The passing last month of Arthur Frommer, whose “Europe on $5 a day” was a bible among a certain set of mid-century Americans marked the radical shifts in the nature and practice of travel in the 20C, particularly in Europe, typically the first overseas stop for those adventurous enough. A strong dollar helped.
A richer contrast can be discovered, as I recently did, in reading the three travel memoirs of Patrick Leigh Fermor who, at the age of eighteen, undertook to walk to Constantinople. He set out in late 1933 and arrived at the end of 1934. He didn’t walk the whole way, but almost so.
The three books—A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road—were written decades later, based on notes, journals, and memories. They are charming, insightful, observant, and fun. They are remarkable documents in two ways. They capture the cultures and landscapes of Europe between the Wars and the distinctive perspective of a young Englishman. Fermor came from a comfortable if dysfunctional family situation, familiar with classics, history, and literature, a great ease with languages, and was a full claimant to that not yet post-imperial attitude with which the English still bestrode the world; a certain cosmopolitan provincialism, if I may put it that way. After all, Muslims had taken over the Christian city of Constantine over 500 years earlier, but it was still "Constantinople."
As a historian, I relished the exposition of cultures—a mix of sophisticated capitals and the most rustic peasantry—with clearly sketched national characteristics for each of the countries through which he walked: Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. (Curiously, there are no notes or presentation of his time in Istanbul.) It was a momentous time. The Great Depression was in full swing across the continent, the evidence of the Great War was at every hand. The Nazis had just been elected to power in Germany and were only just beginning to make clear what their dominion would entail. These major historical aspects are just at the fringes of the story, however. The focus is on the places Fermor walked and the individuals whose uniformly generous hospitality—lavish according to their station—eased his way across the continent.
Europe today, for all its nationalisms and particularities, is connected and not a little homogenized. This is not just a matter of ubiquitous consumer chain stores, hotels, and restaurants and electronic technologies, but also the common modernity of plumbing and roads, the loss of dialect, the sprawl of population and the increasing distance of nature from where most people live. Solitary Balkan mountain footpaths and scarcely attended German castles are harder to find these days. Cultures, too, have changed. Fermor’s hob-nobbing with the British Consul in Sofia or a Hungarian Count seems, from our distance, still tinged with an innocence.
But even more so is the sheer audacity of the expedition. Intermittent mails (including regular infusions of a few pound notes from home every month), occasional local phone calls to confirm arrangements, well-tattered fold-up maps and throughout a firm insouciance about routes and bedding signaled the romance of travel for a young man afoot. It’s about 1500 miles from the North Sea to the Black Sea (not counting innumerable detours). It was also 90 years ago, on the far side of 45 years of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe and the vast destruction of the Second War. It’s all a long way aways.
Since Fermor wrote all this up in his later years, it’s good that he left the temptations of hindsight to the fringes of his saga. It’s a constant challenge for the historian to leave the knowledge of what was to come next to the side and let the people have their own stories in their own time. He nods to the fact that many of his hosts and walking companions were lost—either due to the War, Communism, or the baseline passage of time, but it is a strength of the books that they leave such matters, as well as historical and other analytics to others while floating the faintest of dark shadows over those earlier times.
For one who didn’t really take to middle class English education, Fermor shows a remarkable affinity for and interest in classics and history. The travels are mixed in with extensive references to Crusades, Byzantines, the “Dark Ages,” as well as more recent developments. Byron, a variety of Romans, French and German writers, and English of course are liberally strewn across the pages. Fermor also showed a talent for languages picked up (beyond French) on the fly. This skill put him miles ahead (sometimes literally) in his travels and his ability to extract a sense of the locals, for many of whom England was not much more than a name.
The final point is that the entire trilogy is immensely rich in language. There are obscurities and allusions and other vocabulary builders. I didn’t get them all, but there seemed no need to be precise in my understanding; rather better to let the story carry me along.
