The Artist of Slow Travel: Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Broken Road
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
John Murray, 2013, 384 pages, $49.99

Patrick Leigh Fermor was widely regarded as the greatest travel writer of his time. The travel writers’ travel writer, he was not prolific, but of the eight books he produced in his lifetime, at least two of them, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, can be counted in the canon of travel literature.

On December 9, 1933, not quite nineteen years old, Patrick resolved to set off, on foot, from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (or as he insisted on calling it, Constantinople). He was inspired by Robert Byron’s The Station, and was given the knapsack that had accompanied its author to Mount Athos. Into it he packed pencils, notebooks, a volume of Horace and The Oxford Book of English Verse. Having read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and with a monthly allowance of £5, he was determined to travel frugally. He slept in haystacks and hostels, doss-houses and schlosses as he made his way charming and sponging “south-east through the snow into Germany, then up the Rhine and eastwards down the Danube … in Hungary I borrowed a horse, then plunged into Transylvania; from Romania, on into Bulgaria”. On New Year’s Eve 1934, a year after setting out, he crossed the Turkish border at Adrianople and reached Istanbul.

A Time of Gifts (1977) was his first published account of that journey and Between the Woods and the Water followed in 1986, but still he had only reached the Iron Gates. Both works have a Proustian quality. Written by a man in middle age recalling his journey as an eighteen-year-old, he captures the meaning, value and excitement of travel, combining the romance of youth with the knowledge and wisdom gathered over the following decades. These books can be counted, not just in the literature of travel, but in the canon of twentieth-century English literature. His boundless curiosity, his infectious enthusiasm, his penchant for the arcane, his fondness for an anecdote, and his gift for language combined with a keen eye and a sharp ear produced some intoxicating prose. A memorable vignette was Paddy’s visit to the estate of Baron Philip Schey von Koromla at Kovecses, near the village of Soporna on the river Vah, south of Sered. He was shown into a library so crammed with books in English, French and German that the panelling could scarcely be seen. The baron was sitting in a big armchair, reading Proust.

For twenty-seven years, Paddy’s readers clamoured for the last of the trilogy to complete that epic journey. And, an astonishing eighty years after he set out (and two years after his death), this much-longed-for third volume, The Broken Road, has, at last, appeared. The completion of the trilogy is, in its way, as much of an odyssey as the walk itself.

Patrick Leigh Fermor (always “Paddy” in Britain and “Mihali” in Greece) was born in London on February 15, 1915, the younger child and only son of distant, solemn Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, director of the Geological Survey of India (the mineral fermorite was named in his honour). The family name of Eileen, Paddy’s glamorous bohemian, erratic mother, was, extraordinarily, Ambler. To her son she was the most inspiring and amusing figure in his life.

She came to England to have him but soon returned to India, leaving him for four years with a farmer’s family in Northamptonshire, where he ran wild. Separated from Sir Lewis, Eileen returned with Paddy’s sister to live at Primrose Hill. Young Paddy regarded them as “beautiful strangers”. He was expelled from most of his schools; the last, King’s School, Canterbury, for being seen holding hands on an upturned apple basket with a greengrocer’s daughter.

Footloose in London, he lost his virginity to Elizabeth Pelly, the wildest of the Bright Young People, and was befriended by the rackety Edwardian relic Rosa Lewis. She would call him “Young Feemur” and “Young Fermoy”, railing against Evelyn Waugh (“Mr Woo-ah”) who used her as the model for Lottie Crump in Vile Bodies, for which she vowed to “cut ’is winkle orf”. Perpetually hard up, Paddy was reduced to selling stockings from door to door and, perhaps unsurprisingly, developed a sudden loathing for the city. In December 1933, while listening to “Stormy Weather” in his digs in Shepherd Market, he resolved to walk to Constantinople.

Once in Constantinople, his journey was still not over. He went to Mount Athos, where he spent his twentieth birthday, and a month later, as only he could, found himself on a borrowed horse with a lance charging across the River Struma in a Greek royalist cavalry charge against Venizelist rebels. He reached Athens, where he met a Moldavian princess; and so began two great love affairs—with Balasha Cantacuzène and with Greece.

At the outbreak of war, he left his princess and returned to England and (on the recommendation of Mary Herbert, the widow of Aubrey Herbert, John Buchan’s model for Greenmantle) enlisted in the Irish Guards, a natural choice for a member of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy; although he was never a natural fit for any regiment. While training he caught double pneumonia and convalesced at the Cavendish Hotel as a guest of Rosa Lewis. He was soon assigned to Special Operations on German-occupied Crete.

