Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor, as done by Pearson and Macfarlane

 

Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor benefits from an appreciation in The Guardian online, or it is more like a white-hot tribute to Fermor by Allison Pearson in meeting with Artemis Cooper, author of a very recent biography of Fermor. Also from The Guardian online, the same biography is recommended by Robert Macfarlane. Fermor was their hero, whose touchstone was WWII and Fermor's Cretan exploits therein. Heroes are rare today. What they did to become a hero is usually severely compromised by an emphasis on what the hero did not do or should not have done. The nay overpowers the yea - though still a hero, albeit qualified.

The qualification doesn't partake of morals. No heroes today are moral figures. Pearson and Macfarlane between them found him to be unconventional and faunlike. The faun wasn't like one in marble since he could smoke 80 cigarettes a day and drink like a drowning fish. Very early on, on the farm, he roamed the English countryside and it is suggested he wanted to always do so. To do so he was a bit of a sponger and more like a satyr but that was more than counterbalanced by a passion for living so that in his 80's (he died at 96) he could leap from rock to rock all the while asking about food, what had been visited, supplying information about Greek myths and Dylan Thomas - meantime sporting invigoration and curiosity in addition to being inconclusive and charming.

His personality did not need assembly. Such types can get to be tiresome though envied. Who spent a long time with him on their terms and put more luster on the hero's image? One could add to his being uncommon in many of his activities such as in moral matters. He wrote about a long journey in 1933-34 when he was 18. Then, when he was much older, books about that travel came out in 1977 and 1985. He wrote them from notes not at all supportive of what found its way into print. He, in one example, recounted how he rode across a plain on horseback when he didn't have a horse.

He was not liked by all. He certainly liked the Greeks of the Mani peninsula where he had a home. Why the Greeks? Doesn't the passion for living and being an invigorating influence have representation and reception in other times and places? Yes, in other places, but in other times, certainly in more recent times, is doubtful. The sensations he brought to the fore are routine now as they are accentuated by television, the Internet, and movies. One vital distinction remains - he was real, they are not.