Authors: Patrick Leigh Fermor
Mani
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR (1915â2011) was born of Anglo-Irish descent and raised in Northamptonshire and London. After his stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to Constantinople that begins in
A Time of Gifts
(1977) and continues through
Between the Woods and the Water
(1986), he lived and traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books
Mani
(1958) and
Roumeli
(1966) attest to his deep interest in languages and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived until the end of his life in the house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani. He was knighted in 2004 for his services to literature and to BritishâGreek relations.
MICHAEL GORRA's books include
The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany
and
After Empire
. He is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English at Smith College, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
MANI
Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
Introduction by
MICHAEL GORRA
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
2 The Abomination of Desolation
3 Kardamyli: Byzantium Restored
4 The City of Mars (Areopolis)
8 A Warlike Aristocracy and the Maniots of Corsica
9 Change and Decay. The Cocks of Matapan
11 Bad Mountains, Evil Council and Cauldroneers
14 Confabulation in Layia: Cyprus and Mrs. Gladstone
16 An Amphibian Matriarchy and a Maniot Poet
17 Up the Laconian Gulf: Animals and Winds
Copyright and More Information
W
E HAVE
come down from the mountains to the shore, the hard part of the walk behind us, our legs stretched by the “unattractively Alpine” pitch of the hills, a long series of “rib-cracking clinches with the sublime”; our minds stretched as well by a tour through the world of the gorgon and the centaur, the ikon and the blood feud. Now we sit at rest aboard a caique steaming north up the Laconian gulf, with our journeyâthis bookânear an end. But
Mani'
s host remains expansive, and announces that he shall fill the voyage “with a digression on cats.” So he notes the anatomical differences between the felines of Eastern Europe and the “ribboned pussies” of the West, and for good measureâno digression can stay on pointâdescribes the “Turkish attitude to dogs.” Then Patrick Leigh Fermor lifts into a sketch of his experiences “with strange animals in Greece,” complaining that he has never seen a wolf or a bear, and just a single wild boar. There might once have been a “distant glimpse of...the mad, shy, fierce, the all-but-invisible and nearly extinct ibex of the White Mountains in Crete.” And he has encountered a sea turtle, “sculling steeply down into the blue-green depths between Bari and Corfu almost exactly at that point in the dotted line down the middle of the Adriatic where the
filioque
drops out of the Creed.”
It's a throw-away sentence, and Leigh Fermor immediately moves on, as though dawdling at speed, to other maritime details, sharks and tuna and a great “visitation” of dolphins. That
inconsequence, however, is precisely what draws me. First, the lovely gerund that defines the turtle's motionâthe beat of its flippers, the pause on the backstroke. Then that
filioque
, which at first seems to have nothing whatever to do with such beasts except that the writer happened to think of it. Yet the ease with which the turtle slips away reminds us of how little we ourselves can evade the past, and Leigh Fermor has an uncanny ability to find an historical marker on even the most featureless bit of this planet's surface, to sail always over the ground of ancient contention. Or not so ancient: the schism between Rome and Byzantium occasioned by that bit of Latin does, after all, still hold.
In Leigh Fermor's pages any account of the present begins a thousand years back, and to read him is to enter a mind that delights in bounding from moment to moment and century to century, a mind in which all times appear to exist at once. Not in Faulknerian confusionâit's instead as though they were each one indexed, and available for use. Nor does his conception of the past resemble the
longue durée
of Fernand Braudel, that sense of climate and geography as the motive forces of human history. Leigh Fermor never forgets the shaping force of landscape, but when he looks at a piece of groundâof water, evenâhe sees events, decisions, personalities, he sees battles and theology, paintings and poems and the movements of people; and all of it treated with the same familiarity with which you might grasp a favorite mug.
Anyone who reads this incomparable traveler will have his or her own private anthology of such moments. My own would include the view from the tower of Ulm Minster in
A Time of Gifts
(1977), Leigh Fermor's account of the journey on foot, from Holland to Constantinople, that he began at the age of eighteen in 1933: a steeple-top vision that moves from the Black Forest to “the whole upheaval of Switzerland” and out over the Danube valley, in which everything from Hannibal to the swastika lies waiting. From
Mani
any such collection must contain
that “mist of impossible surmise” in which Leigh Fermor allows himself to imagine that he has discovered the rightful Emperor of Byzantium in the form of an ouzo-swilling fisherman. But my favorite episode in the Greek travels recorded here comes just before the middle of this book, when at the southern tip of his wanderings he drops off the side of a boat and swims into the cave once known as Taenarus.
