Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Adam Sisman (Editor)

Handsome, spirited, and well-read, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a wonderful friend. Spanning over seventy years, from ten days before Leigh Fermor's twenty-fifth birthday to his ninety-fourth year, the letters collected here are a testament to his remarkable life. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper, and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner. As in his travel memoirs, Leigh Fermor's letters convey the writer's insatiable lust for life, love of language, and appetite for adventure. Here, he records stories about hunting for Byron's slippers in remote Greece and being dismissed from Somerset Maugham's villa. Each letter radiates warmth and each letter is entertaining, just like Leigh Fermor himself.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Travel, Writing

512 pages, Paperback

Published November 14, 2017

About the author

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, OBE, DSO was 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.

Fermor was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were no unexpected detours in my reading. This collection traces an arc across the adult life of the author, an impressive arc that, he was 96 when he passed. Even when PLF was being a shit, he had a certain elegance about him. Equally erudite and snobbish he lived a remarkable life and apparently everyone wanted him to spend the weekend with them, ready for a night of learned banter, amazing puns and a an infectious spirit which embraced the ancient as well as the hedonistic. Following Whitman (and as of this week, Zimmerman) he contained multitudes and was in my estimation an embodiment of the lore intricate history of the entire Mediterranean. Known for the Great Trudge, his epic walk to Constantinople, he gained immediate fame in WWII by his heroic exploits on Crete. This solidified his placement in the weekending elite.

There are certain themes in the seventy years of letters. Most notably is procrastination. He was also a connoisseur in a near universal sense, something straight out of an ad for Mexican lager. He was hampered by having the best intentions, something which kept from working apace and the his capacity for consequent lament was near limitless. His warmth for Bruce Chatwin has even given me pause, given my recent denouncement.

[Yvonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The word bon vivant was coined to describe Patrick Leigh Fermor. When the fates bless you with charm, good looks, brains, an ear for languages and writing skills, what do you do? You smooch off others your entire life.
I had a love-hate relationship with this book. Because it deals with his
letters, Leigh Fermor is the subject of the book. His writing is heavenly and the man’s charm permeates every page. But so does his selfishness, studied cunning, and flattery. His calling every woman “darling” really grated on me. His real darling had to wait 24 years before he’d marry her, opening her wallet all along.
He’s the kind of man you meet and think he’s swell until two days later when you realize what he’s all about. Then you ditch him. As a reader, you are stuck with him for 437 pages. This book should have been a third shorter.
Throughout my reading, I wondered what all those he lived off or borrowed from really thought of him. Was he tolerated as an amusing court jester or were they really duped?

[Spiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philhellenist, prose stylist, bon vivant, autodidact, professional houseguest: there was no shortage of strings to Patrick Leigh Fermor's bow. This collection of Paddy's letters is obviously less focused than In Tearing Haste, the book of his correspondence with Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire; in compensation, there are many different registers here, as he writes to people such as his wartime comrade Xan Fielding, and Joan Monsell, his longtime lover and later wife.
After reading that previous collection, I was practically begging for more letters Paddy wrote during his time on location in Africa during the filming of John Huston's film Roots of Heaven; this collection obliges with a couple, while annoyingly reprinting a couple of those he wrote to Debo.

[False · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though hardly known in this country, in his native England Patrick Leigh Fermor is practically a cult figure, often said to be the best travel writer of the 20th century. But Fermor — or Paddy, as he was known to just about everyone — was also a famous vacillator and procrastinator, always distractable, unable to meet a deadline, and much of the effort he might have put into books and articles went into letters instead. Adam Sisman, the editor of this volume, guesses that in the course of his very long life (Fermor died in 2011, at 96) he might have written as many as 10,000. Sisman has selected fewer than 200, but they do add up to a biography of sorts — or, rather, a scrapbook of a rich, fascinating life lived mostly out of a suitcase and in a race to the post office. Until he was almost 50, and finally owned a house, Fermor seldom stayed in one place longer than a month. From the time he bolted college at 18 and hiked across Europe, sometimes sleeping in fields, but more likely than not in some of the finest homes and castles laid open to his youthful good-nature and charm. I am sure Bruce Chatwin, a more contemporary travel writer, took many techniques from his style and pages. Living on wits, tavern songs, an appreciation for good drink and exaggerations and lies.

