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[ INTRODUCTION ] |
Envy is the writer's sin, as everyone knows, but there can be few writers in the English-speaking world who resent Patrick Leigh Fermor's preeminence as one of the great prose stylists of our time. He has no rivals, and so stands beyond envy. |
His literary genre is difficult to define. He is generally classified as a travel writer, but he is really infinitely more than that. Certainly he describes the experiences of travel as providing a theme for his literature, but he is also a memoirist, a historian, a connoisseur of art and architecture, a poet, a humori... |
By then he had lived half an eventful lifetime, and had already published three much-admired books of travel. A born irregular, he had happily abandoned an expensive formal education in his seventeenth year, and joined the British Army at the start of World War II. From the ultra-formal Irish Guards (he is half Irish b... |
Living in Cretan caves disguised as a shepherd probably came easily enough to Leigh Fermor, and A Time of Gifts tells us why. He was built that way. Nine years before Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, holed up in the Cretan mountains with his accomplices, was making final arrangements to kidnap General Kreipe, the strapping ... |
There could be no better material, either, as it turned out long afterwards, for a retrospective book, looking back at pre-war Europe across a darkling plain of history and experience. The young Leigh Fermor had made his trek across the continent at a fateful moment of European history. The 1930s were a remembering tim... |
As Leigh Fermor says himself, at the time he didn't give a damn. It is one of the fascinations of A Time of Gifts that its journey is in effect evoked for us by two people: the carefree young dropout who experienced it, and stored it up in memory and in diary, and the immensely experienced author who, knowing more abou... |
Being altogether sui generis, A Time of Gifts behaves just as it pleases. It follows no precedent, obeys no conventions. The nearest equivalents I can think of are the works of Ibn Batuta, written over a lifetime six centuries before, or John Ruskin's unclassifiable work of memoir, philosophy, and travel, Praeterita. M... |
The Cretan adventure of 1942 pervades the narrative of 1933, because it obviously pervaded the mind of the author in 1977. His introductory essay to the book, addressed to his comrade-in-arms Xan Fielding, hints at the wartime coup, and means that it pervades our own minds too. For this is by no means a simple memoir o... |
The form of the book is layered, too. Sometimes it is imaginatively exploited reminiscence, sometimes pure impressionism. Sometimes it contains suggestions of what is to happen later, all unknown to the young traveler. There are virtuoso displays of scholarship and insight beyond the powers of any nineteen-year-old, bu... |
Nor is there any rigidity to the book's construction. It is all fluid. At any moment we are whisked off into another train of thought, another pace, another mood. Just as we never know where we will spend the next night, in a barn, in a schloss, in a stranger's spare room or in a police cell, so we never know what sudd... |
Almost any part of A Time of Gifts will illustrate the richness of its technique. Take Chapter 6, which describes Paddy's approach to Vienna. It contains a discussion of European popular songs, a passage about Shakespearean stage directions, a lecture about tribal wanderings, a description of the death of Odoacer, two ... |
Occasionally all this requires of us (and most willingly gets) a suspension of disbelief. And it is most decidedly art concealing art. The erudition is obvious, and so are the powers of observation, but the beautiful shape of the book only gradually reveals itself. Whether it was design or serendipity that placed Melk ... |
He is Everyman, but in a particularly delightful kind. People of all sorts like him. He makes friends wherever he goes, is as polite to tramps as he is to barons, repays all his debts, shows just the right degree of diffidence to his seniors, merriment to his peers, flirts with girls who give him duck eggs, gets drunk,... |
It is the central attraction of this figure, so fresh and hopeful, set against the doomed majesty of an ancient continent, that makes A Time of Gifts unique in English letters. It is learned, it is portentous, it is prodigiously gifted, but it is also innocent. What other work of the repertoire can make quite the same ... |
I agree with him, and so will posterity. |
—JAN MORRIS |
[ A TIME OF GIFTS ] |
Linque tuas sedes alienaque litora quaere, o juvenis: major rerum tibi nascitur ordo. |
Ne succumbe malis: te noverit ultimus Hister, Te Boreas gelidus securaque regna Canopi, quique renascentem Phoebum cernuntque cadentem major in externas fit qui descendit harenas. |
Titus Petronius Arbiter |
I struck the board and cry'd 'No more; I will abroad.' |
What, shall I ever sigh and pine? |
