Presents a side of the Second World War seldom written about, as seen from the vantage point of a colorful Middle Eastern city caught up in the conflict by virtue of being in a country that was a de facto British protectorate, parts of which came under Axis control between 1940 and 1942.

I read A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor and was so inspired by the experience that I went straight onto this biography. I already know that feeling inspired by "Paddy" (as everyone knew him) is a common reaction to his work and readers frequently become in thrall to this amazing man, as did most of those who met him in life.

On the off chance the name Patrick Leigh Fermor is new to you, as it was to me until recently, in addition to being one of the great prose writers of the 20th century, recounting his travels; he was a war hero; an open minded, charming companion; and he had an insatiable appetite for both learning and life. 

Artemis Cooper has done a fine job of condensing a full and fascinating life into around 400 pages, and managing to provide sufficient focus to the key stories and also giving a good overview. 

What comes across most clearly is Paddy's energy and restless spirit. His exuberance and lust for life charmed the majority of those he met but he was quite capable of being appallingly tactless too, as one memorable encounter with W Somerset Maugham amply illustrates.

What is even more remarkable is that he found a companion, and ultimately wife, Joan, and both were devoted to each other, despite their open relationship. As he was penniless for much of his life, she would occasionally hand him some cash at the end of dinner in case he needed to procure the services of a prostitute.Artemis Cooper doesn't dwell too much on this aspect of his life but does highlight Paddy's great loves, many of whom ran concurrently with his relationship with Joan. Paddy outlived Joan by a few years and was clearly lost without her despite friends rallying around him.

So, a fine biography of a remarkable man, and yet I still have a nagging feeling that his own writing gave me a better sense of Paddy the man than this biography. It's hard to say how or why. Anyhow that is not to detract from a wonderful book.

As Paddy wrote, hours before he died, and knowing the end was looming: "Love to all and kindness to all friends, and thank you for a life of great happiness". The perfect epitaph for a truly remarkable human being who is well served by this biography.

 

Good but flawed biography of a fascinating writer and character. Patrick Leigh Fermor (nicknamed Paddy) is a national hero in Greece for his work with the resistance in Crete during WW II, culminating with the capture, abduction, and handover to the British military of the top German general in Crete at the time, General Kreipe, in 1944. (A movie called "Ill Met by Moonlight", starring Dirk Bogarde as Paddy, was made based on this adventure.) After the war he started writing, for which he had an enormous talent, but he was easily distracted by other projects, friends, love affairs and travels. By the end of his long life in 2011 (he died at age 96) he had finally published 2 acclaimed books describing a walk he took from Holland to Constantinople in 1933-1934 at the age of 19, two books on his travels in lesser-known areas of Greece, a short novel called "The Violins of St. Jacques" and a few more books about places he visited, as well as many magazine articles and reviews. He and his wife built themselves a house in a remote part of Greece and lived there for almost 40 years. By the end of his life he had been knighted and was acclaimed as "the greatest travel writer of our time". 

 

Paddy Fermor was, by all accounts, a supremely social being, wonderful company (for the most part - there were a few people who couldn't stand him), erudite but not at all pompous about it, charming, good-looking, catnip for women. He spoke six languages (English, French, German, Greek, Romanian and Latin) and had friends all over Europe. Even though he was born into the middle class - his father was a bureaucrat in the Indian Civil Service - he was often invited to visit and party with the upper class in England and elsewhere; for example, he was a great friend of Deborah Mitford Cavendish (the Duchess of Devonshire) and Diana Cooper, the biographer's grandmother, and he spent 5 years before WW II living with a Romanian princess. 

 

Fermor's amazing social life leads to one of the problems with the book - there are a great many people mentioned in the book as friends, lovers or acquaintances of Paddy's but it is almost impossible to keep them all straight.  A Glossary of Persons would have been really helpful, and I might write one myself when I read the book again. Another problem that I had with the book was dates - it would have been very helpful to have an accurate indication of the date to go along with an event's description, particularly in the latter parts of the book after the war, when a lot of events and years were glommed together in fairly short chapters. I could for the most part relate to Paddy himself as a person, but I think his wife Joan Rayner, who spent about 60 years with him and apparently was a fascinating character in her own right, deserved much better illumination as a person. (I couldn't understand at all her motivation for some of the things that she did in relation to Paddy!)   

 

 

bookshelves: radio-4, nonfiction, biography, published-2012, autumn-2012

 

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Patrick Leigh Fermor seems to have led a charmed life. He died in 2011 at the age of 96, after living an unorthodox life on his own terms. Leigh Fermor was a war hero, serving as an intelligence officer on Crete and operating throughout Greece during World War II. He now is best known as a travel writer -- indeed, his [b:A Time of Gifts|253984|A Time of Gifts|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1321602492s/253984.jpg|2636997] is one of my favorite books of all time. In this affectionate biography, Artemis Cooper uses letters and interviews, publications and journal entries, to describe Leigh Fermor's life in all its complexity, conflict, and joy. This biography is likely to be of interest to readers who already love Leigh Fermor's writing, but it may also bring new readers to his work.



