Soracte white with deep snow

Mountains in the Classical Tradition was a research project based at St. Andrews University from 2017 to 2023. It incorporated a blog which considered, among other cultural topics, 'William Golding at Thermopylae' and 'Edward Dodwell on Mt. Hymettos' (the subject of a post here back in 2013). In 'Augustus Hare on Mt. Soracte' Jason Konig discusses the travel writer and watercolourist who published two books about his walks near Rome. These volumes not only described Hare's own impressions of Mount Soracte (now called Monte Soratte) but also referred to twelve other nineteenth century writers who wrote about it. These included Byron, whose Childe Harold lists this rather modest peak alongside the most famous mountains of classical Greece. Soracte's unlikely fame was entirely down to just a few words of Latin verse: the first stanza of Horace's Ode 1.9, in which it stands covered in snow. 

As Jason Konig points out, 

It seems extraordinary that such a brief glimpse could have haunted the imagination of centuries of later readers. It was the opening line of this poem that Patrick Leigh Fermor’s German captive, General Kreipe, quoted to him in looking at the sunrise on Mt Ida in Crete in 1944; Leigh Fermor claims to have quoted the rest of the poem to him from memory in response, an incident which united the two men temporarily in their shared mastery of the classical heritage.

After describing the winter landscape Horace turns to his young companion, Thaliarchus, and urges him not to waste his youth - a similar theme to the famous carpe diem lines in Ode 1.11. There are numerous translations of the full poem online - at the Pantheon Poets site, for example, where you can hear it in Latin. I'll just quote here the start and end of a modern version by David Ferry. 

See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.
See how the laboring overladen trees
Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.

See how the streams are frozen in the cold.
Bring in the wood and light the fire and open
The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars.

O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,
Forget tomorrow. Leave it up to the gods. [...] 

[...] While you’re still young,
And while morose old age is far away,

There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing and there’s music,
There are young people out in the city squares together
As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.

The American literary scholar H. T. Kirby-Smith, a witty historian of poetry, discusses the Soracte Ode in his book The Celestial Twins.   

Critical commentary on this poem usually neglects the metrics and settles on the issue of whether it consistently develops its subject. One reads indignant objections to the idea of sending some young man out into the streets in the dead of winter in hopes of picking up a girl, or suggestions that Horace simply meandered away from his original intention of evoking a winter landscape and contrasting it with the consolations of a roaring fire and a drink. Others, more sensibly, suggest that as Horace turns from himself to his young friend he imagines a more hospitable season — of life as well as the year — when the perils of senescent hypothermia are less threatening. 

It is easy to find online images of snow on Mt. Ida (height 2,456 m) but I failed to locate any of Mt. Soracte (height 691 m). I guess we live in warmer times, but perhaps it was a rare event even in Horace's day. Kirby-Smith thinks the poem's familiar landscape transformed by snow sets the poem going with 'Alpine excitement and novelty.' Neither August Hare nor his literary sources mention seeing the kind of scene described by Horace - they describe Soracte as a distant blue peak. This is how it appears in Edward Lear's panoramic vision (below). Corot painted it several times and you can see pale areas of rock on its slopes, but no sign of snow anywhere. Perhaps Horace was only ever using it as a metaphor - in Kirby-Smith's phrase, 'age as the season of snow.'

Edward Lear, Monte Soratte near Rome, 1880s(?)

Trodden by the feet of gods

I've been twice now to see Charmed Lives in Greece, a highly enjoyable (free) exhibition at the British Museum celebrating the creative lives of Patrick Leigh Fermor, John Craxton and Niko Ghika.  In between these visits, we actually had a holiday in Greece (this wasn't planned, but in his review of Charmed Lives Alastair Sooke wrote that it will 'make you itch to book a holiday beside the Aegean Sea, because the Hellenic fantasy it offers is so irresistibly compelling.')  Whilst I'm sure readers of this blog will be familiar with Craxton and Leigh Fermor, Niko Ghika is perhaps less well known.  His paintings are as colourful and appealing as those of Craxton - nothing ground-breaking but very redolent of a time when the art world was still coming to terms with the influence of Picasso and Matisse.  The exhibition includes photographs, letters and wall quotes that convey the joie de vivre and intellectual curiosity you experience in reading Leigh Fermor...

Of course Leigh Fermor's 'charmed life' in Greece was facilitated by his partner Joan's private income and loyal, emotional support.  He and Craxton also made use of their friend Ghika's house on Hydra (there's a nice photograph of Craxton sketching there on the British Museum's blog post about the exhibition).  It was on Hydra that Leigh Fermor wrote Mani (1958), his digressive account of a journey round the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese.  Here is a passage from my favourite chapter, 'Short Summer Nights'.  It describes the unique sharpness of the sunlight in Greece.

