Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure paperback cover

For those of you who could not stretch to buying the hardback, or who now want to shower your friends with copies of Artemis Cooper’s fine biography, the time is almost upon us when you can purchase the paperback, just in time for summer holiday reading.

It is apparently due for release on 27 June 2013, but as ever is available for pre-order. You can order the paperback version of  Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

As you can see it has a distinctly different cover with the famous view of the house at Kardamyli, whilst still showing our hero at the peak of his powers.

Paddy at Dumbleton

by Peter Green

First published in the Times Literary Supplement 14 November 2012.

Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor was born on February 11, 1915 in London, one year into the world war that changed the face of Europe for ever. Within four months, the Lusitania had been torpedoed and the first Zeppelin air raids carried out over London. At his birth, the attendant good fairy seems to have been in a generous mood. She lavished on him striking good looks, a strong streak of imaginative creativity, physical vigour, a long and – despite an outsize addiction to both cigarettes and alcohol – largely healthy life (he died last year), linguistic skills well above the average, a phenomenal memory, daring courage, an outgoing and exuberant, almost Herodotean fascination with the oddities of the world (not least its more eccentric and obsolescent aristocracies), and an equally exuberant ability to charm a remarkably wide range of people, most notably (though far from exclusively) women.

The bad fairy, watching all this with a sourly malevolent eye, did what she could, which was quite a lot, to minimize the effects of such prodigal largesse. She began by ensuring that the wunderkind, however percipient about the remote marvels of the world he explored, never, in all his ninety-six years, acquired the taste, much less any real ability, for self-analysis. Unable to diminish his creativity, she saddled him with a perfectionist’s crippling demands, and the infinite time-wasting occupations of the born procrastinator. By rendering him impervious to all formal external discipline – much helped by his being allowed to run wild as a child in Northamptonshire while his parents were in India – she both sidelined him from any professional career in the normally accepted sense, and made it inevitable that his prodigious learning (which she could do nothing to stop) was at least of the autodidactic variety. She saw to it that his undeniable charm was frequently interpreted as an attribute of the freeloading gigolo with a weakness for titled ladies, his infectious high spirits as boring bumptiousness, and his very real courage as egomaniacal self-promotion, often – this a contribution from her irredentist Greek cousins – in the service of imperialist politics.

It follows that any prospective biographer of so remarkable a character (frequently labelled “the last Renaissance man”, and for once the cliché is at least understandable) will have an unusually hard row to hoe, and some very tricky decisions to make. This is no less true of one who, like Artemis Cooper, knew him from childhood: such intimate familiarity may in fact have made her task appreciably more difficult. Paddy (as he was known, in Cooper’s prefatory words, “by all the hundreds of people who knew and loved him” – and, one might add, by many more who didn’t) presents the daunting problem of having become a public legend in his own lifetime.

As a teenager (a term he detested) he walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, and used the experience to write a unique elegy to the not-quite-lost, and ultra-Chekhovian, country nobility of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire (A Time of Gifts, 1977). As a Special Operations Executive (SOE) operative on German-occupied Crete in 1944, and against all predictable odds, he not only kidnapped a German divisional general and got him safely away to Cairo, but formed a personal bond with him by smoothly capping one of his Latin quotations. Finally, when almost seventy, and faced with a strong current, he successfully swam the Hellespont.

These and other experiences have been rubbed smooth by much telling, often inaccurate as well as humdrum, and it is very much to Artemis Cooper’s credit that she irons out the inaccuracies, and places each anecdote in its proper context, backing it up with careful documentation. This historicization of what was rapidly becoming myth may take off a little of the lustre, but it also deepens perspective. We can see, for example, not only how extraordinary that moment in the White Mountains of Crete was when Horace’s Soracte Ode created an instant cultural and personal rapprochement between British captor and German captive, but how strikingly it symbolized the final flare-up before extinction of a code of international culture that had endured for over two millennia; how it indeed formed a wonderful, if unintentional, postscript to the dying worlds so memorably evoked in all Paddy’s writings. At one level the extraordinary, and moving, fascination of his work consists in the fact that from start to finish, from the doomed Creole aristocracy of The Violins of Saint-Jacques to Count Jeno, “scion of one of the great Hungarian houses of Transylvania” in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – not to mention his portraits of the Sarakatsani nomads in Roumeli (1966) or the fierce individualists of Mani (1958), who, in their scorched and rocky peninsula, preserved an ancient way of life beyond the reach of the Turks – what he is chronicling is the end of an epoch, a loving and nostalgic farewell to civilizations that were dealt their quietus by a single pistol-shot in the fateful summer of 1914.

