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Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics)

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Here, in part two of Patrick Fermor's promised three-part account of his 1933-1934 walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, the 19 year old wanderer/journalist strolls unguided through Hungary and into darkest Transylvania. Along the way he reads in the great private libraries and parties with washed-up aristocrats; wonders about water buffalo, the echoes of Hapsburg heirarchies, Rumanian gothic architecture, and barbaric wedding practices; rests with gypsies and gabs with rich landowners... He by then had fallen into the rhythm of his travels, and his powers of observation illuminate a strange and distant central Europe. But this isn't mere travel writing. He isn't simply shining a light on a place, a time, and a people. His writing is so ecstatic and muscular that the reader is transported to real yearning for experience, and to face that experience with eyes unclouded by cynicism or too much ossifying adulthood. This book, even more than A Time of Gifts, is a portrait of an enviable mind, a mind that is simultaneously open to experience and wise, or at least subtle and clear-thinking, but refined by a liberal education. The real gift of these books is for us to see a clear glimpse into the mind of a person who is living fully. The glimpse shows the folly of planning, of responsibility, of routine and care. Few writers have ever equalled the clarity of this offering. The life of the cubicle and the steady paycheck is the life of frailty and trepidation. This book spreads a warm ray of strength, resilience, and joy in discovery. A true delight.

This is the sequel to Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts. In 1933, the very young Leigh Fermor set out to travel by foot from Holland to Constantinople. Written many years after this adventure, Between the Woods and the Water describes Leigh Fermor's travels in Hungary and Transylvania. He had the good fortune to make some aristocratic connections and spent a good part of the trip being passed from country house to country house and town to town within an extended family network of the Hungarian aristocracy. The Hungary and Transylvania Leigh Fermor describes had already changed greatly under the impact of the First World War, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Great Depression. Many, if not all of the aristocratic figures from whom Leigh Fermor received hospitality, were living lives of genteel poverty on much reduced estates. Still, he describes a world that would be swept away by the events of WWII, the installation of communist states and the postwar industrialization of much of Eastern Europe. The Hungary and Transylvania through which Leigh Fermor travels is very rural, dominated by a peasantry still coexisiting with the aristocracy. Transylvania in particular was ethnically diverse with significant populations of ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, and Gypsies. These populations were divided also by a variety of languages and faiths. The awareness on the part of the author and readers of fate of these peoples gives much of this book an elegiac quality. Wonderfully written with superb historical digressions and some outstanding descriptive writing about the landscapes, this is book is just a treat. The natural comparison is with the predecessor volume. I think this is the better of the two. This volume was published in the mid-80s with Leigh Fermor promising a sequel that would cover the final segment of the journey. Sadly, this has never been published and given Leigh Fermor's advanced age, it is unlikely to be completed. A real pity.

The title above is German for "Absolutely nothing!", Fermor's droll reply to "What are you studying?" when visiting a scholar with his newfound Transylvanian friend Istvan, who laughs about such blasphemy all the way back from the visit. The polymathic Fermor had contemplated his answer a few moments before answering-"Languages? Art? Geography? Folklore? Literature? None of them seemed to fit." The truth is, of course, as anyone who has read of anything of Fermor's knows full well, that Fermor has been studying all of these things, but with his own assiduous, unacademic zeal. This time he spent in Transylvania (The country's name meaning, as any first year Latinist would know, "Across the Woods") is by far my favourite: His escapades with Istvan, the fleeting amour with Angela, the effortless historical erudition about the region all make it exemplary of the book as a whole - which is not to slight the rest of it at all!

I disagree profoundly with the reviewers who take umbrage at Fermor's "esoteric" use of language and historic allusion. For the armchair traveler, these qualities make the book just that much more fun - Diving into the OED and various encyclopedias to thresh out some of the references.

The overall effect of this book, as with A Time of Gifts, is best likened to a friendly punch in the gut by an old chum. It takes you at unawares but leaves you invigorated and happy to be alive in the world. Yes, there are sadnesses to the book, not the least of which is that the beautiful View of the Danube near Regensburg on the cover of the NYRB edition is now underwater, lost forever; But as Fermor contemplates as his time with Angela draws to a close, "There are hours in life worth more than diamonds." This book is full of them!


And all these youths chain-smoking cigarettes! Perhaps the Surgeon General should put a warning label on the book lest a youth of today discover the vibrant meaning of carpe diem!

