Читать книгу Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life - Jeremy Lewis - Страница 12

Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was published in 1938, and in it he famously contrasted the elaborate Mandarin prose favoured by the writers of an older generation with the terse, unadorned vernacular favoured by younger writers like Hemingway, Isherwood and Orwell. For as long as I can remember, the plain style of English prose has been in the ascendant. Clarity, simplicity and brevity are extolled as the supreme virtues, to the exclusion of all others. Interminable parentheses, sectioned off by colons, semi-colons, dashes and brackets, are regarded as redundant and irrelevant, quaint survivals of a more verbose and leisurely age. Linguistic balancing acts, with sentence piled upon sentence, have gone the way of aquatints or Morris dancing; flat, inanimate prose is de rigueur for our buttoned-down practitioners, who see themselves as the heirs of Isherwood and Orwell, but lack their ability to both simplify and intensify the language. A few reactionary figures have held out against the tide. Patrick Leigh Fermor continues to write an elaborate, baroque prose, glittering with words that are both exotic and exact; following their great Victorian precursors, Evelyn Waugh and Hugh Trevor-Roper interlaced long rolling periods with short, sharp sentences, like cooks contrasting sweet and sour, or painters counterpointing light and shade. Although long sentences and elaborate constructions of clause and sub-clause are equated nowadays with obscurity, pretentiousness, whimsicality and general windbaggery, the great masters of the art – Trollope or Stevenson, for example – combined prolixity with an almost luminous clarity of mind and style: few things give more intellectual and aesthetic pleasure than following a thread, unbroken, through some enormous nineteenth-century sentence, often a paragraph long in itself.

I have a very soft spot for the long sentence and the parenthetical aside, yet some of the best and most effective prose of the twentieth century comes from the opposite camp – and was written, not by literary men, but by soldiers and men of action. Soldiers’ prose tends to be strong, direct and succinct, like a musclebound version of Goodbye to Berlin or To Have or Have Not. When these rather prosaic virtues are combined with vigorous turns of phrase and the ability to evoke character and tell a good story, the effect can be overwhelming. I once asked Tom Rosenthal why, at their best, soldiers write such effective and efficient prose, and – speaking as a former National Service man to someone who had, much to his relief, escaped the net by a couple of years – he came up with an instant solution. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘the answer is obvious. When soldiers communicate with one another they have to be clear, simple and unambiguous: they can’t afford not to be. It could, after all, be a matter of life or death.’

One of the best examples of the genre came my way in the early eighties, when I was working at Chatto. An agent sent me the typescript of a book called Albanian Assignment, by one David Smiley. It was very short – well under 200 pages – so I decided to take it home with me for the weekend. Most of the typescripts I took home for the weekend remained in my briefcase, and travelled back to the office on Monday morning in the same condition as they left it, having made the journey in order to make me feel virtuous and dynamic; but this was a rare exception, in that I took it out of my briefcase, settled down with it in a deckchair, and couldn’t stop reading. It described how, as a young professional soldier, David Smiley had been parachuted into wartime Albania to ginger up the resistance to the Italian and German occupying forces, working alongside Julian Amery, Billy McLean, Peter Kemp and other members of SOE; and how, like their equivalents in Yugoslavia, they had found themselves caught up in a civil war between the Communists, led by Enver Hoxha, and an uneasy coalition of monarchists and right-wingers. Smiley was less interested in politics than were his companions – what he really enjoyed was blowing up bridges, much to Hoxha’s irritation – but he shared their romantic attachment to the old order and their loathing for the Communist partisans, and enjoyed being able to go to war wearing jodhpurs, sandals and a white fez, all of which outraged more orthodox army officers. Written in the spare, no-nonsense style of the quintessential military man, his story rattled along with such speed and energy that I must have finished it within four hours at most; it was also suffused by a tremendous anger at what he considered to be the betrayal of the non-Communist parties in Albania by the Allies – who, as in Yugoslavia, had decided to back the Communist partisans to the exclusion of all others.

