Richard Poole is a world authority on the work of Richard Hughes. His critical biography of Hughes - Richard Hughes, Novelist - was published by Poetry Wales Press, as was Fiction as Truth: Selected Literary Writings by Richard Hughes, which he edited.
Click on any of the links below to select an article.
Introductory
Under the Nose and Under the Skin
Irony in A High Wind in Jamaica
In Hazard
Morality and Selfhood in the Novels of Richard Hughes
Fiction as Truth: The Human Predicament
Any or all of these articles may be copied for the legitimate purpose of individual academic study, provided that in any use made of this material the original source is acknowledged.
Introductory
Richard Hughes was born in Caterham, Surrey, in 1900. He died in North Wales in 1976. He wrote only four novels, but on the strength of these novels acquired an enormous reputation in his lifetime. Two of his novels were published before the second world war, and two after it.
His first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, came out in 1929 and was a best seller and hugely controversial. It challenged the Romantic and Victorian notion of the child as innocent tabula rasa, presenting children instead as a brave post-Darwinian species engaged in a life and death struggle for survival. When a number of children are captured by a bunch of latter-day nineteenth-century pirates, it is the children who turn out the more dangerous of the two groups.
Hughes's second novel, In Hazard, appeared In 1938. The story of a ship and its crew caught up in a tremendous hurricane, it is based on a real-life event. Only after he had published the book did Hughes himself comprehend its subtext: it is an anticipation of the physical upheaval of the second world war, but embodies also the virtues individuals would need to demonstrate if they were to survive the challenge presented by the war.
After the war, during which he worked as a civil servant in the navy procurement office, Hughes embarked on a serial novel of his own life and times entitled The Human Predicament. This was an ambitious attempt to trace and account for the rise and defeat of German National Socialism. Two volumes were completed: The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973). Twelve chapters of a third volume were drafted, and are now included in reprints of The Wooden Shepherdess. In these books, Hughes deftly interweaves the lives of fictional characters and actual historical figures - most notably Adolf Hitler himself. Hughes's hero, Augustine Penry-Herbert, was like Hughes himself born in 1900, but whilst he shares many of Hughes's own life-experiences, his character is very different.
Although he wrote only four novels (perhaps as a result of only writing four!), Hughes lived a full and vivid life. He also wrote poems, plays, short stories, film-scripts and an assortment of journalistic pieces.
The five articles which appear below on this web page were all published in literary magazines that are now out-of-print if not defunct.
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Under the Nose and Under the Skin
Writing in the book section of the New York Herald Tribune in April 1929, the American novelist Sinclair Lewis said that he once received a letter from a woman in the Middle West. She wanted to be a writer, but had nothing to write about. Should she go to New York and "see the world" in order to remedy the deficiency and find a subject? No, replied Lewis: she should capitalize upon her own experience as a mid-Western woman, should stay at home and write about what was under her nose.
This advice prompted Richard Hughes, whose first novel A High Wind in Jamaica had appeared in America the previous year under the title The Innocent Voyage, to contribute an animated article to the same paper. Whilst Lewis's prescription, he said, might seem "simple, practical, unblinking common sense", it was in fact "the merest sentimentality". The material of a novel, he proposed, consists of two parts: what you put in and what you leave out, the latter being the more voluminous. In order to recognize what is under your nose, in order to know what to put into a novel and what to leave out, you need a variety of experience: given that-ideally, at least-the whole world will be under your nose.
Revisiting this theme two years later in a broadcast talk, Hughes declared:
No, what writers really write about is not so much what is under their noses as what is under their skins, and that they can no more help than a hen can help laying an egg. In that sense all books are autobiographical, even ones which appear to be the opposite. And for a novel to be autobiographical in that sense means not, as is generally supposed, that one of the characters is to be identified with the author, and the others are portraits or caricatures of his friends and enemies, it means that all the characters are the author-or rather, that each is one part of the author, and that they are working out some problem, often in allegory which, whether he knows it or not, is dividing his mind at the time.
These words carry us to the heart of Hughes's own novelistic activity. He confesses in the same talk that he himself finds it next to impossible to write about what is under his nose. He set A High Wind in Jamaica in the West Indies-which he had never visited; took for his central character a little girl-which he had never been; made other important characters pirates-one of the few professions he had never tried; and then had the whole thing happen forty years before he was born!
High Wind, of course, is no simple adventure-story, although it is vivid and eventful. It is the work of a man born in 1900 who grew through adolescence during the First World War and expected to die fighting it. It is unsentimental, cruel even, ironic, absurd. It is confidently post-Freudian and post-Darwinian. It aims to kill off the lingering romantic view of children as wide-eyed innocents. Hughes is a novelist of ideas as well as a novelist of action, yet a novelist who embodies the first so skilfully in the second that one may pass over them-may, if one chooses, ignore them. In Aldous Huxley's novels the ideas obtrude, tending to dominate and shape the action, to render character and event schematic; in Hughes, as in Conrad, the ideas are implicit, fully-embodied, and require teasing out.
According to Hughes's definition of the autobiographical novel, its characters are working out some problem that is dividing the writer's mind. The term 'working out' should not be taken to mean 'solving': Hughes said on many occasions that it is the business of creative writers to ask questions-not answer them. 'Working out' is best understood as 'exploring'. The questions probed in High Wind are modern and central: what constitutes 'innocence' and what 'experience'? is human behaviour determined, instinctual, or governable by moral imperatives? are the terms 'good' and 'evil' absolute, relative, or meaningless? when and how does the individual become self-aware and what does it mean to possess a self, to be 'a person'? It is difficult to think of questions more relevant to the modern situation, and it is not surprising that they continued to exercise Hughes's creative intelligence in the further three novels that he was to complete in his lifetime.
Great writers are 'under the skin' writers. Think of Shakespeare, to go no further (it is, perhaps, impossible to go further). Yet Shakespeare is also the greatest plagiarist of all time: only one of his plays, to our knowledge, has a plot that is original. We excuse his plagiarism because, in the spirit of T S Eliot's audacious dictum, "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal". Shakespeare stole so blatantly and brilliantly that his order of plagiarism bludgeons criticism into silence. If Shakespeare wrote from under the skin, he also wrote what was under his nose in the sense that he lifted plots, characters, images, ideas, from wherever he found them lying about him-lying about, that is, mostly in other people's books. But what he found under his nose became transformed, through the sympathetic and absorptive powers of his imagination, into what was under his skin. Shakespeare travels in space -he is a European writer, and in time-he is a historical writer. He was a man of the world not by virtue of travelling it in fact, but by virtue of his ability to assimilate and make his own the travels of others.
Richard Hughes is both a European and a historical novelist. A much-travelled man, he drew in his fiction upon a broad experience of foreign countries and alien cultures as well as upon experience gained through reading. Plainly, and designedly, the two completed volumes of his roman fleuve The Human Predicament (The Fox in the Attic, 1961, and The Wooden Shepherdess 1973) are historical novels (the history is, of course, that of his own century) and European novels, the action taking place in a variety of locations in Wales, England, Germany, Morocco, America. In choosing the history of his own lifetime-notably the rise (and, had he succeeding in finishing the task, the defeat) of German and Italian fascism-Hughes was, one might think, writing of what was very much under his nose. Yet to write informedly, sympathetically, revealingly over the range he set himself was a considerable task, and could not even be begun until the events themselves were absorbed, digested, inwardly known: known, that is, under the skin.
Readers and critics of Hughes sometimes remark upon differences between his pre-war and post-war novels. Differences indeed exist, but they do not constitute a unbridgeable gulf. It is not generally appreciated that the two pre-war fictions are historical novels. A High Wind in Jamaica had its genesis in two accounts of an attack by pirates on the brig Zephyr in 1822, one by Aaron Smith, the Zephyr's mate, whom the pirates abducted, one by an old lady who, then a child, was taken with other children onto the pirate-schooner and royally feasted on crystallized fruit before being returned. What if, thought Hughes, the pirates had sailed away, not with Aaron Smith, but with the children...? As for the tremendous events which befall the steamship Archimedes in In Hazard, they are a precise recreation of what happened to SS Phemius on a voyage from Philadelphia to Colon in November 1932. Hughes was called in by the ship's owners, like "some kind of tribal bard", to record the extraordinary truth. Even details which look like fanciful inventions (such as the ship's inundation by birds when it first enters the eye of the storm) are no less than factual. But the trials of the Phemius struck a profound chord in Hughes's unconscious - so profound indeed that (as he explained in an Introduction* to a later American edition of the novel) he came only retrospectively to understand what he had articulated through the twin symbols of ship and storm. In Hazard, then, resonates with the suggestiveness of allegory: not the formal and elaborate allegory of a medieval mind, but the unconscious allegory of a wholly contemporary sensibility.
* Included in Fiction as Truth ed. Richard Poole
Reprinted from Book News (Welsh Books Council), Spring 1983, pp. 5-6
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Irony in A High Wind in Jamaica
The intention of this essay is to examine some facets of Richard Hughes's irony in A High Wind in Jamaica. I do not intend to discuss the 'ideas' in or behind the novel-though some of these may be revealed through a treatment of the irony. Rather I wish to concentrate on the language and texture of the novel, its main sources of ironic life, and some intricacies of the author's narrative technique. It is a book which has had far less critical attention than it deserves-perhaps on account of its very vividness and readability-yet it has a compression and an impact which in themselves should entitle it to our considered respect.
A passage from the early pages of the novel furnishes an excellent introduction to Richard Hughes's ironic method: the existence of the Bas-Thornton children centres around their bathing-pool:
There were trees all round: enormous fluffed cotton trees, with coffee trees between their paws, and log-wood, and gorgeous red and green peppers: amongst them, the pool was almost completely shaded. Emily and John set tree-springes in them-Lame-foot Sam taught them how. Cut a bendy stick, and tie a string to one end. Then sharpen the other, so that it can impale a fruit as bait. Just at tilt-base of this point flatten it a little, and bore a hole through the flat part. Cut a little peg that will just stick in the mouth of this hole. Then make a loop in the end of the string: bend the stick, as in stringing a bow, till the loop will thread through the little hole, and jam it with the peg, along which the loop should lie spread. Bait the point, and hang it in a tree among the twigs: the bird alights on the peg to peck the fruit, the peg falls out, the loop whips tight round its ankles: then away up out of the water like pink predatory monkeys, and decide by 'Eena, deena, dina, do', or some such rigmarole, whether to twist its neck or let it go free-thus the excitement and suspense, both for child and bird can be prolonged beyond the moment of capture. (Penguin edn pp 8-9)
The factual, virtually monosyllabic, step-by-step instruction as to how to set a springe is disarmingly facile. Repetition of the key-nouns (stick string hole, peg loop) and of the adjective "little" (with its suggestion of small-scale innocence) engages the concentrating reader in the process to the exclusion of any moral concern with the ends of that process. The imperative form of the instruction (Cut... tie... sharpen, etc) places the reader in the position of John and Emily-he/she too becomes a tyro learning how. The factual description leads effortlessly into the actual capture of the bird, and the reader, totally involved, is himself one of the "pink predatory monkeys" upon whose rigmarolish whims the freeing or the strangling of the prey depends. Readers are trapped for a moment in a moral dilemma: humanity demands that they recoil from the amoral violence of the monkeys-yet they are unable to judge them because, willy-nilly they have been tricked into identifying with them.1 The writer has succeeded in grafting onto the reader's adult sensibility the amoral viewpoint of the child. Before the dislocation becomes acute, however, the narrator relents: "thus the excitement and suspense both for child and bird can be prolonged beyond the moment of capture". Events are abruptly distanced and impersonalized, the reader regains detachment and is able to view victim and victimizers from the outside.
Why does Richard Hughes want us to appreciate the child's-eye view of things? The question perhaps contains its own answer: we have forgotten what it is like to be children-we must learn again. Yet we can never again be children merely: the passage is a fine example of Richard Hughes's ability to involve the reader-to set up tensions in the reader which provoke a complex response.
