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 drawn between that community of human beings and things with which the individual can identify himself-the communal 'we' and 'ours'-and those who lie in "regions of opposite emotional charge"-a recognisable 'they'. Reason is powerless here, says Hughes; only emotion can decide. The answer is
wherever in a given context the opposing emotional charges for the moment place it: wherever it brings into balance the feelings of owning and disowning, the feelings of loving and hating, trusting and fearing... 'right' and 'wrong'. (ibid.)
This is the dictum of a moral relativist. The traditional moral absolutes can no more claim sovereignty of place in this historical novel than in A High Wind or In Hazard.
One of the achievements of The Human Predicament is that it accounts for the emergence of the artistic sensibility that produced, among other things, A High Wind in Jamaica It's the sensibility of a generation of men brought up during the years of the first World War to regard "unnatural death" as "a public institution" (Fox, Book I Chapter 26), and to expect a life-span of only nineteen years. Yet though The Human Predicament contains autobiographical elements (pre-eminently Augustine's adventures in Morocco) it's much more ambitious than an autobiography could hope to be. In order most thoroughly to account for himself, a man must account for the period in which he lives: here nothing less than the creative objectivity of the novel will suffice. The Human Predicament sets itself to explore the psychological, moral, social and political forces that shaped an era.
Augustine Penry-Herbert, the novel's 'hero', is one of those boys conditioned to accept death at the age of nineteen. When the Great War suddenly ends, therefore, he's faced with the problem of what to do with his unexpected lease of life. Augustine, a member of the British upper-class, is happily released by inherited wealth from the necessity of earning a living. Disabled by education and temperament from placing an easy faith in the traditional values of his class (previous generations appear to him, in the Darwinian terms favoured by Hughes, "like different species [Fox 1.4]) Augustine embodies the moral and intellectual uncertainty of the post-war generation. His continuing quest, then, is for some experience that will give shape and meaning to his life. Yet restless travelling only reveals the bewildering variety of moral perspectives that exist in the world. His inner conflict of duty and desire intensifies rather than eases as time goes on. Perhaps his fundamental intellectual error is his idealistic belief, shared by his friend Jeremy Dibden, that an "age of illimitable human progress and fulfilment" is now dawning, an age in which "the very words 'God' and 'guilt' must atrophy and ultimately drop off the language" (Fox I. 19). In a moment of luminous insight he perceives that
theirs was the first generation in the whole cave-to-cathedral history of the human race completely to disbelieve in sin. Actions nowadays weren't thought of as 'right' or 'wrong' any more: they were merely judged social or anti-social, personal fulfilment or frustration . . . (ibid.)
But, as Jeremy argues, "that lands us with two dichotomies instead of one... and sometimes they clash". Augustine fails to realise that there is no one fixed entity called 'society', that what might be deemed 'social' in one culture, one country, one class, even one locality, might not be deemed 'social' in another. Augustine is repeatedly to be brought face to face with the implications of the fact that 'personal' and 'social' are at odds with one another, and that, far from being liberated from the tyranny of 'right' and 'wrong' as he thinks he is, he's firmly locked into subservient allegiance to a very definite code of values.
The formal structures of Fox and Shepherdess emphasize Richard Hughes's concern with the necessity of a working relationship between 'self and 'social'. The opening chapters of the first book of each novel focus upon the individual who has deliberately withdrawn from the social world. We begin with Augustine, first at his ancestral home Newton Llanthony in Pembrokeshire, later in the woods of Connecticut. In each case a chance encounter with a girl-child-the first dead, the second alive-compels him to reappraise his relationship with the social world, to recognise the existence of other persons towards whom, willy-nilly, he must take up an attitude. The formal movement of each separate volume is that of an ever-widening spiral. At the still central point stands the isolated individual, but with his first human contact the arm of the spiral branches out into action, circling out to touch lives at greater and greater distances as the central awareness is compelled to formulate attitudes to remoter and remoter happenings: the lone 'I' is forced to consider the implications of the personal pronouns 'we' and 'they'.
Augustine's meeting with Ree by the pool in the Connecticut Woods in the first chapter of The Wooden Shepherdess sets in motion a train of events that is to lead to his loss of virginity.16 This only comes about, however, after several false encounters that demonstrate not only that Augustine possesses a very definite set of mores-in this case sexual-but that they are very different from those of American teenagers. From the start he's "more than a little dumbfounded" (1.12) by the fact that boys and girls of school age should be allowed out together, unchaperoned, after dark. As for girls getting drunk-"It is shocking". "The British upper-class culture Augustine himself had been reared in had tended to 'sex its pubescents in half "-with consequent repressions for the boys. Despite his shocked surprise, however, Augustine isn't inclined to judge this conduct from a moral standpoint, but sees it (as we might have expected) in utilitarian terms: "The fact is he didn't know yet what to think: was this Progress or Decadence?" Uncommitted as it is, this nevertheless carries an ironic suggestion that part of him is attracted by what he sees: how far, indeed, is the stance a rationalisation aimed at quieting a troubled conscience? The dream he has the morning after a drinking session on the roof of his shack of undressing a dead girl who suddenly becomes very much alive testifies to the arousal of instincts too long repressed.17
It isn't until his misunderstanding with Janis, however, that the gulf between respective moral codes is fully brought out. Augustine, encouraged by her seemingly passionate and committed love-making, is shocked when she draws back "at the very last moment of all" (I. 18). Janis is shocked that he should attempt to overstep "the rules of the game"-rules which allow every satisfaction but that to be got from coitus itself. So,
how could those two make it up, when each of them felt so grossly ill-used and insulted by someone without any morals at all? Janis could never forgive his brash assumption that she was the stuff unmarried mothers are made of: Augustine could never accept the idea of a man being used as merely a "thing", without any nerves or needs of his own-as just an impersonal post for a girl to rub herself on. ... (ibid.)
When it comes to the crunch Augustine is seen to have a very clear idea of what's 'right' and what's 'wrong'. His idealism proves unequal to the trial of reality: the theory and practice of morals are things apart. Augustine's sexual morals are indisputably those of his country and class. In fact, of the two young people, it's Janis whose sexual mores are coloured by utilitarian considerations, Augustine's that reveal the stamp of 'purer' moral values. For the intellectual Augustine, "Conscience is an operable cancer" (Fox 1.19), and 'guilt' a word whose days of currency are numbered. His experiences with Ree, however, show guilt and conscience to be things very much alive in his own psychology-and if his generation, newly inspired by "The great revelation which was Freud!", can't overcome them, who shall? Ree's offer of her child-self in his shack on the night of his recovery of the whisky from the sunken Stutz-an offer pre-meditated on her part, but one with which his own loathness to tell her to leave and his initial move of acceptance towards imply his complicity-he feels "ashamed in. . . strangely conflicting ways" (Shepherdess I. 27): ashamed, once presumes, for causing her pain by rejecting her, for almost violating a child, and possibly for lacking the strength to translate his intellectual convictions into pragmatic terms. The complexity of his psychological response is a true reflection of the painful complexity of the human predicament. Ironically, despite his non-violation of Ree, he nevertheless feels afterwards a "load on his heart", a "leaden lump at the very core of his being" that seems to him "mightily close to what people like Mitzi [the German nun] must mean by 'sin'!" (1.28)
But there couldn't be 'sin' if there wasn't a God to offend-which there wasn't, of course. . . . And so, was it Freud whom Augustine in fact had offended against? Or the God Who Didn't Exist? Or would some wholly impartial observer, perhaps, have deemed him in Dutch with both? (ibid.)
Augustine finds himself in the crazy position of experiencing the sense of sin emotionally while denying its existence intellectually. As it can't be 'sin' in the accepted sense (for 'God' doesn't exist) he searches for an alternative power that might have brought it into being! Augustine had once condemned Russians for deifying Marx; now, he himself, ironically, is reduced to deifying Freud in a desperate and self-contradictory attempt to extricate himself from the moral and intellectual morass into which he's fallen. In recognising the claim on him of what looks suspiciously like a moral absolute ("A-child-is-a-child") despite his nagging doubts ("-or, IS it?") he enables the "cancer" of conscience he'd once so loftily dismissed as an anachronism to gain a signal victory over the iconoclastic forces of post-Freudian amorality, forces whose champion he'd fervently believed himself to be.
The polar figures in The Human Predicament are Adolf Hitler and Mitzi von Kessen. To insist that Hitler represents the extreme of 'evil' and Mitzi that of 'good', however, would be to simplify the complexity of the human predicament, and to predicate the existence of a vantage-point from which all human behaviour can confidently be evaluated. The polarity is at base one between kinds of selfhood. Hughes sees Hitler as an absolute solipsist: his self is "contained wholly within the ring-fence of his own minimal innermost I" (Fox I. 26). For such a being, for whom the words 'we' and 'my' are without meaning, "the asylum doors gape". Hitler's psycho-sexual aberrations are seen as functions of his solipisism:
how could that monistic 'I' of Hitler's ever without forfeit succumb to the entire act of sex, the whole essence of which is recognition of one 'Other'? Without damage I mean to his fixed conviction that he was the universe's unique sentient centre, the sole authentic incarnate Will it contained or had ever contained? Because this of course was the rationale of his supernal inner 'Power': Hitler existed alone. 'I am, none else beside me.' The universe contained no other persons than him, only things . . . (Fox III. 10.)
Hitler's selfhood is comparable to that of the amoral egoistic child as yet unaware of the existence outside himself of other persons with wants and needs as imperative as his own. Emily, newly aware of her uniqueness, toyed with the idea that she herself might be God-though aware at the same time of an innate wickedness in herself. Only further experience-that of being a murderer-resolved this inner dialectic. Hitler, it seems, has failed to grow up: in him the egoism and amorality of the child exist alongside a fully-developed (and therefore insane) intelligence!18 Since he exists alone only he is capable of action and creation: were he to die the universe would cease to be!19 Hitler's awareness of self is equivalent to the awareness that one is God.
Mitzi's awareness is diametrically opposite in character. Her greatest insight, stimulated by Uncle Otto's reading of Thomas-a-Kempis, is that she must forgo even a vestigial sense of self in order "to return to God" (Fox III. 18). Later, in face of an overwhelming apprehension of the great 'I AM' of God Himself, her personal '! am' fades into insignificance:
...now, when she probed to her own very innermost pinpoint 'I am', it was like looking into a tiny familiar room through a window and finding herself instead looking out-upon landscapes of infinite width: no longer her little 'I am' inside there at all, but only His great '! AM'.