Although it wasn’t at all her sort of book, Carmen Callil allowed me to take it on, and after agreeing terms with the agent, we arranged for Colonel Smiley to come into the office. He was, and still is, a stocky, muscular figure, with fair hair faded to white, bright blue eyes, a broken nose, hands like root vegetables and an iron handshake. He had, I soon discovered, led a more adventurous life than most: before being parachuted into Albania he had fought in Abyssinia and North Africa, and afterwards he caught the tail end of the war in Indo-China, again working for SOE. After the war he had served as a military attaché in Poland, and, while based in Malta, had been deeply involved in a doomed Anglo-American plan to destabilise Hoxha’s Stalinist dictatorship, involving some of his old non-Communist friends from Albania: the authorities in Tirana were said to have been tipped off by Kim Philby, then working for MI6 in Washington, who alerted his masters in Moscow. The Colonel then spent many years in the Middle East, running the armies of the Sultan of Oman and others.

I took to him at once, and was even more impressed when he revealed that his old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor had agreed to write a Foreword. During the war they and various other dashing young blades had shared a house in Cairo. Always referred to as Tara, it was run by a lively Polish lady, had a resident mongoose, and was the scene of bacchanalian carousings whenever Leigh Fermor and Xan Fielding found themselves on leave from capturing German generals in the mountains of Crete, or Smiley, Billy McClean and Julian Amery returned from their guerrilla exploits among the Ghegs and the Tosks of Albania.

A few days after our first meeting the Colonel asked if he could have the typescript back, since ‘Paddy’ was in London and wanted to have another read of it before writing his Foreword. Some weeks went by before I saw it again, and it was no longer the book it had been. Paddy, the Colonel explained, had decided to edit and rewrite the book. The Colonel’s terse, staccato sentences had been stitched together; colons and semi-colons had supplanted innumerable full stops, like exotic plants invading an arid terrain; functional, straightforward verbs and adjectives had been elbowed aside by more obscure and efflorescent synonyms. It was magnificent, but it was no longer the Colonel’s book, nor was it written in his tone of voice. When I pointed this out, the Colonel was suitably dismayed, but not on his own account: Paddy was not only an old and dear friend who had gone to great trouble to help his book along, but was generally regarded as one of the great writers of his time; we couldn’t just ignore his changes. No one admired Paddy’s prose more than I did, I told him – which was true – but he had a very different style and tone of voice, and since David Smiley’s account worked so well as it stood, it seemed pointless to go ahead with the new version. The only answer was to unstitch the whole thing, and restore the old order.

The Colonel was appalled at the idea: Paddy would be dreadfully wounded if he learned that his hard work and his selfless suggestions had been entirely ignored. I told him not to worry: the chances were that Paddy would never read the book again, and would never know. Everything was put back as it had been before; Paddy sent in a flamboyant and affectionate Foreword, written out by hand in royal-blue ink on large sheets of maths paper, each the size of a pillowcase; maps and a jacket were commissioned, the pictures collected up, and Albanian Assignment inched its way into production. The whole episode was, in a way, a cautionary tale: as an editor, I tended to impose my own tone of voice at the expense of the author’s, and it was only when I went to work with Alan Ross at the London Magazine that I learned the value of leaving well alone.

All that is well over twenty years ago, but although I lost touch with Colonel Smiley, I was haunted by the memory of his book. I loved the idea of those tough, romantic, upper-class young men, like John Buchan heroes, living like bandits among the wild mountains of Albania; I was overawed by their nerve and their insouciance, by the way in which McClean and Julian Amery, still only in their twenties, not only performed deeds of derring-do, but consorted as equals with Anthony Eden and even Churchill himself, and I contrasted their courage and self-confidence with my own timorous and tentative existence. Like many men of my age, I suspect, I half-envied my father’s generation for having fought in the war, while at the same time harbouring the conviction that, had I been put to the test, I would have proved both cowardly and inadequate, suffering endless attacks of fear-induced diarrhoea, failing to show any signs of initiative or leadership, skulking at the back when the time came to make a bold advance, and hiding behind other people if bullets or bayonets headed my way, in much the same way as I step nimbly behind Petra if I see a drunk with a bottle weaving towards us.

