Tag Archives: Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Times Literary Supplement: Patrick Leigh Fermor

First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 2011

There was a time in the early 1950s when, upon arrival in the TLS office of a book about cannibalism or Voodoo, the editor would drop it in an envelope and say, “This is one for Paddy”. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last month at the age of ninety-six, is now best known for his connection to Greece and his youthful trek across Central Europe in the direction of Constantinople (as he insisted on calling it). But in his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, an account of a journey by schooner through the Caribbean islands published in 1950, he was in pursuit of “the whole phenomenon of Afro-American religion”. Before long, the TLS was commissioning the former mountain guerrilla fighter and Intelligence Corps Liaison Officer to write on related matters. He could open a review of a book on Haiti in 1953 by telling readers that “The bibliography of Voodoo – or Voudoun, as some purists insist, with little basis, on spelling it – mounts impressively”. A discussion of cannibalism in the correspondence columns of the TLS was just the sort of thing to elicit a contribution from Fermor: “Apropos of the recent letters about the ethical and culinary aspects of cannibalism, may I quote from a book I wrote years ago . . .”.

There followed a list of the gustatory advantages of various folk, according to the palates of the Caribs who “invaded the Caribbean chain, eating all the male Arawaks they could lay hands on and marrying their widows”. The book he wished to quote from was, of course, The Traveller’s Tree (it was by now 1980), which included this pre-Columbian version of a restaurant review:

“French people were considered delicious, and by far the best of the Europeans, and next came the English. The Dutch were dull and rather tasteless, while the Spanish were so stringy and full of gristle as to be practically uneatable.”

In later years, Paddy – as he was known to friend, reader and stranger alike – wrote for this paper on various topics, including Crete, scene of his wartime adventure. In the common run of Grub Street, there are many people one could call on to evaluate an anthology of nonsense – but Poiémate me Zographies se Mikra Paidia, which Paddy reviewed in 1977, was nonsense in modern Greek. In December 1979, he contributed a clamorous, ringing poem on the subject of Christmas:

What franker frankincense, frankly, can rank
in scents with fawn-born dawning
Weak we in Christmas week, lifetime a shriek-
ing streak – lend length and strengthen!
Poultice the harm away, charm the short
solstice day! Send strength and lengthen!

Among other curiosities we found on rooting through the archive was this plea from May 1968: “Patrick Leigh Fermor, author, traveller: biographical information, letters, personal reminiscences for biography”. The requester was J. Marder, writing from Athens. What became of it, and him? An authorized biography by Artemis Cooper is expected to appear at the end of next year.

We have received this “personal reminiscence” from a correspondent:

“In 2005, I was commissioned by a newspaper to write a profile of Patrick Leigh Fermor. A preliminary meeting took place at the West London home of Magouche Fielding, widow of Xan, PLF’s comrade-in-arms, but my editor insisted that no piece about Fermor could appear without a first-hand account of the house which he designed and helped build in the mid-1960s in Mani, at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese. So it was that, after an overnight stay in Athens and a five-hour drive to the village of Kardamyli, I rang Paddy from a seaside pension.

“‘Good Lord. You’re here already!’ he exclaimed, though all proper warning had been issued. ‘Look here. Come to supper straight away. It’ll be a rotten supper. But come to supper straight away.’ Desiring nothing more than an ouzo followed by a soft pillow, I had the presence of mind to resist. Paddy was understanding. ‘Look here. Come to lunch tomorrow. It’ll be a much better lunch.’ Suppers and lunches, it transpired, were prepared by different maids.

“At about one the following day I set off for the two-kilometre walk from Kardamyli, with directions from a villager. ‘As the road bends to the left, you take the footpath to the right. Go through the olive grove, and arrive at Mr Fermor’s door.’ What could be simpler? There was indeed a bend in the road and a footpath to the right. But there was also another, closer to the bend, up ahead. Then another. After involuntary exploration of hitherto uncharted olive groves and what seemed a sizeable stretch of the Mediterranean coast, I squelched into Paddy’s house from the shore, to find him seated on the sofa reading the TLS. ‘Good Lord. I think you’re the only creature, apart from a goat, who has come in that way. We must have a drink straight away.’ The last was among his favourite phrases.

“Lunch lasted some six hours. (Lemon chicken, with litres of retsina or red Lamia.) Songs in various languages were sung, including a rendering of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ in Hindustani. Lost lines of poems were sought. An anecdote about my lately deceased father and his claim to have seen salmon leaping in a narrow Perthshire stream, confirmed only after his death, threw Paddy into a search for the perfect epithet: ‘The corroborating salmon. The justifying salmon. The proving salmon’. Well into the evening, I prepared to leave. ‘Look here. Come to lunch on Sunday’ (this was Friday). I said I would on be on my way back to Athens. He was startled. ‘Good Lord. You’re leaving already? Then come to supper tomorrow.’ I did so, after an all-day hike in the Tagetos mountains which rear up behind the house that Paddy built, as the Gulf of Messenia opens before it. This time, I arrived punctually, to be admitted by the allegedly rotten cook (in fact supper tasted very good). She directed me to Paddy’s study in a separate building in the garden. I knocked before entering, to find him at his desk, alone in Mani on a late March evening, dressed in Jermyn Street shirt, pullover and grey flannels, reading a Loeb Horace. Towers of manuscripts could not obscure him. Among them, perhaps, was a draft of the third and concluding part of his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople – the first, though not the last, heroic adventure of Patrick Leigh Fermor.”

Wanderlust magazine obituary: Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Thought you had read all the obits you can and learn nothing new? Well this one is worth a read for Jonathan Lorie’s account of a chance meeting with Paddy at his publisher, John Murray.

by Jonathan Lorie

First published in Wanderlust, 14 June 2011

The death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in June has robbed the travel world of its last great romantic. Here, Jonathan Lorie explains why

Which other travel writer can claim to have ridden in a cavalry and charged across a castle drawbridge with sabres drawn? Lived in a Romanian castle with a princess? Kidnapped a Nazi general and driven his staff car through 22 enemy checkpoints disguised in his uniform?

At 19, Paddy walked across Europe from Rotterdam to Istanbul. At 70, he swum the Hellespont from Europe to Asia. And in between, he lived one of the boldest lives and wrote some of the finest travellers’ tales of the 20th century.

He will best be remembered for the two books that recalled his journey across Europe in the 1930s – an epic walk on foot, sleeping in barns one night and ancestral castles the next, entering an older world of peasants and forests, gypsies and counts, which stretched back unbroken to the days of Charlemagne – but was about to be engulfed by war.

The two memoirs, A Time Of Gifts and Between The Woods And The Water, were written decades later: but their vivid sense of that lost order, their boyish high spirits and their learned yet lyrical prose established them as instant classics. The distinguished author Jan Morris has called him ‘the supreme English travel writer’.

A third book was always planned, but never published. It would have told how he reached that journey’s end, fell in love with the princess and lived on her feudal estate until war separated them. But it would not have recounted his wildest exploit, when he parachuted into war-time Crete to run Resistance operations against the German occupiers. Months of hiding as flea-ridden shepherds in caves culminated in the dramatic kidnap of the enemy general, a feat immortalised in the film Ill Met By Moonlight.

He never went back to the princess, but returned to Greece to build a permanent home in Mani, which became legendary for its elegance and its house guests. John Betjeman called his library overlooking the Mediterranean as ‘one of the rooms of the world’. Travel books followed, on the Caribbean and Greece, then the memoirs in the 1970s and 80s which brought the acclaim of the world. By then, Mani had become a magnet for writers and artists – notably Bruce Chatwin – paying homage to the grand old man. In 2004, aged 89, he was knighted by the Queen.

I met him the next day, in the fading grandeur of his publisher’s office, a peeling stucco townhouse near the Ritz. He was sitting in the Byron room, a Georgian salon filled with bookcases and marble busts, where the great poet’s executors burnt his scandalous letters. It was a fitting setting for a modern writer who loved action and romance and Greece.

Paddy looked up. His handsome face was scowling, but his eyes twinkled as ever. “It’s no good,” he spluttered, jabbing at a letter he was scribbling in fountain pen. “I just can’t remember any more.” What, I asked. “I’m writing to the Spanish ambassador. A poem in medieval French. And I can’t remember the end of it.” He frowned, and then burst into laughter.

Rumours abound that the final, missing volume has been written. Ardent fans pestered him for 30 years about it. He promised he would get round to it. We can only hope he has.

Sir Patrick “Paddy” Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE

11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011

Spare And Sublime: A Monastery’s Spell Of ‘Silence’

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Last summer I was struck by a severe case of wanderlust. I wanted urgently to be on my own in the woods, away from the radiating concrete and steel of New York in July. So I packed my bags and set out to the coast of Maine.

By Adam Haslett

First published on National Public Radio, 10 February 2011

On the way, I stopped to see a friend, and when he heard the purpose of my trip — to step outside the daily round of distraction and obligation — he pulled a book off his shelf and suggested I might want to take it along for the journey. It was called A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I quickly fell under its spell.

At a mere 95 pages, it is a short read, yet nothing about it makes you want to rush. In the mid-1950s, Fermor, an English travel writer who as a young man once walked from Holland to Turkey, became interested in the life of monks. He decided to visit several Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France. A Time to Keep Silence is the record of those visits and it accomplishes something that few books do: It replicates in style and rhythm the very experience that it seeks to describe. The writing is spare, exactingly precise, and then occasionally quite beautiful, just as the life of the monks we hear about are pared down, highly concentrated, and every now and then sublime. In short, it’s a book about the contemplative life that delivers the reader into a contemplation of his or her own.

When he first arrives at the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle, Fermor is shown to his visitor’s cell. He writes, “a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke.” He is used to the world of entertainment and distraction, as most of us are, but all that has now ceased and there is nowhere for his nervous energy to go.

But after a few days amidst the silent rituals of the monastery, his mood changes. “There were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.” Soon, “dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a lake shore.”

To read that beautiful, restful sentence is to experience a small piece of the restfulness Fermor himself found. When we say that a book transports us, this is what we mean. The music of the words themselves sing us into a different world.

I had my own time to keep silence in the woods in Maine last summer. I was lucky enough to have Fermor’s book along with me. We can’t all be monks, and most of us wouldn’t want to be, but the genius of excellent writing is that we can know something of what that other life is.

You can also listen to Adam reading the above here.

Honoring Patrick Leigh Fermor: Review Essay

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

Paddy in 1966

by Willard Manus

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor today is both an exhilarating and depressing experience, exhilarating because of the depth and brilliance of his prose, depressing because the Greece he portrays so memorably has been hammered to dust by the march of time. Fermor, who was knighted in 2003, is best known in Greece and in his native Britain, where he was born nine decades ago to Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, director of the Geological Society in India, and Eileen Ambler, who was partly raised there. His first book, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950, dealt with the journey he made through the Caribbean islands in 1947-48. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature, and established him as a writer of note.

His next two books, 1952’s A Time to Keep Silence, which described his stay in various European monasteries (where he discovered in himself “a capacity for solitude”), and 1956’s The Violins of Saint-Jacque, a novel, are interesting but minor works. His literary and political importance is linked to the two books on Greece he published a decade later—Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. Established his reputation as the pre-eminent non-native writer on 20th century Greece.

