Showing posts with label Patrick Leigh Fermor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patrick Leigh Fermor. Show all posts
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Walking the Woods and the Water
It is inevitable that someone would re-trace - seriously - Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey across Europe. Nick Hunt has done it in Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn (Nicholas Brearly, 2014). I think I have to read Fermor's third installment first!
Between the Woods and the Water
It has taken me months - months! - to read the second installment in Patrick Leigh Fermor's mesmerizing travel trilogy about his trek across Europe in 1934. But ultimately, Between the Woods and the Water (NYRB Classics, 2005) has been worth the effort, and if I slowed down a bit on the Great Hungarian Plain, so be it. This volume ends with a stunning note that will make you put the book down and stare into middle distance as you try to comprehend what you have just been told.
It starts, however, exactly where A Time for Gifts left off - crossing the Danube into Hungary - and ends also on the Danube, but far far away at the famed Iron Gates. The great river bookends Fermor's travels in this volume, which mostly occur inland through Hungary and Romania and other countries that were created by the Treaty of Versailles and the aftermath of the First World War, denuded in the Second World War, then isolated and destroyed by the Cold War.
But for the most part, Fermor avoids looking back, and stays in the present of his memories. A central piece of this part of his trek is a throwback to a 19th c. way of life - travelling from one country house to another, visiting with counts and grafs and vons and zus who all have marvelously shabby but graceful country homes filled with artifacts and vast libraries and charming, cosmopolitain guests. His innate British upper crustiness - read, impeccable manners and good education - combined with his genuine curiosity and good humor help him to fit right into this golden world of summer picnics and exploring and shooting and and riding and dressing for dinner with the last Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and cocktails on the terrace and bicycle polo. The owners of these idylls are all fascinating, well-educated, mostly polymaths who share Fermor's love of history and natural science and local tradition, and are perfectly willing to help him along his way, particularly if he stays for a few days. Fermor has great affection for the many characters he meets, and describes them with humor and sympathy.* I could quote endlessly from his adventures here, which truly embody summer of a kind that few experienced then, and none will now.
Maybe this passage will do to give you a sense of the delights that awaited a young Englishman making his way across Transylvania in 1934. He is near Arad, which had been Hungarian but became Romanian after WW1.
"During the hot midday hours, iced soda was splashed into the deep golden wine I keep mentioning. This has a barbarous sound, but it was delicious - Spritzer the called it in German, and, in Magyar, hoszu lepes, 'a long step,' one of the many terms for the degrees of dilution. Generically, all these wines were unmistakably from that particular region, yet each one seemed to change with the roof under which it was to be drunk. it was ready for drinking from the moment the vintage had settled from fermentation, and after years in cool cellars it was beyond praise. At dinner, decanter on decanter was emptied, undiluted now, by the light of candles in tall glass tulip-shaped shields. Jas liked sitting late after dinner when rash and varied talk ranged far into the small hours. When he lifted a forefinger, we would fall silent and listen to the nightingales for a minute. A restless geometry of fire-flies darted about under the spatulate volume of the chestnut trees, and getting up one nigh to go to bed, we found emerald-coloured tree-frogs smaller than threepenny-bits clinging to the leaves like miniature green castaways on rafts." (107)
But of course, you simply can't read Fermor's stories without the shadow of what is to come hanging overhead. Where are all those houses now? What happened to the people? Here's what Fermor says:
"Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all." (110)
It is not only war that destroys this way of life, but "progress." Fermor's final weeks of this passage are spent on the Danube, near the Iron Gates - an area that was completely flooded in 1970 by the construction of a great hydro-electric dam in the late 1960s. You can read about all of this on your own, thanks to the miracle of the internets. But here is an example of what was lost not to war but to improvement. Before the flood (I think that Fermor would like that biblical allusion, except he'd use antidiluvian or something far more polysyllabic) there was an island in the Danube, called Ada Kaleh that was still populated by descendants of the Turks who made it so far into what is now Central Europe. Fermor spends a night in this perfect place.
