1Because I have spent half of my life living in or traveling in Greece, friends often ask me for travel advice. In addition to providing them with a list of my favorite hard-to-reach islands, obscure ouzo-palaces, and tiny museums, I tell all of them that if they travel to Greece with just one object it must be a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book Mani. I should admit that this is not always good advice. Indeed, most of them return from Greece only to report that the book, while delicious in every other way, was otherwise useless to anyone looking to navigate Greece for the first time.

2Of course, one should not turn to Mani (nor Leigh Fermor’s later volume, Roúmeli) seeking the names of suitable hotels, or a sense of how best to get to Kythira, or whether one can visit Epidavros on a Sunday. As the author admits right away in the preface to Mani, his “private invasions” of Greece led him to write “what amounts to the opposite of a guide book.” Yet Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books are deep cisterns of inspiration and information for travelers and writers, like myself, who are in love with Greece and wish to comprehend, and then write about, its bewilderingly stratified terroir.

3Most attempts at this kind of writing will fail, if only because Leigh Fermor has already set the bar too high. I regard Mani and Roúmeli as masterpieces of prose style; as such, they are inimitable. When in 2007 I set out to write my book, Honey, Olives, Octopus (a project that aimed to see what the culinary traditions of Greece might tell us about the country’s history, culture, and landscape, but which wandered away from that purpose recklessly), I knew I had permission to write a virtually impractical text, the opposite of a guide book. I also realized while composing the first chapters that I would be writing a book deeply informed by, and at least partly written in homage to, Patrick Leigh Fermor. So, I set out to remind myself what I find distinctive and useful about the poetics of Leigh Fermor’s Greece books, especially for someone like me who writes under his influence.

4I have been drinking deeply from these books for so many years and wish to use the occasion of this essay to step back and reflect—with just enough sobriety, I hope—on the aspects of Leigh Fermor’s approach to Greece, and to the art of travel writing itself, that I find most astonishing each time I revisit his work. As a writer, I am obsessed with how these books are written. The fact that Greece is their subject is an added gift for me, since that is where my writing also happens to feel most at home. What else, I asked myself, did reading Patrick Leigh Fermor (or Paddy, as his friends and even many of his devoted readers call him) give me permission to do? What aspects of his philhellenic and literary legacy am I most prone to emulate? To answer these questions with some degree of practicality, I have identified four tendencies—or tensions—that leave their signature on his best work.

Omnipresent Pseudo-Invisibility

5To begin, I want to recognize what I call the omnipresent pseudo-invisibility of Leigh Fermor’s literary persona. Now, the most obvious symptom of Leigh Fermor’s genius is his hallmark golden style: sumptuously interlarded, crackling with wit, and fueled by a sprawling and often intimidating erudition that is still perfectly welcoming, if not openly flirtatious by turns. It’s not unusual for a single sentence to drift for several pages and he is fond of extended Rabelaisian lists that seem to sail far off subject but slowly and eventually find some way to return to port. A polyglot, his literary vocabulary plunges so deeply into the language that we must be prepared to encounter arcane and tantalizing words like callipygous (having beautiful buttocks) and pashalik (a territory overseen by a pasha, obviously). Few writers in English have been as eager to mine the language—and several other languages—for obscure ore, to delightful effect. The result: in Leigh Fermor’s books, we encounter sentences so surprising, dynamic, and meticulously constructed that sometimes the challenge is to keep reading, since to move forward means we mustn’t stop to re-read, mustn’t stop to spend more time rubbing the brocade through our fingertips, savoring the artifice of his prose.

6Observe, in this example from Mani, the way Leigh Fermor describes an arrival into the capital city of the Mani:

• 1 Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani. Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, Londres, John Murray, 1958.

The road to the upper world was a stony way ribbed with cut blades of rock to afford purchase for the feet of mules bearing cargoes up to Areopolis from the hot little port of Limeni. Each olive tree, motionless in the still air, was turned by the insects into a giant rattle, a whirling canister of iron filings. But as the stony angles of road levered us higher the clamour fell behind and the road, swept by a cool breeze, flattened across two miles of bare plateau, dropping abruptly to the sea on the west and soaring eastwards once more in a continuation of the Taygetus; and there ahead of us, half castellated and with its roofs topped by a tower or two and the cupola and belfry of a little cathedral—lay the capital of the Deep Mani. The narrow streets of Areopolis were all around us (Mani1 53-54).