The description has more than local significance, however. It is in fact an encapsulation of the whole novel's plot, a moral lesson in microcosm. Here the children are captors; later in their turn they will be captives (perhaps one should write 'captives' as it isn't difficult to regard them from an ironic standpoint as the 'captors' of the pirates'). Yet without a doubt "excitement and suspense" will he prolonged for both parties on the schooner. And whilst they remain there, life and death for the children will be matters of chance to be treated just as factually as the fate of the bird.
2.
There are two major sources of irony in A High Wind in Jamaica. The first is the continual exploitation of the differences between how events really happened and how, on the other hand, they are said and believed to have happened. The irony is one of discrepancy.
Not one of the characters can lay claim to an authoritative grasp of 'reality' in the novel. The children, their parents, the pirates, Captain Marpole, the murder court-all 'see' events through different eyes, though some see less obscurely less dishonestly or less hypocritically than others. Thus there is no simple comic distinction between 'appearance and reality', but often several levels of confusion. Richard Hughes's whipping-post is the chimera of 'objective truth'. The novel's ironic lesson is that no such thing exists. The only authoritative voice as far as a 'true' statement of events is concerned is that of the 'narrator',2 but behind it stands the novelist, who, of course, has invented everything.
Apart from the definitive version given us by the narrator it would be possible to view the capture of the Clorinda from several other angles. We have Captain Marpole's testimony, but it would be possible to get a different story from the pirates (Jonsen is later angry and amused by Marpole's lies) and a fourth one from the children, shut up in the deck-house, with its inevitable youthful misunderstandings-for example of the identity of the enigmatic "fairies". I want to concentrate attention, however, on Captain Marpole's letter: this weird and wonderful document draws its initial force from being the version first encountered by the reader. A piece of masterly understatement precedes it: "Captain Marpole's letter was not so terse and vivid as the children's had been; still, for the news it contained, I give it in full" (p. 43). Naturally we expect an innocuous progress-report on the voyage so far. The first sentence of the letter, however, is peculiar and puzzling: "HONOURED SIR AND MADAM, I hasten to write to you to you to relieve you of any uncertainty!" It is breathless and ambiguous: uncertainty about what? Mr and Mrs Bas-Thornton have no reason to be other than absolutely certain as to the ship's destination. The effect is to pique us, to inculcate uncertainty in us-not to relieve it! The prosaic factuality of the letter's opening with its piled-up clauses modulates half-way through the first paragraph into total fabrication-a fabrication rendered oddly fastidious by the use of words such as "rudely," "peremptory" and the archaic "instanter".When he comes to the ransacking of the vessel, Marpole's punctuation disappears in favour of a series of ands as he rushes breathily on. The fatuous detail of his account (down to mentioning the fate of the cabin bell-pulls, and including an inventory of the Clorinda's cargo), is matched only by the fancifulness of his lies in which, among other things, his nine hundred pounds of specie suddenly increase to "some five thousand pounds in all mostly my private property!" (p. 44) In his headlong eagerness to disclaim responsibility for losing the contents of his ship, however, he complicates matters somewhat by giving two separate and conflicting stories of the children's fate. First we hear that the pirate captain "murdered them every one", then in his final paragraph:
There is one point on which you will still feel some anxiety, considering the sex of some of the poor innocents, and on which I am glad to be able to set your minds at rest, the children were taken onto the other vessel in the evening and I am glad to say there done to death immediately and their little bodies cast into the sea as I saw with great relief with my own eyes. There was no time for what you might fear to have occurred and this consolation I am glad to be able to give you- (p. 45)
Which of the accounts are we to believe? They agree in asserting that the children have been murdered, but the straight contradictions over time and place can hardly make us feel confident about the general trustworthiness of Marpole as observer. The words "glad... immediately... great relief..." impart a grotesquely comic paradoxicality to the passage-and when we consider that the substance of Marpole's fears (if not the manner) are to be realized in Margaret's case and barely avoided in Emily's, ironies by anticipation are added to the letter.
Again there are several possible versions of the murder of the Dutch captain: the narrator's definitive account; that believed by the pirates, based on the purely circumstantial presence of Margaret on the top step of the companionway which leads them to drop her unceremoniously overboard; and third, the obscure and imaginary version suggested to the courtroom bv Emily's hysterical testimony-itself a series of fragmentary impressions of the captain's death rather than his murder (and so, strictly irrelevant), which the court accepts as evidence not because of its con-clusiveness (it has none) but because (a) it has the force of an emotional depth-charge and (b) because the court has already made up its mind that the pirates are guilty (who else could have done it?) and only wants 'confirmation' of this conviction. That the pirate crew should be condemned to death by the inchoate testimony of the actual murderess's confession is at once supremely ironic and grotesquely instructive.
It's also interesting to compare the actual and imagined fates of Margaret on the schooner. The one character who believes she knows what happened to the girl is her "small, yellow, fanatical-looking aunt," who tells Mathias the prosecuting counsel: " 'It's no good questioning Margaret... but it ought to be perfectly clear to you what has happened'." (p. 181) His answer-"'Then I am afraid I must'"-reveals the gulf separating the aunt's reliance on her feminine intuition and the barrister's (and the law's) masculine dissatisfaction with "probabilities"-what we need is something definite'"-and thirst for facts in a situation where no one can supply them. The little the reader knows of what actually took place (and the narrator is deliberately scant here leaving events to be elaborated in the reader's imagination) reveals a psychological and ironic depth beyond the grasp of either intuition or surmise: "At first she seemed exaggeratedly frightened of all the men: but then she had suddenly taken to following them about the deck like a dog-not Jonsen, it is true, but Otto especially." (pp. 100-101) The twofold modification of the verb "frightened" gives the clause a telling resonance: the reader revises his condemnation of the pirates' sexual mores and places a moral exclamation-mark against the thirteen-year-old Margaret's apparently reciprocal fascination. The prevention here of a simple black-and-white view of child-adult sexual relations demands comparison with a more recent one: Vladimir Nabokov,3 in making Lolita-at the tender age of twelve no longer a virgin-the seducer and not the seducee of the infatuated but scrupulous Humbert Humber, both softens the impact of Humbert's behaviour and complicates the reader's moral and comic response.4
It's clear that Richard Hughes considers such things as truth' and 'reality' to be relative phenomena: no one character has a monopoly of them. The futility-nay, the disaster- potential in taking action in a situation where one believes oneself to be in command of 'facts' that cannot be verified empirically is fully portrayed by the novelist in the trial-scene which I shall discuss below.
3.
The second major source of irony is the exploitation of the discrepancy between the ways in which adults' and children's minds work. It is wrong, however, to draw a simple barrier between children and grown-ups: we see radical differences in the mental make-up of different children; after all, they too are individuals.
Chapter One is largely the story of the effect of two natural phenomena on the character-earthquake and thunderstorm. Richard Hughes uses these as touchstones on which to present and elaborate those characters, both old and young. The earthquake has an intense immediate effect on John and Emily, galvanising them into a tremendous release of energy when before they had been quiescent-literally an electrification-but in the long term only Emily seems to value it, and to value it for itself: "there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it" (p. 22). Heaven, it seems to her, has tested her with its utmost test. "Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen to her anything so dangerous, so sublime." Its importance for her is almost purely symbolic-symbolic of the height of peril which the elemental world confronts her with. In real terms, of course, it is insignificant. To John it is the ponies that matter; to the Creole Jimmie Fernandez it is nothing more than something to make the hens lay; to Martha the black maid it is a dust-creating household nuisance. But to Emily the earthquake is as important as both the thunderstorm and the kidnapping are unimportant. It is precisely these latter which bulk large in the minds of Mr and Mrs Bas-Thornton. After her rescue and during the passage to England, Emily is courted by the "wise" Miss Dawson, but when considering experiences fit to compare with her companion's she feels distinctly inferior: "Now she would be eleven in a few months: a great age: and in all that long life, how little of interest or significance had happened to her! There was her Earthquake, of course, and she had slept with an alligator..." (p. 169) but she never dares tell Miss Dawson of her earthquake: "Suppose that to Miss Dawson earthquakes were as familiar as railway trains: the fiasco would be unbearable." The very exoticism of her early life as well as her childishness, creates impassable barriers between them. Yet Emily is right, if right for the wrong reason: Miss Dawson is vicariously interested in hearing of the 'horrors' of life on board the pirate ship and these Emily either considers insignificant or is at pains to forget. The thunderstorm is pregnant with death and is the cue for the Bas-Thornton parents to conceive the plan of sending their offspring to the comparative safety of England-an abiding irony, as this apparently harmless procedure directly precipitates the main events of the tale. The parents ponder the physical and psychological dangers of the Jamaican climate, in so doing totally misinterpreting the reactions of their children to the storm. The children's silence about it they take as a lasting fear born out of suffering, whereas in fact it betokens indifference. The narrator knowingly comments: "Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives." (p. 32) As far as Emily is concerned:
If Emily had known this was a Hurricane, she would doubtless have been far more impressed, for the word was full of romantic terrors. But it never entered her head: and a thunderstorm, however severe, is after all a commonplace affair. The mere fact that it had done incalculable damage, while the earthquake had done none at all, gave it no right whatever to rival the latter in the hierarchy of cataclysms: an Earthquake is a thing apart. (p. 32)
Nevertheless the thunderstorm is significant in Emily's life, bringing with it her first contacts with death. The two deaths it causes have very different effects on the children. That of old Sam is dramatic, and when Mr Bas-Thornton carries his body into the house "Emily and John... were thrilled beyond measure at the way he dangled" (p. 27). The death of their cat Tabby, on the other hand, is demonic and mysterious: "He seemed like one inspired in the presence of Death, he had gone utterly Delphic"5 (p. 26), and when the children fall into drunken sleep it is "a sleep over which the appalling fate of Tabby, torn to pieces by those fiends almost under their very eyes, dominated with the easy empire of nightmare" (p. 30). As they are children and have no 'knowledge' or 'understanding' of what death involves, it is the way in which the deaths act on their imaginations which is important: old Sam is clearly seen to meet his end-nothing about it compels their uninhibited imaginations; but the memory of Tabby's fate, obscure but hellish, haunts Emily to the end of the book, where it is brought forcefully back to the surface of her thoughts by "The terrible look on Jonsen's face as his eyes met hers" (p. 190). What is common to man and tomcat, and written with horrific immediacy on their faces, is their grotesquely esoteric apprehensions of the imminence of their deaths. Sam's, by contrast, is distanced, puppet-like, unreal-lacking in compulsive power. The narrator's dry comment that "there is, after all, a vast difference between a negro and a favourite cat" (p. 32) seems to be thrown in as a light ironic quip designed to provoke the reader rather than a serious attempt to provide a satisfactory explanation of the children's reactions, though (as usual) it is not entirely without truth. The net result of these fatal events on the reader is to leave him with the kind of dual perspective I discussed in section 1: morally mortified by the children's amorality before human death, but simultaneously compelled to understand and appreciate their point of view.
4.
I have discussed two sources of ironic vitality so far, treating separately for the sake of discursive lucidity what are in fact very closely related thematic ideas. Indeed, in some instances they are so interwoven and interdependent that it would be a fruitless and artificial undertaking to attempt to unravel their threads. The events leading up to the trial and the trial itself comprise the most complex instance in the novel. Here the irony expands into satire: from treating the foibles of individuals the writer moves on to satirize a whole system. The butt is Justice. Justice is man's attempt to punish the wicked, reward the good; but in order to carry these things out one must first be able to distinguish between the two extremes. In the body of the novel we have seen what 'natural' justice - that dispensed by the inscrutable Conradian universe - amounts to: when, for example, Sam steals the handkerchief, he takes the distant thunder's growling as "grudging assent", and though it increases in volume, continues to ignore the warning; at the height of the lightning, he gives back the handkerchief, but this act fails to save him; his hut bursts into flames, he appears throwing stones at the sky, and then: "there was another blinding flash, and Sam fell where he stood" (p. 27). We have observed the justice meted out to the Dutch captain, whose mortal offence is to be tied up in a cabin with a terrified convalescent ten-year-old:
The Dutch captain they could see on the floor, stretched in a pool of blood. 'But, Gentlemen, I have a wife and children!' he suddenly said in Dutch, in a surprised and gentle tone: then died. (p. 123)
This, though on a far less grandiose and dramatic level, is the bitter and ironic injustice of the Lear universe (where, we remember, Albany's exclamation "The Gods defend her!" is almost immediately followed by the direction: "Re-enter LEAR. with CORDELIA dead in his arms.") 6 If this is natural justice, how does human justice, the development of thousands of years of culture and civilisation, compare with it? Can men not make a better job of it than this?