"Balconied houses gathered about the mosque and small workshops for Turkish Delight and cigarettes, and all round these crumbed the remains of a massive fortress. Vine-trellises or an occasional awning shaded the cobbled lanes. There were hollyhocks and climbing roses and carnations in whitewashed petrol tins, and the heads and shoulders of the wives who flickered about among them were hidden by a dark feredje - a veil pinned in a straight line above the brown and joining under the nose; and they wore tapering white trousers, an outfit which gave them the look of black-and-white ninepins. Children were identically-clad miniatures of the grown-ups and, except for their unveiled faces, the little girls might each have been the innermost of a set of Russian dolls. Tobacco leaves were hung to dry in the sun like strings of small kippers. Women carried bundles of sticks on their heads, scattered grain to poultry and returned from the shore with their sickles and armfuls of rushes. Lop-eared rabbits basked or hopped sluggishly about the little gardens and nibbled the leaves of ripening melons. Flotillas of ducks cruised among the nets and the canoes and multitudes of frogs had summoned all the storks from the roofs." (246)
It sounds lovely, but if you want the full picture, including the marvelous image of the men in the coffee house smoking hookahs and drinking coffee and raki, you'll just have to read it yourself.
*There are more personal connections this time. Fermor makes a great friend in Istvan, the scion of one house, and takes a lover, Angela, for a few brief but charmed weeks. And there's that romp in the hay after a naked swim, which is never detailed but sure sounds like a bit of whoopee. (137)
It starts, however, exactly where A Time for Gifts left off - crossing the Danube into Hungary - and ends also on the Danube, but far far away at the famed Iron Gates. The great river bookends Fermor's travels in this volume, which mostly occur inland through Hungary and Romania and other countries that were created by the Treaty of Versailles and the aftermath of the First World War, denuded in the Second World War, then isolated and destroyed by the Cold War.
But for the most part, Fermor avoids looking back, and stays in the present of his memories. A central piece of this part of his trek is a throwback to a 19th c. way of life - travelling from one country house to another, visiting with counts and grafs and vons and zus who all have marvelously shabby but graceful country homes filled with artifacts and vast libraries and charming, cosmopolitain guests. His innate British upper crustiness - read, impeccable manners and good education - combined with his genuine curiosity and good humor help him to fit right into this golden world of summer picnics and exploring and shooting and and riding and dressing for dinner with the last Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and cocktails on the terrace and bicycle polo. The owners of these idylls are all fascinating, well-educated, mostly polymaths who share Fermor's love of history and natural science and local tradition, and are perfectly willing to help him along his way, particularly if he stays for a few days. Fermor has great affection for the many characters he meets, and describes them with humor and sympathy.* I could quote endlessly from his adventures here, which truly embody summer of a kind that few experienced then, and none will now.
Maybe this passage will do to give you a sense of the delights that awaited a young Englishman making his way across Transylvania in 1934. He is near Arad, which had been Hungarian but became Romanian after WW1.
"During the hot midday hours, iced soda was splashed into the deep golden wine I keep mentioning. This has a barbarous sound, but it was delicious - Spritzer the called it in German, and, in Magyar, hoszu lepes, 'a long step,' one of the many terms for the degrees of dilution. Generically, all these wines were unmistakably from that particular region, yet each one seemed to change with the roof under which it was to be drunk. it was ready for drinking from the moment the vintage had settled from fermentation, and after years in cool cellars it was beyond praise. At dinner, decanter on decanter was emptied, undiluted now, by the light of candles in tall glass tulip-shaped shields. Jas liked sitting late after dinner when rash and varied talk ranged far into the small hours. When he lifted a forefinger, we would fall silent and listen to the nightingales for a minute. A restless geometry of fire-flies darted about under the spatulate volume of the chestnut trees, and getting up one nigh to go to bed, we found emerald-coloured tree-frogs smaller than threepenny-bits clinging to the leaves like miniature green castaways on rafts." (107)
But of course, you simply can't read Fermor's stories without the shadow of what is to come hanging overhead. Where are all those houses now? What happened to the people? Here's what Fermor says:
"Every part of Europe I had crossed so far was to be torn and shattered by the war; indeed except for the last stage before the Turkish frontier, all the countries traversed by this journey were fought over a few years later by two mercilessly destructive powers; and when war broke out, all these friends vanished into sudden darkness. Afterwards the uprooting and destruction were on so tremendous a scale that it was sometimes years after the end of it all that the cloud became less dense and I could pick up a clue here and there and piece together what had happened in the interim. Nearly all of them had been dragged into the conflict in the teeth of their true feelings and disaster overtook them all." (110)
It is not only war that destroys this way of life, but "progress." Fermor's final weeks of this passage are spent on the Danube, near the Iron Gates - an area that was completely flooded in 1970 by the construction of a great hydro-electric dam in the late 1960s. You can read about all of this on your own, thanks to the miracle of the internets. But here is an example of what was lost not to war but to improvement. Before the flood (I think that Fermor would like that biblical allusion, except he'd use antidiluvian or something far more polysyllabic) there was an island in the Danube, called Ada Kaleh that was still populated by descendants of the Turks who made it so far into what is now Central Europe. Fermor spends a night in this perfect place.