...'All the vapours that roam the Italian atmosphere and muffle the outlines of things are absent here.   A huge magnifying glass burns up the veils of distance, making objects leagues away leap forward clearly as though they were within arm's length.  The eye shoots forth a telescopic braille-reading finger to discern the exact detail and texture of a church, a wood or a chasm ten miles off.  Things in the distance co-exist on equal terms with those hard by; they have a proprietary and complementary share in the patterns that immediately surround one.  A distant cordillera completes a curve begun by the vein along the back of a plane-tree leaf, a far-off belfry has the same intensity as a goat's horn a few yards away, a peninsula leans forward to strike the stem of a dried up thistle at right angles.  Mountain ranges that should melt with the heat-haze and recession, lean forward and impend till one is at a loss to say whether a hill is a small nearby spur or a far-away Sinai...'

This long paragraph continues with further examples before progressing to other properties of Greek light, such as the way it seems to sprinkle surfaces with 'a thin layer of pollen like the damask on a moth's wing.'  These surfaces retain light in the same way that they retain heat. Shadows appear more real than the phenomena they echo.  And 'it is probably because of all this that a strong mystical and sentimental significance pervades the actual surface of the earth, the rocks and the stones of Greek mountains.  The adjective theobadiston, 'trodden by the feet of gods (or God)' in ancient Greek and in the Byzantine liturgy comes to mind.'  All of this, he concludes, has a strange effect on the Greek landscape.  Nature becomes supernatural and 'the frontier between physical and metaphysical is confounded.'

John Craxton's cover for Mani

The Coast of Bohemia

Joseph Wright of Derby, Antigonus in the Storm, 1790-2

On Tuesday we went to see The Winter's Tale at the atmospheric, candlelit Sam Wannamaker Theatre.  I am sure I was not alone in looking forward to seeing how the director dealt with Shakespeare's most famous stage direction: 'Exit, pursued by a bear'.  When it came, this scene played out in near darkness, rightly leaving a lot to the imagination.  This worked well not just because it must be hard to convincingly stage an unexpected bear attack, but because the pursuit takes place on the non-existent desert shoreline of Bohemia.  Perhaps we are not meant to try too hard to picture the surrounding landscape.  Nevertheless, I love the way Joseph Wright has endeavoured to imagine this scene as it might actually have occurred, depicting the rocky beach where Antigonus was pursued and met his grisly end, 'torn to pieces with a bear.'  This painting is in Ontario where it has been shown alongside sound machines traditionally used in 18th century theatre productions, one imitating the wind (canvas passing over wood) and the other rain (beads rotating in a drum.)

Much speculation has gone into Shakespeare's setting for this part of the play.  Some historians have thought he cannot have meant Bohemia and was referring to somewhere else - Apulia, perhaps, or Bithynia.  Others have pointed to the play's source (Robert Green's pastoral Pandosto) which also refers to Bohemia's coast, or have explained it in terms of the political advantage in siting the action in the country of an ally of James I.  But pastoral has never been at all realistic and Shakespeare probably felt as free to imagine 'Bohemia' as his contemporaries would Arcadia.  This is not the only point in the play where reality and fantasy fuse: the actual Renaissance artist Giulio Romano is referred to as sculptor of the statue of Hermione that miraculously comes to life (Giulio was a painter, not a sculptor).  Shakespeare's Bohemia reminds me of another mythical place that I wrote about here before, Kafka's Amerika.  Kafka created a version of that distant continent that was a kind of 'exploded Bohemia'; Shakespeare's coast of Bohemia is similarly a country drawn out of dreams and desires (Kafka on the shore, one might say).

Gelett Burgess, A Map of Bohemia, 1896

In A Time of Gifts the young Patrick Leigh Fermor, walking alone along the Danube near the southern edge of old Bohemia, thinking of The Winter's Tale, dreams up his own theory.  'As I marched downstream, inspiration struck.  'Coast' must originally have meant 'side' or 'edge', not necessarily connected with 'sea' at all!  Perhaps this very path was the Coast of Bohemia - at any rate the Coast of the Forest: near enough!'  Remembering the plot, he imagines a route for Antigonus: sailing from Sicilia to Trieste, overland to Vienna and then up the Danube. 'The ship, running into terrible storms, probably among the Grein whirlpools, founders.  Antigonous, the old courtier, scrambles ashore, - perhaps just under the castle of Werfenstein!' The bear would have emerged from the forest and Act IV's sheep-shearing festivities might have been celebrated in one of the nearby farms.  It is a wonderful moment of creative excitement... followed by crushing disappointment when he arrives at Vienna, checks the play text and realises that Shakespeare's didn't actually use the word coast at all:

SCENE III. Bohemia. A desert country near the sea.  