The spokesman of the legal system in A High Wind in Jamaica seemingly believes that "the natural and proper witnesses are the children. There is a kind of beauty in making them, who have suffered so much at these men's hands, the instruments of justice upon them." (pp. 183-4) It's easy to see the danger of this pseudo-aesthetic thinking-'poetic justice' literally. Mathias's method is to programme Emily so that she says exactly what he wants-thus her preparation assumes the form of a catechism-a rigmarole upon which human lives depend (we recall the fortuitousness of the fate of the captured bird). When we enter the courtroom it is with Emily, and we see it through her eyes. The face of the Clerk of the Court is the first thing to catch her attention: "It was an old and very beautiful face, cultured, unearthly, refined" (p. 188), symbolic clearly of the face of Justice. The next sentence ironically destroys the illusion: "His head laid back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes closed, he was sleeping gently"-as, indeed, Justice too sleeps during the proceedings. The Oath is administered to Emily and her nervousness vanishes. She trots out her rigmarole, singing out her responses (we are put in mind of worship in a church); she sees Mr. Mathias "in fancy dress"; and high above the sleeping mail, another: "Dressed in his strange disguise, toying with a pretty nosegay, he looked like some benign old wizard who spent his magic in doing good" (p. 189)-at once a parody of God and a symbol of civilised man's power over life and death. Amongst another group of wigged men, one is "dialing funny faces". All this renders the happenings unreal, cartoon-like; we are lulled into forgetting that lives are at stake. But the tone changes with the switch of narrative perspective from Emily to Watkin the defending counsel. We become gradually aware of the serious business of the court, of the struggle that is going on. And so the scene rises to its icy climax. At home afterwards Mr. Bas-Thornton shrinks away from his daughter: "Was it conceivable she was such an idiot as really not to know what she had done?" (p. 191) The reader, however, is in a position to see that she cannot know what she's done precisely because she possesses neither the mature moral sense nor the abstract mental capability sufficient to comprehend what is taking place.7 Those who do possess these admirable qualities, conversely, send innocent men to the gallows.
Emily tells the court roughly what it wants to hear; ignorant of the truth, the court would condone this as a responsible action. There is, however, a secondary treatment of this confessional theme earlier in Chapter Ten; here the child is seen to be irresponsible in telling grown-ups exactly what they want to hear. Young Edward finds himself a centre of interest during the passage to England: "It was wonderful for Edward that everyone seemed ready to believe what he said. Those who came to him for tales of bloodshed were not sent empty away" (p. 168). Edward is not encouraged to distinguish between reality and imagination, so that in retrospect "these springings into the main rigging, these stormings of the galley... they had seemed real enough at the time. Now, he had soon no doubt about them at all." The operative word in both these extracts is "seemed" (a verb which Richard Hughes, unlike Hamlet, is fond of): if the grown-ups evince no compulsion to tell the difference between lie and truth, why should Edward trouble to do so? He takes his cue from the adult world. Richard Hughes's master in these matters is Dickens: we recall that Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook accept the "marvels" Pip relates to them following his initial visit to Miss Havisham's house; his insufficient first answers only resulted in him having his face "ignominiously shoved against the kitchen wall," and feeling convinced that he will not be understood if he describes the strange reality of Satis House, he uses his imagination to provide a marvellous but nevertheless credible (at least to his audience) alternative.8 Pip later confesses to Joe; Edward too is forced to come down to earth eventually:
'Shut up!' cried Mr. Thornton. 'Did you, or did you not, any of you, see them hit anybody?'
'Cut off their heads,' cried Edward. 'And throw them in the sea!-Far, far...' his eyes became dreamy and sad.
'They didn't hit anybody,' said Emily. 'There wasn't anybody to hit.' (p. 179)
The dreaminess and sadness in Edward's eyes suggests an interior recognition that the game is finally up: his audience no longer believe what he says, and he must reluctantly admit to himself the imaginative substance of his pretended past.
Edward's irresponsible lies and Emily's 'responsible truths', then, form an ironic counterpoint in this climactic Chapter. It is ironic indeed to reflect that while the former are ultimately harmless, the latter are finally fatal. Man's Justice is revealed as being no improvement on that of nature.
5.
Bait the point, and hang it in a tree among the twigs: the bird alights on the peg to peck the fruit, the peg falls out, the loop whips tight round its ankles: then away up out of the water like pink predatory monkeys, and decide by 'Eena, deena, dina, do' or some such rigmarole, whether to twist its neck or let it go free-thus the excitement and suspense, both for child and bird, can be prolonged beyond the moment of capture. (p. 9)
This passage might have been re-quoted for its ironic analogies with the trial-scene just discussed, but I want now to go on to another topic.
It can be seen from the passage that Richard Hughes's narrative stance in A High Wind in Jamaica is morally neutral, emotionally detached-in accordance with that absolute narrative objectivity which a well-known critic and literary theorist tells us is essential to the ironic fiction-writer's method.9 It would, I think, be a simplification, however, to regard the voice and attitudes of the novel's narrator as the unqualified ones of Richard Hughes the man. It is preferable to view this 'narrator' as a composite of the man himself and an adopted persona. When therefore I speak of the narrator I am imagining a man in late middle or old age-he points out (p. 7) that it is a long time since he was in Jamaica, so that methods of distilling rum on the island may well have changed. His style has a dated, clichéd, idiomatic flavour in these early pages: we meet phrases like "cheek by jowl", "pushed on", "cock-a-hoop", "an event of the first water"; and a whimsical sense of humour-"the stream had gone about its business elsewhere." With its sudden and deliberate shifts of tone and viewpoint, its laconic interest in human idiosyncrasy, and its specific absence of moral concern, the style suggests its owner to be a man of the world (as, indeed, Mr. Hughes is himself) who remains unsurprised by the fantastic, unperturbed by the grotesque, and unmoved by the pathetic.
As might have been concluded from some of the points already made, death in all its forms, whether that of man, woman, child, beast or bird, receives a similar unemotional treatment. Consider, alongside the bird-baiting already discussed, the depiction of the two Miss Parkers, languishing in a welter of exotic decay - ruin physical, mental and environmental. The narrator concludes:
Not long after this, I believe, they were both starved altogether to death. Or, if that were hardly possible in so prolific a country, perhaps given ground glass-rumour varied. At any rate, they died.
That is the sort of scene which makes a deep impression on the mind: far deeper than the ordinary, less romantic, everyday thing which shows the real state of an island in the statistical sense. Of course, even in the transitional period one only found melodrama like this in rare patches. (p. 6)
The tone of the first sentence is dead-pan, yet at the same time their starvation is given a weird emphasis through "altogether". The narrator's indifference over the melodramatic alternative makes murder seem a ludicrous game. "At any rate, they died" has a note of business-like finality. The next sentence has a sinewy energy: the claim that this "sort of scene" (implying that it is anything but a unique occurrence) "makes a deep impression on the mind" goads us into asking 'what kind of impression?'-the impression of a moral lesson? (are we to find he has a moral sense after all?)-or merely the impression made by the out of the ordinary? It is easy to miss the fact that the statement is calculatedly impersonal: "the mind" and not "my mind". Then the terms "romantic" and "melodrama", re-emphasizing the absurdity of the deaths, reinforce the detached stance. Compassionate or sentimental feelings in the reader are prevented by this technique.
The one child-death in the novel is treated with extreme detachment. The narrator believes that children "are human (if one allows the term 'human' a wide sense)" (p. 110), but his practice is to compare them with animals as often as possible. John's death is ironically counterpointed by that of Jacko the monkey-their names immediately point the connection. The amputation of Jacko's diseased tail leads to an "aerial ballet" that ends: "Poor little Jacko missed his hold at last: fell plump on the deck and broke his neck. That was the end of him-" (p. 51). The epithet "poor" is as much condescending and conventional as it is sympathetic; the rhythm and the rhyme give the description a sing-song, nursery-rhyme quality: and "That was the end of him-" carries an almost triumphant finality. On the previous page we were told that the children craned up to watch the circus-like cavortings in the rigging "till their necks nearly broke"; we remember that the children at the bathing-pool were like "pink predatory monkeys": the ironic resonance is inescapable. When a child-neck comes to be broken we read: "John, in his excitement, leaned out too far. He lost his balance and fell clear to the ground. forty feet, right on his head" (p. 78). The narrative interest here centres not so much on the fact of John's death as on the effect of his fall upon the old sailor Jose, who rides a cow down to around-level, where the crowd "stood back and let him have a good look at it [the body], and shake it, and so on. But the neck was quite plainly broken." The body has already ceased to be human, having become "it"-something defunct, neither human nor animal, something to be treated with scant respect ("and shake it, and so on" - the narrator cannot even be bothered to list the indignities that befall it); it is a thing, an object whose neck attracts the impersonalizing definite article rather than the pronoun 'his'.
The child, then, receives a treatment as ironic and uncompassionate as that meted out to any other creature, human or animal, in the novel. Facing the reader with the blatant and meaningless fact of human death, the ironic method refuses him the cosy refuge of sentimentality, continually presents him with the quality of absurdity. We are in an uncompromisingly post-Freudian, post-Darwinian world. Squarely confronted with children as children (if not quite children as animals) and not as undergrown adults, we must recognise at least the partial truth that the child represents a stage in human growth (and indeed, the baby another) as distinct from that of man and woman as the larva is from the imago. We must recognise too the possession by children of their own characteristic fantasies and behavioural traits, their own especial logic and their own ruling amorality.
6.
I want finally to focus attention on one particular aspect of Richard Hughes's ironic narrative technique. In order to isolate this we can take up the point made in the last paragraph's last parenthesis. The baby of the party is Laura, "and babies of course are not human - they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes ... It is true they look human - but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys" (p. 110). The feelings which contact with a baby arouses in the narrator he compares with those aroused in him by an octopus underwater-the media in which they live are hopelessly alien to him. The outrageous comedy of the comparison ends with a deliberate thrust at those most likely to reject it outright:10 "Contact with a small baby can conjure an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain" (p. 111). The policy is direct stimulation of the reader's adrenalin. Then, however, he says: "Of course it is not really so cut-and-dried as all tins: but often the only way of attempting to express the truth is to build it up, like a card-house, of a pack of lies." Card-houses are fated to collapse, but in admitting that his novel is a precarious structure of lies, the novelist is merely admitting that he is a writer of fiction and has no absolute claim on the truth. No adult can ever know what really goes on in a child's head (indeed, why stop at a child's?). Nevertheless the narrator has undermined his own argument: how is the reader to react? The result, I think, is a complex response: readers are at once relieved that the writer is not demanding total acceptance from them and irritated by the fact that the narrator seems to be playing games and refuses to give supply explanations of what is happening. Compelled to admit doubt and ambiguity into his mind, readers are thrown onto their own resources in deciding what degrees of credence or scepticism they are to bring to a consideration of any given event, its particular significance, and its larger applicability. It does not really matter if they reject what is controversial in the novel's argument-what is important is that they should be stimulated into active response.
Richard Hughes, grinning behind his narrator's back, shrugs off responsibility for his own creation. His method is diametrically opposite to that, say, of George Eliot in Middlemarch, where the success of the novel depends so much on the degree to which readers identify their sympathies with those of the novelist. Thus A High Wind in Jamaica can be read for its ironic asides on the conventions of the omniscient narrative. For the sake of a novel's 'psychological realism', we accept George Eliot's pretence that her story is a sequence of 'real' events recounted by the novelist herself, who could not possibly have been present at the original happenings (if only for the simple reason that they never happened). The narrator of Richard Hughes's novel is not typical of the 'omniscient' kind and cannot be regarded as a metaphorical 'bridge' between reader and writer.
