On the Road, Again

“Jonathan Raban, another gifted traveler, has addressed himself to why travel books and travelers who write are of such abiding interest. He might have been speaking of Leigh Fermor: ‘He is a creature of accident and coincidence, committed by his journey to a life of chances muffed and chances seized. He is temperamentally volatile: a friendly hotelier or a break in the weather can make his spirits soar. This traveler-hero, or traveler-fool, has an important place in our contemporary mythology . . . .  He confirms our apprehensions about the strangeness of the world, its unlimited capacity to present itself to us as a foreign land. Seductively, stylishly, he glamorizes what for most people is a source only of anxiety and discomfort—the mobile, glancing, dislocated quality of life in this century.’”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Hapax Legomenon

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“My mother was filled with apprehension to begin with; we pored over the atlas, and, bit by bit as we pored, the comic possibilities began to unfold in absurd imaginary scenes until we were falling about with laughter; and by the time I caught the train to London next morning, she was infected with my excitement.”―Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—August/September 2024—Author’s Note: The essay that follows here was written upon the publication of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, and was initially published in The Athenian: Greece’s English-Language Monthly; then collected in Greek Unorthodox: Bande à Parte & A Farewell to Ikaros

On the 8^th of December, 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor, then all of 18 and characterized by his former (and precipitously ex-) public school house-master as a “dangerous mixture of sophistication and restlessness,” set out from Tower Bridge alone to walk to Constantinople.

He carried with him notebooks, drawing blocks, an old Oxford Book of English Verse, and the Loeb Horace, Vol. I, in which his mother had inscribed a short poem by Petronius: “Leave thy home, O Youth, and seek out alien shores . . .  Yield not to misfortune: the far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind and the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting . . .” (The Youth set out, “free as the road/Loose as the wind.” Installments of cash followed, posted to postes restantes along his route.)

Would that we all had such mothers. Would that we all were such travelers. Forget about becoming such writers, though. For Leigh Fermor is a if not the master of his genre: as self-indulgent as Durrell; as expansive as Melville; as evocative and as precise as Graves; about as good as one gets in the language, and better than most of us deserve. Full stop.

For those of you who, heads in the sand, missed the publication in 1977 of the first volume of this trilogy recounting (recreating, reinventing) Leigh Fermor’s pre-war pilgrimage from England to the Bosphorus, the “time of gifts” has yet to begin, and you have a book to catch up on before getting lost “between the woods and the water.”

Late last year [1986], Viking brought out the penultimate volume, which continues the odyssey begun in A Time of Gifts. Now, we must wait impatiently for the final chapter.

Between the Woods and the Water is no faded sequel, however long Leigh Fermor has left us stranded on the bridge, mid-Danube. He takes up his tale, and his reader, where he left them. It is the same vigorous voice that goes on describing the stranger’s initiation in a strange landscape. This book is a meditation, an epic, an elegy for a vanished Middle Europe. It is a duet for two travelers: a boy who became a man on his feet; and a passionate septuagenarian who traces that boy’s steps, retrieves his lost diary, and interprets, embellishes his memories with the learning of 53 years. (This is the same man who went on to fight in Greece and on Crete in World War II, lead the party that captured General Kreipe, and earn the DSO and OBE; the author of Roumeli and Mani; honorary citizen of Irakleion and Kardamyli.)

The book is a travelogue set to music. Scored for flute and oboe.

Jonathan Raban, another gifted traveler, has addressed himself to why travel books and travelers who write are of such abiding interest. He might have been speaking of Leigh Fermor: “He is a creature of accident and coincidence, committed by his journey to a life of chances muffed and chances seized. He is temperamentally volatile: a friendly hotelier or a break in the weather can make his spirits soar. This traveler-hero, or traveler-fool, has an important place in our contemporary mythology . . . .  He confirms our apprehensions about the strangeness of the world, its unlimited capacity to present itself to us as a foreign land. Seductively, stylishly, he glamorizes what for most people is a source only of anxiety and discomfort—the mobile, glancing, dislocated quality of life in this century.”

All true. But polymath Leigh Fermor is no traveler-fool. What he knew at 19 of languages, history and the fine art of listening, his readers may never master.

You long to have accompanied him. Through the candle- and moon-lit streets of Esztergom, the stork-shadowed Hungarian foothills; across the Alfold astride Malek, “a fine chestnut with a flowing mane and tail”; into the fray of a bicycle-polo chukka with Count Jozsi; and out of time as we know it in the mesmerizing eddies of conversation about history, politics, antiquity, Transylvania.

