The spy in the tree

In case Monday's post didn't convince you to buy Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, I'll share a couple more good bits today.

1 One of the things that comes through most clearly is how many times Fermor could have easily been killed while working as an operative on Crete during the war, a role that was about midway between that of a spy and that of a guerilla organizer. The most memorable came when he and two colleagues were caught out in a field as more than a hundred Germans began pouring up the hill. The three

scrambled into the woods and hid in a thick cypress tree. They spent the rest of that freezing day (it was 25 January) in its branches, scarcely daring to move. The German patrols went to and fro, shouting to each other; some soldiers passed almost directly beneath them. But in the late afternoon the Germans gave up the search when a mist rolled in and snow began to fall.

Fermor and his companions climbed down and clambered uphill to safety . . . of a sort: they spent the night in a damp hole before making their way to a friendly village.

My first thought on reading that was of the Royal Oak, in which Charles II took a similar shelter (with the wonderfully named Lord Careless) after having his forces crushed by Cromwell at the Battle of Worcester in 1651--and I was pleased to learn from Cooper that Fermor took to referring to the escape oas "Oak Apple Day" in honor of the historical parallel.

I thought I remembered a good account of that scene in Jenny Uglow's engaging biography of Charles II, A Gambling Man, but on turning to it I discovered that she refers to it only in passing. Her overall account of the king's dramatic escape, however, is worth sharing:

Although a huge reward of £1,000 was on his head, and all were asked to watch out for "a tall black man, over two yards high," Charles dodged his pursuers with the help of the royalist network and his own wits and charm. He took refuge with Catholic gentry in Shropshire and Staffordshire before cutting his long black hair short and working his way across the West Country as a servant of Jane Lane, a colonel's daughter travelling to help her sister-in-law in childbirth. As a servant should, he rode on horseback with her, doffing his cap to his betters, overseeing the shoeing of a horse, fumbling with a kitchen jack, joking with ostlers and grooms. Finding no chance of a boat from Bristol or Bridport in Dorset, both bristling with Commonwealth troops, Charles turned east, along the south coast. In Brighton, as he stood with his hands on the back of a chair near the fire, an innkeeper knelt down and kissed his hand, "saying, that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going."

2 I shared a handful of very brief points of interest (or amusement) on Twitter earlier this week that I'll repeat in case you didn't see them there. Lawrence Durrell, on first meeting Fermor, called him "A wonderful mad Irishman . . . quite the most enchanting maniac I've ever met," while Steven Runciman called him "a very bright, very grubby young man." And then there's this, which Cooper reports from Fermor's time on Mount Athos during his trans-European hike: "He also saw the cook's cat, which could do somersaults." My cats are even lazier than I thought.

3 Finally, as it's Friday, I'll close with two bits about drinking, which Paddy and his friends did prodigiously in the years before, during, and right after the war. As Greece teetered on the verge of civil war in 1946, Fermor was hired by the British Council to travel the country giving lectures on British culture--but he relatively quickly found himself instead telling the story of how he led a team that kidnapped a German general from Crete. (That adventure is told well in Ill Met by Moonlight, written by Fermor's companion on the raid, W. Stanley Moss.) Cooper tells of the first lecture about the kidnapping:

At the lectern Paddy had a carafe and a glass, from which he took repeated sips as he told the story. When it was nearly empty, he refilled it from the carafe. A roar of approval went up from the crowd as what remained in the glass turned milky-white--Paddy had been drinking neat ouzo.

Then there's Fermor's account of the regular drinking--and its effects--when he got back to London, a bit at sixes and sevens like so many following the war, in the spring of 1947:

"It was a marvellously exhilarating time: hangovers were drowned like kittens the following morning in a drink called either a Dog's Nose or a Monkey's Tail: a pint of beer with a large gin or vodka slipped into it, which worked wonders."

I think--and I suspect that Aesop might back me up--that that's not how one drowns a kitten, but a lion. Have a good weekend, folks.

Highlights from Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

When I was in London in January I picked up--on the advice of one of the sales reps I work with, who said it was the best book he'd read all year--Artemis Cooper's new biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Forty pages in, I feel I've already been repaid for lugging it o'er the seas in my luggage. Some early highlights:

1 Patrick Leigh Fermor's mother's name was Aeileen, but as a girl "she signed herself 'Avrille' or 'Mixed Pickles' when writing to her parents, while they and her husband most often referred to her as Muriel." Patrick's father, named Lewis, she called Peter. Patrick, meanwhile, was known to all as Paddy, which is much more straightforward.

2 You get the impression that no school could have held Paddy--his person or his attention--but he does seem to have been subjected to a couple that were exemplars of English strangeness and decrepitude. His first, Walsham Hall, was run by Major Faithfull, "a pioneer of the wilder shores of education, . . . with messianic eyes and a shock of grey hair." Cooper describes the curriculum:

Lessons were very haphazard; there was also what Paddy described as "a lot of lying down and doing free association while Major Faithfull took notes. I used to invent all sorts of things for him." Most bewildering of all were the country dancing and eurhythmics, in which both staff and pupils participated in the nude. "Nimbly and gravely, keeping time to a cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger's Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole."

It reminds me of the school in which another young Patrick was once placed, by his Auntie Mame:

"So like your father," she sighed. "By the way, I know the most divine new school that a friend of mine is starting. Coeducational and completely revolutionary. All classes are held in the nude under ultraviolet ray. Not a repression left after the first session."