The sentences navigate us through vertical and horizontal space, rising and sinking, then broadening and narrowing in scale (upper, up, angles, higher, fell behind, swept, flattened, dropping, west, soaring eastwards, there ahead of us, roofs, tower, cupola, belfry, cathedral, narrow, all around us), suspending us in busy flight, and yet anchoring us to an olive tree that is at once “motionless” and “a giant rattle, a whirling canister of iron filings” thanks to the roar of cicadas. Ironically, the aim of the whole boisterous, dizzying performance is to land us, gravity restored to our feet at last, on a narrow street in the capital. The passages induces both clarity of perception (I’ve never encountered a more apt description of cicada song) and the joyous vertigo of travel.

7Leigh Fermor’s sentences call attention to themselves, to the fact that they are sentences, and yet they somehow manage to balance the impression of improvised freshness with the surety of permanent inscription. I can think of several poets, but only one other prose stylist of the 20^th century—Vladimir Nabokov—whose books I open at random, as others might a Bible, just to read sentences aloud, if only to remind myself what is possible in that measure of human expression.

8Pulling against the lushness of his sentences, the omnipresence of high literary style, is the near-invisibility of the author in his own books. Of the four most important philhellenic prose writers of the 20^th century—Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Kevin Andrews, and Patrick Leigh Fermor—Leigh Fermor is the least prone to transparent self-observation. Durrell, Miller and Andrews spend much more time involved in the activity of self-scrutiny: their books are filled with insights regarding what these authors come to recognize about themselves. By comparison, Leigh Fermor is much more likely to see “through the looking glass,” as Lewis Carroll puts it. This is ironic, since Leigh Fermor’s biography is so fascinating—very few travel writers—no, very few human beings, can boast a life-story as rich as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s, so it is that much more remarkable that he chose to write books that were not really about him at all, at least in the most superficial sense.

9Taxonomically speaking, we could place Leigh Fermor’s books in the genre of travel writing, but they really constitute complicated examples of memoir—in this second genre, they make for very curious case studies. Consider how infrequently Leigh Fermor gazes inward, as if doing so would have to happen at the expense of so much exterior treasure. He seems to prefer a kind of dissolution into Greece: and his camouflage is so complete and his engagement so deep that we sometimes forget he’s even there (no doubt, he mastered the art of disguise on Crete during the war, many years before he began writing his books). Yet I believe it is crucial to call this pseudo-invisibility, since at every moment, in the form of artifice, stylistic brilliance, and profundity of observation, he is ever-present, displaying impossible sprezzatura while directing our gaze outward, through his.

10Thus, in only a few pages, by way of setting us up for an inhospitable encounter with a Greek muleteer, we might expect to hear casual references to Xerxes, “the pirates of Cilicia,” Kelephas, “the reign of Zanetbey,” Lambros Katsonis, Odysseus Androutzos, and (for good measure) the habits of migrating birds in the southern Aegean, including some legends about cranes. Only while recounting the last of these facts—gleaned not from the library but from conversations with Cretan shepherds, does our author make any reference to himself (“The cranes I have never seen,” he admits, “but Cretan shepherds have told me….”), as if to signal that local knowledge is always superior to ordinary scholarship. Case in point: the chapter concludes, thanks to a little foray into botany, with a profound reflection on the quintessential Greek tradition of philoxenia (kindness to strangers):

It always happens in Greece that encounters with disagreeable people are followed by an overwhelming compensation as though the entire race by an unconscious second sight were in league to compensate the victim and smooth his ruffled spirits. One reads of poisonous leaves and others which contain their antidote fluttering side by side on the same Indian tree. In the case of this small jungle, it was as if nettles and dock-leaves were growing from a single stock (Mani 161).

The erudition of Leigh Fermor’s books could easily bog us down, but facts and ideas are distributed lightly, as if such knowledge has been picked up willy-nilly, gathered just as often in the ravines of Mt. Ida and the tavernas of Piraeus as in thick library books, all of it in service of the deepest possible comprehension, in order that it might be shared with us.

The Double Philhellenic Self

11While his writerly persona intervenes very sparingly, I think it is useful to recognize another tension, one manifested what we might call the double philhellenic self of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Artemis Cooper, author of a sensitive biography of the writer, has helped us realize that all of Leigh Fermor’s books, including those about Greece, were agonized over for decades, while his material was recollected in tranquility. These books bear the mark of temporal distance, and in fact they often draw special attention to it in very surprising ways.