The times when a separate 'Mitzi' still seemed to exist were no more than a lingering nightmare she hoped to be rid of for ever as soon as she woke up after His likeness, a nun: no longer her little 'I will' there ever again, but only His WORD (Shepherdess 11.1)
Mitzi's ideal, to destroy will in herself, opposes Hitler's-which is to maximise it, to be Will Incarnate. If in her early days at Carmel there's a danger in Mitzi's intense awareness of God's presence, it's inherent in a sublimity buttressed by extreme introspection. What the experienced nuns know she must acquire to balance this awareness-"our sense of community" (Shepherdess II. 5), a fruitful connection with others, a shared humility-she herself quickly realises. To be God is to exist in a finished state: what is omniscient is incapable of discovery and development: to be human is continually to be growing.
If Mitzi is a worshipper, Hitler is an object of worship. If Mitzi is herself a seeker after fulfilment and salvation, Hitler is an instrument of fulfilment and salvation for others. The Labour Camp Commandant that Augustine and his party meet at Ulm in June 1934 declares that Hitler is "What a Christian would call a 'saint'-there's no other word for the manifest supernatural power working through him" (Shepherdess III. 20). "What Hitler has done for us all is to wake us out of the nightmare we've lived in for sixteen years. He has started us Germans hoping again, when we'd almost forgotten how to hope." This Saviour is to cure Germany through the quasi-religious methods of the purge: pogrom and firing-squad.
Contrasting with the perversion of religious emotion on which Nazism feeds is the Christian tradition itself, its moral absolutism embodied in Mitzi. Her methods of personal purgation are the spiritual means of prayer, self-discipline and contemplation hallowed by centuries of devotion. Her road too can lead to sainthood, as the Reverend Mother of Carmel reminds herself, thinking of another girl (St Therese of Lisieux) who, a bare generation earlier, had experienced difficulties in getting admitted to Carmel-and yet was now a canonised Saint. At the end of The Wooden Shepherdess it's the Christian tradition which, through Mitzi. is given the last word. It would be naive to conclude from this, however, that Richard Hughes believes that a reversion to orthodox Christian faith is the answer to the dilemmas of the human predicament. Mitzi's spirituality isn't only inspired by an intensity of faith impossible for the vast majority of human beings, but in the novel so far it has been insulated from the Yeatsian world of blood and mire.20 For most of us the confused and uncertain Augustine-for whom the extreme creeds of Mitzi and the Nazis are equally untenable-will remain the key figure: for him, and for us, the exploration must go on.
Notes
1 See, for a stimulating account of the child in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, The Image of Childhood by Peter Coveney (Peregrine 1967).
2 J. A. C. Brown describes the id as a "primeval conglomeration" or "seething mass of impulses or instinctual drives entirely lacking in any directing or guiding consciousness": Freud and the Post-Freudians (Pelican 1961) p. 28.
3 Only the 'otherness' of Laura can therefore be evoked. Mr. Hughes does it in a superb and audacious passage comparing the alienness of a baby to that of an octopus (7. i).
4 In Freudian terms: Emily's 'super-ego'-a critical censor only in part conscious-is now fully active. "An explanation of the normal conscious sense of guilt (conscience) presents no difficulties; it is due to tension between the ego and the ego-ideal [super-ego] and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego pronounced by its criticising function." (Freud, The Ego and the Id (Hogarth Press 1927) p. 73.)
5 Re Freudism: "The principle of causality is not, of course, strictly speaking a scientific law but rather a necessary assumption without which no science would be possible. But Freud was the first to apply it to the study of personality in the form of a literal and uncompromising psychic determinism which accepted no mental happenings as 'accidental'." (Brown, op. cit., p. 3.)
6 For an examination of this narrative voice, see the essay 'Irony in A High Wind in Jamaica' above.
7 After the storm the narrator comments: "It was as if Dick's voice had broken now. He had some fine new manly notes. But the old top-notes were gone. Not, perhaps, for good: the shift had been artificial. In time, security might restore him to his natural range." (14. iv)
8 For the patient "everything pathogenic in the unconscious must be transferred into consciousness". Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: 2nd Ed. (London 1933) p.239.
9 War can act similarly. Mr. Hughes himself has pointed out the symbolic nature of his hurricane in a fascinating and revealing Preface to the American edition of In Hazard (New York 1966, pp. xv-xxiii). His own growth into a realisation of the hurricane as a symbol of the approaching forces of war and violence is a fine instance of the growth of an unconscious truth into consciousness.
10 Cf. "And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realised who she was." (6.1.) And: "Mr Buxton, sucking his apple on the bridge, suddenly realised for the first time why he had gone to sea (he had been at sea now for twenty-five years'" (10.i.)
The ways in which Emily's and Buxton's insights come to them also demand comparison. Cf. "It must not be supposed that she argued it all out in this ordered, but rather long-winded fashion. Each consideration came to her in a momentary flash, quite innocent of words" (6.i). And: "being so hungry he thought in jerks, flashes of insight which were not connected up as I am putting them here." (10.i)
11 Richard Hughes, by Peter Thomas (University of Wales Press 1973) p. 66.
12 Buxton's "natural instinct" can't, I think, be accounted for by saying that Hughes is merely making provision for the Death instinct (Thanatos) which Freud sets in theoretical opposition to the Life instinct (Eros). Sea-going is not analogous to warfare. Brown describes the Death instinct as "an innate destructiveness and aggression directed primarily against the self" (op. cit., p. 27).
13 In Mr. Hughes's next novel, The Fox in the Attic, the central character Augustine and his friend Jeremy loftily agree that Marxism, "a science still fossilised at the Victorian, dogmatic level of mere answers", provides a perfect retreat for the religious-minded Russian people. (Book I Chapter 19.1)
14 Walter Allen comments: "Ao Ling may perhaps represent another variant of virtue." Tradition and Dream (Pelican 1965) p. 84.
15 Op. cit., p. 178.
16 "A watersnake flashed in the dwindled summer cascade scarcely tinkling into the one pool deep enough to swim in." Already in this second sentence unobtrusive Freudian symbolism is at work.
17 The dream connects for Augustine the two significant encounters with dead Rachel and live Ree. His discovery, when he starts to undress her, "that instead of bare skin underneath this child was downy all over with delicate fur; and a fur attractively soft to the touch, like a mole's..." places him in direct line of descent from Dick Watchett and Ao Ling. Ling also dreams: "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." (14.v) Dick animalizes Sukie in the waking dreams he experiences whilst pouring oil. At one point she "hopped away on her unnaturally elongated feet, nervously folding and unfolding her ears.' (8.i) "Sukie" and "Fukienese" chime fascinatingly.
18 Hitler's childishness is brought out both obviously and obliquely. When taken from the Hanfstaengls' house at Lifting after the putsch he's described as "trailing Putzi's prized English rug by one comer like a child who has been playing Indians" (Fox III. 11). An unidentified character wrongly names Hitler 'Egon' in Fox II. 19; an ironic resonance is thus established between Hitler and little Egon Hanfstaengl, who adores him. (The closeness of 'Egon' and 'ego' was surely an ironic windfall for Richard Hughes!) In Shepherdess II. 14 Egon is inspired into a destructive frenzy by one of his beloved uncle Dolf's uncontrollable tirades. He is described as having gone "berserk, completely cuckoo". Later, Hitler himself is likened to a cuckoo-chick (Shepherdess III. 16).
19 Thus his behaviour on the Sunday after the purge. In his account of the descent on Wiessee, only he appears to have acted: "Everything rested on me, as alone and unarmed I rushed the swine before they could fire a shot." As Friedrich realises, Hitler is possessed by the awareness that he might have been killed: "For nothing on earth can equate with a solipsist losing his life, since that is the End of the World itself". (Shepherdess III. 30.)
20 Yet "a time would come when she had to meet and withstand that roaring lion [the devil] himself. For Carmel was 'in' the world where he walked about seeking to tear such children of God as Himmler limb from limb" (Shepherdess II. 33). Mitzi's presentiment seems to anticipate a time when she and her faith will be tested in the world.
This article originally appeared in The Anglo-Welsh Review Vol. 23 No. 55 (Autumn 1975) pp. 10-29.
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Fiction as Truth: The Human Predicament
On May 21, 1969, Richard Hughes delivered the annual Blashfield Address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.1 Entitled 'Fiction as Truth' this succinct twenty-minute talk was concerned with the crucial importance of the writing and reading of novels in and for the lives of human beings. Its basic assumption, however, was that the reading of novels isn't nowadays regarded as an integral element in the daily lives of educated people; the novel is losing ground to other kinds of books (one might add, to other forms of entertainment). Richard Hughes regarded this as a disastrous trend. That his central thesis was expressed in a typically Hughesian ironic inversion doesn't, I think, undermine its importance either for him or for us: "the present general retreat of readers from Fiction into a cloud-cuckoo-land of actualities and abstract studies is at the very least a flight from reality, bespeaks an escapist frivolous generation. Possibly, a doomed one." For Richard Hughes it isn't the writing or reading of fiction (as one so often and so irritably hears) that's escapist; rather it's the belief of representative, apparently intelligent men that the pursuit of fiction is escapist, is beneath their attentions, that is so. Such a man's refusal to countenance fiction carried disturbing psychological implications for Richard Hughes, who believed him to be making "a solipsist retreat into the fortress of his own 'I am' - a retreat similar to an autistic child's. "For there is one unpalatable fact which Fiction might make him apprehend: the fact that other people are not 'things' but 'persons'."
The kind of experience we need in order to realize that others are 'persons' like ourselves cannot, Richard Hughes asserted, be had in real life. "Socially, we live more and more like cells in a single great organism: semantically, cybernetically, invent more and more means of intellectual conference: but in our consciousness we remain incommunicable islands." Even in marriage man and wife are separate, reduced to tapping out loving messages on the dividing wall. It's only through the writing and reading of fiction (or watching plays or films, to the extent that these are forms of fiction) that we can become aware that the world contains persons other than ourselves: "then we do repeatedly adopt someone else's 'I am' for our own. Briefly paroled from our solitary cells, we think what he thinks as he thinks it; we are him feeling-whatever he feels; for the moment, we're no longer ourselves."
Richard Hughes's assertion that men remain essentially the prisoners of their consciousness in actual life is very close to an expression of belief by another celebrated novelist over forty years earlier:
In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by a reader, if the novelist wishes: their inner as well as their outer lives can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends.2
E. M. Forster derives a compensation from the knowability of people in novels for their dimness in life. Forster and Richard Hughes, whose novels in some respects will bear comparison,3 have their roots in the same tradition of English liberal humanism. An objection arises at this point to Richard Hughes's argument, however, which is allowed for in Forster's discussion of the people in novels. The latter discriminates between Homo Sapiens and Homo Fictus: they have much in common,are allied species, and yet are different. Richard Hughes's assertion that we can experience human beings as 'persons' only in novels contains the implicit assumption that, despite the contrast as regards knowability, a man in a work of fiction and a man in actual life are alike in their humanity, and that, when reading novels, we allow them to be so. Is this, even when one takes into account the propagandist and apostrophic nature of The Blashfield Address, too large an assumption to let pass in the present day?
