Adventure was an important word in Eric Linklater’s vocabulary. It meant surprise, discovery, excitement, sometimes disappointment, but more often enjoyment, and all of these he relished as an escape from what he described, ‘in despair of a closer definition’, as ‘normal life’. He liked to recall his own past experiences as a series of adventures, full of light and colour, and to tell stories about them which became richer with age. The title he gave his rectorial address to Aberdeen University in 1945, the year he wrote Private Angelo, was ‘The Art of Adventure’ and in it he suggested to his young audience that sooner or later it would fall to most of them to be confronted with a choice between the routine and the unexpected. It was, he said, like walking out through a familiar door:

There, on that doorstep, you are confronted with a momentous choice: you may regard life either as the general adventure or the general burden. That much of it is burdensome, no one can deny — the daily task of shaving is a nuisance, to listen politely to one’s elders is tedious, to pay one’s taxes an Egyptian load — but if from the beginning you think of life as a burden, you will immediately feel tired, and thereby suffer a disadvantage: you will lack energy that might have procured enjoyment. It is more profitable to see life as an adventure: not as something to be carried, but as something to be broken into.

One of the great adventures in Eric’s own life was the six-month period he spent as the War Office’s official historian in Italy in 1944, following the Allied attack north from Sicily, through Naples and Rome to Florence. He saw scenes of terrible devastation and great suffering; he witnessed bravery and cowardice; but he also saw the Pope in the Vatican wearing red embroidered carpet slippers, and was introduced to King Umberto, and discovered the Uffizi’s greatest paintings only 2000 yards from the German forward positions, stored for safety in the Castello di Montegufoni where, memorably, he took advantage of his intimacy with one of the most famous pictures in the world and planted a kiss on the lips of the pregnant Venus, the loveliest of the Graces in Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’.

These adventures he spoke and wrote of long after the anguish of war had faded into a dark and gloomy backcloth. But above all he remembered and cherished Italy and the Italians. Private Angelo is a celebration of a country and a people with whom he felt immediate and instinctive sympathy. That its central character is a self-confessed coward and its supporting cast is studded with thieves, cheats and black-marketeers, has not prevented it becoming, amongst Italians themselves, one of the very few books by a foreigner which is recognised, with admiration and affection, as presenting an authentic picture of their native character.

Angelo himself, he who lacks il dono di coraggio, the gift of courage, is the universal soldier, like Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik. He witnesses scenes of great violence and horror, but he retains throughout a touching innocence which allows him to turn his experiences of war into a philosophy for peace. From the vantage point of his essential simplicity, he resolves for himself the moral complexities of war, to say nothing of the moral complexities of his own amorous nature, and from it constructs a testimonial to the virtues of common humanity. Angelo’s true ancestor is plainly Voltaire’s Candide.

But if that sounds sententious, or even sentimental, then it is misleading. Private Angelo is wonderfully, gloriously, funny. It is shot through with wit and great good humour, full of wry observation and the warmth of what the Italians call commedia. In fact, its structure seems on occasion closer to the Italian commedia, or opera teatrale, than it does to the conventions of the novel. The plot, as such, is at best sketchy, at times positively unruly. But rather than search for the plumbline of a straight narrative, it is better to see each chapter as a dramatic set-piece, a theatrical scene, frequently opening with a duet which could easily translate onto the stage of a small Italian opera house — the Fenice in Venice would do very well. In one, for instance, Lucrezia, Angelo’s long-suffering fiancée, is talking of life and love and the absence of her beloved, with her sister Lucia. ‘Come tristela vita’ she sighs, as the two pluck hens in the green shade of a trailing vine, and one can almost hear the continuo as it leads up to a much-loved aria.

Angelo himself, like Figaro, is ill-equipped for war. He freely admits that he lacks the dono di coraggio:

War, he learns, teaches above all the art of survival. His patron, the Count of Pontefiore, survives by transferring his allegiances smoothly from Mussolini to the Germans, and then to the Americans for whom he conceives the warmest admiration, largely for their generous nature and their essential practicality; their greatest gift to Italy after the war is, in his view, the sewing machine. Angelo’s friend, Sergeant Vespucci, survives by villainy — plundering petrol, food, even army lorries, and disposing of them on the black market at inflated prices. He too is a kind of hero, achieving freedom from the tiresome constraints of ordinary life by breaking the rules that hold most of his fellow citizens back – a quality which, as the Count points out, might be of value to others:

But it was, perhaps, the women of Italy for whom Eric, romantic by nature, conceived the greatest admiration. He spoke of seeing them in the uneasy months of the Germans’ slow retreat, emerging from the basements and the attics of the houses where they had sheltered, into the warm sunlight of the streets, and he recalls how vividly their pale oval faces and auburn hair reminded him of the madonnas he had seen so often on the canvases and frescoes of the Renaissance, faces from the hand of Ghirlandaio or Filippo Lippi. They seemed to him at the same time fragile yet immensely resilient, and in Private Angelo they are undoubtedly the stronger, and certainly the more sensible sex.

Lucrezia, who survives the bombing of her little village by both sides, and rape at the hands of a Moroccan ‘goum’, is briskly down to earth when it comes to explaining to Angelo how, in his absence, she has acquired a child which is plainly not his. He has, after all, been away for three years: ‘Was it not more unnatural for you to become a soldier than for me to become a mother?’, she asks. She is often ahead of Angelo in his attempts to make sense of the world, and when he tells her that he may have acquired a measure of courage in the course of his experiences, she is unimpressed: ‘Courage is a common quality in men of little sense — I think you over-rate it. A good understanding is much rarer and more important.’

In the end, as the sound of warfare dies away, it seems that the greatest survivor is Italy herself. Roughly wooed by the Germans, pulverised by the Allies in the name of rescuing her, she sometimes wonders who her friends are. As Angelo mildly puts it at one stage: ‘If our old friends and our new ones both remain in Italy, we shall soon have nothing left at all.’

Out of the destruction, however, comes the rebuilding of ‘normal’ life, a process which, after the brutal adventure of war is a sufficient adventure in itself. Eric sees the strength of Italy and her ability to survive in the durability of the Tuscan landscape, the beauty of her art, the timelessness of her towns and villages, and above all in the good sense and amiability of her people. He applauds the pleasure they take in ordinary life, ‘doing nothing in particular to justify their existence, but nothing at all to perturb it … talking and gesticulating … contemplating eternity and abusing the present.’

He dedicated his book to the Eighth Army, for he loved soldiers and enjoyed their company. But it is doubtful if the Eighth Army would have had much truck with Private Angelo or with his unconventional wisdom. Indeed, Angelo’s summary of the perils of war and the virtues of peace would have been regarded by the military hierarchy of any nation as positively subversive: ‘What have you learned, Angelo, while you have been away all these years?’ asked the Countess.

‘That before the war I was better off than I realised: there is one thing. That soldiers can suffer much and still survive, but are not always improved by their suffering: there is another. That if men are as cruel at home as they are abroad, then their wives have much to complain of … and finally, that if living at peace were as simple as going to war, we might have more of it.’

M.L.
March 1992