Book Review

Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

     Patrick Leigh Fermor was an English college dropout who walked across Europe between the two world wars and wrote a trilogy of books about the experience. The first volume, A Time of Gifts, was poorly written and often a chore to read although it did pick up momentum in the second half of the book. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, is a vast improvement.

Leigh Fermor begins this book by crossing the Danube River from Slovakia into Hungary. He is immediately greeted with warm welcomes and taken to a procession and celebratory mass in a Catholic church for the end of Lent. He proceeds on to Budapest, has an amazing time, and moves on to hike across the Great Hungarian Plain, the western most steppe of that geographical feature spreading all the way to Mongolia. He continues to have interesting encounters with the country folk and even spends a night with a camp of Romani people. Despite all he has heard about their criminal tendencies, the night passes without incident to his pleasant surprise. As he gets closer to the border with Romania, he starts staying in upper class villas owned by people he made contact with during his previous travels. What is great about this whole section is the vivid description of the landscape, something that he improves on as he goes farther along. His portrayal of the upper classes, as well as the other people he meets, is of higher quality too. Maybe Hungarians are just more exciting people than the Germans he writes about in the previous volume, but they are more interesting and lively in these chapters than anything he had written before.

One interesting part of his journey through Hungary is the intellectual curiosity and passion for reading that Leigh Fermor shows while he stays with the Hungarian aristocrats. One thing he does when he visits them is read the books they have collected in their personal libraries. Some of the weakest and most muddled passages of A Time of Gifts are those where he struggles to explain historical events from the places he visits. It is some seriously bad writing, but here in Between the Woods and the Water he does a far better job of explaining with clarity all the entanglements of people who either migrated to Hungary, traveled through it, or tried to conquer it. This is tough subject matter including tribes of Avars and Goths, later settlements by Huns and Magyars, invasions by Mongols, Germans, and Ottoman Turks, and eventual collaboration with the Habsburg kingdom. He makes some sharp observations about the Magyar language too. His ability to comprehend and describe the syntaxes of all the languages he encounters while traveling is impressive even if he never fully masters the complexities of Magyar. Being able to explain what an agglutinative language is is good enough.

As Leigh Fermor continues into Romania, he keeps calling on contacts he made through others he met in Hungary. His original plans to sleep in forests, fields, and farms gets scrapped as he continuously gets invited into the homes of aristocrats, living a high and leisurely life with them. They enjoy his company so much that their hospitality seems to be without end. The downside of this is that as he travels southwards into Transylvania, most of the people he associates with are ethnic Hungarians and Swabians, but he encounters far fewer Romanians. Transylvania was formerly part of Hungary and Romania incorporated it into their country when the Habsburg Empire broke up after World War I. The author is acutely aware of the tensions between the two groups as, yet he continuously maintains optimism in the possibility of them all uniting under the banner of one nation despite their separate identities.

Socially speaking, he spends a lot of time with an interesting character named Istvan who takes him on a series of adventures. One interesting part is when the two are swimming nude in a river and two farm girls see them, taunt them, and encourage them to chase after them where something or other happens behind a hay rick. What happens there is left to your imagination, but if it involves two naked men it shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Istvan also takes Leigh Fermor and Angela, a married woman from Budapest, on a car ride around the western edge of Transylvania. Leigh Fermor and Angela are having a fling and Istvan wants to make sure they are out of the sight of nosy neighbors who won’t mind their own business. Along the way, the author continues to expound his knowledge about Romanian history as they visit castle ruins in the mountains. He clearly informs his readers about the lives of John Hunyadi and Vlad Tepes, the count who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

Leigh Fermor then goes off on foot again, trekking through the western edge of Transylvania along the Mures River, connecting again later with the Danube before crossing over into Bulgaria. His descriptions of the mountains are incredible. He uses language to capture the weather, the running water, the plants, the trees, the sounds, the mist,and various other people he meets along the way. Some of the best descriptive writing involves animals; he wakes up one morning to look over a cliff where he sees a golden eagle stretch its wings before taking off in flight, being joined by another eagle. This passage is magnificent.

There isn’t much to dislike about this book. Not all of the writing is perfect, but there are so many more high points in comparison to the first volume of this trilogy that the low points ca be easily overlooked. It is interesting to see how the author’s literary skills grow before your eyes as he continues to write. It also helps that Hungary and Romania are far more interesting countries than Germany or Austria where the author traveled in A Time of Gifts.

Between the Woods and the Water is an exciting travelogue and work of descriptive prose. In it, we see where Patrick Leigh Fermor improves on all the problems he had in the previous book and watching this process of growth unfold is one of this book’s charms. The author is a Romantic at heart and by that I refer specifically to the Romantic movement that preceded the Victorian literary style. But Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Romanticism is a little different; he has the sublimity of nature, the castle ruins, the passage of time, and the push towards transcendence, but at the young age of nineteen, he is too young to wallow in a hopeless longing for the past and the melancholia that the Romantic poets insisted on indulging in. He travels and writes in the here and now as if he loves every minute of it.

