Maryanne Lewell

At the tender age of eighteen Patrick Leigh Fermor set out from England with the aim of travelling from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople - on foot. His journey, begun in December of 1933, immersed him in the diverse, rich cultures of Europe as well as the turbulent political atmosphere of the early Nazi era. A Time of Gifts is the first volume of Fermor's memoirs, recounting his walk through Holland, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and, finally, Hungary: As the reader leaves Fermor alongside the Danube, the enormous scope of his project seems incredible, especially considering the modern traveller's reliance on the comfortable amenities of modem travel. Paul Fussell has commented that

... it seems unlikely that anyone ... would, at the age of 19, set off to walk from London to Constantinople, not for publicity, as today, but because that's what one did. (Fussell, 76)

... long before he has reached Bavaria with its Slav-seeming onion domes and its landscapes - like so many others the length and breadth of Germany - instantly recognizable from the illustrations in nursery editions of the Grimm brothers' fairy tales, with its gabled half-timbered houses turning to ginger-bread in the dusk, its enormous Durer hares pausing on frozen fields with cars pricked at the sound of distant woodcutters' saws, and its "hooded children returning from school with hairy satchels and muffled ears", the author has inspired us with complete confidence in him as companion and friend as well as truthful historian of his travel. (TLS. Oct. '77)

After all, it is important to keep in mind that as Fermor wandered on his pilgrimage through Germany and Austria, Adolf Hitler was enjoying the rewards of the Nazi party's successful rise to power. As John Keegan has put it,

What followed was one of the most remarkable and complete economic, political and military revolutions ever carried through by one man in a comparable space of time ... [Hitler] effectively restored German prosperity, destroyed not only opposition but also the possibility of opposition to his rule, re-created, in a spectacularly expanded German army, the principal symbol of the nation's pride in itself, and used this force to abrogate the oppressive treaties defeat had imposed upon the nation while he was still a humble soldier. (Keegan, 35)

Fermor's brio translates into an almost innate sense of movement and sensual detail in his writing style: I would argue that this dynamism is akin to elements of baroque art and architecture, encapsulating many of the same qualities and principles. For comparative purposes, it is necessary to first define these qualities: art historians and critics have defined the baroque artist's impulse as

... Long[ing] to enter into the multiplicity of phenomena, into the flux of things in their perpetual becoming - his compositions are dynamic and open and tend to expand outside their boundaries; the forms that go to make them are associated in a single organic action and cannot be isolated from each other. The Baroque artist's instinct for escape drives him to prefer 'forms that take flight' to those that are static and dense; his liking for pathos leads him to depict their sufferings and feelings, life and death at their extremes of violence, while the Classical artist [in contrast] aspires to slow the human figure in the full possession of its powers. (Bazin, 6-7)

Before examining further how Fermor invests his descriptive style with this appropriation, it is necessary to discuss how his style complements the genre in which he is writing. Here is Fussell:

Let's call them travel books, and distinguish them initially from guide books, which are not autobiographical and are not sustained by a narrative exploiting the devices of fiction. A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveller, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveller at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply. Travel books are a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker's encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative - unlike that in a novel or a romance - claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality. (Fussell, 203)

The world-famous Hofbräuhaus, Am Platz 9, two blocks from Marienpl., has been tapping barrels for commoners since 1897 and now seems reserved for drunken tourists; 15,000-30,OOOL of beer are sold each day (Maß DMIO.40; sausages and sauerkraut DMIO; open daily 9:30am-midnight). (Zakaras, 421)

This echoing and fluid feeling, the bouncing of sounds and syllables and the hogsheads of pungent liquid that sloshed about the tables and blotted the sawdust underfoot, must have been responsible for the name of this enormous hall. It was called the Schwemme, or horse-pond. The hollowness of those tall mugs augmented the volume of noise like the amphorae which the Greeks embedded in masonry to add resonance to their chants. My own note, as the mug emptied, was sliding down to middle C. (Fermor, 106-107)

The pace of travel can also be seen to determine intimacy of observation in the travel narrative. Fermor walked: when compared with the modern traveller's insistence on speed of travel (i.e. the profligation of jet travel, the "If it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium" variety coach tour offering up to a dozen countries in as many days, or the typical student Eurail jaunt featuring the many train stations and sleeping cars of Europe) his richness of recall is unsurprising. Mark Cocker has commented that

This travel leisure, like travel scholarship, to which it is closely allied, requires further definition. It is not merely the absence of activity, though this can be a part of it. It is the one great, vital commodity so often lacking in modem industrial societies, which measure its scarcity in the hands of the clock ... These periods of leisure and the unhurried activities that fill them are an essential part of the creative travellers life. They are, however, important to more than just the traveller. Since leisure is the free ground out of which all works of imagination, or art, or thought, ultimately emerge. Travel leisure is thus one confirmation and precondition of civilization. (Cocker, 201)

First and foremost, Fermor's talent is evident in his ability to bring the images of artwork to life, infusing them with a sense of activity and movement that echoes his enthusiasm. This is evident at the Groote Kirk in the Netherlands, for instance, where Fermor beholds a typical Dutch cathedral:

