Introduction

1This essay focuses on Nick Hunt’s travel book Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn (2014) as a text within the subgenre of travel writing which has been variously referred to as ‘intertextual journey’, ‘in the footsteps genre’ or ‘the second journey’. First, generic issues concerning this type of narratives in the context of contemporary travel writing will be discussed in order to prepare the ground for the analysis of the nature and variety of relationships existing between Leigh Fermor’s trilogy and Hunt’s travel book. This analysis will be carried out in the main part of the essay. In the concluding remarks the existence of a ‘symbiotic’ relationship between Leigh Fermor’s ‘host texts’ and Hunt’s ‘guest text’ will be argued for.

Taxonomies

2Since the dawn of travel writing studies as an academic discipline, sometime in the last two decades of the previous century, travel writing scholars have been grappling with terminological and generic problems. On the most general level this debate has been focused on the boundaries of travel writing itself. Most American and British scholars have followed the ‘exclusive’ approach proposed for the first time by Paul Fussell in Abroad; British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980) that ‘travel books’, which are ‘referential’ and therefore predominantly non-fictional, are virtually synonymous with travel writing. This approach has been followed by such scholars as Jonathan Raban (1987), Carl Thompson (2011) and Tim Youngs (2013). The ‘inclusive’ approach proposed, in the context of Anglophone travel writing, by Jan Borm (2004), which ‘extended’ travel writing from travel books to such texts as ‘travel novels’, ‘guidebooks’, plays and poems with travel as their main theme, has been widely quoted (and mis-quoted), but with relatively little impact on the praxis of travel writing scholars. Borm argued that ‘travel writing is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel’ (Borm 2004, 14). So, according to his definition, travel writing encompasses not only travel books (travelogues), predominantly non-fictional texts describing journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality, in which ‘the author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical’ (Borm 2004, 17), but also various texts which most Anglophone scholars do not consider as belonging to travel writing, such as fictional ‘travel novels’, but also non-narrative texts such as poems, plays or guide-books whose main theme is travel.

3Similar taxonomical problems occurred when travel writing scholars started theorizing and conceptualizing the issues of so-called ‘intertextual travel writing’, ‘in the footsteps narratives’ or ‘second journeys’. The most comprehensive discussions of these issues so far has appeared in the chapter of The Handbook of British Travel Writing entitled ‘Intertextual Travel Writing’, written by Julia Beilein and Barbara Schaff (2020), and in an essay by Madalene Blaer, ‘Reimagining Emulative Journeys: From Classical Texts to Contemporary Travel Writing in the Digital Age’ (2019). Beilein and Schaff begin their survey with Gérard Genette’s notion of ‘literature in the second degree’, introduced in the wake of Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’, and drawing on this they contend that ‘[t]ravel writers inscribe themselves into places over time thus creating layers of experience, and in one way or another travel writing responds to the multi-layered “trodden paths” of the past’ (Beilein and Schaff 2020, 113). Then they introduce Manfred Pfister’s typology of intertextual travel writing, ‘from negated intertextuality over accretional intertextuality to homage and, in its last phase a dialogic mode of engagement’ (quoted in Beilein and Schaff 2020, 113). This allows them to offer a very inclusive statement: ‘One might even argue that travel writing is always an intrinsically intertextual genre, because even narratives of discovery refer to culturally and literally encoded frames of reference’ (113). Schaff and Beilein then go on to describe and analyse the changing forms and levels of intertextuality in travel narratives over the last few centuries, presenting historical, literary, social and generic reasons for these fluctuations. So, at the most general level, intertextuality is intrinsic to all travel writing, although it varies a lot in its forms and intensity.

4The crucial second part of Schaff and Beilein’s essay is entitled ‘Travelling and Writing “in the footsteps of…”’ (117-121). It is concerned with the stronger and more recent type of intertextuality in travel writing texts. Various labels used by travel writing scholars to cope with this phenomenon are listed: the ‘footsteps’ genre coined by Youngs (2013), ‘emulative’ travel writing proposed by Blaer (2019) and ‘second journey’ coined by Leavenworth (2010). In ‘Reimagining Emulative Journeys’, Madalene Blaer also discusses the typologies and terminology elaborated by earlier scholars: Hulme (1997), Leavenworth (2010), Whitfield (2011), Laing and Crouch (2011), Youngs (2013) and Keirstead (2013), and although later in her essay she comes up with ‘emulative journey text’, it is used synonymously with ‘following-in-footsteps travel writing’ (Blaer 2019, 73, 78-79).

