Review: Tom Mooney
For most, one Byron in a lifetime is just about enough: for the late and great Patrick Leigh Fermor, two had to suffice, but, if you are hoping to follow in anybody’s footsteps as a travel writer, who greater than fellow English men Lord Byron and Robert Byron.
Perhaps I have not been getting about lately, but it was only towards the end of this book that I realised that the biographer, Artemis Cooper, and the subject, Paddy Leigh Fermor, had a connection, and an important one that isn’t satisfactorily disclosed.
Paddy had many, many affairs, but perhaps few as exciting, as colourful and as brief as his happy liaison with Ricki Huston, estranged wife of film director John, and later wife of Viscount Norwich, who is also the father of Artemis Cooper, the biographer of one of her ill fated stepmother’s most exciting lovers.
And Artemis’s proper name is the Hon. Alice Clare Antonia Opportune Beever, a granddaughter of Lady Diana Cooper with whom, you’ve guessed it, Paddy Leigh Fermor was on intimate terms, but whether as a lover or confidant is not known.
The author is also married to Antony Beevor, the eminent historian. It is impossible in a few lines to give you a flavour of the life led by Paddy Leigh Fermor: it is only the tip of the summit of the iceberg, and what is underneath is not for the faint hearted, but if you enjoy a book that pulls you to the leaba at the end of the day, this is for you.
In fact. I had the sensation of being bereaved once I’d finished, because Fermor was not only an extraordinary individual – travel writer, war hero, historian, translator, adventurer, lover, polymath, polyglot – but was someone impossible to dislike for too long. He made for excellent company, and hated going to bed alone, or early
Connections are rife – he used Robert Byron’s rucksack on his first trip abroad and is published by John Murray, Lord Byron’s publisher – throughout his long life, suffused with celebration, fornication and translation, both before and after Word War II when, like the poet, he became famous overnight for coordinating the kidnapping of a Nazi General in Crete.
Paddy Leigh Fermor and his life and times are brilliantly wrought by Cooper, who writes like a bee with the sting of a wasp befitting the writer of a convoluted family set up, from the moment her bored subject decides, at the age of 18, to cross Europe from London to Constantinople, by foot. He is forever in exile, and dedicated to Greek causes, and who does that remind you of.
Warning: for the first part of the book, while he is wandering through Europe, have a dictionary at hand, unless you are kosher with ‘wicked voivodes’ and ‘smoking a chibouk.’ A book to put a smile on your face, to last you all of your days.
