- 1 Despite its author’s own categorisation of the book as ‘journalism’, Midnight in the Garden of Goo (...)
1In the preface to the 1995 paperback edition of his bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the American author John Berendt acknowledged a crucial failure of rhetoric in the earlier hardback. He had originally placed the author’s note, explaining that this was a work of nonfiction, at the end of the book. The result, he wrote, was that ‘quite a few readers got halfway through – some even finished the book – before they discovered that what they’d been reading was journalism, not fiction’ (Berendt 1995, preface para.11) Berendt’s failure adequately to signal the arch-genre affiliation of his book is indicative of a powerful binary governing the way readers approach texts. As Peter Hulme explains, ‘[w]e read books either as fiction or non-fiction’ (Hulme and Youngs 2007, 7). In this, we deploy what Siegfried J. Schmidt and Helmut Hauptmeier call either the ‘fact convention’ or the ‘aesthetic convention’ (Schmidt and Hauptmeier 1982). The former is the mode in which we receive most texts and most interactions. If a newspaper headline announces ‘Queen Dead!’, we assume that the Queen has actually died; if a friend tells us she saw a lion during her safari holiday, we assume that she really did see a lion – or if we suspect that she did not, we do not accept her statement as an aesthetic artefact; we instead identify it as a lie. When we read a novel or watch a play or film, however, we know that the characters do not exist beyond the parameters of the text and that the events depicted have never actually taken place; and yet we do not regard the author as a liar (the idea of the ‘travel liar’ has a long history, see, for example, Adams 1962). This is because, in our reception, the aesthetic convention has replaced the fact convention: we can thus accept things we know to be ‘made up’ entirely on the basis of their aesthetic or entertainment value and without hostility or confusion.
2This is not to say that hybrid texts do not exist; they do, manifestly. Accurate descriptions of actual places derived from authorial experience frequently feature in novels; we enjoy the frisson provided by the knowledge that a roman-à-clef is based on ‘real’ people and events; and fictional elements surely creep into many primarily nonfiction narratives. What is lacking, however, is an established categorisation between ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’, an adequate language with which to conceptualise such hybridity, a suitable third convention between fact and aesthetic. And so, a text which in some way transgresses the binary distinction, or which is somehow unclear in its designation, risks being mis-received by readers – the very fate which befell the first edition of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
- 2 Interestingly, more than two centuries before John Berendt, Jonathan Swift deliberately placed his (...)
3There is an imperative, then, for a nonfiction author whose work is constructed with aesthetic intent, rather than for merely informational purposes, to ensure that their text is received ‘correctly’ by its readers. To do so, they may deploy certain rhetorical devices to signal their apparent truth-telling – the simplest of which is a blunt statement: this is a true story (though as John Berendt discovered, the effectiveness of this particular device depends on its placement2). This rhetoric of truth-telling is particularly significant to travel writing, which, according to Mary Baine Campbell, ‘is generically aimed at the truth’ (Baine Campbell 1988, 2). Travel writers gain their authority, Campbell says – and this may be a rather depressing idea for practitioners – not from talent, but ‘only and crucially from experience’ (Baine Campbell 1988, 3). They need, in other words, to have been where they say they’ve been; and ‘[i]f they are subsequently discovered not to have been, their work is discredited’ (Hulme and Youngs 2007, 3).
4For Paul Fussell, travel books are ‘a subspecies of memoir [which] claims literal validity by constant reference to the actuality’ (Fussel 1980, 202). For Mark Cocker, ‘one of the reasons [that travel writing] commands attention in a way that fiction might not, is that it purports to be a record of fact’ (Cocker 1992, 72). For Carl Thompson, a modern travel book is ‘the first-person, ostensibly non-fictional narrative of travel’ (Thompson 2011, 26). And for Jan Borm, it describes ‘a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one and the same’ (Borm 2004, 17). Travel writing, then, always involves what Peter Hulme calls ‘an explicit or implicit truth claim’ (Hulme and Youngs 2007, 3). To function properly, it needs to be recognised as nonfiction.
- 3 The complexities and ambiguities produced by the novelisation process in Midnight in the Garden of (...)
5And yet, as Carl Thompson points out of aesthetically constructed travel writing, in utilising literary devices, ‘travel writers are arguably not so much reconstructing as constructing their experiences; inevitably what they offer their readers is a somewhat fictionalised rendering of their journeys’ (Thompson 2011, 28). The extended dialogues subjected to opaque translation processes; the coherent linearity of the journeys described; the neat thematic coincidences; and the very richness of the depictions: it may all be literally incredible as nonfiction. The book may run the risk of mis-reception or discrediting if its incredibility is not offset by an effective rhetoric of truth-telling. This tension has existed since at least the fourteenth century and the appearance of the notoriously fraudulent Travels of John Mandeville, a notionally nonfictional text typified by ‘the aesthetically justified lie’ (Baine Campbell 1988, 145). Ever since, as Campbell puts it, travel writing has hovered ‘at the brink of the fictional abyss’ (Baine Campbell 1988, 147). This is certainly true of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (as Berendt acknowledges, he has presented the narrative in a ‘novelized style’; and any reader deploying a modicum of criticality must at very least recognise that the book’s extended dramatic dialogues cannot be strictly verbatim accounts3). But it is still more true of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s celebrated 1977 travel book, A Time of Gifts.