The war in the Balkans had proved a divisive business, and old suspicions and dislikes still smouldered on. Smiley and his friends were convinced that they and their non-Communist allies in Albania had been betrayed by Communist moles in SOE’s headquarters in Bari, and sacrificed to the demands of realpolitik and the wartime alliance with Russia. A future Ambassador in Paris was, I soon discovered, a particular bête noire. I longed to learn more about the activities and influence, in SOE’s Cairo office, of the brilliant, openly Communist James Klugmann, a Cambridge contemporary of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, and a lifelong member of the Party, and of the intrepid left-wing journalist Basil Davidson, who fought with Tito’s Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia, and was later described as the man who invented African history. Among those regarded with some disfavour was the glamorous, kilted figure of Fitzroy Maclean. With Bill Deakin, later the Warden of St Antony’s, Oxford, Maclean had been parachuted into Yugoslavia to liaise with Tito’s Partisans, and had urged Churchill to abandon the allegedly compromised royalist resistance – led by the bearded and bespectacled Mihailovich, who was eventually executed by firing squad on a golf course near Belgrade – and to back the Communists instead. His Eastern Approaches seemed to me to be one of the great books of its time, the very model of the man-of-action memoir I so admired.

Although I couldn’t read a word of German, let alone Albanian or Serbo-Croat, I decided to write a book about Smiley and his friends, placing their adventures in the context of the Balkans in particular and the war as a whole, and trying to find out whether there was any truth in their belief that they had been betrayed by, among others, the future Ambassador to France. I had recently completed my biography of Allen Lane, and although I knew nothing about warfare, or Balkan politics, or the Mediterranean campaign in World War II, I relished the idea of plunging into terra incognita, and temporarily exchanging the feline manoeuvrings of literary London for something more robust.

I ploughed through innumerable volumes of Albanian history, read biographies of King Zog and Enver Hoxha and scholarly articles about British policy in the Balkans before and during the war, and tried to work out who exactly was allowed access to Enigma decrypts, how much of Kosovo had been reunited with Albania during the war, and which wild and bearded tribal chieftain supported whom, and why. All this was interesting enough, if baffling at times, but the perk of the job was reading yet more Buchanesque accounts of high adventure, most of them published just after the war: Julian Amery’s two volumes of memoirs, too Gibbonian at times but gripping all the same; the autobiography of H.W. Tilman, the black-bearded Himalayan mountaineer and long-distance sailor, who spent any time left over from harrying the Hun walking the mountains of Albania, but finding them too tame for his taste; Anthony Quayle’s novel about the time he spent as an SOE officer camping out in a cave on the Adriatic coast; the adventures of Brigadier ‘Trotsky’ Davies, a portly, moustachioed infantry officer of the old school, who disapproved of the sashes and fezzes sported by Amery and Smiley, tried to introduce some order into the proceedings, and was eventually captured by the Germans. The best writer of them all, perhaps, was my old acquaintance Peter Kemp, whose No Colours or Crest must be one of the masterpieces of the Second World War.

But my great discovery, the book which, by itself, would have made all my abortive researches worthwhile, was Christie Lawrence’s Irregular Adventure, published by Faber in 1946. Lawrence was captured when the Germans invaded Crete, and taken back to the Greek mainland for deportation to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. As the train trundled slowly north, he managed to escape from the cattle-truck in which he and other prisoners were held. He made his way through northern Greece and Bulgaria to Serbia, where he joined up with Mihailovic’s cetniks, heavily bearded monarchists who had yet to be denounced by the Partisans as quislings and collaborators. The book ends with Lawrence being captured by the Gestapo, and resuming his journey north. Barely 200 pages long, it was an extraordinarily vivid evocation of guerrilla warfare and Balkan peasant life. Despite a laudatory foreword by Evelyn Waugh, Irregular Adventure defies the comforting old saws about good books never being forgotten, and cream rising to the top. I imagine that Christie Lawrence has been long dead, but he and his book deserve to be better remembered.

At some stage in my researches I wrote to Roderick Bailey, a young man at the Imperial War Museum, who had written an excellent piece about the genial but sinister figure of James Klugmann, taking him from his schooldays at Gresham’s School, Holt, and his years at Cambridge to his activities in the Rustum Buildings in Cairo, the headquarters of SOE in the Middle East, and his post-war proselytising on behalf of the Communist Party. We had tea together, during the course of which it became apparent that he had spent the last seven years – as a postgraduate at Cambridge, and at St Antony’s in Oxford – working on exactly the book I had in mind. He didn’t, as yet, have a publisher, but it seemed madness for me to plod along in his footsteps, duplicating work he had done long before; still more so since he could speak both Albanian and Serbo-Croat, and had made several trips to Albania to interview moustachioed brigands and wizened crones who remembered Smiley, Maclean, Amery, Kemp and my other Buchanesque heroes. I decided to bow out, and introduced him to my agent and to Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape; and the resulting book, The Wildest Province