Words of Mercury Read online

  Text © The Estate of Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Introduction and editorial matter © Artemis Cooper 2003

  Foreword © 2014 by Skyhorse Publishing

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2014

  First published in 2003 by John Murray (Publishers), an Hachette UK Company

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Victoria Bellavia

  Cover photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

  ISBN: 978-1-62914-223-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-280-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915—2011, was born of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places.

  He joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, fought in Greece and Crete where, during the German occupation, he returned three times (once by parachute). Disguised as a shepherd he lived for over two years in the mountains, organising the resistance, and led the party that captured and evacuated the German Commander, General Kreipe. He was awarded the DSO and OBE, was made Honorary Citizen of Heraklion, and later of Kardamyli and Gytheion. He was a Corresponding Member of the Athens Academy.

  He lived partly in Greece in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire.

  Artemis Cooper

  Artemis Cooper is the author of Cairo in the War 1939—1945 and other highly acclaimed books.

  Also by Patrick heigh Fermor

  The Traveller’s Tree (1950)

  The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953)

  A Time to Keep Silence (1957)

  Mani (1958)

  Roumeli (1966)

  A Time of Gifts (1977)

  Between the Woods and the Water (1986)

  Three Letters from the Andes (1991)

  In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor (2008)

  The young Patrick Leigh Fermor on the island of Ithaca in 1946.

  Photo Joan Leigh Fermor

  FOR JOAN

  ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’

  Love’s Labour’s Lost

  Contents

  Foreword ROLE POTTS

  Introduction ARTEMIS COOPER

  TRAVELS

  The Munich Hofbräuhaus

  FROM A Time of Gifts

  Bicycle Polo

  FROM Between the Woods and the Water

  Carpathian Uplands

  FROM Between the Woods and the Water

  Ada Kaleh

  FROM Between the Woods and the Water

  A Cave on the Black Sea

  Holiday Magazine, May 1965

  Rumania—Travels in a Land before Darkness Fell

  Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 12 May 1990

  Rumania—The Last Day of Peace

  FROM Introduction to Matila Ghyka, The World Mine Oyster, 1961

  A Brûler Zin

  FROM The Traveller’s Tree

  Monastic Life

  FROM A Time to Keep Silence

  Serpents of the Abruzzi

  The Spectator, 5 June 1953

  Paradox in the Himalayas

  London Magazine, December 1979—January 1980

  GREECE

  Abducting a General

  FROM a Report written for the Imperial War Museum 1969

  The Island of Leventeia

  FROM Roumeli

  Trade Secrets of the Kravarites

  FROM Roumeli

  The Last Emperor of Byzantium

  FROM Mani

  Supper in the Sky

  FROM Mani

  Delphinia

  FROM Marti

  Sash Windows Opening on the Foam

  Architectural Digest, November 1986

  PEOPLE

  The Polymath

  FROM A Time of Gifts

  Konrad

  FROM A Time of Gifts

  The Postmaster’s Widow

  FROM A Time of Gifts

  Lady Wentworth and Byron’s Slippers

  FROM Roumeli

  Auberon Herbert

  FROM Auberon Herbert: A Composite Portrait, ed. John Jolliffe, 1976

  Roger Hinks

  A Portrait Memoir, in The Gymnasium of the Mind: The Journals of Roger Hinks, 1933—1963, ed. John Goldsmith, 1984

  Iain Moncreiffe

  FROM Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk: An Informal Portrait, ed. John Jolliffe, 1986

  George Katsimbalis

  FROM The New Griffon, no. Ill (Athens: Gennadius Library), 1998

  John Pendlebury

  The Spectator, 20 October 2001

  BOOKS

  Early Reading and Desert Island Books

  FROM The Pleasure of Reading, ed. Antonia Fraser, 1992

  The Strange Case of the Swabian Poet

  The Spectator, 28 September 1996

  Under the Bim, Under the Bam

  Primitive Song by Maurice Bowra, The Spectator,, 6 July 1962

  Cold Sores

  Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington-Lawrence Durrell Correspondence, The Spectator, 26 September 1981

  The Art of Nonsense

  Poiémata me Zographies se Mikra Paidia by George Seferis (Athens 1976), The Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 1977

  A Greek Gentleman in a Straw Hat

  Cavafy’s Alexandria by Edmund Keeley, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 October 1977

  Interfering in Greece

  Athens Alive by Kevin Andrews, The Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 1980

  Dragons and Windmills

  Robert Byron: Letters Home, ed. Lucy Butler, The Spectator, 20 April 1991

  FLOTSAM

  Gluttony.