5In my essay I would like to ‘follow’ in Maria Lingren Leavenworth’s ‘footsteps’ and stick to the taxonomy in which Blaer’s ‘emulative journey’ and Youngs’s ‘footsteps’ genre are to be used as more general terms than Leavenworth’s ‘second journey’. In this taxonomy ‘second journeys’ are more specific instances, in other words, a (sub)genre of the ‘footsteps genre’. The ‘footsteps’ genre is (or could be) treated as a more general category for it describes books in which a travel writer follows in someone’s ‘footsteps’, but that does not necessarily mean referring to an earlier travel narrative. If we take, for example, an instance of a ‘classical’ ‘footsteps’ travel book like H.V. Morton’s In the Steps of the Master (1934), we see that the key text referred to is the New Testament, a text not written by Jesus, the Master, and not an overt travel narrative, even though it describes Jesus’ travels. I propose to distinguish ‘second journeys’ from the ‘footsteps’ travel narrative by the fact that in the former we have two travel narratives, the second of which ‘emulates’, ‘follows in the footsteps’ of the first one, while in the latter, more inclusive category, there is no ‘first travel narrative’, and the manner of following in someone’s footsteps is less literary. Therefore, in the case of ‘second journeys’ we are dealing with two travel narratives, and in the case of a ‘footsteps’ journey we are dealing with just one travel narrative and (usually) with some text(s) which inspired the travel writer to embark on their journey; but this text (these texts) is not an instance of travel writing according to Borm’s inclusive definition.

6Maria Lingren Leavenworth introduced the term ‘second journeys’ in 2000, and when she wrote a chapter for The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing (2019) entitled ‘Footsteps’ she stated: ‘This chapter examines a sub-genre of footsteps travel: what I call second journey’ (Leavenworth 2019, 86). And she offered this definition:

the second journey form hinges on the existence of two travelogues: a first and a second text as material artefacts. The first journey supplies the itinerary which the second journey repeats, and the first travelogue is continuously in the second journey narrative for comparison and contrast (Leavenworth 2019, 86).

Leavenworth’s statement, ‘a sub-genre of footsteps travel: what I call second journey’, is ambiguous for it can be interpreted in two very different ways. The first one is that Leavenworth decides to call a sub-genre of footsteps travel (‘footsteps travel’ being presumably a ‘sub-genre’ of ‘travel writing) ‘second journey’. Here, ‘footsteps travel’ and ‘second journey’ would be synonyms. The second one is that ‘second journey’ is a sub-genre of ‘footsteps travel’ (which, in turn, is a sub-genre of ‘travel writing’). In a subsequent sub-chapter entitled ’A Review of Scholarship’ (Leavenworth 2019, 87-89) Leavenworth discusses not only ‘second journeys’ but also the ‘footsteps genre’ without distinguishing the two on taxonomical grounds, leaving two interpretations possible. But in her conclusion (Leavenworth 2019, 95-96) she makes it (almost) clear that for her, ‘second journeys’ and ‘footsteps travel’ are respectively a homonym and a hypernym:

With increasingly detailed divisions into genres and subgenres of travel literature come possibilities of asking what precisely it does, what it does not do, and what questions each raises or answers. Although as established there are several affinities between second journeys and more broadly defined reiterative travel, the distinction should be upheld to account for the particularities of the sub-genre, predominantly the existence of two material artefacts, and the overt symbiotic attachments between them. Systematic analyses of the epistemic dialogue between host and guest move issues beyond simply acknowledging similarities and contrasts and instead highlight the discourses that structure knowledge differently in one age or another (Leavenworth 2019, 95).