On the night of April 26, 1944, Paddy and a fellow officer, Bill Stanley Moss, impersonating German corporals, intercepted the car of General Heinrich Kreipe. A handful of Cretan partisans pushed Kreipe into and under the back seat while Paddy donned the general’s hat. They managed to pass through twenty-two separate checkpoints. With the Germans in pursuit, it took three weeks to spirit him off the island. The episode formed the basis of a book by Moss and the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight. Paddy was awarded the DSO for this act of bravery, or bravado.

An incident in this adventure says much about Paddy. Waking up among the rocks as dawn broke over Mount Ida (the supposed birthplace of Zeus), the prisoner, on seeing the white peak, murmured the first line in Latin from Homer’s ode, Al Thaliarchum, “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte” (“You see how high he stands, snow white Soracte”). Paddy picked it up and continued it until the end. After quite a silence the General said, “Ach so, Herr Major.” It was, Paddy recalled, “one of the few odes of Horace I know by heart … We had both drunk at the same fountain long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

In 1946 Paddy met Joan Eyres-Monsell, the clever, beautiful, moneyed daughter of a politician, Viscount Monsell, one-time Lord High Admiral. She became his companion and muse—and banker—and travelled with him to the Caribbean, which led to his first book, The Traveller’s Tree, in 1950. They eventually married in 1968, having built a remarkable house of stone by the sea in the Mani, a remote corner of the Peloponnese. At its heart was a library of which their great friend and guest, John Betjeman, said, “Of course that big room is one of the rooms in the world.”

Paddy had resolved to make Greece his home after the war. It inspired him to write Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese in 1958 and Roumeli in 1966, characteristically erudite accounts of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. He was nothing if not discursive—perhaps this was part of his charm?—and in Roumeli he provided an uproarious account of his attempt to retrieve a pair of Lord Byron’s slippers from a man in Missolonghi.

His only fiction, The Violins of Saint Jacques (1953), more novella than novel, was also drawn from his travels in the Caribbean—a volcano erupts during a Mardi Gras ball on Martinique, leaving one survivor. Some critics have suggested this was not his only work of fiction. How could he possibly recall with all that astonishing detail after forty years? He did have his diaries and would retrace his steps. As he told the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, “There are lost faces: chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl’s long fair hair under a tam o’shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones.” Most of it can be attributed to his prodigious memory.

On a few occasions, partly to help him write but also to satisfy his insatiable curiosity, he sought the solitude of monasteries—the scholarly Abbey of St Wandrille; Solesmes, which revived the Gregorian chant; the deeply ascetic La Grande Trappe; and the rock monasteries of Cappadocia. Typically, this merely allowed for another diversion and he produced in 1957 a brief account of his experience, titled, paradoxically for one of the outstanding conversationalists of his time, A Time to Keep Silence.

Although Three Letters from the Andes appeared in 1991, the words that had appeared to gush in a torrent from pen to page seemed to have dried up. So in 2003, as if to partly satiate his disciples, Paddy’s biographer, Artemis Cooper, collected a lifetime of articles, extracts and reviews in Words of Mercury.

As the Times Literary Supplement observed, he “combines the resourcefulness and daring of Odysseus with the learning, culture and glamour of a latter-day Byron”. He was knighted the following year (having refused the honour in 1991, as Joan thought it absurd). In 2008, his correspondence with his friend of sixty years, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, the last of the Mitford sisters, was published. The pages of In Tearing Haste bear witness to Paddy’s pyrotechnic displays of wit and observation; and his genius for friendship. Artemis Cooper’s legendary grandmother, Diana Cooper, was an old admirer and Ian Fleming’s formidable wife, Ann, a great friend. Grande dames fell at his feet.

Men admired him too. He and Errol Flynn got on famously during the filming of Darryl Zanuck’s Roots of Heaven in French Equatorial Africa in 1958 (Paddy was the script writer). But a number of other famous men resisted his charms, dismissing him as a “show-off”. Cooper, who published a superb biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, in 2012, writes that in London he once seriously annoyed Richard Burton, who was in the mood for quoting Shakespeare but the second he stopped, Paddy would cap the quote and go on for several more lines. Finally Burton kicked back his chair and said, “Elizabeth, we’re leaving!” Somerset Maugham dismissed him as “a middle-class gigolo for upper-class women”, which may have betrayed an element of jealousy, like the historian and fellow Hellenist, Sir Steven Runciman, who, it was said, was annoyed that Paddy knew more members of the Greek royal family than he did.

