Excerpted from The Hills of Triumph:
If I ever had a philosophy with which to govern my social life, even long after learning that social is often at the detriment of personal, it would have been no dfferent.
To use the subjunctive for a past thing, we usually use the past perfect, so must I ever had be changed to I ever had had?
I’m not sure, because the presence of ever seems to give us a hypothesis extending to now, justifying the past simple, which can be used for a present hypothetical situation in the protasis.
Best Answer
Without getting into tedious matters of labels, you’re right that the normal sequence should probably be in the perfect in both halves, more like this:
But perhaps the ever, or the length of the first part, served to make the writer forget about such niceties.
Or maybe it’s just that English doesn’t have so formal a sequence of tenses as is sometimes found in other languages, and so people often skate by with sequences that wouldn’t be allowed in those tongues.