Patrick Leigh Fermor A TIME OF GIFTS Intro by Jan Morris

Wow! I neglected blogging all of 2019.  // Well, in this shelter in place, I am coming back...//

Berkeley City Book Club Meeting March 26, 2020 /Discussion:   Patrick Leigh Fermor, A TIME OF GIFTS(1977).  Intro by Jan Morris. / New Yorker article by Anthony Lane.  2007.     Co-Chair, Carolyn Whittle, presiding.  Participant Tel. dialogue, Janet Roberts.

Observations and Topics:    Ptrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) Knighted for his services to literature and to British-Greek Relations (2004) 

1.        Author’s Style: Beautiful phrasing and memorable employment of language.  Janet cites: “cataracts of vegetables” p 90.  “There were gardens and a castle and an ornamental lake where a nearly static and enforcedly narcissistic game of swans were reflected in holes that had been chopped for them in the ice: but no black one that I can remember, like Thomas Mann’s in the same piece of water.”  Place: Skagerrakbruche, the Rhine, outside Dusseldorf)…

               

2.        Author’s Perspective at 60 writing about journey at 19 from journals, and “recall”, and “reconstruction” of memories. cites author’s observation: p. 83:  “ I was at the age when one’s memory for language- indeed for anything – takes impression like wax, and up to a point, lasts like marble.”  Janet  comments that the 60 year old evidently sculpted the marble into the prose we read.  Fermor has the gift of hindsight in his self description of how others perceive his vagabond existence : p. 88. “To a strange eye, one is drunk or a lunatic”.

3.       Historical Context:  1930’s between the two great World Wars.  Carolyn recalls father’s alternative service and  Lowell Thomas providing him position on sheep farm in upstate New York, which enabled him to travel through Europe, first to Scotland, in this period.  Janet recalls her father, but in WWII, having as a good friend, LIFE photographer, who was killed in action, but he had kept a large box of his black and white photos, of their clearance of the concentration camps and the victims, which she recalled seeing when in her teens.

Reader’s responses:  Janet says that of course, a reader finds most interesting what is in ourselves, and that she loved the passages on art and music, and literature. Fermor always comments on the books in the libraries of the homes he visits, especially the Barons, as the libraries are extensive.  He also comments on the excursions to cathedrals, in particular, as well as to art museums, as well as on private collections, and enumerates the Northern German painters, to which his eye is educated.  P 56.  Fermor reveals: “The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey is very close.”   He finds Peter Brueghel’s world dominant in this region.

Literature Some Examples:  On pg 113. One of his most memorable homestays is with Baron Rheinhard von Lipant Ratshoff (Estonian. White Russian, lost his own castle, and outfits him with clothes and rucksack after his thefts): “Evenings were conversations and books”.   Janet cites some literary references as examples: p 46 Thomas Mann, p 50. Hamlet(Shakespeare)  and Childe Harold (Byron) , p 55 Siegfried(Goethe’s The Nibelungenlied ) 84 Fr Baudelaire(2), Verlaine(1), Yeats 1 Ronsard and  Villon,  In the Black Forest. “Memorized as though one can stock up for a desert island or for a stretch as a Solitary” p 85 Catullus and Horace 88 Herrick, Valery. P 116.  Describes explicitly area as being out of “Grimms’ Fairytales”: “Once upon a time, on the edge of a dark forest, there lived an old woodman, with a single beautiful daughter,” it was that sort of region.  Cottages that looked as innocent as cuckoo-clocks turned into witches’ginger-bread after dark.”  Pg. 94. Fermor describing the finials of the church:  Women coiffed, wearing wimples and dresses like dutchesess in Alice in Wonderland, (Lewis Carroll) ; pg 118, Hamlet;  P 141 “Duino Elegies”, Rilke.  280-1 Proust. Baron Pips, who Fermor terms “his true initiator”  is a model for Swann in Fermor’s mind and a model for himself in his own mind.  Both Carolyn and Janet reflect on this point.

Wine:   Janet comments that Fermor is often overdrinking.  p, 139  Liquer distilled from Tokay grapes. (Count Grafin)  Schnapps.  Janet comments on the Langenlois wine which is drunk in this region and looks it up on line, and the village where this wine is produced has remained at a population of 7000 people for over a century. 

