Patrick Leigh Fermor

August 21, 2017
Few people have lived as peripatetic a life as did travel writer Fermor (1915–2011). Even leaving aside the adventures that made his reputation—his walk from Holland to Istanbul and his activities during WWII as a resistance leader in Nazi-occupied Crete—he spent most of his life flitting from place to place. These travels included sojourns with glamorous friends and writer’s retreats in remote locales, the latter in an often-futile effort to combat his penchant for procrastination. Through it all, he maintained a voluminous correspondence with a veritable who’s who of famous friends, including Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell, and Ann Fleming. His letters have a breezy, insouciant quality that’s charming, albeit ultimately repetitive. Above all, Fermor had a brilliant knack for capturing vivid details, such as noting of the older men at a church service on the Greek island of Hydra, “nearly all of them limp from sponge fishing mishaps.” Many of his epistles came decorated with humorous drawings, reproduced here. The drawback to this expansive volume, conscientiously curated and annotated by Sisman (Boswell’s Presumptuous Task) is that Fermor himself never seems to grow and develop; the letters go from 1940 to 2010, but Fermor remains a somewhat superficial if engaging correspondent. The collection will be most appreciated by fans who want to savor more of his descriptive flair.

August 15, 2017
A collection of correspondence to friends and family over more than half a century, recounting the noted British traveler and writer's adventures over a long life.If letters are a lost art, you wouldn't know it from reading this lively collection by Fermor (1915-2011), who, writes editor Sisman (John le Carre The Biography, 2015, etc.), saw them as "a means...of making convivial connection across the void." Famously, as a young man, Fermor had walked across Europe to what is now Istanbul, witnessing the rise of Nazism as he crossed Germany. In the ensuing war, he served as a special operations officer who, spectacularly, kidnapped a German general in Greece. "The Germans in Crete," he recalls understatedly of his squad of behind-the-lines mischief-makers, "were just as courageous, probably more efficient, four times more numerous and a hundred times more ruthless than the British...and yet we all managed to survive quite easily." Fermor seems to have remembered everyone he met and every snippet of conversation that entered his ears, for his letters, to friends and fellow writers such as the poet George Seferis and the medieval historian John Julius Norwich, are full of details of all that he witnessed. Sometimes his memories, as presented in these letters, are quite striking: here he awakens in the middle of the night to the sound of wild ponies driven by the cold from the Devonshire moors, there he recalls decrepit Transylvanian hotels and rugged Spanish goat paths. Even his mundane reminiscences are interesting. He protests in old age that his "memory swings very erratically from the lucid to the nebulous and back," but he doesn't skip a beat. Fans of Fermor's travelogues will recognize incidents, and readers new to him will find this a good introduction. Recounting triumph and tragedy, these letters help round out a portrait of a writer who had long ago reconciled himself to a minor role in literary history--but who deserves a wide readership all the same.

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