Woody
Allen once said 80 percent of life is just showing up. Fitzroy Maclean validated that
maxim if reading his memoir of life as a diplomat, soldier, and other in
the 1930s and 1940s is any clue. Whether sitting ringside at a Soviet show
trial or joining a commando raid in Benghazi, there’s a bit of Zelig in the old
boy.
Originally
titled Eastern Approaches when published
in the U. K. in 1949, Escape To Adventure
presents a story of three distinct parts:
· At 25, a diplomat
in Paris for His Majesty in the mid-1930s hungry for challenge, Maclean opts to
go to Russia, then the Soviet Union, where he gallivants cross-country and
parts beyond, one step ahead of the dread secret police, the N. K. V. D.
· When war breaks
out, Maclean finds a way to get out of the diplomatic corps and enlists in the
military. Soon, he is serving in the earliest version of the Special Air
Service, taking part in a few daring but ill-fated commando raids.
· Finally, combining
his prior stints, Maclean parachutes into German-occupied Yugoslavia to negotiate
better ties to the communist guerrillas doing battle there, becoming a
confidant of their legendary, mysterious commander, Marshal Tito.
All
the time, Maclean seems hellbent on keeping himself in the thick of things.
“But we could be sure of one thing,” he writes at one point. “We should not be
bored.”
So
why was I?
There’s
something to be said for a wartime memoir where the protagonist is endlessly dodging bullets and spies but the end result makes you feel like you
just got through watching one of Uncle Bob’s slide shows. It’s hard to imagine
a writer getting in the way of such material, yet Maclean manages it. His
frivolous tone, his self-importance, his ability to be overly impressed by the
blandishments of others, and a creeping sense of unreality all combine to make Escape To Adventure, dreadful American title
and all, less than the sum of its parts.
Checking
out his Wikipedia entry reveals Maclean was a Scottish baronet, a member of
Parliament for over 30 years, and quite possibly a model for the world’s most
famous fictional spy, James Bond. Maclean did know Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator,
and shares with Fleming a high-toned writing style that veers between engaging
and elitist. But I must admit the spy part of Maclean’s ledger largely escaped
me.
The
first part of Escape To Adventure,
chronicling a series of sidetrips Maclean took as a diplomat based in Moscow,
was for me the book at its most absorbing. This despite the fact it’s the one
section in Escape To Adventure where someone isn’t shooting at our narrator.
Written
as a kind of travelogue behind the Iron Curtain (before there was such a
thing), Maclean provides full sensory overload:
It was then that I
first noticed the smell, the smell which, for the next two and a half years,
was to form an inescapable background to my life. It was not quite like
anything that I had ever smelled before, a composite aroma compounded of
various ingredient odors inextricably mingled one with another. There was
always, so travelers in Imperial Russia tell me, an old Russian smell made up
from the scent of black bread and sheepskin and vodka and unwashed humanity.
Now to these were added the more modern smells of petrol and disinfectant and
the clinging, cloying odor of Soviet soap.
Maclean’s
mordant wit creeps in from time to time to enliven long descriptions of the
people and places:
Biisk [a Russian city
near present-day Kazakhstan] did no
credit to anyone. The dozen stone-built houses were without exception of
pre-Revolutionary construction and the wooden houses with their eaves carved in
the old Siberian style were unbelievably dilapidated. The row of shops on the
main street were a disgrace even by Soviet standards, and the unpaved streets a
sea of mud. What I saw of the population looked depressed, which indeed they
had every right to be.
The
descriptions are diverting, the scenery ever-changing, yet the entire time, I
kept wondering about Maclean. He claims he wanted to learn more about the
country, but his jaunts across bumpy railroads and face-offs with truculent
border guards made me wonder if there was some Bondian exploit going on under
the surface.
If
so, Maclean doesn’t say. The feeling one gets is that he just has a taste for
adventure, even at the point of risking an international incident by playing
dodge ‘em on a railroad buffet car with members of Stalin’s N. K. V. D., whom
he took rather lightly. “What I needed to avoid at all costs was unduly
attracting the attention of the local authorities, who were far more likely to
interfere,” Maclean explains.
