Xan Fielding

"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 FermorIn January 1942, Xan Fielding landed on German-occupied Crete with orders to disrupt the resupply of Rommel's Afrika Korps and establish an intelligence network in cooperation with the Cretan resistance movement. Working with bands of Cretan partisans, he succeeded magnificently. In this memoir of his wartime exploits, Fielding presents a portrait of the quintessential English operative--amateur, gifted, daring, and charming.From the new foreword by Robert Messenger:" 'Hide and Seek' is a classic of British war literature, an understated account of a man's coming-of-age thanks to the sudden shouldering of great responsibility. Fielding is deprecating about the dangers and his own achievements. It is typical of the quiet and reticent man who preferred to live outside the limelight and wrote matter-of-factly about the war rather than with a gloss of adventure or heroism. There's a scene, late in 1943, when Fielding and a group of partisans study the German's list of 'wanted' men. He notes 'with regrettable but only human pride that the entry under my local pseudonym, which outlined in detail my physical characteristics, aliases and activities for a period of eighteen months, took no less than three-quarters of an octavo page in closely-set small-point type.' The Germans had surely measured his worth." 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'.

The Story of a Wartime Agent

Hide and Seek

The Story of a War-time Agent

Justin O'Brien

Albert Camus

Les Possédés. The Possessed. A Play in Three Parts ... Based on the Novel by Feodor Dostoievsky. Translated ... by Justin O'Brien

"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 co-operation with the Cretan resistance movement. Seven years later, Fielding returned to Crete to spend a year travelling 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

Xan Fielding

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