6In A Time of Gifts and its two sequels, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road, pronounced incredibility and robust truth-telling rhetoric engage in a complex and ultimately unresolved wrangle, leaving readers themselves dangling in the conceptual void between fiction and nonfiction. This article focuses on the rhetorical devices that Leigh Fermor deploys to establish the nonfiction status of his text and considers their ambiguous and destabilising effect in an incredible text. It also draws on the author’s archive to examine the mechanics by which one of those devices – the use of ostensibly authentic diary excerpts embedded within the text – has been produced, revealing a process of fictionalisation which further troubles the nonfiction status under which the book is conventionally received.
7A Time of Gifts describes the first part of a journey on foot, ‘from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople’. This journey began in late 1933, when Leigh Fermor was just 18. He reached his destination in January 1935. However, A Time of Gifts itself – which describes the journey only as far as the Hungarian border – did not appear until 1977, when its author was 62. The sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, carrying the narrative as far as the marches of Bulgaria, was published in 1986. The project remained unfinished at Leigh Fermor’s death in 2011, and the incomplete final part of the trilogy was published as The Broken Road in 2013. The extended delay between journey and publication is itself unusual, as has been noted by Grzegorz Moroz: ‘Most travel writers (and particularly professional travel writers) write their travel accounts and publish their travel books swiftly after the journey’s end’ (Moroz 2016, 42). But the nature of A Time of Gifts’ genesis and production makes it more unusual still.
8In the late 1930s, Leigh Fermor reportedly made a brief first attempt to write a book based on what he called his ‘Great Trudge’, but it came to nothing (Cooper 2012, 116). He eventually picked up the project in the 1960s, when he was already established as a travel writer, thanks to a 1950 book about the Caribbean, The Traveller’s Tree, and the first of two books about Greece, Mani (published in 1958, to be followed by Roumeli in 1966). This return to the earlier journey was prompted by a 1962 request from the American travel magazine, Holiday, for a 2,000-word article on ‘The Pleasures of Walking’. This commission ultimately led to an 84,000-word manuscript, recounting the entire 1933–35 journey. This in turn prompted an extensive rewriting process covering the earlier sections of the journey, which resulted first in A Time of Gifts and then Between the Woods and the Water. The edited latter part of the original 1960s manuscript (actually written before both A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) eventually became The Broken Road.
9A delay of more than four decades between the completion of the journey itself and initial publication obviously complicates some of the common assumptions about the nonfiction status of travel writing. Jan Borm’s presupposition ‘that author, narrator and principal character are but one and the same’ cannot strictly apply here: the principal character is a teenager; the author is a man in his sixties; and which of these two figures is the narrator is not always clear. Leigh Fermor himself directly acknowledged this in his original working title for the project: ‘Parallax’ – a term describing the apparent difference in the appearance of a single object when viewed from different positions. Indeed, for Grzegorz Moroz the metaphor of the parallax is appropriate for A Time of Gifts itself, which, he argues, should be ‘seen through the lens of a memoir-like type of focalization of the past, where memory is used in a much less mimetic and much more creative way than in the bulk of travel writing’ (Moroz 2016, 42). It is the ‘parallax effect’, for Moroz, that gives the book its particular dramatic and nostalgic power, with its shifts in perspective ‘between the two figures of Patrick Leigh Fermor’ – the boy doing the walking, and the middle-aged man doing the writing (Moroz 2016, 45). Similarly, Joanna Kavenna argues that it is the lengthy delay between travelling and writing which has provided A Time of Gifts with its remarkable quality, an ‘epic accumulation, the weathering of an individual self through time and experience, the deep and broad spectrum of impulses, recollections and coincidences’ (Kavenna 2014, 151). The apparent shifts in perspective between man and boy, according to Kavenna, amount to a deliberate revealing of a ‘fragile mechanism’ – a ‘pretty risky enterprise’, and yet one which Leigh Fermor is ‘charming, ironic and wise enough to carry […] off’ (Kavenna 2014, 156).
