On "The Broken Road": The Balkans and British Travel-Writing Habits

From Neal Ascherson's London Review of Books (7 November 2013) review of Patrick Leigh Fermor's "The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos" (John Murray).

"‘Paddy’s travel writing is often brilliant and moving, always humane. And yet its sheer descriptiveness, its concentration on things and people exotically “other” when contrasted to some assumed English norm, does put it in a category.’ The guide here is Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). As she shows, writing imaginative or purely fictional work about the Balkans has been an overwhelmingly British habit. Byron can be said to have set it off. But the genre reached its zenith in the late 19th century and early 20th... Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias.

Literary ‘othering’, as teachers tell their classes, is a way of confirming your own society as ‘normal’ by heightening the aberrant weirdness of its supposed opposite. Does Leigh Fermor offer such a performance? Goldsworthy, rightly, doesn’t accuse him of that. Instead, she suggests that he edited his Balkan memories of seventy years ago to construct a nostalgia which, whether he intended it or not, implied deep regret for what England had become in more recent times: ‘Sacheverell Sitwell and, to some degree, Patrick Leigh Fermor lament the passing of a feudal world, the Europe of peasants and princes … Their melancholy reminiscences about the decaying palaces in the East, the pre-industrial Arcadias of Europe’s Orient, with their Romanticist, more or less openly anti-urban and anti-modernist agenda, are again unmistakably British.’ There is some truth in that. But it’s also true that Leigh Fermor was alert to his own delusions. As he worked on this book, he was obviously determined to qualify the Ruritania-loving instincts of his boyhood".


See also, how Artemis Cooper's biography was written

Paddy and Poetry