels in.

‘When the Communists took over, the family were given a quarter of an hour to pack and only allowed to take one suitcase each, and this great friend of mine who I adored, saw my diary lying on top of a bookcase. It caught her eye and she chucked it into the bag she took off with her to the Carpathian foothills, where they were forced to settle. I was blacklisted and couldn’t get back to see her for twelve years. Eventually I smuggled myself in, and I arrived at her house and there it was on the table: the diary that all these books are based on. It was a miraculous recovery.’

Leigh Fermor’s miraculous Europe has vanished. The castles he was invited to have been turned into lunatic asylums; the hillocks of Moldavia have been bulldozed; the amiable nineteen-year-old freak that everyone took under their wing has been succeeded by whole populations. But there is a thoroughness – an almost architectural thoroughness – to his re-creation of the journey. The books are a restoration project. Of the final volume, he is ‘making very heavy weather. I go back to a country and follow the route very roughly to see if I am going to drop any terrific bricks – “I sat dreamily in the marketplace and gazed up at the weathercock on the cathedral”, that sort of thing, so I go back to see if the weathercock is visible from there or not. And recently I went back to Bulgaria, and it put me off my stroke frightfully. They were cheerful people, marvellous singers, and now it is entirely soulless, organised in a Marxist sort of way, and with it the death of all joy and pleasure, and’ – he pauses to stare hard into the pre-Marxist past – ‘that upset me terribly.’

His excursion into civilisation this time around might have been expected to put him off his stroke. But he very nearly bounces as he says: ‘Terrific fun.’ Antibes, unlike Bulgaria, is more or less as it was, in the glamour of the Fitzgerald years.

Several events are laid on. There is, in fact, a celebration of British writing. It is Graham Greene’s birthday, and an exhibition of his life is opened on the second floor of the Musée Picasso. The town wanted to name a square in Greene’s honour, but his estate said that things were not done like that in England. (It is difficult not to cavil at British stiffness: our ambassador has twice been invited and has not replied.) The secretary of the prize, Pierre Joannon, throws a lunch at his villa, on a terrace the size of a tennis court, overlooking the Golfe-Juan. Greene’s partner Yvonne Cloetta is there, looking elegant and frail, and so is Vivienne, Paddy Campbell’s widow. ‘If he were still alive,’ she says sweetly, ‘he would kill Peter Mayle.’ I spend some time talking to an American postgraduate with cornflower-blue eyes – she has been awarded the other prize of the day, which provides a grant to a student of Lawrence Durrell’s work – then I mention to M. Joannon that I would love a swim in his pool. He returns with an armful of swimming costumes.

At night the Jaguars ferry the guests down a succession of pine-masked drives, first for the prizegiving, to a villa whose lighted veranda and enormous garden recall Jay Gatsby’s East Egg mansion, and then to dinner at a ‘large, proud, rose-coloured hotel’: the Hôtel du Cap Eden Roc which was the model for Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers, the place of Dick and Nicole Diver’s first appearance in Tender Is the Night.

Towards the end of dinner, Leigh Fermor stands to tell the mayor of Antibes in his diffident way what a wonderful gift he has of doing it all so lightly. One of the last and unlikeliest of the Bright Young Things is at home here, despite the social duties, while I retain a brief contrasting memory of the self-conscious beauty contests that are literary prizes in Britain. On the way back to our hotel I am consoled by another Fitzgeraldian moment, as the Jaguar is overfull and I find an American academic with cornflower-blue eyes sitting on my lap in the front seat.

You need to watch the French sometimes. They have a habit of equating writing with glamour that in recent years has led to endless novels with architect heroes and slight storylines in oriental settings. On this occasion, they succeeded in making a robust occidentalist – a virtuoso of the unfinished journey and rescuer of a disappeared past – one of their own. He joins the Jaguar.