3 His next stop was King's School, Canterbury, which was founded by Henry VIII and boasted Christopher Marlowe among its graduates. By Fermor's time, it was utterly run down, but it's not clear that even the most up-to-date and resource-rich of schools could have handled the young Fermor. His fellow student Canon Hill

remembered that Paddy's arrival had had an immediate impact on the school. He spoke in elaborate sentences, a mode of speech quite unlike the monosyllabic schoolboy slang of his contemporaries. He would launch into blank verse or Shakespearean dialogue at the drop of a hat, and recited poetry by the yard. Hill remembers once coming back from games and hearing someone singing "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones," an unusual choice from the English Hymnal. Intrigued, he followed the sound and found Fermor dancing about in the showers, stark naked, singing "Alleluia! Alleluia!" at the top of his lungs, all by himself.

I suppose it wouldn't be an English school if there weren't a lot of stories of nudity. Of more interest are the stories Cooper relates of Fermor's daredevilry and recklessness:

The sort of myths that float around schools tended to settle on Paddy. It was said that someone heard Fermor creeping out of the dorm in the middle of the night, and decided to follow him. Lighting his way with a torch and unaware that he was being shadowed, he made his way to the gym, which had a very high ceiling spanned by a great beam, hung with climbing ropes. Hidden in the shadows, the boy watched with mounting alarm as Fermor shinned up one of the ropes, clambered on to the beam and walked from one end to the other. Having completed this feat, he came down the rope and made his way back to the dormitory.

Cooper goes on:

If anyone was caught hanging around the betting shops, smoking cigarettes, clambering over the roof or getting into fights, it was probably Fermor; and his sins were compounded by a fearless swagger and total disregard for punishment.

What an intoxicating combination that must have been for his fellow students, especially when coupled with the charm to which everyone who ever met Fermor attests!

4 He was, unsurprisingly, expelled--though for the relatively pedestrian sin of holding hands with a girl while out on the streets of Canterbury, a dual no-no. He then spent the spring and summer of 1933, when he was eighteen, racketing about London and falling in with the Bright Young People whom Waugh would satirize so mercilessly in Vile Bodies. At one of their haunts, the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, he became a favorite of the proprietress, Rosa Lewis, which leads to this priceless anecdote, apparently related by Fermor directly to Cooper in conversation:

Mrs Lewis thought that Evelyn Waugh's description of her as Mrs Crump in Vile Bodies did not do her justice. "If I get my 'ands on that Mr Woo-aagh," she told Paddy, her false teeth rattling ominously, "I'll cut 'is winkle orff!"

Fair or unfair, it's not hard to see why Lewis would be after Waugh's winkle. To take just one example of many in Vile Bodies, here's Crump at her most obtusely unfeeling:

"We've all been upside down this morning. Such a fuss. Had the police in we have, ever since I don't know what time, drinking up my wine and asking questions and putting their noses where they're not wanted. All because Flossie must needs go and swing on the chandelier. She never had any sense, Flossie. Well, she's learned her lesson now, poor girl. Whoever heard of such a thing--swinging on a chandelier. Poor Judge. What's-his-name is in a terrible state about it. I said to him it's not so much the price of the chandelier, I said. What money can make, money can mend, I said, and that's the truth, isn't it, dear? But what I mind, I said, is having a death in the house and all the fuss. It doesn't do anyone any good having people killing theirselves in a house like Flossie did.

Interestingly, though Cooper points out that through this circle--at another bohemian haunt, the Gargoyle Club--Fermor became friends with Constant Lambert and Cyril Connolly, he seems to not have crossed paths in any memorable way with their mutual friend Anthony Powell. What would Powell have made of him? I suspect that his oddity was, in a way, too foursquare to be the sort that drew Powell as a writer, too well-grounded in confidence: Fermor, it seems clear, did things in order to do them rather than as a means to power, fame, sex, or any of the other phantoms we chase, and whose obsessive pursuit so interested Powell.

5 At the same time that the young Fermor was clubbing it up in London, he was essentially broke, and to alleviate that he took a job selling stockings door to door to suburban London ladies, a job he was good at but hated. Cooper tells a story that Fermor told her:

One evening at the Running Horse [Pub], the boss singled him out as a star salesman and asked him to give the other members of the team a few tips. According to Paddy, he pulled a stocking over his hand and described its properties as if it were a condom--which had the team howling with laughter, and his boss purple in the face with rage. He was sacked immediately.

The whole episode reminds me of Julian Maclaren-Ross, who at a similar period in his life sold vacuum cleaners door to door. He, too, hated it--but without even the consolation of being good at it. In his Memoirs of the Forties, he recounts a conversation with Graham Greene before a lunch that he'd managed to land in order to talk about adapting A Gun for Sale for radio:

"What d'you do meantime? Besides writing radio plays I mean."

"I sell vacuum cleaners," I said.

Greene, almost on the threshold of the pub, halted abruptly and turned to take a good look at me. Unlike the housekeeper, it was clear that he'd not suspected this. "Vacuum cleaners?" he said.

"Yes."

"Are you doing it to get material?"

"No, I'm doing it because I wouldn't have any money otherwise."

"But do you earn much as it is?"