I wrote that Leavenworth made it ‘almost’ clear that she wants to treat ‘second journeys’ and ‘footsteps travel’ as a homonym and a hypernym, because in her conclusion she did not use the term ‘footsteps travel’ (she had used it earlier in her text when explaining her understanding of the term ‘second journey’) but ‘reiterative travel’. But as this ‘reiterative travel’ is ‘more broadly defined’, I presume that ‘reiterative travel’ and ‘footsteps travel’ should be treated as synonyms, a wider category of texts, in which a more specific category of ‘second journey’ is located.

7In what follows I will use the category ‘second journey’ as a sub-genre of the wider category ‘footsteps travel’ (‘reiterative travel’) and will also apply the concepts Maria Lindgren Leavenworth relied on in ‘Footsteps’, of ‘literary symbiosis’, ‘guest’ and ‘host’ as introduced in David Cowart’s Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth Century Writing (1993). In Chapter One of his book Cowart persuasively argues that ‘literary symbiosis’ is at the core of much of postmodernist writing, and having discussed Gérard Genette’s Palimpsestes as one of few texts in which symbiosis in literature has been treated ‘in any substantive way’ (Cowart 2012, 3) he declares that out of five types of ‘paratextual’ relationships listed by Genette, he is most interested in the fourth one, ‘hypertextuality’ (the others are labelled ‘intertextuality’, ‘paratextuality’, ‘metatextuality’ and ‘architextuality’). Cowart proposes to refer to what Genette calls ‘hypertext-hypotext’ as ‘host text-guest text’, and he also proposes to call the author of a host text a ‘precursor’ or a ‘host author’, while the author of a guest text becomes a ‘guest author’ or a ‘latecomer’ (Cowart 2012, 4-5).

Hunt’s Second Journey

8I would like to start the analysis of the relationships existing between Leigh Fermor’s trilogy and Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water as a host text and a guest text with the help of the second of Genette’s ‘paratextual’ categories, namely that of a ‘paratext’, i.e.

a title, subtitle, intertitles; prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords, etc.; marginal, infrapaginal, terminal notes; epigraphs; illustrations, blurbs, book covers, dust jackets and many other kinds of secondary signals whether allographic or autographic (Genette 1997, 3).

9Hunt’s paratextual reliance on Leigh Fermor’s trilogy is not restricted to the title but goes much more deeply and extensively. Hunt’s book is neatly divided into three parts, entitled ‘West’, ‘East’ and ‘South’, each part consists of four chapters, and each covers the portion of Leigh Fermor’s (and Hunt’s) ’great trudge’ described in each of Leigh Fermor’s three books. All twelve of Hunt’s chapters are preceded by twelve epigraphs, all of which are fragments from the respective parts of Leigh Fermor’s trilogy.

10And when we go down from the paratextual level to the level of the text itself, ‘Leigh Fermor trilogy’s intertexts’ are numerous and varied. Let us put the Introduction and the first chapter under ‘intertextual’ scrutiny. The Introduction, entitled ‘From Hook to Horn’, begins with an epigraph from the trilogy:

I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year … there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about (A Time of Gifts) (Hunt 2014, 1).

While the very first sentence of Hunt’s own book reads:

In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnailed boots to chance and charm his way across Europe, ‘like a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar’, on foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (Hunt 2014, 1).

After the Leigh Fermor-centred paratexts of the title and the opening epigraph, we get the first sentence of Nick Hunt, when Hunt not only introduces Leigh Fermor and his ‘great trudge’, but also quotes him (‘like a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar’). Surely, the host/guest relationship cannot be any stronger. In the course of the relatively brief, four-page Introduction Hunt’s persona recounts his reading of Leigh Fermor’s books at eighteen: ‘Before I’d finished reading the books I knew with absolute certainty that one day I would follow in his footstep, retracing his route through Holland, Germany […]’ (Hunt 2014, 3). Then the persona explains that ‘[t]he idea lay dormant for twelve years’ because he ‘came of age in an era of untaxed aviation fuel and limitless opportunities to travel’ (Hunt 2014, 3). And then, as ‘the instant gratification of flying began to lose its magic’ (Hunt 2014, 3), and as the persona realized that he hardly knew the continent he lived on, ‘the half-forgotten fantasy of following in Paddy’s footsteps swam back into focus’ (Hunt 2014, 3), and he started the walk on 9 December 2011, exactly ‘seventy-eight years after Paddy’ (Hunt 2014, 4).