My life and lines are free; free as the road, Loose as the wind. |
George Herbert |
For now the time of gifts is gone— O boys that grow, O snows that melt, O bathos that the years must fill— Here is dull earth to build upon Undecorated; we have reached |
Twelfth Night or what you will...you will. |
Louis MacNeice |
[ INTRODUCTORY LETTER TO XAN FIELDING ] |
DEAR XAN, |
As I have only just finished piecing these travels together, the times dealt with are very fresh in my mind and later events seem more recent still; so it is hard to believe that 1942 in Crete, when we first met—both of us black-turbanned, booted and sashed and appropriately silver-and-ivory daggered and cloaked in whi... |
Indeed, indifference to the squalor of caves and speed at the approach of danger might have seemed the likeliest aptitudes for life in occupied Crete. But, unexpectedly in a modern war, it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the a... |
As it chanced, neither of our school careers had run their course: yours had been cut short by a family mishap and mine by the sack and we had both set off on our own at an earlier age than most of our contemporaries. These first wanderings—impecunious, moss-repellant, frowned on by our respective elders, and utterly c... |
This book is an attempt to complete and set in order, with as much detail as I can recapture, the earliest of those disjointedly recounted travels. The narrative, which should end at Constantinople, has turned out longer than I expected; I have split it in two, and this first volume breaks off in the middle of an impor... |
We must go back a bit. |
In the second year of World War I, soon after I was born, my mother and sister sailed away to India (where my father was a servant of the Indian Government) and I was left behind so that one of us might survive if the ship were sunk by a submarine. I was to be taken out when the oceans were safer, and, failing this, re... |
Those marvellously lawless years, it seems, had unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint. With tact and charm and skill, backed by my swift treason and by London and Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends and Chu Chin Chow, my mother succeeded in bringing about a complete shift of affection, and in taming me, mo... |
First bewilderment reigned, and then despair. After a particularly bad cropper when I was about ten, I was taken to see two psychiatrists. In a recent biography I read with excitement that the first of these and the most likeable had been consulted by Virginia Woolf; and I thought for a moment that I might have gazed a... |
Salsham Hall, at Salsham-le-Sallows, was an unclassifiable but engaging manor house with woods and a rough lake in a wide-skied and many-belfried expanse of Suffolk. It was run by a grey- haired, wild-eyed man called Major Truthful and when I spotted two beards—then very rare—among the mixed and eccentric-looking staff... |
It was midsummer. There were walled gardens close at hand, and giant red and gold gooseberries, and the nets over the loaded currant bushes foiled starlings but not us; and beyond them, the trees and the water descended in dim and beckoning perspectives. I understood the implications of the landscape at once: life unde... |
My mother had to cope with these upheavals. I would turn up in mid-term: once, at our cottage at Dodford, a tiny thatched village under a steep holt full of foxgloves (and, indeed, full of foxes) with a brook for its one street, where she was simultaneously writing plays and, though hard up, learning to fly a Moth bipl... |
But this particular disaster happened to coincide with one of my father's rare leaves from directing the Geological Survey of India. He and my mother had parted by then, and since these furloughs only came round every three years, we scarcely knew each other. All at once, as though at the wave of a wand, I found myself... |
Three peaceful years followed. Gilbert and Phyllis Scott-Malden, with three sons and half a dozen boys cramming for Common Entrance under their wing, lived in a large house with a rambling garden in Surrey. (I can't think of them, nor of Mrs. Scott-Malden's sister Josephine Wilkinson, who had a strong and separate infl... |
Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past and the King's School, Canterbury, touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater's seventy years earlier, and probably identical, I like... |
Although it was a one-sided love in the end, for a time things went well. I liked nearly everybody, from the headmaster and my housemaster down, and prospered erratically at dead and living languages and at history and geography—at everything, once more, except mathematics. I found my mind wandering at games; loved box... |
What went wrong? I think I know now. A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature was abetted—it can only be—by a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless,... |