  FROM The Seven Deadly Sins (Sunday Times Publications, 1962)

  Some Architectural Notes

  The Spectator, 24 September 1994

  In Andalucia and Estremadura

  FROM an undated letter to Diana Cooper

  Christmas Lines for Bernard of Morlaix

  The Times Literary Supplement, 21 December 1979

  Foreword

  Patrick Leigh Fermor lived the kind of sprawling, uncommon life that draws easy comparisons to the classic adventurers of twentieth century fact and fiction. In trying to convey the extraordinary deeds that defined him, writers and critics have likened him to Graham Greene, to Jack Kerouac, to Indiana Jones. The most common comparison is James Bond—no doubt because of Leigh Fermor’s elegant good looks, his real-life experiences as a spy, and the fact he was friendly with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming (who hosted Leigh Fermor in Jamaica when he was fi
nishing Casino Royale, and later drew on his guest’s travel writing for the voodoo descriptions in Live and Let Die).

  To liken Patrick Leigh Fermor to James Bond is, of course, to give James Bond too much credit. Unlike Fleming’s fictional hero, Paddy (as Leigh Fermor was known to friends and fans) never relied on high-tech intelligence-dossiers or flashy spy gadgets. As both a youthful wanderer and a behind-the-lines war commando, he took things slow, mastered languages, and cultivated friendships, guided by his intellect, his charisma, and his exuberant curiosity. When recounting the most iconic moment of his life—kidnapping a German general in Crete during World War II—Paddy was less concerned with his own derring-do than in a moment of human connection with his captive (recounted in these pages) over the odes of Horace.

  It is perhaps telling that the 1957 movie depiction of Paddy’s war exploits, Ill Met By Moonlight, was released in the United States under the pulpy, dumbed-down title Night Ambush. Indeed, to a certain American sensibility, Leigh Fermor’s accomplishments were notable mainly for their dashing, action-hero motifs. Even before he abducted a Wehrmacht commander in Crete, Paddy distinguished himself as a man of deeds, from his early decision to quit school and walk across Europe, to his multi-year love affair with a beautiful Byzantine princess in Romania, to his wartime R&R revelries in Cairo (where he swilled champagne with King Farouk, slept with exotic women, and—once, during a Christmas meal—dined on turkey stuffed with Benzedrine pills). In the years after the war, Paddy traveled extensively in both hemispheres, survived a communist assassination attempt, caroused with socialites, smoked eighty cigarettes a day, wrote a screenplay for John Huston, escaped a Cretan blood vendetta, and built a house overlooking the Messenian Gulf in Greece. At age sixty-nine, on a Byron-inspired whim, he swam the Hellespont from Europe to Asia.

  Leigh Fermor never portrayed himself as an action hero in his own books, however, and that could be a reason why his work is underappreciated in the United States. (I didn’t become familiar with his travel writing until I became a travel writer myself—and then only because other American travel writers recommended him to me with a dizzy fervor typically reserved for underexplored corners of the world.) The most emblematic image we get of Paddy from his own writing isn’t one of a grizzled and glamorous warrior, but of a cerebral young dreamer trudging through the snows of a prewar European winter, ash-wood walking stick in hand, The Oxford Book of English Verse stashed in his rucksack, his heart open to poetry and place and possibility.

  In A Time of Gifts, the first of what would become three volumes recounting his formative European sojourn, Paddy celebrates the simple challenges and rewards that await when one leaves home and sets off into the hopeful unknown. “I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing, and only consort with peasants and tramps,” he exudes at the outset of the journey. “If I lived on bread and cheese and apples . . . there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom!” Leigh Fermor thus captures the infectious ebullience of youth in A Time of Gifts and its sequels, but he also unveils the cultural and historical texture of his wanderings in lyrical, allusive, richly literary prose. Reading his travel writing, one isn’t sure whether to sequester oneself in the library with a stack of classics, or throw open the front door and start walking for the horizon.

  In assembling the excerpts and essays that follow, biographer Artemis Cooper invites us into the pleasures of traveling on the page in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s company. Here, we get tales of a young Paddy sleeping in a Black Sea cave and drinking raki with Bulgarian shepherds; we see him playing bicycle polo on the Great Hungarian Plain; we see him drawing and selling portraits to make ends meet in Vienna; we see him, on the strength of his enthusiasm and charm, being “passed on from house to house like a bad penny” by his aristocratic hosts in Romania. We also get Paddy’s own account of his life as an Intelligence Corps commando, notable as much for its depiction of life in the Cretan mountains as for its military drama. Beyond this, we see an older Paddy hiking to an isolated village in the Indian Himalayas, observing voodoo ceremonies in Haiti, losing at billiards to Byron’s great-granddaughter in England, spotting dolphins off the coast of Greece, exploring silence in a Normandy abbey. And, physical travels aside, these pages offer a tantalizing window into Paddy’s voracious intellect, brimming with ideas and insights about people he met and books he read.