You long to accompany him, and you do, wandering through a life, an era, a place that has ceased to exist. Snuffed out. The glasses touch, Angéla lifts her white arms, the storks take wing, and the scene darkens: “Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed, except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness.”

But Ishmael escapes with his knowledge.

Leigh Fermor’s learning is formidable and eccentric. Put down this book and you feel you have feasted on truffles, good strong meat, and an éclair or two. Along the way with this intrepid little knight, you will learn what the Huns wore (linen raiment or the pieced-together skins of field mice); how to say, “A child with too many mid-wives remains with his navel-string uncut,” in Romanian; and “I kiss your hand, Dear Countess,” in Hungarian. You will also discover how Socinians differ from from other Unitarians, how a bucket of water left on a winter bridge saved ships on the Danube, and how Vlad II of Wallachia earned the epithet “The Impaler.”

Useful information? For a precious few, perhaps. But fascinating if, like this reader, you prefer digressing to arriving. Leigh Fermor’s is a sensibility one would hate to see confined to a less wide-ranging prose form.

And there are the Leigh Fermor sentences that roll on and on like the Don, the Moldau. “Transylvania, the Banat of Temesvár, the Great Plain, the Tatra mountains, Bukovina, Galicia, Podolia, Lodomeria, Moravia, Bessarabia and, above all, the Carpathians themselves—how closely the geography of Austria-Hungary and its neighbors approximated the fictional work of earlier generations! Graustark, Ruritania, Borduria, Syldavia and a score of imaginary kingdoms, usurped by tyrants and sundered by fights for the throne, leap into mind: plots, treachery, imprisoned heirs and palace factions abound and, along with them, fiendish monocled swordsmen, queens in lonely towers, toppling ranges, deep forests, plains full of half-wild horses, wandering tribes of Gypsies who steal children out of castles and dye them with walnut-juice or lurk beneath the battlements and melt the chatelaines’ hearts with their strings.” (I just know he declaims these things aloud down there at his incomparable villa in The Mani, trying them out for sound on the dry, olive-spiced air.)

Just Leigh Fermor’s outrageous, intimidating vocabulary marks him as surely, but not solely, a writers’ writer. Calumet, habergeon, objurgate, helve, jacqueries, penumbra, drugget—all gleaned from one quick thumbing. Not to speak of other languages sprinkled, mostly parsed, it’s true, throughout. Here we have traveler-writer as writer-mentor, as don, as initiator.

I cannot for the life of me imagine sharing a berth with Paul Theroux. Not for a millisecond. Nor does the political angst of Naipaul allow a fellow traveler to preserve her, his sense of wonder (for the horror, the horror!). Jan Morris enchants me on occasion. Freya Stark overwhelms me, somehow. Dervla Murphy simply puzzles me.

But there is no doubt in my mind at all that, between the woods and the water, a great traveler has written his way into the history of letters with this soaring duet in a lost land.

PS from August 2004 Sometime in the 1980s, abandoning any sense of decorum (and I don’t retain much), and yet true to the brashness of my American upbringing, I drove down to The Mani to try to meet Patrick Leigh Fermor, the Ur Scribe of my little philhellenic universe. Only twice in my life have I reached out, so impetuously, to a mentor. I wrote to Anaïs Nin (who kindly wrote back, and wrote back) but I simply showed up at Leigh Fermor’s door.

His formidable housekeeper—an imposing Maniate woman whom I later learned was the aunt of my equally formidable young attorney in Athens, Epamenondas Lekeas—was sharpening a knife on a large, spinning whetstone just at the gate. Like something out of The Sun Also Rises, this unsmiling woman blocked my access and, still sharpening her knife, told me that Mr. Leigh Fermor did not receive the uninvited. (“Well, then he shouldn’t go and write such blisteringly seductive prose!” I felt like telling her.) Instead, I asked if she would hand-deliver a note to her master. I would write one and then leave.

So, I stood by my car and, on the cooling hood, wrote the sort of letter one just doesn’t write to one’s very-British-mentor-of-another-generation-and-social-class-entirely. How could I not? Our time together, vertical on this parched or green little planet is so fleeting. Write all the letters of unabashed admiration and love you can, is what I say.

It was a long letter, on lined legal paper and, while I wrote, the knife-sharpener observed me closely. She had seen my type before, I was sure, and come to her conclusions. I handed her the missive, not getting too close to her, and then she made that sweeping little Greek hand movement which means, “I’m going, but you stay here; right here.” I did. She was gone a good while but, when she returned, she opened the door wide to me and, smiling mysteriously, ushered me into the dark palace of a man I had been reading all my life—dictionary and atlas and ancient and modern histories at the ready—but never dared hope to meet.

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