Catastrophe was staved off for a few months. As I was thought to have done myself some damage skiing in the Berner Oberland just before I was sixteen, I skipped a term and a half, and, on my return, I was temporarily excused games: when everyone trooped off with oblong balls under their arms, I could spin about Kent on... |
Intramural romances spring up and prosper in places of learning, but some exotic psychological fluke directed my glance beyond the walls and, once more, out of bounds. It was a time when one falls in love hard and often, and my aesthetic notions, entirely formed by Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books, had settled years ... |
Captain Grimes was right. A few months after this setback, the idea of an Army career, which had been floating mistily in the air for some time, began to take firmer shape; and the prospect of entering Sandhurst raised its distant hurdle. But what about the sack? When he was appealed to, my ex-housemaster, a strange an... |
I had not yet sat for School Cert.—which, because of maths, I would certainly have failed—and as it was indispensable for would-be cadets, I soon found myself in London, seventeen by now, cramming for an exempting examination called the London Certificate. I spent most of the next two years in Lancaster Gate, then in L... |
But a long interregnum still stretched ahead. |
One of the early chapters of this book touches at some retrospective length on the way things began to change; how I moved from the fairly predictable company of fellow army-candidates into older circles which were simultaneously more worldly, more bohemian and more raffish: the remainder, more or less, of the Bright Y... |
In the late summer of 1933, with Mr. Prideaux's permission, I rashly moved into a room in an old and slightly leaning house in Shepherd Market where several friends had already fixed their quarters. This little backwater of archways and small shops and Georgian and Victorian pubs had the charm, quite evaporated now, of... |
My scheme was not working well. That improvident flight from the rooms and meals and all that went with them at my tutor's had reduced my funds to a pound a week and the way things were shaping, it looked as though opulence from writing might be delayed for a time. I managed somehow, but gloom and perplexity descended ... |
To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I ... |
Even before I looked at a map, two great rivers had already plotted the itinerary in my mind's eye: the Rhine uncoiled across it, the Alps rose up and then the wolf-harbouring Carpathian watersheds and the cordilleras of the Balkans; and there, at the end of the windings of the Danube, the Black Sea was beginning to sp... |
I wondered during the first few days whether to enlist a companion; but I knew that the enterprise had to be solitary and the break complete. I wanted to think, write, stay or move on at my own speed and unencumbered, to gaze at things with a changed eye and listen to new tongues that were untainted by a single familia... |
The idea met obstruction at first: why not wait till spring? (London by now was shuddering under veils of December rain.) But when they understood that all was decided, most of the objectors became allies. Warming to the scheme after initial demur, Mr. Prideaux undertook to write to India putting my démarche in a favou... |
During the last days, my outfit assembled fast. Most of it came from Millet's army surplus store in The Strand: an old Army greatcoat, different layers of jersey, grey flannel shirts, a couple of white linen ones for best, a soft leather windbreaker, puttees, nailed boots, a sleeping bag (to be lost within a month and ... |
At last, with a touch of headache from an eve-of-departure party, I got out of bed on the great day, put on my new kit and tramped south-west under a lowering sky. I felt preternaturally light, as though I were already away and floating like a djinn escaped from its flask through the dazzling middle air while Europe un... |
The next move was my first independent act and, as it turned out—with a run of luck—the first sensible one. You know the rest, dear Xan, disjointedly told, so here it is with an attempt at coherence. I hope that mentions of Crete remind you as lucidly as me of the ilex-woods and caves and folds where our earlier advent... |
P. |
[ Kardamyli 1977 ] |
[ THE LOW COUNTRIES ] |
"A splendid afternoon to set out!," said one of the friends who was seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the window. |
The other two agreed. Sheltering under the Curzon Street arch of Shepherd Market, we had found a taxi at last. In Half Moon Street, all collars were up. A thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by streaming water, had become a submarine ar... |
A smell of fish was there for a moment, then gone. Enjoining haste, the bells of St. Magnus the Martyr and St. Dunstans-in-the-East were tolling the hour; then sheets of water were rising from our front wheels as the taxi floundered on between The Mint and the Tower of London. Dark complexes of battlements and tree-top... |
