What’ve you been reading? My
reading for 2017 included a lot of old favorite writers, a few brand-new books,
and an eclectic mix of in-betweens. I reread the first five Sherlock Holmes
books—actually, I listened to Stephen Fry read them—got through the first half
of The Chronicles of Barsetshire
books, and finished Graham Greene’s Collected
Essays as well as three of the thrillers I hadn’t read, including Brighton Rock. I also chuckled my way
through three P. G. Wodehouse books, including the collection The Man with Two Left Feet (1917), which
has the first Jeeves story.
I went
back to read some of the parts of Auerbach’s Mimesis that I had ignored in grad school. Other books I have
always intended to read but never before got around to were on this year’s
list: Gilgamesh, Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, Main Street, Dead Souls. I filled in some other gaps. Along with
apparently a lot of other readers since Trump’s inauguration, I read both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I was happy to finally read all of the Archy and Mehitabel columns
Don Marquis wrote; they can be found in The
Annotated Archy and Mehitabel.
The only
whole corpus of poetry I managed in 2017 was Elizabeth Bishop’s.
My son
Matt, who often guides my reading, led me to Michel Houellebecq’s Submission and Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. Submission was one of a small list of
new books, along with Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth,
Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland, George
Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and
Joan Didion’s South and West.
I read a
couple of children’s books I’d managed to miss: Winnie-the-Pooh and The
Giving Tree, and I reread one of my favorites, How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, by Russell
Hoban. I also read Kipling’s Captains
Courageous for the first time.
Among
the unclassified and the in-betweens were Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, a selection of the
often hilarious reviews Dorothy Parker’s wrote for The New Yorker under the byline “Constant Reader,” Evelyn Waugh’s
early travel book Labels, Hesiod’s Theogony, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (with many of
the same themes as Fantasyland and Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris’s
not-quite-as-good sequel to The End of
Faith.
Probably
the most interesting book was the last one I read this year, Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters.
“My life story could be entitled ‘The Case of the Overshot Deadline’,” Leigh
Fermor wrote accurately about himself in one of his letters. In fact, his life
story is told in A Time of Gifts (1977)
and Between the Woods and the Water
(1986), two books he wrote decades after his 1933-35 trip on foot when he was
eighteen from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul; in his friend and battle-mate Billy
Moss’s book Ill Met by Moonlight
(1950) which tells of the kidnaping of a German general on occupied Crete in
1943 by Moss, Leigh Fermor, several other British comrades, and a band of
partisan Cretans; and in this collection of letters selected and edited by Adam
Sisman, who fills in the gaps, identifying the correspondents and the hundreds
of people referred to in the letters recording Leigh Fermor’s very social life.
But nowhere is the whole story told of Leigh Fermor’s falling in love with the Rumanian
Princess Marie-Blanche Cantacuzène, called “Balasha,” whom he met in Athens in
1935 and lived with, in Greece and Rumania, with travels to England and around
the Balkans, until war broke out in 1939, when he immediately left to join the
war effort in England. He wrote to her after the war was over, and he visited
her when it became possible to do so, which was not until 1965. They remained
correspondents until her death, but Leigh Fermor in 1946 was already in love
with Joan Rayner, whom he married in 1968.
He had
many other affairs, some of which Rayner may have been aware of. The one with
Lyndall Birch in the late fifties is an example, I think, of how Leigh Fermor
sometimes trades unthinkingly on his charm and expects it to open doors and
arms. He had a fling with her in Rome in October, 1958, wrote one letter to her
in November from London, and then went back in May expecting to pick up where
they’d left off. That didn’t work out. He does not make the same mistake with
his next lover, Enrica “Rickie” Huston, fourth wife of John Huston, whom he
chats up in frequent letters, the funniest being the one where he is trying to
figure out whether she got crabs from him. “Could
it be me?” he asks. He thinks at first it might have been because of that
one-night stand in Paris with “an old pal,” but then he says, no, he has no
sign of them, directs her to an Italian powder for sale in Paris called MOM,
and discusses the departure of her little friends in an allusive paragraph
(“their revels now are ended…where are all their quips and quiddities? The
pattering of tiny feet will be stilled. Bare, ruin’d choirs”) ending with
“Don’t tell anyone…Mom’s the word, gentle reader.”
The
funniest letter is one to “Debo”—Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, youngest of
the Mitford sisters, whose correspondence with Leigh Fermor over fifty years
has been separately published as In
Tearing Haste (2008). He writes about Anne Fleming’s getting him an
invitation to stay with Somerset Maugham at his house in France and about his
being thrown out after one day because he drank too much (he says in another
letter that his favorite noise is “the soft hiss of the soda syphon”) and told
a story about a stuttering friend that rightly offended Maugham the stutterer.
One gets
the idea that the good looks and the charm allowed him to get away with a lot
of unanswered letters, missed deadlines, and carelessness. An egregious
example: he took back to England all of Diana Cooper’s answers to condolence
letters after her husband Duff died—and then lost them. To Balasha he makes the claim that because he wants to
write long, detailed letters, he doesn’t get around to it for much longer than
he would for a short one. Then, two pages later in the same letter we discover
that he and Joan Rayner have just married, and his dilatoriness in writing
takes on a different light.
He complains to his publisher
Jock Murray that his house builders in Kardamyli, at the tip of one of the
southern peninsulas of the Peloponnese, are doing a Leigh Fermor on him. But
the house is finished in 1969. What shall we call it, he asks—“Doubting Castle?
Blandings? Gatherum? Headlong Hall? No. 2, The Pines?”
Once one
actually received a Leigh Fermor letter, however, it was worth the wait. He has
a lyrical gift for describing landscape, as evident in the letters as in A Time of Gifts and other books. He sets
down the mundane events as well as the outré
ones and, as Sisman perceived, does the biographer’s work for him.
