The Broken Road Read online

  Also by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The Traveller’s Tree

  The Violins of Saint-Jacques

  A Time to Keep Silence

  Mani

  Roumeli

  A Time of Gifts

  Between the Woods and the Water

  Three Letters from the Andes

  Words of Mercury, edited by Artemis Cooper

  In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley

  TRANSLATED AND EDITED

  The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis

  The Broken Road

  From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

  PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

  Edited by

  Colin Thubron and

  Artemis Cooper

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2013 by the Estate of Patrick Leigh Fermor

  Introduction © 2013 by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper

  All rights reserved.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by John Murray (Publishers), an Hachette UK Company

  Cover image: Hercules Segers, Landscape with Fir Tree, c. 1615–30. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Maps drawn by Rodney Paull

  Photograph of Patrick Leigh Fermor from the Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive, reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  The broken road : from the Iron Gates to Mount Athos / by Patrick Leigh Fermor ; edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Continues: A time of gifts; and Between the woods and the water.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-754-9 (hardback : alkaline paper)

  1. Fermor, Patrick Leigh—Travel—Europe, Eastern. 2. Fermor, Patrick Leigh—Travel—Mediterranean Region. I. Thubron, Colin, 1939– II. Cooper, Artemis, 1953– III. Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Time of gifts. IV. Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Between the woods and the water. V. Title.

  DJK17.F47 2014

  914.96'044—dc23

  2013043609

  ISBN 978-1-59017-756-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  In memory of Joan

  Contents

  Title Page

  Maps

  From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

  Mount Athos

  Introduction by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper

  1. From the Iron Gates

  2. A Hanging Glass Box

  3. Over the Great Balkan

  4. To the Danube

  5. The Wallachian Plain

  6. Bucharest

  7. To Varna

  8. Dancing by the Black Sea

  Constantinople

  Mount Athos

  Acknowledgements

  Patrick Leigh Fermor at the Rila monastery, Bulgaria, autumn 1934

  ‘I must have been an uncouth spectacle with long, unkempt and dust-clogged hair bleached to a shaggy tow and a face burnt to the hue of a walnut sideboard by the sun; rumpled clothes, a rucksack and a carved Hungarian walking-stick; also – I blush, now, to set it down, but honesty compels it – a scarlet and yellow braid belt bought in Transylvania, a steel-hilted dagger and a brown kalpack from the fair in Berkovitza.’

  Introduction

  There is something poignant and mysterious about incomplete masterpieces. The pair of books that preceded the present volume – A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water – remain the magnificent two thirds of an unfinished trilogy. They are unique among twentieth-century travel books. Forty and fifty years after the event, their journey – and its prodigious feat of recall – reads like the dream odyssey of every footloose student.

  The eighteen-year-old Leigh Fermor set out from the Hook of Holland in 1933 to walk to Constantinople (as he determinedly called Istanbul). But it was only decades afterwards that he embarked on the parallel journey – the written one – looking back from maturity on his youthful rite of passage. A Time of Gifts (1977) carried him through Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Between the Woods and the Water (1986) continued across Hungary and into Transylvania and left him at the Danube’s Iron Gates, close to where the Rumanian and Bulgarian frontiers converge. He was still five hundred miles from his destination in Constantinople.

  The literary completion of this epic would have been a triumph comparable to that of William Golding’s sea trilogy or, in a different genre, to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. But there, at the Iron Gates, Leigh Fermor’s remembered journey hung suspended. Impatient readers gathered that he had succumbed to writer’s block, frozen by failed memory or the task of equalling his own tremendous style.

  But on his death in 2011 he left behind a manuscript of the final narrative whose shortcomings or elusiveness had tormented him for so many years. He never completed it as he would have wished. The reasons for this are uncertain. The problem remained obscure even to him, and The Broken Road is only its partial resolution. The book’s fascination resides not only in the near-conclusion of its youthful epic, but in the light that it throws on the creative process of this brilliant and very private man.

  At the age of eighteen Paddy (as friends and fans called him) thought himself a failure. His housemaster at King’s School, Canterbury, had memorably labelled him ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’, and he had been sacked from most of his schools. His parents were separated, his father – a distinguished geologist – was far away in India, and although Paddy toyed with entering the army, the prospect of its discipline irked him. Instead, he longed to be a writer. In rented digs in London’s Shepherd Market, between wild parties among the remnant of the 1920s Bright Young People, he struggled with composing adolescent verse and stories. But in the winter of 1933, he wrote, gloom and perplexity descended. ‘Everything suddenly seeming unbearable, loathsome, trivial, restless . . . Detestation, suddenly, of parties. Contempt for everyone, starting and finishing with myself.’

  It was then that the idea of a journey dawned on him – a solitary walk in romantic poverty. An imaginary map of Europe unfurled in his mind. ‘A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!’ As ‘a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly’, he set out with a parental allowance of a pound a week and a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse and Horace’s Odes in his rucksack.

