Europe, under a Patrick Leigh Fermor hangover

This spring, I fell in love with Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel writing, and this summer, I took a trip to Europe (Trieste and Vienna) under a distinctly Fermorian hangover. While in Vienna, I even made a point of taking the U-Bahn outside the city center to see the real Danube, the river that Leigh Fermor had spent so many months following on foot (the "Danube" in the city center of Vienna is just a canal).

Panorama of the Danube near Donaumarina station, Vienna, sunset, July 9, 2017

I meant to wait to post this until I had also written up my thoughts on the third book in Leigh Fermor's trilogy (The Broken Road) and the biography of him that I read (Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper), but for now, please have my thoughts on the first two books of the trilogy.

  A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Time of Gifts is an embarrassment of riches. No one else could have written it; its very existence seems a miracle. Starting in December 1933, the 18-year-old Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor decided to walk across Europe, following the Rhine and Danube rivers. He knew no one in Central Europe and spoke none of its languages. His budget was a pound a week (roughly $85 in today’s money). He was only vaguely aware of the rise of Nazism and other troubling political developments. Of course, he had no idea that the whole region he walked across would be war-torn and irrevocably altered within a decade. He had a vague notion to write a book about his travels, but he didn’t publish A Time of Gifts till the 1970s. (And it isn’t even the whole story! It covers only the first third of the journey: Holland, the Rhineland, Bavaria, Austria, Prague, and Slovakia. There are sequels.) If any one of a hundred things had been different—if Leigh Fermor had had a less impressionable memory or a less telling eye for detail or a less generous heart; if he had been killed on one of the daring missions he undertook in World War II—this book would not exist.

And what a book it is! Through Leigh Fermor’s eyes, everything is a marvel; everything is romantic. He is hungry for knowledge and beauty and rapture. He portrays his youthful self as always jaunty and adventurous, but there’s a bittersweet undertone that comes from the older man looking back on his long-gone youth in a vanished world. The travelogue also includes extensive meditations on history and art, and some great set-piece narrative scenes. My favorite might be the interlude where two German girls his own age put him up in Stuttgart: it feels like something from a 1930s Lubitsch film, playful eroticism bubbling just under the surface.

Leigh Fermor’s writing is florid and perhaps even ripe for parody; I had to keep looking up arcane vocabulary words and references to obscure historical figures. (Here’s an extreme example: “Watching his lavoltas and corantos, expert hidalgos from Castille with rowels the size of Michaelmas daisies would make the sign of the cross and cry ‘Miraculo!’”) There are times when it’s a bit too much—the Prague chapter is nearly impenetrable. But then he’ll bring you back around with a good-humored aside, or a vivid character sketch, or an exquisite word choice.

In the introduction to this edition, Jan Morris notes that the exact center of the book is Leigh Fermor’s visit to Melk Abbey, in Austria. There, his prose becomes as baroque as the architecture it describes, and some of his sentences could serve as metaphors for the book as a whole: “The faded quicksilver, diffusing a submarine dusk, momentarily touches the invention and the delight of this looking-glass world with a hint of unplanned sadness.” Afterward, the young monk who’s showing Patrick around Melk asks him if all the aesthetic splendor has left him feeling “un peu gris” (a bit tipsy). He admits, in retrospect, that “gris was too mild a word.” It is, Paddy. It is.

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If technology ever reaches the point where great books get adapted into virtual reality environments rather than movies or TV shows, I’ll be the first to sign up for the Patrick Leigh Fermor VR experience. Just think: you’d get lots of exercise (Leigh Fermor walked thousands of miles across Europe), you’d learn languages (he taught himself German from scratch), and you’d bear witness to endless scenes of natural and man-made beauty. To spend a long summer night in a Hungarian aristocrat’s country house drinking cocktails and dancing to Gershwin records, while the raucous sound of folk songs at a peasant wedding drifts in on the breeze from outside… well, that sounds like my idea of heaven.

I didn’t love Between the Woods and the Water quite as much as A Time of Gifts, which is probably because I was slightly less interested in Leigh Fermor’s itinerary. In the first book, he visits notable cities like Munich, Vienna, and Prague; in this book, after he leaves Budapest at the end of Chapter 2, the places he travels are not places I’d ever heard of or thought much about. (The book principally deals with Hungary and Romania.) He is fascinated by all the different waves of migration that swept through the Hungarian basin and made this region of the world what it is, but this history, told in non-chronological order, can get confusing. It also gets hard to distinguish one country house and charmingly eccentric minor aristocrat from another. Leigh Fermor was lucky to meet with such kindness and make great friends on his journey, but I finished the book a bit over a week ago and I can’t remember the difference between Count Lajos and Count Jenö.

All the same, these are minor quibbles. This is a book to get lost in, a book about the joys of getting lost, an evocation of a lost world that very nearly brings it back to life in all its glory.

In Praise of Harmony @ SF Theater Pub Blog

I know, it got a little quiet around my blog this past week, but that's because I was on a business trip to Dallas. Our Lone Star State colleagues showed us true Southern hospitality and lavished us with Texas-sized amounts of food; so, while I didn't have a lot of free time or opportunities to see tourist sites in Dallas, I had an excellent trip overall.

I did manage to write a brief piece for the Theater Pub blog, inspired by what I was doing in Texas ("harmonizing" business operations between my office and the Dallas one), and some recent thoughts I've been having about how to navigate a playwriting career with calm and confidence, rather than fear and anxiety.