The Fermor who emerges in these letters (and in a conventional biography published in 2012 by Artemis Cooper, granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper, one of his most favored correspondents) was a bundle of contradictions. He was a man of letters but also, like his hero Byron, a man of action — a war hero and a restless adventurer, who even swam the Hellespont when he was 69. He never finished school — his headmaster called him “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness” and tossed him out for holding hands with a shopkeeper’s daughter — but was prodigiously learned, conversant in at least eight languages and able to recite hours of poetry by heart. He was an old-school Englishman, a toff — bespoke clothes, club memberships, plummy accent, riding to hounds — who lived most of his life abroad, broke much of the time, settling down at last in Greece. He was an unabashed snob and social climber who also relished the company of peasants and shepherds. He was a famous ladies’ man and at the same time deeply in love with his wife, who patiently overlooked his wanderings. (She even lent him money for prostitutes.) And he was a tireless socializer, beloved by an enormous circle of friends, who often yearned for solitude and sometimes hid out in monasteries.

Fermor was, as he freely admitted, a shameless scrounger of invitations and of houses he could borrow. (Invited once for lunch at Somerset Maugham’s villa on Cap Ferrat, he reportedly showed up with five cabin trunks, intending to stay for weeks. Maugham dispatched him the next morning.) His letters were, among other things, a way of keeping up with his friends and repaying their hospitality. Many of them are not thank-you notes in the traditional sense, but rather performance pieces of a sort, meant to charm and entertain. The book also includes a great many letters of apology, written in “sackcloth and ashes,” as he liked to say: to his long-suffering publisher, to friends he feels guilty about neglecting (he procrastinated about letter-writing, too) and one to a girlfriend (John Huston’s wife, as it happened) informing her that he may or may not have given her crabs: “I was suddenly alerted by what felt like the beginnings of troop-movements in the fork, but on scrutiny, expecting an aerial view of general mobilization, there was nothing to be seen, not even a scout, a spy or a dispatch rider.”

In his introduction Sisman says that the letters are written in a “free-flowing prose that is easier and more entertaining to read” than that of Fermor’s travel books, which is true up to a point. The books are so original they take some getting used to. The most famous of them is a three-volume account of a journey Fermor undertook in 1933, when at age 18 he determined to walk all the way from the Netherlands to Constantinople, as he romantically insisted on calling Istanbul. It took him a little over a year, in part because he kept making side trips and detours. He slept in barns and hayricks, and even outdoors once in a while, wrapped in a greatcoat, but more often he stayed in the castles and country houses of Central European nobility, who passed him along, like a mascot, with letters of introduction. He got on not so much by his wits as by his charm, and with youthful avidity he took in everything he saw and heard.

But Fermor didn’t begin writing the first of these volumes, “A Time of Gifts,” until some 40 years later, and the third volume remained unfinished at his death. His account is both immediate and shadowed by the passage of time, evoking a vanished world all but erased by war and the blight of communism. The style is ornate and layered, syntactically complicated, and it sometimes preens right up to the edge of overwriting before pulling itself back with an arresting image or self-deflating observation. Fermor’s friend Lawrence Durrell once described it as “truffled” and dense with “plumage.” The letters, by contrast, are spontaneous and effortless-seeming, and sparkle — a little too brightly sometimes — with puns and jokes and with the inexhaustible charm that made Fermor such a welcome guest (and bedmate). For American readers his constant name-dropping and favor-currying may prove a little off-putting: The letters are crammed with mention of the rich and titled, who all seem to be marrying and divorcing one another. Sisman, the author of exceptionally good biographies of Boswell, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carré, here in a subsidiary role, provides copious and helpful footnotes not only uncovering Fermor’s many buried literary allusions but also explaining who is who. A typical example, suggesting both the scope and almost incestuous ingrownness of Fermor’s acquaintance: “Professor Derek Ainslie Jackson (1906-82), nuclear physicist and a jockey who rode in the Grand National three times. Among his six wives were Pamela Mitford, Janetta Woolley and Barbara Skelton. He left Janetta for her half sister, Angela Culme-Seymour.”

