A Time of Gifts

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube
by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with an introduction by Jan Morris
New York Review Books, 2005

Reviewed 2009

In 1934, Patrick Leigh Fermor was 18 years old and at a loose end. He had recently been expelled from his public school for wooing a greengrocer’s daughter, and had no particular career plans other than a vague desire to (eventually) enter the army. He therefore decided to have himself an adventure.

Fired by a romantic imagination given shape by his voluminous reading, young Paddy resolved to hike across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to the spires of Constantinople. He would be a wandering scholar: he would walk anywhere, talk to anyone, eat anything, sleep anyhow.

And this is precisely what he did. In one chapter he breaks black bread with day labourers at a German workhouse; in the next he is the guest of a Count of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He travels by coal-barge up the Rhine and on horseback across the Magyar plain. He shares sausage with Roma, discusses Shakespeare and natural history with a Transylvanian polymath, roots for acorns with swineherds, and beds down in castles and in monasteries.

While Leigh Fermor was tramping across the continent, momentous changes were afoot. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazi party had just come to power, and this was just a symptom of the transformations in the air. All over Europe, the old feudal aristocracy was giving way to a new dispensation. It was truly the end of an era, and Paddy faithfully recorded everything he encountered.

And he wrote a book about it. But not immediately; not even after a year or two. A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, and it reflects this vast gulf of years. And that is the book’s glory.

For on every page we are treated to layers and layers of perspective: young Paddy’s immediate reaction to events; his adult self revisiting many of these same places undercover, during the dark days of the second world war (Major Leigh Fermor distinguished himself in various guerrilla campaigns in the Mediterranean theatre); and old Patrick, sitting in his beach house in Greece, reminiscing about the past – a past made especially poignant by the intervening fifty years of east European history.

If that were all – if the book were merely a densely-layered memoir of interesting times – it would still be a masterpiece. But it’s so much more! Leigh Fermor is an enthusiastic critic of art and architecture, and his writings are filled with discursive musings on far-flung aesthetic topics, all handled with grace and charm and an utter lack of pretension. He is a keen student of history, especially of the post-Roman interregnum in central Europe; his imagination ranges freely over the centuries. He speculates on languages, mythology, custom and tradition, food and drink, music, costume, tribal migrations, dynastic politics, and anything else that catches his fancy. He quotes literature by the bushel. Yet he wears his learning lightly, so that reading along with him is a joy, never a chore.

Above all, though, Leigh Fermor is a master of prose. The phrase doesn’t do him justice; the language in A Time of Gifts is beyond mere praise. Jan Morris puts it nicely in her introduction: “Envy is the writer’s besetting sin. Yet how can one be envious of prose so elegant, so beautiful, so ineffably perfect?” (very rough transcription from memory). And it’s true: so complete is Leigh Fermor’s stylistic mastery that one can only sit back and lose oneself in open-mouthed admiration.

A Time of Gifts is a gorgeous, glorious book. Read it!