The novel of characters, the novel which numbers amongst its distinguished practitioners Dickens, Balzac, George Eliot, Flaubert, Tolstoy and James, is in our time very much under attack. On the one hand one encounters the argument that the novelist who, appearing not to recognize that his creation is an artefact, does not actively make his reader aware that he is dealing with a work of words and not real life, is in danger of falling into solipsism and regarding himself as God. I've argued elsewhere that in in his first novel A High Wind in Jamaica Richard Hughes does in fact exploit the tension between a reader's willingness to accept the characters before him as 'real' and the novelist's ability to remind him that they are, after all, fictional, inventions of the writer.4 In the two published volumes of The Human Predicament, however, Richard Hughes takes up a more conventionally omniscient stance and, despite the confidently twentieth-century aspects of his work (the Freudian analysis, for instance), it's hard to see how many modernists could fail to dismiss it as anachronistic both in its form and in its conception of character.
On the other hand the novel of characters is damned on a host of interrelated grounds-economic, political, sociological. Can there be said to be a future for the individual, either actual or fictive, in a world situation where, since the end of the Second World War, and in spite of the defeat of fascism "most advanced societies, whether liberal-democratic or communist, have seen the individual increasingly subject to collective controls, whether by a bureaucratic state apparatus, by the pressures of the industrial urban environment, or by the conditioning apparatus of a capitalist high-consumption society"5? Thus the French novelist and critic Alain Robbe-Grillet can confidently claim: "The novel that contains characters belongs well and truly to the past, it was peculiar to an age-that of the apogee of the individual."6 If there is a future for novels (which seems doubtful if you agree with M. Robbe-Grillet, since the rise of the novel of characters seems to have accompanied the historical growth of economic individualism) it seems doubtful whether there can be one for 'persons' in novels. If human societies are increasingly to be collective in nature, then the hero of a novel fit to reflect life in such a society ought logically to be a collective being rather than an individual.
Viewed from the perspective provided by such a case, the refusal of representative, apparently intelligent, men to have anything to do with fiction can be interpreted as a symptom of such a process of collectivization. If people cease to see themselves as individuals and begin to sec themselves as collective beings, whv -should they waste their time reading books which represent them as having an individuality they can neither comprehend nor appreciate? Was Richard Hughes then casting himself in the role of apologist for a way of thinking and feeling already doomed, a rearguard with his back to the wall?
Let us at this point recall that The Human Predicament is an historical novel, a novel that, completed, would have spanned the period from 1919 to 1945. It occupies a fascinatingly ironic and paradoxical position. A work that portrays character in the liberal humanist literary tradition, it sets out to explore the very period in which the literary values it implicitly embodies came most severely under attack. It seeks to depict the very age which has made the creation of authentic 'persons' by novelists so fraught with difficulty. Its major historical character is Adolf Hitler, central figure in the development of German national socialism-one of the most powerful movements for human collectivization in this century. It is no coincidence that in the Blashfield Address Richard Hughes asserted that "The Archetypal non-reader of Fiction was Hitler." Elsewhere he recognized that there are traitors in the very camp to which he belongs: "Today, even the novelists themselves seem to have lost faith in themselves."7 He did not do so himself. The Human Predicament is his own major contribution to the embattled position of liberal humanism, and to keeping alive the novel of characters. Not only does he portray in it the age which has seen such severe blows dealt to the ethic to which he was committed, but one of the individuals most responsible for the character of that age. One of his great achievements is to recreate Hitler, the totalitarian, as a person.
2.
The prefatory Note to the first volume of The Human Predicament includes the following statements:
The Human Predicament is conceived as a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War. The fictitious characters in the foreground are wholly fictitious. The historical characters and events are as accurately historical as I can make them: I may have made mistakes but in no case have I deliberately falsified the record once I could worry it out.
This suggests a sharp distinction between the two kinds of characters we shall encounter in this book: some will owe their inclusion to the existence of actual lives lived in the recent past, others to the creative powers of the imagination alone.
This division looks intractable, but let us question it: if its separate parts sit comfortably enough together in the term 'historical novel', why not within such a work? Are what is 'fictive' and what 'historical' truly so mutually exclusive? Is it not in fact the case that an interpenetration of some sort occurs when the actual and the imaginary meet in a work of this kind-interpenetration meaning more than a mere rubbing of shoulders by representatives of opposing factions? Two perspectives are possible here, resulting in complementary propositions. First: are not, in an important sense, all the characters in an historical novel 'historical'? Clearly a writer must defer to 'the record' in his portrayal of persons who actually have lived; but mustn't he also defer to history when depicting persons he has invented? It's essential that such characters be 'true to history'-they must be supplied with sensibilities appropriate to a particular era, awarenesses whose contemporaneousness is that of a period of time past, not of the present in which their creator writes. He may not regard them with the creative eye of the artist alone, he must also view them through the corrective spectacles of the historian. This is a proposition I want to uphold in this essay. Second: aren't the historical characters in a novel touched by the fictional process? Can it he that every word written about them will be found verbatim in 'authorities'? Agreed, the response may come, but why let the argument rest here? Doesn't the novelist, as soon as he begins to speculate about his historical characters' unacknowledged motives, to investigate their neuroses, to depict the complex workings of their minds in dream, step across a divide which separates the biographer and historian from the novelist? The argument has turned sour, for it has led on to the re-establishment of the very distinction whose denial was being sought. This difficulty can, I think, be dealt with in this way. Many historical novels do demonstrate the existence of the divide I have mentioned-those, for example, of Scott. I want, however, to deny its existence in the case of Hitler in The Human Predicament; although it's true to say that Hitler is, for a brief period, 'fictionalized' by Richard Hughes, the verb is misunderstood if defined in its modern reductive sense of 'fabricated', 'falsified'. It will lie an essential part of my continuing argument to maintain that in this portrayal of Hitler from within, the historical novelist's imagination neither fabricates nor falsifies; that, seen from a wholly tenable viewpoint, what is depicted here is no less than the truth.
It is my intention in this essay, then, to explore the imaginative methods and techniques which enable first an interpenetration of the fictive and the historical in The Human Predicament, and further their identification in the portrayal of Adolf Hitler. An examination of Richard Hughes's Hitler constitutes the last and longest part of this essay. Before that, however, I want to discuss two areas, where fiction and history interpenetrate: the scenic description, which Richard Hughes charges with significance at once psychological and historical, and the depiction of fictive persons at a vibrant period in historical time.
3.
In the first and last chapters of The Fox in the Attic (1961) fiction and history interpenetrate in the scenic description, the novelist's set piece, his equivalent to the musician's cadenza. I choose the word 'scenic' rather than 'natural' or 'landscape' advisedly since in one of the passages I want to discuss both these latter are present, and because Augustine Penry-Herbert, the 'hero' of The Human Predicament, himself takes care to distinguish between Nature and landscape. He's musing on the scenery of Havana at the time:
Since landscape changes like this from country to country it must owe very little to Nature: Nature is no more than the canvas, and landscape the self-portrait the people who live there paint on it. But no, hold hard! Surely, rather the people who have lived there: for landscape is always at least one generation behind in its portrayal. (Fox349)8
Despite his self-correction, Augustine is both right and wrong. In the first passage I want to examine, from the opening chapter of the novel, landscape and Nature are both present, and Augustine's second thoughts don't allow for what this particular landscape can reveal about Augustine himself. The second extract comes from the last chapter of the book, and here, though we're confronted with Nature in the raw, we see that she's entirely capable of conveying a truth about the historical situation in which contemporary Germany is placed.
Although Augustine himself is a presence in both these passages, it's a very different presence. In the first he's observed, one of two unidentified men who pass before our eyes; in the second he's observer-what's seen comes to us by way of his consciousness. In the latter instance the scene is charged with significance in situ, our apprehension of its symbolic nature is immediate, in the former the scene acquires significance mainly in retrospect as, gradually, we discover more and more about Augustine. The two examples embody approaches Richard Hughes continually plays off against each other-the one viewing a character from within, presenting his thoughts as he thinks them, the other viewing him from without, objectively. Hughes utilises this twofold method both for his fictive and his historical characters, as we shall see in the course of this essay. It's intimately related to his ironic method, at one moment lulling the reader into an unthinking identification with a character, at the next compelling him to withdraw and view that person critically, from the outside.
In the opening chapter of The Fox in the Attic two men, the younger carrying over his shoulder a dead child, emerge from a drenched and silent sea-marsh. The technique is reminiscent of Hardy. They reach "a lofty but tangled and neglected wood".
Soon however the two men turned off by a short-cut, a steep footpath squeezed between a ferny rock the size of a cottage and a watery plantation of twenty-foot bamboos.
Beyond the bamboos their path tunnelled under a seemingly endless ancient growth of rhododendrons and they had to duck, for though the huge congested limbs of this dark thicket had once been propped on crutches to give the path full headroom many of these were now rotten and had collapsed. At the very centre of this grove the tunnel passed by a small stone temple, but here too the brute force of vegetation was at work, for the clearing had closed in, the weather-pocked marble faun lay face down in the tangle of ivy which had fallen with him, the little shrine itself now wore its cupola awry. Thus it was not till the two men had travelled the whole length of this dark and dripping tunnel and finally reached the further border of all this abandoned woodland that they really came right out again at last under the open whitish sky. (pp. 14-15)
This is in itself evocative: the damaged faun resonates with the dead child, each a victim of the neutral but relentless forces of nature. A few chapters of acquaintance with the younger of the men, however, flesh the detail richly and intriguingly. The image of the tunnel occurs in Chapter 4 where it's connected with Augustine's realisation that an unbridgeable gulf separates his own from every previous generation:
The kind of time called 'History' ended at the Battle of Waterloo: after that, Time had gone into a long dark tunnel or chrysalis called the Victorian Age. It had come out into daylight again at the Present Day, but as something quite different: it was as impossible to imagine oneself born a Victorian or born in 'History' as... as born a puma. (p. 23)
Augustine and Time take comparable journeys. It's only after he has passed out of the sea-marsh and through the dark wet vegetable tunnel with the dead child's body (it shapes itself into a matrix of his shoulder, alien yet intimate) that he's able to emerge into the light of common day, to emerge into a state of consciousness. Marsh and tunnel are unobtrusive symbols, but their provenance is unmistakable: we're spectators at a rebirth into life. Later we come to understand that Augustine has existed since the end of the war (it's now late 1923) in what amounts to a condition of suspended animation. His adolescence, passed in the war years, had been a preparation for an inevitable early death ("they knew they were unlikely to live much beyond the age of nineteen"- p. 109); granted by the end of hostilities a sudden and unexpected lease of life, he has simply not known what to do with it, has vegetated in the family mansion at Newton Llanthony. It takes the intimate experience of a death to stimulate him into life, now at last he comes forth from the dripping 'womb' of the vegetable tunnel.