The best of Fermor’s letters, by and large, are to three women with whom he was not romantically linked but nevertheless formed deep attachments: Lady Diana Cooper; Ann Fleming, wife of Ian, the James Bond novelist; and Deborah Mitford, youngest of the famed Mitford sisters, Duchess of Devonshire and châtelaine of Chatsworth, the great country house where he loved to spend Christmas and rub elbows with the likes of Prince Charles and Camilla. All three women, not coincidentally, were splendid letter writers themselves, and like all great correspondences, Fermor’s with them took on a life and texture of its own. You sometimes feel that they enjoyed one another on the page even more than they could have in person.

It goes without saying that nobody writes letters like this anymore, and it’s a loss. Fermor could never have texted or tweeted, not just because he was a bit of a fogey, but for the same reason he often let weeks pass before answering a letter. He needed to wait until he knew what he wanted to say.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fermor’s letters to many people written over many decades are charming, erudite, affectionate, amusing, but they all sound the same. He had a style and he had Style. He was part of that exodus out of postwar rainy, dreary, ration book England who were looking for fun in Europe and the Middle East. He was friends with many rich and titled people, though he was neither, and something of a professional house guest. He struggled with his writing. His letters are entertaining and capture a slice of social history when people who could were living it up.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 3 out of 5]

He's one charming fella. This is a chronicle of his long life of friendship, romance, and travel writing as told by his legendarily warm correspondences shooting to all corners of the world.

I love Fermor's style, but I particularly love the way he wrote letters, particularly at a time without multimedia and instant communication. Whatever the subject or context of his letter, he's always looking to paint a portrait with his words, then maybe tell a story second, then gossip and complainingly self-flagellate for his procrastination third and fourth.

He's a well-traveled and fascinating man and I still barely feel like I got the full picture of him despite an intimate, but overall fairly specific view of him (the way he talked to his friends and loved ones). This makes the whole collection fairly one-note as there's very little variety in the types of one-sided conversations he's carrying on.

Try not to seethe with jealousy as he talks about how cheap rent is as he goes couchsurfing in Greek Villas and palazzos while surviving on magazine writing. He's a wonderful custodian of his land, and it is enjoyable to read about his travels even in high society both at home and abroad, but eventually, the glamour faded. I would have liked much more insight into his writing process beyond the constant refrain that he's procrastinating and his editor is going to yell at him.

I eventually got tired of piecing together conversations usually about one of three topics and keeping all the threads straight--and I can't imagine anyone actually succeeding at that for the entire 500~ pages, but it's impossible to read this and not to come under the spell of one of the 20th century's great bon vivants.

[Anu]

The writers's writer. Love his books, his writing is a feast, such an inspiring man. Incredible depth of knowlege. He make just about every other writer pale for me, I've read all his works bar one. Just keep re-reading them all. I can see he probably isn't for everyone, but he certainly makes my synapses glow. As a writer I regard him as a mentor, my whole approach to writing has been improved, he's taken me to levels I didn't anticipate or even know existed. Some writers are bread & lard, others are gourmet lunches with vino, PLF's is a groaning board feast, rich, every sentence a world in itself. I also love the way he showcases the social world of writers he moved in from the 30's through to the 00's. A fellow Hellenophile.

[Annalise Kraines · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a SLOGGGGGGG I was so bored the whole time. It's my own fault, really. I saw this book in a bookstore like 5 years ago, and I decided the cover was pretty enough to add to my TBR. But what happens when you read a book that's a person you know nothing about writing letters to his intimate friends who you also know nothing about? You get super bored. There were some delightful little morsels of funny, creative quips and some stories that captured my attention. But it took me literally a MONTH to read this, which never happens.