Billany The Trap

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28925-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 380 Seiten

Dan Billany's The Trap, first published in 1950, still stands - in the opinion of M.R.D. Foot - as 'one of the most powerful English novels to come out of the [Second World War].' It echoes the wartime experiences of its author, who is believed to have died in 1943 while on the run from an Italian POW camp, but not before entrusting the manuscripts of The Trap to safekeeping. The book's narrator, army lieutenant Michael Carr, tells of his early years in Cornwall, of the girl he met and loved there, and of the hard times her family endured between the wars. These troubles and joys give way to the tragedy of war, and the book's narrative becomes one of comradeship, suspense and fighting in the North African desert. 'The Trap is an outstanding novel by a writer of natural genius... written with great force and honesty... profoundly impressive.' Times Literary Supplement

Dan Billany

Autoren/Hrsg.

Billany, Dan

Leseproben

ONE

There I stood, looking at the letter.

I don’t believe I ever before in my life felt quite the same. I cannot describe my state. The postmark shook my very heart with confused emotions. It was ‘Helston, Cornwall: 11.30 a.m., 15th December, 1942’.

[One has to give the history of an emotion: but not in any fashionable way. It’s a question of what one wants to do, and there I fail, in a sense. I can’t say in words what my object is, but that is not to say I don’t know. I know precisely, in the sense that I reject the wrong impressions when I record the past: but I don’t know what makes them wrong. A sense of falseness—‘that’s not it.’

Begin as you mean to go on.

What I want to convey is just truth: reality. Not the effect which results from truth, encountered by surprise on a gravestone, or on the wall of a public lavatory: but the simple bulk reality of events. I don’t feel that any new technique is demanded, but I know myself: I know how delicate my balance must be if I’m not to be swayed to one side by the Sense of the Dramatic, or to another by the savour of words: or another by outrageous indignation, or another by its converse, humility resulting from fear. So for me at any rate there is the question of a sober, strong attitude to my writing, yet a sensitiveness: I must beat out my own way to the truth which lies behind my eyes and no others. There are as many truths as men, but there are so many reasons for not telling them. And above all this, is the fact that I shall be paid by the page, so to speak, for this, and I need the money. And yet I will honestly try.

So I don’t want the running commentary of Hemingway, indeed I’m scared to fall into that style, because it’s so near to what I do want to do, and yet it will betray my purpose completely. I don’t want to leave you out as a spectator of my picaresque adventures, and yet I don’t want to take you with me on an odyssey in the manner of Stevenson: I’m sorry to be so incoherent, but if you think, you’ll see that neither way gives complete truth: there’s something missing in both, perhaps it’s the undertone of all my reflections, reactions, associations. Once that play of shadow is thrown in, the story will stand forth, as if you’d put on stereoscopic glasses, in its living truth. In a sense it’s the immediacy of William Saroyan that must be in with the story. But not quite the same personality, which after all is stagey in its simplicity—the Chaplin naiveté.

When I sit back from writing, and seriously consider what task I am setting out to do, I am afraid, I have the panicky fluttering of the heart that a portrait-painter has when he has put in the main lines of his subject, and, having done, say, the detail of an eye, sees that eye peering out at him from the paper with a cryptic, unanalysable beauty and resemblance to the model, as if the likeness is there, latent in the lines; and the artist catches his breath, afraid—can he bring that out, the speaking likeness? He trembles, feeling inside himself potentialities both for success and failure. He trembles on a narrow line; immense achievement is there, waiting on the stretch of his fingers, and the balance of all his being, if he can poise so nicely. And so I am afraid, because I know how readily I can fail, but the success, if I can achieve it, will be beyond the earth and life. I am a portrait painter: let me draw Truth, so that every grown man, who sees the picture, sees it with blinding recognition: that is Truth!

Here, before I begin, is my prayer for steadiness, and poise not to slip into the facile or the dramatic, not to laugh cheaply: whatever powers affect human accomplishment, make me constant throughout all the pages I am to cover: first, from literary falsenesses, from the temptation to slickness and meretricious lures in the opening pages, to entice the choosing reader at the station bookstall: from false sentiment which may develop in the middle section of my story: and from spurious rages and bitterness, and even worse, false pathos, in the conclusion,

O deliver me.

