Sky Arts Book Club takes a look inside The Travel Bookshop in Notting Hill, London and explores the book A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Click the picture to play.
As I was killing time doing some web searches for Paddy related material, I stumbled across this website which the creator John Chapman claims as a comprehensive guide to the history, geography and sites of the Mani. It is linked to a German language Mani travel site .
Having had a quick scoot around it certainly looks very comprehensive so if you are planning on a visit to the Mani you may wish to use it. The navigation is a bit clumsy, but the content looks very comprehensive indeed.
I found an apartment on the accompanying site where my family stayed on two occasions in the 1990’s near the quiet fishing village of Agios Dimitrios. Right by the sea with wonderful sunsets it is a great place for a holiday enabling you to visit the wider Peloponnese as well. Little did I know at the time that a lovely beach we found near Kardamili, that was overlooked by an inviting looking stone house was none other than the beach where Paddy swims and that the house was his.
Apart from the obvious interest in Paddy from Britain, and some from North America, it is the Germans who seem to have taken Paddy’s work to heart. Maybe it is due to the fact that a major part of Paddy’s 1934 journey was through Germany? This combined with his part in the kidnap of General Kreipe in Crete seems to hold their interest in him. Here is a recent piece about Mani from the Hamburger Abenblatt
Der britische Autor Patrick Leigh Fermor ist ein begnadeter Reiseschriftsteller, der wie kein zweiter die Eindrücke seiner Reisen nach Griechenland unmittelbar und atmosphärisch beschrieben hat. Längere Zeit verbrachte er als britischer Agent auf Kreta während des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Anfang der 50er Jahre kam Fermor auf die Halbinsel Mani auf der Peleponnes. Damals eine einsame Landschaft ohne Touristen, in der das mythische Griechenland und orientalische Byzanz lebendig scheinen.
Beim Dörlemann Verlag sind bereits zwei Bände mit seinen berühmten Wanderungen erschienen. Neu ist nun sein Buch “Mani – Reisen auf der südlichen Peleponnes”. Nie habe ich eine so wild-schöne Geschichte des Johannes-Festes gelesen wie hier:
“Die freudige Festtagsstimmung und die wahnwitzige Temperatur ließen die Luft vibrieren. Die Steinplatten am Wasser, wo ich mich mit Joan und Xan Fielding zum Essen niederließ, strahlten die Hitze ab wie ein Bratentopf, wenn man den Deckel abnimmt. Einer plötzlichen, stillschweigenden Eingebung folgend, wateten wir voll bekleidet ins Meer hinaus und trugen den eisernen Tisch ein paar Schritt weit ins Wasser, dann holten wir drei Stühle, auf denen wir, bis zur Taille im kühlen Naß, um den hübsch gedeckten Tisch Platz nahmen, der jetzt, wie von Zauberhand getragen, eine Handbreit über den Fluten zu schweben schien. Als der Kellner einen Augenblick später auftauchte, starrte er verblüfft auf den leeren Fleck am Kai; als er uns dann entdeckte, kam er, das amüsierte Aufflackern seiner Miene sofort wieder unter Kontrolle, ohne Zögern ins Wasser, näherte sich, selbst bis zur Taille eingetaucht, würdevoll wie ein Butler und verkündete nur lakonisch: ‘Dinnertime’.”
Fermor ist ganz der griechischen Welt verfallen und findet, die griechische Sprache inzwischen meisterlich beherrschend, Zugang zu den Menschen. In seinen Büchern verbindet er gekonnt persönliche Eindrücke und Ausflüge mit den geschichtlichen Zeugnissen, die diese bedeutsame Landschaft in Überfülle bereit hält.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Mani. Reisen auf der südlichen Peloponnes. Deutsch von Manfred und Gabriele Allié. Dörlemann Verlag. 24,90 Euro
In “Aufgeblättert” stellen im Wechsel Rainer Moritz, Annemarie Stoltenberg (NDR) und Wilfried Weber (Buchhandlung Felix Jud) Bücher vor.
(for a faintly humorous translation from Google translate copy and past the above into here )
The following is a piece by Dimiter Kenarov from The Nation which contrasts the journey of Paddy along the banks of the Danube with the more recent account of Andrew Eames, recounted in Blue River, Black Sea. It is clear that if we were to try to follow the foosteps of Paddy that much has changed – I guess that much we knew – but that also the pace of change means that if we are to encounter the last feeble remnants of that post-Austro-Hungarian world, we had better move very fast. This is worth the read.
From Black to Black, a review of Blue River, Black Sea: A Journey Along the Danube Into the Heart of the New Europe
By Andrew Eames.
Every day, at three in the afternoon, I make a trip down the Danube. To travel from Germany’s Black Forest to Romania’s Black Sea takes a matter of minutes, so I try to enjoy myself as much as possible. I sink into a cushy armchair, rev up the stereo and embark on an epic voyage. “Information on the water levels of the Danube River, in centimeters,” the familiar voice on Horizont, the Bulgarian National Radio, announces with the deepest solemnity before reading out the relevant hydrographical values, first in Bulgarian and then in Russian and French. Vienna: 310 (+3); Mohács: 415 (+7); Novi Sad: 162 (-13); Vidin: 380 (+40); Giurgiu: 220 (0).
The captains of river vessels can easily map a course on the Internet, but the daily radio bulletin has remained a fixture in my life. For many years, listening to the fluctuations in the water levels of the Danube was the closest I could get to traveling abroad. Regensburg, Passau, Linz, Vienna: these names mesmerized me. Even places like Bratislava and Budapest, comrades in arms against the decadent West, had the ring of myth to a boy growing up in Bulgaria. Remembering his childhood in the Bulgarian river port of Ruschuk (now Ruse), Elias Canetti wrote, “There, the rest of the world was known as ‘Europe,’ and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe.” If people in Canetti’s immediate circle, at the beginning of the twentieth century, still had the occasional opportunity to waltz up to the palaces of the Habsburgs and back, however, the “Europe” I imagined in the 1980s existed only in a galaxy far, far away. To travel up the river as a tourist during the cold war required visas, special permissions, bureaucratic ballast. To swim across it, a negligible distance of a few hundred meters, was to risk both drowning and the bullets of border guards. For nearly fifty years the Danube was a demolished bridge, a liquid roadblock. The wall may have been in Berlin, but the truly impassable one was an invisible dam on the Danube, somewhere between Vienna and Bratislava.
The Danube—or Ister, as the ancient Greeks called it—is a natural highway of nearly 3,000 kilometers. “The greatest of all the rivers which we know,” declared Herodotus. “A path for the spirit to follow,” wrote Hölderlin, following the footfalls of the Greeks in his hymn “The Ister.” Human tribes traveled west against the current, colonizing the core of the continent, gradually shaping it. Before the Americas, there was Europe. The Romans made a few feeble attempts to bring traffic under control by turning the river into the fortified frontier, or limes, of their empire, but without much success. South of the Danube civilization cowered; in the north, the barbarians bided their time.
There is probably no other geographical element of Europe that has absorbed more political weather than the Danube. Unlike the Russian Volga and the Franco-German Rhine, it has served many masters, as a shield or a spear. In 1683, by the walls of Vienna, John III Sobieski and Charles of Lorraine routed the armies of Kara Mustafa, marking the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Not long thereafter, in 1704, the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy vanquished the Franco-Bavarian alliance at the Battle of Blenheim, an important event in the War of the Spanish Succession. Near the river town of Ulm, Napoleon forced the Austrians to surrender with barely a fight. And Hitler’s Drang nach Osten—yearning for the East—had a strong Danubian stink. “Do not forget,” the elderly Heinrich Heine wrote to the young Karl Marx, “the difference between water and a river is that the latter has a memory, a past, a history.”
It has taken twenty years of European integration for the memories of the cold war to seep away. Quietly meandering across ten countries—Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine—and running softly past more than fifty-five towns and cities, including four capitals, the Danube is once again a major route for trade and tourism, diluting national and political borders and linking numerous shoreline communities into a single organism. The Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, completed in 1992, allows ships to navigate passage from the North Sea to the Black, chugging through the heart of the continent. The river’s delta, with its sprawling network of lagoons and marshes, is a Unesco World Heritage Site and an important bird sanctuary—with its own environmental problems, of course. Today, to sail along the Danube is to see the new face of Europe, old as it is. And, luckily for me perhaps, the daily radio bulletins on Horizont are no longer my only means of travel.
Traveling the Danube became a fad in 1829. That was the year two Englishmen, John Andrews and Joseph Pritchard, founded the First Danube Steamship Company, which lured scores of elated pleasure seekers. “A motley crowd on board, such perhaps as never met together on the deck of a steam-boat before,” wrote the Irish journalist and literary editor Michael Quin about one of those early voyages. Standing among Austrians, Moldavians, Jews, Hungarian nobles and Tyrolean emigrants, he traveled in style down the river from Pest (Budapest) to the Ottoman town of Ruschuk. It was a thrilling but perilous undertaking. Unlike the well-trodden path of the Grand Tour, with its picturesque Parisian streetscapes and Florentine galleries, the Danube offered a wilder ride for people with money and a taste for adventure. Although its waters flowed across half the continent, knowledge of the river was scarce and scattered, especially when it came to portions under Ottoman control. Europe was split in two long before the cold war, and the Danube was the main gateway into its eastern, darker territories. The course of “civilization” had gradually reversed directions.
William Beattie, another of those early steamboat passengers, portrayed that division with typical Victorian bigotry. East of Budapest, he wrote in his 1844 travelogue The Danube, the tourist “feels as if he were taking farewell of civilization, and entering upon a vast primeval desert, where man is still a semi-barbarian; and where the arts by which he converts to his use the natural products of the earth are still in their infancy, or wholly unknown.” As far as Beattie was concerned, Eastern Europe might as well have been an island in the middle of the Pacific. Quin was similarly dismayed by the seemingly crude ways of life he encountered but a little bit more optimistic in his vision of the future. He praised “the miracles of the age of steam” and then blithely prophesied, “Those countries, which have hitherto seemed scarcely to belong to Europe, will be rapidly brought within the pale of civilization…and new combinations…will be created, which may give birth to important changes in the distribution of political power on the continent.” He was right, of course: steam did alter the political landscape of Eastern Europe. (Could it be that James Watt was personally responsible for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the whole contemporary history of the continent?) However, Quin’s journey down the Danube was also a reassertion of his cultural identity and his sunny view about technological progress. As the historian Larry Wolff pointed out in his seminal work Inventing Eastern Europe, “It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half.” And the Danube was the road most inventors took.