Filled with dim early morning light, the concavity of grey masonry and whitewash joined in pointed arches high overhead and the floor diminished along the nave in a chessboard of black and white flagstones. So compellingly did the vision tally with a score of half- forgotten Dutch pictures that my minds eye instantaneously furnished the void with those seventeenth-century groups which should have been sitting or strolling there: burghers with pointed com-coloured beards - and impious spaniels that refused to stay outside - conferring gravely with their wives and their children, still as chessmen, in black broadcloth and identical honeycomb ruffs under the tremendous hatchmented pillars. (Fermor, 33)

picturesque scenes of military life, family life, the tavern, and the inn. They amused a society which, emerging from the heroic period, was tending to stabilize itself in a bourgeois conformism. (Bazin, 94)

For instance, his knowledge of Flemish art reasserts itself in his analysis of a typical winter scene, as he observes how

Snow had covered the landscape with a sparkling layer and the slatey hue of ice was only becoming visible as the looping arabesques of the skaters laid it bare. Following the white parallelograms the lines of the willows dwindled as insubstantially as trails of vapour. The breeze that impelled those hastening clouds had met no hindrance for a thousand miles and a traveller moving at a footpace along the hog's back of a dyke above the cloud- shadows and the level Champaign was filled with limitless space. (Fermor, 43-35)

Fermor's artistic perception reasserts itself in the Danube river valley, where he is drawn to the works of the "Danube School":

the aspect which took my fancy was precisely the medieval and the Teutonic spirit that completely changed the Renaissance atmosphere of these pictures: the emerald green of the sward, that is, the sap green of the woods, the dark conifer forests and bosky spurs of Jurassic limestone; the backgrounds full of snowy spikes. This is the scenery through which the Flight into Egypt, the journey of the Magi and the footpaths to Cana and Bethany uncoil! (Fermor, 145)

after a score of indignities, the moribund carcass is nailed in place and hoisted aloft between two pot-bellied felons whose legs are snapped askew like bleeding sticks ... the special law of gravity, tearing the nailholes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like a spider's legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinking concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain. The body, mangled, dishonoured and lynched, twists in rigor mortis. (Fermor, 148)

In examining Fermor's descriptions of architectural styles, it can be seen that he applies these same principles of detail to evoking the varying designs he encounters and their methods of construction. Like his enthusiastic portrayals of regional art (and through the art, the region), his architectural portraits contain a gusto that infuses the static with pulsing life. An excellent example of this exuberant stylistic vigour accompanies Fermor's view of Linz, in Austria:

Pargeted façades rose up, painted chocolate, green, purple, cream and blue. They were adorned with medallions in high relief and the stone and plaster scroll-work gave them a feeling of motion and flow. Casemented half-hexagons jutted from the first storeys, and windowed three-quarter cylinders blunted the comers, both of them soaring to the line of the eaves where they shelved into wasp-waists and re-expanded spherically to the same circumference, forming buoyant cupolas and globes; and domes and pinnacles and obelisks joined these decorative onions along the city's skyline. (Fermor, 143)

Palace succeeded palace, casemented arches sailed across the streets, pillars lifted their statues; ice-fettered in their pools, tritons floundered beneath a cloudy heaven and ribbed cupolas expanded by the score. The greatest of these, the dome of the Karlskirche, floated with a balloon's lightness in its enclosing hemisphere of snow. (Fermor, 212-213)

Arguably the apotheosis of Fermor's infusion of movement into his descriptions of otherwise static architectural features is seen in his representation of the vaults of Prague, whose

ribs burst straight out of the walls in V-shaped clusters of springers. Grooved like celery stalks and blade-shaped in cross section with the edge pointing down, they expanded and twisted as they rose. They separated and converged again and crossed each other and as they sped away, enclosed slender spans of waft like the petals of tulips; and when two ribs intersected, they might both have been obliquely notched and then half-joggled together with studied carelessness. They writhed on their own axes and simultaneously followed the curve of the vault; and often, after these contorted intersections, the ribs that followed a concave thrust were chopped off short while the convex plunged headlong and were swallowed up in the masonry. The loose mesh tightened as it neared the rounded summit and the frantic reticulation jammed in momentary deadlock. Four truncated ribs, dovetailing in rough parallelograms, formed keystones and then broke loose again with a wildness which at first glance resembled organic violence clean out of control. But a second glance, embracing the wider design, captured a strange and marvellous coherence, as though petrifcation had arrested this whirling dynamism at a chance moment of balance and harmony. (Fermor, 243-244)

Fermor's recognition of the underlying tension between the static and the dynamic is found also in his depiction of landscape. Concentrating on natural forces, he is able to depict this organic action, again demonstrating baroque principles of composition by focusing on "the flux of things in their perpetual becoming" (Bazin,7). Here is a sudden snowstorm in Germany:

The rain had churned the snow into slush, then blasts from the mountains had frozen it into a pock-marked upheaval of rutted ice. Now, after a short warning drift, the wind was sending flakes along by the million. They blotted out the landscape...and the wind seemed either to lay a hindering hand on my chest, or, suddenly changing its quarter, to kick me spinning and stumbling along the road. (Fermor, 89)

On the south side [of the Danube], so far downstream that they were hard to discern, a blur of low mountains marked the end of all this watery disintegration. On my side, as I climbed among the burnt-out fortifications and looked inland, I could follow the advance of another range, the Little Carpathians, of which I was standing on the smallest and southernmost spur. They flowed Eastwards, rising gently out of the plain, the merest wave of the land at first. Then they slowly turned, as the shallow buttresses ascended, into the great range itself, steepening like a warning roll of thunder to soar into the distance, snow-covered and out of sight beyond the furthest ceiling of cloud. (Fermor, 237-238)

A keen sense of both detail and natural tension is brought too to his depictions of the people encountered, both on a cultural and an individual level. The organic, dynamic depiction of his milieu is seen for instance in his adventures at the Hofbräuhaus, where Fermor encounters a group of regaling Germans:

The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard. They branched at the loins into thighs as thick as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o'clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches' eggs reflected the lamplight. (Fermor, 104)

Raw knuckles of enormous hands, half clenched still from the grasp of ploughs and spades and bill-hooks, lay loose among the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open. Smoke had blackened the earthenware tureen and the lights caught its pewter handle and stressed the furrowed faces, and the bricky cheeks of young and hemp- haired giants... (Fermor, 76)

Fermor's vibrant characterizations also share this tendancy, be he recollecting the aged occupant of a Danube castle as genteel as his surroundings; Konrad, the Frisian saccharine-smuggler-to-be, his companion through Vienna; or the colourful postmaster's widow who keeps him entertained until he eventually falls asleep, as

Ensconced in mahogany and plush, I learnt all about her parents, her marriage and her husband... I soon knew all about their children, and their illnesses and bereavements and joys. This staunchless monologue treated of everyday, even humdrum matters but the resilience and the style of the telling saved it from any trace of dullness ... Following her raptly, I found myself, with complete sincerity, merrily laughing, then puckering my brows in commiseration, and a few minutes later, melting in sympathetic sorrow, and never quite sure why. I was putty in her hands. (Fermor, 175-176)

The affinity between the individual and his surroundings infuses both with palpable vitality.

The apex of Fermor's application of baroque principles in his stylistic depictions is seen as he develops his own personal key to understanding the art, architecture and culture he encounters. He combines all three elements into what he calls the 'Landsknecht Formula,' named for a picture he finds of these Landsknechts, figures festooned in the richly superlative decoration of Renaissance detail. The sudden realisation of this concept leads to one of the most exuberantly vivid passages of the entire narrative:

Once I got hold of the Landsknecht formula - medieval solidity adorned with a jungle of inorganic Renaissance detail - there was no holding me! It came into play wherever I looked: not only in gables, bell-hampers, well-heards, oriels and arcades, in the woodland giants that wrestled in colored tempera over fifty feet of façade - but in everything. In heraldry; which haunts all German cities, it was omnipresent. The coats of arms that encrust those South German walls were once as simple as upside-down flat-irons with reversed buckets on top: at the touch of the new formula, each shield blossomed into the lower half of a horizontally bisected 'cello, floridly notched for a tilting lance, under a twenty-fold display of latticed and strawberry-leaf crowned casques, each helmet top- heavy with horns of wings or ostrich or peacock's feathers and all of them suddenly empowered in mantelling as reckless, convoluted and slashed as spatulate leaves in a whirlwind. The wings of eagles expanded in sprays of separate sable plumes, tails bifurcated in multiple tassels, tongues leapt from beaks and fangs like flames; armour broke out in ribs and fluting and flares and inlaid arabesques. All was lambent. (Fermor, 98-99)

So it is that with an exuberant style that illustrates and complements his passion for travel, Patrick Leigh Fermor expresses many of the principles of the Baroque Era. As befits one with a self-admitted "seventeenth-century obsession" (Fermor, 241), Fermor appropriates the sense of emotional drama, minute detail and organic forces into his descriptive style with striking fluency. One critic has described the result as

a monument to a vanished Europe, [and] also an inspiration to every young man with a pack on his back and a taste for scholarship and adventure. (Ure)

Bibliography

Bazin, Germain. Baroque and Rococo, London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1996.

Cocker, Mark. Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century. London: Secher & Warburg, Ltd., 1992.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. A Time of Gifts. London: Penguin, 1977.

Forbes, Alastair, "Walking Towards Constantinople." Times Literary Supplement , October 7,1977.

Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Gray, Rockwell. "Travel." Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modem Literature of Travel. Ed. Michael Kowalewski, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Henderson, Heather. "The Travel Writer and the Text: My Giant Goes With Me Wherever I Go." Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel. Ed. Michael Kowalewski. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Janson, H. W. History Of Art. Vol. 2. New York: Prentice Hall, 1991.

Keegan, John. The Second World War. London: Penguin, 1989.