The Broken Road

Seventy nine years after completing his walk from Holland to Constantinople, the final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his youthful ramble has been published.  The first two volumes, A Time For Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) are considered literary masterpieces (THC has previously written about these books as well as Fermor's other exploits in Leigh Fermor), taking Paddy, as he was known, through Germany, Austria (with a side trip to Prague), Hungary and the Transylvania region of Rumania leaving us just after his passage through the Iron Gates, on the Danube, between Rumania and Yugoslavia and near the border of Bulgaria.  Though long anticipated, it had been thought at the time of his death in 2011 at the age of 96 that the final volume completing his journey was still incomplete and would never be published.

The Broken Road does not complete the journey in a manner consistent with the prior two volumes, and thus its title.  Instead, it is a bit of a patchwork as Leigh Fermor's literary executors, Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, tell us in their introduction to the new book which consists of three distinct parts (like Caesar's Gaul).  The first recounts Leigh Fermor's journey from the Iron Gates through Bulgaria, with a side trip to Bucharest, Romania ending in Burgas, Bulgaria still a hundred miles short of Constantinople.  The origin of this section lies in Paddy's attempt in 1962 to write a magazine piece about the pleasures of walking which morphed into an account of his journeys in Bulgaria.  By early 1965 he had written an incomplete manuscript which he set aside to build his house on the Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese (for pictures see the end of the Leigh Fermor post).  When that project was completed he decided to go back to writing of his journey from the start rather than complete the manuscript about the last portion of the walk.

Though he tried to complete the book in the late 1980s his efforts faltered.  Then in 2008, Artemis Cooper found a typescript of the unfinished manuscript from the 1960s in the office of Paddy's publisher in London and Paddy asked for it to be sent to him in Greece.  Now in his early nineties and with limited vision he began slowly revising with the aid of a magnifying glass.  He was still editing almost up to the time of his death.  It is this version that serves as the basis for the first, and longest, section of The Broken Road.

How must it have felt for a man in his nineties to be editing and revising a manuscript written in his late forties about an adventure undertaken when he was 18 and 19 years old?   More than in the prior two volumes Paddy occasionally inserts himself as an older man into the narrative, providing his reflections on the events.  He is particularly wistful reflecting on the fate of those he met and befriended in Eastern Europe throughout 1934 who would face the twin catastrophe of the Nazis and WWII followed by the Soviet occupation:

Nearly all the people in this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half, in unhappy endings.

A sentiment that puts THC in mind of Rebecca West's dedication for her epic book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) based upon her 1937 journey to Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, a journey into the newly-created Yugoslavia and into its dark, haunted past:

To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved

Leigh Fermor reflects on the challenge of writing a memoir so many years removed from the events:

My first memories, therefore, are overlaid with many more, and it is hard to exclude the inklings gleaned later when writing of these first encounters . . . I am almost irresistibly tempted to slip in one or two balloons from a later date in the pages that lie ahead . . . if I see an apt occasion . . . I may, but not without warning the reader, let it rip.  After all, I am not likely to pass this way again in print . . . 

. . . two main problems beset the very curious and enjoyable task of compiling this private archaeology.  The first is a sudden blur, when exact memory conks out, and a stretch of the itinerary looms eventlessly ahead and no pencil mark on the map comes to my help. . . .The cheerful obverse of all these lacunae is that they save us both from drowning in the indiscriminate flood of total recall.  

The second problem is the opposite of all this: while piecing together fragments which have lain undisturbed for two decades and more, all at once a detail will surface which acts as potently as the taste of madeleine which made the whole of Proust's childhood unfurl.  The haul of irrelevant detail, interlocking trains of thought and associations, and the echoes of echoes re-echoed and ricocheted, is overwhelming, and in the hopes of attaining some redeeming shadow of symmetry and balance, a lot of this irrelevant catch must be thrown away again to swim back to the dark pools where it has been lurking all this time.

Even with these limitations The Broken Road contains many of the set pieces we've come to expect from the previous volumes though there are not quite as many memorable moments.  At its best, as you read marvelous descriptive passages, particularly about his trek in Bulgaria, it makes one yearn to be young and on the road tramping about in the remote back roads of your imagination.  We can feel the wonder when Paddy describes being on a wild path through a pass in the Balkan Mountains as a massive flight of storks pass overhead, heading south as they flee the oncoming winter.  The character sketches of both small towns and the people he encounters (including a crazed barber who follows him throughout northern Bulgaria) are delightful.

In typical Paddyesque fashion his accommodations change radically from day to day.  Here's one sequence of lodgings:

In the village of either Gorni Pasarel or Dolni Pasarel in Bulgaria.

