Questions of Travel

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–2011) is often called the greatest travel writer of his generation. I think he is one of the greatest exponents of the genre ever. The term travel writing, however, needs an overhaul. A workhorse and a thoroughbred share stable room within the capacious barn of this genre. At the most workaday level, you give your readers ideas about the best beaches for swimming, or which restaurants to eat at, which hotels to stay in. On the other side of the stable stands the more elegant mount: literary travel writing, a form of imaginative literature sharing with poetry and fiction a deployment of imagery, characterization, and memorable evocations of local color, drawing its subject matter from the places you travel to when you are not staying at home—“wherever,” in Elizabeth Bishop’s equivocal words, “that may be.”

“Criticism has never quite known what to call books like these,” Paul Fussell writes in his classic study Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars. “A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.” The British own the franchise. From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the eighteenth century on, restless curiosity and a sense of adventure have impelled travelers from those islands on the northwestern edge of Europe to escape the insularity of home and wander freely through the world, large chunks of which were occupied by an empire on which the sun never set—until it finally did. The young Evelyn Waugh excelled at literary travel writing; some of his best efforts can be found in a volume called When the Going Was Good. The gold standard is Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937).

Patrick Leigh Fermor holds his own with the best of them, and has recently become immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. A book of letters between Deborah (née Mitford), Duchess of Devonshire, and him has been published under the title In Tearing Haste. Readers of the Sewanee Review will recall David Mason’s insider’s view of Leigh Fermor, “Getting to Know Michali,” in the summer 2007 issue. (In Greece Paddy, as he was known to his English-speaking friends, was called Michali—his middle name was Michael.)

Leigh Fermor’s life as a traveler began when he was eighteen. At loose ends, living a louche life in London since being expelled from boarding school for his attentions to the daughter of a local greengrocer, he set out to walk across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (a lifelong Hellenophile, he refused to call the city by its Turkish name, Istanbul). Ahead of him, “the Rhine uncoiled . . . the Alps rose up and then the wolf-harbouring Carpathian watersheds and the cordilleras of the Balkans,” and at journey’s end, the “levitating skyline of Constantinople pricked its sheaves of thin cylinders and its hemispheres out of the sea-mist.” The year was 1933, and the young adventurer couldn’t have picked a more momentous and pivotal year to traverse the continent. European civilization, shaken by the tragedy of the Great War, would soon be radically altered by the evil forces conjured up by Nazism and Soviet Communism.

Out of this epic journey emerged Leigh Fermor’s two best books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). The attentive reader will notice how many decades elapsed between making the journey and writing the books. The middle-aged writer managed to slip back into the skin of the young traveler, remembering his adventures, and no doubt inventing what he could not remember. The excitement of reliving youthful adventures adds relish to the telling of the tale.

During wwii Leigh Fermor fought with the Greek resistance on Crete and became a legendary hero for the...