Patrick Lee Fermor Vol 3 The Broken Road My notes, mostly about art and literature.

This has an introduction by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.  I once knew Colin so his interest in Fermor makes great sense given all the travel books he has made about his journeys, though he also writes fiction.

So, for anyone wanting to go this route, Here are my notes.  They need more editing, but I need to move on, just now.  Apologies. 

P 89 “The only authors he had heard of were the same ones who seemed to have gained a unique foothold throughout Central Europe, in German translation or Tauchnitz: Dickens, Wilde and H.G. Wells, then, after a gap, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Charles Morgan, and rather surprisingly, Rosamond Lehmann.  Their bugbear, because of Arms and the Man was Bernard Shaw.”

 P 69  She was as pale as a water sprite or an etiolated Rossetti heroine. 

P 59 rose bushes, hundreds of thousands of them, …Kazanlik is one of the chief places in the world for attar of roses…highly prized in the courts and harems of the  Orient, especially in India and Persia.  …deep crimson yellow centred Damascus rose. Famous for the sweetness and pungeny of its scent, It is the favorite rose for attar….the harvest…like Calvados…in autumn in Normandy…the perfumes of Arabia failed to chase the reck of Duncan’s blood from the hands of Lady Macgeth, were probably exactly this.”

47/  Shamanist Mongols…

30 It is from the Shephardim that Spinoza sprang, and in England, families with names like…Disraeli….Cordova, Granada or Cadiz…I had heard, a version of fifteenth centry Andalusian Spanish caled Ladino

24  Lamertine’s (Le Lac)  house…Philip of Macedon….”

 8 Professor Thomas Whittemore (1872- 1950)

121   quatrains of Omar Khayyam  (pocket edition sent by his mother)

P 107-108.  I was halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, which I had started the evening before and read all through the night: my first introduction to Dostoevsky, in a French yellow-back translation by Le Comte Porzor.  Helplessly spellbound, I postponed getting up from half hour to half hour in spite of the bright autumn morning, outside.  But at about eleven o’clock the light lost its brilliance on the page.  Clouds had collected and soon the sky dissolved.  A steady downpour started;  this lets me off, I thought with delight settling down more comfortably to the doings of Alyosha, and only descending the staircase at two, rather shamefaced to seem so idle a lodger…The book carried me all through supper until closing time and by candlelight until half past three in the morning, when I finished it at last, exhausted and excited.  Dostoevsky ever since, and even the mention of his name evokes a momentary impression of rain and fresh-sawn wood.”

126.  On the wall hung oleographs of an Alp at dawn  and Lake Maggiore with the Borromeo Islands (creating childhood memories for me) and a lute playing love scene from Orlando Furioso.  … I lay back, stripped of possessions, in a floating condition of melancholy peace…But only a touch; the rest belonged to the Arabian Nights..

160  Kishinev, she told me,the capital of Bessarabia, which, thought formerly Moldavian, had been ceded to Russia for over a century.  “What! I said- trotting out something I had learnt in a reference book in Sofia – “the town where Pushkin was in exile”.  That’s it, “she said , looking rather impressed.”

165.  a fair haired and blue eyed one from Sibie, or Hermanstadt, one of those medieval fortified Saxon towns in the Carpathian passes, whose German nationality and speech have been romantically attributed to their descent from the children led away from Hamelin by the Pied Piper.  (Swallowed up by the hillside, they miraculously emerged in this leafy principality.”
 .

185.  The Phanariots.  …”It was not only on their wealth but on their knowledge of languages and their wider European horizons, in a world of fanatic barbarism, that their oligarchy was based.  From the first, when they became Grand Dragomans of the Porte, they were friends of literature and art; the first Rumanian bible was translated by the orders of Sherban Cantacuzene of Wallcachia, and with his faults, a figure as polished as Alexander  Mavrocordato, Byron’s and Shelley’s friend and a leader in the Greek revolt could have sprung from no other East European soil. 

188.  No wonder that Proust should have been so deeply intrigued by Rumanians in Paris and sought them out as friends.  For me, it was exciting and impressive to hear the name Marcel dropped so lightly and easily, and to realize that Anna, who seemed to be everyone’s cousin, was the Comtesse de Noailles, that Paul, if it was not Morand, who had married Helene Soutzo, was Valery, that Jean was Cocteau and that Leon Paul was Fargue; clues scattered in a paperchase that could be followed later….Furstenberg families..how many yokes of land the Esterhazys owned… But I don’t think it would often end up, in the Hungarian capital, with talk about Saint Saens and the Goncourt Brothers, the points in common between Villiers de L’Isle Adam and Barbey d’Surevilly, the link between Lautreamont and surrealism, or what Abbe Mugnier had told of one of the guests about the conversation of Huysmans and what the author had left out in his portrait of him in En Route.   