10These scholarly responses echo those of other readers to the obvious incredibility of A Time of Gifts and its sequels as uncomplicated nonfiction. Reviewing the book on its 1977 publication, Dervla Murphy doubted its absolute veracity, but declared that ‘it doesn’t matter a damn whether he is describing it as he remembers it in 1934 on in 1964 or simply as he fancies it might have been in 1634’ (quoted in Cooper 2012, 364). And Leigh Fermor’s biographer Artemis Cooper is similarly relaxed about his frequent ‘extensions’ and ‘elaborations’ (Cooper 2012, 74). But these readings and responses, I would argue, overlook one of the most notable features of the book: just how carefully and persistently the author deploys the rhetoric of truth-telling. Unlike the first edition of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, there can be no mistake about designation here; Leigh Fermor is at pains from the very start to ensure that readers receive the text as nonfiction. He does this via four specific rhetorical devices: an epistolary opening; the use of an apparently autobiographical narrator-persona; frequent declarations of the limits of memory; and the presence of his own travel diary as an intertext. I will discuss each of these in turn, with particular attention to the latter two which, I argue, are most significant to revealing A Time of Gifts’ pronounced instability as a notionally nonfictional text.
- 4 A counter example to illustrate the significance of genre designation to reception is Bruce Chatwi (...)
11John Berendt’s experience with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil notwithstanding, contemporary readers of commercially published books typically have the appropriate mode of reception – fact convention or aesthetic convention – in place from the outset, thanks to the perceived norms of the relevant genre. Novels, novellas and short stories are customarily received as fiction; biographies, memoirs, history books and, of course, travel writing are received as nonfiction. A Time of Gifts has, from the outset, been categorised by its publishers as a travel book. Most of its readers across the decades will, then, have approached it with fact convention engaged before they even open the book4. Once they do, they will have the nonfiction designation reconfirmed on the very first page with the epistolary address of the ‘Introductory Letter to Xan Fielding’.
12Xan Fieldling was a long-time friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor. They had met as secret service operatives in occupied Crete during World War II. They travelled together after the war and remained close until Fielding’s death in 1991. The ‘Introductory Letter’ serves several purposes in A Time of Gifts. In its content, it provides a brief autobiography, covering Leigh Fermor’s childhood and teens up to the start of his walk – necessary background to the travelogue that follows. As a lifelong friend, we can reasonably assume that Xan Fielding was already familiar with these biographical details, therefore the ‘Introductory Letter’ cannot be regarded as an authentic address to its named recipient: it is, in fact, directed to Leigh Fermor’s wider readership, rather than to its single named recipient (‘Dear Xan’). The author’s decision to disguise an autobiographical introduction as a personal letter is, on one level, a simple aesthetic choice: it is a more unusual, and perhaps attractive, way to structure essential background information than a conventional introductory note.
- 5 The epistolary opening subsequently resurfaces, almost certainly under Leigh Fermor’s direct influ (...)
13The epistolary introduction was a well-established convention in pre-20th century travel writing, with the opening letter sometimes addressed to a named individual, perhaps a patron or a mentor (as in the case of Richard Warner’s early nineteenth-century British travelogues), sometimes to an unidentified ‘Dear Sir’ (as in Daniel Defoe’s 1724 A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain), and sometimes directly to the general readership (as in Wilkie Collins’ 1851 travel book, Rambles Beyond Railways). This formal element had, however, become less common by the time A Time of Gifts was published, so its use here is perhaps a self-conscious archaism, in keeping with Leigh Fermor’s self-conscious and faintly Byronic persona of scholar-adventurer5. But the epistolary opening to a travel book also serves a considered rhetorical purpose in relation to truth-telling. It emerged, as Daniel Carey points out, in the early modern period as part of an arsenal of rhetorical techniques deployed by travel writers to establish credibility and ‘[t]o protect themselves against accusations of untruthfulness’ (Carey 2019, 526). A letter, directly identifying the narrative which follows it as a factual account, and addressed to an identifiable actual person, is a powerful variation of the simple statement of veracity mentioned above: this is a true story. Furthermore, as Carey points out, for early modern travel writers, ‘the standing of the addressee also served to lend credence to the text, on the assumption that an author would not fail to report the truth punctiliously to those in reputation’ (Carey 2019, 530). Something of this, I would argue, still applies today: the addressee in A Time of Gifts is, like Leigh Fermor himself, an established author, war hero and member of a thoroughly networked upper-middle-class clique – the sort of person who has long dominated Britain’s literary, social and political circuits, and the sort of person to whom one might be expected to report the truth punctiliously.
- 6 Gulliver’s Travels, of course, parodies this very technique of truthfulness, opening with a letter (...)
