Saturday, May 3, 2014

A Time for Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time for Gifts (New York Review of Books, 1977) is like that moment early on in your trip where you write in your travel journal with such detail and eloquence about the smallest things because you are so excited to be on your way and everything is magical and glowing through the lens of adventure.  He even manages to make a trip through London to the docks (22-25) sound breathtaking.  I know it will stay like this for the whole book because that is the difference between a real writer and a journeyman journaler.

I hit upon Fermor, who is apparently considered the greatest travel writer of all time, in this review of the final volume covering his walking journey across Europe in 1933-34.  I've not really read any travel literature, but man am I hooked if there is more like this. First, there is the epic romance of his quest.  Kind of a lost soul, PLF decides to walk across Europe from Holland to Turkey, with just some good boots and a backpack, and a few pounds wired ahead to strategic points along the way.  Of course the shadow of tragedy also hangs over it all, because in a decade so much of what he sees will be irrevocably altered socially, politically, and economically by the great storms of German aggression and Soviet conquest.  (See, you even start writing that way after reading this stuff.)  Not to mention, Our Hero is just a bit reminiscent of dear Chummy from Call the Midwife, with his elite British upbringing, and resolute optimism.  (He's way dishier than Chummy though.)  PLF welcomes adventure, judges none, and happily embraces a kind of Teutonic ideal of the wandering student, but there is an essential Britishness underlying it all that will thrill any Anglophile.

This book caught me on my twin loves of splendid language and wonderfully evocative scene-setting. There is such a richness of vocabulary, erudition, complex sentence structure, and not just big words but the correct big words.  Although Fermor starts his story with getting expelled from school, there is still that apparently natural British public school tone of intellectual exclusivity - we're not shutting you out, old fellow, but you do understand that this is just how we talk and write, so if you want to participate, you might have to swot a bit.  Fermor's geographic explorations are in some ways are just a starting point for intellectual  ones:  any old thing or view or person which he encounters will launch a scholarly tangent relating to art or history or ancient civilizations or literature or pretty much anything that strikes his fancy.  While it is true - and not hidden at all - that he wrote this years after the trip, based on notes taken at the time, these ruminations have an authentic feel to them.  He's spending a lot of time alone, walking, after all, so he has to think about something while tramping along in those hobnailed boots.  Selecting one example has almost undone me, but here's a concise but charming scene that generates a range of entirely appropriate if research-requiring tangents.
    "This part of the town [Ulm] contained nothing later than the Middle Ages, or so it appeared.  A kind crone outside a harness-maker's saw me poeering down a hole in the ice.  'It's full of Forellen!' she said.  Trout?  'Ja, Forellen!  Voll, voll davon.'  How did they manage under that thick shell of ice?  Hovering suspended in the dark?  Or hurtling along on their Schubertian courses, hidden and headlong?  Were they in season?  If so, I determined to go a bust and get hold of one for dinner, with a bottle of Franconian wine.  Meanwhile, night was falling fast.  High up in the snowfall a bell began booming slowly.  Funera plango! a deep and solemn note.  Fulgura frango!  It might have been tolling for an Emperor's passing, for war, siege, revolt, plague, excommunication, a ban of interdict, or Doomsday: 'Excito lentos!  Dissipo ventos!  Paco cruentos!'"*  (91)

Later, pages and pages will be devoted to disquisitions on the ancient tribes that roamed Central Europe, ruminations on the fantastical nature of the High Baroque as represented by the monastery at Melk, dramatic imaginings of Czech history by that window in Prague, or just a lovely tramp in the woods:
"Frog time had come.  Each pace, once more, unloosed a score of ragged parabolas and splashes.  Flights of waterfowl detonated like spring-guns loosing off in a whirr of missiles across the water.  It was a world of scales and webbed feet and feathers and wet whiskers.  Hundres of new nests were joining the old ones in the damp green maze and soon there would be thousands of egges and then wings beyond counting."  (301)

The whole German part, especially the Rhineland and along the Moselle touched a deep vein of something - nostalgia? longing? - in me.  My own German experience was of course completely different but I could picture Fermor's as vividly as anything, I felt like I was along on the Rhein, and adored reading the German and saying the place names out loud.  Ausgezeichnet.  Fermor is deeply affected by the newly-in-power Nazi presence, and carefully describes each encounter or view he has of National Socialism.  Yet one can't help but wonder if this is highlighted just a bit more than it might have been if published immediately?  The book is written in 1977, and we all know what happens.  Fermor is obviously appalled at what he now knows about the coming destruction of German culture so how could he write with a 1930s objectivity?  I can't reproduce here PLF's experience of the Hofbrauhaus in Munich as it is several pages (103-108), but it is gripping - relayed with such disgust, such fascination, some fear, and then, unconsciousness due to a katzenjammer.**  It's a bit like those kaleidoscopic montages in the movie version of Cabaret, which end up focusing in on the swastika on someone's armband.

I'll note one more motif, but after that, you've got to read this for yourself to really get the full effect.  Fermor has been well-schooled on European art and one of the great threads is his regular rumination on how the landscape or people or just the geist of the place reminds him of art he has seen. PLF steps off the boat to begin his walk in Rotterdam, so his first chapter includes all of his experiences in Holland.  Here's how he sees it:
"Imaginary interiors . . . No wonder they took shape in painting terms!  Ever since those first hours in Rotterdam, a three-dimensional Holland had been springing up all round me and expanding into the distance in conformity with another Holland with was already in existence and in every detail complete.  For if there is a foreign landscape familiar to English eyes by proxy, it is this one; by the time they see the original, a hundred mornings and afternoons in the museums and picture galleries and country houses have done their work.  These confrontations and recognition-scenes filled the journey with excitement and delight.  The nature of the landscape itself, the colour, the light, the sky, the openness, the expanse and the details of the towns and the villages are leagued together in the weaving of a miraculously consoling and healing spell.  Melancholy [whose?  PLF's?] is exorcised, chaos chased away and wellbeing, alacrity of spirit and thoughtful calm take their place. . . .
  So compelling is the identity of picture and reality that all along my path numberless dawdling afternoons in museums were being summoned back to life and set in motion.  Every pace confirmed them.  Each scene conjured up its echo.  The masts and quays and gables of a river port, the backyard with a besom leaning against a brick wall, the chequer-board floors of churches - there they all were, the entire range of Dutch themes, ending in taverns where I expected to find boors carousing, and found them; and in every case, like magic, the painter's name would simultaneously impinge.  The willows, the roofs and bell-towers, the cows grazing self-consciously in the foreground meadows - there was no need to ask whose easels they were waiting for as they munched."  (33-34)

THAT'S why you take Art 100.  In fact, this whole book is a spectacular argument for studying the humanities.

Now, Fermor isn't perfect.  There are some literary tics that he employs a bit too often - lights twinkle at some point every day, on every page, and he employs a train-window kind of visual.  Castles loom up on the bank, he passes under their shadow, then they recede into the distance.  This happens with a lot of natural and man-made landmarks, while walking, on a boat, on a train.  It effectively conveys the idea of onward movement, but I find it employed a touch too often.  Still, I'll put up with the twinkles and the receding if it means more splendidly evocative and enlightening prose.  Why haven't I read more travel writing?  I believe I shall!

*I believe this may be Latin.  Here's what google translate has to say:  "A funeral lament! Flash break! Wake slow! Waste winds! Paco bloody!"   Of course, google translate thought it was in Portuguese, so there you are.
** katzenjammer = hangover.

No comments:

Post a Comment