The Genuine Buccaneer

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
by Artemis Cooper
John Murray, 2012, 448 pages, $50

The English have produced many great travellers. One thinks of men like Thomas Coryat (c 1577–1617) whose Coryat’s Crudities can be said to have founded the later fashion for the Grand Tour. Soon after came the likes of John Evelyn, observing events at Rome in the 1640s. Long before that came English Crusaders and Pilgrims to the Holy Land, then sea-going explorers to the ends of the earth and later, those who served in the most distant outposts of a far-flung empire. In the twentieth century, this venerable company was joined by such distinctive, but very different, figures as Sir Wilfred Thesiger, Dame Freya Stark and Evelyn Waugh. In our own part of the world, local Anglo-Australian inheritors of this tradition have included Daisy Bates, Dame Mary Gilmore and Xavier Herbert.

Of the more recent great English travellers, perhaps the most remarkable and interesting figure was Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011), who in 1933 at the age of eighteen set off from London by ship to Rotterdam and thence to walk, as he was to put it (and to do it), “from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople”. It was the beginning of a remarkable life, now well told in this biography by Artemis Cooper, who is one of his literary executors.

By the time of his death, Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE had truly become a legend in his own lifetime—due in equal measure to his courage as a British officer in SOE co-operating with Greek partisans to successfully kidnap General Kreipe, the German Commander in Crete, and also to his distinctive literary talents. Indeed, it was the wonderful story of the role which one of the Odes of Horace played in Leigh Fermor’s life, that brought together those two disparate aspects of his personality and cemented his later fame. Having abducted Kreipe at gunpoint, Leigh Fermor and his Greek comrades had taken the General up into the Cretan mountains before delivering him up to British forces. There,

as dawn broke and the sun illuminated the great snow-streaked hump of Mount Ida, the General murmured a line in Latin: “Vides ut alta stet niva candidum Soracte …” It was one of the few Odes of Horace that Paddy knew by heart and which he had translated at school. Taking up where the General had left off, he went on to the end of the poem. “The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine—and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: Ach so, Herr Major! It was very strange. Ja, Herr General. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountain long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.” This was one of the defining moments of Paddy’s war, the one which he was most fond of recalling in interviews.

Artemis Cooper also records the occasion on Greek television in the 1970s when Leigh Fermor, his Greek partisan comrades and the elderly General Kreipe were briefly re-united amid Paddy’s astounding multi-lingual conversation.

It is perhaps a sad reflection upon how Europe, and the world in general, have changed, that such an encounter is so very unlikely ever to occur now. It is also a measure of the tragedy of the German officer class that, until it was too late, they largely went along with the vulgar “new man” Adolf Hitler and his reptilian colleagues and cohorts in the NSDAP. Nor is that phenomenon confined to the fascists. As Cooper notes, the treatment of people by communists in Bulgaria and Romania (where Leigh Fermor enjoyed an idyll in 1936–39 with his lover the Princess Balasha Cantacuzene) was fully enough to confirm Leigh Fermor against the evils of the totalitarianisms of the Left, as much as those of the Right.

Yet it remains a captivating story; and Cooper notes the detail that a Loeb edition of Horace had been one of the books in Leigh Fermor’s rucksack when he left London. Sir Ninian Stephen recounts a similar event in the life of Sir Owen Dixon, who in London in 1923, was walking with Sir John Simon KC down Whitehall and past the Cenotaph, when Simon “no doubt with some relish, in the colonial company … quoted from the Greek two lines from Sappho, of which the scene had apparently reminded him [and] Dixon promptly responded with the next two lines.”