14The epistolary opening also reinforces the idea, central to Jan Borm’s conception of the nonfiction travel book, of a readerly presupposition that ‘author, narrator and principal character’ are wholly united in the text. A novelist – even a novelist who acknowledges an autobiographical quality in their work – does not typically provide a preface directly referring to the protagonist of the narrative in the first person. To do so would, surely, be to invite genre confusion and possible mis-reception. But the ‘I’ of the ‘Introductory Letter’ in A Time of Gifts is plainly indistinguishable from the ‘I’ that appears in the body of the book – or at least from the older version of the two ‘Patrick Leigh Fermors’ identified therein by both Moroz and Kavenna. That ‘I’ gives apparently factual biographical details and addresses them to an actual person of some public standing. We read on, then, beyond the end of the ‘Introductory Letter’, with fact convention fully engaged, assuming that the ‘me’ that appears in the first sentence of Chapter One is the same person who signed off the preceding letter with his actual Greek address and personal initial: ‘Kardamyli 1977 P.’ (Leigh Fermor 1977, 24). This, the author has very firmly signalled to us, is a true story – though we should remember, as Daniel Carey has pointed out of early modern travel writing, ‘that rhetorical techniques employed by travellers to convey their truthfulness’ – the epistolary form amongst them – ’could be readily exploited by authors of fictional narratives’ (Carey 2016, 7)6.
15One of the most notable features – and one of the great pleasures – of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s oeuvre in general, and A Time of Gifts in particular, is the sheer richness of its descriptions. In both style and detail, this is travel writing at its most ornate and complex. The accounts of particular scenes and places – the Munich Hofbräuhaus at full capacity; a Hungarian Easter celebration; a village inn; a party; and much more besides – provide a wholly immersive reading experience and a powerful sense of ‘being there’ with the author, in the moment. The aforementioned Hofbräuhaus scene extends across five pages, laden with details – of people, architecture, action and atmosphere:
The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks […]. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elephantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinée idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blond curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal […]. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out instantaneously on cheek and brow (Leigh Fermor 1977, 104).
16The above, to be clear, is just one small excerpt from the extended scene, which continues in much the same style and detail throughout.
17A Time of Gifts is, as has been established by its genre designation and opening epistle, a work of nonfiction in which author and protagonist are ostensibly the same person, therefore readers are invited to assume that such descriptions are a kind of eyewitness testimony (and if the book were not so belated in its composition, there would also be an implicit suggestion that were we to visit the Hofbräuhaus ourselves, we might encounter something very similar – something that narrative travel writing shares with guidebooks).
18For Daniel Carey, eyewitnessing is emphasised by travel writers ‘as a criterion of truth’ – part, that is, of the rhetoric which ensures a book’s reception as nonfiction. ‘The impression of conveying truth’, Carey writes, relies in part ‘on the power of describing ‘circumstance’, or what we might call situatedness, in vivid fashion’ (Carey 2016, 4). However, I would argue that the opposite may actually be true – that the heightened specificity of the kind which typifies the Hofbräuhaus scene in fact risks drawing attention to travel writing’s semi-fictionality, and thus undermining – possibly fatally – whatever truth claim and experience-based authority it possesses. If a reader pauses to consider their own most recent visit to a busy bar, for example, it is highly unlikely that they will be able to recall the sort of granular detail which features in the excerpt above. And yet, heightened specificity and observational granularity of this sort is a common – perhaps even a defining – feature of travel writing. If readerly criticality is not forestalled, then, the incredibility of a travel book as nonfiction may become unavoidably obvious: imagination must have replaced memory at points in the construction of the narrative here, to a greater or lesser degree (we might, perhaps, allow some benefit of the doubt if we understood the author to have been making notes on the spot; but in this specific case, Leigh Fermor makes it clear that there were no such notes: his diary was stolen from a youth hostel, never to be recovered, while he was actually in the Hofbräuhaus, and the scene was not written up until decades later!).
19How is it, then, that readers are still able to receive travel writing of this sort as nonfiction, when simply attempting to recall the fine details of their own most recent visit to a bar should be enough to reveal the intruding fictionality? Susan Bassnett sees an element of reader-writer ‘collusion’ here. She remarks of supposedly translated dialogues in travel writing – Robert Byron or William Dalrymple engaged in witty repartee with Turkish shopkeepers, for example – that they are ‘so often patently invented that authenticity begins to dissolve’. Yet readers appear routinely to turn a blind eye to this, and thus, according to Bassnett, ‘[w]e could say that one of the bases upon which travel writing rests, is the collusion of writer and reader in a notion of authenticity, that is, the reader agrees to suspend disbelief and go along with the writer’s pretence’ (Bassnett 1998, 35). But ‘collusion’ suggests both a symmetry in the reader-writer relationship, and a conscious readerly decision. I would argue that readers do not have the degree of agency in the suspension of their disbelief which Bassnett implies here. Leigh Fermor’s readers may react with distress on discovering that the horse which Leigh Fermor rides in Between the Woods and the Water was invented in case readers ‘might be getting bored of me just plodding along’ (Cooper 2012, 65), and when presented with specific examples of the relatively minor fictionalising elements that may feature in travel books (reordered chronology, composite characters and so on) they may express general disapproval (see Hannigan 2021, 183–185). This suggests that we are dealing less with a joint enterprise in collusion, than a one-sided writerly exploitation of readerly credulity.