Miraculously, after the pitiless hours of deluge, the rain stopped. Above the drifts of smoke there was a quickly-fading glimpse of restless pigeons and a few domes and many steeples and some bone-white Palladian belfries flying rain-washed against a sky of gunmetal and silver and tarnished brass. The girders overhead ... |
In the gulfs spanned by catwalks between the warehouses, night was assembling too, and the tiers of loading-loopholes yawned like caverns. Slung with chains and cables weighted with shot, hoists jutted on hinges from precipices of warehouse wall and the giant white letters of the wharfingers' names, grimed by a century... |
The reflected shore lights dropped coils and zigzags into the flood which were thrown into disarray every now and then, by the silhouettes of passing vessels' luminous portholes, the funereal shapes of barges singled out by their port and starboard lights and cutters of the river police smacking from wave to wave as pu... |
A gong tinkled and the steward led me back into the saloon. I was the only passenger: "We don't get many in December," he said; "It's very quiet just now." When he had cleared away, I took a new and handsomely-bound journal out of my rucksack, opened it on the green baize under a pink-shaded lamp and wrote the first en... |
I wondered when I would be returning. Excitement ruled out the thought of sleep; it seemed too important a night. (And in many ways, so it proved. The ninth of December, 1933, was just ending and I didn't get back until January, 1937—a whole lifetime later it seemed then—and I felt like Ulysses, 'plein d'usaage et de r... |
But I must have dozed, in spite of these emotions, for when I woke the only glimmer in sight was our own reflection on the waves. The kingdom had slid away westwards and into the dark. A stiff wind was tearing through the rigging and the mainland of Europe was less than half the night away. |
It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland. Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the untrodden quay. I hadn't known that Rotterdam was a few miles inland. I was still the only passe... |
I wandered about the silent lanes in exultation. The beetling storeys were nearly joining overhead; then the eaves drew away from each other and frozen canals threaded their way through a succession of hump-backed bridges. Snow was piling up on the shoulders of a statue of Erasmus. Trees and masts were dispersed in clu... |
The lanes opened on the Boomjes, a long quay lined with trees and capstans, and this in its turn gave on a wide arm of the Maas and an infinity of dim ships. Gulls mewed and wheeled overhead and dipped into the lamplight, scattering their small footprints on the muffled cobblestones and settled in the rigging of the an... |
I hadn't gone far before the open door of the Groote Kirk—the cathedral attached to the enormous belfry—beckoned me inside. Filled with dim early morning light, the concavity of grey masonry and whitewash joined in pointed arches high overhead and the floor diminished along the nave in a chessboard of black and white f... |
In less than an hour I was crunching steadily along the icy ruts of a dyke road and the outskirts of Rotterdam had already vanished in the falling snow. Lifted in the air and lined with willow-trees, the road ran dead straight as far as the eye could see, but not so far as it would have in clear weather, for the escort... |
When the snow stopped, the bright morning light laid bare a wonderful flat geometry of canals and polders and willows, and the sails of innumerable mills were turning in a wind that was also keeping all the clouds on the move—and not only clouds and mills; for soon the skaters on the canals, veiled hitherto by the snow... |
My spirits, already high, steadily rose as I walked. I could scarcely believe that I was really there; alone, that is, on the move, advancing into Europe, surrounded by all this emptiness and change, with a thousand wonders waiting. Because of this, perhaps, the actual doings of the next few days emerge from the genera... |
It was dark when I was close enough to see that the tower, and the town of Dordrecht which gathered at its foot, lay on the other bank of a wide river. I had missed the bridge; but a ferry set me down on the other shore soon after dark. Under the jackdaws of the belfry, a busy amphibian town expanded; it was built of w... |
The clip-clop of clogs on the cobblestones—a puzzling sound until I looked out of the window—woke me in the morning. The kind old landlady of the place accepted payment for my dinner but none for the room: they had seen I was tired and taken me under their wing. This was the first marvellous instance of a kindness and ... |
Except for the snow-covered landscape and the clouds and the tree-bordered flow of the Merwede, the next two days have left little behind them but the names of the towns I slept in. I must have made a late start from Dordrecht: Sliedrecht, my next halting place, is only a few miles on, and Gorinchem, the next after tha... |