Fermor’s first experience of the country dated back to 1933, when as a rebellious and untamed 19-year-old, he dropped out of Sandhurst and set out on a walking tour of Europe with Constantinople as his ultimate destination was Constantinople. Envisioning himself as “a medieval pilgrim, an affable tramp with a knapsack and hobnailed boots,” he embarked, in mid-winter, on a journey that eventually spanned three years and took him through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Rumania and, eventually, Greece. 2

Remarkably, Fermor did not write about his picaresque adventures in pre-war Europe until many years later. “So when A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977 and Beneath the Winds and the Water in 1986, the life of the mid-thirties that he described had been utterly destroyed,” his biographer Artemis Cooper has noted, “and much of the land he had walked over was in the grip of communism for years. Yet his memory recreated this world with an astonishing freshness and immediacy, and recaptured the young man he was then: full of curiosity, optimism and joy in the vibrant diversity of the world.” The concluding volume of Fermor’s trilogy is scheduled for publication (by John Murray Ltd.) in early 2007.

Fermor made it to Constantinople on New Year’s Day, 1935, and then crossed south into Greece. He spent time in a monastery on Mt. Athos, got caught up later in a Royalist vs. Republican battle in Macedonia, arriving finally in Athens, where he met the great love of his life, the Romanian Balasha Cantacuzene. They went to Poros and lived together in an old water mill, where he wrote and she painted. When the money ran out they retreated to her decaying family home in Baldeni, Moldavia.

Fermor described the house in an essay published in Words of Mercury, “Most of a large estate had been lopped away in the agrarian reform. There was little cash about, people were paid in kind by a sort of sharing system, so, in a way, were the owners; and, on the spot, there was enough to go around. Elderly pensioners hovered in the middle distance and an ancient staff would come into being at moments of need. . . .

“There was one crone there who knew how to cast spells and break them by incantations; another, by magic, could deliver whole villages from rats. After sheep-shearing, a claca, fifty girls and crones, bristling with distaffs would gather in a barn to spin; hilarious days with a lot of food, drink, singing and story-telling.

“Snow reached the windowsills and lasted till spring. There were cloudy rides under a sky full of rooks; otherwise, it was an indoors life of painting, writing, reading, talk and lamp-lit evenings with Mallarme, Apollinaire, Proust and Gide handy; there was Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and L’ Aiglon read aloud; all these were early debarbarizing steps in beguiling and unknown territory.”

Fermor was not quite the barbarian he fancied himself. Despite having rejected higher education, he was already something of a polymath, an autodidact. Not only was he conversant in five European languages (only Hungarian stumped him), he was knowledgeable about art, history, architecture, geography, sociology, religion, fashion, etymology, cartography, heraldry and many other subjects, all of which he had absorbed through voracious reading.

The importance of books in his life was discussed in a piece he wrote for The Pleasure of Reading (ed. Antonia Fraser, Bloomsbury, 1992). “When the miracle of literacy happened at last, it turned an unlettered brute into a book-ridden lunatic,” he confessed. “Till it was light enough to read, furious dawn-watches ushered in days flat on hearth-rugs or grass, in ricks or up trees, which ended in stifling torch lit hours under bedclothes.”‘

Among his favorite writers were Dickens, Thackeray (Vanity Fair, anyway), the Sitwells, Norman Douglas, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, not to speak of Kipling and Houseman; Baudelaire and Ronsard in French; Horace and Virgil in Latin; Holderlin, Rilke and Stefan George in German.

“The young learn as quick as mynahs, at an age, luckily, when everything sticks,” he continued. What also stuck were “reams of Shakespeare, border ballads, passages of Donne, Raleigh, Wyatt and Marvel . . . two Latin hymns, remnants of spasmodic religious mania . . swatches from Homer, two or three epitaphs of Simonides, and two four-line moon-poems of Sappho.”

Fermor’s list also includes “the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica … a battery of atlases, concordances, dictionaries, Loeb classics, Pleiades editions, Oxford companions, Cambridge histories, anthologies and books on birds, beasts, plants and stars.”

When Britain declared war in 1939, Fermor immediately went home to join up, leaving Balasha behind in Romania. He first enlisted in the Irish Guards, but because of his fluent command of Greek he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps, serving at first as liaison officer to the Greek army fighting the Italians inAlbania. After Greece fell, Fermor was sent to Crete where he took part in the battle against the German airborne invasion. He remained on the island after the German triumph; disguised now as a Cretan shepherd, with a big handlebar moustache and a dagger in his belt, the tall, slim, Fermor cut a swashbuckling figure as he roamed the mountains to help organize the resistance movement.

It was there, in Crete’s high, wild country, that he recalled in Words of Mercury that…

“devotion to the Greek mountains and their population took root. . . . We lived in goat-folds and abandoned conical cheese-makers’ huts and above all, in the myriad caverns that mercilessly riddle the island’s stiff spine. Some were too shallow to keep out the snow, others could house a Cyclops and all his flocks. Here, at ibex- and eagle-height, we settled with our small retinues. Enemy searches kept us on the move and it was in a hundred of these eyries that we got to know an older Crete and an older Greece than anyone dreams of in the plains. Under the dripping stalactites we sprawled and sat cross-legged, our eyes red with smoke, on the branches that padded the cave’s floor and spooned our suppers out of a communal tin plate: beans, lentils, cooked snails and herbs, accompanied by that twice-baked herdsman’s bread that must be soaked in water or goat’s milk before it is eaten. Toasting goat’s cheese sizzled on the points of long daggers and oil dewed our whiskers. These sessions were often cheered by flasks of raki, occasionally distilled from mulberries, sent by the guardian village below. On lucky nights, calabashes of powerful amber-colored wine loosened all our tongues. Over the shoulders of each figure was a bristly white cloak stiff as bark, with the sleeves hanging loose like penguins’ wings; the hoods raised against the wind gave the bearded and mustachioed faces a look of Cistercians turned bandit. Someone would be smashing shells with his pistol-butt and offering peeled walnuts in a horny palm; another sliced tobacco on the stock of a rifle; for hours we forgot the war with talk and singing and stories; laughter echoed along the minotaurish warrens.”

In 1944 Fermor took part in a bold and perilous mission that later became the subject of a best-selling book, Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, a fellow intelligence officer. 5 The British plan was to kidnap the German army’s chief of staff, General Muller, who had become notorious and hated for his brutal treatment of both Cretan partisans and civilians. When Muller was called away, the new target was his replacement: General Heinrich Kreipe, a professional soldier arriving straight from service on the Russian front.

Fermor and his team, which included Moss, Sandy Rendel (former political correspondent for the Sunday Times), the Cretan partisan Niki Akoumianakis and a dozen other andartes, had to radically alter their original plan. Fermor and Moss agreed to disguise themselves as German military policemen. That meant Fermor had to part with his Cretan moustache Without it, he looked so much the stiff-necked Teuton that Moss kidded him about being on the wrong side. They decided to promote themselves to corporal’s rank and decorate themselves with a few (stolen) ribbons.

Taking up positions outside the isolated Villa Ariadne—the headquarters for the German army had been built above Heraklion before the war by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans—Fermor and Moss flagged the general’s car down at 9.30 pm.

“Is dies das general’s wagon?” he asked.

“Ja, ja,” came the muffled answer from inside.

With that assurance, key members of the band attacked from all sides, tearing at the doors of the car. The beam of a flashlight showed the startled face of the general and the chauffeur reaching for his automatic. There was the thud of a bludgeon; the chauffeur keeled over and was dragged out of sight.

The general, who offered no resistance, was brought to Anogia, the largest village on Crete, located on the northern slopes of Mt. Ida. “Famous for its independent spirit, its idiosyncrasy of dress and accent, it had always been a great hideout of ours,” said Fermor in an account written in 1969 for the Imperial War Museum.

Fermor related that a note had been left in the general’s car stating that he was safe and “would be treated with the respect due to his rank,” and that the kidnap had been carried out by British officers and Greek nationals serving as soldiers in the forces of His Hellenic Majesty. “The point was to give the Germans no excuse for carnage and reprisals in the Knossos area.”

The next day, however, a single-winged Feiseler-Storck reconnaissance plane circled above Anovia and dropped a steady snowfall of leaflets. “To all Cretans,” the message read, “last night the German General Kreipe was abducted by bandits. He is being concealed in the Cretan mountains and his whereabouts cannot be unknown to the inhabitants. If the General isn’t returned within three days, all rebel villages in the Heraklion district will be razed to the ground and the severest reprisals exacted on the civilian population.”

The general was not, of course, returned to the Germans; he was smuggled off the island and delivered by submarine to British army headquarters in Egypt, and the Germans exacted their promised revenge. Fermor deals with this in circumspect fashion in his official report, asserting that “most untrue to form, there had been little violence, few arrests, no shooting on the part of the Germans.”

Fermor’s statement is disputed by Dr. Michael E. Paradise, a Midwest-based Greek-American whose father and two brothers were members of the British intelligence group on Crete. Though in his teens, Michael himself was often used as a courier. “Attacking in the darkness of one night,” he wrote in the April 10, 1997 edition of The Greek American (a now-defunct, New York-based newspaper), “the Germans proceeded to destroy several villages with the utmost brutality and ferocity. I was witness of the destruction of one of the villages, Ano Meros, on Mt. Kendros in Amari.”

The kidnapping of Gen. Kreipe, Paradise asserted, “contributed to the unnecessary death of hundreds of men, who were hunted down like wild animals in the streets of their villages, then, while some were injured and still alive, they were burnt in the houses of the villages, and buried in them when the dynamiting of the houses followed.”

Most Cretans, though, have not held a grudge against Fermor and his gung-ho confederates. As one veteran Cretan commando said at the time of Kreipe’s abduction, “So they’ll burn down all the houses one day. And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks. Let the Germans burn it down for a fifth time! And they killed scores of my family, scores of them, my child, yet here I am! We’re at war and war has all of these things. You can’t make a wedding feast without meat.”

After the war—and his brief Caribbean sojourn—Fermor realized that his love of Greece had tied himself forever to the country’s fortunes. He lived for a time on Evia, then Ithaca and Hydra (in the house of the painter, Niko Ghika). Soon after he began his travels in the far corners of the Greek mainland which led to the publication of his two masterpieces, Mani and Rozemeli. Accompanied by the photographer (and his wife-to-be) Joan Rayner (daughter of the Conservative politician and First Lord of the Admiralty in Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition government, Belton Eyres Monsell), whom he had met in wartime Cairo, Fermor set off with this goal in mind: “To situate and describe present-day Greece of the mountains and islands in relationship to their habitat and history.”

Mani is the southernmost part of Greece, an isolated, mountainous and forbidding peninsula known for its stark, sun-blistered landscape and warlike, feuding inhabitants. Despite having been warned not to attempt to penetrate into The Deep Mani— “the Maniatis are dangerous”—”they are Jews”—”they fear and hate foreigners”—”they live on salted starfish”—Fermor and Rayner defiantly set out on foot and mule, bus and caique, in search of an authentic Greek world.

