“It brings him slap up against two things—what actually happened, and the young, callow, Anglo-centric, slightly Woosterish, touchingly vulnerable young man that he was. He wasn’t quite the poetic figure that his writing later turned him into”

On the Road Again: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Memoir, Finished At Last

by Edward Platt Nov 10, 2013 5:45 AM EST

One of the greatest travel books ever published, the late Patrick Leigh Fermor’s two-volumes of his walk across Europe in the 1930s, is finally finished.

Ironically, one of the things that prevented him completing ‘Vol III’ may have been a surplus of information. Leigh Fermor lost the first three diaries he kept as he made his way from London to Romania, but he rediscovered the one that covered the last section of the walk soon after he finished the draft of A Youthful Journey.  It was saved by his first love, Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, a Romanian aristocrat he met in Athens in 1935, and lived with until the outbreak of the Second World War. She had taken it with her when she was evicted from her family estate, and she gave it back to him in 1965, when he went back to Romania and found her living in drastically reduced circumstances under Communist rule. Leigh Fermor used to say that the loss of his first three diaries “aches, like an old wound in cold weather,” and yet it allowed him to recreate the early stages of his walk from a mixture of memory and imagination. The re-discovery of the final diary was not the boon he might have hoped: “It brings him slap up against two things—what actually happened, and the young, callow, Anglo-centric, slightly Woosterish, touchingly vulnerable young man that he was. He wasn’t quite the poetic figure that his writing later turned him into,” says Artemis Cooper. “I think the diary really shook his confidence in the text of A Youthful Journey, and I think that’s why he put it aside.”