Fermor's journey begun in A TIME OF GIFTS continues in this companion volume. Like its predecessor, it is an exhausting, at times frustrating, demanding read, and equally worthwhile. The reader is cautioned that he or she must be prepared every few paragraphs to look up words the reader has never heard of before, or to look up words used in ways the reader has never used in the same way before; to trace Fermor's topographical references on outside maps, since none are provided by the book; and to have access to outside sources to comprehend Fermor's references to frequently unexplained, or cursorily explained, peoples, places and events. (If I may lodge any criticism about both A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, it is that Fermor assumes the reader to be intimately familiar with the arcane. Because that assumption may be inaccurate, the uninitiated reader might profit from the creation of an additional volume, a guide, that is, to both books that consists of maps, a glossary, annotations, and a bibliography. Readers who make the effort to keep up with Fermor should not constantly be made to feel he is about to leave them behind in a cloud of dust as he speeds down some remote Rumanian highway lost in his remarkable thoughts.) BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER differs only slightly from A TIME OF GIFTS in that fewer architectural treasures are encountered and commented upon. But, like the latter, it is the beauty and quiet of the earth, the common people, an endearing cast of lovable, clueless aristocrats, and the colorful histories that surround them all, that are the stars of the show. And it is Fermor's fascinating inner life and winsome personality that make these books the joy and the education they are.

`Between the Woods and the Water' is a delightful travelogue, even though the sites and sounds are long gone. Fermor paints a picture of the life every young man wants to lead - well-funded itinerant travel, nearly effortless sociability, and a seemingly endless nightlife. This is the ultimate "Wish You Were Here" card, well worth the read for anyone interested in travel, history, and tales of pre-war social frivolity in Eastern Europe.

The narrative structure took me by surprise. Almost every region receives a minor academic treatment prior to Fermor's personal tales: history, language, architecture, nature, fun and games, repeat. I found myself skimming past descriptions of birds and trees, but fascinated by the author's insights into the interplay of geography, language development, and regional history. And, of course, it is impossible not to be won over by the author's late nights, fleeting loves, and brief stays with forgotten royalty.

My father often told me that `On the Road' had a profound effect on him as a youth. `Between the Woods and the Water' has a similar effect on me, only later in life. After the reading the story I was offered a brief trip to Hungary which I could not pass up. Far from Fermor's experience, I was greeted with mindless business meetings, post-communism industrial architecture, a robbery, and small-scale street riots. In the end, my disappointment with reality deepened my appreciation of the book - a memorializing tale of a geography and way of life that no longer exists.

This book and its sequel, "Between the Woods and the Water," is truly a classic of the personal odyssey genre. Together they are the report by the English author of a diary he wrote between the ages of 19 and 22 while he walked from Holland to Istanbul. But he writes his report after a lengthy career in military service and, among other things, in journalism. The result combines the enthusiasm of a young student with the measured and spare prose of a seasoned and skilled veteran. The author as student is amazingly well schooled, even though thrown out of his public school. His reflections on what he sees are both erudite and almost poetic. (Read, e.g., the chapter, Prague Under Snow.) They don't serve as a normal travel guide, but they'll introduce you to the lands he traverses in a way that will make your own visit unusually well informed.

Patrick Fermor's brain must contain more info that the Encyclopoedia Britannica. He weaves his vast knowledge into his accounts to make them come to life . Sometimes you have to just slide over a latin verse, eg., but he is great. This is an account of his age 20 adventure traveling on foot from Budapest to the Iron Gates of the Danube--much of his travel in eastern Hungary and Romania. It was written from journals and memories (and that stored knowledge) when he was much older. A great read.

