Studies 27

with mutual friends: Cyril Connolly, Patrick Kinross, , and . Leigh Fermor’s books resemble Waugh’s early travel books, both amusing and informative. His other book on Greece, Roumeli, was published in April 1966, when Waugh died. He did not live long enough to read Leigh Fermor’s books about his walk to Constantinople. Like Waugh, Leigh Fermor drew on travel in a travel book, The Traveller’s Tree (1950), and a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953), his only fiction.

In The Broken Road, Leigh Fermor travels to Bulgaria, a remnant of the Turkish Empire. He had taken advantage of introductions to country houses in Austria-, but there were not many in Bulgaria. He sought contacts with students and English expatriates as he moved from town to town. Leigh Fermor managed to find interest even in unpromising Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city. The editors prepare fans of earlier volumes for a letdown, but this volume shows Leigh Fermor’s adaptability and persistence.

Parts of The Broken Road were written before the other volumes. Leigh Fermor started with a commission from Holiday magazine for a story about the lower Danube and prepared the draft from memory in 1963. The draft far exceeded the needs of the magazine, so he put it aside, about fifty miles short of Constantinople, and saw that he had to tell the story from the beginning. To write the first two volumes, he recovered the only surviving diary.8 Other diaries had been lost or stolen along the route. Leigh Fermor remembered enough to provide a narrative and drew on imagination to fill blanks in his diaries and memory. That effort of imagination is missing in The Broken Road.

While portions of The Broken Road dealing with Constantinople and Mount Athos are not up to Leigh Fermor’s usual standards, sections on Bulgaria and Bucharest are not far below the first two volumes. Unfortunately, the Bucharest chapter was truncated. When it was written, in the early 1960s, the Cold War was still raging, and Leigh Fermor wrote only about hosts who had emigrated or died. He left out Balasha Cantecuzène, Rumanian princess, sixteen years his senior, though he lived with her from 1935 to 1939. Other passages resemble descriptions of and Transylvania in volume 2, Between the Woods and the Water. Though a bit purple, the prose is as good as in earlier volumes—he sees storks migrating along mountain ridges, inadvertently hires a room in a Bucharest brothel, and hikes along railroad tracks at night as the Orient Express passes by.

After he finished Woods and Water, Leigh Fermor avoided writing The Broken Road. No request to write an introduction, review, article, or obituary seems to have been refused—

8 “The Green Diary” had been left in Bucharest when Leigh Fermor returned to in 1939 to join the army. He retrieved it in 1965. It covered his journey from Bratislava to Constantinople. The diary inspired the narrative of two weeks in Constantinople and three weeks on Mount Athos.