Review of "Patrick Leigh Fermor; An Adventure" by Artermis Cooper

I finished this book with a feeling profound disquiet and unhappiness. I had read PLF's two major travel books, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water", and I'd loved them, even though I could sense that he was a posh boy with a sense of entitlement who strode across Europe with a string of aristocratic connections and the hospitality that this provided for succour. The privations he endured were real, but must have been softened by the knowledge that he would always be a posh boy with posh friends to bail him out. 

And reading the biography, without the beauty of his writing or the charm of experiencing his personality directly, that becomes much much more apparent. So I'm not attracted to him as a character at all, even though Cooper clearly loves him and thinks he's wonderful. His politics are reactionary. He's not a racist, though he doesn't seem to have a really big problem with people that are. He is a charmer, and a chancer, and a serial shagger - not sure if it can be called serial adultery when he's not married to the woman that he sort of shares his life with. There are a lot of pretty young women.

There's a lot of scrounging too. For most of his life he lives off the generosity of posh friends - they give him houses to live in, in London, in Greece, in Paris. He gets commissions to write travel books and film scripts without any particular qualification, and he is published in little literary magazines by his editor friends. He does have obvious talent as a writer, but there are a lot of other people who have just as much or more talent who will never have this kind of leg-up. Or not need to support themselves.

I suppose it's a sign of Artemis Cooper's talent that I can read her book and come to different conclusions from her. But I also feel kind of dirty, and a bit stupid, that despite myself I was charmed in this way, and it retrospectively detracts from my enjoyment of his books.