RICHARD HUGHES (1900–1976) attended Oxford and lived for most of his life in a castle in Wales. His other books include A High Wind in Jamaica, a New York Review Books Classic that was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century, and In Hazard.
HILARY MANTELis an English novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her novel, Wolf Hall, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Her latest novel, Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012.
THE FOX IN THE ATTIC
RICHARD HUGHES
Introduction by
HILARY MANTEL
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
THE FOX IN THE ATTIC
Dedication
Note
BOOK ONE: Polly and Rachel
BOOK TWO: The White Crow
BOOK THREE: The Fox in the Attic
Acknowledgments
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
THE FOX IN THE ATTIC was the offspring of writer’s block: or, as those in the trade might prefer to phrase it, the child of creative silence. Published in 1961, it was the first volume of what Richard Hughes described as “a sort of War and Peace” for the twentieth century: a huge work to be called “The Human Predicament.”
Richard Hughes occupied a singular position in English letters. His 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica had been a best seller and a critical success on both sides of the Atlantic, and had introduced the world to an unsentimental but intensely poetic sensibility. His oblique, pared-down story about children in the hands of pirates had challenged pious assumptions about childhood sexuality, and had been denounced by one anonymous critic as “horrible and cruel and disgusting.” Others, however, had been dazzled by its perceptiveness and the freshness of its writing. Images of power and wit seemed to bubble from the author’s pen.
This was a false impression. Hughes wrote slowly, and with great labor, drafting and redrafting, testing each phrase for balance and euphony, selecting each word for its optimum range of meanings and its penumbral allusiveness. It was not until 1938 that a new novel appeared. In Hazard met a more mixed reception. A story of a disabled ship caught up in a hurricane, it invited and perhaps just survived comparisons with Conrad. Ford Madox Ford called it “a masterpiece,” but Virginia Woolf wrote “on the one hand there’s the storm, on the other the people. And between them there’s a gap, in which there’s some want of strength.” The book was an evident metaphor of its author’s own spiritual struggles, intense and unresolved, and its long gestation showed what patient and desolating labor it cost him to produce fiction at all.
Richard Hughes was born in 1900 in Caterham, Surrey, in safe-as-houses prosperity and gentility. His father was a civil servant who traveled each morning by train to his work in the Public Records Office. His mother Louisa—who had been brought up in Jamaica—concerned herself with children, servants, and the social round. But his sister and brother both died in early childhood, and his father contracted tuberculosis. Hughes would always remember the day of his father’s death, when “I broke like a dam, water and grief bursting out of me.” He would be haunted, too, by what happened immediately afterwards:
Next morning my mouth still tasted salt, and my gummy eyes would hardly open. There was a load of grief on the still house like a heavy fall of snow. And then—I—forgot.
It was mid-morning and I wanted to ask Father something, so I scampered up to his bedroom, burst open the door. Under the stiff folds of the sheet lay what—what looked like a not very skilful wax copy of him.
How on earth had I forgotten, who loved him so much?
Hughes’s biographer, Richard Perceval Graves (Richard Hughes, Andre Deutsch, 1992), believes that the moment was decisive, leaving the child with unresolved shock and guilt. Hughes would grow up physically robust, almost a caricature of the “manly” man, an adventurer in the High Atlas and on the open sea. But emotionally he was vulnerable, suffering a series of nervous collapses during his early life.
He was a child of acute and almost morbid sensitivity. His sense impressions were visceral and overwhelming: “A crowded herbaceous border in June used to make me very nearly sick out-loud.” He decided to become a writer at the age of six. A conventional education—public school, Oxford—would do nothing to dampen his unconventional sensibility. He had his share of romanticism—he was a Welshman by adoption, and called himself Diccon—but he had an original and rigorous turn of mind which made him interrogate the commonplace, reject the trivial, and avoid the ready-made response. His quotidian world was poignant, potent, dangerous.
Two world wars divided his life. He was already a cadet in training when the 1918 armistice was signed. His generation of schoolboys had expected to go into the trenches and live six months; they were shocked to find themselves with another sixty years to fill. Hughes spent World War II as an Admiralty bureaucrat, and began to store up the material he would use in “The Human Predicament.” He intended it as a complex and expansive work, but how expansive, no one could say. What he wanted, he explained, was “a marriage, in epic form, of the two kinds of storytelling, the fictional narrative, where no one knows what will happen next, and the History everybody knows.” There were precedents, he added, “beginning with Homer himself.” He wrote, “Success and failure depend on the one thing only: on whether I was born with adequate gifts. For I certainly intend to stint neither effort nor time.”