  His walk up the Rhine into the heart of Middle Europe, down the Danube and across the Great Hungarian Plain to Transylvania, became a counterpoint of nights in hovels and sojourns in the castles of kindly aristocrats. But above all, as he travelled – exultantly curious – through the landscapes and histories of the unfolding continent, this was a young man’s introduction to the riches of European culture. The journey took him a year. But it was over forty years before he began to publish it.

  Other matters intervened. For four years after he reached Constantinople, he lived in Rumania with his first great love, Princess Balasha Cantacuzene. It was during this time that he first began to write up his youthful walk, but ‘the words wouldn’t flow,’ he wrote, ‘I couldn’t get them to sound right.’ And none of this first effort survives.

  Then came the war, and his period as an SOE officer in occupied Crete, culminating in his legendary abduction of General K
reipe, divisional commander of the island’s central sector. It was not until 1950 that literary success arrived, with a travel book on the Caribbean, followed by a novel and the resonant account of his retreat into monasteries, A Time to Keep Silence. Above all, his travels in Greece, where he settled with his wife Joan Eyres Monsell, yielded two books – Mani and Roumeli – that celebrate not the sites of classical antiquity but the earthy, demotic Romiosyne, the folk culture of the land he had come to love.

  Late in 1962 the American Holiday magazine (a journal more serious than its name) commissioned Paddy to write a 5,000-word article on ‘The Pleasures of Walking’. With no presentiment of what he was starting, he plunged into describing his epic trek. Nearly seventy pages later, he was still only two thirds of the way through – just short of the Bulgarian frontier, at the Iron Gates – and the discipline of compression had grown unbearable. Enormous seams of memory were opening up. Between one sentence and another he threw off the constraints of an article. Those first seventy pages were set aside, and when he resumed the narrative, writing at his journey’s natural pace, he was composing a full-scale book – from Bulgaria to Turkey. Now all the stuff of his walk – the byways of history and language, the vividly etched characters, the exuberantly observed architecture and landscape – came swarming on to the page. On New Year’s Day 1964 he wrote to his publisher, the loyal and long-suffering Jock Murray, that the narrative had ‘ripened out of all recognition. Much more personal, and far livelier in pace, and lots of it, I hope, very odd.’

  So, ironically, the last stretch of his journey – from the Iron Gates to Constantinople – was the first part of his walk that he attempted to write in full. He wanted to call the book ‘Parallax’, a word (familiar to astronomy) that defines the transformation that an object undergoes when viewed from different angles. It was a measure of how acutely he felt the change in perspective between his younger and older selves. Jock Murray, however, balked at the title as too opaque (he thought parallax sounded like a patent medicine) and it was tentatively renamed ‘A Youthful Journey’.

  In the mid-1960s, with the manuscript still incomplete, Paddy put it aside and became absorbed with his wife Joan in the creation of their home in the Peloponnese. When eventually he returned to the project in the early 1970s, he realized that he must start all over again, from his journey’s beginnings in Holland, and that there would be more than one book. For the next fifteen years he laboured over the Great Trudge, as he called it, to produce the two superb works that carried him to the Bulgarian border. The manuscript of ‘A Youthful Journey’, meanwhile, handwritten on stiff cardboard sheets, languished half-forgotten on a shelf in his study, enclosed in three black ring binders.

  The spectacular success of the first two volumes drastically increased public expectation for the third. Between the Woods and the Water had ended with the irrevocable words: ‘To be Concluded’, and the commitment was to dog Paddy for the rest of his life. By the time he returned to ‘A Youthful Journey’ – which began at the Iron Gates, where Between the Woods and the Water ended – he was in his seventies; the text itself was some twenty years old, and the experiences remembered were over half a century away. This early manuscript was written in prolix bursts, barely edited. It lacked the artful reworking, the rich polish and sometimes the coherence that he had come to demand of himself. The slow, intense, perfectionist labour by which the first two volumes had been achieved – even their proofs were so covered in corrections and elaborations that they had to be reset wholesale – seemed a near-insuperable challenge now. And other events weighed in. With the death of Jock Murray in 1993, and of Joan in 2003, the two people who had most encouraged him were gone. The long ice age that set in was perhaps as bewildering to Paddy as to others. Even the help of a psychiatrist did little to ease him.

  One of the astonishing facts about A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water is that they were written from memory, with no diaries or notebooks to sustain them. Paddy’s first diary was stolen in a Munich youth hostel in 1934, and those that succeeded it, along with his picaresque letters to his mother, were stored during the war in the Harrods Depository, where years later they were destroyed unclaimed. It was a loss, he used to say, that ‘still aches, like an old wound in wet weather’.

