In Tearing Haste: Letters of Deborah Mitford and Patrick Leigh Fermor

You could have no nobler new year's resolution than to be more like Patrick Leigh Fermor. If you're in school, drop out immediately and walk from the English Channel to Istanbul, as he did from December 1933 to January 1935, starting when he was 18. (After that he spent more than two years in Crete, as a UK special ops officer, disguised as a shepherd, living in caves, leading the Greek resistance. In the badly titled and inaccurate movie of those events, Ill Met By Moonlight, he's played by Dirk Bogarde.) If you're going to be 96 next month, continue work on volume three of your memoir of that first, fabled walk. (The two extent volumes, from 1977 and 1986, are the immortal classics A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.)

Now with In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor readers can see behind the many travel books to more than fifty years of personal life, from 1954 to 2007. His long volleys and her short returns are crowded with half a century of famous figures from Asquith, Diana Cooper, the Kennedys, Betjemen, Evelyn Waugh and Truman Capote to Lucian Freud, Bruce Chatwin, the Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Everywhere, their correspondence is enlivened by her quotations of the vast Derbyshire staff at her 126-room country house Chatsworth and his interactions with his beloved local Greeks. Chatwin's visit to PLF in Greece inspires only "v nice, tremendous know-all, reminds me of a couplet by O Goldsmith .... He's a great pal of Jackie Onassis." In letters festooned with marvellous, glorious, genius, and frequent comparisons to Heaven, Paradise, and Mecca, you see where "v nice" falls. And don't ever doubt Debo, who is after all the last Mitford sister, or her ability to rise to the level of his letters. Her reply:

"Bruce Chatwin. OH how unfair you knowing him. He wrote a book which I so adored I've never really felt like another. You know what I mean, like my Dad & White Fang.

"How ghoul if he's a know-all, but I wd like just to see & smell him to see for myself. Or is it like meeting royal people & actors, better not?"

Admirers of PLF's rough and tumble travels may need a moment to adjust to the extremely high altitude of his letters, all of which begin, "Darling Debo," and at times threaten to float higher still, into a stratosphere reserved for Wodehouse characters. Things are "frightfully good" or "jolly" and rather than be as common as to say "unfortunately..." PLF announces "the pestilential thing is..." If it ever feels twee, it's balanced by his many truly charming quick line drawings throughout and two 8-page photo inserts.

The crowning highlight is a twenty-page account of his 1972 trek in the Pindus Mountains with three other men and a married couple, a totally improvised trip after being refused permission to climb the Hakkiari in Turkish Kurdistan. Rock slides, snow fields, local guides, 4:00am wakings, the cold, the wet, a steady wonder of flora, fauna, vistas -- all the joys of an ascent conveyed in clear, grounded prose. As with the entire collection, you'll feel privileged for the first-hand look at a fading world of intelligent dash.

Readers who have devoured all the other PLF titles will be gratified to discover NYRB Classics is next week re-issuing his first book, The Traveller's Tree, describing his solo tour through Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti in the pre-tourist days of the late 1940s.

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[Sandy]

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