Let us take another example. When Emily goes to bed at the Fernandez place we are told: "She pressed her eyeballs devoutly with her fingers to make sparks appear, in spite of the slightly sick feeling it always induced: and then, already sound asleep, clambered, I suppose, into bed" (p. 16, my italics). The supposition11 of this last detail threatens to make nonsense of the precise and vividly convincing psychological realism of the forepart of the sentence. It is interesting to consider that the act of clambering into bed is the only act described here which does not require assumption: little girls usually sleep in beds! We are forced, if we are reading carefully, to recognise that the whole scene has been invented: and if one scene, why not all the scenes? Again, though in a different way from the "card-house" instance, we are abruptly reminded of what many novelists strive with all their craft to make us forget-that we are reading a fiction.
The ultimate betrayal of the 'omniscient' stance comes just before the trial scene and concerns Emily: "What was in her mind now? I can no longer read Emily's deeper thoughts, or handle their cords. Henceforth we must be content to surmise" (p. 187). Curiously the result of this is not to destroy our faith (if it has survived impaired) in the narrator's control over character and event, but to emancipate Emily from the tyranny of his irony, to give her a mysterious and private existence beyond his ken; it also puts her beyond the reach of moral censure for the pirates' fate: how can we censure where neither we nor the narrator can pretend to understand? It is because this passage is mediated to us through an ambiguous narrator that it is able to succeed: such an admission by George Eliot would he tantamount to saving that things had got out of control.
The problem that faces us, then, is this: is it possible for a writer to maintain 'psychological realism' in his novel and at the same time to undermine it periodically as does Richard Hughes? The widest significance of the last-quoted extract lies in its implication that all significant 'knowledge' about other human beings is surmise: a truism indeed, but a strange presence in such a context. Those who value verisimilitude and prefer to view a novel as a logical whole may well argue that he is having his cake and eating it. I would argue, however, that Richard Hughes is only taking advantage of the true state of affairs that governs our reading of a novel: that essential double-vision-double-think?-which enables readers (and critics) to regard the world of a novel as 'real' enough to be worthy of close consideration with one part of their brains whilst with another they're aware that it's a fabrication. It's also important to bear in mind the vividness and poetic vitality that infuse event and character in A High Wind in Jamaica, the fact that the technique of undermining is judiciously employed, and the extreme narrative conciseness of the book, which allows abrupt alterations in tone and viewpoint throughout. It seems to me that Richard Hughes has succeeded in getting the best of both worlds-'realism' and narrative objectivity on the one hand, and the shock value afforded, on the other, by the novelist's freedom to confront us, from time to time, with the fact that we are reading a fiction.
Notes
1 This technique has affinities with the Swiftian one of betrayal. See A. E. Dyson's essay on Swift in The Crazy Fabric (1965).
2 For a definition of this term as I use it here, see Section 5 paragraph two, below.
3 Nabokov and Hughes also have in common the trick of presenting the reader with a version of an event which is afterwards contradicted and superseded by another.
4 Margaret's behaviour is carefully prepared for. She has been presented as 'grown-up' all along; she regards Mr. Bas-Thornton as being "handsome" (p. 40); it is she who, on seeing the "fairies" disembark, decides that "she had never seen such beautiful young men before. They were slim, yet nicely rounded ..." (p. 68); and it is she who is "stupidly frightened... the very first night on the schooner" (Emily's words, pp. 99-100).
5 A comic glance at the medieval literary tradition that those near death were visited with prophetic powers. (See, for example, Gaunt's speech in Richard II, II.i.31ff.)
6 King Lear, V.iii.255 (Arden edn. p. 214).
7 The disastrous consequences of regarding children as merely younger adults is a classic Puritan fallacy. It is interesting to compare the trial scene in A High Wind in Jamaica with several scenes in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, where the intolerable pressure exerted on the child-witches produces a hysteria of accusations and betrayals, and leads to the executions of nineteen innocent men and women.
8 Great Expectations, Chapter IX.
9 "Complete objectivity and suppression of all explicit moral judgements are essential to his method. Thus pity and fear are not raised in ironic art they are reflected to the reader from the art." (Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1971) p. 40)
10 As I have found in discussing this novel with mature students.
11 The narrator is fond of this particular form of intervention. Compare its use on pp. 27, 50, 60, and 121. Variants are "I think" (p. 61) and "I believe" (pp. 6 and 33).
This article appeared in The Anglo-Welsh Review Vol. 23 No. 51 (Spring 1974) pp. 41-57.
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In Hazard
My aim in this essay is to examine the aesthetics of Richard Hughes's second novel In Hazard. I'm well aware that my approach is only one of a number of possibilities (a fascinating alternative would consider the relationship of this "fiction" to that remarkable voyage of the S.S. Phemius on which it is based)-but it's one, I believe, that can attempt some account of what it is like actually to read this novel, to respond to the words on the page: for Richard Hughes's two pre-war novels are among that small number of narrative prose-works possessed of the power to induce in a responsive reader what Vladimir Nabokov somewhere calls "aesthetic bliss". Of course, any given literary work is unlikely to prove the same experience for any two of its readers-and may indeed provide a different experience for the same reader each time he/she reads it. That this is true has not, apparently, deterred the majority of contemporary critics and commentators from its labours, for (amongst other things) our age is notoriously one in which interpretation has proliferated to an alarming degree. What has to be said, however, is that the condition of delight which In Hazard (or Lolita) can induce in a reader is as much a part of the novel's conveyed meaning (tenuous word. but it must suffice) as is that network of semantic significances to which the translating intellect reduces it upon sober reflection, and to which it gives the name of understanding: and this delight demands acknowledgement because it articulates a quality that excogitation does not seek to duplicate-the quality of immediacy, a spontaneity uncompromised by the wily and insidious dealings of discursive rationality. And yet, even as I say this. I am compelled to admit (and it is reason compels the admission) that this state of pure delight is one which critical essayists are no more likely ever to do justice to than they are likely wholly to evade the subtle deceits that analytical thought can urge.
In October 1921 Richard Hughes sat down to fulfil a long-promised threat-to send his friend Mrs Amabel Williams-Ellis (later Lady Williams-Ellis) "some sort of poetic Athanasian creed". The omens were favourable-he had a stomach-ache: only when suffering from this particular complaint, he told her, could he manage writing demanding sustained effort. He was lucky: the stomach-ache held up so well that it produced a creed some six thousand words long-a creed of a substantiality more than sufficient to provide a way of looking at my subject. My discussion falls, then, into two related parts: (1) an outline of those aspects of Hughes's creed that seem germane to my aesthetic concerns; and (2) an investigation of In Hazard in the light of that creed. Before I go on to the letter itself, however, a couple of preliminary points demand to be made.
First of all, the author of this creed was in only his twenty-second year. Should we expect a coherent, rounded, original literary philosophy from one so young? Hughes himself remarks with self-deprecating good humour that at times he's secretly convinced that his credos are entirely wrong; also that in six months they may well be heresies. Later he admits that what he says is "not particularly original". Should we be troubled by these comments? I don't myself think it matters whether a theory is original or familiar: what we demand is that it issue in good literature. Certainly the bare holding of a theory may or may not co-exist with the talent, or genius, necessary successfully and memorably to embody it. Nor does it much matter whether it be "wrong" or "right", or, since these are dubious terms to apply in such a context, crazy or sane. (Apparently crazy notions have in the past gone into the making of fine poems.) In point of fact Hughes's ideas seem to me both workable and sane. As to whether they had become heresies by the time of writing of In Hazard: well, we must sample the pudding in order to judge whether or not the blend of its ingredients is in accordance with the recipe. Certainly-and the adjectives are Hughes's own-his terminology can be "obscure" and his argument is at times "rude" and "disorderly". I have to hope then (though this is the burden of any literary commentator) that I've sinned against the spirit neither of the writer's individual terms nor overall argument.
My second preliminary point turns on the title of this essay: not "the theory and practice" of novel-writing, but of "art". Now Hughes's letter begins with some general reflections on art in its widest sense, but when talking about that branch of art we call literature it is poetry he usually chooses to discuss. Nowhere, in fact, does he so much as mention the words "novel" or "novelist". Here, then, is where I must commit myself to a crucial statement: the author of A High Wind in Jamaica and In Hazard is a poet who writes novels. I mean this in the sense that one may call Shakespeare a poet who wrote plays-a dramatic poet rather than a poetic dramatist. Hughes's vision, and the ways in which he manipulates the novel-form in order to articulate that vision, are essentially a poet's. Robert Graves, a friend and contemporary of Hughes, is a poet who writes novels in a very different, and instructively different sense. Graves and Hughes disagreed fundamentally over the relationship of poetry to novel-writing. Graves regarded novel-writing as a separate discipline from poetry-writing and a very inferior one-a secular bread-and-butter affair; Hughes, however, saw no reason why the full resources of the poet shouldn't be drafted into the novel. Graves wrote poetry and novels, side by side, for a lifetime; Hughes wrote no more poems after beginning A High Wind in Jamaica in 1925. Yet his poetic ability was not put to one side, did not diminish: rather it blossomed. Often in the verse of his youth-and all his verse is juvenilia-I sense an artificiality, a constrictedness, whether of rhythm, or of phrasing, or of conception. In prose, paradoxically, Hughes was able to find the verbal space, the essential conditions, his particular poet's sensibility required. No doubt it's true that he was realizing, in the mid-1920's, a comparative maturity, and this coincided with his determination to write a novel. Yet I'm inclined to believe that he matured at least partly because he had decided to embark on a novel. The seriousness of the undertaking inspired a new depth of engagement in him.
But it's time to turn to the letter, to the creed itself.
"Art is not imitative", Hughes begins, "it is creative: creative of beauty". I'm not concerned here to investigate the sources or analogues of these notions, my brief does not allow; what I want to emphasize is their thoroughgoing aestheticism-a term I wield with no pejorative gloss. The business of the artist, Hughes asserts, is in the first place neither to teach the reader nor to provoke that reader's emotion (though readers will be taught and their emotions provoked)-unless, that is, the aesthetic activity itself is an emotion. In so far as human beings who don't practise art appreciate art they too, to that degree, are artists. Beauty, like goodness, is a quality of the human mind. In itself the universe is neither beautiful nor ugly, good nor bad: it's the perceiving sensibility that makes it so.
What then constitutes this beauty? "Beauty seems to be a kind of rhythm." And Hughes underscores a sentence one finds repeatedly in his later, post-1945 discussions of art and rhetoric: "Man is a pattern-making animal". "Pattern", he says, "is a crude form of rhythm, a skeleton of rhythm. Perhaps it would be better to say that Man is a rhythm-making animal." Rhythm is clearly preferred to pattern here: elsewhere in the letter these terms are not so strongly distinguished, nor which is preferable so forcefully expressed. Pattern is a term familiar enough in modern-day novel-criticism. The Marxist critic Arnold Kettle begins his book on the English Novel by suggesting that "there are in all novels which are successful works of art two elements", "life" and "pattern". The first of these is vague, for no adequate synonym is found for it: novels that possess "life" are "life-communicating", convey a "sense of life" which quickens our faculties. As for the second, "pattern":
Pattern is not something narrowly 'aesthetic', something which critics like Clive Bell used to talk about as 'form' (as opposed to life or content). Pattern is the quality in a book which gives it wholeness and meaning, makes the reading of it a complete and satisfying experience.1
Now Kettle's problem, and one he's well aware of, is that these elements "are not, in truth, separable";2 the great writer perceives life in terms of pattern, imposes a vision upon it which rescues it from chaos and gives it significance. Yet Kettle, like so many literary critics after him (and I cannot myself have escaped this pitfall), is compelled to proceed as if, to some extent, life and pattern are separable entities. Hughes's preference for the term rhythm may be seen as his attempt to circumvent the dualism of form and content. Rhythm is that quality which imbues all the elements of a successful work of literature and binds them together. It may be found in a poem on all its "levels"-at once regulating the speed at which successive individual words enter a reader's consciousness, and governing the interplay of sounds, images, and themes. It is because the raw material of literature can be perceived, in these various ways, as rhythms, that the successful work can finally be produced.