The ruined temple with its fallen and ivy-entangled faun is an enigmatic ingredient in the tunnel. Augustine and his old University friend Jeremy Dibden agree that theirs is "a generation relieved of the necessity even of active evangelical atheism because the whole 'God' idea [has] now subsided below the level of belief or disbelief" (p 73). It's tempting to see the faun, in the light of the passage about Time, as symbolic of a self outgrown and left behind amongst the outmoded, decaying religious forms of the Victorian era, an era which no longer allows sufficient headroom, an era from which Augustine believes himself to have won his intellectual emancipation. He is a convinced disciple of Freud. This early landscape then, takes on meanings in retrospect which derive from the psychological and historical concerns of the novelist. It's Augustine's landscape: an intimate mirror into which, unknowingly, he has looked, it bears his reflection long alter his physical self has gone elsewhere.
Hughes explores the political condition of post-war Germany in Books Two and Three of The Fox in the Attic. In the final chapter of the novel the implications of this exploration are, by way of Augustine's own disordered consciousness, given expression in a single embracing symbol, a symbol at once mysterious and terrifying. Out walking from Schloss Lonenburg, unable to decide what action he should take regarding the blind girl Mitzi with whom he's desperately in love, he comes upon the partially frozen Danube:
The road to the station took Augustine close to the river itself. Even now the river was not everywhere frozen: here and there where the current was strongest there were still patches of dark grey water that steamed in the sun, so that the solitary swan indefatigably swimming there was half-hidden in vapour. But elsewhere the Danube seemed to be frozen solid in heaps. It was wild, yet utterly still. Huge blocks of ice had jostled each other and climbed on top of each other like elephants rutting and then got frozen in towering lumps or had swirled over and over before coagulating till they were curled like a Chinese sea. None of them had remained in the place where first it had frozen: each block was complete in itself but now out of place-like a jig-saw puzzle glued in a heap helter-skelter so that now it could never be solved.
It was all such a muddle! Although it was utterly still it expressed such terrific force it was frightening: the force that had made it-thrusting floes weighing hundreds of tons high into the air, and the force it would release when it thawed. When that ice melted at last it would go thundering down the river grinding to bits everything in its path. No bridge could possibly stand up to it. The longer you looked at its stillness, the greater your feeling of panic... Augustine hated Germany: all he wanted now was to get away as quick as he could. (p. 351)
This description of bewildered and bewildering piles of ice, animal in their size and nature, conveys with muscular immediacy the vast potential power imprisoned in post-war Germany itself, suggesting a country balked and frustrated, a people politically and spiritually disorganised. Beneath the perverse and petrified shapes of ice the current of tradition continues to flow, but is visible only intermittently, is in the main submerged. The lone swan, emblem of grace and purity (and for Shelley and Yeats of the free untrammelled soul), seems in danger of being swallowed up in the vapour the sun makes rise from the water and the ice. The problems symbolically embodied in this tremendous confusion of ice are unsolvable, but nothing is more certain than the eventual, and random, release of its pent-up force. No bridge will be able to withstand it. Bridges are emblems of communication, of connection. "The longer you looked at its stillness, the greater your feeling of panic... Augustine hated Germany." The sudden appearance of the second person pronoun pulls the reader into complicity with Augustine's fear and hate. His realisation of his feelings about Germany is intuitive, unarticulated, a reader's may be conscious or unconscious, but at this point it's hard for him not to sympathise with Augustine. The contained but brutal power that inspires the young man's fear and hatred will, released, inspire fear and hatred in Europe and beyond, wreck Europe, and send ripples into most corners of the inhabited world
The frozen river provides Fox with an impressive climactic closure. It also provides a fine example of how the fictive and the historical interfuse in Hughes's creative method. What Augustine apprehends in the Danube is at once personal, a psychological truth, something made possible by a spontaneous upheaval in his sensibility, and general, a symbolic encapsulation of the condition of a culture - an historical truth. Although he doesn't realise it, Augustine has briefly made contact with the raw essence of history-a force of its nature immaterial, whose inherence in these chaotic banks of ice is merely momentary. His flight from it couldn't have been more headlong had he comprehended his experience.9
4.
Augustine believes that the kind of Time called 'History' ended at the Battle of Waterloo, its place being taken by a formidable but static entity known as the Victorian Age. He doesn't believe that his own life belongs to History, and whatever happens in the world during his lifetime he will not regard as historical. This, for the 'hero' of a historical novel, is a nicely ironic state of affairs. But, as his experience at the end of The Fox in the Attic implies, his belief that he exists apart from anything as mundane as 'an historical process' is false, it can only be maintained in Fox because he remains unperturbably insular, seemingly neither able nor willing to appreciate what's going on around him, and only, when the pulse of history beats so loudly in his ears as to compel his reluctant attention, capable of responding to it by flight. In The Wooden Shepherdess (1973) he is drawn into, or commits himself to, the historical process on a number of occasions-the Prohibition-breaking rum-running schooner, the cause of the Welsh miners in 1926, the Moroccan adventure-but despite these sallies there are no signs that he consciously revises his ideas about history. Eventually, at the beginning of Book Three of Shepherdess, his friend Ludo, including him in a grand generalisation, confronts him with a striking home truth: "You're capable only of seeing the world through your own English eyes, so all you see is a mirror reflecting your own English faces and can't conceive that what makes Germans tick is other than what makes you tick yourselves." (p. 200) Augustine's reply is a submissive query: "We're hopelessly Anglomorphic?" Ludo's succinct truth might well stand as the moral of Books Two and Three of Fox.
Augustine's easy assumption of superiority to politicians and politics is very much a product of his Oxford 'education'.
At Oxford (that intense white incandescence of young minds) everyone had been agreed that only inferior people feel an itch for power, or even consent to have it thrust upon them... To Augustine, even honest statesmen and politicians seemed at best a kind of low-grade communal servant-like sewer-cleaners, doing a beastly job decent men are thankful not to have to do themselves. (Fox, pp. 69-70)
The hyperbole is instinct with irony. His distaste for politics, however, is soon revealed as the mere tip of the iceberg of his ignorance of contemporary European affairs: his reactions on first encountering rampant Weimar inflation illustrate a total incomprehension of the harsh realities of life in Germany in 1923. His response to the "incredible noughts" on the banknotes he receives in exchange for a ten-shilling note is to think "What a joke"; his realisation that he's just become a billionaire makes "his head swim a little" (p 132). His inability to grasp the political situation in Bavaria is, however, turned to positive account by Hughes. His ignorance constitutes at once an ironic vehicle by means of which the gulf separating English and German sensibilities is revealed and explored, and Hughes's trump card in persuading the reader to appreciate what Augustine can't, in enabling him to experience politics and political history as dynamic living things.
How does this come about? Augustine, to state the obvious, is a fictive character in an historical novel. But his refusal to recognize that he lives within history, contained in the historical process, makes him an outsider to it even though he exists in its presence. Now readers too are outsiders, external observers of the world of the novel that's at once historical and fictional. If they are British (and not professional historians) they are likely to possess little or no knowledge of Bavarian history in the nineteen-tens and twenties. Aware, on the other hand, of Augustine's extensive blind-spots, of his self-regarding insularity, they will not seek with impunity to identify with this young Englishman, since to do so is to leave themselves unprotected before the continual jet of irony directed by the novelist at his hero. To escape this irony, on the other hand, readers need merely to open their awareness to the Bavarian situation, to the speculations and memories, the enthusiasms and apprehensions of Augustine's proud Teutonic hosts: to lend themselves to a creative history-lesson both informative and enjoyable.
At the dinner-table of his aristocratic relation, Baron Walther von Kessen, a staunch Bavarian monarchist, Augustine is comically but instructively out of his depth. He's vaguely aware that 'Germany' is a fairly new idea (in fact a mere forty-eight years old), and that Bavaria until quite recently was a sovereign country, but these are facts that possess no vital significance for him. Unable to comprehend that what's at stake at this critical moment of time is nothing less than Bavaria's political future, its ideological identity, he's oblivious to the animated conversation of the male von Kessens. Interpreting their jokes and allusions from a hopelessly English point of view, he perpetrates one faux pas after another-saved only, as it happens, by the fact that his cousins find him as incomprehensible as he finds them. At one point in the conversation Walther is prompted by his own inquiries about the British Labour Party to relate his part in the events of five years before: then, a Centre Party deputy to the Bavarian parliament, he had been in Munich when the revolution of 1918 broke out that led to the abdication of the Wittelsbach king. It's clear that the Bavarian socialists' method of bringing democracy to his fatherland was little to Walther's liking:
"How little even we knew then of the unscrupulous Socialist mentality!" said Walther pointedly. "You are aware what happened, of course?"
"What?" asked Augustine, half polite, half curious. To Augustine, who elected to ignore public events any-way, the events of 1918 already seemed centuries ago lost in the mists of time; but even now Walther could hardly pronounce Eisner's name in a normal voice-the rabble-rousing animal Eisner, from Berlin, with his straggling beard and floppy black hat like a seedy professor of piano-forte... marching into the city that night with lorry-loads of all the hooligans of Munich at his heels! It was red revolution, of course...
"They tore off my uniform in the Odeonsplatz," said Walther. "I was lucky to get home safely in borrowed mufti, I can tell you! And the dear old King chased from his bed: Bavaria is to be a republic, forsooth, after a thousand years of Wittelshach rule! And Ei. that Kurt Ei... Ei... Eisner, with a gang of Galician Jews like himself for his cabinet-lunatics, lamp-lighters, gaol-birds, Judases..."
Having reached this surprising (but in fact literally truthful) peroration Walther had to pause for the moment for breath and for his blood to cool... (Fox, pp.144-45)
Energetic and partisan, Walther doesn't merely recall the past-he relives it with a passion that makes it immediate and dramatic. He brings the socialist leader Eisner to vivid life in twenty words, a deliberate caricature of a human being and yet a grotesque whose historical importance for Walther is testified by the vitriol he pours over him. The contrast between the apolitical and anti-historical Augustine and his exuberant host could hardly be more marked: Walther is essentially a political animal, a creature whose habits of mind are utterly alien to his guest. Walther's re-living of his own past not only vitalises history, expressing the dramatic quality of the past as past, but demonstrates its capacity for a rich and dynamic awakened life in the present. Here, in the spacious dining room of this ancient baronial castle, it is Augustine's convictions and habitual ways of feeling that are irrelevant, out of key. It's therefore appropriate that he should repeatedly be spitted on the barbs of his own misunderstandings. It's he, with his dogmatic and narrow view of 'History', who is refusing to live in the present, to recognize that present for what it truly is-history in action.
