‘Darling,’ Carmen said, ‘we’ve got far too much money tied up in this book, and we can’t afford to carry it over for another season. There’s only one solution: you must drop everything else, and write it.’ And that’s exactly what I did. I had never been to the author’s country in my life, and knew nothing about its peoples, its rivers or its mountain ranges. But that afternoon I went round to the London Library, took out a pile of books, and began my researches. I read histories and travel books and memoirs; I spent long hours in the London Library. I remember nothing about it now, but for a very short time I was a world expert on the subject. After three weeks or so I felt I had done enough, and Chatto’s production department was agitating in the wings. I wrote the entire book over a long weekend, interlacing the author’s modest contributions with great slabs of descriptive prose, and brought it to a conclusion reminiscent of the travel documentaries shown in the cinema when I was young. ‘And so our journey comes to a close, in a very different world from that in which we set out,’ I wrote, before ending on a note that was both uplifting and admonitory: ‘If my book helps to persuade my country’s government to do all it can to preserve so rich and unique a heritage, I shall feel I have not written it in vain.’
The photographs were rather more genuine than my prose, and the finished book looked very handsome indeed. With luck, it not only contributed to Chatto’s overheads – rent, rates, salaries, lighting, heating, warehousing and all those humdrum expenses which have to be deducted from the publisher’s share of the monies received from copies sold – but made a modest profit as well. The author’s agent very generously offered to pay me a share of the advance due on delivery, so I was more than happy; but – foolishly perhaps – I have never been tempted since to resume the ghostwriter’s mantle.
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