Dashing for the Post: the Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor
Edited by Adam Sisman, John Murray, £30
The age of letter-writing is over. Few now enjoy or endure what Patrick Leigh Fermor calls “the agony of waiting for letters, and, when they arrive, the sudden bomb-like detonation of delight”.
“Paddy” lived a seemingly charmed life of adoring, and being adored by, a wide circle of friends and lovers. He wrote in torrents of affection to them from all of his natural habitats, whether a fishing village in Greece, the library of a country house the day after a riotous party, or a cell in an ancient monastery where he sometimes retired to in order to write.
Those who already know his life and works will find familiar traits in the letters: tremendous erudition, wanderlust, gregariousness, occasional melancholy, insatiable curiosity, epic procrastination, religious leanings, a gift for landing on his feet, high living and low morals.
In one letter, Paddy describes Sylvia Henley, a friend of Gertrude Bell’s, in words that might have been written about him: “an extraordinary mixture of guts, brains, humour and niceness too, and one can’t get better than that”. Countless purple passages, testament to his stupendous way with words and an all-seeing, deeply cultured eye, will both delight lovers of great travel books and seduce newcomers.
A screenwriting stint in Africa is vividly conveyed, as are the extraordinary events surrounding his years as the subject of a full-blown Cretan blood feud. And what now to make of his description of Aleppo? A “warren of lanes and caravanserais, like a tangle of Oxford colleges”.
I was going to indulge in some mild criticisms. Charm, like many pleasant things, has an underbelly, where traces of affectation, complacency, snobbery and self-deception may lurk. But forget that. It remains an outright pleasure to be admitted to the company of such a man. This is one of those books that make you feel a little bereft when you finish it.
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