Between The Woods And The Water (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Patrick Leigh Fermor relied on a Rhine barge, the odd lorry lift and his own two legs to carry him through Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Northern Hungary. Now, he’s crossing the Great Hungarian Plain on horseback: Whenever he got the chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one of these bursts turned into a long twilight gallop...Back in Budapest, Leigh Fermor had fallen in with a “noctambulistic” smart set (cellar nightclubs, scotch-and-soda, American jazz) whose country-housed, horse-lending cousinage extended deep into Hungary and Romania, along the still-twitching nerves of the old empire. With these connections, much of the eight months of 1934 recollected in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) pass in summery sojourn among the old Hapsburg nobility, our erudite wanderer pausing for weeks at a time to sample the “learning, munificence, and douceur de vivre” of that soon-to-be-swept-away class. Suddenly, the crushing hike described in this book and its predecessor, A Time of Gifts, seems doable when each stretch is recouped with picnics, tournaments of bicycle polo, and undisturbed hours in manorial libraries in which the lore and languages of the dominions just crossed can be learned from the lord’s own incunables and troves of ancient parchment. Leigh Fermor makes all kinds of friends (gold-panning Gypsies, bawdy village crones, sun-brown reapers, a Transylvanian shepherd, even an impenetrably reserved Orthodox rabbi), but it’s his reports from within the “manor houses harbouring over-civilised boyars up to their ears in Proust and Mallarmé” that define this book. Marooned on reduced estates, strapped for cash, the Hapsburg grandees regale Leigh Fermor with memories of the Parisian belle époque, of Edwardian regattas out of Portsmouth, and bemoan the provinciality of the new nations in which they find themselves—all in “fluent and marvelously antiquated English.” Leigh Fermor is not an explicit imperial nostalgist like Joseph Roth, but encountering his long view of the movements of people and customs across geography, of the migrations, exiles, conversions and conquests that compose Middle Europe—“[Turkish:] victories long eclipsed, but commemorated here and there by a minaret left in their lost possessions like a spear stuck in the ground”—one cannot help but feel the ridiculous imposture of nationalism, and the futility and pettiness of tribal purity as a pretension of statehood. This rapport with the displaced was also a feature of A Time of Gifts. He carries into the marches of Transylvania a “beautiful little seventeenth-century duodecimo Horace from Amsterdam,” the gift of a Baltic grandee exiled to Germany: It was bound in stiff, grass-green leather; the text had long s’s, mezzotint vignettes of Tibur, Lucretilis and the Bandusian spring, a scarlet silk marker, the giver’s bookplate and a skeleton-leaf from his Estonian woods.Closing out the decade of the 1930s as the lover of a Moldavian princess, and residing with her “old-fashioned, French-speaking, Tolstoyan, land-owning” family, Leigh Fermor was one of the rare Western Europeans appreciative of the Nabokovian political position—that is, he had equal contempt for the frank murderousness of Fascism and for the humanitarian pretentions of the Soviet Union: From the end of these travels to the War, I lived, with a year’s interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their Western equivalents—peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them—felt able to do.“Old fashioned liberals” is exactly the phrase Nabokov used to describe his family. Leigh Fermor’s wartime exploits include parachuting into Nazi-occupied Crete dressed as a shepherd. He hid out in the mountains, organized the resistance and, famously, coordinated the moonlight ambush, kidnapping and speedboat removal to Egypt of the island’s German commander. He’s 95 now, living in Greece, in a house he designed and built (that casual English omni-competence! A brilliant prose stylist and daring commando, I bet he’s a great cook, too), and working busily on the third volume, which will take him through Bulgaria, Greece, and on to the goal of it all, Istanbul.
Like A TIME OF GIFTS (its predecessor), BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER has moments where the narrative slows down like turgid water eddying in the bend of a river, usually for architectural details or historical asides, but overall the muscular description of nature rules the day and makes the book sing. In fact, this sequel's setting (Hungary, Romania, Transylvania) lends itself to Fermor's strength even more than the first due to the vast swaths of dark forests splintered by sunlight, mist, songbirds, and streams. And that's not even touching on on the peasants in the fields, resting after berry-picking or cutting grains. It's all a lovely idyll that borders on storybook nostalgia as seen through the gauze of time. Fermor does a lot less walking and a lot more loafing here. He hopscotches from castle to castle it seems, where the nobility-in-decline hold on to their crumbling splendor with fanciful meals, well-stocked libraries, exotic wines and foreign cigarettes. A 19-year-old man could get spoiled easily "roughing it" in this manner, but Fermor can only bring himself to gentle self-remonstration at best. The life he enjoyed was just too good to turn your back on in the name of discipline, he seems to be saying, and readers are more than willing to go along for the leisurely ride.Here is an example of Fermor in full Thoreau mode:"Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them."In addition to the beauty of woods and water, Fermor is more forthcoming about the beauties of the young women he meets. "There was something arresting and unforgettable about her ivory complexion and raven hair and wide sloe-black eyes. The house had remained uninhabited for some time and there was a touch of melancholy about it, and of magic, too. At least, so it seemed for the few days I was there as we walked under the Himalayan and Patagonian trees and looked down at the Maros, which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales."Later, with a male companion, he was joined by a married woman whose husband was off on a distant trip. Fermor makes no secret of his fervor for this young lady. Later still, on a "boiling hot day," he and this 30-something nobleman skinny-dip in a river only to be discovered by two young women returning from gathering barley. "They stopped as we swam into their ken, and, when we drew level, burst out laughing. Apparently the river was less of a covering than we had thought. They were about nineteen or twenty, with sunburnt and rosy cheeks and thick dark plaits, and not at all shy. One of them shouted something, and we stopped and trod water in mid-Maros. Istvan interpreted, 'They say we ought to be ashamed of ourselves,' he said, 'and they threaten to find our clothes and run off with them.'" The episode ends in healthy, Edenic "innocence" when the naked boys chase these laughing and squealing (the universal language!) girls to a hayrick where "all four collapsed in a turmoil of hay and barley and laughter." (Cut to commercial break.)Reading Fermor, you learn things. For instance, did you know that Martin Luther (of all people) once said, "Who loves not wine, woman, and song remains a fool his whole life long"? Fermor doubts it, but later verifies it. There are also some reluctant prejudices at work: "A party of Gypsies, in their invariable way managing to turn a corner of the forest into a slum, had settled here with tents and dogs and hobbled horses; but their squalor was redeemed by the extravagant wildness of their looks."Overall a rich and varied trip with ample rewards for readers fond of denser texts brightened by a humanistic flair. Hopefully the final episode will surface under the caring hands of Fermor's executors and editors now that he has died. After these first two efforts, I will gladly see him through to Constantinople. As Robert Frost would say: You come, too.