11The Introduction ends with this paragraph:

Six months before I started, Patrick Leigh Fermor died at the age of ninety-six. For weeks, I’d been planning to send a letter to his home in Kardamyli, Greece, where generations of travel writers had gone to pay literary homage, to explain my reasons for following his road. I’d even written ‘Dear Paddy’ at the top of a sheet of paper, but hadn’t known how to go on. He was an extraordinary man—adventurer, war hero, bon viveur and raconteur—but my interest wasn’t biographical, and I wasn’t trying to cast myself as a modern version of him. It was his journey itself I was after, the contrast between his walk and my own; really, I’d simply wanted to tell him I was on my way. Now it was too late. The walk would have to be my letter. Through woods and water, wind and rain, fields, forests, cities, suburbs, mountaintops and motorways, I hope he would have approved (Hunt 2014, 4).

In the first chapter of Hunt’s book, representing the Dutch leg of the journey, apart from the compulsory epigraph, there is only one short direct quote, but ‘Paddy’s’ presence permeates it, nevertheless. While crossing the North Sea on a ferry the narrative persona comments, ‘[w]hen Paddy embarked on his voyage, 28 489 days ago, he had been the only passenger’ (Hunt 2014, 9). Of Rotterdam he says, ‘The glimpse I had of Rotterdam was almost as brief as Paddy’s own—he walked at once, pausing only for eggs and schnapps […]’ (Hunt 2014, 11). And later,

[f]rom Rotterdam Paddy had plunged into winter countryside, a landscape like a Breughel painting, children skeetering down canals on fantastical ice-yachts. That reality was so distant it almost physically hurt. Now browns and greys seeped from all sides and nothing shone or sparkled (Hunt 2014, 15).

There are numerous comments like this scattered throughout the remaining eleven chapters of the narrative, expressing at the same time the nostalgic notion of belatedness, so common in travel writing of all ages, pointing to the enormity of the changes that occurred in Europe between 1933 and 2011, but also to the paradox that in terms of the environment and ‘[…] in human terms, everything and nothing had changed’ (Hunt 2014, 327).

12Patrick Leigh Fermor admitted in A Time of Gifts that he carried just two books in his rucksack: a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse and the first volume of the Loeb Horace. Similarly, Hunt declares: ‘I deliberately did not research into where I was going. Paddy’s books, eighty years out of date, would be my only travel guide’ (Hunt 2014, 4). But whereas Leigh Fermor would quote copiously from a great variety of authors and sources, the intertexts in Hunt’s books are almost exclusively from Leigh Fermor’s trilogy and, as his narrative develops, his persona is presented as being more and more convinced of synchronicities existing between him and ‘Paddy’, ‘and a dialogue with a somewhat ghostly presence; one occasionally glimpsed or guessed at, but mostly existing somewhere between fact and imagination’ (Hunt 2014, 327).

13Hunt’s book, with its extremely strong intertextual and paratextual reliance on Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, and with Hunt’s persona following (almost step by step) the ‘great trudge’ of his predecessor, is on the one hand a tribute and a homage to Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, and on the other it is ‘a second journey’ par excellence in Leavenworth’s meaning of the term. At the same time, as I am going to argue in the second part of this essay, it is also a very good contemporary British peripatetic travel book in its own right.

14For all his admiration for Leigh Fermor as a war hero and a master stylist travel writer, Nick Hunt does not in any way attempt to either emulate his persona or his florid, lavish, complex syntax. His own style is simple and transparent. He states in the Introduction:

On the simplest level, the narrative of a young man setting out to find his place in the world was something I identified with, because that’s what I was trying to do; I admired his guts, his panache, his inexhaustible delight, even if some of his fascinations – High Baroque architecture and the bloodlines of Europe’s noble families – were things I could hardly relate to (Hunt 2014, 1-2).