So many writers have traveled the Danube that their tributary ink, if channeled into a single stream, would turn the water black. From the Italian naturalist and geographer Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, who professed to have mastered “the anatomy of the river” and then published in 1726 his magisterial six-volume Opus Danubiale, to the contemporary Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy, with his playful travelogue The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube), published in 1991, the outflow of words has been endless. To look for the authentic Danube would be futile, for nobody can describe the same river twice. “It is I who will say what the Danube is,” Esterházy’s protagonist, the Traveler, insists, as so many others before him have: Germans and Austrians, Hungarians and Russians, as well as the odd Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian. For some reason, however, it was the British and a few American explorers, outsiders with ever-roving empirical eyes and an insatiable appetite for the foreign, who frequently attempted to distill the Danube’s essence. Some, like Quin and Beattie, were deeply prejudiced against the world they were about to encounter. Others, like the American painter Francis Davis Millet, who paddled downriver in a canoe in 1891, wrote about the local people and their environs with sympathy and understanding. Then there were those who transcended the ranks of mere travelers to join the great writers.
Patrick Leigh Fermor is the best of the lot. In the winter of 1933, at 18, he set out on foot from Rotterdam toward Istanbul—or Constantinople, as his romantic imagination insisted. With just a rucksack on his back and two books in hand—The Oxford Book of English Verse and the poems of Horace—he traversed the better part of the pre-war continent “like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar.” His trek along the Danube made up only one leg of his amazing odyssey, but it was the most remarkable one. Poring over his maps and trying to decide whether to head for sunny Venice or press farther east, he writes, “Just in time, the windings of the Middle and the Lower Danube began to reassert their claims and the Carpathians and the Great Hungarian Plain and the Balkan ranges and all these mysterious regions which lay between the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea brought their rival magnetisms into play. Was I really about to trudge through this almost mythical territory?” Continue reading
I wonder if anyone can help? Andrew Booker Rennie has posted a question on the Welcome page as follows. I am sure he would be grateful for any assistance. Please reply by adding a comment below or emailing me and I will pass on to him.
“I am researching the development of steel-drum music in Trinidad. PLF came to Trinidad and in the Traveller’s Tree described vividly what he saw of steel-band then. The problem is that no where in this account did PLF indicate what year he visited Trinidad. It is absolutely essential that I identify the year, 1945, 1946 or 1947. Can any one of Paddy’s researchers provide this information?”
abr
Between the Woods and the Water
I have just returned from Montenegro where I had a holiday with my family. It is a place that is not at the top of the list for most people I guess, but it does attract many Serbians and Russians, particularly to its spectacular coast.
We were attracted because it was different, has spectacular scenery dominated by huge mountains, is relatively unknown, and it also enabled us to visit some very famous Serbian Orthodox monasteries as my wife and I are also very interested in Byzantium and its art (see MyByzantine blog).
On our first night, as I casually flicked through the books left in our villa by the owner and previous visitors, I was surprised to come across a paperback copy of Between the Woods and the Water. It had been read and was in good condition. This gave me the excuse to encourage Kim to read it as she happened to be coming to the end of A Time of Gifts which she was enjoying.
It made me think that many of you who read the blog may have come across Paddy’s work in unusual circumstances, and in faraway places. It would be interesting to hear more; why not paste a comment below or email me (tsawford[at]btinternet.com)? Let’s see who has the most interesting tale to tell!
On the same steps as Paddy
“In the heart of them stood a massive building; my objective, the Hofbräuhaus. A heavy arched door was pouring a raucous and lurching party of Brownshirts onto the trampled snow.
I was back in beer territory. Halfway up the vaulted stairs a groaning Brownshirt, propped against the wall on a swastika’d arm, was unloosing, in a stanchless gush down the steps, the intake of hours. Love’s labour lost.”
Those of you well versed in Paddy’s writing will by now have realised that the above is not my own feeble prose but an excerpt from the passage in A Time of Gifts when Paddy enters Munich’s Hofbräuhaus in January 1934.
When I entered that vast temple to beer, sausage and sauerkraut at the end of June, I instantly felt like I had been there before, and indeed I had when I read Paddy’s finest work. Instantly I wanted to visit the chamber bursting with SA men singing Lore, lore, lore, and overweight young German burghers ‘as wide as casks ’ who were ‘… nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst, and blutwurst’ lifting stone tankards ‘for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow.’ Had it not been for the fact that this was midday instead of night I am sure I would have found it barely changed, save for the SA men, whose children and grandchildren (all aged now) have taken up residency.
The Rathaus Munich
My wife and I were in Munich after taking the overnight sleeper from Paris Est to Munich on our journey to see the Passion Play (Passionspiele) at Oberammergau. We had arrived at the relatively ungodly hour of seven o’clock in the morning and had seen Munich come to life on a Saturday morning.
At the time the Alt Stadt was almost exclusively ours apart from some stall holders preparing their wares of ripe and juicy, brightly coloured fruit and vegetables for the Saturday market; two young men demonstrating their ability on MX bikes beside a fountain; and a couple of drunks who had obviously made the most of the warm Friday evening and had now belatedly discovered that the party was over.
During the war Munich was severely bombed by the Americans. When on a NATO course at the German Pioneerschule in the 1980’s I remember a particularly loud American officer asking in all seriousness, whilst we were on a tour of the city, when seeing the massive towers and basilica of the Dom, “How the hell did we miss that?”. Well, of course they did not miss it. Seventy per cent of Munich was destroyed by the bombing and after the war there was a serious proposal to abandon the city and rebuild nearby. Fortunately for the Hofbräuhaus (which sustained minor damage) and for us it was decided to rebuild the city. Many of the older buildings, as with so many German cities, were painstakingly restored. The Dom and the Hofbräuhaus were amongst these.
Following a morning of strolling around the centre, visiting some of the sights, drinking känchen’s of schokolade and eating cinnamon flavoured kuchen I was desperate to find the Hofbräuhaus. I was determined not to make the same mistake as Paddy and end up two miles away; although the prospect of doing so and having a couple of himbergeist to see us on our way was not so unappealing!
We followed a lederhosen clad gentleman ...
Inadvertently we had somehow attached ourselves to an American tour party and listened patiently whilst the bored German tour guide briefed them all on practical logistics like not entering their PIN number more than twice in those mysterious German cash machines, and what they might see on their one hour of ‘freedom from the group’ until it was time to meet up again, climb into their coach and visit yet another city. When it came to question time I asked where I might find the Hofbräuhaus. The guide looked quizzically at me, thinking I must have some obscure mid-western American accent and told me in all seriousness that eleven o’clock in the morning was rather too early to make such a visit and drink beer. I persisted and reluctantly she gave me the directions.
Hofbrauhaus exterior
We walked in the sunshine past the old schloss and down a lane to the ‘slanting piazza’ but I do not recall the Virgin on a column presiding over all she surveyed. We followed a lederhosen clad gentleman wearing a traditional Bavarian felt hat which was adorned by the most amazing plume, reminding me of something that may have been worn by a Roman first spear centurion to enable his men to identify him in the midst of battle.
There before us was our goal. Gothic and grand just as Paddy described it, we entered through wide doors underneath Gothic arches and walked up those vaulted stairs which survived the damage of the war. It was here in January 1934 that Paddy encountered his Brownshirt. The steps are now lined with photographs, one of a maternal looking frau holding eight heavy steins full of the cool, golden Hofbräuhaus beer. Perhaps she had served Paddy on that famous, alcohol fuelled night?
Kim considers joining the waitressing team
The Hofbräuhaus has four floors devoted to the adoration of beer, sausage and pretzels. We visited each one. They were all decorated in a different style with a large communal drinking hall, and a number of smaller private function rooms (which are for hire). It is one of these higher floors that Paddy stumbled into when full of SS officers, Gruppen and Sturmbannfuhrers, black from their lightening-flash-collars to the forest of tall boots underneath the table.
The highest floor is dominated by a large parquet floored room with a vaulted ceiling colourfully decorated with its predominantly pink and blue frescos of Bavarian coats of arms. The Festival Hall was built in 1589. It is light and airy with windows on each side, large chandeliers and dominated by a small stage with heavy, theatrically red velvet curtains. The Hall can seat over 900 on its long tables arrayed in neat rows before the stage, and gives the impression of being eternally ready for a party. Indeed on the occasion of our visit, it was being prepared for the post- Abitur celebration for a very lucky young girl. The mood darkens somewhat when you know that it was in this very room, standing on that very stage that the ambitious politician Adolf Hitler addressed his followers in the early days of the National Socialist Party in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.
Hofbrauhaus Festival Hall
Given the passage of time this ceased to have any sinister effect, but it is a sobering thought and brought to life a period of history, and its aftermath, that has come to dominate my generation, and certainly those preceding us.
Did Adolf visit here?
It was about this time that I needed to answer the call of nature. Kim and I were virtually alone and I sought out a gentleman’s lavatory. Finding one at the end of a corridor leading from this function room, I hypothesised that perhaps Hitler had, on more than one occasion, made this same trip, perhaps accompanied by colleagues such as Herman Goering, and discussed the finer points of how to grab political power, and achieve revenge on all those who had sought to so humiliate Germany via the Treaty of Versailles.
Like Paddy we were now guided right down to the bottom of the stairs, out of the doors and back in another, larger door on the ground floor. After passing the obligatory ‘Hofbräuhaus shopping experience’ we entered a new hall where the vaults of the great chamber did not fade into infinity through blue strata of smoke as this was, unbelievably, 21st century smoke-free Germany.
Drinking cool beer in The Schwemme
It was here that Paddy found the part of the Bastille he was seeking. The Schwemme is a huge, richly frescoed hall that wound this way and that, past huge stone pillars, toward the altar of Hofbrau beer where an army of male and female waiters attend upon the fountain of beer pouring litre upon litre of the marvelous nectar. And it did not stop there. What Paddy would have missed on a dark, cold, snowy night in 1934 was the courtyard beer garden which by now was filling with locals and tourists all keen to bathe in the unique Hofbräuhaus atmosphere.