He doesn't, however, remain entirely impervious to the implications of his conversation with the obsessively political von Kessen menfolk. As he lies in bed afterwards and the wine he's drunk begins to recede, his mind flickers into rapid life. First its "chaotic involuntary plungings" begin to take shape as a poem; then the distant sound of a piano brings Cousin Walther, the probable pianist, to the forefront of his thoughts:
Augustine began to wonder about people like Walther. Were they actually the way they talked-unreal creatures, truly belonging to that queer fictive state of collective being they seemed to think was 'Life' but which he thought of as 'History'? Or were they what they looked - real people, at bottom, just as human and separate as Englishmen are? Was Walther the freak he seemed? Were all the others here-indeed, all Germans-like him? (pp. 154-55)
Typically he comes to no conclusion here; nevertheless for a time he questions his own dogmas, re-examining his habitual dismissal of people like Walther as collective beings, as less than human. That Augustine should equate the collective with the unreal is revealing. Walther could hardly he further removed from the sort of character one might imagine one would find in a totalitarian novel; yet Augustine is tempted to dismiss him as a one-dimensional being. Augustine in fact furnishes for us and for his creator a prime example of the person who can't conceive of other human beings as persons: he would be well advised to consume his share of novels! Blindly applying a parochial conception of what a 'real' human being should be to those he meets, he fails to recognize that people differ according to country, class, creed, education. To have Augustine equate the collective with the fictive must have pleaded the sharp sense of irony of the author of the Blashfield Address: Augustine is himself a fictive being-and yet, clearly not a collective being. It's a fine state of affairs when a fictional person who denies the contemporaneousness of 'History' contemplates dismissing fellow-characters who do recognize the reality of the historical process by committing themselves to it with all their energies as "unreal"-pathetic souls deluded by a collective neurosis into supposing their preoccupation with the world of actions and events to bequeath them reality!
To his own way of thinking, Augustine represents twentieth-century man, a creature emancipated from the characteristic follies of his ancestors by the discoveries of the great liberating thinkers of the nineteenth century. He would have done well to keep at the forefront of his mind his friend Jeremy's assertion that his [Augustine's] cynosure Freud was a Victorian (Fox, p. 72). That he's by no means so unVictorian as he believes himself to be is shown by the very poem he's just been composing in his head: he has enough critical sense to perceive its shortcomings, and these are telling indeed:
Oft have I stood as at a river's brim
In girls' clear minds to watch the fishes swim:
Rise bubbling to their eyes, or dive into places
Deep, yet visible still through crystal faces...
He was rather pleased with the beginning, at first-its detached attitude was so adult. But then he grew disgruntled with its idiom. Why didn't his few poems, when they came, arrive spontaneously in modern idiom - the idiom of Eliot, or the Sitwells? They never did... '0ft... ' This idiom was positively Victorian. Victorian idiom... ? (p. 154)
These thoughts might well give him pause. As we have seen, it's an article of belief to him that the Victorian Age is dead; he finds it as impossible to imagine himself born a Victorian as born a puma. His poem's idiom, an expression of sensibility, demonstrates ironically that his emancipation from the previous century is not as complete as he would wish.10
5.
Augustine and Walther are conceived as antitheses, the one reluctant to recognise the existence of the historical flux, the other finding his raison d'être within it. Different as they are, each is psychologically and historically authentic, true to the disparate elements reconciled in the term 'historical novel'. The delineation of actual historical persons in The Human Predicament also demands a reconciliation. Here, it may be thought, the existence of 'the record' ought to be a positive aid to the novelist who seeks to understand such a person, and to depict him as knowable. Yet it is equally arguable that the record must positively restrict the novelist, for it places bounds on his creative imagination, limiting the scope of a force that, the Romantic artist claimed, delights in limitlessness.
Hughes contents himself with working extremely close to the record where historical persons and events are concerned. Each and every appearance made by Hitler, the subject of the remainder of this essay, is vouchsafed by documentary sources. And I don't merely mean his physical behaviour in each appearance: what he says is also warranted by the record. Even in the one chapter where, at length, we are made privy to what he thinks, his thoughts to a very large extent constitute an imaginative reconstruction of experiences described by his biographers. If the remainder of this essay shows, as I hope it will, with what skill Richard Hughes fashions Hitler's life anew as art, it will also show how literally faithful to "the record" he remains in doing it.
Hughes's method of portraying Hitler differs from situation to situation. He is introduced obliquely as "some egregious pocket-demagogue of Roehm's who (it appeared) also tagged in somehow with the Kampfbund" (Fox, p. 179). His emergence as a personage to be reckoned with is as gradual (allowing for the compression of actual into fictive 'time' that occurs in a novel) as it was in history. Before he appears in person in the book his personality and doings are described and discussed at some length by various interested parties-notably the self-appointed "Hitler-watcher" Dr. Reinhold. We come face to face with him at last during the Munich putsch, planning with Ludendorff and Göring the ill-fated march on the Odeonsplatz. This acquaintance is brief: not until we next meet him in retreat at Uffing (at the home of his friend and comrade Putzi HanfstaengI) shall we be admitted to the intimate workings of his mind. Thereafter we are cut off from the inner man: in The Wooden Shepherdess he is unvaryingly viewed from the outside.
I shall examine three separate passages in which Hitler is portrayed. The first two are alike in approaching him from outside, but offer a mutual contrast. The Hitler of the first is eccentric but explicable, the Hitler of the second enigmatic and unknowable. The third context combines two different but complementary approaches, one illuminating Hitler through direct portrayal of his consciousness, the other offering a psychological explanation of his personality. Hughes's depiction may both attract us and repel us, but it never does less than fascinate.
6.
Augustine himself is present on one of the occasions when Hitler forms a topic of conversation. His outlandish behaviour in society-at the Hanfstaengls', Helene Bechstein's, the Bruckmanns'-provides the substance for a lively anecdote:
"The formula is much the same everywhere these days", said a rather squat actor-type, rising and moving down centre: "First: a portentous message that he'll be a bit late-detained on most important business. Then, about midnight-when he's quite sure that his entrance will be the last-he marches in, bows so low to his hostess that his sock-suspenders show and presents her with a wilting bouquet of red roses. Then he refuses the proffered chair, turns his back on her and stations himself at the buffet. If anybody speaks to him he fills his mouth with cream puffs and grunts. If they dare to speak a second time he only fills his mouth with cream puffs. It isn't just that in the company of his betters he can't converse himself-he aims to be a kind of social upas, to kill conversation anywhere within reach of his shadow. Soon the whole room is silent. That's what he's waiting for: he stuffs the last cream puff half-eaten into his pocket and begins to orate. Usually it's against the Jews: sometimes it's the Bolshevik Menace: sometimes it's the November Criminals-no matter, it's always the same kind of speech, quiet and winning and reasonable at first but before long in a voice that makes the spoons dance on the plates. He goes on for half an hour-an hour, maybe: then he breaks off suddenly, smacks his sticky lips on his hostess's hand again, and . . . and out into the night, what's left of it." (Fox, p. 199)
A reader unfamiliar with the Hitler of biographers and historians would have to be forgiven for assuming this passage to he an elaborate invention of the novelist. It is in fact a version of a description of Hitler given by a fellow guest at a party in 1923, and it was quoted by Konrad Heiden in his Hitler, a Biography (London, 1936). Hughes told me that he he'd never read this book: yet he did read Alan Bullock's Hitler, a Study in Tyranny in which the passage concerned is quoted in full:11
Hitler had sent word to his hostess that he had to attend an important meeting and would not arrive until late: I think it was about eleven o'clock. He came, none the less, in a very decent blue suit and with an extravagantly large bouquet of roses, which he presented to his hostess as he kissed her hand. While he was being introduced, he wore the expression of a public prosecutor at an execution. I remember being struck by his voice when he thanked the lady of the house for tea or cakes, of which, incidentally, he ate an amazing quantity. It was a remarkably emotional voice, and yet it made no impression of conviviality or intimacy but rather of harshness. However, he said hardly anything but sat there in silence for about an hour; apparently he was tired. Not until the hostess was so incautious as to let fall a remark about the Jews, whom she defended in a jesting tone, did he begin to speak and then he spoke without ceasing. After a while he thrust back his chair and stood up, still speaking, or rather yelling, in such a powerful penetrating voice as I have never heard from anyone else. In the next room a child woke up and began to cry. After he had for more than half an hour delivered a quite witty but very one-sided oration on the Jews, he suddenly broke off, went up to his hostess, begged to be excused and kissed her hand as he took his leave. The rest of the company, who apparently had not pleased him, were only vouchsafed a curt bow from the doorway, (pp. 102-103)
Hughes's fidelity to 'the record' is remarkable: this, however, is hardly surprising, for the original 12 is vivid enough despite being cast in a rather literary style and tone. The novel preserves, one after another, the significant details of its source: the message, the late arrival, the bouquet of roses, the cakes, the long initial silence, the anti-semitic oration together with its length, and Hitler's kissing of his hostess before he takes his leave. The only alteration of fact concerns the proffered chair, which in the original is accepted. The only significant omissions are the crying of the child and the description of Hitler's expression while being introduced-this last an omission for which I'm unable to account, since it adds to the eccentricity of his behaviour. The significant additions are almost all visual, aimed at increasing the vividness of the description: so, Hitler's sock-suspenders show when he bows, his roses are "wilting", the cakes become particularized as "cream-puffs" (the last of which he stuffs into his pocket prior to launching into words)13, his voice makes "the spoons dance on the plates", and the kiss lavished on his hostess's hand is delivered by adolescently "sticky lips". None of these does violence to the original account or weakness the historicity of the actor-type's description.
Heiden's account must have cried out to be appropriated, for it is rich with memorable visual images that any novelist would be proud to have invented. What it needed, however, is equally obvious- 'translation' into colloquial English, into the manner of speaking of a specific person. (In length it isn't significantly shorter-a mere forty words in a passage of two hundred and eighty.) Hughes gives the description to a "squat actor-type" who knows just how to deliver it in order to make the most of it. For him it can justifiably take the form of a speech, becoming direct, dramatic, rich with gesture and emphasis (consider, for instance, the wealth of conjunctions, which positively point the listener's [the reader's] attention to a new fact or action, a development in the situation). No one who, as Dr. Reinhold is made to remark afterwards (the comment is originally Heiden's), encounters Hitler at a party is likely to forget him.