This set of slim volumes is, in sum, fine evidence of the limitations of genre classifications. There’s lots of information, myriad impressions, tales (both first person and ‘as told to’), geography, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, adventure, and romance.
A richer contrast can be discovered, as I recently did, in reading the three travel memoirs of Patrick Leigh Fermor who, at the age of eighteen, undertook to walk to Constantinople. He set out in late 1933 and arrived at the end of 1934. He didn’t walk the whole way, but almost so.
The three books—A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road—were written decades later, based on notes, journals, and memories. They are charming, insightful, observant, and fun. They are remarkable documents in two ways. They capture the cultures and landscapes of Europe between the Wars and the distinctive perspective of a young Englishman. Fermor came from a comfortable if dysfunctional family situation, familiar with classics, history, and literature, a great ease with languages, and was a full claimant to that not yet post-imperial attitude with which the English still bestrode the world; a certain cosmopolitan provincialism, if I may put it that way. After all, Muslims had taken over the Christian city of Constantine over 500 years earlier, but it was still "Constantinople."
As a historian, I relished the exposition of cultures—a mix of sophisticated capitals and the most rustic peasantry—with clearly sketched national characteristics for each of the countries through which he walked: Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. (Curiously, there are no notes or presentation of his time in Istanbul.) It was a momentous time. The Great Depression was in full swing across the continent, the evidence of the Great War was at every hand. The Nazis had just been elected to power in Germany and were only just beginning to make clear what their dominion would entail. These major historical aspects are just at the fringes of the story, however. The focus is on the places Fermor walked and the individuals whose uniformly generous hospitality—lavish according to their station—eased his way across the continent.
Europe today, for all its nationalisms and particularities, is connected and not a little homogenized. This is not just a matter of ubiquitous consumer chain stores, hotels, and restaurants and electronic technologies, but also the common modernity of plumbing and roads, the loss of dialect, the sprawl of population and the increasing distance of nature from where most people live. Solitary Balkan mountain footpaths and scarcely attended German castles are harder to find these days. Cultures, too, have changed. Fermor’s hob-nobbing with the British Consul in Sofia or a Hungarian Count seems, from our distance, still tinged with an innocence.
But even more so is the sheer audacity of the expedition. Intermittent mails (including regular infusions of a few pound notes from home every month), occasional local phone calls to confirm arrangements, well-tattered fold-up maps and throughout a firm insouciance about routes and bedding signaled the romance of travel for a young man afoot. It’s about 1500 miles from the North Sea to the Black Sea (not counting innumerable detours). It was also 90 years ago, on the far side of 45 years of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe and the vast destruction of the Second War. It’s all a long way aways.
Since Fermor wrote all this up in his later years, it’s good that he left the temptations of hindsight to the fringes of his saga. It’s a constant challenge for the historian to leave the knowledge of what was to come next to the side and let the people have their own stories in their own time. He nods to the fact that many of his hosts and walking companions were lost—either due to the War, Communism, or the baseline passage of time, but it is a strength of the books that they leave such matters, as well as historical and other analytics to others while floating the faintest of dark shadows over those earlier times.
For one who didn’t really take to middle class English education, Fermor shows a remarkable affinity for and interest in classics and history. The travels are mixed in with extensive references to Crusades, Byzantines, the “Dark Ages,” as well as more recent developments. Byron, a variety of Romans, French and German writers, and English of course are liberally strewn across the pages. Fermor also showed a talent for languages picked up (beyond French) on the fly. This skill put him miles ahead (sometimes literally) in his travels and his ability to extract a sense of the locals, for many of whom England was not much more than a name.
The final point is that the entire trilogy is immensely rich in language. There are obscurities and allusions and other vocabulary builders. I didn’t get them all, but there seemed no need to be precise in my understanding; rather better to let the story carry me along.
This set of slim volumes is, in sum, fine evidence of the limitations of genre classifications. There’s lots of information, myriad impressions, tales (both first person and ‘as told to’), geography, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, adventure, and romance.
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