If you visit the website of the Hofbräuhaus you will see it includes a list of ‘regulars’; those who attend services on a regular basis, with the specific visit days recorded. They have reserved seats and for larger groups, or even families, whole tables are kept for them so that they can indulge and worship whilst listening to the suitably attired Bavarian band that have a dedicated stage in the centre of the hall.
Hofbrauhaus Regulars
The band plays on
We had arrived early, at around 11.00 am and had spent forty-five minutes or so making our tour of the building. It was quiet, with just a few other like minded souls and the staff getting ready for the rush ahead. By midday we had chosen a table and ordered our first refreshing beer, a Würstlplatte for me and Spanferkel for Kim (read the menu in English here). The Schwemme was now filling with crowds of locals and tourists alike and the band had struck up. If you want to visit the Hofbräuhaus to look around, as we did, I would recommend going early, and you also need to be there pretty early to find a table.
It was a wonderful visit, and one that was brought to life even more as we imagined that young man avoiding Brownshirts and knocking back beer with the farming folk he found in the Schwemme. One thing that has not changed is the hospitality and friendliness of the Bavarian people, and it was with some reluctance that we walked out of the Hofbräuhaus into bright sunshine to catch our train to Oberammergau.
Now, where did I leave my rucksack?
First published in The Scotsman 13 September 2008
by Roger Hutchinson
THE MARVELLOUS THING ABOUT yours [books],” wrote the Duchess of Devonshire to Patrick Leigh Fermor in May 1974, “is that they never appear.”
Deborah Devonshire professes a pathological dislike of reading. Somewhere in the unfathomable depths of that eccentricity may be discovered the contrary reason for her having been, for over half a century, the favourite correspondent of one of the greatest British authors of the 20th century.
Debo and Paddy had been swapping letters from various parts of the globe for 20 years when she congratulated him on the paucity of his output. When he received that letter he was in fact just finishing A Time of Gifts, the first volume of the travelogue through Europe in the 1930s which would cement his reputation. If we are to believe the Duchess, she has never read a word of it or any of his other works.
This does not mean that their collected letters, expertly compiled by Charlotte Mosley, is entirely non-literary – there are plenty of gems here for the student of the Leigh Fermor oeuvre. It means rather that their friendship was established on broader grounds.
The youngest Mitford sister, Debo Devonshire, clearly possesses oodles of her siblings’ trademark charm, without the family handicap of being mad as a meat-axe. Patrick Leigh Fermor saw and fell for her at an officers’ ball early in the Second World War. She did not so much as notice him until several years later. By the early 1950s Paddy Leigh Fermor was difficult not to notice. Handsome, polyglot, rakish, wildly itinerant and with a war record straight out of a John Buchan novel, he fell upon London society like a wolf on the fold.
He must have been able to pick off debutantes at a hundred paces. But Deborah Mitford was made of sterner stuff. She had set her sights on a duke. PLF would have to settle for best male friend. We should say, one of her best male friends. Her roster of masculine admirers is extraordinary. President John F Kennedy tops the chart, but it winds down through almost every eligible and ineligible man in the developed world. Debo’s good fortune – and now that this engaging anthology has been published, ours too – is that not a single one of them was half so good a writer as her faithful Paddy.
Naturally, most of the words in this collection were authored by PLF. But if Deborah Devonshire has been a foil, she was a perfect one. Chatty, witty, teasing, gossipy, relentlessly cheerful and with more than a hint of modest good sense, her short replies bounce off his beautiful essays like volleys of tennis balls off a cathedral. Continue reading
Short and to the point, a little video snippet of Artemis Cooper talking about her work on Words of Mercury.
Click the picture to play!
Artemis Cooper and Words of Mercury
It’s time to be honest now: who amongst the regular readers of this blog, or even those that stumble across us because they have read ‘A Time of Gifts’ or ‘Between the Woods and the Water’, has not thought about following Paddy’s 1930’s route? For myself it is a definite goal. It is an ambition; probably a passion. I had come across the following article but have been inspired to re-produce it by Blog reader Matt who says he first got into Paddy’s work when stationed in Baghdad:
First published in the New York Times, May 23, 2010
The article is written by New York Times’ Frugal Traveler columnist Matt Gross who attempted to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Like all good stories it begins ….
ONCE upon a time, a young man went for a walk. It was December 1933, and an 18-year-old Englishman named Patrick Leigh Fermor put on a pair of hobnail boots and a secondhand greatcoat, gathered up his rucksack and left London on a ship bound for Rotterdam, where he planned to travel 1,400 miles to Istanbul [Ed: Constantinople!] — on foot. He had virtually no money; at best, he’d arrive in, say, Munich to find his mother had sent him £5. But what he did have was an outgoing nature, a sense of adventure, an affinity for languages and a broad network of friends of friends.
“If I lived on bread and cheese and apples,” he later wrote, “jogging along on fifty pounds a year like Lord Durham with a few noughts knocked off, there would even be some cash left over for papers and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!”
Something to write about indeed! The books he produced from the yearlong journey — “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water” — are gorgeously rendered classics that have led many to call Mr. Leigh Fermor, now 95, Britain’s greatest living travel writer. But to my mind, he’s always had another title: the original Frugal Traveler — the embodiment of that idea that, though a wanderer may be penniless, he doesn’t have to suffer.
And Mr. Leigh Fermor never suffered, thanks to the miracle of human generosity. Peasants gave him baskets of eggs and swigs of raspberry schnapps. Small-town mayors found him beds. The lingering nobility of Europe put him up in their castles, invited him to balls and lent him their horses. When Mr. Leigh Fermor did sleep rough — in hayricks and barns or on the banks of his beloved Danube — he did it by choice, not because (or not merely because) poverty required it. He knew, even at 18, that the world is an experience to be savored in all its multifarious incarnations.
Matt Gross' route
Could a young person (is 35 still young?) with strong legs and little money find the same spirit of hospitality that Mr. Leigh Fermor encountered some 76 years ago? At the end of March, I set out to find the answer. With only two weeks free, my plan was to walk from Vienna to Budapest, a 180-mile route that would connect the old poles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and track Mr. Leigh Fermor’s trail as closely as possible, taking me along the Danube to Bratislava, the Slovakian capital, and across the plains of Slovakia south to Hungary — through three countries whose languages, cultures and histories could not be more different, or more intertwined.
It was tempting, the day I arrived in Vienna, to just walk east from the airport, but I couldn’t completely skip the Austrian capital, where Mr. Leigh Fermor had spent three weeks among the “crooked lanes” and “facades of broken pediment and tiered shutter.” And so I followed his lead, going into the imperial crypt, where the grandest members of the Hapsburg family lay entombed in elaborate sarcophagi, and into the museums, although I shied away from the most famous in favor of oddities like the International Esperanto Museum. And I luxuriated in storied places like Cafe Alt Wien and Cafe Bendl.
But after two nights in Vienna, I was restless. So I crossed the Danube, put on my 45-pound pack and took off down the Donauradweg, a well-kept biking trail that runs from the river’s source to its mouth at the Black Sea. To my right, the Danube, more green than blue, sparkled in the cool sunlight, and I encountered fishermen tending their rods, elderly sunbathers, nordic hikers poling along and cyclists speeding in both directions.
This first day, I figured, I’d take it easy and do only 15 miles. Ideally, I’d need to hit 18 miles a day — about six hours of walking — to reach my goal. It seemed reasonable, especially with the terrain so uniformly flat. The path, sometimes dirt, sometimes paved, would often stretch so far and straight that I couldn’t imagine I’d ever reach the end, and then I’d finally hit a slight turn and face the same thing: an art-school lesson in perspective, complete with the first low foothills of the Carpathians at the vanishing point — and a scampering rabbit to remind me this was no still life.
Even with such straightforward terrain, there were snags. An attempted shortcut through a fuel depot left me with minor scratches and an extra three miles. But such mistakes have a way of turning out for the best. Had I stayed on the trail, I would have never crossed paths, two hours later, at the edge of Donau-Auen National Park, with Jean-Marc and Marie, newlywed French cyclists who stopped to say hello when they saw a lone hiker in the middle of nowhere. They were taking an extended honeymoon: a two-year bicycle journey from their home in Paris — to Japan!
“Do you know where you’re staying tonight?” I asked. They didn’t. I told them to meet me at Orth an der Donau, a small Austrian town a couple of miles farther down the Danube, where I had arranged for a place to stay via CouchSurfing.org. Maybe, I said, my host could find them somewhere to pitch their tent.
THE host, Roland Hauser, whom we met in front of Orth’s impressive castle, did better than that. He invited them home to his dreamland of soft beds and hot showers. Roland, 26, had traveled from California to Southeast Asia to New Zealand, and his German-accented English was peppered with words like “sí” and “bueno.” That evening, we cooked spaghetti Bolognese, nibbled Südtirolean ham and drank big bottles of beer. I went to sleep marveling at our extraordinary, Fermorian luck.
In the morning, after coffee, I threw out my underwear. This was a strategy to lighten my load — bring old undies and get rid of them day by day. Frankly, I should have done that with everything, as the pack was needlessly heavy. Along with two weeks’ worth of shirts, I had an ultralight down jacket, a waterproof shell and rain pants. A tent and sleeping bag. One pair of jeans and lightweight canvas shoes to change into at day’s end; nothing worse than walking 20 miles and spending the evening in the same clothes. And I packed Mr. Leigh Fermor’s books and Claudio Magris’s “Danube,” which I never had time to read. And my computer and camera gear — work necessities, alas.
When I set off, I was wearing my typical walking outfit: khaki pants by a company in Portland, Ore., called Nau; waterproof running sneakers by Lafuma; good socks (as important as good shoes); and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.
The walk began well. My feet were tender, but the flatness of the Marchfelddamm, a high berm that doubled as biking path and flood deterrent, ensured that I wasn’t struggling. This was the heart of the Donau-Auen National Park: forests of thin trees broken by occasional streams flowing to the Danube. At first, I appreciated the play of light on the water and between the trunks, but hour after plodding hour of unchanging scenery soon became mind-numbing, and I simply marched, putting one foot in front of the other and watching for kilometer markers. It would be 13 miles before I could stop for lunch, and another 10 before I reached my day’s goal: Bratislava.