It is easy to forget, because of his much-touted heroism in the Second World War, that what Paddy actually inherited as an impressionable child was very much a pre-1914 view of life. His passion for heraldry, old houses, even older families, and the colourful pageantry of royal processions; his happy embracement of a Europe in which an infinite number of languages, customs and migrant peoples made a transparency of political frontiers and showed a happy indifference to passports; his polyglot adventurousness, his philhellenic romanticism, his taste for crowned heads and ancient titles: all this stamped him unmistakably as a latter-day Edwardian, drawing comparisons with Rudolf Rassendyll, or Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan’s Greenmantle, and revealing beyond these fictional characters his basic affinity with the no less astonishing real-life characters who had inspired them, such as T. E. Lawrence or Aubrey Herbert (who was twice offered the throne of Albania). He is in his element at the 1958 enthronement of Cardinal Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, dashing off a postcard from Rome to Diana Cooper (Artemis’s grandmother), in ecstasy over “the silver trumpets, the ruffs, the cloaks with Maltese crosses, the morions and slashed doublets . . . . I’m swooning”. His inspired idea, when still eighteen, of walking to Constantinople (never, even at that age, thought of as Istanbul) was not entirely a lucky guess: precocious reading and bred-in-the-bone instinct played their part too. Psychologists will also note how periods of great emotional tension are followed by months of recuperative illness: scabies and pneumonia after initial training in the Guards Depot; near-fatal polyarthritis after the successful abduction of General Kreipe from Crete.

When we ask ourselves how, in essence, the two published volumes of the Great Walk trilogy represent (as is generally, and I think rightly, believed) a higher literary achievement than Paddy’s other work, this sense of their being a powerful and emotionally loaded requiem for an all-but-lost world – artfully strengthened by the way in which the author’s older self, familiar with the bitter end of the story, plays that off against the omnivorous excitement of his innocent youth – is surely the dominant factor. Other major characteristics, from the antiquarian’s delight in exotic historical arcana to sharp portraits of eccentric individuals and a detailed knowledge of local slang and social habits, are all present in Paddy’s other books from the start. The penetrating study of Caribbean voodoo practices in that now much underrated first book of his, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), is a nice case in point. He learned, very early, that to sing successfully for his supper, not just personal charm, but having a genuine interest in the lives and activities of his hosts, were tremendously helpful.

But the other major aspect of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water that surely guaranteed their capacity to enchant so many readers, and their survival as classics of twentieth-century literature, is the immense, time-consuming, and, to his publisher, maddening care their author devoted to fashioning the sentences in which they were written. However much we write off as procrastination, the final subtly crafted verbal achievement is what gives these texts their magical allure, and goes far to justify the long years spent on them. Paddy, as he made unforgettably clear in a famous passage of Mani, was in love, in an almost physical sense, with words:

“I often have the impression, listening to a Greek argument, that I can actually see the words spin from their mouths . . . the noble shapes of the Greek letters, complete with their hard and soft breathings, the flicker of accents with the change of enclitic and proclitic and the hovering boomerangs of perispomena sail through the air . . . . As the argument kindles and voices wax louder, the lettering matriculates from italics to capitals and out like dangerous missiles whizz triangles and T-squares and gibbets and acute angles, pairs of Stonehenge megaliths with lintel stones, and half-open springs . . . .”

What a word is this, Homer remarks in a recurrent formulaic line, that has escaped the barrier of your teeth. That metaphor comes nearer to a kind of unexpected reality in Paddy’s collected works than most of us would ever have surmised. The climax of his prose poem “Sounds of the Greek World”, the concluding chapter of Roumeli, with its caressing description of “the abruptness of asyndeton” and “the swell of hyperbole”, is in the same mode.

