Leigh Fermor

He was a travel writer described by a BBC journalist as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" and by The Telegraph as "one of the few genuine Renaissance figures produced by Britain in the 20th century, a man both of action and learning."

More verbosely, Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, wrote that he:

“was, and remains, an Englishman, with so much living to his credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely sentient pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their scope... We fret about our kids' S.A.Ts, whereas this man, when he was barely more than a kid himself walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. In his sixties, he swam the Hellespont, in homage to Lord Byron—his hero, and to some extent, his template. In between, he has joined a cavalry charge, observed a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, and plunged into a love affair with a princess. He has feasted atop a moonlit tower, with wine and roast lamb hauled up by rope. He has dwelled soundlessly among Trappist monks.” 

Patrick (Paddy) Leigh Fermor died in 2011 at the age of 96 and his passing was the occasion for an outpouring of wonderful writing in the form of lengthy obituaries and reminiscences (Paddy knew everyone) in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times and the NY Times among others. 

I've read four of Leigh Fermor's books.  Two of them narrate his 14 month walk from Holland to Constantinople (as he called it) in 1933-34 when he was 18 years old.  He embarked on this adventure after being expelled from The King's School in Canterbury for being caught holding hands with the local greengrocer's daughter (she was eight years older and there may have been more to the story - his housemaster wrote of him "He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys").  By that time, Paddy had already picked up a love for language, poetry and history but he was never to attend university.

Leigh Fermor was not a speedy writer.  The first of the books about his walk, A Time Of Gifts, was not published until 1977 and the second, Between The Woods And The Water, finally came out in 1986.  Between The Woods ends with Leigh Fermor on the former island fortress of Ada Kaleh in the Danube River, near Bulgaria, a remnant of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by a few hundred islanders "left behind by the retreating Turks . . . The Austrians held some vague suzerainty over it, but the island seems to have been forgotten until it was granted to Rumania at the Treaty of Versailles; and the Rumanians had left the inhabitants undisturbed" and finishes with the words TO BE CONCLUDED.  This promise will finally be delivered on with the publication of the third and last installment in September 2013, eighty years after Paddy began his walk.  Questions have been raised about the accuracy of the books after the passage of so many years but as the Telegraph noted in its obituary:

 "Yet the accuracy or otherwise of particular incidents was beside the point. Leigh Fermor's achievement was, like Proust, to have rendered the past visible, and to have preserved a civilisation which had since been swept away like leaves in a storm. The books are also a brilliantly sustained evocation of youthful exhilaration and joy"

It is very true that in reading these books you feel you have entered into a world that has disappeared.  This is most striking in The Woods And The Water which covers Paddy's travels in Hungary and the Transylvania region of Rumania.  Even at the time this world was fading away in the turmoil of the post WWI breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, before being completely obliterated a few years later by WWII and finally buried under tons of dull grey-brown crumbling Communist concrete.

Here is an sample (taken from The Economist obituary) of that adventure as he takes tea under flowering horse-chestnut trees at the kastely of Korosladany, 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."

The descriptive language in all of Leigh Fermor's books is enveloping and you can reread the best of it many times.  His prose could also have its pitfalls, as William Dalrymple noted in The Daily Beast, writing of another passage in his books:

"It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: beautifully written, fabulously romantic and just a little showy. For Leigh Fermor’s greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Paddy has been responsible for some of the most brightly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable."

After reaching Greece at the end of his walk he joined the Greek Royal Cavalry in fighting a rebellion in Macedonia and then fell in love with Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian Countess (of Greek background) and moved back to her native Moldavia (Balasha) where he lived till the outbreak of WWII.  Returning to England he enlisted in the Irish Guards but was transferred to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) because of his knowledge of Greek and sent to Cairo to assist in guerrilla operations on Crete and the Greek mainland..

Leigh Fermor spent two years in the mountains of Crete, living with the local resistance fighters and grew to love the culture.  It was there that he conceived of his most daring adventure and managed to secure approval from British Army HQ in Cairo to carry it off - the kidnapping of the German Commandant of Crete, General Heinrich Kreipe.  