20One reason for this may simply be the limitations in our capacity to receive texts – the binary division between fiction and nonfiction, fact convention and aesthetic convention, mentioned above. Without a third option, readers must receive a book that manifestly is not a novel as nonfiction. Another reason is the way that travel writers deploy rhetorical techniques to offset the incredible – and indeed impossible – detail of their supposedly eyewitness testimony. Perhaps counterintuitively, the most effective of these techniques may be to draw attention to the limits of their own memory and experience.
21A Time of Gifts is typified by passages of excessively heightened specificity such as that quoted above. But it is also typified by the author’s repeated stressing of the limits of his own recall. Throughout the book, vividly constructed scenes are interspersed with apparent lacunae, of which the following are just a few examples:
[…] the actual doings of the next few days emerge from the general glow in a disjointed and haphazard way (35).
Except for the snow-covered landscape and the clouds and the tree-bordered flow of the Merwede, the next two days have left little behind them but the names of the towns I slept in (36).
I can’t remember under what monstrous eiderdown or in what dank cell I slept that night (38).
Nothing remains from that first day in Germany but a confused memory of woods and snow (42).
And at the beginning of Chapter Three, this is extended further:
Apart from that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine-bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz: the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain: a tower or two, a row of gargoyles, some bridges and pinnacles and buttresses and the perspective of an arcade dwindling into shadow (69).
After listing further confused fragments, Leigh Fermor acknowledges that constructing a coherent travel narrative from such patchy recollections is ‘like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones’ (69). Surely this is authentic nonfiction: an aging author, at work in the 1960s or 1970s, accurately conveying the imperfect nature of his own recollection of a journey undertaken as a teenager. This is where, for Joanna Kavenna, A Time of Gifts is ‘as much about what is forgotten, what has been obscured by the passage of time, as what has been recalled and recorded’ (Kavenna 2014, 150); and this is where the ‘parallax effect’ identified by Grzegorz Moroz seemingly comes into play. But the rhetorical purpose of this acknowledgement of memory’s limits is revealed at the end of Chapter Three’s opening paragraph: ‘The cloud lifts at last in the middle of the Ludwigshafen-Mannheim bridge’ (Leigh Fermor 1977, 68). What follows is an abrupt return to apparently total recall with all its heightened specificity.
22Another apparent failure of memory is signalled at the start of Chapter Four: ‘Nipping and eager, the air bites shrewdly and the snow and the wind have obliterated all the details of the journey to Munich’ (103). This is a particularly significant instance of this rhetorical device, for just one page later the epic Hofbräuhaus scene begins. Having repeatedly reassured readers that he is scrupulously reliant on actual memory by seemingly revealing its patchiness, the incredible detail that follows is offset; the fact convention remains the governing mode for readers; the text is received as nonfiction. Novelists do not, after all, customarily inform readers that they have skipped a chunk of the narrative, or left it barely sketched, because at that point their imagination failed.
23Acknowledgement of the limits of memory – and the closely related device of acknowledging the limits of experience – are key nonfiction signifiers. Half-a-millennia before Patrick Leigh Fermor, the author of the notoriously fraudulent Travels of John Mandeville made effective use of such devices. The Travels includes a great detail of heightened specificity, and (pseudo)eyewitness testimony. But Mandeville also, significantly, stresses the limits of his experience on several occasions. He claims to have approached the gates of the Earthly Paradise, but not actually to have entered it: ‘I cannot speak properly [of it]’, he writes, ‘for I have not been there; and that I regret’ (Moseley 2005, 184). The signal is clear here: the absence of a description of the Earthly Paradise is not a failure of authorial imagination; it is a failure of experience. Readers are thus further encouraged to receive the fantastical things described elsewhere in the text as fact. As Mary Baine Campbell points out, ‘Mandeville must be received as truth (where he is so received) because he sounds like truth’ (Baine Campbell 1988, 127). The same applies to A Time of Gifts, with its carefully constructed pattern of alternating amnesia and recall.
24There remains one final technique by which Patrick Leigh Fermor signals the truth claim, the nonfictional status, of A Time of Gifts: the presence of his own travel journal as an intertext.