And here we begin to see some of the very real problems confronting his biographer. In Paddy’s expert hands the Great Walk becomes an ongoing, and infinitely seductive, quest for the Earthly Paradise, all the more compelling for the rich glimpses of it to which we are treated in his hypnotic and tessellated prose. No accident, I suspect, that he set out for Constantinople in the December of 1933: the year Hitler came to power, but also (and surely related) the year in which James Hilton published Lost Horizon, the novel that made Shangri-La a symbol of the Edenic refuge from modern conflicts. Paddy’s hosts along the way are presented as part of this paradisal world. But the biographer’s business is factual, with the result here that Cooper’s black-and-white functional prose (always in sharp contrast to Paddy’s own richly coloured version), just as it demythicizes the anecdotes, also gives us a walk that is just a walk, and characters who, charming though they may be, are in fact the last survivors of an anything-but-paradisal landowners’ regime. The biography, going about its proper business, is always looking at the Realien behind Paddy’s magically evocative vision, and thus, quite unintentionally, and probably inevitably, ends by steadily cutting him down to size throughout.

Where this becomes a real, and potentially threatening, problem is in the matter of the long-awaited third volume of the trilogy, never published in Paddy’s lifetime, and for years a task with which he struggled in an increasingly pessimistic mood. The crucial question is, does even a first draft of the trilogy’s conclusion exist? Paddy himself talked, on numerous occasions, of working at it. Visitors report seeing a pile of manuscript variously estimated at eight or twelve inches high. Some kind of text is promised for publication in 2013. Yet in her appendix on sources, Cooper lists, for the final stretch, only the “Green Diary” (left behind by Paddy in Romania in 1939, but recovered after the war), and an early (1963–4) version of the Great Walk, about 60,000 words in length, that grew out of a commission from Holiday magazine on “The Pleasures of Walking” (see the 1963 letter to Xan Fielding in Commentary, pp16–17).

It is this last item, we are told, “that will form the bulk of the posthumous conclusion”. But did its final third, from Orsova to the Black Sea, which was, Cooper reports, “covered in detail”, ever get any of the painstaking revision, the cutting and splicing and verbal thaumaturgy that gave the two earlier volumes their enduring magic? What, in fact, were those piles of paper? In what did Paddy’s unfinished labours actually consist? Here, once again, the factual details of Cooper’s biography are suggestive, hinting at possible reasons for non-completion beyond the obvious ones of age, burn-out, and the cumulative ravages of compulsive socializing and over-indulgence.

The quest for the Earthly Paradise needed a fairy princess; and, in a very literal sense, it duly found one. In 1935 Paddy met in Athens, and fell head over heels in love with, Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, who “belonged to one of the great dynasties of eastern Europe”. She was sixteen years older than Paddy, but seems to have reciprocated his adoration with equal fervour. Like many European aristocrats of the period, she maintained a country estate (at Bäleni in Moldavia), while at the same time being virtually penniless. This was no fly-by-night affair. The two lived together – at first in Greece, where they shared a watermill near Galatas, and for a while in England, but for the most part on the Moldavian estate – for nearly five years: writing, painting, translating, travelling, and enjoying each other. It was only the outbreak of war in 1939 that tore them apart, sending Paddy, a natural patriotic adventurer, headlong back to England to join the Irish Guards. This, as Balasha presciently foresaw, was the end of the affair. Cut off, first by the war, then by the brutal initial years of the Communist regime in Romania, which evicted Balasha and her family from the estate, they didn’t meet again until 1965, by which time the one-time princess was a broken wreck of a woman in her sixties, looking much older, and soon to die of breast cancer. But it was she who had preserved the Green Notebook, and at that last meeting she returned it to him.