"I don't do bad at the moment. Eight to ten quid a week."

Greene said: "Good for you," plainly surprised. . . . "I thought of signing on myself at one time. To write a book about it afterwards of course. I never knew one could actually sell the damn things."

Despite his protests, Maclaren-Ross did make use of his experience, building his bleakly comic novel Of Love and Hunger around a failing vacuum cleaner salesman. Maclaren-Ross, however, didn't have the luxury of going out with a bang like Fermor: he was sacked by Electrolux for simply failing to sell cleaners, then, after signing on with their rival, Hoover, was sacked by Hoover for selling a second-hand cleaner at the secret behest of his unscrupulous supervisor.

Which just goes to show, yet again, that we can't all be Patrick Leigh Fermor. Alas.

"I'll never see anything like it again, nor will anyone." R. I. P., Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

The NYRB Classics Tumblr has alerted me to the news that Patrick Leigh Fermor has died. The death of a ninety-six-year-old tends to bring more appreciation than sadness, at least to those of us who knew the man only through his words. I've written about Fermor here quite a bit before; his travel writings are among the best of the genre, and for an unapologetic Anglophile like myself, Fermor epitomized a certain attractive strand of English upper-class intrepidity, a more benignly globetrotting twentieth-century version of the Victorian imperialist adventurer. If you've not read him, now's the time: as I wrote over at the Annex: Start with A Time of Gifts, the first leg of his lifelong journey, or In Tearing Haste, the collection of his correspondence with Deborah Mitford. And then don’t stop. When you’re done with it all, you can read W. Stanley Moss’s Ill Met by Moonlight, an account of the time the author and Fermor kidnapped a German general.

A Fermor fan site is gathering links to obituaries, which will be plentiful and full of incident. For my remembrance, I'll turn to an unforgettable party scene that Fermor, a splendid raconteur and light-hearted enjoyer of good company, described in a letter of thanks to the host, his good friend Deborah Mitford, in a letter of July 26, 1990, collected in In Tearing Haste:

It was a marvelous and grand arrival there--the expanse of empty black-and-white check flor, then the great swoop of scarlet stairs, with your solitary triumvirate welcomingly halted half way up. . . . It was as if the whole house had transformed into a different element, half familiar and half unknown, like a fair, or an aquarium full of resplendent creatures and any number of friendly faces, starting with Henry's. The tented acreage--those steps and the normally outdoors reclining statue and dog being indoors gave a real through-the-looking-glass feeling. The whole thing, that array of people looking after us, everything being marvellous and on time, as though being painlessly managed with a magic wand--there were so many openings for things being held up, or going wrong. None did and, for me, the whole thing dissolved into one of those golden Turner radiances. . . . The great thing was that you and Andrew spread such a feeling of enjoyment and warmth and fun, that it seemed to affect everything else. It was only later that it occurred to me that I had told my entire life story to Madame de Vogue last time, the only one, I'd sat next to her, but it didn't seem to matter. Part of the previously golden Turneresque mist was that I lost touch with all nearest and dearest--couldn't find you or Robert, sat and had long chats with Coote and Billa. What was strange was that it seemed simultaneously to last for ever and to be over almost at once. Like Wellington's battle comparison. It all looked fantastic, driving away, looking back on bridge and river, the big tent, the full moon high up, a few decorative alabaster clouds floating discreetly, some people strolling under oak trees, and dawn beginning to break. It was still total glory. I'll never see anything like it again, nor will anyone, and many many thanks to you and Andrew.

And tons of love from
Paddy

If there's an afterlife, I hope that a Turneresque mist and some alabaster clouds, plentiful fine drinks and good company, and perhaps a little-noted footpath disappearing off into the woods, are what greet Fermor tonight. Rest in peace.

"It is truly ghoulish of me not to have written ages ago," Or, The letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Mitford

I've spent the past two days dipping into In Tearing Haste, the new collection of letters between travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Mitford sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, and it's been a real treat.

My love of books of letters is nearly indiscriminate, but as most collections consist of the correspondence of a single writer, they tend to offer nearly as many frustrations as satisfactions: I find myself regularly wanting to know what the writer's interlocutors are writing, what words he or she is responding to. The solution, so rarely available, is this sort of dual edition, one that presents a lifetime's exchanges between a single pair of correspondents. Debo and Paddy have been friends since the 1950s, and it's a lot of fun to watch them toss ideas and stories and jokes and impressions back and forth over the decades.

As editor Charlotte Mosley (who has for more than twenty years now admirably fulfilled her charge of keeper of the Mitford legacy) explains in her introduction, the two couldn't be more different in their approach to letter-writing:

Unless Paddy was making a plan or asking a quick question--in which case he would scribble a few lines headed "In unbelievable haste" or "With one foot in the stirrup"--his letters are sustained pieces of writing, as detailed and beautifully wrought as his books. With the eye of a painter, the pen of a poet and a composer's ear for language and dialogue, in his letters he often sounds like a musician practising scales before launching into a full-blown symphony. . . . In complete contrast, Debo's letters are breezy and spontaneous. Dashed off almost in telegraphese at times, they are sharp, idiosyncratic and funny. Where Paddy is dazzlingly erudite, widely read and a polyglot, Debo is defiantly (at times disingenuously) a non-reader, puncturing any intellectualising or use of a foreign word with, "Ah, oui", or "quelle horrible surprise."