Hitler is in both passages an eccentric. In Heiden's account his eccentricity carries an ominous force, sinister overtones. The novel transforms this tone, the actor-type bringing a humorous quality into his narrative that serves to disarm behaviour that might otherwise give serious cause for alarm, colours it as the antics of a social misfit. To this end there are a number of significant adjustments in style and tone: the blunt description of Hitler yelling in a powerful penetrating voice is transformed into metaphor, the comic hyperbole of spoons dancing on plates: the detail of the child being wakened is omitted (this too particular a detail in what the actor-type presents as typical behaviour); the violent singIe-mindedness of Hitler's verbal onslaught on the Jews is softened by being buffered by droll references to the cream puffs and the sticky lips they create; and the measured sternness of his leave-taking in the original is given a throwaway abruptness in "and out into the night, what's left of it."
At the same time, however, there are indications in the actor-type's speech that there is more to this buffoonery than might appear to the cursory eye. A final difference between the two versions is that whilst the novelist provides clues to the solution of the riddle of Hitler's behaviour within the anecdote itself, the biographer provides a separate commentary after the story. The actor-type goes no little way towards making sense of his eccentric: he states that Hitler actually aims to poison conversation, so that when the room is silent he can take over the whole party. Behind the posturing lies a formula for self-advertisement, a strategy for self-advancement. Konrad Heiden spells out at length what in the-novel must be inferred:
He was a social climber who had no desire to be agreeable but had the courage to attract attention. For this purpose there were three golden rules, which he was not the first to discover: make a point of arriving late, then you are noticed; take no part in the conversation, thereby making yourself at most agreeable but not otherwise attracting notice; then, suddenly, start gabbing like a maniac, so that everyone is reduced to silence, for thereby you force people to pay attention to you; then go away before the company breaks up, so that those who are left behind can talk about you, which deepens the impression. (pp. 104-05)
The characterization of Hitler as a "social climber" is a sobering underestimation; nevertheless Heiden's analysis reveals the tactical calculation behind the apparently crazy conduct. The weird becomes the comprehensible. It isn't surprising that the account should give the thoughtful Dr. Reinhold pause; it might well give the reader pause too.
What in Heiden was history becomes in Richard Hughes fiction; yet the historical authenticity of the original account is preserved in every essential particular in the novel. Hughes's portrayal of Hitler at the party is both amusing and instructive: what seems from one point of view to be the madcap antic of a social misfit from another reveals itself as the tactic of a brilliant demagogue: it's a miniature lesson in socio-political strategy.
7.
At the party Hitler himself provides the focus of interest; his behaviour there is calculatedly public, and the motives that prompt it are fathomable. Elsewhere the approach to him is oblique; the man we see broodingly private, his thoughts impenetrable. We glimpse a darkly mysterious Hitler in the following passage. The location is the Hotel Dreesen at Bad Gödesberg, time the afternoon of June 30, 1934. The night to fall will become known in history as The Night of the Long Knives, for Hitler will then rid himself of all troublesome elements in his Party at one fell swoop. A minor character, Ernst Krebelmann, a recent recruit to Himmler's S. S., has together with his friend Hans been posted sentry on the Hotel terrace. Below them is the Rhine, beyond it a range of "vine-clad mountainous hills-the Siebengebirge, capped by thunder-clouds white in the sun". Hans, taking a peep as he passes the windows of the dining-room, catches sight of the party leaders within:
Forgetting discretion, the two young men turned their heads till they nearly twisted them off their shoulders. But then they had to stop their patrolling entirely to goggle, for windows alas are made to look out of not into-the plate-glass reflected the brilliant blue sky, the mountains, the thunder-clouds, even their own silly faces but barely revealed those dark living figures inside, as faint and as insubstantial as ghosts. Yet the Führer was certainly there, striding the length of the room and biting the nail of his little finger. At Hitler's elbow was Göbbels, and... Was that or wasn't it Göring, away at the back there with all those others? (Shepherdess, p. 349.)
The two young men are joined by a third.
All at once (and as if they'd been tantalised quite enough), a cloud passed over the sun and those brilliant reflections suddenly dimmed and faded, the shadowy figure behind the glass turned solid and clear. Yes, there indeed was Dr. Göbbels: his lambent eyes never left the Führer-they'd almost the look of a ferret's eyes watching which way the rabbit would bolt... His lips were moving, he seemed to he urging something; but not a word could be heard through the thick plate-glass-not even a sound.
"It's like at an old silent movie," said Hans.
"Yes," said the new arrival: "Only there aren't any subtitles telling us what's going on."
Meanwhile it grew even darker. A flash, and a rumble of thunder-and then came the rain. It fell like a cloud-burst. The three young men turned their backs to the glass, and flattened themselves against it for shelter as best they could. The thunder crashed, forked lightning weirdly lit the Wagnerian scene as the rain-lashed tree-tops bent to a sudden wind.
Cold water was slowly trickling down his back inside his clothes when something made Ernst turn his head; and there-behind his shoulder, and only an inch or two from his own-on the other side of the pane was the Führer's face looking out.
The gaze of a man half-conscious: vague, shifty, glassy, settling nowhere and seeing nothing, (pp. 350-51)
The sudden darkness, the thunder, the rain, and above all the weird forked lightning might be thought a legitimate invention of a novelist bent upon charging a crucial scene with 'atmosphere' to the highest possible degree. Again, however, Hughes is enormously indebted to the record. Ernst's experience is based upon that of an actual historical figure, Walter Schellenberg, who by 1945 had risen to be the youngest of Himmler's S.S. generals, and an early advocate of peace negotiations. Schellenberg joined the S.S. in 1933, and on June 30 of the following year found himself sent to guard the fashionable Hotel Dreesen:
All day strange and disquieting rumours had reached my unit. There were said to be plots, divisions in the Party, and impending disasters. It was whispered that the highest leaders of the Party were coming to the hotel and I was posted outside the French windows that led from the terrace to the dining-room, from which point I could look down over the valley of the Rhine to the mountains beyond. Inside the dining-room preparations had been made for a conference, and before long 'they' arrived: it seemed the rumours were true. In the dining-room were assembled the highest leaders of the Nazi movement, among them I recognized Hitler, Goebbels and Goering. I could see their changes of expressions and the movement of their lips, though I could not hear what they said.
Meanwhile, black clouds had been gathering over the valley and now the storm broke. As the rain poured down, I pressed myself back into the shelter of the building. Lightning forked across the sky, illuminating the scene with a weird and frightening glow. From time to time Hitler would come to the window and stand staring at the tempest with unseeing eyes. He was clearly labouring under the burden of weighty and difficult decisions.14
Once again Hughes happened upon a passage perfectly suited to his purposes. Again he's remarkably faithful to his source, his task again being to convert the received elements into novelistic terms. This, as before, is achieved with resounding success.
The major refinement concerns viewpoint. Since Schellenberg is intent upon relating matters of great historical interest, his account concentrates attention on the crucial room and its occupants. In the chapter of The Wooden Shepherdess which deals with the same events, it's the minor characters in the novel's foreground who enjoy the bulk of the novelist's attention: yet they don't, in the final analysis, dominate matters. Only for two brief moments is the Führer brought into clear, dramatic focus. Hughes's references to him run parallel to Schellenberg's. In the first of these the description of Hitler's nail-biting is clearly indebted to the fact that Schellenberg initially could see only the expressions and lips of the Nazi leaders. In the second Hughes concentrates into a single moment an action that in the original takes place "From time to time". I shall return to this particular event in a moment.
A second refinement concerns the young men's attempts to see through the window. Schellenberg makes no mention of any difficulties involved in seeing into the room. At first, however, the young guards in the novel find this problematical. As long as it stays sunny and bright the figures within remain "as insubstantial as ghosts". Only with the arrival of dark clouds do they become "solid and clear". The novel presents us with an intriguing and suggestive paradox: whilst the outside world is bathed in light the Nazi leaders remain shadowy; when it darkens they assume definition. Darkness-the colour of coming night-is their true and unnatural element. Most fully illuminated is the predatory Göbbels, who rates a concise but intense description again developed out of Schellenberg's unembroidered statement that he could see only the lips and expressions of those within. Göbbels at this moment in time was in a tricky position, for, carefully observing from a certain distance the power-struggle within the Party, he'd long kept his loyalties uncompromised, joining the major planners of the bloodbath, Himmler and Göring, only when the situation became critical and a choice had to be made. That the Führer alone could offer him adequate protection against personal liquidation is explanation enough of his intense interest in the decisions still to be made.16
The passage quoted, and the chapter, end with this climactic fourteen-word evocation of a numinous, preoccupied Hitler : "The gaze of a man half-conscious: vague, shifty, glassy, settling nowhere and seeing nothing." It's a sentence that goes on reverberating in the mind after it has been read. In the first hardback edition, the blank whiteness of almost a whole page confronts the reader's eyes immediately after he reads of the "nothing" that Hitler sees, so that he sees what Hitler sees. It's also a sentence that induces almost a physical sense of suspension in the mind. Its indefiniteness of statement is as much a matter of syntax as of sense: consisting of a trio of adjectives and an adjectival phrase in apposition to a noun phrase, and therefore wanting a governing verb, it seems to float free in the text, its indeterminacy providing a complete contrast to the concrete factuality of the previous paragraph. Its syntactic structure enacts its rootlessness.
I stated above that in this final description of Hitler, Hughes concentrates into a single occurrence an action that Schellenberg says took place several times. There is a further difference between the two versions: whilst Schellenberg explains the Führer's introspection Hughes does not, choosing instead to expand the suggestive "with unseeing eyes" of the original. As a result we're confronted by a very different Hitler from that of the party scene. This is no half-comic, half-sinister eccentric, a man acting out a persona he has devised for himself: with Ernst we glimpse a man looking not out upon the world but looking within, locked in a contemplation of his own thoughts and feelings, a being mysterous and unknowable-as unknowable as a 'person' in real life. What Hitler's thoughts and feelings might be like, we shall see in the next section.
8.
In the passages depicting Hitler discussed so far, Hughes portrays his subject very much from the outside. At the party and at the Hotel Dreesen the reader is in the position of an observer: even though he can, in the first of these, find a logical explanation for Hitler's behaviour, he remains unaware of his private thoughts. Elsewhere Hughes seeks to balance his external approach by penetrating into the inner man and revealing the operation of Hitler's unique mind.
Prominent in this exploration is his interest in the morbid psychology of his subject, and in Hitler's sexual identity. Hughes portrays him as a solipsist, his ego that of an infant which has survived into adulthood, so that in him a young child's antisocial amorality exists alongside a mature adult intelligence.17 Hitler's own 'I' is the only reality of which he is aware: he cannot grasp the separateness of other human beings; to him they are things rather than persons, tools to be manipulated in the obsessive furtherance of his own grand designs. He's incapable then of normal sexual relations, since complete sexual love involves each partner in the recognition of a separateness-the 'otherness' of the other.