It is, I think, at least possible that this horrific end to the happy idyll that had formed the climactic conclusion to the Great Walk was one factor, and not a small one, in helping to create so massive a writer’s block in Paddy over the final volume of the trilogy. It will have joined that other nightmare of the Mediterranean expatriate: recognition of advancing age, the ultimate failure of the dream of eternal youth, when the sunlit world is less easily mastered, and the physical self, once so carelessly taken for granted, begins to fail. Paddy defied the clock better than most (a photo of him taken on Ithaca in 1946, when he had a tough war behind him and was in his thirties, makes him look a teenager still), but the determined mountaineering of his later years, not to mention his swimming the Hellespont, had their inevitable limit. His increasing melancholy as time passed hints at a characteristic Mediterranean timor mortis lurking behind the still upbeat bonhomie, and this, too, cannot have encouraged the literary pursuit of paradisal dreams recollected in a mood increasingly removed from tranquillity.

It is also possible that, in some sense, he never fully recovered from the loss of Balasha. His subsequent record of Don Juanism does nothing to disprove this; nor, more surprisingly, does his lifelong relationship with Joan Eyres Monsell, which Cooper charts with an unsparing eye. We watch Joan’s hope for marriage and children being thwarted by a combination of the freedom dream and the writer’s demand for creative solitude (this last being helped out at tight moments by her trust fund). While their companionship grows ever stronger, a time comes when she nevertheless abjures sex with Paddy, and indeed takes to giving him cash handouts to pay for pick-ups. By 1968, when they finally marry, they are both in their fifties, and Joan has had a hysterectomy. Curiously, nothing better emphasizes the subtle gap between their life and that of the Greek world where they spent half of each year than the reaction to their wedding of the citizens of Kardamyli in the Peloponnese, where they had built themselves a legendary house. When they returned from London as a married couple, they found the single bed in Joan’s bedroom, at the other end of the house from Paddy’s, “covered with rose petals and sugared almonds”. Joan, Cooper reports, “was embarrassed and amused”. The amusement, I suspect, was hard work. Artemis Cooper’s biography is subtitled “An adventure”, and in its understated way it spells out just how much, for all its undeniable glamour, that adventure cost.

Peter Green is the Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin. He is a professional translator and an occasional poet and novelist. He currently serves as a member of the Classics Faculty at the University of Iowa.

My thanks to David Platzer who wrote this review of An Adventure for the 1 December issue of The Tablet. It is the first time an article from the Catholic organ has made an appearance on the blog.

By David Platzer.

At the beginning of this splendid biography, Artemis Cooper tells us that one of the very first books Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paddy to his friends, ever read was Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill,  a  favourite to which Leigh Fermor yearly returned, along with another Kipling gem, Kim, until the end of his long life.  There was a bit of Puck in Leigh Fermor. To this was added a Buchan hero’s dash and a spice of Byron in good looks, a reputation as  heroes in Greece and both being published by John Murray. Byron and Leigh Fermor possessed as well a sympathy for Catholicism without ever converting even if Leigh Fermor identified himself as ‘R.C.’ during the Second World War.

The war made Leigh Fermor famous when, while fighting with the Greek Resistance he led the kidnap of General Kreipe, German Divisional Commander in Crete.  Any other  writer would have wasted little time in turning his wartime adventures into a book as did Fitzroy Maclean  did with regard to his experiences in Yugoslavia. Leigh Fermor was happy to let his comrade-in-arms, William Stanley Moss, tell their story; as it happened, Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight, filmed by Michael Powell with Dirk Bogarde playing Leigh Fermor,only enhanced Leigh Fermor’s legend.   Leigh Fermor made his literary fame with The Traveller’s Tree, one of the few books that  James Bond is known to have read.  Years later Leigh Fermor finally did he accept a commission to write an article about his war; typically, the chronically dilatory Leigh Fermor was eleven months late in filing 36;000 words of  ‘Abducting the General’, well over the 5,000 limit specified. Cooper, Antony Beevor’s wife,  discusses in detail Leigh Fermor’s war. This included two darker moments, Leigh Fermor’s accidental shooting dead of a Cretan resistant and the killing, to Leigh Fermor’s horror,  of General Kreipe’s driver by the two Greeks guarding him.