Le Monde: Mort de l’écrivain voyageur Patrick Leigh Fermor

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By Jean Soublin

First published in Le Monde 17 June 2011

En 1944, le jeune Leigh Fermor, issu de la grande bourgeoisie anglaise, organisait en Crète la résistance contre l’occupant allemand. Il parvint avec ses maquisards à capturer un général SS et l’emmena pour le cacher dans les montagnes avant de l’acheminer vers la mer, d’où on l’enverrait en Egypte. Alors que le soleil apparaissait derrière le mont Ida, l’Allemand murmura le début d’une strophe latine dans laquelle Horace célèbre cette montagne. Le jeune Fermor, bon latiniste lui aussi, continua la strophe. “Ach so, Herr Major !” lui glissa le SS. Cette émotion partagée par deux hommes enracinés dans les mêmes valeurs littéraires a sans doute marqué le jeune Anglais : presque tous les ouvrages qu’il a publiés sont empreints de ce qu’on pourrait qualifier de “Désir d’Europe”. L’envie de connaître, de comprendre, et finalement de chanter sa patrie européenne, ses origines grecques, son histoire commune, ses valeurs partagées.

Son premier ouvrage, publié au début des années cinquante, est pourtant un récit de voyage aux Antilles : The Travellers Tree. Fermor donne ici sa première leçon, magistrale, sur la manière de voyager, de ressentir, de partager et de décrire ce qui compte : les paysages, naturellement, mais surtout la vie des gens, leurs espoirs et leurs découragements. De Trinidad à la Jamaïque, avec un long et passionnant passage sur Haïti, toujours attentif aux croyances : ses commentaires sur le vaudou sont fascinants. On retrouve cette même veine antillaise dans son unique nouvelle : The Violins of Saint Jacques, un petit chef-d’œuvre d’observation attristée, sa seule œuvre de fiction.

Les ouvrages suivants, sont écrits surtout en Grèce, où l’auteur s’est installé au cours des années cinquante et où il passera la plus grande partie de sa vie : Mani et Rouméli décrivent les paysages et les personnages du Péloponnèse. C’est aussi de cette époque que date A Time to Keep Silence : une réflexion religieuse. Fermor y observe la vie monacale dans diverses abbayes françaises et termine en les comparant aux communautés monastiques de Cappadoce. Continue reading →

Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ, «Ελληνας» από επιλογή, πολίτης του κόσμου

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From John Stathatos

An article about Paddy pubished on the 15th in Kathimerini, the leading Greek broadsheet newspaper. The last paragraph is particularly interesting: “The stone-built house which he raised with his own hands in Kardamyli has been left to the Benaki Museum. According to the museum’s director, Angelos Delivorias, “It was his wish that that the house should provide hospitality and a place to work in for a few months to writers and poets visiting Greece” (my translation).

John

=======================================================

Του Σπυρου Γιανναρα

Λίγοι άνθρωποι αξιώνονται να μνημονεύονται ως θρύλοι πριν από τον θάνατό τους. Λίγοι έχουν την ευτυχία να ζήσουν έναν πολυκύμαντο και δημιουργικό βίο σαν του Πάτρικ Λη Φέρμορ. Ο αυτοδίδακτος λόγιος στρατιωτικός, που από ήρωας πολέμου μεταμορφώθηκε σε μεγάλη προσωπικότητα των γραμμάτων, τίμησε με το έργο του τη γενέτειρά του, αλλά και τον επίλεκτο τόπο της καρδιάς του, την Ελλάδα. Ο μεγαλύτερος συγγραφέας ταξιδιωτικής λογοτεχνίας της εποχής μας, σύμφωνα με Βρετανούς ομοτέχνους του, όπως ο Ουίλιαμ Νταλρίμπλ, έγραψε βιβλία για τη «Μάνη» (1958) και τη «Ρούμελη» (1966) σε μια θαυμάσια πρόζα που ενέπνευσε μεγάλους συγγραφείς του είδους, όπως ο διακεκριμένος μαθητής του, Μπρους Τσάτουιν. Δεν είναι τυχαίο, άλλωστε, ότι ο Φέρμορ ήταν εκείνος που σκόρπισε τις στάχτες του Τσάτουιν σ’ ένα βυζαντινό παρεκκλήσι κοντά στο σπίτι του στην Καρδαμύλη. Continue reading →

Travel writing: Lost art in search of a lost world

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Few authors have been able to equal Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ability to dissolve into the places described in his books.