He inspired a generation of contemporary travel writers, among them Jan Morris, William Dalrymple, Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin had his ashes scattered on a peak near Mani and yet his admiration for Paddy was not enough to suppress his fierce competitiveness. According to Chatwin’s biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, when Paddy told Chatwin that he had swum the Hellespont (he was seventy at the time), Chatwin retorted that he had swum the Bosporus, which was wider and had a stronger current. “Anyone with you?” Paddy inquired. “Yes, there was a very nice caique following me with three Turkish princesses.”

Paddy remained at Mani until the day before his death on June 10, 2011, eight years after Joan’s. It was his wish to be buried with her in Dumbleton, the Eyres home in Worcestershire, rather than at Mani—a Hellenist for life but an Englishman to the last.

It seemed that the promise of the last line of Between the Woods and the Water, “To Be Concluded”, had not been fulfilled. In his winning, self-deprecating way, Paddy joked that the third volume should be titled “The Carpathian Snail”. He would do anything to avoid it, once emerging triumphantly from his study to proclaim he had just translated P.G. Wodehouse’s story “The Great Sermon Handicap” into Greek. In 2008, Cooper, who had known him since her childhood, found in the archives of Paddy’s publisher, John Murray, a manuscript of the last leg of what Paddy called his “Great Trudge”. Initially titled “A Youthful Journey”, it had been written in 1963 and 1964, curiously before the first two volumes. He had it sent for and worked on it until a few months before his death. This forms the bulk of The Broken Road and, while the perfectionist Paddy may have wanted to go on polishing it for a few more decades, its pages bear all the dazzling, richly layered detail and erudition that is classic Leigh Fermor.

Cooper and Thubron, his literary executor, have, together, been responsible for this act of homage; noting reassuringly in their introduction, “There is scarcely a phrase here, let alone a sentence, that is not his.”

Setting off from the Iron Gates, he arrives at the great monastery of St John of Rila, describing

an archbishop and several bishops and archimandrites besides the abbot and his retinue. They officiated in copes as stiff and brilliant as beetles’ wings, and the higher clergy, coiffed with globular gold mitres the size of pumpkins and glistening with gems, leaned on croziers topped with twin coiling snakes.

Later, as he heads for the Danube, he encounters “an indefinable presiding charm … of a party of itinerant beekeepers”.

As with the rest of his journey, he always found somewhere to sleep—a consul here, a countess there; but a cowshed and a cave too. Another winning trait was that his boredom threshold was virtually non-existent. Friendships were forged instantly, but, given his quest, partings were inevitable and frequent. As he put it, “The whole itinerary was a chain of minor valedictions, more or less painful ones, seldom indifferent, only occasionally a relief.”

He was fascinated by history but uninterested in politics, and was aghast and distressed when he learnt that a young Bulgarian companion thought he was a spy. “Races, language, what people were like, that was what I was after: churches, songs, books, what they wore and ate and looked like …”

There is an honesty and frankness in The Broken Road that were not as apparent in the first two volumes. He reveals bouts of depression and shares struggles with his memory. It has always been a mystery how could he possibly recall with all that astonishing detail after so many years. All he had was one notebook, “The Green Diary”, saved and kept for him by his old lover Balasha, whom he had met in 1965 for the first time since before the war, aged and almost broken by her treatment at the hands of the communists and close to death from breast cancer.

There are numerous brilliant set pieces. At a fair in Trambes on the Bulgarian side of the Danube he fell in step with a man with a dancing bear. That night, after much carousing and dancing to gypsy music in a tavern, Paddy and the bear-owner were told they could sleep on the balcony. His companion slept with his arms around the bear, “which snorted or grunted all night”. Another memorable night was spent in a cave off the Black Sea with a group of fishermen and goatherds, which (from Cooper’s biography) was clearly a conflation of two episodes. Asked in 2000 by the journalist James Owen if travel writers improve on truth for the sake of art, eighty-five-year-old Paddy responded:

I’m a bit worried that I’ve got a slightly disinfectant memory, as if some goblin had washed out the gloomy parts and let the luminous ones survive. But, overall, I don’t think I’ve sinned too heinously.

Although Paddy’s journey was to end in Constantinople, his “Green Diary”, which had recorded nothing more than impressionistic notes and jottings of his time in that city, became, on January 24, 1935, a fully written record of his next destination, Mount Athos, the holy heartland of Greece. It seems appropriate to see in The Broken Road the last of this great Philhellene as he first fell for Greece, that other great love of his life. The other fascinating feature to this epic saga is that Paddy’s account of the original journey ends mid-sentence, at Burgas, only fifty miles and a few days’ walk from his goal, Constantinople, with: “… and yet, in another sense, although …” What a poignant and somehow fitting finale for a legendary procrastinator.

It was certainly worth the wait.