                                                   
 Hans Memling  Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza 

As for painting, the dominant motif,  

P 96.  “Stark memories’:  Janet cites a particular passage:  “Hans Holbein”…”more like Memling in costume and feeling – They turned out to be by the father and the namesake of the best known Holbein, patriarch of a whole dynasty of Augsberg painters.”  ( see image of Memling which I found in my postal cards from Madrid) 

P. 98 Fermor speaks of the “Landsnecht formula – medieval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail – “

 pg. 99: “All was lambent.” Durer. Holbein.

Pg. 112. Fermor  goes to Pinakothek in Munich and to see Baroque churches

                  P 149, Cranach Holbein, Durer.  Munich galleries: Altdorfer to Grunewald. / 153-54.                                   Lessons in Art History

P 157.  Brueghel, “Hunters in the Show’. 

P 163.  The Danube, “The Nibelungenlied.

P 178. Schloss Schonbuhel in town square home to Counts Seilern.  (Fermor sketches)

 In Music:  p. 142.  Lieder of Schubert and Strauss and Hugo Wolfe played on the piano in an evening, and himself, Fermor, as page turner.

Janet  cites a memorable passage, p. 168: Fermor is told by the “scholar gypsy” “It’s a pity you did not go over the hills opposite Mauthausen    - It’s only half a dozen miles.  Schubert wrote the Trout Quintet there.  He was on a walking tour like you.’ ( See posting of Trout Quintet from UTUBE)

4.      Reader’s favorite chapters or sections of the journey: Carolyn prefers the gypsies of “The Marches of Hungary” , as well as the first chapters beginning “The Low Countries” and “Up The Rhine” as she found the chapters visiting the Barons to be dull and about degenerate aristocrats. /Janet especially liked “Winterreise” and “The Danube: Seasons and Castles”, due to the description of the landscape and the eccentricies of the Barons, as well as the apt comparison,of the contrasts between barns and castles:  p 142 “Cocooned in smooth linen and lulled by the smell of logs and beeswax(candles) and lavender, I nevertheless stayed awake for hours, in all these delights and contrasting them with joy to the now-familiar charms of cow-sheds and haylofts and barns. “  Carolyn comments that this may reflect a nostalgia for the peasant home in which he was reared due to loss of his parents. / p 136 Another favorite evocative description in the castle: “I found myself in the corner tower of another castle two evenings later, wallowing in a bath of ancient shape, enclouded by the scent of the cones and the pine logs that roared like caged lions in the huge copper stove.”    and least, perhaps,  “The Danube: Approach to a Kaiserstadt”, the encounter with and observation of Nazi soldiers and the detraction of his 19^th birthday, due to a lie he tells his hosts, because he does not feel welcome.  Carolyn understood that he felt humiliated; I felt he should have owned up to his lie and stayed rather than suffering in the rain on a trail.  Janet reflects that the Rhine is compared to the Loire in the  Toraine Valley in France, which is interesting.  Carolyn has travelled the southern region to Munich; Janet has only travelled the central region: Cologne, Dusseldorf, Berlin.

5.       Employment of German phrases with some frequency. Does the reader need to know German?  Carolyn does not know German and ignored phrases.  Janet knows German and found Fermor’s “on the road” German, which develops by conversation, easy to comprehend.  German gives the sense of a foreign country and spikes the narrative with authenticity.

6.       Movie available on UTUBE:  Noted in review Life and Letters  ‘An Englishman Abroad” Patrick Leigh Fermor’s journey through the twentieth century.  by Anthony Lane, The New Yorker. May 22, 2006. The book was published in 1950 and the movie made in 1957. “Ill Met by Moonlight”. Cited as “a spirited account of the Kreipe operation in Crete by William Stanley Moss a friend of Femor wjp sat beside him and drove the General’s car. Dirk Bogarde miscast as Leigh Fermor, in Lane’s view.  Janet wondered if he was a relative of Humphrey Bogart (the profile would fit) but Carolyn clarified the different spelling of their names and that Bogarde is an English actor.  Janet immediately went to utube and watched the movie.
7.  Possible on line to travel Fermor's route.  Janet looked up Schloss Schonbuhel and the wine region,  Langenlois. 

The BCC will discuss in the book club on April 23. Carolyn and I are so hooked that we are going on to read the other two volumes by Fermor.  The second BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER (1986) starts in Holy Week, continuing on from Budapest. We have both downloaded it on KINDLE. 

 Fermor is a "British travel writer" (the genre) and it is exceptionally delightful prose, so he is good company.

As an afterthought I am reminded of the young Laurence Durrell on Corfu and his writings...another Englishman taking on the country in  his prose and memoir of sorts, but actually more travel writing...of a very pleasurable type.