A splendid new edition.--James Campbell, Times Literary Supplement
Xan Fielding was a gifted, many-sided, courageous and romantic figure,
at the same time civilized and Bohemian, and his thoughtful cast of mind
was leavened by humour, spontaneous gaiety, and a dash of recklessness.
Almost any stretch of his life might be described as a picaresque
interlude.--Patrick Leigh Fermor
During the Second World War, Xan Fielding served for two years as an
officer in the British Special Operations Executive on German-occupied
Crete, where he ran an intelligence network in cooperation with the
Cretan resistance movement.
Seven years later, Fielding returned to Crete to spend a year traveling
in the island's White Mountains (the stronghold of the title),
revisiting sites of his wartime exploits and seeking out former comrades
who had returned to their peacetime lives. His sojourn resulted in this
remarkable memoir, a documentary-like record of days spent among Cretan
peasants blended with history and literature--a travelogue like no
other.
The Stronghold is a blending of history and culture with experience,
but one wedded to fidelity. Fielding never arrives; there is no great
journey of self. There is just a question answered about the war and
youth...he can't shake Crete, as no man can shake the formative
experience of his youth.--from the new foreword by Robert Messenger
This book of mine does not claim to be a serious sociological work; it
is simply the account of a more or less carefree year spent among people
who seem to fit so perfectly into their startling surroundings that at
times I imagined it was not the landscape that conditioned their lives
but their personalities that had conditioned the landscape.--Xan
Fielding
Xan Fielding (1918-1991) was a British writer and traveler, and a
lifelong friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who served with him in Crete
during World War II. (The introduction to Fermor's A Time of Gifts is
written as a Letter to Xan Fielding.) Fielding also translated many
novels from French, most notably, The Bridge on the River Kwai and
The Planet of the Apes.
Robert Messenger is the books editor of the Wall Street Journal.