Leigh Fermor was born in 1915 in London to Lewis Leigh Fermor, a respected geologist working for the English Civil Service and stationed in India, and Æileen, a free spirit who loved theatre and socializing, but who chafed against staid expectations for behavior. Paddy-Mike lived the first years of his life separated from his parents and older sister, Vanessa as we has brought up by the Martin family in Northamptonshire, to protect him from possible attack by the Germans. By all accounts, this was an idyllic period in Leigh Fermor's life, but it ended when his mother brought him to live with her in London. He was not yet five.

Leigh Fermor's parents were profoundly incompatible, so they separated and later divorced. Leigh Fermor's youth saw him veering between two extremes: a bright boy with an impressive memory and a talent for languages and history, who was also undisciplined and unwilling (and perhaps unable) to abide by rules. He loved socializing, acted without thinking of consequences, and generally let his high spirits move him to act. As a result, he had difficulty remaining in any one school for longer than a few terms. By the time Leigh Fermor turned 18, his future was in doubt. He was in debt from living a wild social life, he had no degree and no prospects for an academic or a professional future, and his lack of discipline made a tenure in the army questionable at best. Cooper traces these aspects of Leigh Fermor's personailty not only in his youth, but throughout his life. The contrast between his meditative, scholarly inclinations and his adventuresome, exuberant spirit remained a constant.


Photo by Joan Leigh Fermor

At this point, Leigh Fermor developed his plan to walk across Europe, from Holland to Constantinople. The prospect excited him -- the chance of adventure, the promise of meeting new people, the opportunity to see places he had read about in history texts and works of literature, and the ability to make his own decisions about where to go and what to do. He got some funding to help him outfit himself for life as a wanderer, made arrangements to receive his allowance in intervals on the road, and set off on December 8, 1933. The first stage of this journey later was retold by Leigh Fermor in [b:A Time of Gifts|253984|A Time of Gifts|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1321602492s/253984.jpg|2636997], while stage two is related in [b:Between the Woods and the Water|293207|Between the Woods and the Water|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320564549s/293207.jpg|807394]. (A posthumous volume collecting Leigh Fermor's writings about the final stage of the journey is set to be published in Spring 2014.)

Cooper draws heavily on Leigh Fermor's writings to tell of his travels during this period, but she also provides some additional perspective. She cites on interviews with Leigh Fermor to indicate places where he fictionalized some events. She explores the gaps between 18-year-old Leigh-Fermor's rudimentary understanding of politics and his later recognition that these political blinders made him miss many crucial details relating to the rise of Nazism in Central Europe. She later traces the difficult publication history of these volumes, as for anything that Leigh Fermor wrote. Paddy was often plagued by writer's block, He wrote very slowly, and often was distracted when he was writing. Decades after his walk through Europe, he was overwhelmed by the success of [b:A Time of Gifts|253984|A Time of Gifts|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1321602492s/253984.jpg|2636997] and [b:Between the Woods and the Water|293207|Between the Woods and the Water|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1320564549s/293207.jpg|807394]. Cooper's biography provides insight into this aspect of Leigh Fermor's life, particularly as she quotes from correspondence between Paddy and his publisher.


Princess Balasha Cantacuzène

Cooper also provides insight in Leigh Fermor's life after the walk. She details his relationship with Princess Balasha Cantacuzène, a Romanian painter whom he met in Athens, and with whom he lived for years until the onset of Wrold War II. She describes his work in World War II, when he worked as a British Intelligence Officer, focusing especially on work with the Cretan Resistance Movement. His journeys through Greece and his language skills made him a valuable officer, as did his ability to forge strong relationships with people from different cultures. Leigh Fermor achieved fame for leading a successful operation to kidnap a German general on Crete. Cooper describes not only this action, but also its afterlife, including some controversy over different versions of events, and what happened when Hollywood took interest. Greece remained an important part of Leigh Fermor's life until his death. He visited often, wrote two well-received travel books ([b:Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese|766421|Mani Travels in the Southern Peloponnese|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1343686627s/766421.jpg|780647] and [b:Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece|766415|Roumeli Travels in Northern Greece|Patrick Leigh Fermor|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1343686844s/766415.jpg|752486]), and later designed and built a house there.


Moss, General Kreipe, and Leigh Fermor on Crete

For a long period of time after WWII, Leigh Fermor lived a hand-to-mouth existence. A constant in his life was Joan Rayner, whom he met just after World War II, and who was his longtime partner, and later his wife. In Cooper's portrait, Rayner emerges as a fascinating figure: calm, quiet, practical, intelligent, beloved by her close friends, and, according to Cooper, happy for Leigh Fermor to engage in affairs and spend considerable time away from her. As depicted by Cooper, theirs was not a conventional relationship. Using personal correspondence and interviews with friends. Cooper shows the depth of their mutual love and respect for each other. I would have liked more focus on Joan throughout the biography -- or, perhaps, for someone to write a biography of her. She appears as a self-contained person, someone who valued a spiritual, emotional and intellectual connection with Leigh Fermor far more than any physical relationship. She also was widely-traveled, a skilled photographer, an intelligent person with many gifts and a quiet confidence in herself.


Joan Leigh Fermor

In the end, Cooper presents Patrick Leigh Fermor as a three-dimensional figure, a man whose gifts and flaws shaped his life. He veered between depression and exhilaration throughout his life, but consistently viewed himself as profoundly fortunate. He lived outside of convention, on his own terms. Cooper does not gloss over his flaws, but explores them with sensitivity and balance. I emerged with a better understanding of his life, and a new foundation from which to approach his writings which I have not yet read.