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The Glory Of Patrick Leigh Fermor

A kind reader sends David Bentley Hart’s column about Patrick Leigh Fermor on the occasion of his 2011 death. Excerpts: While he was serving as an intelligence officer in Nazi-occupied Crete, where he fought alongside the Greek resistance, often in the garb of a local shepherd, he and the equally daring William Stanley Moss (who […]

A kind reader sends David Bentley Hart’s column about Patrick Leigh Fermor on the occasion of his 2011 death. Excerpts:

While he was serving as an intelligence officer in Nazi-occupied Crete, where he fought alongside the Greek resistance, often in the garb of a local shepherd, he and the equally daring William Stanley Moss (who recorded the story later in his book Ill Met by Moonlight , later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde as Leigh Fermor) managed to abduct the commander of the German garrison on the island, General Karl Kreipe, in his own car, drive him through roughly two dozen checkpoints, and then force-march him through the Cretan wilds, over the top of Mt Ida, to the coast where a motor boat was waiting to spirit him away to Cairo.

To this day, the event is recalled with some wonder in Crete. Some of the older inhabitants of the island tend to think of it as more a foolish escapade than a heroic coup, inasmuch as the response of the garrison was one of typical German delicacy: the orderly massacre of several villages. But the abduction was, in any event, a palpable blow against the occupying forces.

The “scene” from the story that many of us think most memorable, however”recounted later by Leigh Fermor and corroborated by others who were present at the time”was that of General Kreipe, gazing up at Ida’s peak, beginning to recite Horace’s ode “ Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte . . .”, only to have Leigh Fermor pick the poem up from there and quote it to its end. There could scarcely be a more poignant or grimmer commentary upon Western civilization at the moment of its final collapse.

Just imagine that moment! Here is the Horatian ode:

You see how [Mount] Soracte stands out white
with deep snow, and the struggling trees can
no longer sustain the burden, and the rivers
are frozen with sharp ice.

Dispel the cold by liberally piling logs on
the fireplace, and draw out more generously,
o Thaliarchus, four-year-old unmixed wine
from the two-handled Sabine jar.

Entrust everything else to the gods; as soon as
they have stilled the winds battling on the heaving
sea, neither the cypress trees nor
the ancient ash trees are shaken.

Leave off asking what tomorrow will bring, and
whatever days fortune will give, count them
as profit, and while you’re young don’t scorn
sweet love affairs and dances,

so long as crabbed old age is far from
your vigor. Now let the playing field and the
public squares and soft whisperings at nightfall
(the appointed hour) be your pursuits;

now too the sweet laughter of a girl hiding
in a secret corner, which gives her away,
and a pledge snatched from her wrists
or her feebly resisting finger.

Hart goes on to say:

All I will say in ending is that you should read all his books if you have not yet done so. The man is excellent company on the printed page (and was so, it is generally reported, in person). But, more to the point, he was one of the greatest masters of English of our or any epoch, and any literate person who speaks the language really ought to know and to love his work.

I am not sixty pages into A Time Of Gifts, and I am certain that Hart’s judgment is correct. Patrick Leigh Fermor does things with the English language that I have never seen before. Hart speaks of the “opulence” of the Englishman’s prose, and that is certainly true. I have never read writing that is so glittering without seeming rococo and overdone. And what a generous spirit Patrick Leigh Fermor seems to have had. If you can read all of Hart’s column and resist the urge to buy some Patrick Leigh Fermor, you are a stronger man than I. If you can read three pages of A Time Of Gifts online, and avoid buying it, you are a much stronger man than I. Or you might be dead.

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