The contrasting styles, which could be dizzying, instead are charming; reading the book, you quickly settle into the rhythm of the correspondence, feeling, because of Patrick's lush descriptions, more as if you're sitting with Deborah receiving these reports and dashing off answers than as if you're trekking the world with Patrick.

The best bit from Fermor that I've encountered so far is a letter describing some of the people he met while in Africa working on the film The Roots of Heaven, for which he wrote the screenplay. His description of director John Huston, which jibes with what others tended to say about him, is concise and memorable, even chilling:

John Huston. Wildly bogus, charming, complicated, boastful and ham. I like him very much and don't trust him a yard. He has to be kept under pretty strict control; he would trample on one if he saw the faintest flicker of a flinch, and does so when he does see it. This entails keeping on the offensive quite a lot, i. e. diagnosing his weak points and, when occasion arises, hitting hard and often. This establishes an equivocal and amusing kind of truce and makes life quite fun, a rather dangerous game which both sides divine by an amused look in each other's eyes: thin-ice work & figure skating. He sings "Johnny, I Hardly Knew You" beautifully.

In a few short lines, he makes you want to stay far away from that man--even as you realize how great a character he would make in a novel.

Fermor's sketches of actors Trevor Howard and Erroll Flynn are also nicely turned:

Trevor Howard. Have you ever seen him?--sorry, of course you have. I only asked because I'm so ignorant in such matters. He is playing the lead--Morel, the elephant defender--and seems to me wonderful. A very nice man, but as with nearly all actors, there is something missing: --'A bit of a bore' doesn't quite cover it, somehow. It's something missing somewhere else, which I have yet to put my finger on. He drinks like Hell, starting at breakfast, and goes through his part in a sort of miraculous trance.

Errol Flynn. All the above strictures about actors do not apply here. He poses as the most tremendous bounder--glories in being a cad--but is intelligent, perceptive, and, in a freak way, immensely likeable. We are rather chums, to my bewilderment. Sex rules his life, and very indiscreet and criticisable and amusing he is about it.

Deborah's pen portraits, on the other hand, tend to be more like this:

I've been to dinner at the White Ho[use] twice. Jackie Kennedy was there. she is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way.

But, like her sisters, she also has a great eye for amusing oddities; elsewhere in the letter I've just quoted, she writes,

A rich lady said to me she needed a secretary who understood her "nervouswise." The lingo is very nice indeed but takes a bit of learning.

In another letter, from May of 1974, Deborah writes,

I had a jolly day with a burly team of woodmen, who were doing some clearing. We got to some thick ivy & stuff & I said look out, there might be some birds' nests in that. The foreman said "Oh of course you have that commitment as well." Do admit.

Not that Patrick's letters, polished though they are, are all seriousness and culture; the tale of the woodmen and the birds makes a nice pair with this bit from one of his letters of a few years later, sent from his home in Greece:

We've got two owls here, very close to the house, who hoot like anything just beyond the sort of arched gallery where we dine. I'm very jealous of Joan [his wife], because she's an ace at imitating them through clenched palms, as I bet you can too. I can't do it, like being unable to whistle, because of two front teeth being too far apart, I suppose. Anyway, when Joan breaks into their dialogue, there is an amazed or embarrassed silence, then bit by bit they answer, until an enthusiastic three-sided exchange begins, which it is hard to break off.

{Photos by rocketlass.}

There's much, much more in the book--including some of what Patrick calls "terrible gossip column stuff," which no real Mitford fan can deny being interested in. For now, though, I'll leave you with a bit of properly autumnal description, from an October 2006 letter sent by Patrick from Greece:

The olive harvest has begun. Ladders are propped among the branches of each tree and olives come pattering down on to coloured rugs and tarpaulin, with lots of children and dogs skipping about, and pillars of pale blue smoke from the sawn-off branches floating up into the autumn sky.

And now, speaking of olives, time to go put a few of them into their natural habitat . . .

Sybille Bedford's A Legacy

Sybille Bedford's A Legacy (1956) tells the story of three German families in the years leading up to World War I: two neighboring landed families from the Catholic South and a Jewish manufacturing family from Berlin. Narrated by a woman whose mother was the product of one of the marriages that over the years intertwined the families, the book relates their very different ways of being in--and, despite their wealth and connections, largely being at the mercy of--the rapidly changing Germany of the turn of the twentieth century. Bedford describes one of the Catholic families, the Feldens, thus:

[T]hey were neither backwoodsmen nor courtiers, but country gentlemen of cultured, if not general, interests. They drank hock and claret, but they also drank and knew how to make their own wine. They dabbled in the natural sciences; they enjoyed and contributed to those branches of the arts that increase the amenities of linving--domestic archietecture, instrument-making, horticulture. They were bored by the abstract, bored by letters, and their acceptance of thought was confined to acceptance of thought about things. They liked new theories of acoustics, but turned from ones of government with suspicion and distaste. They played music like craftsmen, and made objects like artists.

The Feldens are lovably eccentric: for example, one of the sons, Julius, keeps chimpanzees that he treats like people. The family leads a charmingly bucolic countryside life that would seem farfetched if it didn't jibe so well with what Patrick Leigh Fermor discovered on his mid-1930s trek through that area. But that life of near-Edenic plenty and ease has done little to fit them--Julius in particular--for life elsewhere, where one must find new activities and occupations, and when love draws Julius to Berlin, he is unmoored and to some extent never quite recovers.