To the ancients it was an “entrance to Hades,” the place where Psyche came and Herakles too, and yet once inside Leigh Fermor finds something that “none of the legends mention.” For the cavern's interior is all water, without a floor on which to rest your foot, and its bottom so “measureless” that for a few seconds it seems indeed as though he might be sucked below. It is a place he dare not stay. A few quick strokes carry him back out into the sun, where he's struck by “how clear the daylight looked, and how bright the colours!” And there's something wondrous in the way that, once back on land, he encounters a child with “a lamb slung over her shoulders,” and steps into the healing realm of pastoral.
Leigh Fermor's first book,
The Traveller's Tree
(1950), offered an account of the Caribbean that, in retrospect, seems a postwar attempt to step away from the history that provides his best subject. A novel followed, and then
A Time to Keep Silence
(1957), a beautiful but fragmentary chronicle of his visits to three very different monasteries.
Mani
(1958) stands as his first work of permanent value, and one of the few enduring travel narratives of its period. And yet the physical journey it records is a mere wisp, a week or so of walking through this eponymous region in the Peloponnese, and often enough the sound of footsteps fades out as these pages linger over such arcana as the “Byzantine passion for strange hats.”
Many of its details concern the peculiarities of the Mani itselfâits villages of towers, its long resistance to Ottoman ruleâbut Leigh Fermor nevertheless draws his material from
throughout the Greek world. For the book is but a shard of the one he meant to write, a volume that would chronicle a trip through “all parts of Greece...a matter of countless bus-rides and long stretches on horseback and by mule and on foot.” Once those travels were over, however, Leigh Fermor discovered that the resulting shelf of “closely written notebooks” looked so frighteningly long that he decided “to avoid a thin spreading of the gathered material” and instead to “attack...in depth.” Still, he is easily snared by the “ramifying tendrils of digression” that sprout around his every step, and neither
Mani
nor its later companion,
Roumeli
(1966), limits itself to a single itinerary. So an ikon in a Maniot church will pull him over the sea to Crete and through time to the Fourth Crusade in search of an explanation.
Where those digressions almost never take us is into Leigh Fermor himself. His eyes look out, not in. We know him by the pace of his sentences, his fondness for lists, his expertly mixed cocktails of metaphor. We know him by his passions, his taste in books and in buildings. We know him by his friends. Yet there's little here about his private lifeâjust the Christian name of his traveling companion, and eventual wife, Joan Eyres Monsell. Nor is there much about his earlier experiences: the walk recalled in the indispensable
A Time of Gifts
; or his wartime service on Crete, where for two years in the mountains he organized the resistance to the Nazi occupation. His band's successful kidnapping of a German general provided the basis for the Michael Powell film
Ill Met by Moonlight
(1957), with Dirk Bogarde in the lead as “Paddy.” But he doesn't much speak of it himself, and on the rare occasions in
Mani
â
Roumeli
offers a few moreâwhen Leigh Fermor summons up his time on Crete it's never in terms of drama or danger or fear, of his actual work in the hills, but rather such things as the treading of the grapes or the inescapable belief in the evil eye.
A soldier and a scholarâthe combination is now almost unknown.
Leigh Fermor's belated account of a pre-war Europe, of those years when the going seemed good, deservedly remains his best-known work. It is the most brilliant single book in the great renascence of the travel narrative that took place in the second half of the 1970s, the years of Bruce Chatwin's
In Patagonia
(1977) and Peter Matthiessen's
The Snow Leopard
(1978), and a link with the earlier world of such classics as Robert Byron's
The Road to Oxiana
(1937). Leigh Fermor continued that story in
Between the Woods and the Water
(1986), and in other years his pen has taken him through both India and the Andes. Yet it is Greece to which he has most often returned for a subject and where indeed he settled a few years after this book appeared, building a house in the Mani itself.