But there’s a funny thing about long walks. With patience, all those steps add up, and by 2 p.m., I’d crossed a bridge over the Danube and settled into a cafe in the stately town of Hainburg, where an open-faced baguette pizza and glass of beer gave me the courage to face the miles ahead. And soon I found myself trudging along the shoulder of the small highway with cars flying past — and missing the monotonous near-silence of the forest.
Not far off, I could see Bratislava’s hilltop castle — in Mr. Leigh Fermor’s era, a burned-out wreck worked by prostitutes but in the 1950s rebuilt as a stately white-and-red palace — and it teased me with its apparent nearness. Still, I had far to go, past a derelict border post, and through three miles of snaking bike paths, before I crossed the Danube again and was in the heart of Bratislava’s old town, all cobblestones and tile roofs and sidewalk cafes.
After checking into the Hotel Kyjev — a 1970s tower turned budget boutique — I checked myself out: I wasn’t sore, out of breath or even tired. I did have blisters on my feet, but they were easily treated: puncture, drain, clean, bandage. My ankles, however, were terribly swollen, the peroneal tendons in particular, a result (I think) of how my body mechanics had altered with the weight on my back. I popped some ibuprofren, took a shower, then hobbled outside for dinner.
It was the Friday during Passover, and like any wandering Jew, I wanted a Sabbath meal. And thanks to Chabad, the Hasidic Jewish outreach organization, I got one, at the home of the transplanted American rabbi Baruch Myers. He was only too willing to share his food (cucumber salad, gefilte fish), his friendship and his family, including a battalion of adorable children who cheerily walked me through the Passover story.
It wasn’t just this heartfelt welcome that got to me; it was the very existence of a Jewish community in Bratislava. Back in his day, Mr. Leigh Fermor wrote, the Jews “were numerous enough to give a pronounced character to the town.” No longer. The Holocaust had reduced the Jewish population to, in Rabbi Myers’s estimate, 1,000 people. There was a synagogue, a few kosher restaurants, a Jewish museum and even a pension, but few visitors today would see in Bratislava a Jewish-inflected city.
On Saturday, partly inspired by the rabbi and partly because of my feet, I rested and contemplated the future. I had walked 40 miles so far, and if my ankles were any indication, there was no way I’d make the remaining 140. Unless … If I took a train a short way — say, 15 miles northeast — I could certainly walk another 10 miles. I’d be breaking my rules, but those rules were arbitrary. Continue reading
It should come as no surprise to learn that Paddy is a member of the London gentleman’s club The Travellers Club. The following was sent to me by Blog reader and correspondent James who had scanned it from a copy of “More Tales from the Travellers” which seems to be almost impossible to get hold of in print. I have typed it out exactly as it is printed in the book. It is a speech that Paddy gave to members at an event to celebrate sixty years of membership of the Travellers in 2004. I do hope that you enjoy this wonderful ‘tail’.
In the Library of the Travellers Club
Sixty years is a long time to belong to any institution, let alone one as venerable and distinguished as The Travellers. Sometime, looking back, the lapse of time seems far less, and at others (especially if one dabbles in history at all, as I do now and then) it seems to reach very far back, almost out of sight.
My War-time brother-in-arms, Xan Fielding, and I were put up for the Club when we were in our twenties. Arthur E.E. Reade, our sponsor, was rather older, and a member of long standing when the candidature was set in motion on 1942. We were all three at the time SOE captains dressed up as shepherds, deep in ash and lice, huddling cross-legged over the embers and under the stalactites of a cave in German-occupied Crete. Arthur sealed the envelope putting us up. Obviously it would take some time before it could be handed to the next caique or submarine, longer still to reach Pall Mall. To the south of us, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Rommel was hastening on to El Alamein. Our candidature might take a while.
We asked Arthur what the ‘E.E.’ stood for in his name on the back of the envelope, and he said ‘Essex Edgeworth’. Was this anything to do with Maria Edgeworth, the pre-Jane Austen, Anglo-Irish novelist, we asked, the author of Castle Rackrent? We had just about heard about her.
‘Yes,’ Arthur replied. ‘She was a sort of great-great-aunt.’ This we learned, made him a relative of her uncle, the Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont, the Jesuit son of a convert kinsman who had settled in France and, during the Revolution, became chaplain and confessor to Louis XVI. He accompanied the king to the guillotine where he was reputed to have said, just before the blade fell, ‘Fils de Saint-Louis, montez au ciel!’ He then hastened down the steps and dashed away through the Jacobin crowd.
We also learned that the Club later on was very much the background of those dilettanti who ventured farther east then Venice and Florence in Regency times; particularly the ones who pushed on to Constantinople where, under the auspices of our fellow-member Sir Charles Barry, the amazing British Embassy – damaged by a bomb only a few months ago – was soon to be built. It was of course Barry who designed the premises that surround us at this very moment. Many of these travellers would have hobnobbed with the Ambassador there, Sir Stratford Canning – the ‘Great Elchi’ of Kingslake’s Eothen – who first took up has task at the age of twenty-four and held it all through the Napoleonic Wars, steering Turkey away from hostilities with Russia in order to foil Napoleon’s advances in the north-east.
Canning’s world was the Levant of janissaries and mamelukes, a region wonderfully handled, in those times, by Nelson and by Sir William Sidney Smith of Acre, and by Canning himself. The only communication from London during Canning’s long tour of duty was a very un-urgent and very unimportant enquiry from Wellington’s brother Lord Wellesley, about some antiquarian manuscripts he had vaguely heard about in the archives of the Grand Seraglio. What an example to us all …
Another member born in the same year as Byron and, like him, a sort of Apollo – as one sees by the portrait painted later in Rome by Ingres – was the architect Charles Robert Cockerell. He was the great-nephew of Pepys, and after exploring Italy and Sicily, he had set off from Constantinople into Asia Minor, heading for Troad and Smyrna, and then crossed the Ægean to continue his researches in the Morea. How little the Napoleonic Wars seems to hamper archaeological research!
In 1811 Cockerell and three scholarly companions discovered – or rather re-discovered – the lonely and wonderful Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassæ, built here by Ictinus to celebrate the end of the plague in the same decade that he put the Parthenon together. The temple at Bassæ combined Doric and Ionic columns and, for the first time, launched the Corinthian styles into the architecture of the world. (I say ‘rediscovered’ because halfway through the eighteenth century the French traveller Bochon had barely set eyes on Bassæ when he was murdered by bandits, who thought the brass buttons on his coat were gold.) A generation later the English party, more soberly dressed, gazed at the temple in wonder. There it stood almost complete in its vast and lonely Arcadian glen, one of the wildest and most haunted regions of the Peloponnese. They were struck dumb.
Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassæ
We know the rest of the story: the rescue and reassembly of the frieze that had run round the cella of the temple; the long pourparlers with the Vizir of Tripolitza; the bargaining, the transport of the slabs in a British ship to Zakynthos – Zante, that is – in the newly acquired Ionian Islands; their arrival in England and their final erection on the British Museum, where they were second only to Lord Elgin’s Athenian loot.
The Travellers Club was founded three years after Waterloo and very soon up went Cockerell’s casts of the never-ending conflict that rages just above our heads.
Arriving back to be demobbed at the end of our war, I made a bee-line for Pall Mall. (Xan Fielding and I were members now – Arthur Reade’s letter, three years in transit, had worked.) I dashed upstairs, barely touching Talleyrand’s ramp, and into the Library, to gaze up at the battling Amazons and Greeks and Lapiths and centaurs that girdle this marvellous room. It was a great moment.
I was back in Greece soon afterwards, a peripatetic deputy-director of the British Institute improvising lectures to patriot warriors all over the country, largely about Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – and I’m not sure how gripping the whiskered guerrillas found them. Accompanied by Joan, whom I had married, and by Xan Fielding who was still in the Army, we set off in his jeep and drove from Tripoli to Andritsaina into the fierce Arcadian mountains and on to Phigaleia and – at last! – to Bassæ. We trudged the last few miles along goat tracks, reached the austere and silent temple after dark, and dossed down among the pillars. The early sunbeams over Mount Elaios lit up not only the wonderful columns, but also a young fox sitting in the middle of them. He gave us a long pensive look, the trotted off in search of somewhere less crowded.
Back in the Library here, much later, I was led to Davis Watkin’s Life of C. R. Cockerell and settled with it in a corner (where the centaurs seemed to be getting the upper hand) and it fell open on the page where Cockerell and his friends were inspecting the ruins: ‘One day when they were scrambling about amongst the great fallen columns.’ I read. ‘a fox that had made its home deep down amongst the stones, disturbed by the unusual noise, got up and ran away’. I nearly jumped out of my skin. ‘In the light that streamed into its momentarily emptied lair, they discovered a glint of marble, then the first slab of what turned out to be the felled bas-relief – then another and another, and yet another, until the whole wonderful cincture was resurrected and linked together.’
Our fox must have been a descendent of theirs, the great-great-great-great-great-great – in fact, the hundred-and-fortieth great-grand cub of the one that jumped out of its hole on that momentous day a century and a half before. After all, it was only two thousand, three hundred and seventy-odd years since Ictinus and his fifth-century BC team, having finished their task, piled the spirit-levels and hammers and chisels into the panniers of the baggage-train, shut their dividers, coiled their measuring ropes, brushed off the chips and poured a last libation to Apollo and , perhaps, another down their throats – before following our track across the glen; and we were unshakeably convinced that a small fox, ancestor to all the others, must have watched them out of sight.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
The above is the text of a talk given by the author at a Library Dinner in 2004 to celebrate his sixtieth year of membership.
I have just finished reading Three Letters from the Andes published in 1991, but first written by Patrick Leigh Fermor during the month long expedition to the high Andes in Peru in 1971. He was accompanied by good friends, most notably his close friend Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire.
The original text consists of three letters to his wife Joan and mailed by Paddy to her to try to describe to her much of what happened during the expedition which included some challenging climbing, which for the greater part, Paddy did not join. He describes his principal role as ‘minder of the primus stove’ and this duty enabled him to sleep in the spacious mess tent.
Three Letters from the Andes
The book is enjoyable enough and it does what it says; it describes the journey and I am sure Joan would have enjoyed the letters. Paddy did some editing prior to publication to make them more presentable for general readership (and probably removed any indiscreet comments). However, compared to the more familiar A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, this is a lightweight affair. Perhaps it shows how much work Paddy must put into his constant redrafts to expand upon his first thoughts. This is clearly work that had minimal redrafting, and is interesting because of that.