The other southern family, the Bernins, is more politically active, its members staffing government departments and holding cabinet positions, while the Berlin family, the Merzes, is almost entirely contained within its large townhouse, which is stuffed with spinster aunts and ungrateful uncles and autocratic grandparents. The events of the outside world reach them in confused fashion; then that blurry information is endlessly talked round and suspected to the point of negation. This scene, where the patriarch, some cousins, assorted other family members, and the butler discuss the extravagant gambling debts run up by the eldest son, Eduard, shows the mix of obliviousness, confusion, and petty cruelty that reigns in the house; it also serves well to demonstrate Bedford's light touch with comic dialogue:

"Whist, I suppose."

"Not whist, papa."

"Well, some fool game. Good money out of the window. Daresay it's in the family. Look at your uncle Emil. Wake up, Emil!" His brother-in-law, who was fifteen years younger and neither deaf nor napping, looked up. "Edu's lost more at the tables than you ever had a chance to spit at."

"Poor Sarah," said Emil, who was a nice man.

"Sarah is a rich woman," said Cousin Markwald, who was neither.

"Well, she forked it out. How much did you say it was?" said Grandpapa who knew, but wished to hear again.

Friedrich named a figure.

"Round," said Grandpapa.

"Has poor Edu been losing again?" said Grandmama. "He's always such bad luck. I'm sure they swindle him."

"Him," said Cousin Markwald.

"The results do not point to that conclusion, sir."

"Well, yes, mama, I think the money-lenders take him in. It's hardly conceivable otherwise; no-one could stake so much in cold blood."

"I never heard of anyone staking in cold blood," said Emil.

"Money-lenders?" said Grandmama. "What would the poor boy want to borrow money for?"

"Has my son been to the money-lenders?" said the old gentleman, really stung. "I'm going to cut him off. Who does the fool think he is, a Goy?"

"Everybody goes to them nowadays, papa," said Friedrich.

"It does sound degenerate of us," said Emil.

Bedford makes that sort of comedy seem effortless. She's just as skilled at showing how the refusal of each of these families to engage fully with reality and its problems not only dooms them to loss and decline but also, when ramified through a whole society, ultimately aids the rise of the Nazi horror.

But the novel really comes to life when Bedford begins to focus more clearly on Sarah, Eduard's long-suffering wife. Early on, when Sarah--who, unlike her in-laws, always lives in the world as it is, rather than as she'd have it be--is beginning to come to terms with the fact that she's married a wastrel, Bedford offers this capsule description:

She was a woman who had to know herself just in all her dealings. She liked few people, had never loved and liked at the same time for long; she could not afford not to like herself. Dignity and consience were her shell and her recourse. She had presence, she was instructed, she judged, she was too tall; men treaterd her as she appeared to them, and never, once, had she been spoken to in the way Julius spoke to Tzara, his chimpanzee. Nor was there anyone from whom this could have been entirely acceptable: she sought rectititude, success, character; looks, wit and mind, and had never found them united in one person. Without looks she could not be moved, looks and a civilized facade; mind she was long resigned tofinding only among those of her acquaintance who were slovenly and self-interested, or slovenly and indifferent; and at that period of her life she was quite alone.

Sarah's natural toughness, her cold facade, are drawn so convincingly, made so familiar and comprehensible--and, importantly, sympathetic--that when we learn, in a passage I quoted from yesterday, that she has fallen in what Bedford describes as "late love," the very revelation is moving. When we find (and here those of you who might be thinking of reading A Legacy should probably stop reading; the scenes on which I'm basing the rest of this post are best encountered in context), perhaps not unexpectedly, that the object of her love is fickle and flighty and probably unworthy, we ache for her--yet at the same time, Bedford draws that love so well that we understand.

The object of Sarah's love is revealed to us at a dinner party. She turns out to be a married woman named Caroline, who arrives decidedly late, spraying apologies to the assembled:

"How can you ever forgive me? That endless Brahms--you know the way that never stops. And then of course no cabs, there's a blizzard--"

She whirls through the party, "hugging silence, sometimes bubbling to the surface in a splash of talk," at one point managing an amusing exchange with Sarah's brother-in-law and friend Julius:

"Dinner parties," Julius told her, "so unnecesary. Large ones. So many people eating together. The after-dinner faces--it is so unbecoming to the women."

"How like Lord Byron."

"The poet?" said Julius with the recklessness of someone trying a very long shot.

She smiled at him, all on the surface now. "Lord Byron, the poet."

But later, when the crowd has thinned, Sarah corners her:

"My dear."

"And I wanted to say, I don't see how you can forgive me for tonight. It was unpardonable. But you know--"

"My dear--it was not Brahms this afternoon, it was Schumann. I know: because I was there."

"No? What a lark." She smiled at Sarah with her eyes. "Darling, then you're able to say that you saw me."

"Please, please my dear, be careful. Oh I beg you."

"I might. A little. To please you--to throw something to the gods."

"And were you supposed to have changed into this dress in the cab?"

Her look turned inward again as if to meet a memory.

"Should you even talk so much about going alone in cabs?"

"Not alone."

"I am frightened."