Which brings me to those elements which in works of art exist imbued by rhythm. In music, clearly, rhythm will be a corollary of certain configurations of notes, since (at least up to the advent of the school of Schoenberg) musical structure is based upon the principles of repetition and variation; in plastic art it will reveal itself through significant form; in literature through what Hughes, leaning on the Greek word eidola, calls "idea-images". This is, as might be expected, a very general term. An idea-image can be anything produced by intellectual-imaginative activity, is "whatever it is that the mind does, makes". If the materials of the plastic artist are shapes and colours, those of the poet are "sensual images, emotions, conceptions". Idea-images then vary in kind from those in which the element of image is, metaphorically-speaking, "uppermost"-where what is presented is a definite sensory image-down through weaker gradations of image to those in which the element of idea is uppermost-where what is purveyed is a pure abstraction. The idea-image with the fullest capacity for life is one that simultaneously incites sensual and intellectual responses in a reader.
Three things, says Hughes, are essential to the good poem: individually the idea-images must be vivid and quickening; second, they must be organized into an orderly, satisfying whole by a governing "rhythmic conception"; and finally "the conception of rhythm in all these dimensions must be influenced by their own interplay". A few years later in 1925, in a review, Hughes found these aesthetic essentials in Mrs Dalloway.3 The review begins: "To the poet the visible world exists: it shines with an intense brilliance, not only to the eye but to the touch, ear, smell, inward vision" (words that tempt one to apply them to the opening chapter of A High Wind in Jamaica). What especially exists in Mrs Dalloway-what, the implication is, makes Virginia Woolf a poet of the novel-is London, which Hughes finds "emerges shining like crystal, out of the fog in which all the merely material universe is ordinarily enveloped in his mind: it emerges, and stays". Here, if we wish to see it, is a gloss on Hughes's earlier assertion that art is "creative" rather than "imitative". A brief excursion into philosophy will give depth to the point. The Scottish philosopher David Hume divides human perceptions into two distinct kinds. To "sensations, passions, emotions" he gives the name "impressions". To "the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning" he gives the title "ideas". Ideas themselves are of two kinds: of imagination or of memory. Between these again he asserts a difference to lie, ideas of memory possessing a greater degree of vivacity than ideas of imagination.4 When Hume comes to consider how imagination is employed in poetry he continues to maintain that poetic ideas ("poetical fictions") differ from ideas belonging to memory or judgment in the comparative weakness or imperfectness of the feelings they engender.5 "Imagination, then consists in having (seeing, hearing, tasting, etc.) weak experiences".6 Richard Hughes inverts Hume's teaching: for him an artist cannot be truly creative unless he or she has the ability to invest objects with a vividness, a paradoxical reality, that they lack in objective perception or in memory. The images created by one human imagination for another may evoke feelings more intense than those feelings stimulated in us by the outside world. Thus he can assert: "To Mrs. Woolf London exists, and to Mrs. Woolf's readers anywhere and at any time London will exist with a reality it can never have for those who merely live there". Yet, even when so much is allowed, this brilliance, this vividness isn't in itself enough: "it is only the material of art". The further essential is an organisational faculty capable of shaping the individual images into a satisfying whole; but this too Virginia Woolf possesses, so that Hughes can say: "it is not by its vividness that her writing ultimately stays in the mind, but by the coherent and processional form which is composed of, and transcends, that vividness". Mrs Dalloway, then, possesses those rhythmic qualities without which for Hughes literature cannot be considered to be art.
It's time now to turn to In Hazard. Can we discern in this novel the three interconnecting qualities Richard Hughes believed essential to the successful work of art?
The question it seems natural to ask first is this: What, if anything, constitutes the governing rhythmic principle of the book, what is the unifying power to which all the individual elements are subordinate and in which they all inhere? Let me postpone my answer for a while. In his letter Hughes says that "one of the most prevalent forms of mental pattern is the relation of something or other to a symbol". In his Introduction to the American edition of In Hazard of 1966 he develops his notion of poetic symbol. He starts from the premise that the writing of poetry does for the poet what dreaming does for other people: "it allows a safe outlet for conflicts and tensions too painful for his conscious mind to face, disguised so impenetrably in symbol that the poet himself has no inkling of what his poem is really 'about'-just as the dreamer has none till his analyst tells him".7 The essential factor here is the poet's ignorance of the deeper significance of what he's saying-his symbol must be subconscious, hence a quite different matter from conscious allegory. Frequently in his writings Hughes asserts that a writer should write only when compelled to do so by an inner force he can't deny. Opposing those critics (Robert Graves amongst them) who deny that prose is as deeply rooted in its creator's imaginative being as poetry is, Hughes asks: "Why must the novelist's compulsion be assumed to differ in kind from the poet's?" The force of this will readily be admitted: to take an obvious instance, consider the writings of Kafka. In Hazard was very much a book that insisted on being written-indeed another one, half-done, was put aside in order to make way for it and never resumed. And this was in the thirties when, Hughes believed, "Reason" forbade the British consciously to recognize the brutal realities under their very noses. So, the text of In Hazard is interpolated with what look like clues. On its opening page Hughes's narrator sees "what appeared to be my Prime Minister, in a suit of overalls, crawling out of a piece of dismantled machinery with an air of real authority and knowledge and decision" (p. 3).8 (The politician Ramsay MacDonald, of course, died at sea in November 1937-on a voyage to South America!) Then the narrator tells us that when its "guys were properly set up, that funnel was as safe as the Bank of England" (p. 4). Later, discussing the behaviour of hurricanes, he quips: "Ships (which can run) are safer in those latitudes than government offices (which cannot)" (p. 33). The name of the Captain, Edwardes, suggests those of a series of English kings-the last, by choice, a brief incumbent. And the salvage vessel at the end of the story is American. But no, we are not to simplify matters: In Hazard isn't an allegory or a prophecy: it presents us with symbols, and if we wish to speculate we must take our cues from this pronouncement, one as elusive as any Hughes ever made: "symbol (in the dream sense) is never concerned primarily with the future qua future but with a much more timeless kind of truth".9
When in 1933 he heard (from Mrs Williams-Ellis, as it happens) of the epic struggle of the SS Phemius with a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, Hughes testifies to the fact that he became "obsessed"10 by the event. The twin symbols of ship and storm gained an inexplicably powerful hold upon his imagination. His poet's sensibility must have been quick to appreciate the pattern discernible in their prolonged encounter. Here then is my answer to the question I posed earlier: the governing rhythmic principle of the book is to be discovered in the conflict between the simultaneously real and symbolic entities of ship and weather: Archimedes and its human crew on the one hand, the hurricane and the maddened sea on the other. The book doesn't of course begin in storm, but it's not long before we see in retrospect that those early pages about the ship's design, workings and crew were all given in anticipation of the tremendous struggle that was to ensue. The novel begins in calm, we sense the gathering swell, then comes the full onslaught that rips the tarpaulins off the hatches and plucks out the funnel; the rhythm of the main part of the book is one of alternating buffetings and lulls as Archimedes is first pushed into the centre, then sucked back again into the maelstrom, pushed in and sucked out again. Only when she is at last spewed out in the hurricane's rear does, upon exhausted sailors and readers alike, some semblance of comparative calm descend. It's here that I can with propriety counter those reviewers of 1938 who found that In Hazard petered out inconclusively, even frivolously.11 The aesthetic symmetry of the novel makes it proper that it should close on a crippled ship limping in tow to port through a gradually diminishing swell. To enter upon the Sage Line's verdict upon Captain Edwardes's handling of his vessel (the suggested continuation) would be to embark upon a fresh sea of conflict, to introduce a distinct rhythmic element-and the balance of the tale would be impaired. The Sage Line's verdict, too, is a secular affair, whereas the true matter of the conflict has been spiritual.
In order to discover whether In Hazard meets the second demand of its author as regards vividness and quickeningness we must turn to a consideration of the idea-image. Let's begin by looking at it in its (deceptively) simplest form. The oddest creature on board Archimedes is the lemur Thomas, whose favourite nocturnal pursuit is prising open the closed eyelids of any sleeping sailor bold enough to leave his door ajar. Entering the wheelhouse during the storm, Captain Edwardes finds Thomas at work on the clamped lids of the fear-frozen second mate: "Captain Edwardes cuffed the little lemur away, as you would drive a vulture off a dead body" (p. 91). There are two ideas, two images here, linked by simile: that of cuffing the animal, that of driving off the bird. The sentence is brisk, business-like: "cuffed" suggests a father's summary chastisement of a persistently aggravating child. But is his action really like beating a vulture off a corpse? We are all implicated in the action by that "you" (a favourite Hughes device)-yet how many of us are accustomed to vultures, let alone corpses? But then it's equally pertinent to ask how many of us have cuffed lemurs given to prising open men's eyelids in the night? It's the narrator's tacit, off-handed assumption that his readers commonly do these things that arrest and piques-and, in addition, recalls us to that reality which creative literature at once invokes and transcends. Richard Hughes's interest in the bizarre is an oft-remarked and sometimes denigrated phenomenon, but it's an essential aspect of his art: he deliberately sets out to provoke and delight the intellect through the unexpected image, often one that appeals simultaneously to sense.
Another example. Two paragraphs earlier Mr Rabb left the Chinese carpenter's room: "He was not really conscious any more. His actions were automatic as a sleepwalker's, with the unswerving tenacity of purpose of pure instinct-like a shark snapping" (p. 90). This extract, I think, might also compel something of a self-confrontation in a reader. In my own case it led to a revaluation. Again there are two similes in the sentence. In the first Rabb's state is likened to that of a sleepwalker. Never having witnessed a sleepwalker, my own notion of what one looks like, a notion as hackneyed as it was intellectually unexamined, used to be that purveyed by childhood story-books and second-rate movies: he (or she) moves rigidly, sluggishly, eyes glazed or altogether shut, sometimes with arms outstretched as if to detect obstructions-a parody of blind-man's buff! Hughes banishes the cliché. "His actions were automatic... with the unswerving tenacity of purpose of pure instinct": that's surely fine enough for most writers-how forcefully the plosives convey Mr Rabb's mindless yet decisively direct course through the ship; suggesting indeed a degree of physical self-control, of uprightness, that the conditions could not have admitted. But this isn't enough for Hughes: he must clinch the idea, and he does it with a second image at once vivid and unmistakably Hughesian: "like a shark snapping". What a long way we seem to have come in the one sentence, from the simile invoking sleep to this involving the shark's sinister power. They clash head-on, and yet are reconciled in the embracing logic of the sentence. Again Hughes aims to arrest, to surprise, to make his reader think. The aesthetic pleasure to be gained from reading him isn't the kind to be got from merely passive attendance on the beautiful; rather it comes from a complete activity in which sense and intellect, simultaneously stimulated, conjoin in recognition, synthesis, delight. This I think is very much the order of pleasure that poetry can bring; I shall return to this analogy later.
So far in discussing these two instances of idea-images I've been concerned with local effect. But individual verbal events should be related to the recurrent rhythms of the novel, and the examples I've given aren't difficult to place. The lemur-cuffing incident looks both forwards and backwards to other appearances of this animal. That of the sleepwalking Rabb contributes to that interconnected series of idea-images which goes to make up his character-portrait: a penetrating presentation of what blind, uncontrollable fear can do to a man: which is in turn one of a number of comparable rhythms, one of the numerous threads in the novel's human weft that the inhuman warp of the storm ropes closely together. But to follow this rhythm further isn't my task today. Looking again from the particular outwards, however, one might say that the similes of shark and vulture (and, on a larger scale, the appearances of Thomas the lemur), take their rhythmic place in that whole gallery of animal, bird and fish images with which In Hazard (like its predecessor A High Wind in Jamaica) is infested: the consequence of Hughes's curiously detached naturalist's eye.
