“My life story could be entitled ‘The Case of the Overshot Deadline’,” Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) wrote accurately about himself in one of his letters. In fact, his life story is told in A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and the posthumously published The Broken Road (2015), three 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 who like them were managing to get by on Crete disguised as partisans, and a band of real partisan Cretans; and in a collection of letters, Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters (2016), 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 only in biographies 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.”
Another funny 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 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.
Leigh Fermor decided when he was eighteen to walk to Constantinople. He set off in December in a little steamer from Tower Bridge to the Hook of Holland, walked up the Noorwede, the Waal and the Maas until the last turned into the Rhine (in Holland, the Rijn).He follows the Rhine into a Germany taken over by the Nazis only a year before. Though somewhat apprehensive, he finds the Germans he deals with, aside from an occasional drunk and belligerent type, are friendly and as unlikely to want to discuss politics as he is. Up the Rhine from Düsseldorf to Cologne, on a barge to Coblenz, walking again to Stolzenfels, Bingen, Rüdeseim, Mainz, Worms, Mannheim, and then along the Neckar to Heidelberg, where he spends New Year’s. At each town he buys a stocknagel, a little town badge with a nail to drive into your walking stick, and before he loses the stick at Munich he has twenty-seven of these. He is taken in by various kindly innkeepers, spends several days with two Stuttgart girls his age whose parents are out of town, and finally, when his rucksack with passport and money is stolen in Munich, he makes use of a letter of introduction he has to Baron Rheinhard von Liphart-Ratshoff, who not only extends his own hospitality, but writes to Schloss-owning friends of his on Leigh Fermor’s route, who also take him in. The first part of this story is told in A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977). Writing almost 45 years after the events he is describing, Leigh Fermor shows a young man striding through an old and toppling world, shortly to be ravaged by a war that will change many of the borders he crosses. His letters of introduction give him entrée to the elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that will no longer exist in ten years, and he is entertained in castles whose residents are soon to be ousted and in some cases their names erased. His account of all this is travel writing as elegy.
His policy is to walk unless he can’t because of terrain or fatigue, and to accept rides “for no further than a day’s march would cover.” He joins the Danube at Ulm and continues east, leaving Germany and entering Austria near Salzburg. He spends three weeks in Vienna, beginning his stay there without any money, knocking on doors and offering to do sketches of people for a couple of schillings. He is remarkably successful, but eventually his allowance arrives. He comments on the city’s museums and goes to the Spanish Riding School, which prompts a discussion of the Spanish-Austrian Hapsburg connection. Looking at artifacts, he speculates what would have happened if the Ottoman Turks had taken Vienna. Architecture is one of Leigh Fermor’s interests, as is obvious from the detail of the descriptions, and in Vienna he visits works of von Erlach, including the Karlskirche, and of Hildebrandt, such as the upper Belvedere.
From the beginning of his journey, Leigh Fermor was in the habit of making sketches; when they were of people he would often give the sketches to the sitters, many of whom had been hospitable to him. Clearly the sketching habit helped with his memory of people and places. Although he says recalling the details of his journey forty-plus years later is “like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones,” clearly he has a prodigious memory; during one long dull stretch of walking he recites all the literature he knows by heart, and the catalogue takes two pages. Catalogues are a feature of his style, and he ekes out the account of his own doings with historical asides, incidents from his own past or occasionally his future, and other sorts of long views: as he passes the point where the Moselle joins the Rhine, he writes:
A seagull, flying upstream, would look down for scores of miles on tiered and winding vineyards, and swoop, if he chose, through the great black Roman gates of Trier and then over the amphitheatre and across the frontier into Lorraine. Skimming through the weather-vanes of the old Merovingian city of Metz, he would settle among the rocks of the Vosges where the stream begins.
This sort of description, along with mentioning places he saw on later trips, is a way of describing the road not taken and expanding his narrative. His style also includes quotations from various standard authors and Latin tags. He is not above stealing an idea, for example in this passage, which borrows from W. H. Auden’s use of it in “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
In Holland the landscape is the protagonist, and merely human events—even one so extraordinary as Icarus falling head first into the sea because the wax in his artificial wings has melted—are secondary details: next to Brueghel’s ploughed field and trees and sailing ship and ploughman, the falling aeronaut is insignificant.
Also notable are passages giving a devastating critique of German painting, noting the changes in accent he encounters in spoken German as he moves south and east, or describing fat Germans in the dining hall of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus. Leigh Fermor often compares what he sees to art and admits how painting has affected the way he views things. A farm woman sitting by a fire, for example, is compared to a Supper at Emmaus or Bethany.
Leigh Fermor begins this book with an “Introductory Letter to Xan Fielding,” whom he met undercover, like himself, in the hills of German-occupied Crete in 1942. This enables him to give an autobiographical sketch up to the time he left England on his journey to Constantinople, telling of his parents away in India for much of his childhood, and schools where the young Leigh Fermor did not necessarily fit in. “English schools,” he writes at one point, “the moment they depart from the conventional track, are oases of strangeness and comedy,” but it is likely that he did not see the comedy until later.
