A London Pick-Up

Artist Jean-Pierre Trevor and his father, novelist Elleston Trevor

By Dan Hagen

What should I find had hopped the pond for me yesterday but a bubble-wrapped package from my mate Greg Harris in London. In it was a hardcover edition of the novel “The Big Pick-Up” by my late friend and mentor Elleston Trevor. The novel, which I’ve never been able to find in hardcover in this country, was used as part of the basis for the film “Dunkirk.” It’s even signed by Elleston.

In it, he writes, “Bellman had a child. Donald, two and half. And men were trying to burn his child alive, while he tried to burn theirs. And that was the difference between war and peace — but what in God’s name could you call it, this difference? A turning of the brain? A change of heart? A reversion to barbarism in the midstream of civilization? Or longer words, more complicated phrases? Was there a word for a thing like this, really a single word that wouldn’t stick in the throat and choke you before you could say it to a soul?”

Elleston prided himself on hitting all the marks as a professional writer, and had little or no patience for unprofessionalism of any sort. But he was disdainful about being an artist, in part because he felt uncertain in that area, I think. And yet anyone who can write passages like that — and he wrote many of them — should never have been uncertain about that.