BOOKS
Swanning to Byzantium
Alastair Forbes
BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER by Patrick Leigh Fermor John Murray, £13.95 How often during the past decade have I taken down from my shelf of favourite English Classics where, next to Borrow's Bible in Spain, it very properly belongs, Book the First of Paddy Leigh Fermor's idiosyncratic allusive historical- pastoral-comical yet at the same time epic tale of his pre-war pauper's pilgrimage from the Low Countries to Constantinople (A Time of Gifts, available in Penguin at £3.95 and really rather essential prelimin- ary reading for purchasers of the present Volume, though Leigh Fermor for my money is superb stuff wherever you care to open him) and enthusiastically refreshed my memory of it down to its last page and that page's two last sentences: 'I hastened to follow. I didn't want to be late!' No wonder the first, presumably tongue in cheek sentence of its successor is: 'Perhaps I had made too long a halt on the bridge.' For, too much tranquility, not to mention entropy having perhaps proved inimical to recollection, he was a good eight years past his publishers' first deadline when last year, with an Ms-stuffed parcel under his arm, he guiltily dawdled his way up the few yards separating Whites' from 50 Alber- rnarle Street, there to be met by his old friend, editor and publisher, Mr Jock Murray. The latter could have been for- given for repeating to him Louis XIV's superb rebuke Tai failli attendre'. When, after subsequent study had disclosed to him that his author (the cruising speed of whose pen, by the reckoning of his own log, has so far not exceeded 60 m.p.a. — 1.e. miles per annum) had still got himself no further than the Iron Gates, he decreed that he would be damned if he would wait (indeed might not live) until the Golden Horn finishing line, after much port and starboard tacking, could at last be sighted through the poetic mists of Paddy's palimp- sest prose manuscript, and that the home- work so far shown up must be published forthwith. And so, after 'feverish' but not alas 100 per cent thorough 'sessions of revision in the Stag Parlour near Bakewell' (a waggish codename for Chatsworth Whose ducal chatelain has been the au- thor's foot-slogging fahrende geselle in many a far corner of the globe, from the High Himalayas to the High Andes), it has come to pass. All this in the unsure and uncertain hope of his being able before too long to hang up on paper his still sturdy ammunition boots from Millets in the Strand and with his back to the Balkans at last bring his inimitable chapters to a close Ill contemplation of the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. Meanwhile his fellow Greek resident, that Cretan-by-adoption Johnny Craxton, has improbably shown him, on a book-jacket itself reminiscent of the cover of some 20's magazine, looking like a very junior Rassendyll double on a Pony Club trek to Ruritania. Nevertheless, and suit- ably enough before the end of Franz Liszt's centenary year, here our handsome hero is at last on Hungarian soil, on All Fools' Day 1934. Anyone sharing the rather jealous Chips Channon's criticism of Paddy at first meeting as 'too pedantically loqua- cious' could be forgiven a little apprehension at seeing him let loose on Magyar language and history: 'Those tangles of S's and Z's! Gazing at the peppery strings of diareses and the tempests of acute accents all swaying one way like wind-blown corn, I wondered if I would ever be able to extort a meaning.'