12I think, for example, of the final sentence of the first chapter of Mani, which comes after a very lengthy aside about the Jews of the Peloponnese, complete with numerous bewildering parentheticals, dates, and quotations. Just a few pages earlier our hero has fallen into wine-induced slumber atop a tower in the village of Anavryti, so we are invited to read his extensive dissertation on Hebraic Arcadia as a playful fiction: learned as it is, each rivulet of conjecture might be dismissed as another gush of drunken reverie. But his overspilling dissertation stops quite suddenly: our narrator pulls back the reins with a start, breaking the narrative fourth wall, remarking: “Unburdened as yet by all these complications, I slept on peacefully” (Mani 20). For me, the “as yet” is the stroke of genius there, since those two words remember the future author to us, shining a light on the real labor of literary production, which seemed so effortless just an inebriated moment ago. What else do these conspicuous moments of narrative splitting reveal?

13For one, that Leigh Fermor’s acts of remembering involved tricky negotiations and much imagination. Two philhellenic selves must find a way to cooperate in the Greek books (and learning how to let both selves have their say became important in his later books too): on one hand, we travel alongside the former self, an elegant young vagabond whose curiosity demands he leave no stone unturned, but who is “unburdened by complications” since he is simply incapable of absorbing everything; he’s too busy walking, drinking, dancing, loving, and fighting. On the other hand, we come to know a more learned and arthritic self who is there, years later, in his brown study, slowly moving a pen across the page. This latter self manipulates the marionette strings, and it is his job to sort through and revel in all the multi-faceted complexities the former self had the luxury to overlook while he was in motion.

14For most writers, the distance between these two selves might easily be measured in nostalgia—which sighs deeply and bathes all the past in artificial golden light—but Leigh Fermor rarely succumbs to that. The elaborate tapestries of his sentences leave only a little room for the occasional thread of emotional disclosure. Yet I suspect that for Leigh Fermor there was both joy and grief involved in remembering and representing moments that were now lost. I feel exactly the same about trying to recollect my own distant memories of Greece. Re-writing such moments, Leigh Fermor always reminds me, is a way of reshaping them and re-living them.

15Though the Romantic poet I associate most with Leigh Fermor is (for obvious reasons) Lord Byron, the phrase “spots of time” from William Wordsworth’s Prelude might be instructive here. For Wordsworth, and for Leigh Fermor, returning to the past, selecting and lingering over specific moments, working to reconstitute their essence and reinhabit them, allows a later self to be “nourished and invisibly repaired” (Prelude, 1805, Book XI, ll. 209-228). Wordsworth assures us that these “spots of time” are “scattered everywhere” —we must only travel backward in search of them. With a life as rich as Leigh Fermor’s, a lot of scattering had to be accounted for. Invention and re-imagination, he reminds us now and then, are very much part of the painful and regenerating acrobatics of literary remembering.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: Portrait Artist

16Though it’s actually a very small country, Greece is enormous. Trying to comprehend any view of the place requires a very wide lens and a sustained depth of attention. Leigh Fermor was immensely skilled at peeling back the various historical, archaeological, and linguistic layers to be discovered around every bend. But I love how often the high-flying ideas and learned divagations are interrupted by moments of human close focus.

17Leigh Fermor obviously spent a lot of time admiring church architecture and the arrangement of Nyklian towers, reference books in hand, but he was equally fascinated by the human beings who actually lived atop the great stratified mess that is Greece. He reminds us early on that one of his aims in Mani is anthropological, to “situate and describe present-day Greeks of the mountains and islands in relationship to their habitat and their history; to seek them out…” And seek them out he does, though the Greeks he meets by accident are almost always the most fascinating.

18Leigh Fermor’s gift at capturing the bottom nature of others should never be underestimated—he was a master portraitist, with an uncanny knack for suggesting real psychological depth with just a few literary gestures. Among the unforgettable characters we meet in Mani and Roúmeli, I probably think most often about the two shepherd girls, Anastasia and Antiope, who wander atop a mountain at the entrance to the Mani and who “see nothing but God.” He writes: “They sat side-by-side on stones with immense black luminous eyes strangely compounded by innocence and wisdom under brows like arched and sweeping penstrokes, which seemed to fill their entire faces” (Mani 25). The art of rendering others was one he took very seriously (and of course he drew portraits too). But his written portraits are never static. He always manages to retain a sense of spontaneity (note the cheeky “sweeping penstrokes,” a reminder that is both drawing and writing), offering quick flourishes of impression that imbue his descriptions with a sense of immediate and fleeting encounter.