Artemis Cooper has provided us with a detailed and informative study of Leigh Fermor’s life, ranging from his unusual upbringing in rural England whilst his parents were based in Calcutta; his difficult school years, including his expulsion from King’s School, Canterbury, for being caught holding hands with the local greengrocer’s daughter. His last report there described him as being “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness” and thus a bad influence. Yet, after a brief period of “Bohemian London and a raffish group who introduced him to nightclubs, strong drink and modern poetry” his departure on his epic European tour marked the turning point of his life. On a monthly allowance of five pounds,

he slept in hostels, sheepfolds, monasteries, barns, people’s sofas, and for a few luxurious months in castles and country houses in Hungary and Transylvania. He reached Constantinople [Paddy always preferred Istanbul’s old name] on New Year’s Day, 1935. He spent his twentieth birthday on Mount Athos and a month later took part in a Greek Royalist cavalry charge against Venizelist rebels across the River Struma on a borrowed horse. He then made his way to Athens, where he met Princess Balasha Cantacuzene. A Romanian painter with dark, exotic looks, Balasha was eight years older and recently divorced. That summer they lived in a watermill opposite the island of Poros and in autumn they retreated to Balasha’s family home in Romania. Baleni, the Cantacuzene estates in Moldavia, was his refuge for three years. Here he made the first attempt to write up his notes from his trans-European journey. He did not like the results, but he did earn some money by translating Constantine Rodocanachis’ Ulysse fils d’Ulysse, which as Forever Ulysses became a bestseller in America. When war was declared, Leigh Fermor decided to go home. “The farewells next day,” he wrote, “were like marching orders out of paradise.”

Failing to gain the hoped-for commission in the Irish Guards, he was commissioned in the Intelligence Corps, which returned him to Greece. Following the German invasion in 1941, he

escaped by caique to Crete, where he took part in the battle in May 1941 against German paratroopers; when the battle was lost he was evacuated to Egypt. He was sent back to occupied Crete in June 1942, as one of a handful of SOE officers who were helping the Cretan Resistance. After the Italian surrender in August 1943 he was contacted by the Italian General Angelo Carta. Rather than co-operate with the Germans, Carta wanted to leave Crete. Leigh Fermor saw him safely to Egypt—a mission which sparked the idea of kidnapping a German General. Promoted to Major, he returned from Cairo to Crete in February 1944. With his second-in-command William Stanley Moss and a hand-picked team of resistance fighters, the ambush took place on 26 April 1944 when General Heinrich Kreipe, Commander of the Sebastopol Division, was pulled out of his car on his way to his villa … Moss’s diary was made into a book Ill Met by Moonlight (and later a film with Dirk Bogarde). Leigh Fermor was awarded the DSO and remains a hero on Crete.

After war Leigh Fermor served as Assistant Director of the British Institute at Athens. He travelled around Greece on a lecture tour with Joan Rayner, the daughter of the first Viscount Monsell. He had met her earlier in Cairo. In 1949, they visited the French Antilles and he wrote his first major book, The Traveller’s Tree. During the 1950s Leigh Fermor travelled more and wrote some books; his articles on monasteries were collected as A Time to Keep Silence, and then came his only novel, The Violins of Saint Jacques. He also wrote for the Spectator and the Sunday Times.

Cooper shows how Leigh Fermor’s writings did not come easily to him: “His friend and publisher Jock Murray, was often in despair, as every set of proofs came back covered in crossings out and addenda.” To prove the point, Cooper’s book features as its frontispiece, instead of the usual photograph of her subject, reproductions of two such proof pages, very heavily marked up and over.

In 1958, there emerged Mani, Leigh Fermor’s landmark first book on Greece. It shows the southern Peloponnese as it was before tourism—a land of rocks and dazzling light, blood feuds and deep superstition, where people still told tales of their struggles against the Turks and pirates. Its companion volume Roumeli (1966) covers his travels from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth.

In 1964, Leigh Fermor and Joan Rayner built, with the help of Athens architect Nico Hadjimichalis and a team led by the local stone­mason Nico Kolokotrones, a house at Kardamyli, in the Mani, south of Kalamata. Cooper devotes a chapter to this remarkable abode, entitled “A Monastery Built for Two”. It was built of “fast-weathering limestone, all prised out of the Taygetus range in whose foothills we live—it looked like a monastery which had been crumbling for centuries” and “the floor is paved with unpolished rectangles of grey-green stone from Mount Pelion”. Leigh Fermor himself famously commented: “I tried to write while the building was going up, but in the war of gerunds, the furor aedificandi always triumphed over the cacoethes scribendi, and so it did here.” However, as Cooper points out, the house was a singular success and at its heart is “a library described by John Betjeman as ‘one of the rooms of the world’”. Indeed, the Leigh Fermor house at Kardamyli was subsequently featured in that special book The Englishman’s Room (1986) compiled by the late Alvilde Lees-Milne and Derry Moore.