The description of the journey and key events remain in my memory but it did not give the deep pleasure gained by the former books. Just a couple of my favourite bits:
When flying in to Lima the party had to go through Peruvian customs and immigration. Paddy describes the staff as ‘sleepy, rather blank faced … officials who were far from brisk.’ He goes on to describe Andrew Cavendish’s experience. ‘… our passports seemed to puzzle them and Andrew’s proved utterly enigmatic. He got through the last barrier half an hour after they’d finished with the rest of us, murmuring sadly: ‘I can’t deny there are countries where being a duke is a bit of an advantage; but Peru’s not one of them.’
Right at the end of the journey at a dinner given for the party at the British Embassy, Paddy is seated next to a ‘very quiet and very beautiful neighbour called Dona Diana de Dibos’. After a while he realized that she was the sister of Lt Mike Cumberlege, a naval officer who used to ferry partisans and SOE agents into and out of Crete during the German occupation. He had been shot in a concentration camp just four days before VE day. Paddy cheered her up by telling her many stories about her brother that she had never heard before.
Three Letters is short and easy to read. For Paddy fans it is essential reading to complete our picture of him and his life and his various publications. There are probably better ways of spending a few hours, but I don’t think anyone reading it will be disappointed … as long as they don’t expect a short version of ATOG.
As you will know by now Deborah Devonshire (one of the famous Mitford sisters), the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire is one of Paddy’s closest friends. Their communication by letters over more than half a century forms the basis for the collection of letters edited by Charlotte Mosley – ‘In Tearing Haste’ – of which I have written before. The seat of the Dukes of Devonshire is Chatsworth in Derbyshire and this year Chatsworth will be staging a special exhibition to celebrates Debo’s 90th birthday. I thought it worth posting details for those who may be interested. For more information please read the press release below or visit www.chatsworth.org .
In an epic year, Chatsworth is staging a special exhibition throughout 2010 in honour of the 90th birthday of Deborah Devonshire (on March 31), now Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the last surviving of the famous Mitford sisters.
Andrew and Deborah Devonshire
Feb 18, 2010 – Sister, mother, wife, Duchess, writer and celebrated national treasure. Over the years Deborah Devonshire’s path has taken her in many directions creating a life story which is nothing short of fascinating. In an epic year, Chatsworth is staging a special exhibition throughout 2010 in honour of the 90th birthday of Deborah (on March 31), now Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the last surviving of the famous Mitford sisters, marking the nine eventful decades of her life, illustrating her many interests and achievements.
Memories of the Dowager’s Mitford ancestry, and her famous siblings, will be evoked with many unique items never seen by visitors before, including numerous letters, plates from the much loved Berlin dinner service sold by her father and purchased by her husband, the Cavendish/Devonshire family tree and the beautiful Renoir painting left to Chatsworth by her sister Pamela.
Visitors will experience a rare insight into the remarkable life of Deborah, illustrated with mementos and keepsakes personally chosen by her Grace including early diaries, the Dowager’s childhood ice skates (skating was an early passion), her nature notebook and a copy of her wedding invitation. Deborah’s passion for all things outdoors quickly becomes clear. A keen supporter and participant in all country pursuits, the exhibition will include the Duchess’s gun and game books. Two of her beautiful handmade walking sticks are also featured, and her love of poultry reflected in a wooden chicken sculpture and her rosettes and prizes for eggs.
Deborah comments: “Putting this exhibition together has meant thinking back over the nine decades of my life so far, and trying to gather together mementos and photographs that will interest visitors to Chatsworth this year. I hope people will enjoy the wide range of things on view, from Paris dresses and works of art I love, to family photographs and a telephone from the gift shop at Graceland. I have been lucky enough to know many fascinating people and be involved in local and national organisations and good causes, and the displays will reflect these.”
In the 1950s, the Dowager had the huge task of restoring Chatsworth after the depressing war years (it had been leased to a girls school), and making it fit for the growing number of visitors, and as a family home. The wallpaper patterns that she used then will be shown alongside the books she wrote later in life, celebrating Chatsworth’s house, collections, garden, food and landscape. Her growing family is represented by glamorous private images of her and her young children by Norman Parkinson.
As Duchess, she was involved in many significant public and state events, and chose to take on many public responsibilities, charitable concerns and interests. The robes she wore to the Queen’s coronation in 1953, at which her son, the present Duke, was page to his grandmother Mary, widow of the 10th Duke, will be on display, alongside presentation objects from public engagements over the last 60 years.
Having known many famous artists and writers, there will be displays of early work by Lucian Freud, sculpted heads of some of the Dowager’s more illustrious artistic friends, by Angela Conner, and the special edition of one of his books given to her by Evelyn Waugh, with blank pages to avoid the bother of actually having to read it.
Deborah continues: “I have known Lucian Freud for well over fifty years, and he remains a great friend and a fascinating person. Being painted by him, when I was in my thirties, was a slow process, as he is not a lightning artist, but I think the result is full of insight – I certainly get more like the picture the older I become.”
Her tastes and style are represented by a number of exquisite couture gowns and other clothes and hats; favourite works of art by Atkinson Grimshaw, Tchelitchev, Jo Self, Epstein, Frink and others; a selection of the jewelled insect brooches she was given by her husband over many decades; and mementos of her hero Elvis Presley, including the Elvis telephone, and a section of fence from Graceland.
After 54 years in charge of Chatsworth [and its estate], Bolton Abbey and Lismore Castle in partnership with her husband, the late Duke, the Dowager’s retirement has not been quiet. Memorabilia relating to her latest books, and forthcoming memoirs, will be on display, together with new photographs taken for the exhibition, including a special image of the Dowager with her seventeen great grandchildren.
Chatsworth re-opens on March 14 and the exhibition runs until 31 October 2010. Entrance is free with house admission. For more information please visit http://www.chatsworth.org
I am still thoroughly enjoying ‘In Tearing Haste’ which is my ‘train’ book, read as I travel up and down to London. I am nearing the end but want to share some of my favourite bits. Here are a couple of impromptu PLF rhymes that he passed on to Debo in a letter dated 12 August 1958.
In early August 1958 Paddy and Joan, with Alan the Spy (is this Alan Pryce-Jones who had once been engaged to Joan?), and Roxanne Sedgewick climbed Mount Olympus in Greece. The climb was tough and Joan said that she was to be buried there if she fell down a crevasse. She did not want to be lugged down and placed on a train back to Athens. Paddy wrote her an epitaph:
Bury me here on Olympus
In the home of the lonely wall-creeper
But don’t take me back to Athens, please,
Stretched out on a second class sleeper …
Later that week upon their return the group grew to include Coote Lygon (Lady Dorothy (Coote) Lygon 1912-2001) who was in the WAAF during the war. As she smoked a cigar she told a story using all the regular RAF slang which inspired Paddy to write this:
‘What’s happened to Winko?’ asked Groupie.
The Mess Corporal wagged his old head:
‘He said that he’d fancy a Bass, sir,
But he went for a Burton instead …’
Ind Coope Burton Ale
Selection: Michalis Katsigeras
First published in Kathimerini October 17, 1958
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR: The latest book by the distinguished British writer and philhellene Patrick Leigh Fermor, titled “Mani,” is to be released in London on December 1. The book describes the region of Mani, its history and customs with the sympathy and wit that generally characterizes all his writing on Greek issues. Leigh Fermor came to Greece for the first time 1935. He has none of the reserve that is usually a characteristic of the British people [Ed – Huh!!!] and fell in love with Greece at first sight. He learned to speak Greek very quickly and the next year, in 1936, translated Rodokanakis’s “Odysseus” into English. In the years before the war, he travelled a great deal. During the German occupation of Greece, he was sent to Crete where he played a leading role in the abduction of the German General Kreipe. He now lives in Crete, among his Cretan friends.[Ed – not quite true – Paddy was nomadic at this time eventually settling near Kardamyli in the mani] (Ed. Note: “Mani” was translated into Greek by Tzannis Tzannetakis in 1973 when he was in internal exile during the military dictatorship.) POPE PIUS XII: Vatican City – Vatican City’s radio station issued an official announcement today that Pope Pius XII has passed away. His death came at about 3.50 a.m. local time. Italian President Giovanni Gronchi and Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani ordered a period of national mourning.
by Anne Chisholm
First published in The Spectator Wednesday, 3rd September 2008
Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor proof reading In Tearing Haste
This exchange contains much of what makes their letters so beguiling and so British. Both are more interested in facts, jokes and stories than in feelings; there is no soul-searching in this fat volume.
Both stay firmly in character: she the non-intellectual, resolutely unimpressed by foreign culture, he the erudite polymath, bursting with knowledge. Linked by deep affection and with many friends in common, they live different lives in different countries, have different tastes, use different language; what they have in common, and what these letters so wonderfully demonstrate, is an unfailing appetite for life.
Having first encountered each other during the war, when Paddy was a dashing soldier and Debo, the youngest of the spectacular Mitford sisters and newly married to Andrew Cavendish, the younger son of a duke, they met again in the mid-1950s. By this time she was 36 and Duchess of Devonshire, châtelaine of a castle in county Waterford and a palace in Derbyshire, helping her husband with his unexpected inheritance and beginning the revival and transformation of Chatsworth. He was 41 and a compulsive traveller, famous for pulling off one of the more dashing exploits of the war by kidnapping a German general in Crete. He was also beginning to be known as a writer, having published a novel and his first travel book. This time they fell for each other, and, one suspects, almost into a love affair; almost, but not quite, as Debo already loved Andrew and Chatsworth and Paddy loved Joan Eyres-Monsell and Greece. She was settled and he was a wanderer, and although they met as often as possible over the years on his visits to England it was on paper that their relationship really belonged. Continue reading
There is a very interesting discussion thread about this poem that I stumbled across recently.