  Carefully observed and remembered, these writings reveal a man who knew what he was passionate about, and had decided to live in such a way to enjoy those passions. To read his work is to be reminded that the best education is found through active engagement with the world, seeking and learning—that age doesn’t matter, that friendship counts, that one need not ever waste time being bored.

  ROLF POTTS

  New Haven, Connecticut, 2014

  Introduction

  Soon the delighted cry of ‘Delphinia!’ went up: a school of dolphins was gambolling about half a mile further out to sea. They seemed to have spotted us at the same moment, for in a second half a dozen of them were tearing their way towards us, all surfacing in the same parabola and plunging together as if they were in some invisible harness. Soon they were careering alongside and round the bows and under the bowsprit, glittering mussel-blue on top, fading at the sides through gun-metal dune-like markings to pure white, streamlined and gleaming from their elegant beaks to the clean-cut flukes of their tails. They were beautiful abstractions of speed, energy, power and ecstasy leaping out of the water and plunging and spiralling and vanishing like swift shadows, each soon to materialize again and sail into the air in another great loop so fast that they seemed to draw the sea after them and shake it off in mid air . . .

  These are the opening lines of a passage from Mani on dolphins which readers of Patrick Leigh Fermor come back to again and again, for the sheer joy of it. There are other favourite passages too: the discovery of Byron’s slippers at Missolonghi, the description of the Munich Hofbräuhaus, the crowning of the last Emperor of Byzantium—each one displaying the breadth of his learning, his extraordinary memory, and the dazzling quality of his prose.

  The purpose of this volume is to put these passages alongside introductions, reviews, memoirs and articles that Paddy* has written over the years. The book covers the whole range of his writing. It will be welcomed by his legions of admirers, and forms a perfect introduction for those who are not yet familiar with his work.

  Paddy’s irrepressible exuberance made him a noisy and unruly schoolboy, yet he did not dislike learning—in fact (with the exception of mathematics) he devoured it. An avid reader from an early age, he developed a passion for history, poetry, and languages both living and dead in the course of his rather disjointed school life.

  His last school was King’s, Canterbury, from which he was sacked for holding hands with the greengrocer’s daughter. After this he was sent to a crammer in London, with the idea of preparing him for Sandhurst and a career in the army. This plan did not last long, for Paddy decided instead to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. It proved to be a turning point in his life, and the best education he could ever have had.

  Starting in December 1933, at the age of eighteen, Paddy walked through the snowbound Netherlands, and spent his nineteenth birthday in Austria. Travelling as rough as possible, he slept in barns and hostels, with shepherds, bargemen or pedlars for company. However, a friend’s letter in Munich brought him into contact with the landed gentry and country-house owners of central Europe. He must have been a popular guest, for those he stayed with never failed to send him on his way with letters of introduction to friends and relatives further along his route.

  The aristocracy of Europe were still living the life that they had lived a hundred years before, sitting squarely in the middle of their estates which were still farmed by oxen and peasants. It was a pleasant life, but monotonous. The appearance of a charming young tramp
in travel-stained clothes was a welcome distraction—all the more so when he appeared so delighted and intrigued with everything around him. One can imagine the pleasure of these kind grandees as Paddy listened eagerly to their stories, immersed himself in their family histories, quizzed them on the local dialects and customs of the region, and spent hours in their libraries reading everything he could lay his hands on. Yet one must not imagine that his journey was spent simply swanning from one schloss to another. There were still plenty of nights spent in barns and monasteries, in inns and hostels, in caves and sheepfolds, on people’s sofas and under the stars.

  Although Paddy kept notebooks of his travels, he did not publish an account of his first journey until many years later. So when A Time of Gifts appeared in 1977 and Between the Woods and the Water in 1986, the life of the mid-thirties that he describes had been utterly destroyed, and much of the land he had walked over had been in the grip of communism for years. Yet his memory recreates this world with an astonishing freshness and immediacy, and recaptures the young man he was then: full of curiosity, optimism and joy in the vibrant diversity of the world.

  Paddy finally reached Constantinople on New Year’s Day, 1935, and then moved south into Greece. He spent his twentieth birthday in a monastery on Mount Athos. In Macedonia, a few months later, he took part in a royalist campaign against rebellious republican troops which ended in a dashing cavalry charge across a bridge over the river Struma. By now, Paddy had fallen in love with Greece. He learnt the language and, over the next few years, roamed the country.

  It was in Athens that he met the first great love of his life, the Rumanian Balasha Cantacuzène. They both wanted to get away from the city—he to write, she to paint; and for many months they lived in an old water mill surrounded by lemon groves, looking out towards the island of Poros. They could not live at the mill for ever; and when the time came to go, Balasha suggested that they move to the house she shared with her sister Hélène in Moldavia, the northernmost province of Rumania, and the home of this branch of the Cantacuzène princes for generations.