From false humility and the abdication of my own judgment, which are really due to fear, so that I should bow before authorities whom I did not in my heart acknowledge,

O deliver me.

From rhetoric and the deliberate writing of purple prose, with all their corollaries of false morals and lack of honesty with the reader,

O deliver me.

From all those various obstacles of vision and sobriety which intervene between the truth and the various schools of present-day writers,

O deliver me.

Make me myself alone: let me not echo the words of others, lest I also echo their thoughts in the belief that I am expressing my own.

This prayer is not addressed to God, since I do not believe in him, nor to any other Powers of the Air. If it were addressed to anything precise, I daresay it would be addressed to my Unconscious. But I haven’t said so, because the notion of a man saying a prayer to his Unconscious seems ridiculous to me. Anyway, the Unconscious, like God, is deaf. Most people are really praying to their Unconscious when they think they’re praying to God. But it makes no odds, there’s never any answer.

Is it possible for a man to see what is before his eyes? Does he always see what is behind them? This is not obscurantism: I can put certain disconnected lines on paper, and you will see them as letters of the alphabet: your eye will fill in the gaps. But the material your eye puts in—isn’t there. Your reading of the lines is a demonstration that you are seeing more than is before your eyes. You are reading—in a metaphysical sense—between the lines. Similarly, at Helston, which I propose to describe as objectively as I can, Lord Tennyson visited the Loe Pool, and, according to his published works, saw there ‘an arm, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’. Lord Tennyson also observed about the Loe Pool a landscape of jutting crags and iron cliffs. In fact, as can be verified by any metropolitan who cares to take a ticket on the Cornish Riviera Limited, these features observed by Lord Tennyson are not there. His description of Helston is highly dramatic, but he has eliminated much that is, to replace it with much that is not. Not that I’m saying his description is less accurate than mine. It is to his purpose, and his purpose included King Arthur and Bedivere, etc. My purpose is different, but I’ve no doubt at all that it will distort my vision. Emotional Relativity.

This is how I see Helston (and all those who have seen the town, passed through it, visited it for the Furry Dance, stayed in it, and last of all, those who live there, please add your own comments between the lines—you will in any case).

It is a small agricultural and market town in South-West Cornwall, within two and a half miles of the sea: the people there all speak in the most beautiful of English dialects, a low-pitched resonant burr which has the musical sonority of American without its nasal bleat; a manly accent, like Paul Robeson’s in a way: they also transpose nominatives and accusatives with a freedom I find fascinating—‘Us be after ’ee’.

Helston is in a valley, so that if you want to leave the town, you have to climb: all the roads climb out of Helston, except one which winds out by the Loe Pool, under the hill, to Penrose, and eventually to Porthleven: but as I remember it, that road is closed, you can’t go further than Penrose. You have to go by the main Porthleven road, over the hill.

The Loe Pool is very charming: a smooth shallow sheet of water. Tennyson said:—

‘And lo! the level lake, and the long glories of the winter moon.’

It is really the estuary of the river, silted up till it is divided from the sea by the Loe Bar. In the Valley, by the Loe Pool, I have often heard the quiet sighing of the sea on the Bar, a mile or so away.

You see, you can be quiet in Helston. God forgive me if I should talk of a ‘sleepy old Cornish town’: it isn’t that. There is a quietness, I admit, which is proper to an organism that’s half asleep, or half dead, but there’s also the quiet of a man who is more interested in hearing and seeing than in being heard or seen. That is the kind of quiet I found there. One could be at ease: not stealthy, but peacefully aware of the metabolism of existence. One had time to hear the sea and see the sky.

Nothing in that part of Cornwall makes a bid for your attention. Thank God for that. Thank God for unambitious things. Because frankly I’ve been brought to such a rawness of nerves by now, that the mere thought that Cornwall still is there, that the road slopes up out of Porthleven as it did when I walked there—those thoughts alone hurt me in a way that I don’t care to encourage. I want to look at some solid Cornish cliff, and square stone houses for a time, till I get back my emotional balance.

It’s grey and featureless when it rains, but when I look up at the unbroken blue above me now, how I long for the hissing rain of a September afternoon at Helston to be trickling behind my ears and under my collar again, while the town soaks in its basin of dark hills, and the dark sky streams down on it.

All this flood of recollections for a postmark.

Here is one more. The scene is not Helston, but Polpryn, more or less midway between Helston and...