Having explored some examples of the idea-image, let us pause to register an objection which might be made to the structural emphasis placed by Richard Hughes on this phenomenon. Surely, it will be objected, many writers have recourse to something akin to this method of giving their work internal unity. True, but two qualities distinguish Hughes here from other novelists. First there is the fact of his conscious formulation of the concept, and of his placement of idea-images at the centre of his art. Second there is his quantitative deployment of them, and particularly of sensuous images, which gives his art so much of its originality, strength and appeal. Hughes, lover of the ironic paradox, is a creative writer whose artfulness in shaping his novels is matched by the impression of effortless artlessness a reading of them mainly conveys. Some reviewers comment on the simplicity or naivety of his style, but like the studied simplicity of some other fine writers-I am thinking particularly of poets-its clarity and lucidity deceives about its depth. In Hazard took five years to write. It isn't deciding what to put into a book that takes the time, Hughes was fond of remarking, but what to leave out. What I myself must omit from this survey is discussion of all bar one of what, in my opinion, are the most memorable clusters of idea-images that abound in In Hazard: each reader, if he has liked the book at all, will have one or more permanently stuck in his imagination-one of the descriptions of the seas during the storm, perhaps, or the haunting episode of the birds in one of the lulls, or Ao Ling's surreal dream, or the dance of the dolphins (which one ecstatic reviewer-a poet, unsurprisingly- employing a musical term implicity sympathetic to my approach, compared to a triple fugue12).
Instead, by way of illustrating how Hughes sustains individual thematic rhythms I want next to trace the metamorphoses undergone by a linked pair of idea-images in the course of the novel. Ashore at Norfolk Virginia, Dick Watchett, the third mate of the Archimedes, finds himself at a wild party at which the girl Sukie, who has attached herself to him, gets drunk and throws off her clothes: "For a few seconds she stood there, her body stark naked. Dick had never seen anything like it before. Then she fell unconscious on the floor" (p. 17). Dick feels "a wilder intoxication thumping in his ribs. She had been lovely in her clothes, but she was far more lovely like this, fallen in a posture as supple as a pool..." (ibid.) He rolls her in a hearthrug and returns shaking, to his ship. The next two paragraphs must be given in full:
For hours he lay awake, quite unable even to dim the vivid picture in his inward eye of Sukie's drunken innocence. But at last he fell asleep, her lovely face and her naked body flickering in his dreams. And then presently he was awakened by feeling his heavy lids lifted by thin little fingers, and found himself staring, through the texture of his dream, into large anxious, luminous eyes, only an inch from his own: eyes that were not Sukie's. He bashed at the electric-light switch in a panic,
It was Thomas, with his soft fur and his big tail, hopping away on his unnaturally elongated feet, nervously folding and unfolding his ears. (p. 18)
A few pages later Archimedes is on her way to Colon, putting time and sea between herself and Norfolk, between Dick and Sukie. The girl begins to fade in his mind. But then Dick encounters the dolphins. Again a complete paragraph must be given:
At first Sukie had blazed in Dick's mind, lighting every part of it: but now already, after two days, she had contracted and receded like the opening by which you have entered a tunnel: turned more unearthly bright than the broad day, but very distant and small and clear. Yet now, as he watched the dolphins, for a moment light seemed to come back over his whole mind, gently flooding all its dark places, and then fading in a mood of pleasurable sadness. (p. 23)
The tone of this is beautifully judged: Dick's sensations and feelings are obliquely conveyed through more images-the first, of the tunnel, precise, visual and familiar; the second imprecise and uncertain (a good example of the weaker intermediate idea-image), yet luminous, delicate and tender. But why do the dolphins momentarily relume his mind in this way? That same night he encounters another sea-effect: "It was a rare and magnificent thing. But it did not move him as the naked dolphins had done" (p. 24). Now, in the single, telling, wicked word "naked"-a word used twice in those earlier passages about the drunken Sukie-Hughes at once gives us the connection and artfully pricks the romantic bubble of tender sentiment that was Dick's brightened mood. "Naked" is sufficient in itself to reinvoke the whole of Dick's previous experience in a reader's consciousness. From every important point of view-of rhythm, accentuation, sound-it is the focal, energised word in its sentence. A dissyllable following eight unexceptional monosyllables, hard and sharp in its impetus, it cashes in on the abeyance of significant stress that precedes it. If we look more closely we shall see, however, that it isn't the only image-word working to connect Sukie and the dolphins in our minds: when she passed out it was to fall "in posture as supple as a pool"-it was the sensuous liquidity of her abandonment that seized upon Dick's imagination. Later, when he watches the dolphins, these "powerful mermaids" (p. 23) also embody this quality.
This rhythm of girl-animal association returns a second time, much later in the book. During his long stint of oil-pouring in the forward latrine Dick occupies himself by talking (in his mind) to the absent Sukie:
'You see,' he said when he met her again, about a hundred yards further down the cave, 'pouring oil out of this drum is my job.'
'Sure, ' said Sukie: leaning forward she stared close into his eyes, laying her beautiful cool eyes almost to touch his briny, swollen lids.
'Oh, sure!' she said again: and turning, hopped away on her unnaturally elongated feet, nervously folding and unfolding her ears. (p. 132)
We remember that Dick was rudely awakened from his earlier dream of Sukie by Thomas the lemur. Now girl and animal have become one in his mind. Hughes is able, that is, to illustrate Dick's curious mental state, at once vividly active and thoroughly dislocated, merely by repeating (but for a neat change of pronouns) the very same descriptive phrases as before. Here is a case of a "simple" image lightly bearing the weight of a considerable idea.
One further stage remains to be charted in the series of variations on this rhythm. The two characters whose lives prior to this voyage are, in retrospect, most closely explored, are those of the Englishman Watchett and the Chinaman Ao Ling. Hughes delineates in brief and selective but fascinating biographies the growth and development of religious feeling in children of utterly different races."Where men's environment, their education, differ fundamentally, flowers from the same hidden root will seem to bear no kinship: will differ 'fundamentally' too" (p. 179). Yet though the visible flowers differ, their roots-the "powerful innate forces in us", "plastic and chameleon-like" though they may be-are common to all men. The general anthropological and psychological observation has been made. It remains for Hughes to press his truth home. We've already seen how that "prime mover" which we call sexuality affected Dick Watchett. In his subconscious mind the naked dolphins and the furred lemur became inextricably entangled with the supple body of Sukie. Towards the novel's end Ao Ling, handcuffed on his prison cot, is dreaming: "He was surprised to find a Fukienese girl on the cot beside him. He raised himself on one elbow, to embrace her: but the fine hair on her face and hands warned him that she was but a fox in human shape" (p. 269). Assiduous readers may well discover here a curious anticipation of the next novel Richard Hughes was to write. But that is an aside. How deliciously "Fukienese" chimes with "Sukie"! And can we not be reminded by the fox-girl of the lemur-girl who hopped away from Dick in his day-dream? Thus, Hughes's idea-image compel us to connect the subconscious selves of young men outwardly very different from one another. Whilst at the same time, through a subtle policy of repetition by variation, he binds together his novel by strong rhythmic threads.
Let us now turn to idea-images of a different order. When In Hazard first appeared, reviewers varied in their responses to the book's technical or scientific content. V. S. Pritchett commented that Hughes had "revived our lost sense of wonder [before storms] by turning to the scientific though none the less imaginative view".13 He found no difficulty in reconciling the author's accounts of "hot air, cold air, pressures and sea-levels" with his telling of a story. John Brophy in a somewhat liverish review, however, encountered "reservations" to his enjoyment: "Mr. Hughes lectures well, about engine-rooms and meterology and so on, but these disquisitions irritate and hold up the story".14 Which of these responses should we prefer? Is it possible to accommodate these "lectures" to the notion of idea-images that I have propounded? We can, I think, regard the technical passages as a rhythmic series within the aesthetic whole of the novel. The hurricane as scientifically explicable phenomenon complements the hurricane as aesthetic phenomenon and elemental force. Hughes's storm is nothing if not beautiful, and in its possession of this formal quality it can be said to differ from Conrad's famous typhoon, which, in the sense of this word as it's defined by Kant in his Kritik of Judgment (in a distinction dear to the heart of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophers), represents a reaching after the sublime.15 Certainly Hughes's scientific "disquisitions" possess some of the mannerisms of the lecturer-phrases like "The thing to remember...". "And then consider this". Yet if we look closely at a representative passage we shall find that this is only part, and a small part at that, of the picture; we shall not, I think, find such passages lacking in imaginative style or poetic energy-in that kind of beauty we recognize as typical of Richard Hughes's creative art. Here is the circular storm as scientific idea-image:
Air moving in from all round towards a central point: and in the middle, air rising: that is the beginning. Then two things happen. The turning of the earth starts the system turning: not fast at first, but in a gentle spiral. And the warm air which has risen, saturated with moisture from the surface of the sea, cools. Cooling, high up there, its moisture spouts out of it in rain. Now. when the water in air condenses, it releases the energy that held it there, just as truly as the explosion of petrol releases energy. Millions of horse-power up there loose. As in a petrol motor, that energy is translated into motion: up rises the boundless balloon still higher, faster spins the vortex. (pp. 34-5)
The rhythm of this extract is that of the gradually intensifying motion which it describes. We begin calmly with air moving in and air rising; to which, then, the turning earth imparts a gentle spiral movement. The risen air cools, condenses, and releases its energy-for that energy itself to be translated into motion: and so to the urgent "faster spins the vortex". Within the paragraph at large subordinate idea-images, introduced as clarifying metaphor or simile, add their sensual energies to those of the atmospheric disturbance-the boundless balloon (a challenging notion!), the explosion of petrol in an engine. And then there are the individual rhythms of sentence and phrase, reinforced by the typical rhetorical resources of the poet. The "technical" parts of In Hazard illustrate, if at times in a modest way, the same aesthetic motives visible in the novel at large.
The third quality essential to the successful work of art in Hughes's view was that an artist's conception of rhythm in the various dimensions of his work "must be reinforced by their own interplay". The governing rhythmic conception of In Hazard was, I suggested, the conflict between the Archimedes and her crew and the raw elements. At the risk of simplifying matters we may say that two of the "dimensions" opposed in the story are the forces of the natural world and the products of human technology-perhaps the single most graphic focal point of this antithesis being the ship's funnel, whose guys are designed to withstand a strain of a hundred tons. The last passage I want to glance at reflects fascinatingly on Hughes's desire to create an interplay between these dimensions. At the same time it provides an illuminating comparison with the passage I've just quoted. There we saw what Hughes could produce when he applies (though that is far too crudely mechanistic a verb), without exaggeration, distortion, or any sense of straining after effects, the varied resources of a natural rhetoric to what might otherwise have been a dry piece of explication. The passage, as V. S. Pritchett allowed, was imaginative; yet I wouldn't want to claim that the full transforming powers of creative imagination were involved there. Those powers are decidedly present in the following extract, however: we are in Mr. MacDonald's engine-room, giving our full attentions to his ship's propeller-shaft:
Think of a tree. The roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. This nourishment passes, unified, up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. So all the varying forces, the stresses and resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the while and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ship's wake. (p. 8)
In order to attempt to express the order of aesthetic pleasure to be gained from this piece of writing I must return to the claim I made early on in this essay, that Richard Hughes is a poet of the novel. Speaking for myself, the effect of this passage is something like that of an elaborate metaphysical conceit-with two provisions: first that Hughes sustains the conceit to greater length than is normal in seventeenth-century verse, and second that in the vivacious sensuousness of his English he is closer to Marvell than to Donne. Heterogenous things are yoked by violence together-yet the violence has disappeared, absorbed in the effortlessness of the art: we feel no sense of intellectual gymnastics at work to produce an effect-the art is seamless, unselfregarding, unselfconscious. Entities soon to be terrifically opposed on the broad canvas of the novel, the creations on the one hand of inorganic technology ("that welter of machinery") and on the other of organic nature (trees and water), are momentarily not merely compared, are unified, audaciously interfused. It is a paradox that must have given Hughes himself a great deal of pleasure.