25Within any travel book, direct reference to note-taking during the journey may itself be read as a powerful rhetorical signal of reliability, a way to evidence eyewitnessing and, once again, to assuage any readerly doubts raised by the incredibility of the ‘situatedness’, the heightened particularity of the descriptions. We, as readers, may not be able to recall much about our last visit to a bar, but if we had had a notebook in hand, and had been recording our impressions in the moment, we would surely be able to reconstruct the experience in greater, and more accurate detail. As Zoë Kinsley notes, ‘[t]he journal format foregrounds the relationship between the physical progress of a traveller’s journey and the passing of time’ (Kinsley 2019, 415); and when this format features – either in direct quotation or merely in oblique reference – in the final published text, both the quality of the eyewitnessing and the general truth claim are firmly reinforced. This is not to say that the presence of, or references to, diaries and journals in travel books are wholly uncomplicated as signals of reliability. Entire travel books are sometimes presented using a diary form, but while in some cases the published text is an edited version of an actual diary kept during the journey it describes – Dervla Murphy’s 1965 book Full Tilt, for example (Hannigan 2021, 132) – in other cases the form is an aesthetically constructed artifice – Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937) being a prime example here. And Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is replete with both references to notetaking in the moment, and extensive excerpts purportedly from the author’s ‘moleskine’ notebooks – and yet, as discussed above, Chatwin insisted that The Songlines was a novel. But these complicating examples notwithstanding, the presence of diaries and journals in and around a travel book surely has a powerful effect of truth-signalling.
26There are a number of direct references to diary-keeping in A Time of Gifts. We first see the author filling his journal right at the very start, aboard the ship that carries him from London to Holland: ‘I took a new and handsomely-bound journal out of my rucksack, opened it on the green baize under a pink-shaded lamp and wrote the first entry while the cruets and the wine bottle rattled busily in their stands’ (Leigh Fermor 1977, 31). The rhetoric of reliability is powerfully at play here. The reference to diary-writing is itself embedded in heightened specificity (the green baize, the pink lampshade, the rattling cruets), and the implicit suggestion is that these details – surely impossible to recall more than 30 years later – are authentic: they may have been noted down in that handsomely-bound journal, right there and then. This effect is instantaneous on the reader, so it is unlikely to be recalled, or countered, when we discover, many pages later, that the diary in question was stolen in Munich, and therefore cannot have provided an aide-mémoire during the preparation of the book.
27The stolen journal was replaced with the famous ‘Green Diary’. Leigh Fermor later mislaid this journal too, having left it with his sometime lover, Balaşa Cantacuzino, in Romania. Remarkably, she preserved the journal throughout the post-War upheavals in Southeast Europe and returned it to the author in 1965 when his work on A Time of Gifts was already underway. In the final two chapters of the book, Chapter Ten, ‘Slovakia: A Step Forward at Last’, and Chapter Eleven, ‘The Marches of Hungary’, this original record abruptly intrudes as an intertext. The Green Diary, as Leigh Fermor himself acknowledges was not consistently kept during the journey. It features an early sustained section that ‘breaks off for a month or two, then starts up again in notes, stops once more, and blossoms out again in proper diary form’ (Leigh Fermor 1977, 261). In fact, just twelve full days of walking at the very start of the journal are ‘in proper diary form’; the rest of the journey as far as Istanbul features only sporadic notes and huge lacunae (though a thoroughly sustained narrative of a later visit to Mount Athos appears at the very end). These twelve days coincide precisely with the ground covered by the two final chapters of A Time of Gifts.
28At the start of Chapter Ten, Leigh Fermor writes that for the rest of the book, ‘I can’t resist using a few passages of this old diary here and there. I have not interfered with the text except for cutting and condensing and clearing up obscurities’ (261). He actually includes many long excerpts from the Green Diary, some stretching over several pages. This is where the ‘parallax effect’ and the impression of dual narrators seems to become most prominent – while at the same time the truth claim of the book is most powerfully reinforced: we are looking here, or so it seems, at the original writing of the 19-year-old protagonist rather than the older author. However, all of this is deeply complicated if we compare the Green Diary itself with the excerpts presented in the book, for it quickly becomes apparent that Leigh Fermor’s claim not to have interfered with the text is disingenuous. He did far more than ‘cutting and condensing and clearing up obscurities’ (261). Today the Green Diary is held in the National Library of Scotland, along with Leigh Fermor’s various typescripts and handwritten manuscripts, and much of his correspondence with his publisher, John Murray. By examining these materials, it is possible to trace the extensive editorial process – arguably a process of fictionalisation – to which the diaries were subjected during the composition of A Time of Gifts.