And it is Leigh Fermor’s fascination with Middle European aristocrats, their glamour, erudition and lifestyle that brings the only direct and overt criticism of Leigh Fermor’s views, his ‘aristocratic nostalgia’:

‘The Hungarians over the centuries had handled their alien subjects – and all their own compatriots below a certain rank with great clumsiness,’ wrote Paddy. ‘Disdain, oppression, blind feudalism, exclusion from any voice in their councils, rigorous Magyarisation – no blemish was missing.’ His own words shed a slightly different light on his rose-tinted vision of pre-war culture, those bucolic rural scenes set out against the leisurely life of counts and their liveried servants; the image of an Eden before the Fall. Behind all disparities of wealth and power lies implicit violence, no matter how cultured the ruling class might be. Paddy himself acknowledged the rumours that István, his happy-go-lucky companion, was implicated in Hungary’s counter-revolutionary White Terror; many of the young bloods he had picnicked and partied with must, unavoidably, have been involved in the viciousness of their age. The brutality that swept away István’s and Angéla’s world, and created the trail of ruins I’d followed down the Mureş Valley, was a reaction to hundreds of years of class patronisation (Hunt 2014, 213-14).

The social unrest as represented in the ‘West’ part of Hunt’s book is definitely the mildest in form, quixotic and almost innocent. While in Nijmegen, Hunt first went to the oldest pub in town and ended up in a local Occupy camp:

The night ended incongruously in a hash-fragranced circus tent pitched in a nearby park. During the meal we’d been joined by a moustachioed student called Dick who offered to put me up for the night […]. So by midnight the three of us were huddled around a wood-burning stove with groups of softly spoken anarchists discussing the Arab Spring, the impending collapse of the EU, alternatives to capitalism and a new type of engine that ran on water (Hunt 2014, 26).

In the ‘East’ part of Hunt’s book, the threats not only to social cohesion but to (freshly re-established) democracy itself become obvious once the persona reaches Budapest:

[…] Viktor Orbán – once a hero of the anti-Communist revolution, who had swept to power two years before – was systematically destroying the democracy he had helped establish. Everyone had their own outrage to add, a litany I soon knew by heart. Freedom of speech was being curtailed: new media laws threatened journalists with fines if they published anything deemed ‘unbalanced’. The constitution had been rewritten, giving government appointees the power to nominate judges, and the symbolic ‘Republic’ was dropped from Hungary’s official title. Anti-Slovakian and anti-Romanian sentiment was being stoked up, and the government was flirting with irredentist fantasies restoring the lands Hungary had lost after 1920. Violence against Roma and other minorities was on the rise (Hunt 2014, 147-48).

The full degree of havoc which the forces of Nazism and Communism wreaked in the countries described by Leigh Fermor in the second and third volumes of his trilogy and by Hunt in the ‘East’ and ‘South’ parts of his book could, paradoxically, be clearly seen only after the fall of Communism in 1989. In his book Hunt constructs a parallax scene in which his persona parties with a group of young Bulgarians near an idyllic waterfall call Rai, ‘Paradise’ in Bulgarian. The persona learns that one of them, Georgi, is soon ‘to emigrate to California to start a new life’ (Hunt 2014, 271). When asked by a startled persona why he wants to live in such a place he answers:

Everyone is selfish here. Obsessed with money. Under Communism we were taught to obey, to let the clever people in the Party make decisions for us, not to have opinions of our own. Fifty years of being told to be stupid and small-minded. So now we have democracy, but no civil society. It’s called post-Communist apathy (Hunt 2014, 271).

15Fortunately, however, this turns out to be only one side of the story, which Hunt describes with compassion and a certain detachment as he meets along the road many hospitable, open and friendly people, different but also strangely similar to the people Leigh Fermor encountered eighty years earlier and was to re-construct and re-shape four decades later.