In my piece, I wrote, "If the odds are so bad, if it’s difficult to achieve either fiscal or artistic success as a playwright, the only thing that we can do is treat ourselves with care, and try our best to enjoy our lives in the theater." I started having thoughts like this after I read Outrageous Fortune four years ago (it's actually four years to the day since I attended the Outrageous Fortune community discussion hosted by Theater Bay Area) and they've only intensified since then. That shouldn't be seen as justification for slacking off or throwing up your hands in defeat; but it should be a reason to build a career on your own terms.

East Coast Girl (at least for a week)

Tomorrow, I'm traveling to New York for a week to attend my 5-year Vassar reunion (where did the time go?!), catch up with East Coast friends, see some Off-Broadway theater, avoid getting attacked by cicadas... you know, the usual.

There'll probably be no new posts while I'm away (well, except for a link to my new Theater Pub column when it's up). But I do hope to have some fun adventures, and to share them here once I've returned home!

Song for the moment, a.k.a. New Favorite Song: "East Coast Girl" by Cayucas.



When I first heard this song on the radio, a couple of months ago, I liked it a lot, but I also thought "This band sounds like they are trying to out-Vampire-Weekend Vampire Weekend." Turns out I'm not the only person who thinks that: the good people of Pitchfork have come to the same conclusion regarding Cayucas' musical style. Unlike the snooty Pitchforkers, though, I'm not so bothered by the way that Cayucas sounds like a breezier, less substantial version of one of my favorite bands. Music need not be epic or groundbreaking to have value, and it's hard to hate such summery, charming indie-pop.

I bought Cayucas' album, Bigfoot, the week it came out, and listened to it while I was on my way to a hipster barbecue in the Mission District. The sun was shining. I was wearing cut-off jean shorts. I rode the J-Church train past Dolores Park and saw San Francisco's golden youth spread before me, day-drinking and sunbathing on the grass -- full of beauty and promise and entitlement and absurdity. And with Bigfoot playing in my ears, it was a perfect moment.

This isn't to denigrate "darker" or more ambitious music -- in fact, I love the way that Vampire Weekend's new album, Modern Vampires of the City, deals with twentysomething angst and despair and "the nagging pressure to make the most of their finite youth." Goodness knows, I've been feeling a lot of that lately, as the realization "Marissa, you graduated college five years ago" sinks in, deeper and deeper. But sometimes you need an antidote to such negativity: lilting music that speaks of summer fun, a weekend reconnecting with old friends and celebrating the good things that have happened in the last five years.

That's what I hope Reunion will be like, at least.

"A Writer Never Has a Vacation"

Ionesco said, "A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing."

Well, I'm off to go prove Ionesco wrong -- or try to.

Taking 15 days: San Francisco to New Jersey to London to Paris and back to S.F.

This has been a crazy month for me -- planning my trip, cramming in lots of theatergoing before my departure, the Olympians book was released, there's some stressful personal/family stuff going on -- which may somewhat explain my lack of blogging.

(You should check out my latest Theater Pub post, "Why Songs of Hestia Should Be On Your Summer-Reading List," though, if you haven't already.)

I don't know what my internet access will be like for most of this trip and I think my focus during my travels might be on personal journaling rather than public blogging... but I do hope at some point to write about some aspects of my trip. (I've already got tickets to see 2 plays in London!)

OK, so maybe I won't be proving Ionesco wrong after all. Writing is always a big part of my travels and while I may not be doing any playwriting while I am away, I still won't be able to turn off the journaling/blogging/putting-words-together part of my brain.

I'm exhilarated at the thought of returning to Europe after five years, but also exhausted from the busy month I've been having. Hopefully I can get a good night's sleep on the red-eye to London Sunday night and arrive there alert and wide-eyed and ready to take it all in!

Rough Crossings

Even though Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies begins with an account of a "sick-making" English Channel crossing on rough seas, I read it and wondered whether one can still cross the Channel by boat. Could I perhaps take a ferry between England and France, rather than the Eurostar through the Chunnel?  That seems like the sort of thing I would do.

(Oh yes, did I mention?  I've a trip coming up. Late June. London and Paris. Eleven days. Please feel free to give recommendations of sites/restaurants/shops to visit, for London particularly. Also seeking recommendations of Paris places that have opened in the last five years or are off the beaten track.)

According to train-travel website The Man in Seat 61, it is still possible to make the crossing via ferry but it takes nine hours, instead of two, from city center to city center.  So much for that idea. I will already be spending fewer days in Paris than in London and I can't cut into my Paris time like that.

Meanwhile, having discovered The Man in Seat 61, I'm reading itineraries and accounts of train trips all over the world, and dreaming up future vacations...

Also, isn't it strange that both Evelyn Waugh novels I have read -- Vile Bodies and Brideshead Revisited -- feature an important scene that takes place on a rough sea voyage that leaves most of the passengers seasick?  The opening scene of Vile Bodies, and the scene in Part II of Brideshead Revisited where Charles and Julia take advantage of the fact that they are "good sailors" (and Charles' wife isn't) to begin an affair. I can't recall any other novels that describe seasickness so vividly, though the Guardian lists some examples.  Do you think Waugh was a good sailor or a bad sailor?