29To begin with, it should be made clear that the twelve days of walking covered by the sustained opening of the Green Diary broadly confirm the route and the events as described in the final chapters of the published book. But there are several discrepancies. There is no trace in the diary of a lavishly detailed description of a church service in Köbölkút which features in Chapter Ten, nor of Leigh Fermor’s supposed host there, a Jewish man from a village in the Carpathians. While this is hardly evidence that there was no church service or Jewish host, the heightened specificity of the descriptions here must be cast into doubt. More significant, however, are two instances where the diary entries themselves, as presented in the book, are entirely fabricated. In Chapter Ten, Leigh Fermor uses the diary to cover the whole narrative of his visit to a village he calls Nagy-Magyar, and a relatively brief passage listing Hungarian vocabulary (263) is a fabricated insertion of which no trace appears in the original Green Diary. Several pages later, in Chapter Eleven, a much longer section (278–279), presented as part of an extensive diary excerpt, is also a complete fabrication of which no trace appears in the diary itself. This fabricated insertion covers an encounter with ‘a spectacled young man on a bike’ who dismounts, falls in step alongside the narrator, and proceeds to give him a detailed account of Slovakian historical grievances. This passage clearly serves an informational purpose: Leigh Fermor is providing readers with interesting background on the cultural, ethnic and religious tensions of the region. It is possible, of course, that his bicycling interlocutor did exist, and did provide this information and that, despite having recorded nothing of the encounter in his diary at the time, he somehow remembered it more than three decades later. But a more credible interpretation, perhaps, is that writerly craft has trumped faithfulness to veracity here: the mature author felt that the cultural background would be interesting to readers, and so he invented a chance-met travellee and placed this information in his mouth, rather than presenting it overtly as his own book-learnt knowledge. To be sure, this is likely a common enough travel writing practice – the chance-met stranger on the bus sharing nuggets of local history, and so on. But what is striking here is that Leigh Fermor has done it within what is supposedly an intertextual insertion: a fabricated extract from his own diary.
30It is also revealing to examine the Green Diary alongside the working manuscript of A Time of Gifts (National Library of Scotland MS1770) and the final published version, to reveal Leigh Fermor’s complex editorial process. The following is the opening of the actual first diary entry, followed by the modified version which appears early in Chapter Ten and the final published version. The alterations in the manuscript are indicated, with Leigh Fermor’s deletions shown, and his later insertions in parentheses:
Green Diary: The sky a perfectly lovely blue, and I walked along a twisting avenue of squat elm trees. The grass is a lovely emerald green which really shows that spring is here; looking back, I could see the chimney pots of Bratislava, and the grey castle on the Schlossberg. I wandered along, smoking quite contentedly.
Manuscript: The sky was a lovely blue with big white clouds, and I walked along a twisting avenue of elm trees. The grass is emerald [a brilliant] green. [and] Spring has begun! Looking back I could see all the chimney pots of Bratislava [Pressburg] and the grey castle on the Schlossberg [mountain], and I could hear the bells over the fields. I wandered on, smoking quite contentedly.
A Time of Gifts: The sky was a lovely blue with big white clouds, and I walked along a twisting avenue of elm trees. The grass is a brilliant green and Spring has begun! Looking back, I could see all the chimney pots of Pressburg and the grey castle on the mountain and hear the bells over the fields. I wandered on, smoking contentedly (261–262).
The changes here are mostly stylistic, and – with the possible exception of the tolling bells – cannot reasonably be regarded as fictionalisations in their detail. But the fictionalisation of what is to be presented to readers as an authentic teenage diary is nonetheless underway. This becomes more pronounced as Leigh Fermor continues.
31En route to Nagy-Magyar, he crosses a river by a rope-pulled ferry. The description then continues thus:
Diary: When I was [sic: word missing] the other side, I found myself again walking through absolutely flat fields, and as the sun was setting in a soft red sky, it was really lovely. Everything was quiet and windless.
Manuscript: On the other side, I [again] found myself again through utterly flat fields with[. T]the sun [was] setting in a soft red sky with a few thin lines [strands] of lighted cloud. The gold bar of heaven! Everything was quiet and windless.
A Time of Gifts: On the other side, I was walking through utterly flat fields again. The sun was setting in a soft pink sky with a few strands of lighted cloud. The gold bar of heaven! Everything was quiet and windless (263).
32Again, the stylistic tinkering is plain to see here, but more significant is the inserted italicised line, ‘The gold bar of heaven’, of which there is no trace in the Green Diary itself. This line comes from the first verse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem ‘The Blessed Damozel’. Later, a line in the Green Diary – ’these were the zigeuner folk, the Hungarian gypsies I had heard so much about – they are the most amazing people and completely eastern – Metternich said ‘east of Vienna, the Orient begins’ and he was right’ – becomes in the purported diary entry presented in the book, ‘Zigeunerfolk! Hungarian Gipsies, like the ones I saw in Pozony. Amazing! Östlich von Wien fängt der Orient an!’ (263). In this instance the literary quote does feature in the actual diary, but Leigh Fermor has replaced it with its original German, and removed the attribution. Later, the Green Diary records an encounter with some Romany women outside Nagy-Magyar: ‘They were quite without any bashfulness or modesty of any sort. I must say, I understand these chaps who take some swarthy maid to rear their dusky race.’ In the published version, still purportedly a direct quote from the diary, this becomes, ‘They were without any bashfulness. I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race’ (264). Here, the older Leigh Fermor has provided an accurate quote (though again, without identifying it) from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, rather than allowing readers to read the authentically garbled version as written by his younger self.