Had Joyce, 'as quick at languages as Borrow', become adept enough at it to be able, as reported, to give English lessons to Admiral, later the Regent, Horthy during his stay in Trieste? He is fascinated by the 'literary ghosts' of that 'enthralling' Habs- burg port. (Here there came to mind my own sudden realisation ten years later, that neither Randolph Churchill nor the GOC British troops to whom I was talking in a Duino embrasure high over the Adriatic had ever heard of Rilke) Soon he was 'back among Barons' in the late 18th- century hillside quarter, where, in one of Buda's family Palais, the son of his host's house wore l'intin plus fours', like in those days most continental schoolboys. Idioma- tic English was in such circles the lingua franca and where not, German, if more reluctantly, would serve. In the latter language he had made much progress since his first struggles with the Schlegel & Tieck translation of Hamlet he had bought in Cologne on the earlier Rhineland leg of his journey, though the Lexikon he found such a 'firm standby' is still Meyer's and not, as he always MGM'ly has it, Mayer's. He soon realised that between 'People like us' Du was a must and Sie kept for the possessors of hairier heels than his. In borrowed plumage he enjoyed a posh ball followed by a visit, across the Chain- Bridge over the Danube, in Pest, to 'the most glamorous night club I have ever seen', followed in its turn by one of the countless hangovers that must punctuate the life of any jeune homrne moyen sensueL After less than a fortnight in Hungary, and the strictly overseen removal of his equestrian L-plates, he was loaned a part- Arab horse that if not quite worth a kingdom at least bore an Arabic name for a king, Malek, and the two of them set off across the Great Hungarian Plain. Master soon learned how to hobble his steed at night, one of several tricks picked up along the way from the gypsies, with whom the author was able to break the ice with a few words remembered from Lavengro. Christ- opher Booker once entered Leigh Fermor for a Guinness Record as the author of the longest sentence in English literature, de- voted to a detailed catalogue of some of the many communities enclaved within modern Greece, but in his latest opus I could come across nothing better to put in a qualifying heat than the following by Leigh Fermor standards almost succinct tour-de-force, surely an excellent 'starter for ten' in any school dictation exam:
Clothes were still emblematic, and not only among peasants; an expert in Rumanian and Hungarian symbols, looking at the passers- by in a market-place — a couple of soldiers, a captain in the Rosiori, an Ursuline prioress, a Sister of St Vincent de Paul, a Poor Clare, an Hassidic rabbi, an Armenian deacon, an Orthodox nun, a Uniate archi- mandrite, a Calvinist pastor, an Augustinian canon, a Benedictine, a Minorite friar, a Magyar nobleman, an ostrich-feathered coachman, a shrill-voiced Russian cab- driver, a bear-leading Gypsy with his spoon- carving fellow-tribesmen, a wool-carder, a blacksmith, a drover, a chimney-sweep, a woodman or a waggoner, and above-all, women from a dozen villages and ploughmen and shepherds from widely scattered valleys and highlands — would have been able to reel off their provenances as swiftly as a herald glancing along the flags and surcoats of a fourteenth century battle.
My Goodness, how our much-missed friend and fellow-clubman, lain Moncreif- fe, would have enjoyed that recitation and its envoi! The author had picked up plenty of history since setting off from the Hook of Holland, shortly after which he had actually passed through Aachen without realising that it was Aix-la-Chapelle. Now he learned that in 802 Haroun-al-Rachid had sent Charlemagne a male elephant called Abuhalaz (later it seems killed in battle by some Danes) and wonders if the Caliph had perhaps dispatched him petite vitesse north across the Hellespont. He diffidently fails to disclose that this was the waterway that, following a tradition once set by a much younger and more world- famous John Murray author (whose words in Albemarle Street about some of his work would, were he not so modest, be perfectly appropriate in his own mouth: 'confess, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing. . . is it not good English? is it not life, is it not the thing?), he himself had chosen to swim in celebra- tion of his completion of the Biblical span of life, his remarkably long-drawn-out struggle against currents and anno domini being made the subject of a characteristi- cally brilliant letter circulated to a wide circle of his admiring acquaintance. Not elephants but water-buffaloes were to be the most 'awe-inspiring surprise' to cross his path. The jolliest of the author's swell hosts, Count _Tem:5 Teleki, who had picked up a broad Scottish `dinna ken' way of speaking English from his nanny, would raise his hand and mutter 'Sail before Steam' when one of the surly beasts held up 'with unbelievable slowness' his motor- car. The polymath Count's library was eclectic. It's lighter, lowbrow section over- flowed into the guest-rooms; Ilenty, Bal- lantyne, Jock of the Bushveld, Owd Bob, Black Beauty. . . any amount of Tauchnitz editions, faded by the last summers of the Habsburg monarchy and redolent of those peaceful times when apart from the habi- tual ragged fusillade in the Balkans, scarce- ly a shot was fired between Sedan and Sarajevo.' The scholarly Count loved limericks and puns but was stymied by his young English visitor's breakfast riddle; 'What is the most entomological of Shakespeare's plays?' Answer and groans: 'Antennae & Coleoptera'. (Thirty years on, he was quite miffed when at the bar of Whites' I returned on a lucky half-volley his pleased-as-Punch puzzle, 'Which of Shakespeare's plays has a Chinaman in it?', with an 'Easy as pie, Midsummer Night's Dream, and its 'Wall, Wall, Lend me thy Chink!').