The chapter from which the following extract is taken is a tour de force, providing the only occasion in The Human Predicament on which Richard Hughes permits himself the liberty of imagining the intimate workings of Hitler's consciousness. This portrayal is carefully prepared and set in context. After the failure of the putsch of 1923, Hitler escapes to the home of his friend and comrade Putzi Hanfstaengl at Uffing. There, exhausted and in considerable pain from a dislocated shoulder, he lies sleepless in the attic of the house:
Suddenly the bells started ringing: the Sunday bells of Uffing, beating on his ears with their frightful jarring tintinnabulation. Whereon somebody must have started pulling a clapper in Hitler's own head too, for his own head started chiming with the bells of Uffing. His head was rocking with the weight of its own terrible tolling.
Flinging back the blanket Hitler gazed desperately round. His trusty whip stood just out of reach, but how he longed to hear again instead of those clanging bells the whirr of its clean singing thong of rhinoceros-hide-the whining and the crack! If he had given those three traitors a taste of it instead of letting them through his finders he'd have been in Berlin by now-yes in BERLIN!
'Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery... the noise of a whip . . .' (To think that this very hour he should have been riding triumphant through Berlin!) (...the noise of a whip, and the noise of the rattling of the wheels, and of the prancing horses, and of the jumping chariots . . .' (In Berlin, scourging the money-lenders from the temple! A city in flames!) 'There is a multitude of the slain, and a great number of carcases; there is none end of their corpses, they stumble upon their corpses...'
Scourging the hollow barons... scourging the puking communists... scourging the Lesbians and the nancy-boys with that rhinoceros-thong!
But that barrel-it was changing shape: now tall now short, now fat now lean... erect, and swelling . . . and out of the swelling barrel a remembered figure was rising-smooth and gross, and swaying and nodding like a tree. It was a man's figure from his own penurious teen-age in Vienna: it was that smooth-faced beast at the Hotel Kummer, bribing the bright-eyed hard-up boy with cream puffs, promising him all the pastries he could eat and daring to make passes at him, at Adolfus Hitler!
Then under the hammering of the bells the figure collapsed-suddenly as it had
risen.
Scourging the whores, the Jews... scourging the little flash jew-girls till they screamed...
Now the dark corners of the room were filling with soft naked legs: those young Viennese harlots sitting half-naked in the lighted windows all along the Spittelberggasse (between the dark windows where 'it' was already being done.) For once upon a time the young Hitler used to go there, to the Spittelberggasse: to . . . just to look at them. To harden his will; for except by such tests as these how can a lad with the hair new on him be assured that his will is strong? The boy would stare, and walk on a few yards; then come back as 'strong' as ever-back to the most attractive and most nearly naked and stare her out again, pop-eyed.
He called it "the Flame of Life", that holy flame of sex in the centre of a man; and he knew that all his whole life his 'Flame' had to be kept burning without fuel for at his first real touch of human, female fuel it must turn smoky, fill his whole Vessel with soot. This was Destiny's revealed dictate: if ever Hitler did 'it' the unique Power would go out of him, like Samson and his hair. No, at most if the adult male flesh itched intolerably it might be deviously relieved.
After all, how could that monistic 'I' of Hitler's ever without forfeit succumb to the entire act of sex, the whole essence of which is recognition of one 'Other'? Without damage I mean to his fixed conviction that he was the universe's unique sentient centre, the sole authentic incarnate Will it contained or had ever contained? (Fox, pp. 264-266)
This is a lengthy quotation, but its abbreviation would be undesirable even if it were possible. It is a fine example of Hughes's complex and heterogeneous creative method. It is still more than that, however: here he attempts and pulls off his most ambitious imaginative coup-he becomes Adolf Hitler.
But, you may say, Hitler is no 'ordinary' fictional character, he was an actual historical person: how can a novelist do other than pretend to know such a character? I wish to maintain, nevertheless, that Hughes does become Adolf Hitler: that here Fiction presents us, neither more nor less, with Truth.
It was in the Blashfield Address that Hughes expressed his belief that only in the writing and reading of fiction can a human being grasp the fact that others are 'persons'. The novelist is able to induce this ability in his readers because "It is [his] unique ability to station himself inside someone else's innermost 'l am' and look out on the world through eyes other than his own. Not to peer in, but to see out..." This unique ability is demonstrated in the attic at Uffing: there Hughes doesn't speculate objectively' on what goes on in Hitler's mind, he thinks himself into his character, achieves a vantage-point from which he can look out upon the world from within.
Let me again state the obvious: The Human Predicament is an historical novel. In such a hybrid work the fictive and historical imaginations exist in so intimate an interrelationship that they are, to say the least, extremely difficult to distinguish. The philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood, in comparing the products of novelist and historian, concludes that "As works of imagination [they] do not differ" except in so far as "the historian's picture is meant to be true".18 In practical terms 'truth' for the latter signifies deference to three rules of method from which, Collingwood avers, the novelist is free: the localisation of his picture in space and time, the observance of self-consistency, and "relation to some thing called evidence". The Human Predicament observes the first two of these demands throughout and the third when treating material appropriate to the historian, as I hope my earlier analyses have suggested. Collingwood's notion of history cannot be distinguished from the 'fictionalised' history of Richard Hughes's novel. Collingwood discriminates between what he calls the 'inside' and 'outside' of events: by the latter he means "everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements"; by the former "that in it which can only be described in terms of thought" (my italics). The historian's work may, for him, "begin by discovering the outside of an event, but it can never end there; he must always remember that the event was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent" (Ibid. p.213; again my italics). What Collingwood's belief amounts to is that the historian must attempt to become the historical person he wishes to understand, to become him just as Richard Hughes seeks to become Hitler in the passage before us.
How then does the historian come to know the thought of the human object of his investigation? Precisely, says Collingwood, through the historical imagination. This, using Kantian language, he names a priori, signifying that "it is in no way arbitrary or merely fanciful" (p. 240). He further denies the "prejudice" which holds that what is imaginary must be fictitious or unreal: "The imaginary, simply as such, is neither unreal nor real" (p. 241). 'The historian's task, then, can never consist merely in assembling a patchwork picture of his subject from his sources and authorities ("scissors and paste history"). These are not "evidence", since evidence for Collingwood is also subject to verification and approval by the historical imagination. "Everything is evidence which the historian can use as evidence. The whole perceptible world. is potentially and in principle evidence to the historian'' (pp. 246-47). The historian's end must be the creation of "a web of imaginative construction" verified and justified alone by his own critical intelligence.
What Hughes gives us of Hitler in the attic at Uffing is "a web of imaginative construction". Since his concern now is with the inside of an event (Hitler's retreat to Uffing after the failure of the putsch}, is to re-create thought, everything is evidence which can be used as evidence. About the task of rethinking Hitler's thought there is nothing arbitrary or fanciful: the imagination governing this act is a priori, at once critical and creative. What we are given is neither more nor less than the truth.
Let us now go back to the passage quoted. It begins with third-person narrative and ends with omniscient authorial analysis. Paragraphs two to five, however, are in indirect free style, the writer presenting the thoughts and images which pass through a character's consciousness at once as if he, the novelist, were recounting them and the character experiencing them: the distinction between creator and created is collapsed. Thus in "If he had given those three traitors a taste of it instead of letting them through his fingers he'd have been in Berlin by now-yes, in BERLIN!" the idea appears to issue simultaneously from novelist and character. In the third paragraph the participle "scourging" escapes from its qualifying auxiliaries and takes on a relentless life in the present: for Hitler himself, in his delirium, what's being imagined assumes the immediacy of reality, of action ensuing in the present. Even the italicised passages seem to emanate at once from novelist and character.
The key to the unity of the early paragraphs is the whip. Hitler's disturbed thoughts are on revenge, and the whip is the weapon with which he imagines himself carrying it out. This whip existed, a gift to Hitler early in his political career from Elisabeth Büchner, the landlady of his favourite guest-house in Berchtesgaden. It provided Hughes with a ready-made symbol, expressive at once of Hitler's cruelty, lust for dominance, and repressed sexuality. Hanfstaengl describes Elisabeth as "a towering Brünnhilde type with a flashing gold tooth" and goes on sardonically to comment that Adolf "had developed for her one of his unproductive, declamatory passions. He used to play the romantic revolutionary for her benefit, stamping round and cracking his rhinoceros-hide whip".19 The intimate relationship between the racial, sexual and political in Hitler's consciousness is brought out through the scourging, which is to fall indiscriminately upon the barons, communists and false triumvirate (Lossow, Kahr and Seisser); lesbians, homosexuals and whores; and the Jews. Hitler identifies himself, as chastiser of his enemies in Berlin, with Christ in the temple at Jerusalem. Blasphemous or not, this is again no more than an echo of fact; not only was it an idea ever-present in Hitler's mind, he himself connected it with the whip. Dietrich Eckart, the editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, once confided to Hanfstaengl whilst sharing a room with him at the Büchners', that
something has gone completely wrong with Adolf. The man is developing an incurable case of folie de grandeur. Last week he was striding up and down in the courtyard here with that damned whip of his and shouting, 'I must enter Berlin like Christ in the Temple of Jerusalem and scourge out the moneylenders', and more nonsense of that sort. I tell you, if he lets this Messiah complex run away with him he will ruin us all.20
What Eckart reports objectively as a statement made by Hitler is transformed in the novel into a subjective psychological truth.
It's again the whip that provides the cue for the passages in italics. Here Hughes takes his largest imaginative liberty with Hitler, and yet if one is inclined to dismiss the possibility of the Führer reliving a passage from the Bible it's worth noting that he had "learnt a lot" from it; atheist though he was by the time Hanfstaengl came to know him, "he still paid lip-service to religious beliefs and certainly acknowledged them as the basis for the thinking of others."21 The a priori imagination seeking to know the thought of Hitler finds that, in his ravings, he identifies himself with the First as well as the Second hypostasis: for the voice of Nahum here is also that of Jehovah, threatening the downfall of Nineveh in the seventh century before Christ (see Nahum 3:1-3 in the Authorized Version).22 The inclusion of part of Nahum's triumphal ode allows Hughes also to perpetrate a terrible irony: a "great patriot" and a "passionate" nationalist, Nahum was "the last of the great classical Hebrew poets":23 Nahum's own race, over two millennia later, is to be a major victim of Hitler's great 'purge'.