16With some help from John Murray, his friend and publisher, and John Craxton, the illustrator, Leigh Fermor craftily constructed the teenage persona of himself as a tramp, a pilgrim and a wandering scholar. In the famous original book cover of A Time of Gifts designed by John Craxton we see the back of this wanderer, wearing puttees and a heavy overcoat, bareheaded, with a rucksack and a solid, long walking stick, standing on the crest of a hill and looking at the winterscape of an Alpine burg on the left, a red-brick tower on the right, and the winding Danube meandering towards mountains and the winter sun. It brings evocations of Breughel’s winter landscapes, but also of the Impressionists’ fascination with warm, pastel colours. The text of A Time of Gifts largely supports this vision of a nostalgic Winterreise. It seems that one of the effects of the hiatus between Leigh Fermor’s journey and his textualization of this journey is that the peripatetic discourse of travelling (walking) as travail is not foregrounded. True, Leigh Fermor recounts and reconstructs some of the roughness of the journey, sleeping in woodsheds or sleeping outside, but as the trilogy narrative’s progresses, the aristocrats’ letters of recommendation lead to Leigh Fermor’s persona sleeping more and more in comfortable bedrooms in castles and palaces. Hunt’s persona, following in Paddy’s trail through Transylvania, comments, ‘once again, my journey was a trampier version of his’ (Hunt 2014, 211). And it is truly ‘trampier’, not only because of the roughness of the accommodation, but also because of Hunt’s focus on the day-to-day drudgery of long-distance walking largely missing in Leigh Fermor’s trilogy. Hunt’s persona reaches Ulm, a German city less than a quarter of the way to Istanbul, suffering physically and mentally from the accumulation of hundreds of hours’ strenuous walking. After a visit to a doctor, he reports:

My ankle’s condition barely improved, the pain ballooning morning and night. Without crutches, it was an effort to cross to the other side of the room […]. I upped my Ibuprofen dose, taking 800 mg a pop, which gave me a full, fuzzy head and slight euphoria […]. Prinzing [the doctor] couldn’t say when I’d be fit to walk again; injuries like this could take months to heal (Hunt 2014, 70).

The peripatetic aspect of Hunt’s book is more ‘realistic’ than that of Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, where the ‘highs’ of long-distance walking are foregrounded and the ‘lows’ are either long forgotten or do not fit the construction of Leigh Fermor’s two distinct personae. Hunt, on the other hand, for whom the eight-month walking stint was fresh in his memory and notes, represented both the ‘highs’ and the ‘lows’, the physical and mental ups and downs of such long peripatetic treks. It is only close to the end of his narrative that Hunt embedded the obvious truth that eludes most of us for most of our lives: ‘[…] my mind emptied and the pains in my body withdrew. Walking, as so often before, became less a means to an end than an end in itself. Like the act of meditation it answered its own question’ (Hunt 2014, 259-60).

17An interesting aspect of Hunt’s narrative is the attitude of his narrative persona to the issues of the ‘reliability’ of Leigh Fermor’s persona (or rather personae) in the trilogy. In the second sentence of the first chapter we read that the three books Leigh Fermor wrote ‘are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct’ (Hunt 2014, 1). In the chapter in which he did not find ‘A Cave on the Black Sea’ in Bulgaria he states, ‘as Artemis Cooper suggests […] the cave was another of Paddy’s confabulations, a literary composite melded together from disparate elements’ (Hunt 2014, 288). Earlier, in Chapter Four, as Hunt’s persona is approaching Persenbeug on the Danube, we get this fragment:

It was here, in the riverside inn, that Paddy met a character he simply named ‘the polymath’, whose monologue encompassed everything from Germanic tribes to the decline of aristocracy and the creeping blandness of industrial civilization. Artemis Cooper’s biography suggests the loquacious old gentleman may have never existed – his character was a composite of several others Paddy had met – but the fact of his existence was curiously unimportant (Hunt 2014, 99).

In a recent book by Tim Hannigan (a travel writer and travel writing scholar) entitled The Travel Writing Tribe (2021) there is a chapter entitled ‘Winterreise I’. It describes his journey to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, where The Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive is held. Hannigan’s fascinating book is a history of contemporary British travel writing in the form of essays/chapters describing on the one hand the author’s own journeys to interview the key living British travel book writers (seventeen of them), and on the other, his journeys to the archives of those who are no more (like William Thesiger or Patrick Leigh Fermor). ‘Winterreise I’ is set towards the end of Hannigan’s book, which is also focused upon ethical aspects of fictionalization in the ‘predominantly non-fictional’ genre of the travel book. Hannigan compares fragments from Leigh Fermor’s famous ‘green diary’, which he supposedly quite miraculously re-gained while he was writing A Time of Gifts, and from which he ‘quoted’ quite copiously in the second part of this book:

[Leigh Fermor] threw in scraps of non-English vocabulary to the supposedly authentic excerpts where the real diary featured none, corrected a fumbled (and uncited) reference to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, tossed in an unattributed line from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’. Elsewhere he simply invented diary passages—counterfeiting his own text! Leigh Fermor was constructing an authorial persona—not for the man doing the writing, but for the boy doing the walking. He made him more bookish, more erudite; awarded him a greater stock of literary references than he had ever possessed. But somehow I felt no sense of outrage or betrayal here. It seemed less like a con than a hearty joke, openly shared with his readers. I found myself carried along with it (Hannigan 2021, 290).