"I am happy." The face became drawn; then her eyes met Sarah's fully, she very lightly touched her hand with her hand. "Sarah--I am so happy. The world--"

"It does not make you invisible. Nor invulnerable."

"But it does," said Caroline, "it does, it does."

My god, that recklessness, that life, that glow--can't you see it? Haven't we all fallen for it at some point, despite knowing better? I get chills every time I read that scene, and what follows in the remaining 150+ pages, as relationships, marriages, families come and go, is worthy of that shiver.

A Legacy is a brilliant book; I'm with Nancy Mitford, who wrote to Evelyn Waugh that it "all seemed perfect to me."

The Thirty Years War

Last week I reiterated my preference for histories written with an eye toward the personalities of its subjects, the odd details that bring historical figures to life. As a dilettante rather than a scholar, I know that I'll never be able to recall--let alone master--a large portion of the history I read, as I tend to flit like a butterfly across eras and locales, so from most histories what I hope to take away is a general sense of the sweep of events and the changing of cultures. That knowledge, however, is only interesting when wrapped up in--and anchored by--actual people who, memorably described, bring otherwise flat events to life.

When it comes to such a complicated event as the Thirty Years War, that sort of portraiture and description become indispensable. The war itself--which will probably be most familiar to non-historians as the war in which the Three Musketeers are involved--was so lengthy, widespread, and politically intricate that it almost defies explanation. But in The Thirty Years War (1938), C. V. Wedgwood (descendant of the potter and Lunar Man Josiah Wedgwood) does a masterly job of sorting out the causes and consequences of the war--while salting the narrative with fascinating details and stories.

The war, which began with one of the best-named historical events, the Defenestration of Prague of 1618, in which a group of Protestant leaders, worried about the consequences for religious freedom of the election of the Catholic Ferdinand as King of Bohemia, threw two Catholic governors of Prague out a window. (To everyone's surprise, they landed on a pile of dung and survived.) The war that ensued was at various points a religious war, a territorial war of nationalism cutting across religious lines, and an essentially causeless struggle between opposing armies of mercenaries. The number of nations and armies and prominent figures involved is mind-boggling: the list of belligerents includes the Holy Roman Empire, France, Spain, the Netherlands, England, Sweden, and a plethora of German princes, all in a welter of alliances that continually dissolved and re-formed along new lines. The eventual peace negotiations, which took nearly five years, give a hint at the underlying complexity of the war: it took six months for the parties to agree even to the order in which they would enter the room.

Despite all that, Wedgwood brings a surprising clarity to the conflict. She's very good at explaining the ins-and-outs of diplomacy, much of it secret, that continually determined the course of the war and the roster of participants, but she's at her most effective when tying the decisions of statesmen and generals to the suffering of peasants and conscripts. She never lets us forget that such losses, as always in war, were borne by those farthest from the seats of power:

[The price] may not have seemed to expensive to the princes, for it was not they who paid the price. Famine in Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel caused the Duke to notice that his table was less plentifully supplied than usual, and three bad wine harvests on the Lower Danube once prevented Ferdinand from sending his annual gift of tokay to John George of Saxony--such minute draughts blew in through palace windows from the hurricane without. Mortgaged lands, empty exchequers, noisy creditors, the discomforts of wounds and imprisonment, the loss of children in battle, these are all griefs which man can bear with comparative equanimity. The bitter mental sufferings which followed from mistaken policies, loss of prestige, the stings of conscience, and the blame of public opinion gave the German rulers cause to regret the war but seldom acted as an incentive to peace. No German ruler perished homeless in the winter's cold, nor was found dead with grass in his mouth, nor saw his wife and daughters ravished; few, significantly few, caught the pest. Secure in the formalities of their lives, in the food and drink at their table, they could afford to think in terms of politics and not of human sufferings.

That relative immunity to consequence, Wedgwood argues, was one of the primary reasons the war lasted as long as it did, but another, just as important, were the particular strengths and weaknesses of the leading players. Time and again, she asserts convincingly that, had the Emperor Ferdinand, or naive Prince Frederick, or General Wallenstein been just slightly different people, decades of suffering might have been averted. For example, of John George, the dithering, uncertain Elector of Saxony, she says, "he was one of those who, seeing both sides to every question, have not the courage to choose. When he did act his motives were wise, honest, and constructive, but he always acted too late."

That phrase should give you a sense of Wedgwood's deftness at sketching brief portraits, which is what will stay in my mind long after I've lost a lot of the details of alliances and battles. It quickly becomes obvious that Wedgwood loves her vast array of sources and the gems of inessential knowledge about the players she finds there. Her description of John George, for example, continues:

In spite of [his] claims to culture, John George had preserved the good old German custom of carousing in a manner that shocked men under French or Spanish influence, Frederick of the Palatinate and Ferdinand of Styria. John George, who scorned foreign delicacies, had been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf's ears, or pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant's head as a signal for more. He was not a confirmed drunkard; his brain when he was sober was perfectly clear, and he drank through habit and good fellowship rather than weakness. But he drank too much and too often. Later on it became the fashion to say whenever he made an inept political decision that he had been far gone at the time, and the dispatches of one ambassador at least are punctuated with such remarks as, "He began to be somewhat heated with wine," and "He seemed to me to be very drunk." It made diplomacy difficult.