 

Book Review

A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

     What a disappointment. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British student, drops out of school at the age of eighteen and goes on a walking tour of Europe that starts in the Netherlands and ends in Constantinople (now Istanbul). He sets out in 1934 and sees the interwar continent from ground level while the menace of the Nazi movement begins taking hold in Germany. It sounds like an exciting subject for a book. Unfortunately, A Time of Gifts, the first book in Leigh Fermor’s trilogy about his travels, doesn’t live up to its promise.

The book starts off poorly with a biographical letter written to a friend that serves as an introduction. We learn that the author is a smart student with undying curiosity for all aspects of education, maybe a potential Renaissance man type. He is also a bit of a screw up, lacking in discipline and direction, seeking out the company of bohemian types who prefer partying to studying. So Leigh Fermor drops out of school and walks across Europe, writing about it all along the way. The problem at this point is that his prose is so choppy that it becomes a chore to read almost immediately.

The writing starts getting better as he walks across the flat, winter landscape of the Netherlands and over the border into Germany. Rather than actually describing what he sees, he instead imagines himself entering into the painted world of Flemish painters, most specifically Breughel, and the enchanting winter scenes they depict. It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I would have been more satisfied if he had written more about what he had actually encountered there.

Leigh Fermor’s descriptions of the northern European landscape doesn’t do much to arouse interest. He tries too hard at times to be poetic, sometimes going into flights of abstract language, complete with arcane Britishisms and vocabulary that hasn’t survived to our current day. A dictionary might come in handy here, but if you look up every word he uses that you don’t know, you may never finish the book. Some of the descriptions are just plain awful. There are some long passages where I couldn’t tell if he was described the landscape, a painting, a book, a piece if music, or the clouds in the sky and ended up not caring enough to re-read them for a full understanding. His attempts at describing the history of the regions he walks though are also impossibly muddled to the point of frustration so that I felt like giving up a few times.

On the plus side, the cities and towns he visits are a little more palatable. In the beginning he sets off with the intention of sleeping in forests, fields, and barns along the way, but he has a knack for making friends with the locals and, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, he always depends on the kindness of strangers. Everywhere he goes he meets up with people who are willing to feed and shelter him. Some of them are more interesting than others. Most of them contact other people they know in places further along the road to Leigh Fermor’s destination so he ditches his plans for sleeping like a vagrant and ends up staying with a network of upper class aristocrats. He starts off sleeping in fields and farms, but ends up staying in chateaus and castles.

His impulses also drive him to debauchery which, unfortunately he never describes in detail. In one passage he stays in an apartment with two beautiful young madchens while their parents are away on business. In this, and other scenarios, he doesn’t say everything that goes on between them, but if you read between the lines it is quite obvious. Leigh Fermor has a strange kind of Victorian approach to his writing style that seems out of place for a twentieth century narrative.

Another thing to notice as he travels through Germany and Austria is the creeping encroachment of the Nazis who he briefly encounters at various times. He expresses disdain for them, and so do most of the people he befriends, but he doesn’t condemn them very loudly. H even socializes with them amicably a couple times; I don’t think his intention is to warm up to them, but rather to keep out of trouble. Being an English citizen in Germany at that time could be risky and he seemed to be mostly concerned with playing it safe, not with sympathizing with their cause. He is actually open to speaking with anybody he meets, even with the Romani and Jewish populations that the European host societies routinely treat as second-class citizens.

The narrative starts improving when the author gets to Vienna. While staying at a Salvation Army homeless shelter, he meets a slightly eccentric man named Konrad who comes from the Frisian Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. Konrad convinces him to make money by sketching people’s portraits, so Leigh Fermor goes door to door with his sales pitch and does well-enough to live a little more comfortably. The scenes inside the people’s apartments are some of the most amusing and interesting parts of this book. He does a good job of describing urban Vienna too.

From there, Leigh Fermor walks east along the Danube, skirting the southern border of Slovakia and eventually crossing the river into Hungary. What is interesting about this is that the prose continues to get better the farther along he goes. Reading this book is like watching somebody learning how to write and making improvements with each passing page. This only makes me wish that he had revised the first half of the book more effectively; starting a book with disastrous writing and progressing towards smoother, more polished and descriptive prose, albeit prose that is average at best, is not a good writing strategy. But at least the auther redeems himself a bit by the end.

My biggest criticism of this travel narrative is that Leigh Fermor followed a literary axiom too closely. They say a good author not only knows about what to put into their work, but also what to leave out or eliminate. Leigh Fermor leaves out too much. His descriptions of the countryside are sparse, especially in the beginning and he meanders into poorly written explanations of historical events instead, and never getting around to saying what he actually feels as he walks. He never mentions the cold or the wind. His feet never ache or get sore. He never feels tired or hungry. He simply doesn’t address all five of the human senses. When he says he gets drunk, he never explains how that actually feels. He leaves too much up to the imagination so that his prose comes off as flat, shallow, and one dimensional.

A Time of Gifts captured my interest because I have backpacked across Europe and went to a lot of the places that Patrick Leigh Fermor visited. I wanted to see how he described them as they were in the 1930s. His execution of the writing didn’t satisfy my curiosity, but considering it improved a bit in the second half, I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time reading this. Hopefully the second volume of this trilogy will be better.