What they found and reported on was a revelation to one and all. The Mani was a strange, combative place, to be sure—most people lived in pyrgi, stone towers that were more fortress than domicile—but it was fantastical at the same time, rich in history and bravery (no part of Greece played a more conspicuous and valuable part in the War of Independence). With its code of honor and hospitality, its love of freedom, the Mani was also pulsing with life, colorful in speech, custom, ritual and superstition.

The book that came out of this expedition into the heart and soul of the Mani became an instant classic. Fermor’s prose and Rayner’s photographs (sadly dropped from subsequent editions) won plaudits from critics and readers alike. The British artist (and longtime Greek resident) Polly Hope has said, “Mani was one of the books that brought me to Greece. When my husband and I first read it we knew instantly that this was the world we wanted to go to. It told of magic and fury and history and people and landscape. Completely breathtaking. We read it and reread it and read it again until our heads were full of towers and feuds, cucumbers like slices of ancient pillars, and ouzo. Donkeys and heat. And the dark sea that because of the extraordinary Greek light stands up vertically as far as the horizon. We had to go. And immediately. “We did, and remained, though not in Mani. Still all these years later it is the book that tells about Greece as it is. It is still right and as clear and informative as that first reading. Although tourism has spread its ugly veil over most of Greece the people are still there, the feuds and cucumbers, the vertical sea and broiling sun.”

Similar praise was bestowed on Roumeli when it was published eight years later. Fermor and Rayner’s portrait of the northeast corner of Greece, including Messolonghi, where Lord Byron (one of Fermor’s heroes) fought and died for Greece, is as vivid and compelling as anything in Mani. Whether writing about the sarakatsans, the nomadic shepherds—”self-appointed Ishmaels”—who inhabited the mountaintops, speaking in a secret tongue; or the origins of the local Karayiozi puppet shows; or the Meteora monasteries; or the “stone-age banquet” (celebrating an arranged marriage) to which they were invited, Fermor’s prose shines and shimmers like beaten gold.

Historian John J. Norwich believes that Fermor “writes English as well as anyone alive.” 7 He also praised ‘the preternatural copiousness” of Fermor’s two books. Jan Morris seconded the statement, adding that Fermor was “beyond cavil, the greatest living travel writer.” In November, 2004 the British Guild of Travel Writers concurred, bestowing on Fermor its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Fermor won another important prize in 2004: the second Gennadius Trustees’ Award for his support of things Greek. At the ceremony in Athens, the previous recipient of the award, writer/translator Edmund Keeley, said, “I look upon Mr. Fermor as one of my first mentors, a man of letters who taught me, perhaps more than any other Philhellene, the best way to write about the second country we have both come to love and to celebrate in our work.”

After lauding Fermor for his “imaginative projection of Greece,” Keeley offered a specific example of the kind of “special insight” that Fermor brings to his writing about Greece. “A scene in his superb book on the Mani . . . not only captures the essence of Greek hedonism . . . but demonstrates his easy and subtle understanding of the Greek sensibility.”

The scene took place in “the glaring white town” of Kalamata where the Feast of St. John the Baptist was being celebrated. Fermor, his wife Joan, and their friend the writer Xan Fielding sat down to eat their dinner set out at the water’s edge on flagstones “that flung back the heat like a casserole with the lid off.”

Suddenly they decided to pick up their iron table, neatly laid out, and set it down a few yards out to sea, followed by their three chairs, then by the three of them sitting down with the cool water up to their waists. Quite sensible, the only slightly odd thing about this was that all three were fully dressed. Yet the really significant moment, the epiphany, came when the waiter arrived on the quay, gazed in surprise at the space they’d left empty on the burning flagstones, and then (quoting Fermor) “observing us with a quickly masked flicker of pleasure,” stepped without further hesitation into the sea and “advanced with a butler’s gravity” to put down their meal before them, three broiled fish, “piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling.”

As Keeley pointed out, “It is Fermor’s seeing both that flicker of pleasure and the quick masking of it that says so much, more even than his report that others on the quay sent their seaborne fellow diners can after measuring can of retsina, and a dozen boats gathered around to help them consume the complimentary wine, and a mandolin arrived . . . to accompany rebetika songs in praise of the liberated life. Only those who have often taken apart and savored a broiled tsipoura or fangri . fresh from the sea and amply bathed in an olive-oil-and-lemon sauce would recognize why no representative Greek citizen given to pleasure would think of disturbing, except in a celebratory way, any table holding such a succulent, earthy gift from the Gods. And only a writer with Fermor’s precise vision and brilliant skill in expression would choose to show our hedonistic waiter appropriately masking his pleasure and assuming the gravity of a butler as he entered the sea on his mission to deliver the gods’ gift.”

It is, alas, harder and harder to find such raffish scenes in 21stcentury, tourist-choked, EU-regimented Greece. Even Fermor, in a recent essay, had to admit that much of what he first encountered and experienced in Greece has disappeared. “Progress has altered the face and character of the country,” he commented. And as for tourism, “it destroys the object of its love.” 10

That said, Fermor still continues to write about Greece. In his 90s, living alone in the pyrgos he built in the Outer Mani—Joan died in 2000, of injuries suffered in a fall—he toils away on the final book of his Hook of Holland to Constantinople trilogy, the one that deals with his first years in Greece, working from notebooks, maps and memory. In a way Fermor is a chronicler of a bygone age, a rememberer of things past. The Greece he reveres may have died, but he battles with the last strength in him to keep its spirit alive.

Notes

1. ‘Only two of Fermor’s books are in print in the United States: A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. They are New York Review of Books Classics. In the UK, most of Fermor’s books are published in hardbound and paperback by John Murray Ltd., but Penguin has published a few of his titles as paper reprints. The following are his major publications. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. Photos by Joan Eyres (London: Murray, 1958); Translation of George Pyschounadkis, The Cretan Runner: His story of the Germany Occupation. (London: J. Murray, 1978, c1955); Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (London & NY; Penguin, 1983, c1966); Introduction to Kostas Chatzepateras, Greece 1940-41 Eyewinessed (Anixi Attikis {Greece}: Efstathiadis Group, 1995); Text with Stephen Spender of Ghika: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture (London: Lund Humpries, 1964); A Time of Gifts; On Foot to Constantinople, from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (NY: New York Review of BooKs, 2005).

2. Quotations is from a review from “Scholar in the Woods,” a review by James Campbell in The Guardian, April 8, 2005.

3. ‘James Campbell, Words of Mercury.

4. A11 quotes regarding Fermor’s reading tastes are taken from his essay in
the anthology The Pleasures of Reading edited by Antonia Fraser, Bloomsbury,
1992.

5. ‘The details of the kidnapping are taken from Ill Met by Moonlight (London:
Harrap, 1950). In the movie of the same name released in 1958, Fermor is
played by Dirk Bogarde.

6. Letter to the author sent in 2004.

7. Copy written for the dusk jacket of the paperback edition of Between the Woods and the Water.

8. Ibid.

9. This and subsequent Keeley citations are from a 2004 letter to the author. Date?

10. See Fermor’s essay in A Time of Gifts.

Marathon man

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Justin Marozzi

Door-stepping a 91-year-old knight of the realm, second world war hero and one of the finest writers in the English language is an awkward business. Particularly when he is hard at work in his home in the southern Peloponnese trying to finish the elusive third volume of what would be among the greatest trilogies in modern literature.

by Justin Marozzi

First published in the Financial Times February 2 2007

Yet this is no time for reticence. A man who kidnapped a German general on Crete in 1944 and then drove through 22 checkpoints impersonating him, before spiriting him on to a Cairo-bound submarine – having first bonded over a shared passion for Horace’s Odes – probably favours the direct approach. This, at least, is what I tell myself on arriving in the fishing village of Kardamyli in the Outer Mani, armed with all sorts of introductions to Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor.

In the event, Leigh Fermor, known to English friends as Paddy and to Greeks by his nom de guerre Mihali, could not be more charming when I ring him from a nearby hotel. He suggests lunch. I accept faster than you can say hero-worship.

The following day, the housekeeper waves me down a vaulted stone gallery, cool air ruffling through the arches, an architectural reminder, perhaps, of Byzantium, which, in a sense, has always been Leigh Fermor’s true north. It was to Constantinople – never Istanbul – that the 18-year-old set out on his serendipitous, marathon walking tour, a journey immortalised half a century later in the densely beautiful prose of A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986).

His stint at King’s School Canterbury, where his housemaster diagnosed “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness”, had just come to a premature end with his expulsion for fraternising too closely with the town’s female population (women have always found him irresistible). Leigh Fermor notes proudly that Christopher Marlowe was another King’s man who got into high-spirited scrapes. His education after that – and all his books display the dazzling range of his erudition – was that of a freely roving autodidact.

From Byzantium I step back into England into the sort of room to make a writer swoon. Betjeman called it “one of the rooms in the world”. Whitewashed walls, stone floor and panelled wood ceiling frame a space that is both sitting room and library. Bookshelves rise from floor to ceiling. Light streams in from tall windows thrown open towards the sea. Piles of books jostle for Lebensraum with armchairs, cushions, icons, sculptures, maps, kilims. Browning, James Joyce, John Betjeman, several feet of dictionaries, atlases, Greek-English lexicons, pictures by the late Greek artist and Leigh Fermor’s friend Nikos Ghika. In Leigh Fermor’s words, “Where a man’s eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is, there shall his heart be also.”

For a moment, I think the man who stands up to greet me in this literary Elysium must be a house guest, since he looks no more than 70.

“How very nice to see you,” he says. His English is polished gravel, the voice of a more civilised generation. He is clasping a Loebb edition of Herodotus and is alarmingly handsome, which means that this must be the nonagenarian Leigh Fermor, no youthful house guest. In various letters despatched to Greece I have asked, rather clumsily, if we can talk about Herodotus for a book project.

“You’ve kept me up till 1.30 in the morning with this,” he says breezily. “I’ve been reading about the battle of Marathon.”

I apologise for inflicting the Father of History on him. “Absolutely not. He’s rather engaging. Now what would you like to drink? My sight’s not very good so do help yourself.”

We walk over to a table lost beneath a shimmering forest of glass bottles. Leigh Fermor has an enviable head of hair and is crisply dressed in blue checked shirt, russet tie, a blue jumper and corduroys. Red socks betray a note of flamboyance. A more debonair specimen of the literary man of action would be difficult to imagine.

“I’ve already had a vodka and tonic so I won’t have anything,” he says. I pour myself a drink from a very large, obviously much used, green bottle with the handwritten legend “OUZO”. He draws alongside and joins me for a second vodka. His constitution is said by friends to be as robust as his wartime record.

So what news for Leigh Fermor devotees awaiting the third volume, which would see him reach his beloved Constantinople after all these decades?

