A Time for Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

In December 1933, a young Brit picked up a freighter to Holland from London to begin a walk across Europe to Constantinople (Istanbul). He'd knocked about in school, never quite fitting into to the routine, although clever and widely read. He held no express goal for this journey except to complete it. After a brief stint traversing Holland, he crossed into Germany and began trekking up the Rhine Valley. After achieving southern Germany, he turned east, picking up the Danube, following the river’s course into Czechoslovakia. He concludes this portion of his journey at a bridge crossing from Czechoslovakia into Hungary. It will take him until January 1935 to reach his goal of Constantinople and a lifetime to complete the three volumes that recount his journey. The final installment, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos won’t be published in the U.S. until March 2014.

Three traits make this book so impressive. The journey across Europe, poised roughly midway between its two great 20th century cataclysms, puts the reader in a time machine with young “Paddy”. Fermor begins his youthful journey in the year that Hitler came to power, and he encounters Brown Shirts in beer halls and an exuberant thug who’s sloughed off his Communist trappings—physical and mental— to dive headlong into the Nazi movement. As Fermor journeys forward towards his destination, he moves backward in time. He sleeps under the open stars, in barns, in taverns, in hostels, in homes, and in castles. Fermor's youth and charm seem to provide an open sesame to ordinary folk, to the middle class, and to the fading aristocracy. He develops a web of connections among the well-to-do that opens doors as he travels into the next town or castle. He moves from pauper to prince and back with elegant ease. He deftly portrays the characters and scenes that he encounters, often providing digressions on history, flora and fauna, and landscape as he makes his way. A brief side journey to Prague elicits a short foray into the Defenestration of Prague. 

The second factor that adds luster to this work arises from the fact that he wrote this first installment over 40 years after his journey. Invited to write a magazine article about the virtues of walking, Fermor instead wrote this book (published in 1977). Thus, except from some brief excerpts taken directly from his journal, we have the work of a mature, worldly, and erudite man reconstructing his adventures as a very young man. The exuberance of youth mixes with the perspective of age, although the narrative is uninterrupted and of a single voice. We meet two selves speaking through one voice.  

Finally, Fermor's prose exceeds poetry in its beauty and grace. Fermor's work supports my contention that prose can exceed poetry in its beauty, fueled by more extended metaphors, descriptions, and narratives—if penned by the hand of a master such as Fermor. Poetry mimics music in its fleeting melody and open suggestions. Prose, like painting, is more plastic and invites detailed consideration, revealing nuances of meaning as the text retards time of allow a deeper contemplation of the scene created. Others, like William Dalrymple, praise Fermor as one ofthe great English prose-stylists. I concur. Fermor paints verbal portraits and landscapes that rival a Turner or Constable in beauty. 

My brief review does not indicate a lack of merit or enthusiasm for this book; quite the opposite, my ability is inadequate to do real justice to this gem. I’ll leave you with a quote from a passage of the book to provide you a better representation of what Fermor accomplishes with his prose. The setting is at the end of the book, as Fermor stands on the bridge over the Danube between Czechoslovakia and Hungary on Holy Saturday evening: 

I too heard the change in the bells and the croaking and the solitary owl’s note. But it was getting too dim to descry a figure, let alone a struck match, at the windows of the Archbishopric. A little earlier, sunset had kindled them as if the Palace were on fire. Now the sulphur, the crocus, the bright pink and the crimson had left the panes and drained away from the touzled but still unmoving cirrus they had reflected. But the river, paler still by contrast with the sombre merging of the woods , had lightened to a milky hue . A jade-green radiance had not yet abandoned the sky. The air itself, the branches, the flag-leaves, the willow -herb and the rushes were held for a space, before the unifying shadows should dissolve them, in a vernal and marvellous light like the bloom on a greengage. Low on the flood and almost immaterialized by this luminous moment, a heron sculled upstream, detectable mainly by sound and by the darker and slowly dissolving rings that the tips of its flight-feathers left on the water. A collusion of shadows had begun and soon only the lighter colour of the river would survive. Downstream in the dark, meanwhile, there was no hint of the full moon that would transform the scene later on. No-one else was left on the bridge and the few on the quay were all hastening the same way. Prised loose from the balustrade at last by a more compelling note from the belfries, I hastened to follow. I didn’t want to be late.

TO BE CONTINUED

Fermor, Patrick Leigh (2010-10-10). A Time of Gifts (Kindle Locations 4710-4721). John Murray. Kindle Edition.

And continue I shall with Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, the next installment. As a little added bonus, I’m very much looking forward to hearing his biographer, Artemis Cooper, speak @ #JLF about her Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure published in 2013.

A Review of A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Last summer I read Tony Hiss’s In Motion (which I’m now re-reading), and he discussed and quoted from the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor. About the same time, I read an article by William Dalrymple, who also mentioned Fermor in glowing terms. Thus, when I saw the title A Time for Silence on the Prairie Lights remainder table, grabbed it. I quickly read the short work and thought it a gem. This summer, I found it on the shelf and I’d recommended it to Tanta Rose, so I re-read it. This time I admired the gem, not rushing it, but slowly turning it over to appreciate its many facets, as one might admire a gemstone, and it was time well spent. 

In the 1950’s, Fermor left the lights of Paris and headed to a Benedictine monastery in France, not as a pilgrim, but as a refugee. He wanted solitude to write, and so he came as a guest. After a couple of days of what I might call decompression, he settled into the rhythms of the monastic life and began carefully observing the ways of the monastery. In masterful, almost poetic prose (for which I now understand that he’s rightly famous), he describes this world: its history, its practices, its ambiance. 

