posted on 14 Jan 2019

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, the story of his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the early-1930s when he was just eighteen, must rank as one of the most extraordinary travel books written in the twentieth century.

With a monthly allowance of £4.00 wired on to a series of prearranged stops, PLF set out with a rucksack, a pair of hobnail boots, a volume of Horace and an anthology of English verse. He boarded a Dutch steamer at Irongate Wharf and left London in a squall of foul weather on the 9th December 1933, as the “Trafalgar Square fountains twirled like mops” in the gale-force winds and “the clubmen of Pall Mall, with china tea and anchovy toast in mind, were scuttling for sanctuary up the steps of their clubs”. The steamer Stadhouder Willem lurched back and forth on its moorings on a high tide. The rain stopped. “Above the drifts of smoke there was a quickly-fading glimpse of restless pigeons and a few domes and many steeples and some bone-white Palladian belfries flying rain-washed against a sky of gunmetal and silver and tarnished brass.”

Written with almost hallucinatory recall – the preceding passages are typical – when Leigh Fermor was in his late-50s and early-60s, Gifts was first published in 1977. It was followed by a second volume Between the Woods and the Water, in 1986. Leigh Fermor worked sporadically for decades on a third volume but it defeated him. The unstoppable torrents of opulent prose that characterise the first volume – sometimes almost impossibly rich, but never stilted or congested – seemed to have deserted him and the trilogy was finally completed from Leigh Fermor’s sprawling notes and drafts and false starts by his biographer and his literary executor. The final volume, The Broken Road, was published a couple of years after Leigh Fermor’s death in 2011 aged 96.

I read Gifts again for the third or fourth time over the Christmas period, having entirely forgotten that the first fifty or sixty pages actually take place in the run-up to, and during Christmas. And it is only with these successive rereadings that I have begun to understand what makes the book so remarkable. For I don’t think the journey itself, stupendous though that was, is the book’s primary subject. What Leigh Fermor is really concerned with, I think, is memory – memory and recollection and the passion and vigour and innocence of youth.

It is, of course, also about a lost Europe. When Leigh Fermor lopes through the snowy fields of Holland or the fairy tale forests and villages of Germany he is traversing a Europe that in many respects is little changed from the Middle Ages, but which trembles (did he know it) on the cusp of cataclysm. His first sighting of swastika emblazoned flags and brownshirts gathered in heavily falling snow in a the small public square of an unremarkable German town still comes as a shock, a dash of iced water.

But what makes the book so remarkable is that virtually every page is crowded not just with memories but with different layers of memories. Europe is seen through layers of art; Dutch interiors and Breughel landscapes come to life; the “ostlers, butchers, barrel-makers, and apprentices” echo the peasant faces seen in the brutally explicit scourgings and crucifixions of German medieval art – “wounds fester, bones break through the flesh” and “there is a hint of gangrene and putrefaction in the air” in these grim pictures. It is seen through layers of literature – Romance and quest literature, myth, magic and fairy stories, the Nibelungenlied. And it is seen through teeming layers of history – the Peasants’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Goths and Vandals and Burgundians who warred against or sometimes allied with the Roman Empire. And overlaying all of this, there are the memories and recollections of an ageing man looking back beyond his war time experiences, back to the innocence and self-discovery of youth – to the romance, the Wanderjahre, the Winterreise of a young man in a now largely vanished Europe.

But as well as art and literature and history, at various times Leigh Fermor’s own irrepressibly fertile imagination  also intrudes, adding a further rich layer to what is already almost sensory overload. One marvellous example of this occurs to me. At times Leigh Fermor sleeps in barns, bedding down beside the cattle like a wandering medieval scholar or a journeyman apprentice; at others he sponges shamelessly from aristocratic hosts in magnificent mountain-top schlosses. At one point he stays with a wealthy family of White Russians who had fled from Estonia to Munich following the loss of their estates at the end of the First World War. He recalls the time spent with them and the friendships struck up with their sons. He remembers the chaos and cruelties of the First World War (which had ended less than two decades previously). But when writing about the parents his imagination takes flight, adding grace notes, almost like the ornamentation one might hear in baroque keyboard music:

“Their parents were captivating survivals of the decades when Paris and the South of France were full of northern grandees seeking refuge from the birch trees and conifers and the frozen lakes of their white and innumerable acres. I could see them, in imagination, lit by the clustering globes of gasoliers on the steps of opera houses and spanking along avenues of lime trees behind carefully matched greys – I could almost catch the twinkle of the scarlet and canary spokes. They would be cantering among the tombs of the Appian Way or gliding from palace to palace in wonderful clothes, under a maze of bridges.”

This is not to say – not quite – that A Time of Gifts is a perfect book. I had a vague recollection that it sagged somewhat about halfway through, and it does. The forward momentum seems to stall and there are extended disquisitions on arcane history, architecture, and more that go on just a little too long. I think Leigh Fermor more or less admits this to be the case at one or two points. And I still think the first sixty pages or so to be the best part of the book – the most flawlessly sustained.

I’m not a traveller and thus a full grasp of the scale and geography of Leigh Fermor’s undertaking will always be beyond me, as will his grounding in the classics, medieval history, ecclesiastical architecture, European art (from Early Medieval to Gothic to the Renaissance), and the enormous swathes of memorised poetry and prose deriving from a particular kind of upper class, English, public school education of the 1920s. Nonetheless, each time I read A Time of Gifts I am astonished afresh. Even allowing for its faults here and there, this book was Leigh Fermor’s unrepeatable masterpiece and it offers a lifetime’s reading.

 

Alun Severn

January 2019