Editorial, first published in The Guardian 18 June 2011

“I hate the French cookery, and abominate garlick,” Tobias Smollett told his readers 245 years ago, with a snooty disregard for foreigners that runs through too much travel writing today. Describing distant places fairly, curiously and entertainingly has never been easy. Few authors, in any century, have been able to equal Patrick Leigh Fermor’s liquid ability to dissolve into the places described in his books, so that he seemed to be less reporting on than living in them. His death this month, at 96, with the third of his great trilogy of prewar European exploration still unpublished, is a moment to ask what travel writing can still achieve.

Leigh Fermor was lucky, in that he walked through an archaic and aristocratic eastern Europe soon to be obliterated by the second world war. His two greatest books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, take readers into a time and place that can never exist again, and that, as much as his pitch-perfect writing, is why they are among those few books worth reading many times.

Few of today’s writers have this advantage. They must describe a world in which it is easier to communicate, and travel, than ever before. No teenager setting off from Tower Bridge now would find themselves amid ballgowns, hunting parties and lonely mountaintop shepherds. Facebook and text messaging have brought Bucharest and Birmingham closer. Describing difference has been made harder.

Leigh Fermor was one of the last of the great travel writers whose experience spanned the previous century. A varied assortment, mostly men, wrote books that still stand as classics today: among them Eric Newby, Norman Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger. Jan Morris, still writing, deserves to be among them. Two decades ago, a fresh crop of authors revived the art but then fell victim to their own celebrity, Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux included.

Where does travel writing stand now? There are fewer famous authors and fewer sales. Some of the best books involve almost no travel at all: Roger Deakin’s account of wild swimming in Britain, Waterlog, or Neil Ansell’s lovely Deep Country, about the birds and landscape of mid-Wales. William Dalrymple remains an explorer in the classical sense: in From the Holy Mountain he shows Byzantium is not quite destroyed. William Blacker’s Along the Enchanted Way, about eight years living in rural Romania, is the closest modern writing has come to Leigh-Fermor, and not only because the Gypsy and Saxon life he shares is almost gone.

Always, the attraction is the slow pace. There is no need for hurry, no requirement for horror, just immersion in a place and time that is different, even when it is not far from our own.

King’s School Canterbury: Death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of the school’s most distinguished former pupils died on Friday 10 June.

Published on the King’s School Canterbury website 12th June 2011

Born in 1915, Paddy Leigh Fermor was in The Grange from 1929 to 1931, when his school career came to a premature end. For his own view of the school see the final passage in Memories of King’s. He had a distinguished war career, especially in Crete. His involvement in the kidnap of General Kreipe was later the subject of the film Ill Met By Moonlight, directed by another OKS Michael Powell.

He is widely regarded as the best travel writer of the twentieth century. A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) describe his journey across Europe in the mid-1930s.

He returned to the school on several occasions, most recently in 2007 to open the new Grange boarding house.

Many tributes to him can be seen here: Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Some Memories of King’s .. And the final word goes to?

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor opens new facility at King’s School Canterbury

So No More He’ll Go A-Roving

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Patrick Leigh Fermor was a maker of paradisiacal sentences that leave the reader hungry for life.

Toward the end of his life, the great writer, war hero and traveler Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died on June 10 at age 96, grew deaf and suffered from poor eyesight, sometimes wearing a rakish eye patch to correct his vision. But when I saw him last September he was still volubly alert, his memory undimmed as he retold stories of World War II. His hair was thick, hardly grayed, and his hands resting on the tablecloth resembled knots of wood. We were seated outside for lunch beneath the Byzantine-styled arches of his villa in southern Greece. Ilex trees cast shadows on the stone walls, and waves washed the rocky beach nearby.

It was good to be back.

by David Mason

First published in The Wall Street Journal, 18 June 2011.

Thirty years ago, my first wife and I had lived in a tiny stone hut next door to this magnificent house on a bay called Kalamitsi, land once considered sacred to the Nereids, sea nymphs of Greek myth. A young would-be writer, I was given the great gift of friendship by Paddy and his wife, Joan. They meant as much to me as models of gracious living as anyone I have ever known. Joan (tall, angular, quiet, unfailingly wise) died in 2003, and Paddy soldiered on in her absence, buoyed by friends and his own unkillable enthusiasm for life.