Click here to have a look. It includes discussion about translation and some You Tube links. Here is what Paddy has to say about it in Roumeli:
“Unknown outside Greece because of the deep vernacular that enshrouds it and its daunting length for a translator-though many, including me, have longingly toyed with the idea-it is one of the great epic poems of Europe. In Crete, this tremendous metrical saga plays the part of the Homeric cycle in Dorian times. Everyone knows it, all can quote vast tracts, and, astonishingly, some of the old men in the mountains, though unable to read and write, could, and still can, recite the whole poem by heart; when one remembers that it is nearly a thousand lines longer than the Odyssey, this feat makes one scratch one’s head with wonder or disbelief. They intone rather than recite it; the voice rises at the caesura and at the end of the first line of a couplet, and drops at the end of the second; now and then to break the monotony, the key shifts. During our winter vigils, it continued for hours; every so often another old man would take over; listening, I occasionally dropped off for an hour or two, and woke to find Erotokritos in the thick of yet another encounter with the Black Knight of Karamania. (He symbolized, at the time the poem first saw the light, the threat of the Ottomans; Turkey had already conquered the rest of Greece, and was soon to submerge Crete itself.) The rhythmic intoning might sway on till daybreak, with some of the listeners rapt, others nodding off or snoring.”
Musically it gets quite passionate as evidenced by these two samples:
Apparently the Erotokritos was written in about 1587. Here are some translated verses:
Of all the gracious things upon this earth
It is fair words that have the greatest worth,
And he who uses them with charm and guile
Can cozen human eyes to weep or smile.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos I 887-90 (Stephanides)
Begin your lesson now. It is a rule
That he who starts in time soon leaves the school.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos II 1871-2 (Stephanides)
There are full many, sweet, whose tongues are bland,
Who hide a poison phial in the hand.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos III 141-2 (Stephanides)
You straighten easily a fresh-cut stake,
Yet when it dries it will but split and break.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos III 279-80 (Stephanides)
True is that adage: “He who yields to rule
by woodenheads, becomes himself a fool.”
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos III 967-8 (Stephanides)
Well said by the prudent who discover:
The heaviest pain lighter ones cover.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos III 1287-8 (Ragovin 1, p. 14)
Man shapes his plans as he intends and deems,
And not because of visions and of dreams;
The future is not yet, dreams cannot sway,
Man’s destiny this, that, or any way;
As each one makes his bed, so does he sleep;
The foolish only trysts with shadows keep.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos IV 139-144 (Stephanides)
Anyone who wants the great things of this life
Yet does not know he is only travelling the road,
And prides himself on his nobility and boasts of his wealth
-I dismiss him as a nobody, to be thought of as mad,
For these things are flowers which come and go,
They are changed by time, and time often takes them away.
— V. Kornaros, Erotokritos IV 601-6 (Bryans, p. 89)
A personal view by Max Hastings who thinks that Paddy’s best book is Mani.
First published in the Daily Telegraph 12:01AM GMT 04 Jan 2004
Not long after the Second World War, an English couple chanced upon a remote taverna in the mountains of Greece. As they ate their simple lunch the proprietor, perceiving their nationality, remarked: “We had another English couple here once, before the war. They stayed for weeks. They were so beautiful and so in love. And every night they dressed for dinner!”
It was this last foible that had plainly captivated him, and indeed conjured for his listeners an enchanting vision of young lovers in “the full soup and fish”, as P G Wodehouse would have said, in this lonely Greek inn. All became clear when the innkeeper added: “His name was Lefemor.”
This was, of course, the inimitable Paddy (he has never been known as anything else), though the innkeeper was wrong about the nationality of his other guest – she was in truth a Romanian princess, Balasha Cantacuzene, with whom he enjoyed a romantic idyll through the last few years before the war.
Legend has it that “Lefemor’s” distraught family ordered him home, finally cabling the fare when he pleaded poverty to explain his inability to return. He merely used the money to protract the affair.
Like many stories told both by and about Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor – as he became this week at the age of 88 – this one may be a trifle fanciful, owing as much to soaring imagination as to historical fact. No matter. It is the sort of story about Paddy which ought to be true.
He richly deserves his honour not only for what he has written – some of the finest travel books of all time – but for what he has been. In prose, as I heard one of his oldest friends put it recently, “he possesses an extraordinary gift for expressing beauty in words”.
He has fulfilled the dream of so many upper-class Englishmen of his generation, to live, love, play the hero, sage and wit with a lightness of touch which, translated into the milieu of the kitchen, would produce a souffle of genius.
He was the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a geologist who travelled widely and made his reputation in India. “His tall, straight figure might often be seen dancing in Calcutta,” the DNB observes playfully. Paddy’s somewhat erratic schooling terminated at King’s Canterbury, from which he was sacked for some misdemeanour – “holding hands with the greengrocer’s daughter” is his own version, which will serve as well as any other.
Rejecting parental plans for Sandhurst and the Army, in December 1933 at the age of 18 he set out instead to walk to Constantinople, with very little money but some rather grand letters of introduction. The consequence was that for the next 18 months, he was wafted from schloss to schloss across old Europe, plunging his insatiable social, cultural, intellectual and linguistic curiosity into a river of happy encounters.
These he has described in the two volumes, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). A third instalment of the journey has been long in preparation, but it is unlikely that anyone except his publisher expects it to get finished.
He has always been a slow writer, each of the eight books in his modest output requiring long and painful labour. His dilatoriness has been reinforced, perhaps, by indifference to money. Though he has never had any, somehow God or friends have eagerly provided. He has practised a superior brand of Micawberism, founded upon the belief that something or somebody would turn up, which in his case it always has.
When war came in 1939 he left Baleni, the wonderful Romanian mansion where he had been living with his princess, to join the Irish Guards. Instead, however, he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps as a Greek speaker. He spent the winter of 1940 as a liaison officer with the Greek Army.
Affectionately sceptical friends say that Paddy’s linguistic fluency is a trifle exaggerated. Sixty years ago an Englishman who heard him gassing away nineteen to the dozen said to a neighbouring Greek woman: “Is he as fluent as he sounds?” She replied: “No. He is simply making a wonderful noise.” This is a little unjust, and of course he has indeed become a master of the Greek language after living in the Peloponnese for so long. He possesses a gift for communicating with his fellow man of any nationality, class or condition, without need for anything as vulgar as a phrasebook. Continue reading
As we know Paddy was 70 years of age when he swam the Hellespont with his wife Joan encouraging him ( whilst probably very worried) from a boat. His good friend Xan Fielding was waiting for him upon his return with a bottle of champagne. There is a long account in the excellent “In Tearing Haste”. Paddy was inspired by, amongst others, Lord Byron and his swim in 1810. There was a very interesting Radio Four programme about this yesterday … you have until approx 24 May to listen again on the BBC iPlayer.
Click here to listen again but only until approx 24 May 2010.
Lord Byron
It is 200 years since the poet Lord Byron swam the Hellespont, commemorating the feat in a poem and setting off a mania for swimming throughout Europe. He said it was his proudest moment.
His talent for swimming was one of the qualities that made him a legend and wherever he swam became almost a sacred spot. On the shore of the Bay of Spezzia, where Shelley drowned, stands a plinth dedicated to “Lord Byron, Noted English Swimmer and Poet”. Note which comes first!
Comedian and Channel swimmer Doon Mackichan takes a look at the man and the event through his poetry and journal entries, comparing Byron’s swim with the experiences of some of the swimmers who turn up every year for a race across this historical channel that separates Europe and Asia. Organised by the Canakkale Rotary Club, it is one of the highlights of the wild water swimming calendar.
Byron was inspired by Leander who, according to Ovid, nightly swam the strait to visit his beloved Hero and, after hours of love making, swam back home again. No slouch in the sack himself, Byron marvelled that Leander’s conjugal powers were not “exhausted in his passage to Paradise”.
Swimming gave Byron, lame as he was, some of the most exhilarating moments of his life. Only in swimming was he able to experience complete freedom of movement and freedom was a state he aspired to in all things – political and sexual.
How many of today’s swimmers have been inspired by Byron to put pen to paper? The programme set them a challenge and you can hear some of the best entries alongside Byron’s own effort.
A Review of Artemis Cooper’s “Words of Mercury” by William Dalrymple published in the Guardian.
First published in the Guardian 13 December 2003
William Dalrymple relishes Words of Mercury, a selection from the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Britain’s greatest living travel writer.
Skill with the sword usually precludes much competence with the pen. For all that Sir Philip Sidney could write sequences of Petrarchan sonnets as well as lead buccaneering raids on the Spanish Netherlands, or Siegfried Sassoon write his anti-war memoirs while also winning the Military Cross, bookishness and military machismo are rarely found roosting together (after all, it’s no secret, as the old joke goes, that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms).
The great exception to this rule in our own time is Patrick Leigh Fermor. For though he is one of our finest prose stylists and – since the death this summer of his only possible rival, Norman Lewis – without question our greatest living travel writer, he was also responsible for one of the most audacious special operations coups of the second world war.
Leigh Fermor’s own account of the abduction of General Kreipe, the German commander of the Nazi occupation forces in Crete, is published for the first time in Artemis Cooper’s wonderful new anthology of Leigh Fermor’s work, Words of Mercury. The story is a famous one, and in the film version, entitled Ill Met by Moonlight, Paddy was played by the dashing Dirk Bogarde. But in Leigh Fermor’s own account, the climax comes not as the general’s staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE party dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the Cretan highlands and thence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as “a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida”: “We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the General, half to himself, slowly said: ‘ Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Socrate’. It was the opening lines of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off … The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ It was very strange. ‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”
It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: beautifully written, fabulously romantic and just a little showy. For Leigh Fermor’s greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild, scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Paddy has been responsible for some of the most highly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.
For as well as being a war hero, one of the world’s great long-distance walkers, and as tough a traveller as you could find, Leigh Fermor has always been a writer of great intelligence, sensitivity and profundity. Here he is, for example, describing a French Cistercian monastery, where he says he discovered “the capacity for solitude and the recollectedness and clarity of spirit that accompany the silent monastic life. For in the seclusion of a cell – an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual and long solitary walks in the woods – the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.”
Words of Mercury is a cornucopia, full of the rarest gems, but it is also a rather odd book: part collected journalism, part greatest hits anthology, with a few other surprising odds and ends thrown in, such as a memoir about the eccentric Scottish genealogist Sir Ian Moncrieffe of that Ilk. This tells of Moncrieffe’s huge pleasure in discovering that he was directly descended from “The Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, Monster of Csejthe [who] was convicted in 1610 of the slow murder – in order that their blood might magically preserve her beauty – of more than six hundred girls.” In a similar mood, there is also a letter from Paddy to the editor’s grandmother, Lady Diana Cooper, and a footnote directing the reader towards the “strongly recommended” work of the military historian Antony Beevor, who just happens to be the editor’s husband (though in fairness, it appears that this warm endorsement comes from Leigh Fermor rather than Cooper).