“That’s the plan, of course,” he says. “I’ve been rereading my notes and getting things in order. Clearing the decks. But it’s all a bit grim. I’m finding writing rather difficult.” He says he has developed tunnel vision and at the moment is confronting the disconcerting sight of an interviewer with two pairs of eyes and four nostrils. He does not type, has never been very keen on dictating and has no secretary. We must keep our fingers crossed, while looking forward to Artemis Cooper’s biography.

“Charge on,” is the cue for lunch. We leave the library and return to the world of Byzantium, taking our places in the gallery at a table set for two. An arch encircles a sunlit scene of bougainvillea amid a diaphanous blaze of green foliage. Four well-fed cats hover expectantly and a squadron of buzzing flies makes merry around us. Centre stage is a large carafe of chilled white wine. In fact, it is retsina, for which my host apologises when I ask what we are drinking.

“I’m terribly sorry. Dreadfully rude of me. I didn’t ask you. I have some proper wine next door.”

Absolutely not. I have developed a taste for the stuff. He nods his vigorous approval. “I’ve been drinking it for 50 years and it’s done me no harm.”

In Mani, his celebrated travelogue on the southern Peloponnese, published in 1958 and described by this newspaper, together with Roumeli, its counterpart on northern Greece, as “two of the best travel books of the century”, he dwells on the improving qualities of retsina. He offers the delicious observation that “one of its secrets is drinking it with unstinted abundance. It seems to have an alliance with the air in the promotion of well-being. Many people think that it bestows the gift of bodily health as well; a belief I accept at once without further scrutiny.”

We set to our lunch of Herculean pork chops luxuriating on a bed of garlic and onions with spinach, potatoes and tzatziki. The retsina in the carafe descends with the winter sun. We talk about his latest honour from the Travellers Club, which last December presented a bust of Leigh Fermor, now sitting in pride of place alongside Sir Wilfred Thesiger, another of the club’s favourite sons and fellow soldier-writer.

“It’s all rather terrifying,” he says. Flattering, too? “Oh, rather!” The eyes twinkle.

In fact, Leigh Fermor has been serially honoured for his many achievements on the battlefield and in print. His typically dashing exploits in the Special Operations Executive, rubbing shoulders with David Stirling, Fitzroy Maclean and Wilfred Thesiger, above all the audacious kidnapping of General Kreipe on Crete, were recognised with a Distinguished Service Order. An OBE followed. He is an honorary citizen of Heraklion, Kardamyli and Gytheio. His first book, The Travellers Tree (1950), won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. In 2004, he was knighted for services to literature and Anglo-Greek relations.

Ice cream arrives. I ask him whether he shares the feeling of nostalgia and regret, so pervasive in Greece, at the loss of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. His writing seems to reflect this pain.

“Only in a romantic sense,” he says. “You can’t just forget 2,500 years of history and call it Istanbul. I deplore the Turkish role in eastern Europe, but of course you can’t blame them. It would be like blaming the laws of hydrostatics for flood damage.”

Though he is not a political man, preferring to remain above or beyond the fray, he is, above all, a European. In the confrontation between east and west there seems little doubt as to where his sympathies lie. Does he feel the western world and its way of life are under threat?

“It does rather feel like that, though I haven’t been keeping up on it as much as I should have,” he replies.

Back to the library for Greek – not Turkish – coffee. There is a splendid photograph, taken recently, of Leigh Fermor and Earl Jellicoe, wartime comrade and commander of the Special Boat Service. Both men wear dark suits, their chests a riotous patchwork of medals. Leigh Fermor’s left hand rests jauntily on his hip. Even in his tenth decade, there is an unmistakable poise and swagger.

After coffee, we walk outside into the garden. Across the water to the west lies the rump of Messenia. Beneath us is Leigh Fermor’s private little cove and steps down to the sea. This is the house that Paddy built, with his late wife Joan, in the mid-1960s. He sits for a few photographs while we swap notes on travel writers young and old.

Bruce Chatwin was a frequent visitor to the Mani in the 1980s. “People have said I was a guru to him. It’s absolute nonsense. Bruce would have been appalled.” He considers him a marvellous writer and is a fan of Jan Morris, too. He abhors being called a travel writer, regarding it as a lesser category, “rather like being called a sports writer”.

I have trespassed on his time long enough. On our way out, he suddenly leads me to another building, half hidden by the olives and cypresses. A fleeting glimpse into his inner sanctum: papers everywhere, more zigzagging stacks of books, a towering blue and white ceramic light from Portugal. His hero Byron stares at us from a plate in the centre of a broad chimneypiece.

“Do drop in again if you’re ever in the area,” he says. I may have to leave my wife to become his amanuensis.

This man, I reflect, as I drive away from his secluded haven, who has walked across a continent, fallen in love and run away with a princess, fought for his country, kidnapped a general, built a house, written books of dreamlike brilliance, joined a Greek cavalry charge and lived long and exceedingly well, is a true knight. Quite possibly one of the very last.

Justin Marozzi is the author of a number of travel books his latest being the acclaimed The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus which includes the account of a lengthy retsina fuelled lunch with Paddy.

An eye for detail and the memory of the Hotel New York in Cluj

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There is often a debate about Paddy’s ability to recall so much of his journey with accuracy so long after the event and often without his precious notebooks. Benedict Allen put him to the test at the Red Ox Inn in Heidelberg and the Romanian spa resort of Baia Herculene: Paddy passed that test with flying colours.

During one of my recent trips to Cluj I was able to enter the famous Hotel New York (now the Continental) during a small exhibition as part of the Transylvanian Film Festival. Immediately I reached for my copy of Between the Woods and the Water and turned to page 144 …

“An hotel at the end of the main square, called the New York – a great meeting place in the winter season – drew my companions like a magnet. István said the barman had invented an amazing cocktail – only surpassed by the one called ‘Flying’ in the Vier Jahreszeiten bar in Munich – which would be criminal to miss. He stalked in, waved the all clear from the top of some steps, and we settled in a strategic corner while the demon-barman went mad with his shaker. There was nobody else in the bar; it was getting late and the muffled lilt of the waltz from Die Fledermaus hinted that everyone was in the dining room. We sipped with misgiving and delight among a Regency neo-Roman décor of cream and ox-blood and gilding: Corinthian capitals spread their acanthus leaves and trophies of quivers, and hunting horns, lyres and violins were caught up with festoons between the pilasters.”

: Inside the Hotel New York (Continental), Cluj

… and given the costume display, this next paragraph came to life for me as Angéla tries to disguise herself with a scarf Paddy and István suggested it might be better to turn into someone else:

“King Carol, Greta Garbo, Horthy, .. Groucho Marx … Queen Marie, and Charlie Chaplin; Laurel and Hardy, perhaps; one of the two; she would have to choose, but she insisted on both.”

Angéla, Paddy, István and Tom in Cluj-Napoca

Paddy’s wartime files now available at the National Archive

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For those of you who like to do a little first hand research, you may like to know that Paddy’s wartime file (1939-1946) has just been released for public viewing at the National Archives in Kew, London.

If you are interested I suggest some online research first and then get in contact with the staff to ask about access to his files. Please do tell us about anything of interest that you find!

Review – The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands

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The Traveller's Tree

Patrick Leigh Fermor, by turns youthful adventurer, linguist, classicist, and war hero, was the quintessential “gifted amateur” when he set out with two companions, in the late 1940s, to journey through the long island chain of the West Indies.

By Don Ryan

He was the ideal traveler, inquisitive, humorous, interested in everything. His budget, and curiosity for the lives of the Creole, disposed him to live among them, but introductions from home afforded him also time among the governors and administrators in colonial manor houses. His sense of history runs deep; he encountered 450-year-old cultures which he calls young. He reminds us how everything is connected by time’s threads and sinews.

Fermor was observant of architecture and of fashion and influence. He knew how to notate music and sings us overheard melodies and recites the latest Calypsos. He shows immense empathy for the Negroes and gives a long and sympathetic description of Haitian Voodoo – but is skeptical about Jamaican Rastafari. His ear for language heard the connections with West Africa.

This is a complete and evocative a description of a culture, of an archipelago of cultures, as I have ever read. But a word of caution: if you are planning a trip to the Caribbean, this is not a guidebook to take. This is to read if you will never be able to go. – Don Ryan

Geographically, the Caribbean archipelago is easy to split up into component groups….

No such brisk summing-up can be formulated for the inhabitants of these islands: the ghostly Ciboneys, the dead Arawaks and the dying Caribs; the Spaniards, the English, the French, the Dutch, the Danes and the Americans; the Corsicans, the Jews, the Hindus, the Moslems, the Azorians, the Syrians and the Chinese, and the all-obliterating Negro population deriving from scores of kingdoms on the seaboard and hinterland of West Africa. Each island is a distinct and idiosyncratic entity, a civilization, or the reverse, fortuitous in its origins and empirical in its development. There is no rule that holds good beyond the shores of each one unless the prevalence of oddity, the unvarying need to make exceptions to any known rule, can be considered a unifying principle. The presence of religious eccentrics like the Kingston Pocomaniacs and the adepts of Voodoo in Haiti and the survival of stranded ethnological rock-pools like the Poor Whites in the Islands of the Saints or the semi-independent hospodarate of the Maroons of the Jamaican mountains – all this, and the abundance and variety of superstitions and sorceries and songs, of religious and political allegiances, and the crystallization of deracination and disruption into a new and unwieldy system, almost, of tribal law – all this excludes any possibility of generalization.

The skipper heaved the sloop’s bowsprit round and pointed it at the fading silhouette of St Eustatius. The wind was piercingly cold, and as the ship leapt forward, we dug out a half-empty bottle and lowered comforting stalactites of whisky down our throats. Night fell, and the rain stopped. The heads of the Negroes, who had all taken refuge under a tarpaulin like some tremendous recumbent group of statuary before its unveiling, began to appear again round the edge. The two nearest to us were talking to each other in an incomprehensible language that was neither pidgin English nor Creole. Many of the words sounded like Spanish, but the flow of the language was suddenly thickened by noises that were guttural and uncouth. Seeing that I was listening, one of them whispered, |Papia poco poco bo tende?’ and their voices dropped. But I understood, with excitement, that they were talking Papiamento, that almost mythical compound of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English and African dialects evolved by the slaves of Curacao and the Dutch islands of the Southern Caribbean.

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Sir Geoffrey Chandler, former director of Shell, 1922-2011

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Sir Geoffrey Chandler

An extract from the obituary of a man of action and a champion, before it was fashionable, of business ethics and human rights. When Chandler ‘faced the disdain of his peers, … he insisted that companies had a moral responsibility to make human rights and protection of the environment as much part of their bottom line as profit.’ He worked with Paddy in SOE in the war and last saw him in Alexandria in 1945.

By Phil Davison

First published in The Financial Times, 15 April 2011.

Born in London in 1922, Chandler was educated at Sherborne school in Dorset and Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of 19, with the second world war raging, he joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, where he became a captain before being assigned to Force 133 within the SOE, nicknamed “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. There he met the now-legendary SOE agent and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

“The last time I saw Paddy was in Alexandria towards the end of the war when he and I were loading a jeep onto a caïque (a Greek fishing boat) athwartships,” Chandler once told a friend. “The jeep was full of gold coins to pay off the partisans.” Chandler was parachuted behind Nazi lines as a saboteur in Greece, where he learnt fluent Greek. He related his experiences in his book The Divided Land: an Anglo-Greek Tragedy, published in 1959. In it he criticised Britain for not imposing the rule of law in Greece after the defeat of the Nazis. A rightwing backlash to communist atrocities after the war resulted in bloody civil conflict in Greece.