In September, Paddy talked of the British retreat from northern Greece nearly 70 years earlier, how he and several companions in a Special Operations Executive unit found themselves making a mad dash south with a suitcase of money meant to shore up the Greek war effort. They bought a fishing boat, but it was shot out from under them by dive-bombing Stukas, “sending the suitcase and all that money straight to Davy Jones”—and several British commandos, Paddy among them, into the Aegean to swim for their lives. Following more trials, they made it to Crete in time for another battle and another retreat.

Paddy would return in 1942 to the island by parachute to live in the caves and mountains among shepherds and guerrilla fighters. He is best known for having kidnapped the German commander of the Cretan occupation in 1944—a story often related with romantic dash and brio and even made into a movie. Dirk Bogarde portrayed Paddy onscreen in “Ill Met by Moonlight” (1957). Yet Paddy himself avoided starring roles. The movie was based on a fellow officer’s book on the raid, and Paddy preferred translating a Greek account by George Psychoundakis, “The Cretan Runner” (1955), to writing his own.

Never inclined to introspection, Paddy was endlessly curious about the world, and that curiosity distinguished his life and writing from our confessional age. He insisted that the reference library be near the dining-room table for consultation during mealtime arguments. Once, as he recounted in his lecture, “The Aftermath of Travel,” he started researching “the distribution of crocodiles on the Upper Volta River, where I had never been or ever wanted to go. I took down the right volume of the Encyclopedia, but must have opened it at the wrong page, for three weeks later I had read the complete works of Voltaire, but I still knew nothing about the distribution of those crocodiles.”

What made Paddy famous as a writer—or as famous as a writer’s writer can be—was his narrative of walking from Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s. The writing was spurred by the unexpected recovery of diaries that he had assumed were lost forever, and what resulted was a pair of masterpieces, “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and “Between the Woods and the Water” (1986). A third volume completing the journey is still awaited. The glacial pace of Paddy’s writing frustrated many readers, but his weaving and unweaving of sentences resulted in some of the richest English prose we have. Here he is in Vienna with a young Frisian Islander who learned his English from reading Shakespeare:

Our way back took us along the Graben and the Kärntnerstrasse. About lamplighting time, I had noticed a small, drifting population of decorative girls who shot unmistakable glances of invitation at passersby. Konrad shook his head. “You must beware, dear young,” he said in a solemn voice. “These are wenches and they are always seeking only pelf. They are wanton, and it is their wont.”

The particular exuberance of his prose came from endless revision, where he added layer upon layer of detail as his mind leapt nimbly across cultures and centuries. He wrote to me in 1985 about the second volume: “I have just put the mss on the Oitylo-Athens bus where it is to be met by the typist, who will get to work on it at once: now for pruning, revision, scissors and paste, the moment I get it back.” His manuscripts were fringed with emendations, often covered with fanciful scrawls and illustrations.

I have a copy of one of them, “Notes on the Hellespont,” sent to me after he had celebrated his 70th birthday by swimming that legendary strait. The typescript is covered not only with marginal arrows and alterations but also with seagulls, clouds and waves drawn with his fountain pen. “I was swimming sidestroke, and began to notice a strange fluctuating and hissing noise under my submerged left ear; it was very eerie, like an echo in a vast dark room below, and I thought it must have been the grinding of pebbles and silt at the bottom of the sea.” Continue reading →

An account of Paddy’s funeral

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I drove over to Paddy Leigh Fermor’s funeral at Dumbleton today. I have no connection with the family. What follows is just a series of observations for other fans who could not be there, separated only by time and distance.

This account of Paddy’s funeral was written and submitted by’Andy’.

Dumbleton is a small Cotswold village set in green pastoral of unripe wheat fields and hay meadows. The honour guard was provided by veterans of the Intelligence Corps, PLF’s old regiment. Two uniformed Intelligence Corps soldiers complete with green lanyards were also present.

The church was full – many men in dark suits and several Greeks among them. A cheery woman welcomed us and a choir in blue smocks crammed into the stalls. As the coffin was borne in by four local undertakers the priest, the Rev Nicholas Carter, intoned, ‘I am the resurrection and the light. Whosoever believeth in me shall never die,’ always the most stirring start to a Church of England funeral.