The Führer's hallucinations resurrect memories from his youth. Young Adolf's daring of the Spittelberggasse and his encounter with the homosexual at the Hotel Kummer are both described by his boyhood friend August Kubizek in the only extant biography of this period of his life. Here is Kubizek's account of the meeting with the homosexual:
One evening, at the corner of Mariahilferstrasse, a well-dressed prosperous looking man spoke to us and asked us about ourselves. When we told him that we were students. . . he invited us to supper at the Hotel Kummer. He allowed us to order anything we pleased and for once Adolf could eat as many tarts and pastries as he could manage. Meanwhile, he told us that he was a manufacturer from Vöcklabruck and did not like anything to do with women, as they were only gold diggers. I was especially interested in what he said about the Chamber music which appealed to him. We thanked him, he came out of the restaurant with us, and we went home.
There Adolf asked me if I liked the man. "Very much," I replied "A very cultured man, with pronounced artistic leanings."
"And what else?" continued Adolf with an enigmatic expression on his
face.
"What else should there be?" I asked, surprised. "As apparently you don't understand, Gustl, what it's all about, look at this little card!"
"Which card?"
For, in fact, this man had slipped Adolf a card without my noticing it, on which he had scribbled an invitation to visit him at the Hotel Kummer.
"He's a homosexual," explained Adolf in a matter-of-fact manner.
I was startled. I had never even heard the word, much less had I any conception of what it actually meant. So Adolf explained this phenomenon to me. Naturally, this, too, had long been one of his problems and, as an abnormal practice, he wished to see it fought against relentlessly, and he himself scrupulously avoided all personal contact with such men. The visiting card of the famous manufacturer from Vöcklabruck disappeared into our stove.24
In the novel this incident undergoes a radical transformation, demonstrating clearly the difference in kind between the imaginative engagement here and that productive of the passages discussed in previous sections of this essay. In Kubizek's account Hitler is self-possessed and unperturbed; he appears to take the encounter in his stride; he's the embodiment of sexual sang-froid. The hallucinatory re-entry of the homosexual into his consciousness at Uffing could hardly offer a greater contrast: the figure is lurid, epicene, so charged as to suggest a tempter both repellent and attractive: "gross" and bestial, the figure is also "smooth", "smooth-faced". Did Hughes find Kubizek's statement that homosexuality had been one of Hitler's "problems" satisfyingly ambiguous? With the compression of the event in the novel comes an alteration in its nature and significance. What in the original is lacking entirely in the sensational becomes in the novel a fully dramatised psychological happening.
For a while it looks as though Hughes is going to treat the Spittelberggasse incident in a similar way. With the second sentence of the new paragraph, however, comes a sudden, though not abrupt, withdrawal, and we again find ourselves on the outside of Hitler. We've glimpsed for a brief moment the inner man, and it's time to take stock: the rest of the quoted extract consists of omniscient authorial analysis of his peculiar psyche-a fair gambit for the psychoanalytical historian. In discussing "the Flame of Life" Hughes again draws on Kubizek, who admits that he often had to struggle in order to grasp the meaning of his young friend's "bombastic formulae" but defines this entity as "the symbol of sacred love which is awakened between man and woman who have kept themselves pure in body and soul and are worthy of a union which would produce healthy children for the nation." (p. 172) Hitler's obsessive chastity reveals itself as a foundation-stone for Hughes's broad understanding of him as a solipsist. With the final sentence of the extract we experience the novelist at his most omniscient-his own 'I am', indeed, makes a brief curtain-call. Illustration and analysis, what has been shown and what stated, now dovetail, and we see again, but from a different angle, how Hitler can, to himself, seem God Himself.
Stephen Spender has written that "Mr. Hughes 'creates' the characters of Hitler and some of his colleagues as though they were fictitious in the way that his unhistoric characters are".25 Here the inverted commas and the qualificatory "as though" keep open the right options. The inner Hitler in The Human Predicament is a product of the a priori imagination, a force at once creative and historical: historical because Hughes has, in Collingwood's words, thought himself into an historical action, discerned the thought of its agent; creative because the 'record', a constituent of that which can he used as 'evidence', is reshaped in psychological terms as memory, hallucination, desire.
It seems unlikely that Collingwood's view of what it is to be an historian would find ready acceptance by many academic historians who, holding a different conception (or different conceptions) of 'science', would balk at ascribing so fundamental a part in the reconstruction of the past to the imagination.26 Collingwood, however, provides a perfect description of what can go into the making of an historical novel, and does go into the making of The Human Predicament. It seems likely that in our dry empirical age only the historical novelist-or the novelistic historian-can truly carry out the business of the historian as Collingwood conceives it. If the first is likely to be misprized because he's regarded as a writer of "feigned or false stories", the second is likely to be depreciated because he's too liberal in the use of his imagination. It's against reductive conceptions of the novelist that I assert that Richard Hughes in The Human Predicament is, in a very literal sense, a presenter of Fiction as Truth.
Notes
1 Printed in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Second Series, No. 20 (New York 1970) pp. 16-22.
2 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Pelican 1962) pp. 54-55.
3 See Stephen Spender's review of The Fox in the Attic in 'The Miniature and the Deluge' (Encounter XVII (1961) pp. 78-81).
4 In 'Irony in A High Wind in Jamaica', The Anglo-Welsh Review Vol. 23, No. 51 (Spring 1974) pp. 41-57.
5 Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (Pelican 1972) pp. 44-45.
6 Snapshots and Towards a New Novel (1965) p. 60 (quoted in Bergonzi p. 45).
7 In an unpublished talk to Yr Academi Gymreig on 1 September l973, given at Coleg Harlech.
8 Throughout this essay page numbers refer to the first hardback editions of The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess
9 A question that must continually recur in the mind of a reader or critic is: "Did the writer intend to convey the meaning or meanings I find in his work?" Generally this is a fruitless
question, since the reader or critic has no way of discovering the truth apart from asking the writer. It's worth saying, then, that Richard Hughes became fully conscious of the Danube
symbolism before he'd finished writing the passage, but hadn't thought of the meanings I suggested in the description of the rhododendron tunnel until he read this essay. This doesn't
signify, of course, that I'm right in the significance I attach to one passage, wrong about the other. Rather it points to the different levels of meaning embodied in a work of literature
by its creator-those consciously intended, and those unconsciously embodied. In a letter to me, Hughes wrote: ''You know that I rate questioning above answering as the writer's proper function:
conscious symbolism tends to serve the latter category, unconscious symbolism the former. Again conscious symbolism tends to be merely simple, to strike a single note of meaning, whereas unconscious
symbolism tends to be multiple-to convey a whole polyphony of meanings." The capacity of the rhododendron tunnel description to elicit such a richness of response in a reader (unconscious as well as
conscious!) marks it out as a profounder product of Hughes's art than the Danube passage.
10 The four lines of Augustine's poem appear, with little difference, in the shamelessly Keatsian 'Lover Finds Something Out' in Confessio Juvenis, Richard Hughes's youthful Collected Poems (London 1926):
So have I often stood, as by a brim,
In girls' clear minds to watch the fishes swim;
Which bubble to their eyes, or dive into places
Deep, yet visible still 'neath crystal faces ... (p. 59)
Hughes attributed the differences between the two versions to the fact that he quoted from memory when writing the novel. The use of "Oft" strengthens the point about poetic idiom, but its appearance is balanced by the disappearance of the equally painful poeticism '"neath". The two varieties of inversion are common to both texts. The irony directed by way of the poem at Augustine points also, a delicious private joke, at Hughes's earlier literary self.
11 London 1952. In the Pelican edition the passage can be found on p. 81.
12 This 'original' is of course a translation, as are those of the texts of Kubizek and Schellenberg quoted later in this essay. Since Hughes worked from English versions (a sizeable portion of his study floor was covered with 'the record', arrayed spines uppermost), it will simplify matters to refer to them as 'originals'.
13 Hughes would have found references to the specific kind 'of cakes Hitler liked in his sources. Hanfstaengl says, "He had the most incredible sweet tooth of any man I have ever met and could never be given enough of his favourite Austrian cakes heaped with whipped cream" (Hitler-The Missing Years (London 1957) p. 39).
14 The Schellenberg Memoirs (London 1956) p. 23.
15 Hughes's description might well have been inspired by Hanfstaengl's energetic description of Göbbels: "I always likened this mocking, jealous, vicious, satanically gifted dwarf to the pilot-fish of the Hitler shark. ... He had those liquid eyes and a wonderful voice and a constant flow of malicious novelties." (Op. cit. p. 224.)
16 "Göbbels didn't trust Göring and Himmler not to do him in too once the Purge began (if it did begin): only under the Führer's personal wing could he really count himself safe." (Shepherdess p. 343.)
17 Hughes contrasts Hitler, who is all ego, with the German nun Mitzi, who desires to lose all sense of self in God. For an examination of this contrast see my essay 'Morality and Selfhood in the Novels of Richard Hughes', The Anglo-Welsh Review Vol. 25 No. 55 (Autumn 1975) pp. 25-27.
18 The Idea of History (Oxford 1946) p. 246.
19 Hitler-The Missing Years pp. 82-83.
20 Ibid. p. 83. Hitler's conception of himself as the German Messiah is implied in his own Mein Kampf: "And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord." (London 1939, p. 66.) It's also common in historical and biographical works about him: see Schellenberg, op. cit. p. 112; and, on Houston Stewart Chamberlain's conception of Hitler's destiny, Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London 1960) p. 109. It's fascinating that even a man who never met Hitler gained the impression that he conceived of himself as a Christ-figure. George Orwell, in a review of Mein Kampf in the New English Weekly of 21 March 1940 confesses to being able to feel "no personal animosity" toward him: "The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him... [his] is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that this is how Hitler sees himself." (Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 2, Penguin 1970, p.28.)
21 Op. cit. p. 69.
22 "In this poem, Jehovah's appearance during storm and earth-quake, as a vengeful and angry God, marks the annihilation of his foes but the protection of those that trust him." Robert H. Pfeiffer, Introduction to the Old Testament (London 1952) p. 595.
23 Pfeiffer pp. 596-97.
24 The Young Hitler (London 1954) p. 175. For the Spittelbergasse incident see pp. 173-74.
25 Loc. cit. (Note 3) p. 78.
26 It's worth remarking, however, that no less an authority on Hitler than Alan Bullock has recognized the historicity of The Human Predicament. In the Pelican edition of Hitler, a Study in Tyranny a footnote on p. 113 refers his reader, "for a graphic reconstruction of the whole episode" of the Munich putsch, to The Fox in the Attic. Hughes had previously used Professor Bullock's book as a source for his novel!
This article first appeared in The Anglo-Welsh Review Vol. 26 No. 57 (Autumn 1976) pp. 57-92.
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