Boundless Curiosity: A Great Travel Writer

To be a great travel writer, you need, first of all, great material. Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose life of adventure made him one of the major travel writers of the 20th century, found such material on the road, where he discovered his career almost by accident.

Fleeing an unhappy life in England at the age of 18, he set out in 1933 for a walking tour of Europe, from Holland through Germany, into the Balkans and Greece, ending in Istanbul.  Along with way, he became a self-taught master of several languages and a self-educated cultural historian who saw that his unique experiences could provide material for books. So he created his own literary career.

Paddy Fermor, as he was known to everyone, was a romantic adventurer who was curious about everything, incapable of being bored, as he repaid his many hosts along his youthful journey with songs and stories, talking long into the night.  Some people eventually found him a bit of a show-off, Artemis Cooper says in her superb biography of Fermor, but the ladies loved this handsome, talented fellow who charmed shepherds and gypsies as well as Eastern European nobility, who opened their castles to him.

A  vagabond, he often slept in barns or monasteries or in open fields, weather permitting, but he was the type of guy who always made his way to the  top in any society, despite his ragged clothes.  With letters of introduction, he found his way into Mount Athos as well as into a ball at the British embassy in Athens, where he met a Romanian princess, with whom he lived for several years.

One reviewer (Barnaby Rogerson) says that Paddy was a consummate freeloader who paid for the chance to stay with counts and barons in their hunting lodges with his great energy and talent for song, dance, poetry, talk, and other men's wives. But Paddy was a great reader, too. He mastered French, Romanian, and Greek along the way and ended up living in Greece; during the Second World War, he became famous as the leader of a the group that abducted a Nazi General on Crete and spirited him away to Egypt.

I was fascinated by Fermor's account of Germany in 1933, when people even in the smaller cities he visited were clicking heels and giving Nazi salutes within months of Hitler's take-over of the country.   Although sometimes taking a train or boat, he mainly walked from place to hilly place, finding refuge where he could. His hosts generally found him a charismatic talker who saw conversation as an art, and he remained friends with many of the people he met along the way. 

His journey goes from isolation and poverty--he lived on practically nothing and had no money to repay anyone--to luxurious accommodations. Once, after an isolated spell in the Carpathian mountains, he meets a rabbi who speaks only Yiddish, then spends the night with a man who owns a dancing bear that he holds onto all night as they try to sleep.

In Vienna, he resorts to selling pencil sketches door to door to earn a few shillings; in Hungary, he meets a Count who reads Proust; and so it goes, with nubile girls, noblemen and swineherds as companions. He recites Shakespeare in German, memorizes Latin, Greek and French poetry, which he recites at the end of long dinner parties.

Above all, he notices the details of things and describes them memorably. based on his notes, Fermor later writes A Time of Gifts, A Time to Keep Silence, The Broken Road, and ten other books of memoirs and letters, recounted in what is at times a formal style that favors Latinisms ("penumbra" is a favorite word) that today's readers might find quaint. Of course, the world he describes is long gone--all the more reason his work is so fascinating and valuable.

The energy and curiosity of Paddy Fermor is boundless, as is his love of people and language. He is one of those born storytellers I would love to have met: he made his life into a work of art.

Fear and Fame

Why do so many people, even non-readers, have such a high regard for authors? Why is there such uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does publishing something, even online, make a person into an object of admiration?

These are some of the interesting questions Tim Parks asks in a recent article.  I found it earlier this month just after giving a talk on Hemingway to a group of 25 people, all of them familiar with the Hemingway legend but few of them readers of his work. Even non-readers have literary heroes, it seems.

The same week, my wife, Lynn, published more of her fiction on Amazon Kindle, and the reaction to this news, even among those who have intention of downloading these stories, is usually one of excited awe, as if she were now some minor celebrity.

Parks teaches creative writing on occasion and finds among his students the same eagerness to publish than I have found in some of my students.  They see the only real validation of their work as having it accepted in some format so that it's "out there" so that they are, presumably, no longer anonymous nothings.  They are not willing to wait until the story or article or poem is ready; this may take months, even years.  Yet most of these emerging writers are impatient.

We live in a culture of celebrity, where winning is everything even though this motive is rarely acknowledged by most writers.  The fear of being unrecognized seems to be at work here, the fear of being ignored, the fear of personal failure if the piece of writing we dash off one week is not soon being applauded by readers.

Fame is a devouring monster. Leo Braudy, in his fine book The Frenzy of Renown, sketches the role of fame in some of the great writers and its cultural interplay with the realization that all earthly fame is fleeting: today's Hollywood celebrity is tomorrow's has-been. Yet something in most of us seeks at least fifteen minutes of fame.

I remember my then 9-year-old nephew asking me, "Are you famous?" when he saw my books listed on Amazon.  I assured him that I was not and never will be famous; that I did not seek fame, though I was pleased that much of my hard work was rewarded. Much of this publication was expected by the university where I taught; but my non-academic writing, including this blog, is not produced primarily to attract attention to myself. If I can reach a handful of readers who find something I say interesting, I am richly rewarded; if I have no readers at all, the process of having written is deeply satisfying. Too many writers do not enjoy the process.

Parks worries about his ambitious students, who (like many people I have known) rush into publication before they are ready.  They will neglect the patient thought and revision needed to make a text really satisfying in an effort to make it commercially viable. The motive: not money so much as fame, the reward, apparently, for the nagging need we have for reassurance that we are important in and of ourselves.

Parks finds low self-esteem at work; I would add fear, which is even more basic and underlies so much.