But that's not the worst the Germans come in for from Wedgwood, who, however objective her intentions, was writing as the Nazis were sweeping across Europe:

Germany was in fact celebrated throughout Europe at this period for nothing so much as eating and d rinking. "Oxen," said the French, "stop drinking when they are no longer thirsty. Germans only begin then." Travellers from Spain and Italy were alike amazed at the immense appetites and lack of conversational talent in a country where the rich of all classes sat eating and drinking for hours to the deafening accompaniment of a brass band. The Germans did not deny the accusation. "We Germans," ran a national proverb, "pour money away through our stomachs." "Valete et inebriamini" a jovial prince was in the habit of closing his letter s to his friends. The Landgrave of Hesse founded a Temperance society but its first president died of drink; Lewis of Wurttember, surnamed the Pious, drank two challengers into stupor, and being himself still sober enough to give orders, had them sent home in a cart in company with a pig. The vice ran through all classes of society; young gentlemen in Berlin, reeling home in their cups, would break into the houses of peaceful burghers and hunt them into the street. At the weddings of peasants in Hesse more would be spent on food and drink than could be saved in a year, and the bridal party arrived at the Church more often drunk than sober. . . . This was not a reputation of which the intelligent German could be proud, yet there was a tendency among the simpler sort of patriots to glorify the national enjoyment of meat and wine. They had the authority of Tacitus that their ancestors had behaved in much the same way.

In fact, it's reasonable to say that the shadow of Nazi Germany hangs over much of the book; some scholars trace vicious strains of German nationalism to the decentralized German state left by the eventual peace, and while Wedgwood doesn't go quite that far, it's hard not to feel the presence of the Nazis throughout, even indirectly in statements such as this one:

Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a government which they hold to be right rather than in comfort under one which they hold to be wrong.

There's much more I could share from The Thirty Years War--it's as rich as any history I've read, and the New York Review of Books should be applauded for returning it to print (perhaps at the recommendation of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in A Time of Gifts calls it "by far the best and most exciting book on the whole period"?). But I've taken enough of your time tonight, so I'll stop here; if I get really organized, maybe I'll arrange to run some more bits from The Thirty Years War while I'm on vacation.

Austen

From Anthony Lane’s “An Englishman Abroad,” in the May 22, 2006 issue of The New Yorker

“My abiding memory of Patrick Leigh Fermor comes from Crete, eight years ago. We had spent time there, and I wanted to know how he would be retuning to the mainland: a flight to Athens, presumably, followed by a taxi to the Mani. On the contrary, he said; he would board the overnight ferry. I offered at least to book him a cabin, since the night could be cold. He smiled and replied that he would prefer a chair on deck, adding, “My dear boy, I have a bottle of red wine and a copy of Persuasion. What more could I possibly need?”

That does sound like a pleasant way to spend an evening, though at some point about midway through the bottle, I’d likely realize that I’d been reading the same page for the past fifteen minutes and decide it was time to watch the suddenly blurry waves.

If I had my choice, though—or my beautifully designed Jane Austen omnibus edition—I’d probably choose Pride and Prejudice (1813) instead. Not that Persuasion (1817) isn’t a pleasant, at times lovely book, full of the perceptiveness, humor, and irony that are the reason I read Jane Austen—but in Persuasion, the characters are a little less interesting, the plot a little slower and less intricate, even the narration a bit less lively.

The main reason that Persuasion suffers in the comparison, though, is because it has far less dialogue than Pride and Prejudice. Dialogue is Austen’s greatest strength, because that’s where she can best demonstrate both her understanding of character and her willingness to trust her reader to see past her characters’ statements to the intentions and evasions beyond them. She also mines that disjunction for much of her gentle humor; she works with the ironies of conversation with the same skill that Wodehouse works with its absurdities. Having less dialogue in Persuasion necessarily leaves it less wryly funny than Pride and Prejudice

To be fair to Austen, I should point out that Persuasion was written in the last years of her brief life, when she was ill; doubtless it would be far more polished had she lived longer. Even unpolished, Persuasion contains such gems as this exchange among Ann, the heroine, her superficial sister, and her sister’s kind-hearted but non-intellectual husband:

”I think Lady Russell would like him. I think she would be so much pleased with his mind, that she would very soon see no deficiency in his manner.”

“So do I, Anne,” said Charles. “I am sure Lady Russell would like him. He is just Lady Russell’s sort. Give him a book, and he will read all day long.”

“Yes, that he will!” exclaimed Mary, tauntingly. “He will sit poring over his book, and not know when a person speaks to him, or when one drops one’s scissors, or any thing that happens. Do you think Lady Russell would like that?”

I suppose that complaining that one Jane Austen novel isn’t as much fun as another is a lot like complaining about having the wrong flavor of ice cream. After all, there is no bad ice cream. I imagine Patrick Leigh Fermor would agree with me.

Well-designed books

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977)

All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss has only one result under this roof . . . What books? I had named them: when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: “We can’t do much about the others but here’s Horace for you.” He put a small duodecimo volume in my hand. It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket. There were gold edges to the pages and a faded marker of scarlet silk slanted across the long S’s of the text and the charming engraved vignettes: cornucopias, lyres, pan-pipes, chaplets of olive and bay and myrtle. Small mezzotints showed the Forum and the Capitol and imaginary Sabine landscapes: Tibur, Lucretilis, the Bandusian spring, Soracte, Venusia.

