Tag: Patrick Leigh Fermor

Artemis Cooper’s Fermor Biography: A Great Read

artemiscooperI just finished Artemis Cooper’s splendid biography (Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure).

Fermor, who died in 2011 at age 96,  is widely regarded as the foremost travel writer of the last century–ever observant, never boring, blessed with diligent recall, and unexcelled with metaphor.  When you read Fermor, you’re getting not only description, but history and art amid the first stirrings of fascism in pre-World War II Europe.

The apex of his writing is, of course, his recounting of his three year walk (1933-35) across Europe, or from Rotterdam to Istanbul in two volumes:  A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.  Sadly, it’s a Europe that’s largely vanished with its post Great War vestiges of Hapsburg resplendence; of unfettered freedom-loving peasants; of an untamed Danube not yet shackled by dams, bounded by bird-saturated wetlands; of fulsome traditions and extant vernaculars; of a redolent human goodness replete in hospitality transcending class or wealth; of a Europe not yet initiated into the apocalyptic horrors of fascism and the aftermath of Soviet hegemony across Eastern Europe.

Gifted with an ebullient personality along with many a youth’s folly, he made friends easily and treasured these friendships across the years.  They included every day people–shopkeepers, peasants, gypsies, monks–along with luminaries like Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connally, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Toynbee.  He was especially close to Lawrence Durrell and Ian Fleming.

Here let me confess I prefer biography to autobiography because I think it’s in the former you’re more likely to find honesty than among the raconteurs of the latter, often promoting themselves or embroidering their narrative through boasts or claims difficult to confirm.

Fortunately, we have one surviving Fermor journal that records his journey, assuring us it happened.  Even so, any perusal of it tells us what we surmised–that despite his prodigious talents for memory and detail, no 18-year old could possess the salient knowledge Fermor displays forty years later in his layered recall.

In short, Fermor added details across the years, embellishing his journals through vast, omnivorous reading–often in their original languages (he was fluent in six of them)–in a laboring  akin to fashioning a mosaic.  At times, he confessed to steeping his writing in imaginative touches like riding horseback across the Hungarian steppes.  At heart, Fermor was an ardent Romantic who sometimes linked himself with Byron, who like himself had a fondness for Greece and fought for its freedom.  I wasn’t surprised then that like his hero, he swam the Hellespont.  What shocked me was that he was 69.

Like, Byron, he also had many lady loves, despite his long relationship and later marriage to Joan Raynor, whose mother was heiress to a fortune made in woolens manufacturing. (Be warned that when you learn of Fermor’s women friends you’re probably right to assume they were loves.)  What enabled Joan and Paddy’s marriage to survive these amours was their foreswearing of sexual jealousy.  In fact, Joan was observed providing Paddy with money on one occasion, should he need a woman in his travels.  His early love affair–before Joan– with the Rumanian princess, Balasha Cantacuzine, sixteen years older than himself, is certainly moving in its ultimate tragedy of ensuing separation with the onset of war and later Communism.

I know I risk understatement when I say Fermor had an intensity about him when it came to life.  Passionate, he wanted to know the full palette of human experience and verbally paint its textures.  A consummate intellectual, he never put on airs with his encyclopedic command of many disciplines, whether music, art, history, literature or languages.

He was also a brave and ingenious man, serving in World War II as a naval officer assigned to the Intelligence Corps and dropped into Crete as a liaison to the Cretan resistance against the occupying Germans.  Ultimately, in one of the war’s greatest exploits, he would mastermind the capture of the commanding German general on Crete.  Cooper is very thorough in presenting the many facets of this endeavor and the narrow escape of Fermor and his fellow partisans from German reinforcements in search of their general.

Cooper unflinchingly gives us full portraiture of Fermor.  Not everyone liked his tendency to dominate a conversation, for example.  Politically, he was conservative and despised the Communists who created havoc in civil war Spain, opposed resistance efforts in Crete, and contributed to considerable violence in post-war Greece.  He had also killed a fellow member of his Cretan guerrilla unit in an accidental shooting incident he could easily have avoided with more diligence to gun safety.  As for his writing, some critics argue his long sentences, weighted with details, may trip up readers and frequent digressions provoke their annoyance.  We learn, too, that he smoked as many as seventy cigarettes a day.