On the one hand, there is a young Anglo-Irish romantic expelled from school, possessing uncommon charm, an astonishing facility for languages, and an interest in everything under the sun & moon. His collaborator is an urbane & erudite autodidact with the benefit of further research and a half century of hindsight. The young man is 19-year-old Paddy Leigh Fermor, who set out to walk across Europe when Hitler had just come to power. The mentor is the older Paddy, an authentic war hero, distinguished writer, and confidante of the old and new nobility. The result is a brilliant travel memoir, of which this volume is the middle part (the first is A Time of Gifts, the third alas was not published before his death in June 2011) covering Hungary and Romania. It suggests a bildungsroman as the young man exults in the wooded hills and tributaries of the Danube, sleeping rough, befriending peasants, laborers, and the last remnants of a dying class of landed nobility. The narrative wanders, like the author, around linguistic traces mirroring the flux of various peoples across the plains of central Europe. He chronicles remnants of a vanishing way of life as he passes from one Count to another, one estate to the next, and a succession of private libraries that illuminate the historical context.
Fermor is an exceptional literary stylist, which facet builds upon his gift for observation to describe the natural world, the constructed world, and personalities. As one traverses Transylvania today, a modern traveler realizes that the age of landed gentry is long past, as Fermor recognized when he revisited many years later. But some of the natural landscape is still evident, and some of the architecture remains. A visitor can alternate between Fermor's text and the actual object (in this case a World Heritage fortified church) and find the book still a reliable guide:
"At the heart of each village, sturdy churches reared squat, four-sided steeples with a tough, defensive look. ... Pierced by arrow-slits, the walls rose sheer, then expanded in machicolations; and above these, rows of short uprights like squat pillars formed galleries that hoisted pyramids of steeple. They were as full of purpose as bits of armour and the uprights between steeple and coping gave the triangular roofs a look of helmets with nasal pieces and eye-slits."
Both Fermors had catholic interests, and this happy characteristic helped the younger man to find common ground with almost everybody. He camped with Roma (gypsies) and shepherds, stayed with a Habsburg Count and many others of that class, communicated by sign language with swineherds, spoke French with a housekeeper, Latin with a Franciscan monk, German with loggers, and memorably befriended a Rabbi by showing interest and a little facility in Hebrew scripture. He provided a wonderful rhyming translation of the tragic-mystic Romanian poem Mioritza.
Besides poetry, he picked up tales of fairies, werewolves, and vampires (which, along with the historical figure Vlad Tsepesh, nurtured the invention of the Dracula story) and descāntece, metrical witches' spells. He delighted another host, a famous entomologist, with a riddle on the most entomological of Shakespeare's plays ("Antennae and Coleoptera").
This is the grandest sort of travel book, depicting geography and monuments, interwoven with history and linguistics and natural history, describing the lives of vanishing peoples, told from the perspectives both of a neophyte seeing undeservedly obscure parts of the wide world with fresh eyes, and a wonderfully knowledgeable scholar of action, all transmuted into elegant prose of great descriptive power.

Budapest... the Hungarian Plains... Romania... Transylvania. Sound capital-R Romantic? It's that and more in the adept hands of Patrick Leigh Fermor. This continues the story of his 1934 travels through Europe as a 19-year-old. And if anything, the pastoral settings of Eastern Europe suit his descriptive hand even better than this book's predecessor, A TIME OF GIFTS. Here is a glimmer of Fermor's writing as he describes the Carpathian Uplands:

"These great forest chambers, bounded by mingled stretches of hardwood and underbrush, slanted uphill and out of sight in a confusion of roots. Freshets channeled the penumbra, falling from rocky overhangs into pools that could be heard from afar, or welled up through husks and dead leaves and turned into streams. There had been two hoopoes in the lower woods and bee-eaters, with an eye to the hives perhaps, perched on twigs near the harvesters' clearing; golden orioles, given away by their black and yellow plumage and the insistent shrill curl of their song, darted among the branches. But every so often invisible flocks of wood-pigeons plunged everything under a spell so drowsy, it was hard, sitting down for a smoke, to keep awake; then a footfall would loose off a hundred flurried wings and set them circling in the speckled light of one of the forest ballrooms like Crystal Palace multitudes calling for Wellingtonian hawks."

It resembles an idyll, the way his pen lends itself to descriptive passages of nature, and the wild beauties of this more mysterious corner of Europe comes to life because of it. Part III of this book has yet to be published, though they say Fermor completed most of it before his recent death in June of 2011. Until then, if you are a devotee of travel writing or nature writing, you owe yourself a look at Fermor's delightful tandem, A TIME OF GIFTS followed by BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER.

This is a marvelous trip abroad in pre-World War II through Europe. Fermor writes in the kind of prose that appeals to each of the five senses, He is a veritable camera who captures a world that is no more. To read Between the Woods and the Water is to walk with him through the past, to eat in palaces and ancient pubs,to listen to the music of the Danube, to smell the black forest, and to touch the stones of crmpling castles.