George G. Harrap first edition - 1944
At last, I have tracked down my final Helen MacInnes novel. For years I have had twenty of her twenty-one books firmly bedded down on my Library shelves - all in first editions with their wrappers. Off and on I have searched for her third book - The Unconquerable (While We Still Live in the USA) - and finally bought it in the first week of this October. I have now read it! I started reading MacInnes' spy/thriller novels in 1970, seven that year, and continued until her last book, Ride a Pale Horse, came out in 1984. I purchased and read them all in paperback (hence the final novel I didn't get until 1986 - by which time she was dead, of a stroke on 30 September 1985). I have kept all these paperbacks (including The Unconquerable) as well as subsequently buying all the hardback first editions. Some critics have labelled them old-fashioned, but that's probably why I like and identify with them. I grew up in the years she was writing about - the dangerous Cold War decades, when Russia and its expansionist tentacles were spreading everywhere. It was still the period when Nazis were being hunted down and non-fiction books were being published about the Second World War. MacInnes wrote about these scary times, with intelligence and an astute understanding of the complex web of foreign affairs. By the 1960s, when male authors such as Len Deighton and John Le Carré were starting out and Alistair MacLean was getting into his stride, she was into her third decade as a suspense novelist. That decade saw the publication of her Decision at Delphi, The Venetian Affair, The Double Image and The Salzburg Connection - all among her best.
Her bête noire was totalitarianism of any hue; thus her earliest novels focused on the Nazi threat and activities. Her first book, Above Suspicion (1941), was based partly on notes she had taken whilst on her honeymoon in Bavaria in 1932, and dealt with the evils of the sinister Gestapo. By the time the War broke out, MacInnes had been in New York for a year, as her husband Gilbert Highet had been made Chair of Latin and Greek at Columbia University. 1942 saw the publication of her second novel, Assignment in Brittany, which concentrated on a battle of wits between the Nazis and the British secret service. Then came The Unconquerable, one of her longest novels (452 pages) and, possibly the most deeply felt.
It is the story of Sheila, an English girl, who was staying with friends at a Polish country house in August 1939. When war broke out she was urged to leave the country but stayed on in Warsaw. Why? Perhaps it was due to the charm of Adam Wisniewski, a Polish cavalry officer, even if she would not have admitted this. She also remained to support her Polish friends, Madam Aleksander and her children, and her brother Professor Edward Korytowski in Warsaw. Her decision meant she was caught up in a sequence of dangerous events, which included getting involved with a group of patriots working secretly to organise the defence of their country. While Nazi bombs were falling and Warsaw was burning, Michal Olszak and others are putting together plans for an organised resistance movement. Sheila becomes a cog in this complicated machinery. For a short time she masquerades as Anna Braun and, called to the Gestapo headquarters in Warsaw, is sent by the Nazis as a German agent on a mission. One German, Dittmar, has his suspicions of her and, woven into the more general story of the resistance group's conflicts with the Germans, is his attempts to track her down. The denouement, when it comes, is riveting. The book gave such an accurate portrayal of the Polish Resistance movement, that some reviewers and readers thought she had been given access to classified information (by her husband, who worked for the British MI6?).
MacInnes was certainly an able teller of exciting stories, as the dustjacket on The Unconquerable put it. She is excellent at character drawing and a skilful conveyor of atmosphere and landscape.
Some extracts:
A spy is someone who finds out information for a certain amount of money. The money smothers his conscience if he is a traitor. If he is a patriot the money softens the lack of public recognition. But there is another word which I prefer to give to men who care neither for the money nor for any recognition. Their lives are often ruined; they may meet an unpleasant death; but they fight in their own way - with their brains, secretly, courageously - because all that matters to them is what they are fighting for. I think it is only fair to give them full credit for that.
All these people [Nazis], these self-appointed lords of creation, were vulnerable. They lived with the perpetual fear that their power was threatened, because the foundation of their power was opportunity. The nouveau riche displayed his yachts and pictures to silence his doubts. The arriviste in politics displayed his brute force for the same purpose. Cruelty, like all forms of display, was the compensation for the hidden, nagging fear of inferiority...
I know how you [Sheila] feel. I came here like you, not quite believing. Guerrilla army? A story-book adventure . . . something out of the Middle Ages . . . fantastic. Perhaps we are all these things; but we are also the only army left to a conquered country. Some of us at any rate will be here to help those who start pushing the Hun back where he belongs. Then we shan't be just a story-book chapter; we'll be in the history books as well.
A firm. crisp surface formed on the deep snow. You could walk on it as you could on icy ground. The white-grey skies changed to a clear pale blue. The sun set this clean, unmarked world glittering. The very air seemed to dance with light. Only the leeward trunks of the trees with their long winter shadows, and the walls of the houses which had sheltered under broad roofs kept their dark colour in defiance of so much change...in the evening the snow was streaked with gold and orange furrows from the large round sun sinking so swiftly behind the jagged edge of the mountains. The shadows deepened to violet, the columns of smoke thickened and darkened and the day's sounds died gradually away....night walked over the mountains, sweeping its train of stars, their brightness sharpened by the keen air. The carpet of snow became a cloth of silver. The shadows were black as the windows where the lights died one by one.
The tragedy for Poland and its people was that, although the Nazis were defeated in 1945, a further forty-five years were to pass before they achieved any sort of real independence. Not until January 1990 was the Polish People's Republic disbanded. The Warsaw Pact was formally dissolved in July 1991 and the first Polish free election took place just two months earlier. One shudders to think what probably happened to Adam Wisniewski under Russian occupation - that is, if he had survived the Nazi regime. It is ironic that it is present-day Poland who is at the forefront of European democracy, once again standing up to the evils of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Previous Blogs:
[All in 2020]
March 14: Above Suspicion (1941); Assignment in Brittany (1942)
April 23: Horizon (1945); Friends and Lovers (1948)
May 17: Pray for a Brave Heart (1955); North from Rome (1958)
May 23: Decision at Delphi (1961); The Venetian Affair (1964)
June 4: The Double Image (1966); The Salzburg Connection (1968)
June 30: Message from Malaga (1972); The Snare of the Hunter (1974)
August 2: Agent in Place (1976); Prelude to Terror (1978)
August 5: The Hidden Target (1980); Cloak of Darkness (1982)
August 9: Ride a Pale Horse (1984)
Not Blogged on:
Rest and be Thankful (1949)
Neither Five nor Three (1951)
I and my True Love (1953)
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