Cooper Artemis - The broken road: from the Iron Gates to Mount Athos

There is something poignant and mysterious about incomplete masterpieces. The pair of books that preceded the present volume A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water remain the magnificent two thirds of an unfinished trilogy. They are unique among twentieth-century travel books. Forty and fifty years after the event, their journey and its prodigious feat of recall reads like the dream odyssey of every footloose student.

The eighteen-year-old Leigh Fermor set out from the Hook of Holland in 1933 to walk to Constantinople (as he determinedly called Istanbul). But it was only decades afterwards that he embarked on the parallel journey the written one looking back from maturity on his youthful rite of passage. A Time of Gifts (1977) carried him through Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Between the Woods and the Water (1986) continued across Hungary and into Transylvania and left him at the Danubes Iron Gates, close to where the Rumanian and Bulgarian frontiers converge. He was still five hundred miles from his destination in Constantinople.

The literary completion of this epic would have been a triumph comparable to that of William Goldings sea trilogy or, in a different genre, to Evelyn Waughs Sword of Honour. But there, at the Iron Gates, Leigh Fermors remembered journey hung suspended. Impatient readers gathered that he had succumbed to writers block, frozen by failed memory or the task of equalling his own tremendous style.

But on his death in 2011 he left behind a manuscript of the final narrative whose shortcomings or elusiveness had tormented him for so many years. He never completed it as he would have wished. The reasons for this are uncertain. The problem remained obscure even to him, and The Broken Road is only its partial resolution. The books fascination resides not only in the near-conclusion of its youthful epic, but in the light that it throws on the creative process of this brilliant and very private man.

At the age of eighteen Paddy (as friends and fans called him) thought himself a failure. His housemaster at Kings School, Canterbury, had memorably labelled him a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness, and he had been sacked from most of his schools. His parents were separated, his father a distinguished geologist was far away in India, and although Paddy toyed with entering the army, the prospect of its discipline irked him. Instead, he longed to be a writer. In rented digs in Londons Shepherd Market, between wild parties among the remnant of the 1920s Bright Young People, he struggled with composing adolescent verse and stories. But in the winter of 1933, he wrote, gloom and perplexity descended. Everything suddenly seeming unbearable, loathsome, trivial, restless... Detestation, suddenly, of parties. Contempt for everyone, starting and finishing with myself.

It was then that the idea of a journey dawned on him a solitary walk in romantic poverty. An imaginary map of Europe unfurled in his mind. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about! As a thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly, he set out with a parental allowance of a pound a week and a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse and Horaces Odes in his rucksack.

His walk up the Rhine into the heart of Middle Europe, down the Danube and across the Great Hungarian Plain to Transylvania, became a counterpoint of nights in hovels and sojourns in the castles of kindly aristocrats. But above all, as he travelled exultantly curious through the landscapes and histories of the unfolding continent, this was a young mans introduction to the riches of European culture. The journey took him a year. But it was over forty years before he began to publish it.

Other matters intervened. For four years after he reached Constantinople, he lived in Rumania with his first great love, Princess Balasha Cantacuzene. It was during this time that he first began to write up his youthful walk, but the words wouldnt flow, he wrote, I couldnt get them to sound right. And none of this first effort survives.

Then came the war, and his period as an SOE officer in occupied Crete, culminating in his legendary abduction of General Kreipe, divisional commander of the islands central sector. It was not until 1950 that literary success arrived, with a travel book on the Caribbean, followed by a novel and the resonant account of his retreat into monasteries, A Time to Keep Silence. Above all, his travels in Greece, where he settled with his wife Joan Eyres Monsell, yielded two books Mani and Roumeli that celebrate not the sites of classical antiquity but the earthy, demotic Romiosyne, the folk culture of the land he had come to love.

Late in 1962 the American Holiday magazine (a journal more serious than its name) commissioned Paddy to write a 5,000-word article on The Pleasures of Walking. With no presentiment of what he was starting, he plunged into describing his epic trek. Nearly seventy pages later, he was still only two thirds of the way through just short of the Bulgarian frontier, at the Iron Gates and the discipline of compression had grown unbearable. Enormous seams of memory were opening up. Between one sentence and another he threw off the constraints of an article. Those first seventy pages were set aside, and when he resumed the narrative, writing at his journeys natural pace, he was composing a full-scale book from Bulgaria to Turkey. Now all the stuff of his walk the byways of history and language, the vividly etched characters, the exuberantly observed architecture and landscape came swarming on to the page. On New Years Day 1964 he wrote to his publisher, the loyal and long-suffering Jock Murray, that the narrative had ripened out of all recognition. Much more personal, and far livelier in pace, and lots of it, I hope, very odd.

So, ironically, the last stretch of his journey from the Iron Gates to Constantinople was the first part of his walk that he attempted to write in full. He wanted to call the book Parallax, a word (familiar to astronomy) that defines the transformation that an object undergoes when viewed from different angles. It was a measure of how acutely he felt the change in perspective between his younger and older selves. Jock Murray, however, balked at the title as too opaque (he thought parallax sounded like a patent medicine) and it was tentatively renamed A Youthful Journey.

In the mid-1960s, with the manuscript still incomplete, Paddy put it aside and became absorbed with his wife Joan in the creation of their home in the Peloponnese. When eventually he returned to the project in the early 1970s, he realized that he must start all over again, from his journeys beginnings in Holland, and that there would be more than one book. For the next fifteen years he laboured over the Great Trudge, as he called it, to produce the two superb works that carried him to the Bulgarian border. The manuscript of A Youthful Journey, meanwhile, handwritten on stiff cardboard sheets, languished half-forgotten on a shelf in his study, enclosed in three black ring binders.

The spectacular success of the first two volumes drastically increased public expectation for the third. Between the Woods and the Water had ended with the irrevocable words: To be Concluded, and the commitment was to dog Paddy for the rest of his life. By the time he returned to A Youthful Journey which began at the Iron Gates, where Between the Woods and the Water ended he was in his seventies; the text itself was some twenty years old, and the experiences remembered were over half a century away. This early manuscript was written in prolix bursts, barely edited. It lacked the artful reworking, the rich polish and sometimes the coherence that he had come to demand of himself. The slow, intense, perfectionist labour by which the first two volumes had been achieved even their proofs were so covered in corrections and elaborations that they had to be reset wholesale seemed a near-insuperable challenge now. And other events weighed in. With the death of Jock Murray in 1993, and of Joan in 2003, the two people who had most encouraged him were gone. The long ice age that set in was perhaps as bewildering to Paddy as to others. Even the help of a psychiatrist did little to ease him.