And so to my conclusion. I've not sought to give an interpretation of In Hazard: my task has rather been to examine the practical working of a particular aesthetic theory. Art, the young Richard Hughes believed, should strive to realize beauty. Beauty inhered in "a kind of rhythm", whose elements were eidola or "idea-images". Three qualities were said to characterise the successful work of art: first, the individual images must be vivid in themselves; second, they must be organized under a governing rhythmic conception; and third, "the conception of rhythm in all these dimensions must be influenced by their own interplay". I hope that my discussion has done enough to suggest the triumphant presence of this trio of essentials. We should not, then, if my conclusion is justified, be surprised to discover that Richard Hughes himself believed In Hazard to be his most well-constructed and most unified work of art.
Notes
1 An Introduction to the English Novel, Volume One (London 1951), p. 15.
2 Ibid., p. 26.
3 "A Day in London Life', Saturday Review of Literature (New York), 14 May 1925.
This is conveniently reprinted in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Majumdar and McLaurin (London 1975) pp. 158-60.
4 See A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford 1888). pp. 1, 8-9.
5 Ibid., pp. 630-31.
6 Mary Warnock, Imagination (London 1976), p. 133.
7 Time Incorporated, New York, p. xviii.
8 Page references are to the original Chatto and Windus (London) edn. of 1938.
9 Op. cit., p. xxi.
10 Ibid., p. xix.
11 V. S. Pritchett in The Bystander, 20 July 1938.
12 Richard Church in John O'London's Weekly, 15 July 1938.
13 The Bystander, 20 July 1938.
14 The Daily Telegraph, 15 July 1938.
15 See especially §23 in the "Analytic of the Sublime".
This article originally appeared in Planet No. 45/46 (November 1978) pp. 68-77.
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Morality and Selfhood in the Novels of Richard Hughes
The central concern of Richard Hughes's writings, from his earliest play The Sisters' Tragedy (written in 1922) down to his most recent novel The Wooden Shepherdess, is with the vexed question of moral values in a world where 'good' and 'evil' can no longer he seen as absolutes, or even as polar opposites. The difficulty of a fixed concept of 'personal morality', he sees, lies as much in the word 'personal' as in the word 'morality'. He finds, in practice, that an investigation of the nature of human mores is inseparable from an investigation of the nature of human personality. If the forces that shape the latter-psychological and environmental alike-vary from culture to culture, from social class to social class, so must 'moral values' themselves. The notion of 'morality' must then be replaced by one of 'moralities', each of which will be relative to particular circumstances. And in a world of multiple moralities it shouldn't be surprising if, from time to time, what is 'good' and what is 'evil' should turn out to be one and the same thing viewed from different angles, from irreconcilable perspectives.
Richard Hughes's novels, which are as essentially concerned with ideas as they are to present those ideas by traditional means-story and plot, characterization, dialogue, narrative description-consistently refuse to simplify. The complexity of the human predicament demands a corresponding complexity in the novel. Hughes sees no reason why the novel shouldn't encourage a high order of ambiguity. The novelist's role is to ask questions, not to answer them.
Hughes's first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), sets out to explore some of the many confusions, paradoxes, ironies and absurdities to which conventional assumptions about the nature of 'good' and 'evil' can give rise. At the same time, in offering an account of the emergence of personality in the child that takes in the revolutionary theories of Freud and Darwin, it seeks ironically to explode the Romantic nineteenth-century literary tradition of the child as "originally innocent" which developed in the writings of Rousseau, Blake and Wordsworth and had attained senility in the indulgent sentimentalities of popular Victorian novelists such as Marie Corelli, Mrs. Henry Wood and J. M. Barrie. 1 Adults in an orderly, rational, 'civilised' society, the novel argues, assume children to be by nature good, by definition innocent; outlaws to be by nature evil, by definition guilty (ignoring the obvious truth that outlaws too were children once). Such assumptions are shown even to operate in a court of law, the institution traditionally regarded as the last bastion of objectivity and fairness in a civilised country: preconvinced that the pirates are guilty of murdering the Dutch Captain, Vandervoort - for who else could have done it? - the court is prepared to hang them on the thinnest tissue of 'evidence' it can get. In this case that 'evidence' lies in the inarticulate and hysterical babblings of a ten-year-old (babblings which, had the court known what the reader knows, it might have interpreted not as an indictment but as a confession). The disastrousness of conventional assumptions about what constitutes 'good' and what 'evil' is sharply and wittily driven home.
Richard Hughes's children are capable of murder; his pirates of kindness and selflessness. Only a superficial assessment of A High Wind in Jamaica, however, could see its author's method as a simple inversion of a state of affairs prevailing in the 'real' world. A High Wind isn't in the least schematic; it doesn't present us with the emblematic world of an inverted morality.
Hughes depicts children as growing slowly out of amorality and egocentricity into a developing awareness of the existence of a thing called 'society' which can make upon them justifiable demands, out of 'animality' into 'humanity'. They possess 'moral sense' in differing amounts according to the degree of development they've attained. Laura, the three-year-old, hasn't yet emerged from that animal state during which, in Freudian terms, the child is still dominated by the id, the seat of the passions: 2 in Mr. Hughes's words: "babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind" (Chapter 7 Section i). 3 The children in the novel between the ages of five and nine possess a limited moral awareness which consists in reproducing their parents' moral dictates in their attitudes, opinions, judgments and prejudices. Thus the children are scandalised when Jonsen utters the unmentionable word "drawers" (5. i). Rachel, the only girl in this group, is said to have two overriding interests-the first domestic, the second moral:
She had an extraordinary vivid, simple sense, that child, of Right and Wrong-it almost amounted to a precocious ethical genius. Every action, her own or any one else's, was immediately judged good or bad, and uncompromisingly praised or blamed. She was never in doubt. (7. i.)
Her awareness isn't sufficiently developed to be able to distinguish shades of good and bad, or to question the validity of the code upon which her judgments are based. It's natural that her view of the pirates should mirror that of society at large-and ironic that it should anticipate that of the court in particular: ''It was now tacitly admitted that these men were pirates. That is, they were wicked." (ibid.) If conscience as yet poses no problems for Rachel, however, it holds real terrors for ten-year-old Emily.
Emily's realisation of her separateness, her uniqueness of identity, is the key event in the novel. Its momentousness is emphasized by its placement at the book's precise mathematical centre. Emily feels with a moral complexity inconceivable in Rachel. She can, for example, experience paradoxical feelings of divinity and devilishness at one and the same time:
She might go weeks together in a happy unconsciousness, she might have flashes of vision when she knew she was God Himself: but at the same time she knew, beyond all doubt, in her innermost being, that she was damned, that there never had been anyone as wicked as her since the world began. (7.i)
Emily's capacity for guilt is indeed great. 4 Her realisation of her selfhood doesn't give her a new sense of freedom: instead it makes her intensely aware of the interconnectedness of her destiny with the fates of things and persons outside herself, with "the whole fabric of a daily life"; it is a rudimentary awareness of human society. Nevertheless, the first movement of her newly-fledged identity is a movement of defence, of self-concealment. Emily is a person', but she daren't let anyone know. "Why should she hide it?" asks the narrator. "She never really asked herself why: but instinct prompted her strongly of the necessity." (ibid.) Her conscious attainment of her selfhood adds a new dimension to her capacity for fear.
It's from Emily's self-protective instinct (the drive Freud subsumes under the term 'Life instinct', "Eros") that the 'immoral' events of the novel's second half stem-her killing of the Dutch Captain, and the court's condemnation of the pirates to death. The first is a reflex act of self-defence-defence of that "rather pleasing little casket of flesh" (6. i) which houses Emily's consciousness. The second is ensured by her neurotic inability to tell the whole truth-a truth she believes would incriminate herself and again jeopardise her new self. Ironically, the very weakness of the self-preservative instinct in the pirates, and in Jonsen particularly, can be seen as a crucial factor in their downfall. Their altruistic act of self-exposure on the high seas in order to hand the children back to civilisation' demonstrates, in the novel's thoroughly Darwinistic world, that the streak of humanity in their nature is fatal to them. They are, ironically, hopelessly corrupted by good.
Yet the final moral status of both Emily and the pirates is complex in the extreme. It's much too simple, of course, to conclude that because Emily is a murderess she is 'evil'. It's arguable that sheer fortuity-a mere combination of circumstances-determines that her sense of her wickedness shall prevail over her sense of her godliness. Her act of murder is certainly evil in the way that any act of murder is that deprives an 'innocent' human being of that which is most precious to him or her: life. But the sequence of events which leads to the murder-the injury to her leg producing the "feverish and nervous condition" (7.ii) which the Dutch Captain's gropings for a knife are to heighten to uncontrollable terror-show her not to be malicious, and her act not to be evil by intent. That part of her motivation (supposing that the strands might be separated) which stems from a desire for self-preservation-the preservation of an individuality made the more precarious and precious because Emily has only just entered into possession of it-is totally authentic and rational, and it's the act of any normal person in a situation of kill or be killed. That part of her motivation which is irrational, stemming from Emily's pathological certainty that the Dutchman is going to kill her, is equally authentic-authentic because a child's consciousness isn't that of an adult: things inconceivable in the adult world aren't so in the child's, for the child's world isn't the same: children's minds "are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact)" (7. i). In a very real way Emily's murder-act is a product of 'innocence', but this innocence must be defined in psychological rather than moral terms: as the child's lack of understanding of the way the world works and of the logic attendant on such knowledge-a lack continually emphasized by Hughes.
The pirates, though certainly not guilty as charged, are thieves and outlaws. If we're inclined to stress the injustice of the court's finding we should recall the summary justice they themselves mete out to the person they believe to be the culprit: Margaret. They, like the court, are guilty of conventional thinking: it isn't simply the seeming circumstantiality of Margaret's presence near the scene of the crime which leads them to believe her the murderer: they presume that if she's capable of belying her age in her sexual behaviour (and she a mere thirteen year old) she must be capable of belying it in even more monstrous and contemptible ways: her very youth seems to them to make her crime more, rather than less, horrific. They no more ask themselves the reason why she should kill a bound man than the murder court asks itself the reason why the pirates should have killed Vandervoort. In the event it is sheer chance which interposes a boat between Margaret and certain death by drowning and prevents the pirates from being murderers themselves. The 'justice' meted out by the court then, ironically, is neither better nor worse than that meted out by the pirates it condemns. It just so happens that only some of them are favoured with the luck of a life-saving boat: transportation.
When Emily kills the Captain, her act is the logical outcome of a certain sequence of events; when the pirates throw Margaret overboard, it's a reflex action stimulated by horror and disgust: when the court condemns the pirates to death, it's acting in accordance with the neutral and inexorable dictates of 'justice'. In none of these situations is there any place for the exercise of a moral choice. The world of A High Wind in Jamaica is to a large extent deterministic, if not overwhelmingly so. This is indeed inevitable in a novel which draws so much of its inspiration from the insights of Freudism and Darwinism, systems which are in essence deterministic. 5 This same fact explains why the novel's narrator never makes a moral judgment about anything he recounts: 6 a writer who sees the world in deterministic terms must necessarily forgo the right to judge for his characters will be what his world has made them, not what they've made themselves. So, before the execution, the negro cook declares: "'You know that I die innocent: anything I have done, I was forced to do by the rest of you.'" (10.vii) The circumstances which combine to make a murderess out of Emily are the same ones which make martyrs out of the pirates.