The 'bloody portents' of Hitler's 'Night of the long knives' spread dismay. . . for a day or two; and then the topic died, drowned by the heat and the weight of summer.' When the Austrian Chancellor Dolfuss was assassinated by the Nazis a month later, 'our mood was such that the gloom didn't last much longer than break- fast; it all seemed such a long way to the west.' By this time he had reached Trans- ylvania, one of what his favourite Saki had once called 'those mysterious regions be- tween the Vienna Woods and the Black Sea', playing hookey from the school of real life during an unforgettable hon- eymooning sort of side-trip with 'a pretty and funny girl' (ideal two-in-one feminine combination!) called Angela, 'a few years older than I, and married, but not happily'. Unhappiness had not shaken her religious convictions for 'Silly asses!' was her only comment when told that Socinians didn't believed in the Trinity. 'Prompted, I think, by amused affection on her side and rapt infatuation on mine, a light-hearted affin- ity had sprung up in a flash. . . and thanks to A's high spirits everything was gay and comic as well; during the next nights and days, all unentwined moments seemed a waste.' There had been earlier lessons along the road in his Education Sen- timentale, one of them when he was caught swimming naked with a chum by two very jolly and Brueghelish girl-reapers who spotted their clothes where they had been left on the stubbly river-bank and got the thorough tumbling they had been teasing for, a sunlit scene written as if for the shooting script of one of those charming black-and-white Hungarian films. Of another girl, Iza, with her 'very fair hair and dark blue eyes who spoke no word of anything but Hungarian, but this didn't matter at all' one would have liked to have read more and it seems a pity that Jock Murray did not print the author's drawing of her 'gazing out under arched brows, and, by a stroke of luck, looking nearly as pretty in the sketch as she did in real life', a picture still 'pressed like a petal in the back pages of my journal'. He often did such drawings to please women and children he met, just as, in certain houses, he also could and did sing for his supper ('We spent hours singing at the picture-laden piano; French and German and a few Polish songs'). With Angela 'a darting luminous phantom within these pages' it was clearly something altogether apart. 'Our short time together had been filled with unclouded delight.' Of their farewells, made on a Rumanian station platform, he movingly writes 'I can still feel the dust on her smooth cheek', calling to my mind the beginning of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's beautiful Terza Rima lines on the tout- passe-tout-casse-dness of life.
Noch, spar ich ihren Atem auf den Wan gen Wie kann dos sein, class diese, nanen Tage Fort sind, fur irnmer fort, und ganz vergangen.
The author, also without bothering to translate, prefers to quote in an epigraph five lines from Schiller that speak of whole peoples disappearing, of names fading from memory, of dark oblivion sweeping entire generations away, but Angela, I believe, is one of the few characters in this book to have survived, as the author himself was lucky enough to do, the long and avoidable war that gave central and eastern Europe the knock-out blow to follow up the stunning stupidities 20 years earlier of the Treaty of Trianon, which, with that of Versailles, had created such lasting local grievances as well as Balkanis- ing Europe at the very moment the Bal- kans most needed Europeanising. The Anglo-Irish Leigh Fermor could sympathe- tically understand how the Transylvanian tumour had metastised so fatally into Central Europe but he was never moved to take sides, preferring to pursue into a much more distant past the parentheses which are the Edel Siiss paprika in the delicious goulash of his travel's history. He is much more at ease translating into commendable rhyming couplets two pages of the oldest poem in the Rumanian language, the Mioritsa.
I know of few books that have so subtly but well conveyed as this one a mature writer.'s personality alongside his senstitiv- ity to the yellowing map but artistically recalled landscapes and conversation pieces of his youth. In his life as in his writing Paddy Leigh Fermor has managed to remain all of a piece. Perhaps nobody has better described him than the famous French singer Juliette Greco who, 30 years or so ago, spent many weeks on film location in his company under African skies and took a tremendous shine to him, though the lyricism of her portrait inevit- ably must lose something in my translation of part of it from her rather whimsical autobiography: 'He is a writer of great talent, possessed of an irresistible tone of voice. Words jostle each other as they come crowding their way out of his mouth, so anxious is he to make you a present of them, to throw them like flowers at the feet of a loved one. Talking is his passion and indeed he has something to say about nearly everything and, what's more, in nine or ten languages. Listening to him is a real delight for he seems to know all that is beautiful yet little or nothing of what is not.' I do not doubt that she will find this book as enchanting as I did and like me will pray that its continuation and conclusion appear before author and readers alike have had to take leave of the planet. Besides, by the time it is translated into French, it may have lost some of the unscholarly misprints that escaped those 'feverish sessions of revisions', such as 'Azay-les-tideaul for Azay-le-Rideau, for- sooth.
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