P 189…the already half-mythical Maruca Cantacuzene, who married Enescu, the composer…

P 191.  The room I occupied, filled with Empire furniture, was entirely circular, the only one I have ever slept in, except a bell tent, a hut in the French Cameroons, a converted coast house and one in the Hotel de la Louisiana in Paris.)

P 198.  I struck very lucky.  That night there was a marvelous and now very big party given by the Spaniards Perico and Lili Prat at their legation, for Artur Rubenstein.  He was a great friend and always stayed with the Prats when he had a concert in Bucharest.  After supper he played Chopin for a while, and then dancing and drinking set in at an uninhibited tempo.  I thought I’d never seen anyone enjoy himself more, only knocking off dancing to talk at a tremendous speed and very funnily, his conversation scattered with marvelous imitations, abetted by his red hair and a pale, charming face.  He seemd to infect everyone else with fun and high spirits. It was a memorable and glorious evening, and a very late one.  The last thing I remember was expounding my views on literature with considerable urgency to Julie Ghika and Noucheette Gafencu.

P 216.  My childhood was spent in London in my mother’s very exciting company, with my sister Vanessa, who was four years older, when she was not in India…These studios were entirely inhabited by sculptors and painters, and my mother persuaded Arthur Rackham to paint the door of our nursery -school room with a picture of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens sailing down the Serpentine in a bird’s nest. “

P 217.  Man remembers mother playing lead in “the Maid of the Mountains” in Simla in 1913. …the post-Kipling existence of reading, languages, gymkhanas and acting, unfolding under deodars, was half hindered, half abetted by my grandmother.  She was a very fair portrait painter, rather of the Burne-Jones school, and she had left a picture of my mother at that time: a beautiful girl in a white dress with her head bowed in a posture of entirely deceptiive meekness in order, I think and quite rightly, to display the long Pre-Raphaelite cascade of flame-coloured hair/”  

224.  Ovid, Pushkin was the tumulus marking the grave of Mazeppa, a lonely mound among the  Danube’s outlets.  “…I quickly read Byron’s poem, and my thoughts of the plain sweeping from the river and across the Ukraine to Kiev were incomplete thenceforward without the Gericault-vision of Peter the Great’s heman of Cossacks lashed naked to the back of a wild horse galloping with streaming mane and wild eyes and nostrils across the crepuscular steppe.”

Last chapter is ATHOS.

  He visits all the monasteries; one is Russian and another Bulgarian, both of whom have special permission to have their monasteries.  A lot of Raki is drunk.  It is the welcome drink at each place. The worst food is uncooked vegetables or sardines in oil…which he usually manages to not eat somehow, but on one occasion, must swallow or offend his hosts.

  He reads Byron the moment he arrives in Greece, and boards the boat immediately to Athos. He loves Byron and reads Don Juan more than once.  He wonders why Bryon is not more appreciated.  

  (See woodcut by Albrecht Durer )

 P 283.  Describes scene of monks …………”A sailing vessel lay among the rocks, and some of the fishing brothers, their habits tucked about their knees, were drawing in their nets and grounding their boats.  It was a scene from the Dark Ages, and showed how time has stood still here. “

P 285.  Browsing through Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, I came across a stanza which just captured the feeling when I was standing before the monastery gate at sunset, as he must have done a hundred years ago.

More blest the life of godly eremite

Such as on lonely Athos may be seen,

Watching at eve upon the giant height

That looks o’er waves so blue, skies so serene,

That he who there at such an hour hath been,

Will wistful linger on that hallowed spot;

Then slowly tear him from the witching scene,

Sgih forth one wish that such had been his lot,

Then turn to have a world he had almost forgot.

Fruit of imagination as Byron never went to Mt. Athos. .

P 302  “Russians are mysterious to me, but I adore their company – such gentlemen, even the peasants, such odd throught processes, and such sense of humour!

P 306 Megisti Lavra.  The library like the monastery itself, is the largest and oldest on the Holy mountain.  Manuscripts and codex and robest.  His guide shows him a card, “with a picture of the codex, from Sir Arthur Hill, director of the botanical gardens at Kew. “

P 312  Simonopetra:  “it is perched high up on the mountain, looking as if it grows straight from the peak beneath it, the brick blending as imperceptibly with the rock as a mermaid with her tail:…Robert Byron compared it to the Potala of Lhasa, and he was quite right.  …The evenings on Mount Athos, with their touch of melancholy, are of an unimaginable quietness and serenity.” …To look down…I remembered Rossetti’s lines about the ‘flood of ether as a bridge…where this earth spins like a fretful midge’ – it was just such a feeling.

