The Patrick Leigh Fermor Appreciation Society discussion
Patrick Leigh Femor : the man
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This article was published in the Weekly Standard on 29 September 2014 by Dominic Green...A Place in the Sun: The very slow progress toward a permanent retreat
I think this is as good a summation of Paddy's strengths as a writer as any I have come across so far...
Leigh Fermor’s writing, like his biography, is one of the last monuments of the imperial age, when the British were not merely worldly, but global. His tone is a late outcrop of Bloomsbury—delicate, languid, melodious, precise—but purged of provinciality. His clauses flow with a French rhythm, the décadence of Second Empire Paris, and are studded with a cosmopolitan glitter of linguistic borrowings and historical speculations. Leigh Fermor was a travel writer in the sense that Pepys was a diarist. Every turn of his road evokes reflections on history, art, religion, and language. Investigations of folk songs, dances, and cheeses lead to anecdotal hunts for a pair of slippers that might once have shod Lord Byron, or a fisherman who might be the lineal descendant of the last emperor of Byzantium.
Always the language rises to the occasion, be it scenic, romantic, antiquarian, or philological. Always the present is excavated to reveal the fragments of memory. No philhellene has written better on Greece than Leigh Fermor in Mani (1980) and Roumeli (1973). Few have eulogized lost youth and interwar Europe more elegantly than Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), the record of his walk, aged 18, from the Hook of Holland to the Iron Gates of the Danube. A posthumous and incomplete third volume, The Broken Road (2014), carries the narrative into Greece through shepherds’ huts, urban mansions, and fishermen’s caves.
Click here to read the whole article - which is about Paddy's house in Greece
For background on PLF's schooling, may I suggest: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... (indexed) even though it is of a date (1957) such that the sole reference to PLF himself is to be found on page 177, economically advising, “Among authors, Patrick Leigh Fermor is brilliantly promising.”
Promise realised. I think we can agree.
Absolutely; and a brilliant promise which is also yielding gems from others who have read PLF. Mitch's review of 'Mani' made me chuckle warmly when I read "Patrick had a certain flair for rhapsodic language which he employed on the rocks and cacti that helped enliven the place,...." (I'm possibly being a bit unfair in cutting Mitch's words off at that point). You really need to read the whole book to understand.
David Singerman in his review of M makes an interesting comparison between the different styles of writing in M and ATOF. Take a look AFTER you've read M. I've recently started ATOG & agree with him.
Re msg 1 above:The obituary of Xan Fielding, close friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and SOE agent in Crete during WW2, is to be found in “The Daily Telegraph Second Book of Obituaries: Heroes and Adventurers”, ed. Hugh Massingberd [ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... ] The obit has been retyped at https://patrickleighfermor.wordpress.... including PLF’s OWN testimony to his friend, earlier published on pages 198-201 of Massingberd's excellent book.
Thanks so much ^The Xan Fielding Obituary is very interesting.
I am looking forward to reading his book too.
Funny, isn’t it how one can positively need respite from the intensity of PLF & so take time out in order to read a handful of other books. Then, as if with the blink of an eyelash PLF reappears right back there in the frame! I’ve acquiesced & have just now started BTW&TW; along with an occasional surreptitious dip into “In Tearing Haste”.
^ wrote: "I’ve acquiesced & have just now started BTW&TW; along with an occasional surreptitious dip into “In Tearing Haste”. "Splendid. Do keep us informed.
I have three books to get through and then it'll be straight on to Between the Woods and the Water - I can't wait.
Check this out: For all fans of PLF, at 1600hrs British Summer Time on Monday 22nd June, 2015, UK BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a half-hour programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05zhl3b , presented by John Humphreys.Looks well worth catching either live or for a period after.
^
Superb - thanks so much for highlighting it ^The Man of the Mani
John Humphrys travels to Greece, to the village of Kardamyli in the Mani, to explore the life and work of travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Fermor is arguably the most influential travel writer of the 20th Century. At the age of eighteen he took off, with notebook in hand, on a walk across Europe. During the Second World War he fought in Greece and Crete, and is still remembered in the country today for his daring exploits with the resistance. His most celebrated action came in 1944 when he led a commando operation to abduct the German General Heinrich Kreipe.
In the early 1960s he moved to Greece, to the Southern Peloponnese. He built a house in the village of Kardamyli in the Mani. It was here that he wrote much of his most celebrated work and where he remained until his death in June 2011.
John Humphrys visits Fermor's village to explore the influence that Greece had upon his life and work, and also to consider the impact that he had on the village and the people he lived alongside. John visits Fermor's former home, now in the care of the Benaki Museum in Athens, and discusses the plans for its future. He meets those in the village who met Leigh Fermor when he first arrived in the 1960s - a man in his nineties recalls how they "danced on the tables into the night" - and he hears tales of influential guests, great writers like Bruce Chatwin and John Betjeman, even a King and Queen.
Accompanied by Fermor's book 'Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese', John Humphrys also travels into the deep Mani, one of the remotest, wildest and most isolated regions in Greece.
Producer: Kevin Dawson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.
Whilst visiting Crete last week I read….
Crete: The Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor
Click here to read my review
4/5
Great stuff - thanks for the link about...Dashing for the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor
A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road.
Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend.
The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy's twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes - particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving.
Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron's slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe's abduction; his extensive travels. Some letters contain glimpses of the great and the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.
Can I just ask any PLF fans (I'm currently reading ...& loving, Between the Woods & the Water) WHY did Paddy have such an obsession with monasteries & monastic life? Is this explained anywhere? Thx.
Jonny wrote: "Can I just ask any PLF fans (I'm currently reading ...& loving, Between the Woods & the Water) WHY did Paddy have such an obsession with monasteries & monastic life? Is this explained anywhere? Thx."I don't know for sure but I suspect A Time to Keep Silence will reveal all.
From the French Abbey of St Wandrille to the abandoned and awesome Rock Monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, the celebrated travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor studies the rigorous contemplative lives of the monks and the timeless beauty of their monastic surroundings. In his occasional retreats, the peaceful solitude and the calm enchantment of the monasteries was passed on as a kind of 'supernatural windfall' which A Time to Keep Silence so effortlessly records.
I've just set up a thread...
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Jonny wrote: "Can I just ask any PLF fans (I'm currently reading ...& loving, Between the Woods & the Water) WHY did Paddy have such an obsession with monasteries & monastic life? Is this explained anywhere? Thx."I think he was the epitome of an enquiring mind as well Jonny. I think his readers might be that as well. Would willingly go and visit the places on his journeys.
Nigeyb wrote: "^ Thanks 4triplezedThere's a thread here...
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/..."
Sorry Nigeyb. I actually thought I put it in there but must have changed threads. Too much Christmas cheer :-)
No worries, have an enjoyable day.
I have got a copy of PLF's The Violins of Saint-Jacques https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... for an entire $1.00 2nd hand. His only novel I believe?
Nigeyb wrote: "Wow. Please do report back."Will do. Not sure when I will read it. Only short so should get stuck in soon I suppose.
The Patrick Leigh Fermor Appreciation Society
Books mentioned in this topic
A Time to Keep Silence (other topics)Dashing for the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor (other topics)
Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (other topics)
Between the Woods and the Water (other topics)
http://patrickleighfermor.wordpress.com
Well worth checking regularly, and/or you can sign up for email notifications so you know every time the site is updated.