Fermor goes on to another Benedictine monastery, one that specializes in practicing and preserving Gregorian chant, and we can sense the order of the chant and the monastery, as we read his descriptions of the stone edifices. As we read the brief history of these ancient institutions, we appreciate how complex and resilient they are. A third stop is a Cistercian monastery, where the strict practice of silence rules. Fermor finds this practice more forbidding and difficult to appreciate, yet his quiet observations never fail to inform. 

Finally, Fermor writes about the long abandoned stone monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, where strange looking rock formations were hewn to allow entire subterranean monasteries to exist in the remote section of that country. A Byzantine world gone underground. 

I’ve passed my copy on, so I can’t provide any quotes that might exhibit how this beautiful book works through its poetic prose and I wish I could, because my own meager words and review can’t do it justice. Assuming you get the NYRB re-print, do read the introduction by Karen Armstrong (herself once a member of a convent), which provides some context and even mild criticism of this work. It’s well worth your time as well. If you’ve ever wondered about these worlds outside the world, I can’t think of a better place to begin your exploration and appreciation than with this book.

A Review of India Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann

One of the benefits of reading history is that you don’t have to be an academic historian to succeed in the field. Indeed, from Herodotus and Thucydides to Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Parkman, and Henry Adams, up through many successful and worthwhile practitioners writing today, we have a wealth of non-academic historians who enlighten and entertain us with graceful prose. (I realize one might argue about Adams, since he taught Medieval History at Harvard for a while, but I don’t believe that his major works were written while in the academy or for the academy.) Our move to India led me to discover William Dalrymple, who writes beautifully about contemporary India and the Middle East, as well as having written very highly regarded histories set in India and Afghanistan. In fact, via a piece that he wrote for the wonderful Five Books site, I discovered Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. 

The title might prove misleading, since the “secret”, as the author notes within her work, was not so much a secret as a little-known or little-discussed (but not completely unnoticed) situation. The “secret” was that the wife of the last British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, had a love affair with the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Of course, this love affair (the details of intimacy remain unknown) unfolded against the huge historic panorama of Independence and Partition. As Dalrymple notes in his remarks about Von Tunzelmann, in focusing on these three actors, she tells the immensely complicated story of Independence and Partition in manner that provides a sense of the immensity of the problems and undertakings without enmeshing us in details that would overwhelm most readers. In addition to focusing on the triangle formed by the Mountbattens and Nehru, she also deals deftly with other significant players such as Gandhi, Jinnah, and Patel in India, and with Churchill, Attlee, and others back in Britain. 

Von Tunzelmann does an excellent job of setting the scene for the momentous events of Independence and Partition by first establishing the biographies of the main players. Lord Mountbatten, for instance, is from a German family that married into the British aristocracy. Mountbatten, known to friends like such as two British kings and Noel Coward, as “Dickie”, appears in some ways the embodiment of an upper-class British twit. His naval career is in some ways a disaster (such as running a ship aground and having one sunk from underneath him), but it nevertheless leads him to the position of Allied Commander for Southeast Asia during WWII. While inept in some ways, and enamored of pomp, circumstance, genealogies, and medals, he’s also quite charming and persuasive. And, lest you think him a poor cuckold, his marriage to Lady Mountbatten, Edwina, is an “open marriage” from near the beginning. Both carried on rather open affairs and had a complex relationship, to say the least. Edwina, especially in her youth, couldn’t help reminding me of Princess Diana: a rather repressed young woman whose marriage to a much more sedate man seems to have released a rather marked free-spiritedness. But like Lady Di (after demotion), Edwina found a serious and very successful calling helping out in London during the Blitz and maintaining a very active, hands-on roll in India and Pakistan dealing with the human misery found here both before and after Partition. The third person of our triumvirate, Nehru, had morphed from a young, Indian-British dandy (Cambridge and all) into a national leader. He underwent an arranged marriage and never seemed very happy about it. His wife, an apparently pious woman in contrast to his militant (if publicly restrained) atheism, died relatively young, so that Nehru was a widower at the time he came to know Edwina in the mid-1940s. 

Von Tunzelmann keeps her narrative moving, weaving the personal lives of the Mountbattens and Nehru together to meet in the momentous years of 1947 and 1948 and then apart again. In addition, she keeps the big picture in focus. Her passing remarks and judgments, such as how Gandhi’s peculiarities, irrelevancies, and standing in world opinion alternately retarded and forwarded the cause of independence and Hindu-Moslem relations, leaves one wanting more, but not at all disatistfied. (Gandhi’s life and role in all of this, of course, fills volumes.) She also remarks on the irony that I noticed immediately upon coming to India: Gandhi’s likeness adorns all denominations of rupee notes. A rather ironic honor for an ascetic who thought all India should follow his austere example. 

Von Tunzelmann writes with a light but perceptive hand. She deftly manages the many facts, or where evidence lacks, caution and restraint marks her prose. She also displays a light sense of irony appropriately deployed. In this description of the Indian Assembly at the turn of midnight that marked Independence, she writes: 

            As the chimes sounded and the unexpected blast from a conch shell startled the delegates in the chamber of the Constituent Assembly, a nation that had struggled for so many years, and sacrificed so much, was freed at last from the shackles of empire.

            Yes, Britain was finally free. 

She’s not being cute or coy here: her narrative has established the draining demands of Empire upon the war-impoverished Brits such that most—except Churchill and a few other die-hards—realized and wanted desperately to unload the burden that India and Empire represented. 

If one enjoys reading a history that interweaves the personal into the grant narratives of empires, nations, and peoples, as many a great novel as done, then you can’t expect to find a more engrossing account of the extraordinary people and events portrayed here. An outstanding work. 

Interesting note: The cover photos on my copy of the book purchased here in India shows the Mountbattens standing together with Gandhi; in the U.S. editions, they are pictured on the cover with Nehru, who's laughing.