As the impecunious Leigh Fermor zigzags around the city, the guest of his better-heeled and well-connected friend (the blithe sponging off obliging students, postmistresses, madams, diplomats, and aristocrats is an amusing leitmotif of his travels), goggling at the castles and bridges, the relics and the nightclubs, the text goggles and zigzags, too. Here, as often with this erudite and garrulous author-the dashing autodidact and World War II hero, considered by some to be the greatest travel writer of the twentieth century-the geographical digression becomes a narrative one. But in Bratislava, with Hungary and the continuation of his southeasterly route shimmering just across the great river, he finds himself unable to resist a Czech friend’s invitation to go north to see Prague, that “bewildering and captivating town.” His plan at this point was to follow the Danube all the way to the Black Sea, whence he would head south to Constantinople-the name by which the romantic-minded youth, his head brimming with memorized verse, insisted on calling Istanbul. By this point in A Time of Gifts-written some four decades after that remarkable journey and first published in 1977-it is late in 1933, and the high-spirited, precocious, poetry-spouting eighteen-year-old, long since expelled from school (“a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” a housemaster clucked), weary of England, and hungry for adventure, finds himself in Czechoslovakia, having walked from the Hook of Holland through the Low Countries, southern Germany, and Austria, his battered copies of The Oxford Book of English Verse and Horace’s Odes firmly, famously in hand.
“Like this” ostensibly refers to the author’s weakness for detours. “We shall never get to Constantinople like this.” This rueful aside, which comes toward the end of the first of the three books that the late Patrick Leigh Fermor devoted to his youthful travels on foot across Europe in the early 1930s, was to prove prophetic. Patrick Leigh Fermor in Phlomochori, a village on the Mani peninsula, southern Peloponnese, Greece 1.
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