33I will provide one final example of the editorial layers that exist between the Green Diary and the excerpts presented in the book:
Diary: I have just had breakfast, and as the day is lovely I must say good bye to the burgomeister, leave Nagy-Magyar, and set out for Kovecses Puszta. The day is perfect, with just enough wind to make it pleasant.
Manuscript: I’ve just had breakfast, after scribbling the foregoing rot at high speed. I must say goodbye to the burgomaster and set out for Kovecsespuszta. It’s a lovely morning with a light breath of wind.
A Time of Gifts: I’ve just had breakfast, after scribbling the foregoing rot at high speed. I must say good-bye to the Burgomaster and set out for Kövecsespuszta. It’s a lovely morning with a light wind (264).
34Even allowing for the stylistic tinkering to the original excerpt as it is presented in A Time of Gifts, this is a potent moment. The decades-long gulf between the journey and the book briefly collapses and we, as readers, have access to impressions recorded with absolute immediacy, written in the same moment as they are observed by a 19-year-old traveller on the morning of 20 March 1934. But what is significant to the discussion in this article is the brief fabricated insertion which does not appear in the Green Diary itself: ‘after scribbling the foregoing rot at high speed’. The complexity and ambiguity introduced by Leigh Fermor’s modifications and fabrications within the published diary excerpts is fully revealed here. The self-reflective judgement – ’this rot’ – appears to belong to the 19-year-old. But in fact it belongs to the older author, a disavowal – perhaps of the prose, perhaps the thoughts, perhaps both – surreptitiously placed within the discourse of his younger self. And there is a still further complication: the notional diary text that immediately precedes this passage in A Time of Gifts is one of the wholly fabricated sections of which there is no trace in the Green Diary itself – that, mentioned above, on Hungarian vocabulary. What is actually being disavowed as ‘rot’ here, when and by whom? It is very difficult to say.
35In Joanna Kavenna’s reading, the older Leigh Fermor is, throughout the book, deliberately attempting to ‘reinhabit his former ignorance, to recreate it’ (Kavenna 2014, 159). But the discrepancies between the actual Green Diary and its published excerpts in A Time of Gifts reveal something rather different. Rather than reinhabiting his actual former ignorance, the author is projecting the erudition, literary knowledge and criticality of his older onto his younger self. The actual 19-year-old who wrote in the Green Diary on his approach to the Hungarian frontier in 1936 was seemingly incapable of accurately reciting Tennyson or of quoting Metternich in German, and may not have had lines from Rossetti’s poetry at his ready disposal. He also shows no sign of an ability to critique his own writing. But that same 19-year-old as he is presented in the published book does. The apparent ‘parallax effect’ of A Time of Gifts, its seemingly sincere attempt to reinhabit a youthful perspective, cannot, then, be taken entirely at face value, and nor can the other instances of cultural knowledge explicitly awarded to the younger Leigh Fermor in the book – not least the near-parodic five-page catalogue of the literary texts he supposedly occupied himself by reciting from memory as he walked (Leigh Fermor 1977, 84–89). The walking, poetry-reciting protagonist of this notionally nonfictional book is, in some senses, a fictional creation.
36There has long been an element of knowingness in the way some readers approach Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books, especially A Time of Gifts and its sequels: an unbothered acceptance of the idea that, of course, he must have ‘made up’ at least some of it. This has become further entrenched since the publication of Artemis Cooper’s 2012 official biography with its revelation that Leigh Fermor had entirely fabricated the horse that is so central to the narrative of Between the Woods and the Water that it actually features in John Craxton’s iconic cover art. But this tolerant cynicism does not, I would argue, properly equip us to recognise the full instability and ambiguity of these texts.
37Even if we recognise that fictional elements must feature in A Time of Gifts, we do not read the book as fiction. There is nothing inherently fantastical within the text; if it were a novel it would be a realist one, about an English teenager walking across Europe in the runup to World War II. It is the text itself that is incredible, but that incredibility has been thoroughly offset by a pronounced rhetoric of truth-telling, as outlined in this article: the opening epistle which in turn reinforces the idea of author-narrator-protagonist unity; the repeated signals of failed memory to offset the impossible richness of the detail elsewhere; and the use of a notionally authentic (but in fact partially fabricated) travel diary as an intertext. With these devices in place, we cannot receive the text as fiction, and so we therefore receive it by the only other means available to us: the fact convention, as a work of nonfiction, unaware that, in reality, we the readers, along with the author and his semifictional protagonist, have entered uncharted territory, a nameless abyss somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, governed by no known reading convention.
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