 P  318  It is his 20^th birthday and he is at St. Panteleimon. “The soft faced librarian spoke affectionatly of Professor Whittemore, and consented to my taking  Robert Byron’s “The Station”, which Father Basil had presented back to my cell”…

.Finds it splendid and breaks into laughter…PLF writes in a footnote: “I had set out on this jounrey with a rucksack he had given me. – the year before last now – the very one he himself had carried with accompanying Byron and David Talbot Rice in the great Athos Journey “The Station” describes.  It was stolen in a Jugendherberge in Munich in January  1934)

P 321 I felt slightly depressed as the conversation continued, owing to the realization that I was talking to someone for whom all the vanities and selfishness to which I am prone were nonexistent.”    (Becomes homesick; remarks about what people are doing at home, when will he be home again, etc) t

P 324  At day’s conclusion of his birthday, he writes: “it has been a wonderful day, and I could not have wished for anything better for my birthday.  Just a year ago, I was in a schloss in upper Austria, sleeping after a dinner and an evening with Count and Countess Trautmannsdorf .

P326  Xenophontos.  “The afternoon was pleasant enough, however, as Basil came over to tea, and we sat long, talking of Virgil, Horace and Catullus.  I showed him the little Elzevir Horace that his compatriot, Baron Liphart, gave me a year ago in Munich.  He talked of the Englishmen he had met at his monastery, a few of whom I knew – Professor Whittemore, Robert Byron, Mar Ogilvie Grant, David Talbot Rice and Balfour and Captain Stuart-Hay. 

P 330 Dochiarion.  Arthurian Legend.  

331. “ …beardless novice grinning like a chimpanzee…the priest…cense the congregation…had the air of a retired publican coming out to water his roses on a summer evening.  …greenfinch…flitted in the church, taking everyone’s gaze throughout the service…twittering and chirping…at last service ended…brother…walked round with a fan of turkey’s feathers, extinguishing the candles with a sweep of his hand…”

“The sunset over the sea was lovely, as the globe of the sun was purified to one of those clearly defined orange balloons that in winter set so prettily over the Serpentine.”

332.  “I think one of the greatest blessings of this life is its solitude.” Outside now, the moon and stars are shining brightly on the snowy roofs, and making a silver track across the inky sea. I do so wonder what everyone is doing at home now.

…pointed leaves like glittering green sword blades,,, I found a taciturn Albanian sitting on a rock, looking out to sea with the sorrows of Prometheus on his brow.”

333.  “feeling his eyes on my back, as if he had found me manufacturing bombsI” Snowballs.

Konstamonitou.   Forlorn and neglected…doddering greybeard…melancholy eyes…strict humbleness and poverty which his coenobite monastery enforced on its monks…from ikon to ikon, told me their histories.”

334.  ,,,,crossings and obeisances, bending and touching the floor repeatedly with both hands. I naturally remained stationary,…old monk came up, and with fury in his eyes muttered “Get Out!  Get Out! , to make me do likewise.  Father Paul arrived in time, telling him I was a heretic and knew no better.”  …vegetables and sardines, raw and swimming in yellow oil, with the stone-hard loaves and the metal jug of wine…not a word was said all the meal…

335.  They all come to his chamber…drink raki, become “quite gay and noisy.  They were good souls and in spite of their ascetic look, men and brothers.”

Zographoas.  Bulgarian. “The scene might have come straight out of Tehocritus”…pirate-proof little fortressses…”The forest closed in with a jungle of olive, yew, oleander, borom, laurel, rhododendron and holly.  A blackbird told of the nearness of spring, and set me thinking about home.”

337  Macedonian…”Most of the monks were Macedonians: that melancholy, warlike people.  I spent much of my time, head lung back, gazing at the frescoes, which though not old, were amazingly graphic.”

339.  Monastic life in retirement from owning a large cloth factory, having been an ambassador, recipient of medals, etc.  German Consul in Gabrovo. Saw Czar Boris and Queen Joanna, Bulgarian…in reception salon.  Bulgarian govt changes.

340  Only real butter…and Bulgarian kashkaval, vastly superior to the oily white cheese of the monks…scene between Zographos and the Serbian monastery of Chilandari…four leaded Byzantine domes…Montenegrins doing the sword dance…battle of Kosovo…Peter of Serbia … It is amusing to think that Count Hunyadi, the nephew by marriage of the last Obrenovitch king, lives in Transylvania within a few miles of Xenia Czernovits, the cousin of the present Karageorgevitch, on perfect terms of good neighbourhood.  It only occurred to me, now, and what a coincidence it is by knowing them both.”

344/  Father Damascene cooked a splendid supper of fried fish and potatoes and some good soup too, which he dished up with great aplomb, watching me eat it with great pleasure. (earthquake)

345.  Reads A Shropshire Lad, which his mother gave him for his 19^th birthday.  …lying on my overcoat under a Scotch fir, reading A Shropshire Lad, and finally falling asleep.  Wears moccasins…

349.  Enroute to stay with Peter Stathatos on estate at Modi, near Lake Volvi.  “This last month will be an unbelieveable memory when I’m back in England.  I wonder when I shall be here again? “