After the war, Chandler remained in Greece as a British press and information officer, when he pushed for aid for the war-stricken Greek population. He returned to London to work for the BBC External Services in 1949 before joining the Financial Times as leader writer and features editor. In 1955, he married Lucy Buxton, a Quaker.Born in London in 1922, Chandler was educated at Sherborne school in Dorset and Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of 19, with the second world war raging, he joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, where he became a captain before being assigned to Force 133 within the SOE, nicknamed “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. There he met the now-legendary SOE agent and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. “The last time I saw Paddy was in Alexandria towards the end of the war when he and I were loading a jeep onto a caïque (a Greek fishing boat) athwartships,” Chandler once told a friend. “The jeep was full of gold coins to pay off the partisans.” Chandler was parachuted behind Nazi lines as a saboteur in Greece, where he learnt fluent Greek. He related his experiences in his book The Divided Land: an Anglo-Greek Tragedy, published in 1959. In it he criticised Britain for not imposing the rule of law in Greece after the defeat of the Nazis. A rightwing backlash to communist atrocities after the war resulted in bloody civil conflict in Greece. After the war, Chandler remained in Greece as a British press and information officer, when he pushed for aid for the war-stricken Greek population. He returned to London to work for the BBC External Services in 1949 before joining the Financial Times as leader writer and features editor. In 1955, he married Lucy Buxton, a Quaker.

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

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Patrick Leigh Fermor

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

by Vikram Doctor

First published in Economic Times of India, 28 June 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In search of a hero and friend of Greece

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

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

By Luke Slattery

First published in The Australian, 18 June 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This passage from Mani is celebrated for its effervescence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir Wanderlust – Portrait von Patrick Leigh Fermor

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

Sir Wanderlust vonWolf Reiser, first published in Travellers World

Travellersworld-Sir Wanderlust-1

Die Heimat der Nomaden, first published in Süddeutsche Zeitung

SZ-MANI-REISER

Paddy’s memorial service

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

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

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

Leigh Fermor’s hidden letters to see the light

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

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

Economist obituary: Paddy Leigh Fermor

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

First published in the Economist, Jun 16th 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Traveller’s Rest

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

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

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

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

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

John Stathatos

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

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

By Julian Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Jean Soublin

First published in Le Monde 17 June 2011

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

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

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

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

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From John Stathatos

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

John

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Του Σπυρου Γιανναρα

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

Travel writing: Lost art in search of a lost world

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

Editorial, first published in The Guardian 18 June 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by Paddy of Artemis Cooper’s book Cairo in the War

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Artemis Cooper’s introductions and accompanying text to Duff and Diana Cooper’s published letters, A Durable Fire (1983), and to Lady Diana’s Scrapbook (1987), had a strong dash of her grandmother’s humour and lightness of touch; but only a most clairvoyant critic could have predicted Cairo in the War, 1939–1945. Her account, though it sticks punctiliously to fact, is as hard to put down as good fiction . The research is wide, detailed and scrupulous. She lays hold of the military background – the dramas unfolding just off-stage, but threatening to break out of the wings at any moment – with a soldierly grasp; and she seems to have talked at length with all the surviving dramatis personae.

By Patrick Leigh Fermor

First published in The Times Literary Supplement 1 September 1989 (republished online 15 June 2011)

Unleavened by personalities, military history can be heavy on the hand, and politics too, once the urgency has gone. The author’s skill redeems them both. As for the complex country and people on whom the war had impinged, she has segregated the strands with great discernment – the Copts, the Arabs, the Mamelukes, the Ottomans, all the sects and enclaves of the Mediterranean and the Levant, the Helleno-Judaeo-Ptolemaic nexus of Alexandria, the fellahin and the effendis and the nationalists, the rivalries of the Western European powers, with their local allegiances and clients and phobias, and, above all, the reigning Albanian dynasty and the predominating British presence and tutelage.

The author is particularly helpful and fair about the tensions between the last (in the persons of the young King Farouk and the proconsular Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson), which culminated with British tanks all round the Palace, near-abdication and an enforced change of government: the German advance in the desert was the raison d’état. The enemy was held and driven back; certain froideurs remained at the top; but, astonishingly, the surface of the luxurious, dazzling and hospitable social life was hardly ruffled. At times this resembled the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before Waterloo, at others the Congress of Vienna: “The Kings sit down to dinner and the Queens stand up to dance . . .”. The pool at the Gezira Sporting Club sluiced hangovers away, the willow smacked the leather, polo-balls whizzed there all afternoon, and roulette-balls plopped at the Mohammed Ali after dark. There were enticing restaurants and enterprising night-clubs, party followed party and bedtime often coincided with the first muezzin’s call from the minaret of Ibn Tulun. Guilt about rationed London bit sharp now and then, but for those on short leave from the Desert, not deep.

Among the missions and staffs and the permanent officials, intrigue and gossip were as intense as in Mrs Hauksbee’s Simla. The author is eerily well informed about Groppi’s Horse and the Short-Range Shepherd’s Group and, a fortiori, about GHQ at Grey Pillars and SOE at Rustam Buildings (particularly the latter) and all the cross-currents, promotion-mania and the clashes – eg, “Bolo” Keble and Fitzroy Maclean – the political schisms of Southern Europe and their repercussions in Egypt. The pages on spies and counterespionage and raiding forces are one of the most impressive parts of the book.

The author is perceptive about the frustrations and amusements of all ranks of the assorted armies. There were shaming moments, but on balance it seems that arrogant behaviour towards the Egyptians may have been more frequent among the commissioned than the other ranks. In the case of a pasha who was insulted beyond endurance by a very drunk officer, nemesis was brisk and condign. The oblivious offender was inveigled to the pasha’s house. Most would have kept quiet, Artemis Cooper observes, but he was soon telling everyone, “You’ll never guess what happened to me last night — dashed unpleasant. I got buggered by six Nubians.”

In spite of the strains on high, the diplomatic world, the military, the cosmopolitan, the purely decorative and the intellectual interwove to a surprising degree, and lasting friendships were formed. The contribution of Greeks such as Seferis, and transplanted Greece-addicts like Lawrence Durrell and Robin Fedden, were important here. Poets and writers teemed, and Personal Landscape, the Nilotic equivalent of Horizon, was impressive. The author unfolds the catalogue of personalities with humour and understanding, though she is unduly dismissive of Sir Charles Johnston: cf his sonnet “The Lock”, and his Pushkin translations. The only omissions I can spot are Elizabeth David, the painter Adrian Daintrey and the writer-painter Richard Wyndham. Perhaps she should have included an eccentric cavalryman called Colonel Wintle, who got into hot water for taking a surrendered Italian general to luncheon, in full uniform, at the Turf Club.

The book ends with the calamitous post-war aftermath. Like the abstruse anecdotes, the range and choice of the photographs will promote sighs of delighted recognition and occasional ground teeth, and it is hard to think, on finishing, how this demanding book could have been handled better, more lucidly or more entertainingly.

Sophie Moss Obituary from Daily Telegraph

One Man’s Great Game: Lieutenant Colonel “Billy” McLean

Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor by Thos Henley

So No More He’ll Go A-Roving

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

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

It was good to be back.

by David Mason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An account of Paddy’s funeral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Funeral Service of Patrick Leigh Fermor, 16 June 2011

He was in constant celebration of being alive

From Hellenic Voice: Reflections on the life of Sir Patrick

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By Alexander Billinis.

First published in The Hellenic Voice, 15 June 2011

I never had the honor of meeting Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in person, though I know he often spent time in Hydra, my ancestral island, and I imagine that I must have raced by him some summer, a kid on the way to the rocks we called a beach there. Gone is Greece’s greatest biographer, perhaps the greatest travel writer in history, but his beautiful prose provides him with immortality.

Sir Patrick was born in 1915, in the thick of the First World War. He spent his first years in the English countryside, developing an independent, noble spirit that is the hallmark of the best of English eccentrics. Not for the structure of school, he had his own higher education on foot, traveling at 18 from the London docks via barge to the Dutch coast, and then traveling, mostly on foot, from the Netherlands to Constantinople. He stayed in haystacks, houseboats, small inns, and as his charm, good looks, exceptional facility for languages, and genuine intellect became better known, in palaces and castles.

He chronicled these travels in three books: “A Time of Gifts,” chronicles his travels from the Dutch coast to the Danubian frontiers of Slovakia and Hungary. His second, “Between the Woods and the Water,” describes his journeys and adventures through Hungary and Romania, ending, again, at the Danube bridge at Ruse, thence into Bulgaria. His third volume, about Bulgaria and Turkish Thrace, is currently in manuscript form and we can hope that it will be released as a posthumous tribute to Sir Patrick. I have had the benefit of visiting many of the places Sir Patrick describes, and his books are the perfect companion.

After successfully completing this journey to Constantinople, Sir Patrick went to Greece, the start of his lifelong association with the country. After spending some time in 1930s Greece, he went to Romania with his first great love, the Phanariot-Romanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene. With the coming of war in 1939, Sir Patrick returned to Britain to serve his country.

Sir Patrick’s knowledge of the Balkans resulted in a liaison posting to Greece, where he witnessed firsthand the heroism of the Greek counterattack of the Italian invasion. After the fall of Greece to the Germans, Sir Patrick worked with the Resistance in Crete, spending the greater part of two years as “one of them” and earning the lasting affection of the Cretans, which was mutual. Here “Patrick” became “Michali” as he was affectionately known thereafter in Greece.

It was in Crete that Sir Patrick/Kyrios Michalis, with the help of a small band of British and Greek commandos, and the general constant support of the heroic Cretan people that he pulled off his greatest coup – the capture of the German commandant of Crete, Gen. Kriepe. After a roadside carjacking near Iraklion, on Crete’s north shore, Sir Patrick and company hauled their quarry across Crete’s sheer and beautiful mountain spine to the southern shores where a British ship whisked him to British headquartersin Egypt. Sir Patrick recalls one morning, high in the Cretan mountains, when the general quoted passages from the Roman poet Horace, in Latin. Sir Patrick finished the verse, and the general and he, in the chaos of war, suddenly realized they once, as Sir Patrick said, drank from “the same fountains long before.” Years later, when meeting Sir Patrick again, Gen. Kriepe said that Sir Patrick treated him “wie ein Ritter– like a knight.”

Postwar, Sir Patrick knocked about in various places, including the Caribbean, but by the mid 1950s his center of gravity became Greece. He wrote two books, “Mani: Travels in Southern Greece,” and “Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece,” which are exceptional biographies of a land he came to love as his own. Many consider them the finest travel books ever written. He and his wife, Joan, an accomplished photographer, eventually chose the Mani for their home, and designed and built a house by themselves in Kardamyli.