When I was younger, and a Star Trek fan, I enjoyed that Kirk and (more believably), Picard were fans, in that distant future, of antique printed books. Even as a kid I knew what the writers were trying to convey. A well-designed book is more than the words it contains, and I too rarely note that in this blog about books. So, a moment to appreciate as objects some books I’ve read recently.

The passage that opened this post is from a book in the New York Review of Books classics series, which are smartly designed, hearty paperbacks, printed and bound to last. At the other end of the spectrum, but no less well-designed for their subject and audience, are the lurid, pulpy Hard Case Crime volumes, with their original cover paintings by R. B. Farrell and others. The Hesperus Press, too, has a memorable, effective series design, with French flaps, an elongated trim, and well-set type.

Then there are the tiny volumes of the Library of America’s American Poets Project, with their luxurious, creamy paper and their sandy-textured, matte-finish jackets, designed by Chip Kidd. Or Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them, designed by Darren Haggar, which wonderfully weaves photos into the narrative, which is itself set in the appropriately elegant Centaur MT. And along those lines, there’s the most extravagantly beautiful design I’ve seen the past few years, the three-volume, illustrated, slip-cased New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

All of these books are instances of designers adapting art to the needs of commerce, and thus enabling commerce itself to be put to work passing on stories, disseminating knowledge, continuing an argument. It’s complex, difficult work, and its successes—the many, many books that are a joy to pick up, open, read, and lend to friends—are the reason our house will keep getting more and more crowded as the years go on.

Posting will be sporadic through the Fourth of July holiday, as work and travel and such things intervene.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor was born in England in 1915, and in 1933 he set out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople. More than forty years later, he wrote the first of a pair of books about his journey, A Time of Gifts (1977), recently reissued by the New York Review of Books. I'm not going to write much about it now, in part because I'm busy, and in part because Anthony Lane's article in the May 22nd New Yorker about Fermor, "An Englishman Abroad" is hard to top. It's not online yet, but it's worth seeking out the magazine for.

Instead, I'll just give you a couple of passages that convey some of Fermor's eye for detail, his pleasant nature, and the rich texture of his writing. Here he tells of one of his first days of walking, through a wintry Dutch landscape:

In less than an hour I was crunching steadily along the icy ruts of a dyke road and the outskirts of Rotterdam had already vanished in the falling snow. Lifted in the air and lined with willow trees, the road ran dead straight as far as the eye could see, but not so far as it would have in clear weather, for the escorting willows soon became ghost-like in either direction until they dissolved in the surrounding pallor. A wooden-clogged bicyclist would materialize in a peaked cap with circular black ear pads against frostbite, and sometimes his cigar would leave a floating drift from Java or Sumatra on the air long after the smoker had evaporated. I was pleased by my equipment. The rucksack sat with an easy balance, and the upturned collar of my second-hand greatcoat, fastened with a semi-detachable flap which I had just discovered, formed a snug tunnel; and with my old cord breeches, their strapping soft after long use and the grey puttees and the heavy clouted boots, I was impenetrably greaved and jambed and shod; no chink was left for the blast. I was soon thatched with snow and my ears began to tingle, but I was determined never to stoop to those terrible earpads.

He continues into Germany, meeting, and sharing the surprisingly free hospitality of, many people of all ages and social classes along the way. Though he sees the signs of the growing grip of fascism--signs which were much more fateful by the time of writing, forty years later, than they were when the eighteen-year-old Fermor was travelling--the Germans are overall extremely friendly, giving few signs of the horror that was already taking hold in their midst.

But then Fermor gets to a real beer hall in Munich. A brownshirt is vomiting on the stairs, and a room of S.A. men chant and slam beer steins on the table. It is the civilians, however, that he finds most grotesque:

One must travel east for a hundred and eighty miles from the Upper Rhine and seventy north from the Alpine watershed to form an idea of the transformation that beer, in collusion with almost nonstop eating—meals within meals dovetailing so closely during the hours of waking that there is hardly an interprandial moment—can wreak on the human frame. Intestine strife and the truceless clash of intake and digestion wrecks many German tempers, twists brows into scowls and breaks out in harsh words and deeds.

The trunks of those feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a year. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. . . . The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee 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 again instantaneously on cheek and brow. . . . They were followed by colossal joints of meat—unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves’ pelvises or the bones of elephants.

The book is full of such carefully wrought descriptions, whether Fermor is telling about the people he meets, the landscape, or the architecture. And despite the above grotesquerie, Fermor does like and get on well with nearly everyone he meets. As he explains, when telling of friends from his pre-travel days in London,

They were very nice to me, because I was the youngest and because genuine rashness, linked with a kind of clownish exhibitionism, whose secret I had learnt long ago and sedulously cultivated, always won a dubious popularity. I was even forgiven, after diving into a lake at a ball, for only remembering when climbing out covered in slime and duckweed that my tails were borrowed.

Within ten years of Fermor's trip, the Europe he wandered had been largely destroyed by war. But through his ability, all those years later, to remember and relate it so clearly, he not only preserved it, he brought it back to life in the way that only great writing can do.

Now it's on to the second volume, Between the Woods and the Water. As Anthony Lane points out in "An Englishman Abroad," we're still waiting for the ninety-one-year-old Fermor to publish the third volume. I know he made it to Constantinople, but I certainly want to know much, much more about how.