Would Hunt’s reaction to these ‘revelations’ be similar? I would think so.

Conclusion

18In their text about second journeys, Julia Beilein and Barbara Schaff cite critical remarks by two travel writing scholars about this subgenre: Steve Clark’s about ‘the endemic, obsessive re-enactment of previous quests’ (quoted in Beilein and Schaff 2020, 117), and Tim Youngs’s, that ‘[t]his type of book, which dominates the shelves of travel writing sections of bookshops, is generally as predictable in content as it is unadventurous in form’ (quoted in Beilein and Schaff 2020, 118). However, although Beilein and Schaff agree that

[t]here certainly are examples of in-the-footsteps journeys which offer little more than pastiche and the attempts of writers who have little interesting to say apart from quoting from a canonical travelogue in order to ennoble their own,

they also argue ‘that there are indeed many successful examples of second journeys, which offer fresh and interesting views, adding depth to the narrative through an encounter of two writers across time’ (Beilein and Schaff 2020,118). I would like to argue that Nick Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water should be placed in the latter, rather than in the former category, for quite a few reasons.

19Firstly, had Hunt merely wanted to use ‘a canonical travelogue to ennoble his own’, he might have chosen one which required less time, less money and less effort. He might have walked for several days in the Cévennes in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, rather than for eight months in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Walking in the footsteps of Leigh Fermor required real commitment and fascination with the personae of Leigh Fermor’s trilogy. And it is this commitment and (not uncritical) fascination which is the driving force of Hunt’s book.

20Secondly, although Hunt’s book is connected very strongly, and on many levels, textual and paratextual, with Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, it is at the same time markedly different from it. It is different in its simple, clear style, contrasting with Leigh Fermor’s baroque language and poetic intertextuality. It is different in its far more realistic treatment of the peripatetic elements. It is much more a representation of the ‘great trudge’ than Leigh Fermor’s original trudge, which is so nostalgically positive about the experience of walking long distances. Moreover, Hunt, with all his respect for Leigh Fermor as a person and a writer, and his trilogy as an inspiration, did not try to emulate either the person or the writer, but merely walked in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps and he himself wrote a very different book.

21Thirdly, for all the differences between Hunt’s travel book and Leigh Fermor’s travel books, these texts share many ‘symbiotic’ similarities. The most striking of those perhaps, is the positive, approving, open and emphatic attitude of Leigh Fermor’s and Hunt’s personae to the ‘travelees’, various people ‘real’ or ‘fictional’ (as is Leigh Fermor’s polymath) whom they meet on the road and who help them in various ways. Hunt might just as well have entitled his book A Time of Gifts as Walking the Woods and the Water. Hunt’s and Leigh Fermor’s books glow with gratitude for the hosts who provide the personae with shelter and food and interesting stories. Some of these hosts are, both in Leigh Fermor’s and Hunt’s books, ‘accidental’, and their hospitality is shown as the result of their goodwill and humanity; some are ‘pre-arranged’ by two different types of links on which Leigh Fermor and Hunt relied. In Leigh Fermor’s case the link was established through letters of recommendation his aristocratic hosts wrote to their aristocratic relatives and friends with castles and manor houses located further down his long path. Hunt relied on www.coachsurfing.com, a much newer and more egalitarian service, but similar in its fundamental hospitality. As Hunt wrote towards the end of his book, ‘in every country of my walk I encountered kindness and generosity that Paddy would have recognised’ (Hunt 2014, 328).

22In view of all this, I am firmly convinced that Leigh Fermor’s trilogy (as a ‘host text’) and Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water (as a ‘guest text’) are four British travel books bound by what David Cowart labelled ‘literary symbiosis’.