Sir Patrick wrote prolifically in a prose from another time. His is an era outside the digital, soundbyte age – an era steeped in the Classics and elegance. It is easy to picture him as a youth in an Austrian schloss, charming his Triestine Greek hostess, dancing in a prewar club in Budapest, or composing

mantinades over raki and cracking walnuts with a pistol butt on some cliff off Mount Ida in Crete. He was at home in all these circumstances, and we have the privilege of vicarious attendance via his rich prose. He remained, as we say in Greek, a

gero potiri,a “tough glass,” and writer Anthony Lane wrote, in 2006, “If you think that you can match him ouzo for ouzo, on a back street in downtown Athens, you better think again.”

His love and knowledge of Greece was profound and profuse, and while his love did not make him blind to her darker sides, his ability to express Greece so beautifully and fundamentally, together with his plethora of friends and admirers in all places, no doubt enhanced Greece’s tourist appeal in the initial stages of the tourism boom. It is a pity that Greece of today, again in profound need, lacks such an erudite, elegant advocate. We could use one.

When writing about the passing of Georgos Katsimbalis, his dear friend, an intellectual giant, and a champion of Greek letters, Fermor wrote, “These pages are filled with landmarks that have vanished, but George, in a very special sense, is not one of them.” The same can be said for Sir Patrick.

Alexander Billinis is a Greek American writer living in Serbia. For readers unfamiliar with Sir Patrick’s writing, he recommends “Words of Mercury,” edited by Artemis Cooper.

The man who fell for Mani’s charms

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Patrick Leigh Fermor in Greece in 2001. (Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press)

Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, called this Peloponnese peninsula home. Andrew Eames makes a pilgrimage.

By Andrew Eames

First published in The Independent, 18 June 2011

Somewhere about 100km beyond ancient Olympia I chucked my navigator out of the window; figuratively speaking, of course. She’d long since lost touch with reality, telling me to do U-turns and take sharp lefts where such things would only have ended in motorway carnage. Underneath me, the A7 unrolled its great tongue of Tarmac imperturbably towards Kalamata and yet she would have had me off the road and into the goat tracks among the prickly pears, so I gave up on her, imagining her left behind, sitting on a rock, still insisting that I recalculate my route.

I had another reason for wanting to enter the Mani peninsula, that middle finger of the southern Peloponnese, without the insistent voice of an out-of-date GPS. I was following the trail of a British writer who had been inspired and nourished by this once-wildest and most isolated region of Greece for well-nigh 50 years. Patrick Leigh Fermor hated wirelesses. He wrote in his book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, that he “dreaded the day when the metalled highway would appear through the hills blocked by a column of motorlorries each of them loaded with a howling menagerie of wireless sets for the silent Mani.”

That’ll be me, then. So the silencing of my (wireless) navigator was a tribute, in a way, even though Leigh Fermor himself had just left.

I have long been an admirer of Leigh Fermor, who until his death last week at 96 was, in my opinion, Britain’s greatest living travel writer. My most recent book, Blue River Black Sea, was a journey made partly in his footsteps down the length of the Danube, and it had always been in my plans to make a trip to the Mani sooner or later, with the hope that I might get to meet the great man in his “perfect writer’s house” down by the sea beside Kardamyli. Tragically, I was a couple of days too late, so my journey became something of a pilgrimage instead, a celebration and a comparison between the Mani that Leigh Fermor wrote about in 1958, and the Mani of today.

When Leigh Fermor, with his wife Joan, first crossed into the Mani, he had done so on foot led by his navigator, a taciturn goat-herder called Yorgo, who took him up over the barrier of the Taiyetos mountains, through a “dead, planetary place, a habitat for dragons”, an inferno of rocks whose only living organisms survived “on a memory of water”.

Historically, the Mani’s very inaccessibility had made it an enclave of refugees, feudal villages, vendettas and turf wars. Its rugged infertility meant agriculture was virtually impossible, so its inhabitants tried their hand at everything from piracy to slave trading in order to survive.

For Leigh Fermor, that isolation translated into what he called “an Elysian confine” from the moment he first arrived in Kardamyli, a castellated hamlet on the edge of the sea “whose quiet charm grew with each passing hour”, which became his home. He believed he had found a place “too inaccessible, with too little to do, for it ever to be seriously endangered by tourism”. I would have liked to have asked him if he ever regretted that sentence.

Crossing the Taiyetos today is still something of an ordeal – if you are a car. The A7 fizzles out at Kalamata and it falls to a nimble-footed minor road to try to avoid the worst the mountains can do. The reward for getting through is an eagle’s view of the Mani, across mountains that tumble to the sea, with villages as barely-tolerated ochre encrustations on their elongated toes.

The English have bought houses here, undoubtedly some of them partly due to Leigh Fermor’s book. Package tourism has been drawn inevitably to the village of Stoupa, 7km south of Kardamyli, by the presence of a perfect horseshoe-shaped beach, but it is package tourism in its more restrained manifestation, and very contained.

Just along the coast, tourism is more select and discreet at Agios Nikolaos, a fishing harbour bobbing with caique boats, where the morning recreation is watching the fishermen return and set out their catch beside the harbour wall, a wall that will be lined with fish-restaurant tables when the sunset comes.

Kardamyli itself is not that much changed, largely thanks to its lack of beach; the 17th-century fortress houses are still there, in a more or less tumbledown state and the rest of town is a peaceful web of cobbled lanes, vegetable gardens, and balconied stone houses whiskered with vines and bougainvillea.

Tavernas line the shore, including one run by Lela, Leigh Fermor’s veteran housekeeper. The great man’s property itself, down by the beach at Kalamitsi, 1km south of Kardamyli, is no longer alone, but newer buildings maintain a respectful distance.

There’s talk of turning it into a museum, because the writer was as much revered in local life as in the wider literary world. “We called him Kyr Michalis,” says George Giannakeas, Lela’s son, who grew up as a little boy in the writer’s house. “He used to walk into Kardamyli every day to get the papers, often completely lost in his thoughts.”

I catch up with George as he is readying himself for the journey to the UK for the funeral, so I put the question to him: would Leigh Fermor have regarded the modern Mani as spoilt?

“He didn’t like the changes, but he never criticised. He could understand that everyone needed to benefit. If he didn’t approve of something, he would make positive suggestions. Lots of people spend one or two years here then start complaining, but he would never do that. He could sit and talk to anyone about anything. One of his best friends here was the petrol pump attendant. Every year he invited the villagers to his house for his name day, as he did this year, too. He will be sadly missed.”

Even into his 90s Leigh Fermor remained a great walker, said George, so partly out of tribute to him I tackled a couple of the local trails. From Kardamyli up to Agia Sophia, on a well-made path up through cicada-rich olive terraces, with the shoreline opening up below. And then up the Nupati Gorge, a resinous, scented ravine where I had to walk bent double much of the time, scrambling through ankle-snapping rocks the size of elephant’s skulls, a quick reminder of just how tough it was to move about before the days of roads.

Plenty of early- and late- seasonvisitors do a lot of walking here; the views are magnificent, the landscape pungent with ancient sweat. At this time of year, however, the heat is oppressive, the going too tough to be anything but an ordeal. Far better to stay in the sea breezes and read a good book. If you do, there’s one author I’d recommend.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Personal Memoir

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One of the downsides of getting older – I am now 62 – is that one’s friends die. Friday, it was the turn of Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged ninety-six, and I am having trouble accepting that he is gone.

By Paul A. Rahe

First published in Ricochet on 12 June 2011.

I first met Paddy in the summer of 1983. I was working then – oddly enough, as I am working right now – on a book on classical Sparta, and I had a grant and a hunch. The Spartan way of life was based on something like slave labor. The Spartans ruled the southernmost two-fifths of the Peloponnesus and drew their livelihood from farms worked by their helots (the word in Greek means captives), who reportedly outnumbered them seven-to-one. In their realm, there were and are two river valleys – one in Laconia and the other in Messenia – divided by a mountain range named Taygetus, and there was and is mountainous terrain elsewhere in Messenia. I had read extensively about the history of slavery, and I was persuaded that there must have been gangs of runaway helots in the hills of Messenia, as there later were in early modern Jamaica and in other locales where servile labor was the norm and there was wilderness nearby. I knew that the Greek resistance during the Second World War had operated in the mountainous country of northern Greece, but I knew little about their operations in the Peloponnesus. A fellow ancient historian who had lived in Greece for some years and had tried to make it as a novelist said to me, when he heard of my hunch, “You ought to talk to Paddy Leigh Fermor. He lives down there, and he fought with the resistance on Crete. He lives in Kardamyle. You should look him up.”

And that is precisely what I did. With the grant I had been given, I bought a plane ticket, and I spent some weeks in the company of a former student who hailed from Thessalonica, exploring the Peloponnesus – by boat, in a rental car, and on foot. Kardamyle was in the Mani – the southernmost prong of the Taygetus range, and it was one of the towns that Agamemnon had offered Achilles in an attempt to get him to take the girl back. When we got there, however, Paddy was away. So I mailed him a brief note and moved on. When we returned, I telephoned him – and he immediately invited the two of us to lunch.

Leyla, who had long been their cook, produced a sumptuous feast. We ate, and we drank, and then we drank some more – and the next thing we knew it was 5 p.m. Paddy and Joan, fearful that we were too intoxicated to successfully traverse the half-mile on foot back to Kardamyle, offered us beds. It was one of the most delightful afternoons that I have ever spent. The historian and journalist Max Hasting has observed that Paddy was “perhaps the most brilliant conversationalist of his time.” Never have I encountered anyone as entertaining.

Paddy was – there is no other word for it – a hero. He lived the strenuous life. There was in him an exuberance that could not be contained. Christopher Marlowe, who was of a similar temperament, managed to make it through the King’s School in Canterbury, but Paddy did not. There was some hanky-panky with the daughter of a greengrocer, but that cannot have been the whole story. “He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” his housemaster wrote in an official report, “which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.” I would have been anxious myself.

Not long thereafter, with the support of his mother, who mailed him a fiver from time to time, Paddy set out in December, 1933 by ship for the Hook of Holland – and walked from there to Constantinople and on to Mount Athos and its monasteries. It took him more a year, and you can read about his adventures in two of the books that he later published – A Time of Gifts (1978) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – which together constitute what the Germans call a Bildungsroman. In those volumes, you will encounter a world of peasants and aristocrats, of socialists and fascists that no longer exists.

Balasha Cantacuzene

On that journey, Paddy met an older woman. He was nineteen. She was married and thirty-one. You can find a description of the beginning their affair in the second of the two volumes mentioned above. Her name was Bălaşa Cantacuzino, and she was a Romanian princess descended from the Byzantine royal house. When his trip was over, they settled down together, oscillating between Athens and at her country house in Moldavia. Then came the Second World War, and he volunteered for the British army. The two would not meet again until after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989.

During the war, Paddy fought in Albania, Greece, and on Crete. After being evacuated to Cairo, he joined the Special Operations Executive and spent much of the remainder of the war running guerrilla operations in the mountains of Crete. He left the island in May, 1944 under truly exceptional circumstances. On 26 April 1944, on a bet made with friends back in Cairo, Paddy, W. Stanley Moss, and a group of Cretan shepherds kidnapped General Karl Heinrich Georg Ferdinand Kreipe, the German commander on the island.