In April 1944, Major Fermor and another British officer (Billy Moss), dressed as German corporals, kidnapped Kreipe in his own car and bluffed their way through 23 German checkpoints and into the mountains of Crete (with Paddy wearing General Kreipe's hat and speaking German).  A month later they were able to smuggle Kreipe out of Crete and back to Cairo.  It was during this month of Kreipe's Cretan captivity that one of the most famous of Paddy's stories originated.(Leigh Fermor, right, and Billy Moss dressed in German uniforms, Crete, 1944)

About three weeks into the kidnapping, Kreipe and his captors reached the vicinity of Mount Ida, in Greek legend the birthplace of Zeus.
 

"Gazing up at the snowy peak, Kreipe recited 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). Leigh Fermor immediately continued the poem to its end. The two men realised that they had "drunk at the same fountains" before the war, as Leigh Fermor put it, and things between them were very different from then on. "

His wartime exploits gained him the OBE in 1943 and the DSO in 1944 and he was made an Honorary Citizen of Herakleion, Crete after the war. In 1957 a movie, Ill Met By Moonlight, was made of this exploit, starring Dirk Bogarde as Paddy.  Oddly enough, Kreipe and Leigh Fermor were reunited in 1972 on the Greek TV version of This Is Your Life.

In its obituary, The Guardian wrote of this period in Paddy's life:
  

"He was exactly the right age to be a war hero, and in his two years with the Cretan resistance made a number of lifelong friends, blood-brothers and brothers by baptism. At one point General [later Field Marshal] Bernard Montgomery ordered him to depart at once and come on leave to Cairo, but received a telegram saying he had misunderstood, and that Major Leigh Fermor was enjoying himself enormously and did not want any leave. "What I liked about Paddy," one of his Cretan blood-brothers said to me, "was he was such a good man, so morally good. He could throw his pistol 40 feet in the air like this, and catch it again by the handle."
 

For most of his last 60 years, Leigh Fermor split his time between Greece and England.  He built a house near Kardamyli on the isolated Mani peninsula in the southern Peloponnese and also had a home in Worcestershire with his wife, Joan, who died in 2001.

It was during these years that he wrote the other two books that I've read.  The first is Mani, about a walking tour that Leigh Fermor took on this mostly desolate peninsula in the early 1950s, before he built his home.  In it he tells a story in(On the Mani)  that captures the sense of fun in all his books.  He and his companions are in Kardamyli, and are seated for dinner by the harbor where "It was midsummer in that glaring white town, and the heat was explosive":

"On a sudden, silent decision we stepped down fully dressed into the sea carrying the iron table a few yards out and then our three chairs, on which, up to our waists in cool water, we sat round the nearly laid table-top, which now seemed by magic to be levitated three inches about the water.  The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist-deep with a butler's gravity, and, saying nothing more than 'Dinner-time', placed our meal before us"

The other book is Roumeli: Travels In Northern Greece in which he visits the hanging monasteries of Meteora, attends a Sarakatsan shepherd's wedding and pursues a pair of slippers said to have once belonged to Lord Byron.  (A Meteoran monastery)


William Dalrymple writes, in Paddyesque style, about his home in Greece:
  

"Most of these books were written in Paddy’s beautiful house at Kardamyli deep in Mani, at the tip of the Greek Peloponnese. It is the most perfect writer’s house imaginable, designed and partially built by Paddy himself in an old olive grove overlooking a secluded Mediterranean bay. Buttressed by the old retaining walls of the olive terraces, the white-washed rooms are cool and airy and lined with books; old copies of the TLS and the NYRB lie scattered around on tables between Attic vases, Indian sculptures, and bottles of local ouzo. A study filled with reference books and old photographs lies across a shady courtyard filled with olive trees. There are cicadas grinding in the cypresses, and a wonderful  view of the peaks of the Taygetus falling down to the blue waters of the Aegean, so clear that it is said that in some places you can still see the wrecks of old Ottoman galleys lying on the sea bed far below. There is a warm smell of wild rosemary and cypress resin in the air; and from below comes the crash of the sea on the pebbles of the foreshore."

You can find pictures of Leigh Fermor's house in Kardamyli taken by his nephew, Miles Fenton here:


 
What stands out for me in reading the accounts of those who met him is his sense of graciousness and generosity even with those he barely knew (see, for instance, this piece by Paul Rahe).  He didn't slow down as he grew older and you can read an account of what he was like at 83 here.  Diagnosed with cancer, he underwent surgery in Athens and then expressed a desire to return to England to die and be buried next to his wife.  He was flown to Worcestershire and died the morning after his arrival.

Give him a read.  You'll enjoy it.