'It Was Impossible to Imagine It!'

A friend has finished reading Between the Woods and the Water (1986), the second volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s three-volume memoir of tramping across Europe, starting the year Hitler came to power. He read them out of order, beginning with the posthumously published final volume, Broken Road (2013), followed by A Time of Gifts (1977). Fermor’s timing was impeccable. At age eighteen he experienced a Central European world soon to be destroyed by the Nazis and Soviets. Tim writes:

 

“I love his way of capturing people, like the gentleman with the country house (and grand library) in Transylvania, ‘who could easily have been a clergyman; there was a touch of Evensong about him.’ I think it’s his description that I admire most.”

 

Tim’s right. What I remember most vividly from Fermor’s books are the vignettes, deft snapshots of people met along the way. About the Transylvanian nobleman described above, he goes on to write:

 

“His hobby was wheat-breeding and the two Swedish colleagues staying with him were as soft-voiced and quiet as he. Wheat-ears covered the furniture and one of the Swedes, well versed in the English terminology of his passion, explained as we strolled from specimen to specimen the differences between turgid ears and the common bearded kind; then we surveyed the Polish variety and appraised the spikelets and the awns, the median florets and the glumes.”

 

I hear a muted satirical strain in Fermor’s account of the Swede’s “passion.” The passage reads like a parody of E.J. Kahn’s 1984 five-part series in The New Yorker devoted to the “staffs of life” --  corn, potatoes, wheat, rice and soybeans.

 

To my taste, the best travel writing is devoted to the people encountered and the cumulative impressions of places visited, rather than a desultory inventory of monuments climbed and meals consumed. See Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Zbigniew Herbert, V.S. Naipaul, Ryszard Kapuściński and Marius Kociejowski. Tim writes:

 

“[Fermor’s] recollection of a summer’s day in Transylvania makes the moment seem real even on a cold December day. ‘The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had both vanished, cuckoos had changed their tune and were making ready to fly.’ It’s a 500-word paragraph, and I didn’t want to come to the end of it.”

 

So, here’s a little more: “Roast corn-cobs came and trout from the mountains; cherries, then strawberries, apricots and peaches, and, finally, wonderful melons and raspberries. The scarlet blaze of paprika—there were two kinds on the table, one of them fierce as gunpowder—was cooled by cucumber cut thin as muslin and by soda splashed into glasses of wine already afloat with ice; this had been fetched from an igloo-like undercroft among the trees where prudent hands had stacked it six months before, when—it was impossible to imagine it!—snow covered all.”

 

Fermor is above all a writer with a celebrative streak, not a hack generator of travelogues. He’s an old-fashioned writer for whom prose is a craft to be practiced with care, erudition and pleasure. He possesses the essential quality needed for good writing of any sort: an interesting mind.

[Tim has a useful suggestion for future editions of Fermor’s trilogy: “I wish there were an atlas of Fermor’s travels. I tried to find where he was on modern maps, but never really got the sense of geography. It would be helpful to have a book of maps, or even a folding Rand McNally that show his route, with smaller maps of cities and excursions. There might also be a few historical notes for context. Readers of Rebecca West also could benefit from such an atlas.”]