The two Englishmen dressed up as German police corporals and stopped Kreipe’s car as he was making his way back one evening to his villa near Knossos. Having eliminated the chauffeur, Paddy put on the general’s hat, and Billy Moss drove the car. Kreipe was hidden beneath the back seat – on which three hefty Cretan andartes sat. They then bluffed their way through Heraklion and an addition twenty-two checkpoints before ditching the car and hiking into the mountains – where, for three weeks, they evaded German search parties before being picked up by a British motor launch on the south coast.

At one point, as they neared the top of Mount Ida at the break of dawn, Kreipe quoted the first line of Horace’s ode Ad Thaliarchum – “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte” (See how Soracte stands white with snow on high), and Paddy finished the poem to its end. “At least,” the general remarked, “I am in the hands of gentlemen.” In the days that followed, before they were evacuated to Cairo, the two discussed Greek tragedy and Latin poetry. In 1972, they would meet again in Athens to tape a television show. Afterwards, Paddy once told me, they went out to dinner and sang old German drinking songs. Well before that time, however, Billy Moss had published a book on the incident entitled Ill Met by Moonlight, and Michael Powell had made a movie with the same name in which Dirke Bogarde was cast as Paddy.

Before the war, Paddy had begun his literary career with a translation of of CP Rodocanachi’s novel Forever Ulysses (1938). Afterwards, he began to write books of his own. The first of these was a travel book, focused on the West Indies and entitled The Traveller’s Tree (1950). It won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. Soon thereafter he published a novel set in Martinique entitled The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953), which was turned into an opera by Malcolm Williamson; a meditation on monasticism entitled A Time to Keep Silence (1957); and two travel books focused on two of the wilder regions of Greece: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966). That all of these remain in print is no surprise. Five years ago, Paddy was described to me by an Oxford don as the greatest living master of English prose.

In 1984, I was offered by the Institute of Current World Affairs a fellowship two years in length, which would take me to Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, and I jumped at the chance to situate myself in Istanbul (where I lived in the neighborhood in which Claire Berlinski now resides) and to explore the landscape and experience the seasons in the world within which the ancient Greeks had made their home. I spent most of my time in Turkey, exploring its nooks and crannies and writing long newsletters about contemporary affairs. From time to time, however, I hopped a plane to Greece, interviewed various figures in Athens, and partied with some journalists I knew (Robert Kaplan was based in Athens in those days).

On those occasions, I always took a bus to Kardamyle and spent a few days with Paddy and Joan. Their house, which Paddy had designed himself, was built out of stone and situated on a bluff overlooking the sea. We rose when we chose, ate breakfast separately, and Paddy put pen to paper while Joan saw to the management of the establishment – and I read a novel, a travel book, or something pertinent to the composition of my first book Republics Ancient and Modern (which Paddy would later review for the Christmas books section of The Spectator).

After lunch, where we drank a considerable amount of wine, we would nap. Then, we would go back to work, and, at about 5 p.m., Paddy and I would head off for an extended walk in the mountains. He was about seventy at the time, but he was astonishingly vigorous. Every day he would go for a long swim, disappearing into the drink and reappearing a half hour later. On his seventieth birthday, he swam the Hellespont – something that very few men half that age could manage. (I know. I watched from a motor launch once while a thirty-something friend gave it a try).

Before dinner, there were drinks. “C’est le moment,” Paddy would say, quoting Victor Hugo, “quand les lions vont boire.” Dinner itself was a feast, and it often ended with the singing of songs. Paddy taught me The Foggy, Foggy Dew, and I taught him They Call the Wind Maria. After a week or so, I would take the bus back to Athens and head on to Greek Cyprus or back to Istanbul. On one such occasion, I carried to the British embassy the manuscript of Between the Woods and the Water. From there, I gather, it was sent on by diplomatic pouch to Paddy’s publisher in London. He had served his country well, and his compatriots took good care of him. He was offered a knighthood in 1991 and finally accepted one in 2004.

In the 1990s, when I came to Greece in the summer, I would fly in to the Athens international airport, and then I would generally take a bus across to the domestic airport, go up to the counter, look over the available flights, and book a ticket for an island that I had never visited. Then, after a week or so on, say, Paros, I would go down to the harbor and catch whatever boat there happened to be – for Lemnos or Andros or some other unfamiliar spot. Eventually, after having spent three or four weeks exploring, I would return to Athens and go down to the Mani to see Paddy and Joan. The routine in Kardamyle was the same – except that, towards the end of the millennium, Paddy was less able to hike in the mountains.

After I got married, there was less traveling. In 2003, however, I did manage to see Paddy in England at their country house in Gloucestershire (Joan was the daughter of a Viscount). Ours was a subdued lunch. Joan had died at the age of ninety-one in Kardamyle hardly more than a week before. I last saw him in Kardamyle in March, 2006. I had spent Michaelmas and Hilary Terms as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and I was about to take up a similar fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. There were, however, two weeks in which we had no place to call our own. So my wife, our daughters, and I flew to Greece, rented a car, and, after a brief visit to Athens, headed to Delphi and on from there to the Peloponnesus – where we stopped at Olympia, the Apollo Temple at Vassae, Mycenae, and other sights. I tried to call Paddy, but the Greeks had added a digit to the old number, and I could not figure it out. So we drove to Kardamyle and then out to his house on the outskirts of town, and I rang the bell.

Paddy at home

And there he was – older, quite a bit slower in his gait, but very much himself. “Paul Rahe,” he said. “I don’t believe my eyes. Come in, my dear boy.” And when I mentioned my family, his response was immediate: “Bring them in. You can all stay here.” And so we did. That night we took him to dinner at the restaurant in town that Leyla now runs, and we sat up late talking and drinking. His eyesight was not good. He had glaucoma and in the candlelight at one point was not sure that we were still there. He had had a heart attack and had a pacemaker. He could hardly walk up the drive to the highway. But there was still a twinkle in his eye, and he was as alive as ever.

He was also writing, and in his nineties, after decades of resistance, he had actually learned how to type (no one could read his handwriting). A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were intended to be the first two parts of a trilogy. With the third part, he had had a terrible time. After 1989, he had returned to Roumania and Bulgaria to retrace his steps, and it was not as he remembered it. When I visited in the 1990s, I would ask about the third volume, and Joan would pull me aside and tell me not to mention it. “He is having trouble with it. He is very frustrated. That trip back to review his path robbed him of the confidence he had in his memory,” she once said.

When I saw Paddy in 2006, however, he was halfway done with the manuscript, and he was going over it to look for things that could be cut. I gather that somewhere in the house at Kardamyle there is a manuscript and that on the cover it reads “Volume Three.” I wonder what he called it. That last night just over five years ago, he, my wife, and I tried to come up with a title, and we could not think of anything satisfactory.

If and when the third volume of his trilogy does come out, I will buy a copy. Reading it will, I am confident, bring back the man. His other books do. I doubt, however, whether I will ever meet the like again – and that I very much regret. Perhaps the biography that Artemis Cooper is writing will relieve my gloom.

36 Hours only! – Colin Thubron talks about Paddy on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves

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At last a (somewhat) decent discussion about Paddy from the BBC. The travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor died last Friday and his death has been followed by an outpouring of respect and admiration from fellow writers. Colin Thubron talks to Philip Dodd about the man and his writing.

Available to listen on iPlayer only until 10:47PM Mon, 20 Jun 2011.

The discussion starts at 38 Minutes and 10 seconds into the programme. Just click on the picture and then slide the cursor to that point to play. It will buffer very quickly.

The Phoenix Land: The Memoirs of Count Miklós Bánffy

A reminder that Arcadia Books will be republishing Count Miklós Bánffy’s memoirs “The Phoenix Land” in June 2011. The book is already available for pre-order in bookshops such as Waterstones in the UK. and of course on Amazon. Arcadia first published this in 2004 and you can read a Spectator review here.

Bánffy’s memoirs were translated from the Hungarian by his daughter Katalin Bánffy-Jelen and Patrick Thursfield,winners of the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Paddy once more offers a foreward. The blurb describes the book as follows:

“The thousand year-old year-old kingdom of Hungary, which formed the major part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the last Habsburg fled in 1918, was finally dismembered by the Western Allies by the terms of the peace treaties which followed the First World War. Phoenix-like the Hungarian people survived the horrors of war, the disappointment of the first socialist republic, the disillusion of the brief but terrifying communist rule of Béla Kun, and the bitterness of seeing their beloved country dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon. This is the world that Miklós Bánffy describes in The Phoenix Land.”

I contacted Gary Pulsifer at Arcadia for some further background and to ask him to explain more about why Bánffy is one of their authors. He sent me this, including a little vignette about Paddy and the writing of his introduction:

Tom, two reasons, one general, one specific. The first is that Arcadia specialises in translated fiction. The second is the story and this is it:

When I worked at Peter Owen Publishers I was invited to Tangier by the Hon David Herbert, one of Peter’s authors. He took my partner and me to lunch with his neighbour Patrick Thursfield, who as you know is the Bánffy co-translator. After lunch Patrick gave me the manuscript of THEY WERE COUNTED, which I read while I was on holiday, and was hooked. I tried to persuade Peter Owen to publish the trilogy, but no go, so when I started Arcadia in 1996 volume one was one of our early titles. I became quite close to Patrick, stayed with him in Tangier and saw a lot of him in London and he even once came along to the Frankfurt book fair. He was overjoyed when THEY WERE DIVIDED won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize (this happened at an awards ceremony in Oxford, when Umberto Eco presented the prize).

A funny aside is that Paddy’s forward was written in longhand and he came into our tiny offices to have Daniela de Groote, now our associate publisher, word-process it. Daniela, who is Chilean, hadn’t been in the UK all that long – she had been studying for a PhD here prior to working at Arcadia – and she had some difficulties in understanding Paddy’s upper crust accent as he dictated the foreword. Daniela was also catching a plane to Santiago that afternoon and the whole thing was a little much for her. So much so that I had to leave the office until they were finished . . .

Xan Fielding Obituary

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I am reposting this obituary to Xan Fielding at this time as he was Paddy’s very good friend, the one to whom Paddy wrote his open letters at the start of A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Those who have found this site for the first time might wish to read about his friend. At the end is a special tribute written by Paddy. I believe this to be the only on-line copy and it now includes newly discovered photographs.

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After much searching I can bring you what I believe to be the only on-line obituary to Xan Fielding which I have retyped from the Daily Telegraph Second Book of Obituaries: Heroes and Adventurers. This includes a special tribute from Paddy to one of his closest friends.

First published in the Daily Telegraph 20 August 1991

Xan Fielding, the author, translator, journalist and adventurous traveller, who has died in Paris aged 72, lived a charmed life as a Special Operations Executive agent in Crete, France and the Far East during the Second World War.

Short, dark, athletic and a brilliant linguist, he was God’s gift to operations in rugged mountainous regions and wherever his languages were needed.