"Balconied houses gathered about the mosque and small workshops for Turkish Delight and cigarettes, and all round these crumbed the remains of a massive fortress. Vine-trellises or an occasional awning shaded the cobbled lanes. There were hollyhocks and climbing roses and carnations in whitewashed petrol tins, and the heads and shoulders of the wives who flickered about among them were hidden by a dark feredje - a veil pinned in a straight line above the brown and joining under the nose; and they wore tapering white trousers, an outfit which gave them the look of black-and-white ninepins. Children were identically-clad miniatures of the grown-ups and, except for their unveiled faces, the little girls might each have been the innermost of a set of Russian dolls. Tobacco leaves were hung to dry in the sun like strings of small kippers. Women carried bundles of sticks on their heads, scattered grain to poultry and returned from the shore with their sickles and armfuls of rushes. Lop-eared rabbits basked or hopped sluggishly about the little gardens and nibbled the leaves of ripening melons. Flotillas of ducks cruised among the nets and the canoes and multitudes of frogs had summoned all the storks from the roofs." (246)
It sounds lovely, but if you want the full picture, including the marvelous image of the men in the coffee house smoking hookahs and drinking coffee and raki, you'll just have to read it yourself.
*There are more personal connections this time. Fermor makes a great friend in Istvan, the scion of one house, and takes a lover, Angela, for a few brief but charmed weeks. And there's that romp in the hay after a naked swim, which is never detailed but sure sounds like a bit of whoopee. (137)
Monday, March 9, 2015
summer
It seems that winter may be finally loosening her icy grip on Cambridge - although she will hold on to those snow piles for weeks yet. But during one of the darkest moments, I read the following passage in the second installment of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trek-trilogy, Between the Woods and the Water (1986, New York Review). For just a moment, I could see summer.
"Those long un-desert-like stretches [of the Plain] have left a memory of dew and new grass and Malek's [that's his horse] hoofs trotting through woods and flowers while the climbing sun showed so clearly through leaves and petals and grass-blades that they seemed alight. The woods flickered with red-starts and wheatears, newly arrived after amazing journeys, their giveaway rumps darting through the tree-trunks among birds with their nests already built, and in the open, crested larks flew up from the grass at our approach and sang as thought they were suspended about the sky on threads. There was not a single way in which life could be improved."
I have found myself thinking of this passage during the minor-ly arduous trek to and from work. While I'm just walking to Harvard Square, Fermor is making his way on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain. There is a languid, sun-gilded quality to this whole book so far, as Our Hero moves between ancient landed gentry and their marvelously shabby country houses across Transylvania, all in the somnolent late-summer haze of pre-war eastern Europe. I find myself wondering what happened to all those people, and their summer-y lives and houses. If one followed Fermor's trek today, what, if anything, would one find?
"Those long un-desert-like stretches [of the Plain] have left a memory of dew and new grass and Malek's [that's his horse] hoofs trotting through woods and flowers while the climbing sun showed so clearly through leaves and petals and grass-blades that they seemed alight. The woods flickered with red-starts and wheatears, newly arrived after amazing journeys, their giveaway rumps darting through the tree-trunks among birds with their nests already built, and in the open, crested larks flew up from the grass at our approach and sang as thought they were suspended about the sky on threads. There was not a single way in which life could be improved."
I have found myself thinking of this passage during the minor-ly arduous trek to and from work. While I'm just walking to Harvard Square, Fermor is making his way on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain. There is a languid, sun-gilded quality to this whole book so far, as Our Hero moves between ancient landed gentry and their marvelously shabby country houses across Transylvania, all in the somnolent late-summer haze of pre-war eastern Europe. I find myself wondering what happened to all those people, and their summer-y lives and houses. If one followed Fermor's trek today, what, if anything, would one find?
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.
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.
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