The great novelist and travel writer Lawrence Durrell was born on this day in Jalandhar, India, in 1912.
Most famous for The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell employed his exceptional talents for evoking the spirit of a place in numerous travel books, including the collection Spirit of Place. His great love was the Mediterranean, especially Greece. He grew up on Corfu, which he wrote about in Prospero's Cell. His brother Gerald wrote his own, more popular, book about the island, My Family and Other Animals.
In subsequent travel books - Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes), Bitter Lemons (Cyprus)- Durrell elevated the art of travel writing. For one, he brought great learning to the task, not only speaking the language but possessing a deep knowledge of the history and mythology. Also, rather than passing through - like traditional travel writers - he lived in each place, intimately getting to know the people and the politics and the gossip and the rhythms. You read his books to be entertained, to marvel at the language and the erudition, and to learn about the world. One essay on Provence from Spirit of Place will give you more than Peter Mayle's entire oeuvre.
I'm going to be on the road tomorrow - heading to Key West - but I didn't want the 25th to pass without marking the birth, 64 years ago, of Shiva Naipaul.
Like his brother, Shiva was born in Trinidad, studied at Oxford, and became a writer. In books like Journey to Nowhere, in which he investigates the Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, and Beyond the Dragon's Mouth, with its brilliant evocation of growing up in Port-of-Spain, he exhibited the patented Naipaul intelligence but complemented it with compassion.
When he died from a heart attack, at the age of 40, Martin Amis wrote: "we have lost 30 years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius."
George Mikes, journalist and travel writer, was born on this day in 1912.
A native of Hungary, Mikes went to England in 1938 (to cover the Munich crisis) and stayed. He specialized in humorous books about countries back before the age of political correctness. But he was never mean, and at his best he was both funny and insightful. "On the Continent, people have good food," he wrote in perhaps his most famous book, How To Be an Alien. "In England they have good table manners." (This was back before the British learned how to cook.)
Little Cabbages begins: "In Hungary I was taught that France was a Great Power; in England I was told that France was a great joke."
Any Souvenirs: Central Europe Revisited , published in 1971, is his most poignant book, beginning with a lament for the vanished culture of the coffee-house, and ending with his expulsion from his native land. This last chapter is titled: "How To Be an Undesirable Alien." As with all great humorists, the light touch overrode personal sorrow and disappointment.
Before we leave Patrick Leigh Fermor, who turned 94 yesterday, a taste of his brilliance:
"The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal - or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube - and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. ...When the children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone - children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs - moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath."
Patrick Leigh Fermor, the greatest living travel writer, turns 94 today.
In 1933, the teenage Leigh Fermor took a boat from England to the Hook of Holland and proceeded to walk to what was then Constantinople. His account of this peregrination takes up two volumes, A Time of Gifts (arguably the greatest travel book title, as well as the greatest travel book) and Between the Woods and the Water (also in contention for best travel book).
Written decades after the fact (with the help of a journal), both books capture - in fervent, erudite, often baroque prose - the grand sweep and the hard-earned joys of travel, as well as a Europe that was soon to disappear forever. The young Englishman was alive to everything: languages, customs, topography, architecture, flora and fauna, history, literature, politics. Planning to travel rough, he made an early connection with some landowners who gave him letters of introduction to use along the route. So when he wasn't bedding down in barns he was sleeping in castles.
Leigh Fermor eventually settled in Greece - disguised as a Cretan shepherd, he captured a German general during World War II - and wrote two excellent books about the country: Mani, where he lived, and Roumeli. His book The Traveller's Tree is probably the best travel book ever written about the Caribbean. He is one of the few travel writers to write both itinerant (traveling through) and sedentary (settling down) travel books.
The account of his youthful walk across Europe is his great, and sadly unfinished, masterpiece. Fans have been waiting patiently for the final volume, which would take him triumphantly into Constantinople, but the fear is that it may never see completion.
Of all the writers I admire, there are only two whom I can reread and feel instantly changed. A few sentences by Nabokov will make me see the world with greater clarity (like getting new glasses), and a paragraph by Leigh Fermor unfailingly heightens my enthusiasm for life's infinite richness.
Elliot Paul, journalist and travel writer, was born today in 1891 in Linden, Massachusetts.
Paul specialized in vanishing worlds. The Life and Death of a Spanish Town, perhaps his most famous book, depicts the inhabitants and customs of Santa Eulalia on the island of Ibiza just before it was changed forever by the Spanish Civil War. The Last Time I Saw Paris is a minutely-observed, poignant portrait of the residents of Rue de la Huchette, in the Latin Quarter, in the days leading up to World War II.
This was decades before Ibiza became party central, Rue de la Huchette became a home for Greek restaurateurs, and the sedentary travel book became a guide to the good life.
Pulling my copy of The Life and Death of a Spanish Town from its shelf last night I found a bookmark from Sessler's Bookshop in Philadelphia - another vanished world - with lines from Ship of Fooles:
Still am I busy,
Bookes assembling,
For to have plentie
It is a pleasaunt thing.
You don't get that with Kindle.