Leigh Fermor’s dilatoriness was the cross of the long-suffering John Murray who died, still waiting for the third volume of the trilogy of Leigh Fermor’s masterpiece portraying his walk in his late teens from Holland to Constantinople in the Thirties. The always hard-up  Leigh Fermor approached his work as if he was a leisured gentleman writer,  blessed with unlimited time in which to write and re-write, his ‘Penelope-ising’, as his friend, the poet George Seferis, put it. He was fortunate indeed in his wife Joan, Wendy to his Peter Pan, who possessed the private income he lacked. Artemis  Cooper, who knew her subject  as a family friend, doesn’t shirk mentioning that Joan not only looked the other way to her companion’s sexual infidelities but even encouraged them.  Though Joan gave up sleeping with Leigh Fermor fairly early in their relationship and long before their marriage, she didn’t expect him to be celibate.  One is reminded of the biographer’s own grandparents, Duff and Diana Cooper, also bound together by a deeper link than the merely physical.

Other than his army pay in wartime and a brief stint at the British Council in Athens, Leigh Fermor never earned a salary and Cooper quotes Somerset Maugham’s description of him as ‘a middle class gigolo for upper class women.’  Maugham, always touchy about his speech impediment, was miffed by Leigh Fermor’s bibulous jokes about stammerers at the octogerian author’s table; nevertheless,  Maugham’s fiction often celebrates cheeky adventurers triumphing at the expense of rectitude and the remark may  have been more a compliment than a barb.  Friends and lovers found he earned his keep through his kindly thoughtfulness. ‘Most men are just take, take, take,’ Ricci Huston, one of Leigh Fermor’s loves said, ‘…with Paddy, it’s give,give, give.’ A few of Leigh Fermor’s  acquaintanceship found that his boisterousness, the frequent singing in nine different languages, often for his supper, and  the dazzling flow of erudition a little too much of a good thing. For the overwhelming majority, however, whether aristocrats or peasants, he was always welcome.  This enthralling biography may well convert even those sceptical to the charm of this endearing sprite, luckier than any Jim,  who succeeded in his early ambition of making his life into a novel.

Fed up with Jamie Oliver? Tired of E.L. James? High street book retailers have come up with an alternative list of books that they think will be best-sellers this Christmas. Of course An Adventure must be in your top ten for Christmas presents this year, and judging by various articles the biography is doing very well both in terms sales and recommendations. Here is just one of them by James Hall from the Telegraph.

Around 200 independent bookshop owners voted on the ten books they think will appeal to people looking for something a little different this year.

The list includes titles such as 101 Uses for a Dead Kindle by Adrian Searle and Wenceslas: A Christmas Poem by Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate.

The number one book is Horologicon: A Day’s Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth. The book examines “extraordinary” words from the English language arranged by the hour of the day.

In second place is Artemis Cooper’s biography of the war hero and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Patrick Neale, president of The Booksellers Association, said that the list contains “bizarre”, “obscure” and “undiscovered” titles.

“These out of the ordinary, off-beat titles were nominated during the Association’s annual conference, which brought together around 200 booksellers. These were carefully selected with the imaginative book buyer in mind, who may be looking for something a little different to bestseller books,” said Mr Neale.

The Alternative Top Ten

1. Horologicon by Mark Forsyth

2. Patrick Leigh Fermor by Artemis Cooper

3. The Middle Class ABC by Fi Cotter-Craig and Zebedee Helm

4. Wenceslas by Carol Ann Duffy

5. 101 Uses for a Dead Kindle by Adrian Searle

6. First Class by Chris West

7. On the Map by Simon Garfield

8. Paper: An Elegy by Ian Sansom

9. Fir Tree by Sanna Annukka

10. Bring Me Sunshine by Charlie Connelly

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

By Anthony Sattin

First published in The Observer, 21 October 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

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

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

By Philip Marsden

First published in The Daily Mail, 15 October 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

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

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

By Roger Hutchinson

First published in The Scotsman 20 October 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

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

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

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

by Artemis Cooper

First published in The Guardian, 20 October 2012

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

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

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

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

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

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

First published in The Economist, 20 October 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

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

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

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

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

By Philip Mansel

First published in The Spectator, 13 October 2012.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can buy Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure here.

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