Sarah Gabriel sang, ‘Amazing Grace,’ her voice filling the church, capturing, perhaps, the loneliness of death and departure. Then Colin Thubron read Sir Thomas Browne – The Garden of Cyrus with its admonition to ‘close the five ports of knowledge.’

We then stood to sing ‘The King of love my shepherd is…’ The second reading was taken from the apocryphal Book of James, chapter XVIII verse two. Mary is just about to give birth to the Christ child. Everything comes to a standstill, frozen for an instance, as the author of their motion is born of woman. The piece was read very competently by Robert Kenward, concluding, ‘And of a sudden all things moved onward in their course.’

The most challenging part of the service must have been the sermon. How does one write and then deliver a eulogy for a man widely revered as the greatest writer in the English language, certainly of his generation, if not the entire cannon?

The genial Reverend Carter mounted the pulpit and cast off with aplomb and bonhomie. Comparing PLF’s life to a ‘wine goblet overflowing with rich red wine,’ he paid tribute to PLF’s wide range of interests and uncanny ability to put people at ease – be they mountain shepherds or English aristocrats. ‘He saw himself first as a solider,’ said Carter. Second he was a writer, using ‘a rich panoply of words.’ Most importantly he paid tribute to PLF’s love of Greece, the country, its culture, its people and ouzo. The vicar startled the congregation briefly by urging us to take up where Patrick Leigh Fermor had left off. Various journalists and writers shifted uneasily in the pews. The day seemed suddenly hotter. ‘….By swimming the Hellespont aged 70,’ Carter went on. A much more realisable aspiration than equalling PLF’s literary fountain.

Of equal importance was his marriage to Joan, daughter of local family, Eyres-Monsell. ‘Joan was a soul mate and it was one of the happiest of marriages with always a deep love and affection between them.’ Sir Patrick, as he was referred to throughout, was always, ‘generous of spirit,’ – the sixth sense still extant in the absence of the other five. Deeply compassionate, PLF, was ‘always an English gentlemen, always impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite….He gave of himself unstintingly to all who needed him.

Quoting St John, ‘I am come that you might have life and have it to the full,’ Carter said, it was as if PLF, ‘picked up this quote and shone a torch on it..’ Nicholas Carter went on, ‘He was in constant celebration of being alive.’ And then ended with a traditional Greek blessing. ‘On touching sand may it always turn to gold.’

After the Lord’s Prayer and a rather wonderful hymn written by J. S. B. Monsell 1811 – 1875. Sarah Gabriel sang again. This must have been planned by the ever humorous PLF a while ago. Sarah Gabriel sang ‘Vedrai Carino,’ from Mozart’s Don Guiovanni. Reading a translation is well worth it. In the song the peasant girl, Zerklina, promises to comfort her lover. ‘You’ll see, dearest, if you’re a good boy what a lovely remedy I’ll give you…’ Clearly Patrick Leigh Fermor’s idea of the kingdom of heaven is wonderfully at variance with that of more serious theologians. The song continues, ‘Do you want to know where I keep it?’

The undertakers and Intelligence Corps had taken up their position, ramrod straight before the coffin, before the song commenced. At its conclusion they bore Patrick Leigh Fermor to his final resting place in the east of the country churchyard as Dr Alastair Kiszeley played the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ on the bagpipes outside. A bugler from the Irish Guards – PLF’s first regiment – immaculate in mirror finished boots, scarlet tunic and Bearskin, delivered the Last Post…note perfect.

Afterwards we approached the grave and threw pecks of confetti down. The sun shone throughout.

Behind the church an elderly couple were watering their garden. Despite his many travels and the inspiring association with Greece, Paddy Leigh Fermor lived and died an Englishman. An officer and a gentleman, he lies at home beside his adored wife deep in the English countryside. England may not always realise it but she is the richer for his courage, his bravery and his superlative blessing of her language. Rest in peace.

The Funeral Service of Patrick Leigh Fermor, 16 June 2011

He was in constant celebration of being alive

Patrick Leigh Fermor

He drank from a different fountain

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