What do You think about Between The Woods And The Water (2005)?
This book follows A Time of Gifts, which was superb. In this part of his travels Patrick Leigh Fermor walks on foot, for the most part, from Budapest to the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube River beween Romania and Serbia. His end destination is Constantinople. He does get there, in the last book The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos and goes even a bit further to Mount Athos in Greece. Fermor is nineteen when he makes this trip. He did it in 1934. The world is changed now. The war, dams, industrialization. He is educated. He is a polyglot, or on the way to becoming one. He is of the nobility, and this shapes his trip - sleeping outdoor with gypsies one night and in a four-poster bed the next. What is best is Fermor’s description of nature and the world as it used to be, in Hungary and Romania, in Transylvania. History is told about the places where he passes, and this gives it a whole other dimension. A few things gave me trouble. Would I ever be able to live off the hospitality of others in the way Fermor does? Those he stays with are all so wealthy so I suppose it is just irrelevant to think in such terms. Fermor has an amorous affair with a married woman along the way, but he IS only nineteen. Does that excuse him? She was older, but still no wiser. This sort of disturbed me. He was in a way flouting the hospitality shown him. Or maybe I should admire that he says it all, how it really was? This part of the trip was in a car and this too felt like he was cheating…. There is a map in the paper book, but it is almost impossible to follow since the places mentioned are often not indicated on the map. One more complaint - the author has such an antiquated view of the Mongols. Too bad the author never read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. I very much disliked the narration of the audiobook by Crispin Redman. He exaggerates every line. He adds accents which make it difficult to hear what is being said. Many languages are employed and much is untranslated. You have French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Latin.....The best parts of the book are those where Fermor is roughing it, walking, by himself, looking at the animals the land, the sky. It is amazingly beautiful how he describes nature, and that is what I love the book most for. These parts are delightful, and then when you visit the mansions and castles where he stays you are spying into a world that is no longer. It seems like a fairytale world, but it was real once.As usual, I am rating the written book, not the eaudiobook.
—Chrissie
Even better, and more "literary" than Volume 1, this begins in Hungary and ends at the Danube's Iron Gates. The author becomes more candid about his various affairs with high-born and a few peasant women. And his sentences got longer, but not in an annoying way.Page 28, describing how they dress in Budapest: "Tigers for turnout."Page 41: "The few clouds in the clear, wide sky were so nearly motionless they might have been anchored to their shadows." Bless him for not adding the unnecessary "that" before "they"--it's a personal pet peeve.Page 42-44: Understanding I was a foreigner, she asked "Német?" (German?). My answer "Angol" induced a look of polite vagueness: an Angle meant as kettle to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor. . .[I]n a minute a grand-daughter brought a foaming glass of milk: they both smiled as they watched me drink it. I sipped slowly and thought: I'm drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain. . . When I dismounted, they crowded about him and patted and stroked his neck and flanks and scanned his points with eyes like shrewd blackberries."Page 128, looking down on the river, "which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales."Page 210 et seq. contains a sequence where he happens upon a family of Romanian Jews, who are reading from the Torah; the author doesn't understand Hebrew, but, in a beautiful epiphany, manages to puzzle-out that the verse is 2 Samuel 1 19:27 "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places; how are the mighty fallen!"
—Nooilforpacifists
If I could, I would rate this book with ten stars!!!!! Patrick Leigh Fermor's book is not just a travelogue, it is a piece of art, a fresco evoking the world, the people and the customs long gone. Patrick Leigh Fermor was lucky indeed to have been the witness to the this civilisation destroyed by the Second World War and its aftermath. His skill, nay the virtuosity of the English language when describing the nature, the people or anything at all-left me speechless. I could literally see the landscapes rising in front of my eyes (perhaps because I have visited myself some of the places Patrick Leigh Fermor visited, like Esztergom with its magnificent cathedral and Budapest)!!! Until now, I only thought French language was capable of such evocative richness, but I am glad I was and am wrong. Now, onto the first and the third part of this unique trilogy (that is, if I can find the two volumes in my local library)!!
—Janez Hočevar