19Equally etched in my mind, thanks to an uncharacteristic touch of sentimentality (Leigh Fermor very rarely risked too warm an assessment of anyone), is his portrait of the salt-gathering women who live in the “shadowless, desolate landscape” of The Tigani: though brutally impoverished, they offer their water and paximadia (barley rusks) to the travelers. He closes the scene of this poignant encounter with a slow, gradual pulling back of his lens, written from the perspective of his rowboat as it casts off from shore: “We left them there under their immense hats, growing smaller with each oar-stroke. I often think of them. They are probably scraping for salt among those infernal rocks at this very second” (Mani 97). These unbitter and miraculous women would be swept up into the recesses of time and memory unless he’d found a way to record their disappearing world and ancient way of life. It’s worth remembering that Paddy might not have written this passage if his wife Joan’s moving photograph of one of the women hadn’t already helped to rescue her from oblivion.

20There are so many other characters I love: the nine-year-old boy who leads Paddy up to the top of the Chora of Serifos, pointing into a well where the head of Medusa might be found; or the epicure, hedonist and second-lieutenant, Marko, who Paddy meets by chance while descending a mountain gorge … poor Marko, who had “grown up [just] in time to get the civil war as a coming-of-age present” and whose harrowing stories are shared over a blistering and bubbling leg of roast lamb.

21If, as Leigh Fermor put it, “the Greek world, with all its absorptions and dispersals and its Odyssean ramifications, is an inexhaustible Pandora’s box of eccentricities and exceptions to all conceivable rule” (Mani 12), we leave his Greek books with the firm conviction that the country is likely, at any given moment, to throw into the traveler’s path characters who will illumine and deepen, if not complicate or call into question, every certainty that legions of scholars have asserted about the place.

Patrick Leigh Fermor in the Infinitive

22Finally, I want to speak about Patrick Leigh Fermor as a verb. We should consider Patrick Leigh Fermor in the infinitive. Mani and Roúmeli are both chock full of astounding information. But most of my favorite passages in those books interrupt the spell of ideas by bursting suddenly into action—as when he dives into the sea-cave entrance to Hades, for instance, or staggers through cobwebbed caverns in the Taygetus. At these moments our narrator finally materializes before our eyes. Along with him, we too must “Patrick Leigh Fermor” our way into Greece.

23I love the way these raw physical encounters with the landscape ground Leigh Fermor’s high-flying erudition. These moments of action also remind us of his boyish fearlessness and sense of adventure; they prove that he was always as much .007 as he was a linguist or a bookworm. His qualifications as a man of adventure surely outstrip almost every other writer I can think of, yet his wartime heroism on Crete hardly ever comes into play in his Greek books (and how easily he might have rested on those laurels, which awarded him a kind of insider status in Greece that very few outsiders could boast). Indeed, about the war, he says little more than it “did not interrupt [his] travels, though for the time being it altered their scope and their purpose.” That is putting it far too mildly.

25Only a few pages later we came upon one little sentence—much more a tossed off thought than one of his signature insights—that lights up for me on the page and explains so much about all of his books. He has left the monastery at Lavra to visit a nearby Romanian skete and he offers this plain-spoken account of his walk back:

It was great fun talking Rumanian again. I like the language, and wish I knew it better. I’m soon out of my depth, but I can fake it up a bit.
I ran most of the way back, as it was downhill, and it is great fun jumping from stone to stone, with one’s heart in one’s mouth. (The Broken Road 306)

Here, we are reminded that the joy of travel was, for Leigh Fermor, all reckless motion. What do you do when you are out of your depth? You improvise. Or, as I’d like to put it, you “Patrick Leigh Fermor” your way through. I liken this Leigh Fermor to a shark: he will likely suffocate if he doesn’t keep moving at all times. This shark-like movement—his fondness for spontaneity, digression, and surmise—asks a lot of us as readers, since we must grow accustomed to “jumping from stone to stone,” with our hearts in our mouths. Some vertigo is inevitable, but so is joy, so we just hang on for the ride.

26While the lushness of Leigh Fermor’s prose makes us want to err on the side of slowing down, his “Leigh Fermoring,” his jumping between stones, pulls us ahead, lurching, so we can peer along with this champion of curiosity at whatever and whomever we’ll meet around the next outcropping of Greek stone. The tension this creates is both unsettling—it’s true that nobody can keep up with him, physically or intellectually—and intoxicating. We will knock back another cup, gladly, and then on we go to the next taverna or village or mountaintop, directionless if need be, drunk on the monologue of the most charming and dashing companion we might ever meet. Soon we will find another fountain, where we’ll stop to drink or think again.

27“One compensation of this kind of travel,” he wrote, “is the unchartable and unregimented leisure between the rigors of displacement” (Mani 188). As both a writer and as a person, I am endlessly thankful for the fact that he allows us to accompany him on his unchartable journeys.