Leigh Fermor went on to write A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and Three Letters from the Andes (1991). The 1977 and 1986 books were the first and second volumes of a projected trilogy covering his wanderings in pre-war Europe. He was assisted by the notes in his Green Diary, a book purchased in Bratislava in March 1934 and which Balasha Cantacuzene preserved safely for decades, despite the upheavals in her own life in the war and postwar Europe under the communists; and was able to return to him when he visited her in Romania in 1965. Cooper comments on these two first books of the trilogy:

together they present a snapshot of old Europe just before the joint cataclysms of war and Communism swept them away for ever. Every paragraph reflects the loss of a way of life still linked to its soil and its history, while celebrating the joy and enthusiasm of a young man discovering the riches of a continent. The reviews hailed him as the best travel writer of his time—and reader reviews on Amazon show him being rediscovered.

Yet, Leigh Fermor found it hard, as he aged, to overcome the difficulty he had always had, despite his great literary and conversational gifts, about getting works down on paper in a form that satisfied him. Cooper notes, “Ultimately, the clamour for him to finish the last volume [of the trilogy] ushered in an ice-age of writer’s block. In 1988 and 1990 he revisited his old haunts in Bulgaria and Romania, hoping to kick-start the creative process. Shocked by the all-obliterating change, he found his own memories fading.” He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004, when he was ninety.

In October 1984, Leigh Fermor had still been fit enough to swim the Hellespont, in imitation of Leander and also of Lord Byron. In the winter of 1984–85, Leigh Fermor was visited at Kardamyli by the novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, whom he had first met in 1970. Cooper writes:

Over the course of his life Bruce had many mentors and Paddy was one of the last and most revered … In literary style, however, they were aiming for opposite poles. While Paddy’s prose was a rich and elaborate tapestry built up in layers, Chatwin was aiming for an austere simplicity that used as few words as possible to maximum effect.

At Kardamyli, the two of them “went for long walks in the hills. Solvitur ambulando, said Paddy—it is solved by walking. Bruce, who passionately believed that walking constituted the sovereign remedy for almost every mental travail, was delighted and wrote it down in his Moleskine notebook.” 

In his later years, Leigh Fermor suffered various health setbacks, including failing eyesight, and he twice had surgery for cancer. He died at Dumbleton in England in June 2011, only a day after arriving there by air from his home in Greece. Although the third volume of his trilogy remained unfinished, the manuscript has been recently edited and it is now expected to appear later this year.

With this comprehensive book, Artemis Cooper has done more than justice to her subject, who must have had one of the most blessed and interesting of lives of all the English travellers of the last century. The book is a handsome hardback with a profile photograph of Leigh Fermor on the dust jacket. There are two eight-page sets of black-and white-photographs, covering the subject’s lifetime, his pre-war travels in Europe, his exploits in Greece during the Second World War, his later life in Greece and England, and his wide circle of friends, including Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, whose correspondence with Paddy, and his to her, In Tearing Haste, was published in 2008. The present book also includes several helpful sets of maps. It is a rewarding read that uplifts the spirits.

In her detailed obituary of Leigh Fermor published in the Independent, Artemis Cooper relates that in postwar Greece, he gave a lecture for the British Council:

he took sips from a large glass as he spoke and when it was nearly finished, he topped it up from a carafe of water. The liquid turned instantly cloudy: he had added water to a nearly empty tumbler of ouzo. A roar of appreciation went up from the audience at this impromptu display of leventeia. A quality prized in Greece, leventeia indicates high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, charm, generosity, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor had leventeia in spades.

In the 1950s, Dame Freya Stark had famously said of Paddy, “He is the Genuine Buccaneer.”