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As you know I trawl the net for Paddy related material to create the best online source of information about PLF and his friends and associates. Some of you may have come across this essay that attempts to analyse Paddy’s style and his literary achievement. In my view it is just one of many that emphasise how great the man is and how unequalled is his prose.
First published in New Criterion, Jan, 2001 by Ben Downing
I have carried the soldier’s musket, the traveler’s stick, the pilgrim’s staff. –Chateaubriand (what a great quote for Paddy!)
The captive must have been exhausted and afraid, but when, on the fourth day of his grueling forced march across Crete, he saw dawn break behind Mount Ida, the sight was so beautiful that it brought to his lips the opening of Horace’s Ode I.ix: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum/ Soracte,”(1) he murmured. Then, just as he trailed off, one of his captors came in to take the poem over, reciting the rest of its six stanzas. At this, the captive’s startled eyes slanted down from the peak to meet those of his enemy, and, after a long thoughtful silence, he pronounced, “Ach so, Herr Major.” For the captive was a German soldier–the commander of the island’s garrison, no less. General Karl Kreipe (to give him his name) had been abducted on April 26, 1944 by a band of Greek guerrillas led by two English commandos. Over the next three weeks, the kidnappers picked their way across Crete, eluding the thousands of Nazi troops who hunted them, until eventually they were met by a British boat and whisked to Cairo, where Kreipe was handed over and the two commandos promptly awarded the D.S.O. One of these men was W. Stanley Moss, who in 1950 published a riveting account of the escapade, Ill-Met by Moonlight, later filmed by Michael Powell. The other was a certain Patrick Leigh Fermor. Disguised as a shepherd and (like Zeus in his Cretan boyhood) living largely in caves, he had spent much of the previous two years on the island organizing the resistance. Leigh Fermor it was who finished the quotation.
But where had he, who’d never completed high school, learned Horace so well? Had Kreipe asked him this, Leigh Fermor could have answered, savoring the irony, that he’d committed the odes to memory during his teenage Wanderjahr a decade earlier, when, just after Hitler’s rise to power, he’d walked clear across Germany (among other countries) with a volume of Horace for his vade mecum, often reciting the poems to himself as he tramped. About that experience he’d not yet written a public word, and would not do so for many more years. Similarly he held off recounting his aubade with Kreipe. At last, however, in the 1970s, he broached the subjects of his continental traverse and, in an aside to that account, of his fleeting bond with Kreipe. Some things are best waited for: the book in which Leigh Fermor set these matters down, A Time of Gifts (1977), along with its sequel, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), represent not only the capstone of his career but, in my opinion, the finest travel books in the language and a pinnacle of modern English prose, resplendent as Soracte or Ida in deep snow.
The deplorable fact that most Americans, even well-read ones, have never even heard, as I also had not until recently, of a figure who in Britain (to say nothing of Greece, where he lives to this day) is revered and beloved as war hero, author, and bon vivant; who is, in Jan Morris’s words, “beyond cavil the greatest of living travel writers”; and who, in those of the historian John Julius Norwich, “writes English as well as anyone alive”–all this spurs me to correct our oversight of the sublime, the peerless Patrick Leigh Fermor.
His turbulent early life is recounted in the introduction to A Time of Gifts. Shortly after his birth in 1915, his mother and sister went to join his father in India, while he was left behind “so that one of us might survive if the ship were sunk by a submarine.” For four years he was billeted with a Northamptonshire farming family, an experience that proved “the opposite of the ordeal Kipling describes in Baa Baa Black Sheep.” A halcyon period, this, but the taste for boisterous freedom he acquired in the fields made for trouble later on: “Those marvelously lawless years, it seems, had unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint.” Especially intolerable to him were academic strictures of any kind, and there ensued a long series of dust-ups and expulsions, hilariously related. At ten he was sent to “a school for difficult children,” among which misfits he lists
the millionaire’s nephew who chased motorcars along country lanes with a stick, the admiral’s pretty and slightly kleptomaniac daughter, the pursuivant’s son with nightmares and an infectious inherited passion for heraldry, the backward, the somnambulists … and, finally, the small bad hats like me who were merely very naughty. Continue reading
“In Tearing Haste” is such a good read. As time passes Debo’s letters become better and better. She is so funny. Highly recommended. Is it heresy to say that she is starting to pip Paddy?
One learns so much in this book, which in effect is the closest to an autobiography we are likely to get for Paddy’s post war life. Got to p175 of my paperback version today when out of the blue I read this:
Mayday 1979 Athens
Darling Debo,
Last Sunday night – Easter Sunday in the Orthodox Church – our car was blown sky high with an explosive charge and a length of fuse, with a red poster with hammers and sickles. I think they’d got the feast confused with Ascension Day. I think it’s all part of an attempt of ours to erect a modest bronze plaque to Fallen Comrades in Crete. It was to go up at a certain Abbey in the island. The Abbot and monks all consented, there was a feast to honour the decision, but a week later it was withdrawn: four men in cars had turned up, Communists from Heraklion, and frightened and threatened the monks. The same thing happened at another monastery, where our submarines used to surface on the same coast. Then a splendid village said they’d have it, and shoot anyone who tried to disturb it; and a few days later, BANG! At our doorstep. There is quite a powerful Comm. Party in Eastern Crete. The West is all OK: shows what a minority can do. The amount of telephone calls and telegrams from Cretan pals and Greeks in general – indignation, sympathy, etc, has made it almost worthwhile. But not QUITE, as insurance pays nought for Malicious Acts. Bugger them all.
Tons of fond love from
Paddy
This rivalry with the Communists goes all the way back to the time of wartime operations on Crete. See “Ill Met by Moonlight” and the threats and betrayals by the Communist Andartes. Is there a seamless link on to the 8 June 2000 assasination of Brigadier Stephen Saunders, 53, the British military attaché in Athens?
Wake up. Stretch. Open eyes and look around. We’re in the most comfortable bedroom imaginable, physically and aesthetically. A great bed, soft sheets, pastel grey woodwork, white upholstery. Through the open French windows is a dream beach: a perfect crescent of pristine sand lapped by clear blue water and shaded by tall palm trees. A barefoot 50 paces across tightly mown grass and we are in the warm sea. It doesn’t get any better than this.
How different it was for Patrick Leigh Fermor and his companions 56 years ago. With Joan Eyres-Monsell, the woman who was to become his wife 20 years later, and Costa, the great Greek photographer, spent six months travelling through the Lesser and Greater Antilles. Then, the many islands they visited were thoroughly run down. The great buildings of church and state and planters’ wealth were mostly ruinous and rotten. The future in the depressed economic climate just after the Second World War looked bleak and, indeed, “King Sugar” was about to die, as it had on the abolition of slavery – only this time as a victim of sugar beet and the macro politics being played out between America and Europe.
Yet, Leigh Fermor still managed to reveal the romance and the magic of the archipelago and so start the obsession so many have since had with visiting the “Friendly Isles”. His vision saved them by helping to create a climate in which tourism could grow, and tourism has been the salvation of the Caribbean ever since.
In those immediate post-war days, the few hotels and boarding houses were grim. The tourism industry was embryonic and only when they stayed in some of the grand privately owned great houses, built by rich planters, “were we redeemed from the usual squalors of our island sojourns”. Most of these have now become hotels or “plantation inns” and they are delightful places to stay, combining old-world elegance with modern luxury.
Earlier this year, my wife, Louella, and I decided to follow in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps to see how much the islands had changed. Our pace was less leisurely than his and we were able to visit only 10 of the 15 islands he saw, but with his books as our vade-mecum we found our eyes, ears and all our senses opened and enhanced.
We started in Antigua and headed straight for the Carlisle Bay hotel. There, Gordon Campbell Gray has achieved the same understated excellence on a Caribbean beach as in his highly regarded One Aldwych in London.
Antigua has changed radically since Leigh Fermor’s day. Then, Nelson’s dockyard was in ruins. “The timbers were so eaten away,” he wrote, “that we had to step from beam to beam, for the boards between them had fallen to powder, or still hung from rusty nails in rotten fragments.” English Harbour, the great 18th-century naval base favoured by Rodney, Cochrane and Nelson and perhaps the prettiest and safest harbour in the whole Caribbean (the view of it from Shirley Heights is without equal), had no facilities whatever.
First publushed in the Daily Telegraph 12 Oct 2003
Paddy Leigh Fermor has lived one of the great picaresque lives of the 20th century. He left a minor public school under heavy clouds with no money and a penchant for wandering. From 1934, for five years, he sustained a lotus existence in eastern Europe and the Balkans, by charm, genteel begging and Byronic good looks. His parents must have despaired of him during this longest gap year in history.
Words of Mercury by Artemis Cooper
One of Evelyn Waugh’s characters observed in 1939: “It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it with friends.” Leigh Fermor pursued this policy with notable success. His 18 months as a British agent in Crete made him a legend, not least for the kidnapping of the German General Kreipe, theme of the later film Ill Met By Moonlight.
After the war, Paddy resumed his leisurely course. One can no more imagine him occupying an office desk, queueing for the weekly envelope, than some marvellous beast of the African bush taking up employment as a security guard. He wandered the world until, in 1950, he suddenly produced a small literary masterpiece about the Caribbean, The Traveller’s Tree.
Thereafter, at irregular intervals, he has written travel books and fragments of autobiography. On his visits to England, rural grandees and metropolitan hostesses fight for the privilege of his society. The home he created with his wife Joan on the south shore of the Peloponnese at Kardamyli is a small work of art in its own right, owing much to their pets, or – as he writes here – to four-footed “downholsterers and interior desecrators”. How he loves language and words!
What is charm? In Leigh Fermor’s case it is an infinite curiosity about other people. He treats Bulgarian peasants and English dukes exactly alike. John Betjeman once spoke of Paddy “sitting there listening to you, his eyes sparkling with excitement as he waited to hear what you might say next”. Generosity of spirit is among his notable qualities.
A personal tribute to PLF from a fan. A song about Paddy’s long walk to Constantinople in “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water”.