Cooper knew Fermor firsthand as the granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper, who found Fermor captivating and remained a lifelong friend and correspondent:

He could illuminate any subject under the sun, and had a memory that had retained most of the thousands of books he had read over the years.  He knew all her favourite passages from Browning, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Meredith and Keats by heart–and much more besides….

As for Paddy, he worshipped Diana, not just for her indestructible beauty, but for the original cast of her mind, the flourish of her phrases, and the blind eye she turned to convention.

The New York Times has recently listed her book as one of the year’s (2013) most notable biographies; likewise the prestigious New York Review of Books, which had already proven its fondness for Fermor by printing several of his works as “Classics.

Having recently read A Time of Gifts, I found the biography an exceptional read in translating an extraordinary life into an effulgence of candor, scholarship and artistry.  I can’t think of a better memorial.

–rj

A great talent: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts

fermorI’m always eager for a good read and get ecstatic when I find one.  There are so many possibilities out there that I try to choose wisely, usually from several sources such as NPR, The Times Literary Supplement, and my favorite with its nearly 200 reprints of notable works, The New York Review of Books.

The latter is the source for my newest read, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s standout travel saga, A Time of Gifts (1977).  I’m embarrassed at missing out on Fermor these many years, liking travel narratives as I do, but then that’s why I keep the NYRB close-by.

Fermor was just an amazing guy in explorer Sir Richard Burton mold, fiercely independent, assertive and bold; linguistically gifted, courageous and cunning.  Joining the Irish Guards In World War II, he fought in Greece and served with a guerrilla unit on the isle of Crete, where he disguised himself as a shepherd for 18 months, living in mountain caves, while successfully master-minding the abduction of a German general.  He was knighted in 1994, for his service to literature and promotion of British-Greek relations.

In A Time of Gifts, Fermor begins his recall years later (age 62), of his three year walk across Europe to Constantinople as a 19-year with little more than a backpack in 1933. He actually only gets half-way by the close, and so there’s a sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, but even then, you don’t get to the Bosphorus.  It little matters, for what we have is splendid, as we follow this young man hobnobbing with rich and poor, gypsies and priests, occasionally sleeping in ancient monasteries.  His account of Germany in 1933, which saw Hitler becoming Chancellor, fascinates.  On one occasion, he strays into a beer hall filled with Nazis.

What attracted me to A Time of Gifts amid a plethora of can’t go wrong choices were multiple reviewer comments on Fermor’s stylistic talent, one reviewer likening him to Sir Thomas Browne as the best of the best prose masters across the several centuries. As a former teacher of English for some forty years, I’m an aficionado of style, or the mastery of the cadence of the English sentence.  Talented writers know the weave of sentences spun into art, exemplary in the literary world, especially in the 19th century in the likes of Newman, Ruskin, and Pater.

Of course, I’ve only begun A Time of Gifts, but his writing already excites me with its prowess, not only in its trenchant rhythms, but through its sensory capacity for total awareness.  To possess such talent for minutiae down to a grain of sand like this would make Flaubert (le mot juste) proud.  Let me try out a passage on you:

The gables of the Rhine-quays were gliding past and, as we gathered speed and sailed under one of these spans of the first bridge, the lamps of Cologne all went on simultaneously. In a flash the fading city soared out of the dark and expanded in a geometrical infinity of electric bulbs. Diminishing skeletons of yellow dots leaped into being along the banks and joined hands across the flood in a sequence of lamp-strung bridges. Cologne was sliding astern. The spires were the last of the city to survive  and as they too began to dwindle, a dark red sun dropped through bars of amber into a vague Abendland that rolled glimmering away towards the Ardennes.

Informed mastery like this, housed in rhythmic sentences acute with colorful detail, sets Fermor apart as one of our greatest travel writers since John Ruskin.

You can read more about him in Artemis Cooper’s magnificent biography (2012).  Having full access to his papers, she tells us that Fermor left behind a completed draft that gets him to Constantinople and that it will be published soon.

Despite losing some of his sight and hearing, he remained active almost up to the day of his death at age 96 in 2011.

In a book he had been reading, he wrote:  “Love to all and kindness to all friends, and thank you for a life of great happiness.”  Now that’s an epitaph we can only envy.

–rj