East of Vienna, at the point where the March/Morava River empties into the Danube, Leigh Fermor crosses over into the East: “Östlich von Wien,” wrote Metternich, “fängt der Orient an.” The Slovakian part of Czechoslovakia is on the north side of the river, and Hungary on the south. In Bratislava, just across the border in Czechoslovakia, he visits two nearby bars, one full of Magyars and the other of Slavs, and delineates the differences in person, dress, and drink—although they’re all drinking fruit brandy of one sort or another. He also visits the Jewish quarter and a Gypsy encampment. He is staying with a friend in the city, a banker whom he met in Vienna—the man’s home town—and his friend convinces him to take a side trip, by train, to Prague. Prague is “a baroque city loaded with the spoils of the Austrian Caesars,” and a lot of its architectural details run together in Leigh Fermor’s memory, late Gothic and baroque vaults and traceries detached from their context in particular buildings, though he finds the Charles Bridge over the Moldau/Vltara “one of the great medieval bridges of Europe.”
Friends of his banker friend invite him to yet another nobleman’s castle, this one 50 miles east of Bratislava, so he remains in Slovakia longer than he’d intended. And now he has a diary recovered years after he’d left it in Rumania. The entries begin as he leaves Bratislava and finds his way with difficulty to the Baron Schey’s house. Here his genteel host entertains him, urges him to read Proust, and tells him stories that evoke a whole lost turn-of-the-century world in the capitals of Western Europe. Then the Baron sends Leigh Fermor off with a tin of tobacco, a leather case full of cigars, and a whole roast chicken. He makes a loop through Slovakia before returning to the Danube/Donau/Duna. He crosses into Hungary and enters Esztergom on the evening of Holy Saturday.
Leigh Fermor has a peculiar sensibility, no doubt useful later when he was behind enemy lines in the war, but that he questions late in this book:
The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.
He has this thought on the first night that the temperature allows him to spend the night outside, and only a few miles from his entry into Hungary.
I have not read Between the Woods and the Water or The Broken Road, about the rest of his journey, which takes him not only to Constantinople but back into the Balkans, ending just before the beginning of his grand romance with his Rumanian princess. The other book I have read of his is one published earlier than any of these, entitled A Time to Keep Silence (1957).
Above the road along which Emma Bovary hurried from Yvetot to her lover in Rouen is the Abbey of St. Wandrille, where Patrick Leigh Fermor spent some weeks in the early 1950s. His purpose in secluding himself in a visitor’s cell of the oldest Benedictine abbey in France was to finish a book, but he also wrote letters to Joan Rayner, the photographer/correspondent whom he would eventually marry, and these letters became the basis for A Time to Keep Silence.
Wandrille founded the monastery on the banks of the Fontanelle in 649, and over the years it produced many candidates for sainthood. The abbey grew in size, lands, and royal favor, was ruined in the ninth-century Norman invasion, suffered a fire in the thirteenth, survived Commendation—appropriation by lay courtiers as royal favors—in the sixteenth, and was abandoned from the time of the French Revolution until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then the monks spent the time from the 1901 anti-monastic regime until 1930 in Belgium. Some damage was done to the abbey in WWII.
Leigh Fermor went from an initial period of depression and sleeping badly to falling in with the abbey’s hours. Then he no longer felt tired and was able to work and explore the abbey, especially the library he was given the freedom of. He makes an apology for the life of the monks, a life that would make no sense without the basis first of Christian belief and second the “belief in the necessity and efficacy of prayer” (though Karen Armstrong, in her introduction to the NYRB edition, disputes this, and says the practice can come first and bring about the belief). Barring these, he says, they “lead a good life, make (for they support themselves) no economic demands on the community, harm no one and respect their neighbours.” But if you accept the two beliefs, “their power for good is incalculable.” Of their commitment to constant prayer, their scholarship, their building, their conservation of learning during many centuries he concludes, “I, not the monks, was the escapist.”
He also spends two weeks in the Priory of St. Peter of Solesme on the Sarthe. But the middle of the book is devoted to La Grande Trappe and the severe, austere part of the Benedictines known as the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, named from the 12th-century Abbey of Cîteax. Here St. Bernard reformed the backsliding Benedictines and started the Cistercians, who, at least at La Grande Trappe, spend their lives in silence (they are allowed to speak to the animals they tend and, of course, to confess and confer with the Abbot), sleeping on straw-covered boards in an unheated, common dormitory, eating no meat, eggs, or fish, working in the fields when not at prayer. While “prayer for the redemption of mankind is the basis of Benedictine monasticism…in the Cistercian branch…the principle of prayer has been supplemented by the idea of vicarious penance.” Their way of life is designed for expiation and atonement for sin. Leigh Fermor muses about what psychologists might make of the effects of all this “repression,” but he observes at the monastery only that this life of “acute outward suffering” seems to be really “one of peace and joy.” He cannot imagine himself a Trappist, however, even if “endowed with an abundant gift of faith and with the monastic temperament.”
His last monastic episode is a visit to the ruined monastic community of Urgüb, in Cappadocia in modern Turkey, churches and habitations carved out of volcanic cones and built to defend against Roman and later Seljuk invaders. A postscript Leigh Fermor writes from a Benedictine priory in Hampshire, while musing about the monastic communities that once were scattered all over England and now, he writes, are coming back in small numbers. He ends by quoting a letter from St. Basil, who eventually moved from his native Cappadocia to a monastery built within sight of the Black Sea.
A man who could have written Casanovan memoirs about sleeping with many of the prominent women of Europe over several generations, or could have written about feats of derring-do performed while undercover in occupied territory during wartime, chose instead to write about travel, and in my opinion may justly be acclaimed as the best travel writer of the second half of the twentieth century.
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