Major Fielding was awarded the DSO in September 1942, “for going into a town”, as he said later with a typical modesty.
He had a boyish, slightly rebellious spirit which he shared with many of his contemporaries in SOE. His self-confessed, or self-proclaimed, amateurishness certainly belied a tough professionalism, great resourcefulness and bravery in action. Fielding was the sort of man one would be happy to go into the jungle with.

While still in his early twenties he was responsible for clandestine and subversive activities in large areas of enemy-occupied Crete. He survived numerous encounters with German forces, only to be rumbled by the Gestapo in France towards the end of hostilities in Europe.

Even then his luck held. Locked in a death cell at Digne in 1944, he was “sprung” in an audacious move by Christine Granville (nee Krystyna Skarbeck) whose SOE exploits matched his.

Alexander Wallace Fielding was born at Ootacamund, India, on November 26 1918. His family had long links with the Raj and his father was a major in the 50th Sikhs.

Xan’s mother died at his birth and he was largely brought up at Nice, where his grandmother’s family had considerable property. Fluent in French, he subsequently became a proficient classicist at Charterhouse and then studied briefly at Bonn, Munich and Freiberg Universities in Germany. He saw what was happening in that country and was so shocked at the attitude of the Chamberlain government that he came close to joining the Communist party.

At the end of the 1930s Fielding – who had recently been sacked as a sub-editor on the Cyprus Times and was by now unsuccessfully running a bar – found himself a misfit in the Mediterranean colony. Colonial officials abhorred his refusal to adopt their disdainful description of Cypriots as “Cyps”. That he was also reasonably fluent in Greek rendered him suspect to district commissioners, who could not speak the language of the people they administered.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, haunted by the thought that he might find himself trapped in Cyprus for the duration, he fled to Greece and found asylum on St Nicholas, an island owned by the anthropologist, Francis Turville Petre. Fielding dreaded not so much the battlefield as joining the conventional officers’ mess. But eventually news of the fall of France, the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Britain induced a “stab of guilt”.

He returned to the colony and was commissioned into the Cyprus Regiment, which appealed to him on account of its perverse refusal to have any regimental pride.

On hearing in Cairo that Cretans had taken up arms against the Germans, he yearned, as he wrote later, to help lead “this concerted uprising of the technically non-combatant”.

When Crete fell, Fielding was interviewed in Egypt by SOE. He was asked: “Have you any personal objection to committing murder?” His response being deemed acceptable, Fielding was put ashore in Crete with a load of weapons and explosives by Cdr “Crap” Miers, VC, skipper of the submarine Torbay.

Fielding, who had adopted the style and dress of a Greek highland peasant, was accompanied by a First World War veteran, who was inseparable from his solar topee and unrecognisable as the village schoolmaster he was supposed to impersonate.

Fortunately it was not long before he teamed up with the far more kindred spirit of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Sporting a royal blue waistcoat, lined with scarlet shot silk and embroidered with black arabesques – and singing folk songs in several languages – “Paddy” Leigh Fermor enlivened their meetings in desolate mountain hideouts.

Fielding understood the need for reliable intelligence and communications, and he daringly set up his headquarters near Crete’s northern coastal road in the proximity of German units. He experienced, as he put it, a childish excitement in “brushing shoulders with the Wehrmacht” in the corridors of the town hall when calling on the mayor of Crete’s capital, Canea. And he found it entertaining to attend parties given for the Germans by Cretan associates feigning fraternisation.

Operationally, Crete had become a massive transit camp to reinforce the Afrika Korps. Among his intelligence successes Fielding signalled the timetable of transports taking off from the airfield at Maleme, enabling the RAF to intercept them.

After six months he was picked up by a Greek submarine and given a breather in Cairo. This gave him a chance to niggle about the inaccuracy of RAF air drops.

As a result Fielding was invited to observe, from the front turret of a Wellington, a drop arranged for Leigh Fermor high up in the White Mountains. Considerably shaken by the experience – not least the anti-aircraft fire- he returned to the island by Greek submarine at the end of 1942 and never complained again.

Following the Crete mission, he parachuted into the south of France in the summer of 1944. Bearing papers announcing him as Armand Pont-Leve, a young clerk in the Electric Company of Nimes – but codenamed “Cathedrale” – Fielding was received by Francis Cammaerts (alias “Roger”) and also by Christine Granville.

Fielding found them an “imposing pair”. Still in uniform, he felt “rather like a novice in the presence of a prior and prioress”. The canister containing his civilian clothes, with poison pill sewn into the jacket, was missing and he felt something of a freak in the baggy Charlie Chaplin trouserings produced by “Roger”.

Shortly afterwards he was in the Cammaert’s car when it was stopped at a road block near Digne. Questions revealed that SOE staff in Algiers had failed to stamp a current date on his otherwise impeccable papers. Worse Fielding had split a large sum of French money between “Roger” and himself, and the enemy twigged that the notes were all in the same series.

Christine Granville was not with them and news of their arrests reached her on the Italian border. Earlier she had been arrested, but had managed to convince her German interrogators that she was a local peasant girl.

She arrived at Digne prison and passed herself off as “Roger’s” wife – and, for good measure, as a niece of Gen Montgomery. She persuaded an Alsatian named Albert Schenck, a liaison officer between the French prefecture and the German Siercherheitsdienst, to co-operate by reminding him that the Allies had already landed on the Riviera.

Schenck put Christine on to a Belgian, Max Waem, who agreed to help, though his price was two million francs. SOE in Algiers dropped the money in. As a result Fielding and “Roger” were led out of prison. Believing themselves on the way to be shot, they were astonished to be welcomed by Christine who was waiting with a car.

Fielding was awarded the Croix de Guerre in France in 1944. Before the war in Europe ended, he returned to Crete; he was one of the first into liberated Athens.

During the war Fielding would often pass through Cairo, which became a sort of SOE headquarters for the Mediterranean and Middle East, and meet up with kindred spirits such as David Smiley, “Billy” McLean (qv), Peter Kemp (qv) and Alan Hare. In 1945 they decided the place to be was the Far East. As Fielding put it: “I was at a loose end and wanted to see what was going on out there.”

He spent some months in Cambodia, with a Japanese driver fighting the Vietminh. Then came as six-month stint with the Special Intelligence Service in Germany, and an appointment as United Nations observer in the Balkans.

Peacetime, though, brought disillusionment and a disturbing sense of misgiving. But in 1948 an encounter with the Marchioness of Bath at what she described as an “hilarious lunch” predestined the course of much of the rest of his life. She had recently taken up photography in place of painting; he was planning a book on Crete. The upshot was that Daphne Bath accompanied his return to the White Mountains to illustrate the book. They married in 1953.

Xan and Daphne Fielding with Dirk Bogarde on the set of Ill Met by Moonlight

Soon there was another and more welcome distraction. Michael Powell was filming Ill Met by Moonlight – the story of Paddy Leigh Fermor’s wartime abduction of Gen Kreipe, the German commander in Crete – and Fielding was hired as technical adviser. Dirk Bogarde played Leigh Fermor and Fielding lent him his Cretan guerrilla’s cloak and coached him in the part.

Patrick Leigh Fermor writes: After an early essay at painting, Xan Fielding wandered to Greece and the islands, added Greek to his list of languages and acquired a lasting attachment to the Greeks.

His life took on an adventurous and peripatetic turn. Early in 1942 he was landed in plain clothes and by submarine in German-occupied Crete. Germany was in full advance on all fronts and Crete was a strongly galvanised Luftwaffe base for the Desert War. The mountains were full of stray British and Commonwealth soldiers who had broken out of PoW camps or been left behind after the Battle, a mortal danger to the Cretans who hid and fed them.

Gathering and evacuating them from remote caves was among Xan’s first tasks. Establishing a network of agents and signalling information back to Cairo came next followed by parachute drops to the growing guerrilla bands and the e organisation of sabotage, and propaganda while maintaining liaison with the island Resistance leaders.

Light and fine-boned when suitably cloaked and daggered, Xan could be taken for a Cretan. With his determination, humour and intuitive sympathy and his quick mastery of dialect and songs, he made countless friends, and worked there precariously for two years.

In 1944, the war moving west, he was dropped in the Vercors region to the French maquis. He returned to Crete for a final two months before the liberation, then headed for Cambodia on further SOE missions and spent some time on the Tibet border before returning to the West Bank in Greece.

Xan commanded a mixed Allied unit supervising the 1946 elections, and during prolonged leave in Rhodes, his friend Lawrence Durrell – who was press officer there – insisted on printing a set of Fielding’s poems, which make one wish he had written many more. Chafing at Oxford life as a demobilised undergraduate, he worked for a spell with the Beaverbrook Press and found it even less congenial.

These years were perplexed by tangled Dickensian lawsuits in Nice: family property had been unrecoverably misappropriated in the occupation. During that harassing time he wrote Hide and Seek, an exciting account of his experiences in Crete.

Soon after he married Daphne Bath, and they travelled all over the island (of Crete) for his long book The Stronghold, a combination of travel and history.

They first settled in Portugal. Then a long sojourn in the Kasbah of Tangier – perhaps inspired by the film Pepe le Moko – gave rise to his book Corsair Country, the history of the pirates of the Barbary Coast.

Near Uzez in Languedoc, their next long halt, his excellent French suggested translation as a profession and he put more than 30 books into English, including many by Larteguy and Chevalier, and Malrauz’s Les Noyers d’Altenborg [Ed: and perhaps better known Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai]

After a friendly separation from Daphne he married Agnes (“Magouche”) Phillips, daughter of Adml John II Magruder, of the United States Navy. They were extremely happy.

Xan and Magouche took root in the Serriana de Ronda, which looks across Adalusian ilex-woods to the Atlas. There he edited the correspondence of his friend and neighbour, Gerald Brennan, with Ralph Partridge, and continued his translations.

Xan’s own book, The Money Spinner, about the Monaco casino – the hazards of gambling had always fascinated him – came out in 1977. Later, Winds of the World gave free rein to his interest in atmospheric commotions and their mythology.

In the winter of 1990 One Man and his Time appeared; it described the life, and the Asian, Ethiopian and Arabian travels, of his old friend “Billy” McLean (qv), the wartime commander of the SOE mission in Albania.

At almost the same time Xan was smitten by cancer and he and Magouche moved to Paris for therapy. Though fatally stricken for the last eight months, he was suddenly, three months ago, granted a reprise which exactly coincided with the ceremonies for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Crete and the Resistance.

At a special parade of the Greek navy at Souda, he and six Allied officers were decorated with the commemorative medal of the Resistance, and for 10 days he visited scores of mountain friends from 50 years before. His return was everywhere greeted with feasting and songs.

Xan Fielding was a gifted, many-sided, courageous and romantic figure, deeply committed to this friends, civilised and bohemian at the same time, with a thoughtful style leavened by spontaneous gaiety and a dash of recklessness. He was altogether outstanding.

August 20 1991

Patrick Leigh Fermor

He drank from a different fountain

Tag Archives: Patrick Leigh Fermor

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Xan Fielding Obituary

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