Most of the connections and locations of Leigh Fermor’s Budapest have been traced and relayed in Budapest in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, an article written for iNews by Michael O’Sullivan in 2019. It would be redundant to dwell on the ground covered by it (though I managed to visit the locations mentioned), therefore this post will focus on a few aspects not covered by O’Sullivan, and some unexpected comparisons. Skimming the article is encouraged before reading on.
What struck me about Chapter Two of Between the Woods and the Water was that, in spite of its title (‘Budapest’), the author’s words for the cityscape and its geography are restricted. Leigh Fermor, writing about the Great Hungarian Plain or the Abbey of St Wandrille devotes a significant amount of his words to vivid, intricate descriptions of the physical, such as architecture, trees, ground. It is as if he surveyed the very pores of limestone like a hawk; his style is unsurpassably lucid and on the qui vive. The chapter devoted to Budapest constitutes a lacuna, in which Leigh Fermor has relied more heavily upon memory than notebooks from the time, and whose lack of detail he ascribes to being hungover for much of his sojourn— ‘a noctambulistic set and my stay was punctuated by [hungover] awakenings like this.’ The chapter remains a worthy read nonetheless, and does feature some distinguished one liners, such as ‘Budapest is that sort of city; a place with a capacity to easily unleash a myriad of complex historical emotions’, whose truth resonates perhaps even more today than it did in 1934.
Particularly intriguing is the paragraph in which Leigh Fermor relays an anecdote about El Grecos. He describes Annamaria, ‘the pretty girl I made friends with at the ball’, and states that he ‘haunted them [museums and galleries] all’, thanks to her studying art history. It is not in a picture gallery, however, that leigh Fermor finds himself in a long room ‘empty except for half a dozen tremendous El Greco’s’, but in the private house of an aristocrat. This raises the question, then, of where these works are now. I was pleasantly surprised to find about this many in the Museum of Fine Arts in Heroes’ Square, but it’s impossible to tell whether they are the same works that Leigh Fermor glanced upon, tremendous as they are. (For the Museum of Fine Arts, see Budapest III: Museum of Fine Arts.)
This sort of anecdote, which consists of Leigh Fermor at some entertaining turn in the company of an aristocrat, pepper the three volumes recording his walk across Europe, of which Between the Woods and the Water is the second. He was essentially gentry himself, being the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, an eminent geologist, but his philosophy for walking found him more often in the company of the impoverished than that of the elite. As I roved (limped, actually, as I had injured my right knee somewhere in the night of Pest) the Hungarian National Gallery, I came across the works of Lázló Mednyánszky. The overwhelming amount of his works are inside of that gallery, housed in the Royal Palace perched high above the Danube, surveying all Pest. The few (which can be counted on one hand) that aren’t are in private collections. It is therefore unsurprising that he is not better known.
To a visitor walking around Budapest in the shadow of Leigh Fermor, the parallels between his life and Mednyánszky’s are irresistible. Both were born into establishment families, but turned away from the lifestyle of their class at a young age. Mednyánszky, even more so than Leigh Fermor, sought out harsh and unforgiving conditions and environments—‘his models were urban tramps and criminals as well as poor and landless rural folk’, the ever helpful gallery captions tell us. His Head of a Tramp, painted between 1911 and 1913, looks as if it could as easily belong to a ’70s album cover as the walls of the Hungarian National Gallery. It is double-edged; prima facie striking the viewer with glowing heat, (anger of destitution?), but on closer inspection, evokes the arid and bleak conditions of a sterile desert, the subject’s expression one of complete dolor. It reminded me, however distantly, of the description of the dust-devils of the Great Hungarian Plain in Between the Woods and the Water, ‘seeming to mop and mow like rushing phantoms as they go’, and which attain a near-legendary status in the author’s mind, for the opportunity to see one never arrives.
Mednyánszky died in 1919, and so missed Leigh Fermor by just over a decade. What conversation, one cannot help but wonder, would the two have shared in a chance meeting on the streets of Vienna or Pest?
in vestigiis 