Later, unable to give up on his speculations, Leigh Fermor has a second moment of jubilation after an afternoon spent in his host's library searching for connections between England and Bohemia.  'The windows of the flat looked down on the whole of Prague.  Towards the end of my search, the pale sun had set among those silver and purplish clouds and at lighting-up time all the lamps of the city had leapt simultaneously to life.'  His host suddenly has an idea and takes down a history book.  It explains that Bohemia did briefly have a coastline, when its territory extended to Dalmatia.  Celebratory drinks are poured in a mood both victorious and valedictory, as the young literary detective is set to leave Prague and head off again on his slow journey to Istanbul.  Years later, writing the book, Leigh Fermor looks back on all this with the knowledge that Shakespeare's comedies always have an imaginary topography...

'Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids.'

The Broken Road

The latest New York Review of Books carries a piece by Daniel Mendelsohn on Patrick Leigh Fermor and the posthumous publication of The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos.  Apparently Lawrence Durrell once referred to the 'truffled style and dense plumage' of Leigh Fermor’s prose and Mendelsohn suggests that 'what you think of his writing, and indeed what you make of the final instalment of his most beloved work, depends on your taste for truffles and feathers.'  Well I'm certainly not averse to them now and again, and I found myself as entranced by this volume as I had been by the earlier two (which have been mentioned here before).  Some feathers feature in this landscape description, which comes towards the end of the book, in December 1934, when PLF is just days away from his final destination and has reached the wooded slopes on the edge of the Black Sea.

'Downhill at the end of plunging tunnels of trunks and branches and over the foliage of the ledges, the lowest stems of which seemed almost rooted in the sea, the European continent fell to fragments in spikes and small tufted islets far below, standing in translucent, pale green water, which darkened as it receded from the rocks to bottle green and the blue of peacock's neck feathers and fled away to the skyline.  The almost still water was stirred by incoming creases as slight as a breath on silk, just enough to hem the join of rock and water with a thin bracelet of white, but too little to interfere with the symmetry of the semi- and three-quarter circles that the rocks sent spinning slowly out to sea again.  Only the ghost of their sigh floated up through the mews and the wheeling sunlit wings of the seagulls.'

As he continues through these woods, the late afternoon sun strikes them at an angle parallel to their slope, 'filling the clearings and striking the tree-boles and the foliage with layers of wintry gold, hanging rafts of light in the leaves, falling through the wood in long spokes and breaking up the loops of shadow over the surface of the water with horizontal windows of radiance.'  This perfect moment of solitude and peace in the 'celestial light' is full of the promise of what he imagines he will soon experience in the islands of the Aegean.  Later that day however, after the sun has set, he becomes lost among the rocky headlands, slips into a freezing pool, drops his torch and almost gives up hope before stumbling upon a cave where a group of shepherds and seamen revive him with fish, lentils and raki.  As Neil Ascherson points out in his LRB review, the description of what follows - a 'night of mighty bardic song, feasting and ancient dances' - may not be literally true to what happened on the journey, but it constitutes one of the book's most memorable set pieces. The evening finally ends with firelight ebbing on the walls and the stalactites while this extraordinary young traveller, unable to sleep, lies looking up at a high gap in the cave's wall where the stars of Orion are visible, blazing 'like a slanting lozenge of ice-crystals.'

Moonlight on the Danube

There was a nice article today by William Dalrymple about Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose books include some extraordinarily beautiful descriptions of landscape. Here he is, for example, in A Time of Gifts describing moonlight on The Danube: 'the line of the moon's reflection lay amidstream where the current runs fastest and shivered and flashed there like quicksilver. The reefs and shoals and islands and the unravelling loops of water which had lain hidden till now were all laid bare. Wastes of fen spread from either shore and when the surfaces were broken by undergrowth or sedge or trees, they gleamed like fragments of flawed looking-glass. All was changed. The thin-shadowed light cast a spell of mineral illusion. The rushes and the flags were turned into thin metal; the poplar leaves became a kind of weightless coinage; the lightness of foil had infected the woods. The frosty radiance played tricks with levels and distance until I was surrounded by a dimensionless and inconcrete fiction which was growing paler every second. While the light was seeking out more and more liquid surfaces for reflection, the sky, where the moon was now sailing towards its zenith, seemed to have become an expanse of silvery powder too fine for the grain to be descried. Silence transcended the bitterns' notes and the industry of the frogs. Stillness and infinity were linked in a feeling of tension which, I felt sure, presaged hours of gazing watchfulness. But I was wrong. In a little while my eyes were closing under a shallow tide of sleep.'

This quotation should indicate why Dalrymple talks about Leigh Fermor's 'sublime prose style' and calls him 'arguably our finest living prose-poet.' Out of context this kind of writing may seem a bit full on; but A Time of Gifts is not a dispassionate account - it describes the impressions of a eighteen year old who is awakening to a world 'luminescent with promise'. For the same reason, I enjoyed the way Leigh Fermor started to see the landscape of the Low Countries and Germany through the eyes of painters: Brueghel in particular. Of course in this he was just following the picturesque tradition, but young Leigh Fermor was rediscovering these artistic correspondences for himself. They were part of an appetite for culture and history (fed in part by the erudite and civilised conversations he manages to have en route) which give all his 'landscapes' a vivid connection to the past.