During these first three days I was never far from a towpath, but so many and confused are the waterways that unconsciously I changed rivers three times: the Noorwede was the first of them, the Merwede followed, then came the Waal; and at Gorinchem the Waal was joined by the Maas. In the morning I could see the great s... |
All the country I had traversed so far was below sea-level and without this discipline, which everlastingly redressed the balance between solid and liquid, the whole region would have been wild sea, or a brackish waste of flood and fen. When one looked down from a dyke, the infinity of polders and canals and the meande... |
The Maas advanced and retreated all day long, and towards evening it vanished to the south. Once out of sight, its wide bed climbed the invisible gradients of Brabant and Limburg, bound for a faraway Carolingian hinterland beyond the Ardennes. |
Dark fell while I was trudging along a never-ending path beside the Waal. It was lined with skeleton trees; the frozen ice-puddles creaked under my hobnails; and, beyond the branches, the Great Bear and a retinue of winter constellations blazed in a clear cold sky. At last the distant lights of Tiel, poised on the firs... |
A change came over the country. For the first time, next day, the ground was higher than sea-level and with every step the equipoise of the elements tilted more decisively in favour of dry land. A gentle rolling landscape of water-meadow and ploughland and heath, with the snow melting here and there, stretched away nor... |
Imaginary interiors... No wonder they took shape in painting terms! Ever since those first hours in Rotterdam a three-dimensional Holland had been springing up all round me and expanding into the distance in conformity with another Holland which was already in existence and in every detail complete. For, if there is a ... |
A second kind of scenery—the Italian—is almost as well known in England as the Dutch, and for the same gallery-haunting reasons. How familiar, at one remove, are those piazzas and arcades! The towers and the ribbed cupolas give way to the bridged loops of a river, and the rivers coil into umbered distances between cast... |
These vague broodings brought me—somewhere between Tiel and Nijmegen, it must have been—to the foot of one of those vertiginous belfries which are so transparent in the distance and so solid close to. I was inside it and up half-a-dozen ladders in a minute and gazing down through the cobwebbed louvres. The whole kingdo... |
In the bottom chamber, as I left, an octet of clogged bell-ringers was assembling and spitting on their palms before grasping the sallies, and the clangour of their scales and changes, muted to a soft melancholy by the distance, followed me for the next few miles of nightfall and sharpening chill. |
It was dark long before I reached the quays of Nijmegen. Then, for the first time for days, I found myself walking up a slant and down again. Lanes of steps climbed from the crowding ships along the waterfront; between the lamplight and the dark, tall towers and zigzag façades impended. The quayside lamps strung themse... |
I knew it was my last night in Holland and I was astonished how quickly I had crossed it. My heels might have been winged. I was astonished, too, at the impressive, clear beauty of the country and its variety, the amazing light and the sway of its healing and collusive charm. No wonder it had produced so many painters!... |
Sleep fell so fast and empty of dreams that when I woke at six next morning the night seemed to have rushed by in a few minutes. It was the blacksmith's hammer just under the floor boards which had roused me. I lay as though in a trance, listening to the stop-gap bounces as they alternated with resonant horseshoe notes... |
It was snowing. A signpost pointed over the bridge to Arnhem, but I stuck to the south bank and followed the road for the German border. In a little while it veered away from the river and after a few miles I espied two figures in the distance: short of the frontier, they were the last people I saw in Holland. They tur... |
The officials at the Dutch frontier handed back my passport, duly stamped, and soon I was crossing the last furlongs of No Man's Land, with the German frontier post growing nearer through the turning snow. Black, white and red were painted in spirals round the road barrier and soon I could make out the scarlet flag cha... |
[ UP THE RHINE ] |
Nothing remains from that first day in Germany but a confused memory of woods and snow and sparse villages in the dim Westphalian landscape and pale sunbeams dulled by clouds. The first landmark is the town of Goch, which I reached by nightfall; and here, in a little tobacconist's shop, the mist begins to clear. Buying... |
The town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter's shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika arm-bands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read Heil Hitler ... |
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