White Eagles

Olivia Manning took inspiration from her wartime service with the British Council in Bucharest for her Balkan Trilogy. Lawrence Durrell used his time with the British Council in Belgrade to write authoritatively about Yugoslavia in White Eagles Over Serbia.

It’s a real cracker – a spy/adventure yarn in the best traditions of Dennis Wheatley, Eric Ambler, John Buchan, etc. – published in 1957 – with wonderful descriptions of the Serbian mountains and rivers, redolent of Dornford Yates, and some fishing as an enjoyable extra.

“He crossed the first shoulder of mountain beyond the monastery and could not help stopping to admire the soft undulating mountain lawn through which his way led by a maze of paths, through fir plantations and groves of mulberry trees. The fresh smell of hay was delicious and in the middle distance he saw the higher slopes dark and feathery with beeches. It was quite hard to imagine that once he crossed the crest he would be far from towns and human habitations. The landscape had the premeditated air of a great formal park and one half-expected to see the gables of some Elizabethan country house peeping through the screen of green foliage at every corner.
The sun was sinking though its warmth still drugged the windless air and on this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage grew more and more luxurious, while the woods were full of tits and wrens and blackbirds. The woods were carpeted with flowers, sweet-smelling salvia, cranesbill, and a variety of ferns. Here and there, too, bright dots of scarlet showed him where wild strawberries grew, and in these verdant woods the pines and beeches increased in size until he calculated that he was walking among glades of trees nearly a hundred feet in height. He could not help contrasting all this peace and beauty with the grim errand upon which he was bent, and which might lead him to sudden death.” (White Eagles Over Serbia, Laurence Durrell, 1957)

Curiously he published possibly his best novel, Justine, in the same year. This is the first in The Alexandria Quartet, set in Alexandria before and during the Second World War, so some overlap with Olivia Manning’s Levant Trilogy, perhaps. Incidentally, the AQ may be called a tetralogy, a useful addition to my impoverished vocab.

“The first three books tell essentially the same story and series of events, but from the varying perspectives of different characters. Durrell described this technique in his introductory note in Balthazar as “relativistic.” Only in the final novel, Clea, does the story advance in time and reach a conclusion.” (Wikipedia)

Tipped off by Wikipedia I have ordered just Justine and see how I go. There may be a similarity between ‘relativisticism’ and repetition.

Alec Waugh, born 1898, Peter Fleming, born 1907, and Lawrence Durrell, born 1912, are a trio of great writers whose well deserved fame has been eclipsed by their younger brothers. Don’t worry, Bru, I am unlikely to turn my hand to writing plays ..  but … maybe I could emulate the Prime Minister’s younger brother, The Hon William Douglas Home. He wrote about fifty ephemeral plays, some of which I saw at their first outing as House plays at school. He was unusual in entrusting his latest to a teenage, all-male cast but they (the plays) usually made it to the West End and occasionally to the screen.

There is a good anecdote attributed to WDH on Wikipedia.

“He told a story in The Observer Magazine that he took a morning off from the 1959 election campaign to go shooting with his brother, four years before the latter became Conservative Prime Minister in 1963. Alec uncharacteristically missed all the birds in the first drive. When William asked him what was wrong, Alec replied “I had to speak against some bloody Liberal last night!” He had been unaware that the “bloody Liberal” was his own younger brother. William’s comment was : “I would have given him a lift if I’d known he was going.”