There are, however, two points in A High Wind where it might be argued that characters exercise a moral choice. The first is the Bas-Thornton parents' decision to send their offspring to England. The determinist might argue that, as responsible parents, this is the only course of action open to them after the hurricane has revealed to them the insecurity of life on Jamaica. The irony of the decision, however, lies in the way events conspire to make a mockery of the Thorntons' good intentions. Disaster strikes nevertheless. Is human action powerless to avert the onset of evil? A second apparently free choice is that made by Captain Jonsen to return the children to civilisation. Here the determinist might argue that after the murder of Vandervoort the pirates are very much aware that they are marked men: to be found with the children aboard will lay them open to a certain and unanswerable charge of kidnapping (Jonsen doesn't remember the death of young John till the ship-to-ship transfer has taken place). In any case, life aboard the schooner is becoming by the day more difficult for self-respecting buccaneers. Again, however, the decision is fraught with irony, for it leads only to the speedier capture of the pirates: Emily betrays them as soon as she gets back into the women's quarters. Again circumstances conspire to mock good intentions: the desire to do good is productive of evil. The pirates would have been better off tossing the children over the side, sewn up (as Jonsen himself at one point jokingly suggests) in little bags.
A High Wind in Jamaica confronts us then, in dissolving normally-accepted distinctions between what is 'good' and what is 'evil', first, with a world in which things aren't what they seem, in which a person's moral nature can't be determined from his or her outward appearance or social role; second, with a world in which the actions and fates of human beings seem largely determined by things beyond their control; and third, with a world in which even arguably 'free' moral choices made with the best of intentions turn out nevertheless to be productive of evil.
2.
Like A High Wind, In Hazard (1938) resists simple identifications of good and evil. The hurricane which besets the Archimedes is in itself, like that in the earlier novel, a neutral force. Viewed from a human standpoint, however, it becomes ambiguous, for it can be seen as either a good or an evil according to whether it is productive of moral growth or degeneration in the seamen on the embattled steamer. For Captain Edwardes, to whom it brings an unsought and unexpected fulfilment, a fulfilment no other order of experience could have given him, it must be seen as a positive good. So, too, for the junior officer Dick Watchett, in whom it makes possible a growth into 'maturity' (though 'maturity', the narrator implies, agreeing with Conrad in The Shadow Line, can't be regarded as an absolute, or an achievement secure once attained 7). But for Mr Rabb the supernumerary, whom it plunges into a state of paralysing fear and reduces to a grovelling animal, and whose career it effectively destroys, it must be seen as a positive evil. The hurricane is an ambiguous force in another way. Edwardes discovers from Captain Abraham, the commander of the ship that comes to the rescue of the Archimedes when the storm has dropped, that a tidal wave created by it has engulfed a whole town, killing its two thousand inhabitants. "That same tidal wave, which, by lifting them over the reefs, had saved their lives!" (13.iii) Edwardes attributes this miracle, and his loss of not a single man (the Chief Engineer, Mr McDonald, has yet to fall overboard), to the fact that "the Lord our God is very merciful!" (ibid.): the present writer is inclined to attribute as much, and as little, relevance to this belief as to the celebrated and conflicting ones by Edgar and Gloster about the morality of the gods presumed to govern the universe of King Lear.
Whether such a phenomenon as a hurricane is 'good' or 'evil' is, then, a relative question. It is through the medium of the hurricane, however, that Hughes is able to isolate a moral positive that serves to offset the mockery that is the moral world of A Wind in Jamaica.
Freud saw the basic aim of psycho-analysis as being to render conscious in a person what previously had been unconscious.8 The paradoxical value of the extreme phenomenon lies in its potential as catalyst, in its ability to force to the surface of a man's mind moral truths about himself that before have lain dormant.9 The process of self-discovery is a making conscious of the unconscious. Emily's realisation is an enforced instance of this kind: the narrator says there was "little reason... why it should not have happened to her five years earlier, or even five later; and none why it should have come that particular afternoon." (6. i) The discovery made by Mr Buxton, first mate of the Archimedes, of the reason why he first went to sea is of the same order of importance for In Hazard as Emily's realisation of her identity for A High Wind 10 "It was because he liked virtue: and was not the Economic Man." (10.i) Mr Buxton had always wanted to be a professional man; the crucial difference between the two is that "whereas the Economic Man looks on work as the means to get money, the professional man looks on money as the means to do work." (ibid.) The narrator readily recognises the paradoxes inherent in Buxton's chosen profession:
As a profession, though, sea-going seems something of an anomaly: for is not its mainspring Trade? Yes, it is a Colossus with each foot planted in a different set of values. I mean, the raison d'être of it is economic, and yet the practice of it is judged by standards which are not economic at all, which can only be called moral: and which are peculiar to it. For the working of a ship calls for certain qualities-virtues, if you like-which do not seem to be appropriate today to the relations of employers and employed on shore. The shore-labourer's liability is limited: the seaman's is unlimited. The seaman may be called on to give the utmost that he is able, even to laying down his life. That is not an imposition on him, a piece of chicanery on the part of his employers: it is inherent in the profession he practises. A necessary draw-back?-Oddly enough, it even seems to be the reason why certain men, such as Mr Buxton, embrace that profession in the first place. (10.i)
Mr Buxton's reason for going to sea would seem to hold true, in greater or lesser degree, for many seamen-whether consciously aware of it or not. But why should a man be drawn to the practice of virtue? The narrator gives the only answer he's capable of: "I can only suppose that Virtue (using the word in its Roman rather than its Victorian sense) is a natural instinct with some men: they really cannot be happy unless they can give it an outlet." Natural instinct: it's the same thing that caused Emily's concealment of the fact of her selfhood. Hughes seems concerned to emphasize that the human urge towards virtue is also a fundamental force: Mr Buxton's discovery is of something innate. His positive act of instinct balances Emily's negative act. Going to sea for Buxton is as altruistic as it is possible for any human act to be which results from a whole complex of motivating factors, conscious and unconscious-as altruistic as that of the pirates in risking capture to give up the children; unlike the pirates' action, however, it isn't mocked by circumstances. It's true, of course, that the Archimedes "remains afloat as much by accident as endeavour", 11 and that there's real irony here; it's true that the fight put up by the seamen (though not Captain Edwardes) is motivated by a desire to save their skins; yet there are truths that antedate both of these, truths that are causes where these are effects, truths implicit in Buxton's discovery. They are these: not only that selfhood must be risked in order that men may grow, but that for some men the risk is integral to the way their lives must be lived. 12
But it must be acknowledged that there is no absolute which can be termed 'altruism'. The pirates had strong selfish reasons for wanting the children off their schooner; Mr Buxton in going to sea was responding to a deep-seated psychological need. The philanthropist who gives away thousands satisfies a personal desire. The world of In Hazard can be seen to be as deterministic in its nature as that of A High Wind. How far can it be said that Mr Buxton truly "chose" his profession? "Natural instinct," on the one hand, drove him to seek a profession that would allow him to practise virtue; social circumstances, on the other, restricted his field of choice, for, as the narrator says, "Sea-going is almost the only profession open to the poor man." (10. i) Only if he'd been a different man, we must conclude, could Buxton have 'chosen' other than he did.
The relative nature of human moral values is most thoroughly illustrated in In Hazard by way of a contrast between the Englishman Dick Watchett and the Chinaman Ao Ling. They are the same age, yet their life-styles have been so utterly different that it's impossible to conceive of any mutual understanding existing between them. So the narrator states: "Where men's environment, their education, differ fundamentally, flowers from the same hidden root will seem to bear no kinship: will differ fundamentally' too." (10.iii) If Dick's childhood is fairly typical of an English boy's, Ling's is most untypical of that of a young Chinese. Dick's progression through various stages of religious belief, through changing conceptions of God. is authentically, even familiarly traced (though here, as with Emily, Hughes's ability to depict the workings of the child mind is startlingly original). If Dick, however, is "a very normal young man" (14.iv), conventional and orthodox in his attitudes and behaviour, Ling is in every way a rebel-against his father, the gods, the prevailing political system. Yet Ling's unconventionality should be seen not as the response of a free and self-determining will, but as the result of psychological factors active in him from infancy. The key to his nature seems to lie in one of his earliest memories :
The whole family were straddling the thatched roof of their cottage. The yellow flood-water swirled around them, and the mud walls beneath them were melting away. I suppose their peril was pretty acute. Ling was lying in his mother's arms. He must have been very young then: for presently she save him suck.
However, hardly had the milk begun to come when suddenly his father tore him from her breast, and tossed him, howling furiously, into the rescue-boat which had just drawn near. (10.v)
The first paragraph is understated, lacking completely in tonal stress. When it comes, then, the father's action, accentuated by the energetic and alliterating verbs "tore" and "tossed", seems all the more gratuitously violent. The passage gains in impact from its placement at the chapter's end. How many Freudians would ignore the implication that Ling's rejection of all forms of authority is the result of an undissolved Oedipus complex?
Ling's first overt act of rebellion takes place during a year of famine when he is seven. After witnessing the almost magical ease with which a lone small gatekeeper repulses a crowd of more than a thousand starving people from the door of a rich and well-provided man, Ling goes out to the fields and destroys the country-gods-by whose presence he's afterwards haunted. At the age of twelve he runs away from home, travelling widely and getting work where he can. In 1927 he deserts from the Kuomintang flag to the Red Army-a further act of revolt which is to lead to his "conversion" (10.iii) to a new 'religion': 13 "He absorbed the Marxian doctrine like a thirsty animal drinking. It refreshed every corner of his soul. For it freed him from his three great fears: fear of his father, fear of the supernatural, fear of the rich." (11.i) With the Red Army he withstands the siege of Chingkangshan. Then, during a sortie, he's separated from his patrol. Arriving at length at Canton, he puts himself at the disposal of the Party, which provides him "with a set of a genuine-looking seaman's papers" (11.ii). And so he's signed on the Archimedes, where Dick Watchett in helping to take him prisoner needlessly knocks him out. The reciprocal moral standing of the two young men approaches the complexity of that of Emily and the pirates at the end of A High Wind: clearly 'right' no more lies with Dick than 'wrong' with Ling-they embody opposing moralities, each of which possesses its own validity. 14 Though I can't claim to understand Ling's stunningly surreal dream in his prison-cell (14.v: it seems designed to resist analysis), we can, I think, discern in the weird dream-figure of Captain Edwardes a composite of Ling's "three great fears". The figure is supernatural in origin and powers, rich in appearance (wearing "a pair of silk Chinese trousers, from which flashed dazzling rays of gold light"), and appears as a sadistic father-figure which, tearing the scales off a glowing dragon from the sea, wrings from it the despairing sobs of Ling's "own infantile voice, weeping to him out of the far years of the past". We are thrown back to the flood-time episode. Ling's belief that Marxism had freed him from his fears is revealed as a sad delusion: his unconscious, released in dream, demonstrates the powerlessness of political doctrine to exorcise psychological demons. Richard Hughes couldn't but find himself in agreement with Freud's dictum that "the Unconscious is the infantile mental life".15 Ao Ling provides us with a classic example of how (in Wordsworth's phrase) "the child is father of the man"-of the psychic determinism such a truth implies.
3.
The actions in A High Wind in Jamaica and In Hazard take place in relatively delimited situations. The two volumes so far published of Hughes's long historical novel The Human Predicament widen the author's canvas greatly: significant events take place in a variety of countries-England, Wales, Germany, America, Morocco. The Fox in the Attic (1961) confines itself to a narrative of events in the November of 1923, centring on Hitler's abortive putsch in Munich. The Wooden Shepherdess (1973) carries the story on to the June of 1934, culminating in a reconstruction of The Night of the Long Knives - Hitler's ruthless purge of the Nazi party. The ideological centre of The Human Predicament is to be found in Chapters 26-28 of Book I of The Fox in the Attic. Here Richard Hughes makes his fullest and most explicit theoretical statement about the nature of the self. He rejects 'extreme' conceptions of the relation of the individual self to things and persons outside itself: that, on the one hand, of Cartesian philosophy, which confines the concept of self wholly within the "incontestably cogitating 'I'"; and that, on the other, of Humanism, which pretends "to awareness of every one as universal 'we' " (Ch. 26). The truth for Hughes lies somewhere between the two: "Selfhood is not wholly curtailed within the I." The problem is, then, where the line is to be d