A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

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From Solesmes to La Grande Trappe", in The Cornhill Magazine, [41] John Murray, London, no. 982, Spring 1950.

I admit that I am lobbing these accusations at Leigh Fermor with an uneasy conscience, because in so many ways he is leaps and bounds more learned and eloquent than I am. Yet to misuse one’s gifts seems more culpable than not having gifts in the first place. But let me stop being vague. Consider this passage from the beginning, right when the writer is setting out and saying goodbye to his loved ones: Central part of Leigh Fermor's villa at Kalamitsi, Kardamyli Leigh Fermor's office, c. 2009, view of French wallpaper Desk in Leigh Fermor's garden near Kardamyli, 2007 Leigh Fermor's grave at St Peter's, Dumbleton, Gloucestershire The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete in file number HS 5/728.To be just, Leigh Fermor is marvelous when it comes to surfaces and particularities. He seems to notice every small, fleeting detail of everything he sees: buildings, cities, people, sunsets, landscapes. His love of strange words and foreign phrases fits equally well with this wont—the verbal flavor of an unusual term more important to him than its ability to communicate meaning. Leigh Fermor’s propensity to drown in an ecstasy of aesthetic observation—rendered in gloriously profuse prose—often reminded me of Walter Pater’s similar flights. But even Pater, an extreme aesthete, is not as wholly superficial as Leigh Fermor—who seems entirely incapable of holding abstract ideas in his mind. A Time to Keep Silence (1957), with photographs by Joan Eyres Monsell. [39] This was an early product of the Queen Anne Press, a company managed by Leigh Fermor's friend Ian Fleming. In it he describes his experiences in several monasteries, and the profound effect the time spent there had on him. A documentary film on the Cretan resistance The 11th Day (2003) contains extensive interview segments with Leigh Fermor recounting his service in the S.O.E. and his activities on Crete, including the capture of General Kreipe.

This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. 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 passenger in the train and this solitary entry, under cover of night and hushed by snow, completed the illusion that I was slipping into Rotterdam, and into Europe, through a secret door. Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. [29] Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life. Between the Woods and the Water – On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986)

Now, I am being rather unduly harsh towards a book that is generally good-natured and light-hearted. Partly this hostility comes from defensiveness: If I am to accuse someone as highly respected as Leigh Fermor of writing badly, I must make a strong case. As the final exhibit in my prosecution, I include this snippet of a description from a bar in Munich: Sir Max Hastings first met Leigh Fermor in his early twenties: "Across the lunch table of a London club, hearing him swapping anecdotes, in four or five languages, quite effortlessly, without showing off. I was just jaw-dropped." bbc.com. Rainey-Smith, Maggie (10 June 2008). "Greece: The write stuff". NZ herald . Retrieved 13 January 2019. The Hidden Gifts of Helping : How the Power of Giving, Compassion, and Hope Can Get Us Through Hard Times

In 1950 Leigh Fermor published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean, which won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career. The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote: "Mr Leigh Fermor never loses sight of the fact, not always grasped by superficial visitors, that most of the problems of the West Indies are the direct legacy of the slave trade." [20] It was quoted extensively in Live and Let Die, by Ian Fleming. [21] He went on to write several other books of his journeys, including Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Now, despite all this, was I often astounded by Leigh Fermor’s diction and his fluency? Yes I was. Did I enjoy some parts of this travel book? Undeniably I did—particularly the section where he is taken in by the German girls. Do I think Leigh Fermor is insufferable? Often, yes, but he can also be charming and winsomely jejune. But did I learn something about the places he traveled to? I’m honestly not sure I did; and that, more than anything, is why I felt the necessity to write in opposition to the famous travel-writer. Brevet, Brad (22 May 2013). " Before Midnight Location Map – Celine and Jesse Vacation in Greece". Rope of Silicon . Retrieved 30 October 2013.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Chancellor, Henry (2005). James Bond: The Man and His World. London: John Murray. p.43. ISBN 978-0-7195-6815-2. To my ears, this is just painfully overwritten. Including infinity and blue strata and iron dumb-bells in a simple bar scene is too much. And the final touch of calling a glass of beer a “brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth”—besides being a nonsensical image—is yet another example of his adolescent imagination: he can hardly touch anything German without his fantasy flying off into legendary knights and Germanic sagas. There is something to be said for enlivening a regular scene using colorful language; but there is also something to be said for honest description. In 2007, he said that, for the first time, he had decided to work using a typewriter, having written all his books longhand until then. [3]

My grandpa (a fan) wrote to Fermor’s publisher to ask when the third and final book of his trilogy would come out. Fermor died in 2011 having never completed it and my grandpa never got to read The Broken Road, which was published using the typescript Fermor was working on until a few months before his death, carefully edited by Colin Thubron and his biographer Artemis Cooper. When I began this book, I fully expected to join the universal chorus of praise. The premise of this book could hardly be more promising: a naïve, bookish nineteen-year-old decides to walk from Holland all the way to Constantinople. We have here all the makings of a literary adventure: an author sensitive enough to language and art to appreciate the finer points of culture, and impetuous enough to get into scraps and misadventures. The only book I can think of that holds comparable promise is Gerald Brenan’s South From Granada, which begins, similarly enough, with the young, bookish Brenan settling down in the south of Spain to read Spinoza. Boukalas, Pantelis (7 February 2010). "Υποθέσεις"[Hypotheses] (in Greek) . Retrieved 16 April 2019. At the age of 18 Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople ( Istanbul). [8] He set off on 8 December 1933 with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a Loeb volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but was also invited by gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way.In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion… They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart, besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage…Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he depicts here. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the coming catastrophe.”— Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Hailed as a masterpiece, A Time of Gifts is in part a coming-of-age memoir, but it is also a rich and compelling portrait of a continent that – despite its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers and grand cities – was soon to be swept away by war, modernisation and profound social change. George Elliot both anticipated and perfectly summed up Leigh Fermor in Middlemarch, in the character of Will Ladislaw—another young Englishman with vague literary and artistic ambitions who travels to the continent to bask in the culture: “rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good,’ and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point.” This description fits Leigh Fermor to a T—the total aimlessness, the nebulous hopes of someday writing a book, the amateurish sketching that Leigh Fermor himself is careful to denigrate.