“was” vs. “had been” [closed]

Question

At the end of "Fear is the Key," Alistair MacLean wrote

And so it had been with my red rose, before it had turned to white.

When I tried to recall that line, though, what I got was

And so it was with my red rose, before it turned to white.

My version seems better to me. Is there a grammatical reason why MacLean's version is more correct than mine?

If it matters, the preceding text is

The sun was on the rim of the sea now and the western world a great red flame, a flame that would soon be extinguished and vanish as if it had never been.

Answer 1

Without context (which is the way you're remembering it), your version is clearly better.

With the context of the previous sentence, a stickler for grammar might argue that only the past perfect is grammatical, since the previous sentence is in the past, and the final sentence happened before the previous one. However, since the relative times are clear from context, I would say that the simple past works fine here, too. I don't know whether Alistair MacLean made a conscious decision to put the final sentence in the past perfect, or just naturally used the past perfect here because of the relative timing.