I had sloshed through a yard full of pigsties and offered, perhaps, out of wetness and fatigue . . . to pay for a night's lodging . . . I was in the most primitive village house I had so far seen . . . on entering one went down several steps into a single, semi-troglodytic and windowless room, with a damp earthen floor . . . It was the world of Gurth and Wamba, a Saxon swineherd's hut just after curfew.

As the sole boarder in a small hotel in the Danube river town of Rustchuk, run by Rosa, its head maid, with whom he goes out dining and drinking.

In a small village in Rumania where he stays for a night with a Jewish grocer, Domnul David.

At what he takes to be a small hotel in the outskirts of Bucharest when, after arising from a good night's sleep, he realizes is primarily a brothel where he is promptly taken under the wings of its attractive residents (though he is admirably discreet as to precisely how far under their wings he is taken).

And finally, staying for several days with Josias von Rantzau, one of the secretaries for the German Legation in Bucharest to whom he had been given a letter of introduction by one of the acquaintances he had made during the Transylvanian sojourn described in Between the Woods and the Water.  The head of the Legation, whom von Rantzau greatly admired, was Count Friederich von der Schulenburg who later became German ambassador to the Soviet Union and was eventually executed for his part in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.  Leigh Fermor does not talk much about politics but this was only a year after Hitler came to power and he recounts a conversation with von Rantzau, a descendant of a noble family from Holstein, near Denmark:

One evening when we had been talking for hours, Josias said, after a pause, rather seriously, fixing me with large, blue eyes: 'Here's a silly question.  Do you believe in the English phrase "Right or wrong, my country"'?

Losing contact with von Rantzau, Paddy then tells us:

A few days after the end of the war, in command of a team of the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force, bumping over the rubble and the cinders of Hamburg (a sight and a smell which made us all fall silent, and dimmed for a while the exhilaration of victory), I found myself at Flensburg in the north of Holstein.  Marked on the map near the town of Itzehoe, was a point reading 'Schloss Rantzau, and I headed for it next day . . .

He finds a second cousin of von Rantzau who tells him: "Dear Josias?  Yes, he was in Eastern Europe somewhere.  We've no news of him for ages.  I think the Russians must have snapped him up . . . ".  In fact, von Rantzau, who became a Wehrmacht officer, died in Russian captivity in 1952.

And the other two sections of the book?

Next are some fragments from Paddy's diary during his short stay in Constantinople.  Not very illuminating and one wishes he had devoted some of his descriptive powers to that city.

The final segment is the diary of his month long tour of the Orthodox monasteries of the Mount Athos peninsula to which Paddy had wangled a letter of introduction from the Orthodox Patriarch while in Constantinople.   Unaffected by later editing it is the unadorned writing of a young man who has just turned twenty and an appropriate way to bring his journey full circle.
    (one of the Mt Athos monasteries)
We'll conclude in a fitting way with Paddy's evening in a cave along the Black Sea shore of Bulgaria where he stumbles across a group of Greek sailors and Bulgarian shepherds and joins them in a night of singing, dancing and drinking:

On a rock near where I sat was the heavy, low round table that I had eaten from. Revolving past it, Costa leant forward: suddenly the table levitated into the air, sailed past us and pivoted at right angles to his head in a sequence of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth and held there by nothing but his teeth buried in the wood. It rotated like a flying carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of woodsmoke, so fast at some moments that the four glasses on it, the chap-fallen bagpipe with its perforated cow’s horn dangling, the raki flask, the knives and spoons, the earthenware saucepan that held the lentils and the backbones of the two mackerels with their heads and tails dangling over the edge of the tin plate, all dissolved for a few swift revolutions into a circular blur, then redefined themselves, as the pace dwindled, into a still life travelling in wide rings along the cave. As Costa sank gyrating to floor level, firelight lit the table from above, then he soared into the dark so that only the underside glowed. Simultaneously he quickened his pace and reduced the circumference of the circle by rotating faster and faster on the spot, his revolutions striking sparks of astonished applause through the grotto, which quickly rose to an uproar. His head was flung back and his streaming features corrugated with veins and muscles, his balancing arms outflung like those of a dervish until the flying table itself seemed to melt into a vast disc twice its own diameter spinning in the cave’s centre at a speed, which should have scattered its whirling still life into the nether shadows. Slowly the speed slackened.  . . . Not once had the dancer’s hands touched it; but, the moment before it resettled in its place, he retrieved the stub of the cigarette he had left burning on the rock, and danced slowly back to the centre with no hint of haste or vertigo, tapping away the long ash with the fourth finger of his upraised left hand. He replaced it in his mouth, gyrated, sank, and unwound into his sober initial steps . . . then having regained his motionless starting point, straight as an arrow and on tip toe, he broke off, sauntered smoking to the re-established table, picked up his raki glass, took a meditative sip, deaf to the clamour, and subsided unhurriedly among the rest of us.