THE WRITER Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked his way into the eternal affection of restless souls with his account of a journey across Europe on foot, has died aged 96.
His editor at John Murray, Roland Phillips, said he was immensely sad that “such a great writer – a figure who was a hero to me long before I ever met him – has died” and hailed him as “the greatest travel writer of the 20th century”.
Leigh Fermor began his travels in December 1933, putting a school career he recalled as full of "discipline problems . . . like fighting, climbing out at night, losing my books" behind him with the idea of a "change of scenery". Taking only a sleeping bag, the Oxford Book of English Verseand a volume of Horace, he walked up the Rhine and down the Danube, sleeping in barns and shepherd huts along the way, finally arriving in Istanbul in 1935.
With the second World War approaching, he enlisted in the Irish Guards, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his heroism as a member of the Special Operations Executive in German-occupied Crete. He met his wife, Joan, in 1946, living with her in cheap hotels and in friends’ houses during the 1950s while working as a journalist and writer.
Other journeys followed, yielding a slim volume recounting time spent in French monasteries, A Time to Keep Silence, published in 1957. Leigh Fermor moved to Greece in 1968. But it was the publication in 1977 of the first volume of his European odyssey, A Time of Gifts, which sealed his fame.
According to his biographer, Artemis Cooper, the story of Leigh Fermor’s first expedition contains “very little analysis: it’s purely the beauty and the romance”.
“They’re very much books about memory,” she said. “They’re written by a man of 50, looking back at a boy of 18, evoking the joy of travelling while young – that amazing, honeyed time.”
Although he had a visceral dislike of Nazism, she said, he was not interested in the political turmoil sweeping through Europe in the 1930s.
“He’s looking beyond reality to an idealised version of Europe without frontiers, seen through the eyes of painters such as Vermeer, Breughel and Altdorfer,” she said.
A second volume followed, Between the Woods and the Water, in 1986, leaving the author at the Iron Gate which marks the border between the Yugoslavia and Romania.– ( Guardianservice)