A review of Words of Mercury by Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed Artemis Cooper first published in the Independent
Sunday, 2 November 2003
The overwhelming impression this book left on me was of a lost world of aesthetic public schoolboys, powerful newspaper editors, friendly ambassadors, and an unspoken understanding of what it meant to be upper- middle-class and English. What it meant was easy access to embassies and aristocratic houses around Europe, bicycle polo in Hungary, and the possibility that the next shepherd you met would be an Etonian Special Operations officer, speaking classical Greek. Here you will find the term “middle class” applied in a pejorative sense, rather than in the current usage which has such a wide catchment. That John Murray, the publishers of this book and upper-middle-class publishers par excellence, are no longer family-owned, perhaps confirms that this world has passed. And with it a love of language and literary decoration.
To quote Jan Morris, Paddy Leigh Fermor is beyond doubt the greatest of living travel writers, although the term “travel writing” barely does justice to the beauty, the lustrousness and sensuality of his writing. Take this, for example, speaking of how Greek temples once looked before they were stark ruins: “But the reality of the ruins, re-cohering in cobalt and blood-red, studded with metal, gaudy with idols, shiny with spilt honey and blood and reeking with sacrificial smoke, will have replaced the tinted ivory artefacts that had stolen their place and the void between the cutting of the flutes on the columns and the laying of the tramlines begins to fill up with people and events.”
There are about 40 short pieces divided into headings: Travels, Greece, People, Books and Flotsam. Many of these pieces are from Leigh Fermor’s great books, Mani, Roumeli and A Time of Gifts. (In 55 years he has only written eight books.) Others are from scattered newspaper pieces and obituaries. All the major phases of his life are represented here: the wandering schoolboy heading for Istanbul, the two years just before the war he spent in Romania with a doomed aristocratic family after meeting the daughter of the family in Athens (the woman Artemis Cooper describes as the love of his life), the extraordinary exploits in war-time Special Operations in Crete, where he captured the German General, Heinrich Kreipe, and his post-war exploration of Greece, particularly Mani where he has lived for 40 years in a house he built with his wife Joan, who died recently. Their story will be told by Artemis Cooper in a biography to be published after his death.
There are some tough jobs around, but few could be tougher than writing a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor. However, according to the acknowledgements section of “In Tearing Haste” by Charlotte Mosley, Artemis Cooper is apparently doing so; ‘… to Artemis Cooper, who is preparing a biography of Paddy’. Artemis of course edited “Words of Mercury” (2003).
Given that we have been waiting twenty four years for “Vol 3” what are the chances of Artemis’ biography being published before that volume? Not great I would have thought. But what a challenge to write about the life of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. I wish her the best of luck!
I have been reading ‘In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh-Fermor’ (2008), edited by Charlotte Mosley. It is really quite good and gets better as Debo writes more often to Paddy; she is very funny.
On page 22 of my paperback version in a letter from Paddy written on 26 August 1956 he writes:
“I was asked by W.S.M. (William Stanley Moss – his partner in the Kreipe kidnap escapade – see Ill Met by Moonlight) to a meal of reconciliation and amends, where we met as affable strangers. It was really a gasbag’s penance and I, having learnt the hard way, vouchsafed little more than a few safe monosyllables.”
Well what does this mean? It is clear something had caused a breakdown in what was once a good friendship. They had been through a lot together and to feel like this, there must have been something terrible to cause such a rift. Was it the way Moss portrayed the events of the Kreipe kidnap? The fact that Moss married Sophie? Who knows?
If anyone knows please add a comment to this article.
After what must have seemed an amazing four months to a young man of eighteen, Paddy arrives at the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border at Esztergom, which as he says (p 276 A Time of Gifts) contained ‘the Metropolitan Cathedral of all Hungary’. It is these last closing pages of his first volume that he describes the colourful preparations for an Easter service as he watches from no-man’s land in the middle of the bridge spanning the Danube. It is from this point that he picks up the story in volume two ‘Between the Woods an the Water’.
Wikipedia tells us: Esztergom (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈɛstɛrɡom], also known by alternative names), is a city in northern Hungary, about 50 km north-west of the capital Budapest. It lies in Komárom-Esztergom county, on the right bank of the river Danube, which forms the border with Slovakia there.
Esztergom was the capital of Hungary from the 10th till the mid-13th century when King Béla IV of Hungary moved the royal seat to Buda.
Esztergom is the seat of the prímás (see Primate) of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary. It’s also the official seat of the Constitutional Court of Hungary. The city has the Keresztény Múzeum, the largest ecclesiastical collection in Hungary. Its cathedral, Esztergom Basilica is the largest church in Hungary.
Imagine Paddy standing in the middle of this bridge looking at the cathedral
“Sex O’Clock High” – Get out your dictionaries, standby to Google … reading this short article by Paddy for the New Statesman (written in 1963) is at once both a joy and a frustrating, dizzying cornucopia of colourful and fiendish alliteration (thanks to my friend Carl Hagan for leading me to this)
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 1 March 1963. The author of The Traveller’s Tree and A Time of Gifts, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor is the doyen of British travel writers. He is also the central figure of W Stanley Moss’s Ill Met By Moonlight, a true tale of derring-do in wartime Crete. Now aged 91, he has written only rarely for the New Statesman: perhaps this item taxed the sub-editors’ patience too far.
It was an iridescent August morning and the effects of morphia and onanism were wearing off. Sitting up, Jack sipped his Earl Grey. Then he slipped into the Isabella-coloured pantaloons and a pair of Blucher boots proffered by his plimsolled and Jesuitical Jeames, byronically knotted his lavallière, donned a cardigan and a spenser and threw on a raglan. Trying a gibus, a trilby, an Anthony Eden, a fedora and a tam o’shanter, he finally pulled a billycock over his ears, narcissistically fluffed out his imperial and his dundrearies and, putting a lucifer to his Henry Clay, strolled downstairs to the electronic brougham.
Jill, attended by her gamp-grasping Abigail, was waiting for him by the wistaria’d Belisha beacon, her marcelled pompadour peeping roguishly from a Dolly Vardon in sarsenet. Soon, however, the brougham broke down. (Lack of volts? of amps, ohms, farads or watts?) The Jehu whispered that Jeames was a Jonah. Jill panicked, but their neighbour, jovial, Good-Samaritan Tom – a true Nimrod, martial in a stetson fitted with a havelock, a macfarlane, knickerbockers and wellingtons – quixotically gave them a lift in his phaeton, leaving Jeames there with the titanic gladstone-bag. (It was Shanks’s mare for him: Hobson’s choice.) They bowled over the macadam, passing many a stanhope and many a victoria, past Boniface with his churchwarden stuffed with cavendish outside the Marquis of Granby, where a peeler saluted; they finally settled under the bougainvillaea. But the food? Would they have a Barmecide feast: dine with Duke Humphrey? Jim thought of wartime maconochies and murphies. But soon Jeames arrived and panglossian Tom declared that it was all Sir Garnett.
They sipped John Collinses and grog with their sandwiches and discussed a lucullan soubise while Jeames cooked an Arnold Bennett omlette, boeuf strogonoff and, though Jill was banting, a gargantuan Chateaubriand. They washed these down with a Toby jug full of negus followed by a jeroboam of Mouton Rothschild. (Saturnine Jeames, their Ganymede, a professing Rechabite but secret slave to John Barleycorn, pharisaically out-Heroded Herod by swallowing a dozen baby Guinnesses.) Hermetic bakelite yielded pralines of filberts and logan berries, and soon Tom was sadistically guillotining his pêche Melba into procrustean slices. Jill put a Maréchal Niel behind her ear and picked a posy of hyacinths, dahlias, eschscholtzias, zinnias and Lady Diana Manners, while Jack, their amphitryon – a true epicure – extracted Napoleon brandy from the tantalus and offered Tom a Romeo and Juliet.
How they laughed at Tom’s odysseys! Jill declared that their Homeric and stentorian Mentor was a regular Munchausen. He related that, to forget an Oedipus complex, he had once crossed from a zeppelin to a mongolfier over a volcano somewhere in the Atlantic (O, for an atlas!), and, in his halcyon days, had performed caesarians in the Americas and taken Wassermans in the Gilbert Islands, broken up manichaean cabals with colts, bowie knives and shrapnel, joined the Fabians in San Salvador, practised as a psychiatrist and cured some Hudson Bay cyprians of nymphomania and the lotharios of Baffin land of priapism, seduced vestals in Rhodesia with aphrodisiac cereals, played cicerone to a croesus in Saudi Arabia, haussmannized Washington with mansards, swapped sanbenitos for fermorite in Liechtenstein, galvanized vandals with sapphics, published clerihews in morse and braille, taught Monroevians Sir Roger de Coverley, diddled Jack Ketch in Vancouver with a coup de Jarnac, turned the Trotskyites of Gorki into luddites among the diesels, mithridatized himself against nicotine in Virginia, prosecuted paulicians for simony in Columbia, driven St Simonism out of the Sorbonne, won pyrrhic victories with half-nelsons over herculean apaches in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, performed veronicas with mackintoshes in Bolivia, buggered a Buchmanite in Tasmania, stolen a strad from a musical Wykehamist in the Dolomites, built a mausoleum for a Maxim-gun mogul, out-witted the dogberries of Port Said, and confuted the Arians of Alexandria. He had lost his burberry at the Derby but returned from the Cesarewitch with a tin Lizzy-load of bradburies. A Mae West once saved him from Davy Jones between the Behring Straits and the Humboldt current. He had ranted, Roscius-like, among the thespians of the Palladium, sold plutonium and ammonia to Zwinglians in Louisiana, hunted Reynard and Bruin with yahoos and mohocks beyond the Mason-and-Dixon line, eaten a shaddock in mistake for a greengage when struck by Daltonism in Smithfield, bowdlerized pasquinades for Huntingdonians in Ekaterinoslav, and been boycotted as a quisling and almost lynched by Stakhanovites in the Bodleian.
Over the Benedictine, Jill told a rocambolesque story of how, as a girl, in Paris, with her hair tied en cadogan, she had slipped on a melted esquimau by a Wallace and fallen into a vespasienne! Mesmerized by Tom, she only tittered masochistically when he said her spooneristic malapropisms were Freudian. It was turning into bacchanal.
Were her feelings for Tom just platonic, Jill mused. How namby-pamby Jack seemed after the other’s hectoring rhodomontades. Sitting on the edge of a chesterfield by a Chippendale davenport that evening, she heaved a maudlin sigh and unscrewed her Parker to write Jack a collins.
Patrick Leigh Fermor 