One
trek to China does involve an official diplomatic mission, though nothing comes
of it. You get the feeling Maclean’s presence or absence in Russia made little
difference to anyone other than Maclean himself.
The
main section of interest in this part of the book is Maclean’s bearing witness
at a famous show trial of former Soviet leaders, the “Trial of the Twenty-One” of
1938, featuring Stalin’s former deputy, Nikolai Bukharin. The accused confessed
assorted fantastic crimes to a largely believing audience. Even Maclean was
impressed:
These were men in
full possession of their faculties; the statements they made were closely
reasoned and delivered, for the most part, with every appearance of
spontaneity. It was unthinkable that what they said had simply been learnt by
heart beforehand and was now being delivered under the influence of some drug
or hypnotic spell.
And yet, what they
said, the actual contents of their statements, seemed to bear no relation to
reality. The fabric that was being built up was fantastic beyond belief.
When
World War II breaks out, Maclean craves military service but is told he is too
valuable a diplomat. So he finds a way to make himself less valuable: He runs
for Parliament, knowing politicians are barred from the Foreign Service. Then
he enlists.
 |
| Fitzroy Maclean as a young soldier. He was one of two men (the other being Enoch Powell) to enlist in the British Army during World War II as a private to rise to the rank of brigadier before the war's end. Image from https://alchetron.com/Sir-Fitzroy-Maclean,-1st-Baronet. |
This
section, the shortest of the three, was for me the most disappointing. Leaning
on his social connections, Maclean meets David Sterling, setting up an elite
commando unit known as the Special Air Service stationed in North Africa.
Maclean volunteers:
Officers and other
ranks alike were volunteers. They needed to be. Staying in the desert for weeks
on end, short of food and short of water, is not everyone’s idea of fun.
Here,
like with his earlier jaunts through Russia, I was struck by a lack of purpose.
Maclean volunteers for a series of dangerous missions, the main reason for them
apparently being that they were dangerous and represented an opportunity for
posh fellows like himself and Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, to get their
toes wet.
One
Benghazi raid winds up accomplishing little except a demonstration of
Maclean’s coolness in adversity. Wearing a British uniform, he rounds on an
Italian sentry for slackness. “On such occasions it is one’s
manner that counts,” Maclean writes. “If only you can behave naturally, and
avoid any appearances of furtiveness, it is worth any number of elaborate
disguises and faked documents.”
I
found Maclean an unreliable narrator here, as I did with the longest section of
Escape To Adventure, chronicling his
time in Yugoslavia.
Here
Maclean’s purpose was clearer: Dope out the truth behind Tito and his Partisans
and, if possible, secure an alliance. To this end, Maclean comes off eager,
perhaps too eager, as Tito clearly took his measure of the young bounder and
had him for breakfast.
As
a young conservative, Maclean had his doubts about the communist Tito, but was
quickly brought to heel. At times he comes off positively smitten by
the power of this Stalin wanna-be and his ideology:
In guerrilla war,
ideas matter more than material resources. Few ideas equal Communism in
strength, in persistence, in insidiousness, in power over the individual. Their
Communist leaders furnished the Partisans with the singleness of purpose, the
ruthless determination, the merciless discipline, without which they could not
have survived, still less succeeded, in their object.
Tito
played Maclean when it served his purpose, making vague noises about a common
cause while pressing for munitions from U. K. and U. S. forces, then ran off to
Moscow like a jaded minx. Left feeling a bit used, Maclean was easily mollified,
taking comfort in the idea that Tito was his own man, “a principal, not a
subordinate.” But so was Stalin.
Throughout
Escape To Adventure, a lightweight
aura hangs over all. Maclean writes about war as a tea party. Various colorful
characters make their entrances and exits. People die, offstage and
unobtrusively.
Over
all hangs a sense of divertissement, a sense there was no overriding mission
except keeping Maclean from feeling bored. One looks in vain for a sense of
higher purpose than just being there and living through it. Maclean didn’t lack
for bravery, but I wished there was more to Escape
To Adventure than reaffirming so honorable if basic a point.
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