  Yet curiously the absence of corroborating records may have been liberating. To a writer of Paddy’s visual gifts, memories and associations would mount up together in vivid feats of reimagining. ‘While piecing together fragments which have lain undisturbed for two decades and more,’ he wrote in a reflective passage of The Broken Road, ‘all at once a detail will surface which acts as potently as the taste of madeleine which made the whole of Proust’s childhood unfurl. The haul of irrelevant detail, interlocking trains of thought and associations, and the echoes of echoes re-echoed and ricocheted, is overwhelming . . .’ Without the constraints of a day-to-day logbook, these retrievals could develop less into a literal narrative than into memory-spurred recreations. Acts of poetic licence and conflation were, he admitted, all but inevitable.

  In 1965, just after he had laid aside the unfinished ‘A Youthful Journey’ in order to build his Peloponnesian home, he was commissioned to write an article on the Danube, from its source to its end in Rumania’s Black Sea. Communist Rumania, at this time, was easing open to the West, and he seized the opportunity of revisiting Balasha Cantacuzene. It was the first time he had seen her since leaving for the war in 1939. He met her secretly, at night, in the little town of Pucioasa, in the attic flat she now shared with her sister and brother-in-law. He was shocked by the toll that the past quarter century had taken, but moved to see her again. In 1949, already stripped of almost all their possessions, they had been evicted from their estate with just a quarter of an hour to pack, and she had thrown into her suitcase Paddy’s fourth and final diary, which he had left behind with her. This precious remnant he took home to Greece. Written in faded pencil, the Green Diary, as he called it, carries his life forward to 1935 after his walk was over, and is appended with sketches of churches, costumes, friends, vocabularies in Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Greek, and the names and addresses of almost everyone he stayed with.

  But strangely, although the diary covered all his walk from the Iron Gates to Constantinople and more, he never collated it with ‘A Youthful Journey’. Perhaps its callowness jarred with the later, more studied manuscript, or their factual differences disconcerted him. The two narratives often diverge. Whatever the reason, the diary – which retained an almost talismanic significance for him – did nothing to solve his dilemma.

  In 2008, while researching Paddy’s biography, Artemis Cooper came upon a typescript of ‘A Youthful Journey’ in the John Murray offices in London. Paddy had never allowed her access to the manuscript in its black ring binders, and had forgotten that years ago he must have sent a copy of the unfinished work to Murrays; but now he asked for the typescript to be sent to him. He was in his early nineties. He had developed tunnel vision and could read only two lines of text at a time. But Olivia Stewart, a devoted friend after his wife’s death, typed it up in an enlarged font size, along with the diary.

  Now Paddy began painfully to revise once more, reading the typescript with a magnifying glass and correcting it in black fountain pen. Given his perfectionism, it was an all but impossible task. The whole narrative, he once said, needed ‘unpicking’, and if he had possessed the time and stamina he might have rewritten much of it wholesale. He was still editing, in a shaky hand, until a few months before his death.

  It is this typescript, checked against the original manuscript of ‘A Youthful Journey’, that forms The Broken Road. It was mostly written in the onrush of creation between 1963 and 1964, with haphazard slips of grammar, style and punctuation, very different from Paddy’s finished prose. Occasionally he hurled together data with the clear intention of clarifying it later. A few passages he expressly wanted cut.

  As Paddy’s editors and literary executors, we hav
e sought, above all, to bring lucidity to the text, while minimizing our own words. There is scarcely a phrase here, let alone a sentence, that is not his. In attempting to preserve his distinctive style, we have respected the structure of his often elaborate sentences, with their train of subordinate clauses. We have retained his characteristic punctuation, his occasional lists and his long paragraphs. Provisionally he broke the text into many numbered sections; we have separated it instead into eight chapters, mostly titled geographically, as was his custom. The footnotes (a handful are his own) are mainly inserted for the elucidation of history and the translation of languages (whose occasional, exuberant guesswork we have generally corrected in the main text).

  Finally, we must take responsibility for the book’s title. The Broken Road is an acknowledgement that Paddy’s written journey never reached its destination. (It stops short at the Bulgarian town of Burgas, fifty miles from the Turkish frontier.) The title recognizes, too, that the present volume is not the polished and reworked book that he would have most desired: only the furthest, in the end, that we could go.

  Paddy’s decision to write about his teenage walk seems almost preordained. He had a natural empathy with his boyhood; he remained, in a sense, oddly innocent. In The Broken Road, his generosity of heart, his youthful bravura and occasional swankiness go hand in hand with an indulgent estimate of others and an intense gratitude for any kindness shown. But these are tempered by unexpected intimations of vulnerability, with hints of depression and homesickness. The book is franker and more self-revelatory than it might have become with varnishing. Faithfully he records his boyish delight in the high society of Bucharest – the naivety of an idealizing teenager – and his occasional prejudices.