Augustine, the wealthy young Englishman at the center of the narrative, is a semiautobiographical character, a shining, heedless version of the author, with few dark thoughts and a habit of not noticing things. It is as if, in creating Augustine, Hughes has written himself a prescription for an easier life; and yet Augustine’s sheltering wealth and natural amiability leave him open to perilous illusions. Augustine imagines his generation as a new kind of human being, singularly unhaunted by guilt; it refuses the notion of sin, since Freud has explained it away. A blithe atheist, Augustine will never understand the anguished spirituality of his blind German cousin, Mitzi, with whom he falls in love just as she falls in love with Christ. An optimist, a healthy hedonist, he leaves England in search of “the new Germany with its broad-minded peace-loving spirit and its advanced ideas,” and finds a sick and shattered society ripe for Hitler.
The early part of the novel offers a social panorama of the world of Augustine’s youth. There is the small Welsh town of Flemton with its mad, malicious inhabitants, a country house in Dorset with its masters and servants. The latter, especially, are far from caricature: the butler Wantage deploys a suitable “tone of deferential benevolence” when talking to the “Gentry,” while sticking to his belief that they are “stupid sods.” Augustine’s pompous brother-in-law Gilbert inducts us into the world of political party in-fighting, and his niece Polly opens up for us the secret, convoluted world of childhood imagination. Polly is one of the novel’s great successes, as is German uncle Otto, with his wooden leg, who reads aloud Thomas à Kempis as if it were “musketry instructions.”
But the most remarkable and powerful sections of the book concern the Nazis’ rise to power. The writer who decides to mix fictitious characters with real ones takes a risk: if he is too timid and respectful, the real people will lie inert on the page, flattened by the weight of his research. Hughes buried himself in reading, but set a premium on firsthand accounts; his research would be applauded by historians when the book appeared, because he had managed to turn up hidden material. He visited his own German relatives near Augsburg and immersed himself in both their family life and their private papers. He had many private conversatio
ns with Helene Hanfstengl, who had been a friend of Hitler’s in the early 1920s, and she gave him an unpublished account of her experiences.
Hughes has a great deal of hard information to convey to the reader before he can get his plot underway. But his portrait of Hitler is electric: from his first appearance, “mis-en-scène by Hieronymus Bosch,” it is poised between the comic and the macabre, a portrait of a two-bit Machiavelli, a cream-cake-eating screecher, a solipsist who will devour the world.
The book came into being with great difficulty. With such a large, long-term project on his hands, Hughes needed to keep his family afloat financially, and imagined he would do this with reviews, essays, and occasional pieces. But when he began to write, bureaucrat’s prose came out. His war service at the Admiralty had depleted his imaginative resources. For an Englishman of his time and status, the necessities of life included servants and private-school fees, and at times he relied almost wholly on the family income of Frances, his wife. Through years of hard writing he struggled on, often plunging into depression; there were dotty attempts at self-sufficiency at the Welsh seaside, and overdrafts, and near-breakdowns, and finally the salvation of an income from screenwriting.
Hughes was not an author who could plan ahead. “For me,” he said, “writing can never be, like a piece of carpentry, done from a blue-print: it has to grow—like a tree.” He writes in short chapters, many of which are self-contained, miniaturized works of art. Some went through fifty drafts. There were times when most of his daily work was deletion. He would claim to have done 50,000 words, which would “progress” to 10,000. There was no particular reason, except his publisher’s natural impatience, for the first volume of “The Human Predicament” to end as it does: with Augustine throwing his possessions into a Gladstone bag and quitting Germany just as the door of a Carmelite convent closes behind Mitzi. But it is a strong ending which leaves the reader with huge expectations. When and where will Augustine grow up, and what will it cost him? How long will his innocence protect him in the dangerous years ahead?
Central to Hughes’s ambition for “The Human Predicament” was a fusion of intimate, invented narrative with the “History everybody knows,” but that kind of history becomes more elusive the harder one looks at it. Hughes’s research must have shown him the large, drifting cloud-masses between one “fact” and another. Hitler materializes as a demonic lightning flash from one of these clouds, less a personality than a rudimentary flicker against a dark sky. Augustine too is a half-fledged personality, a bundle of instincts at war with a conventional moral code that he has partly internalized but not worked through for himself. Still unconscious of what is going on in the more distant rooms of his mind, how can he begin to guess at what is happening in the unvisited upper rooms of his German family’s castle? The end of this first part of his story finds him unaware of the immediate perils that have beset him, protected by Mitzi’s courage and superior discernment. He is unaware of the identity and even the existence of the Fox in the Attic, trailing the feral stench of death.
—HILARY MANTEL
THE FOX IN THE ATTIC
TO MY WIFE
and also my children (especially Penelope) in affectionate gratitude for their help
NOTE
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.
The reader may wonder why a novel designed as a continuous whole rather than as trilogy or quartet should appear volume by volume: the plain truth is I am such a slow writer that I have been urged not to wait.
—R.H.
BOOK ONE
Polly and Rachel
1
ONLY THE STEADY creaking of a flight of swans disturbed the silence, laboring low overhead with outstretched necks towards the sea.
It was a warm, wet, windless afternoon with a soft feathery feeling in the air: rain, yet so fine it could scarcely fall but rather floated. It clung to everything it touched; the rushes in the deep choked ditches of the sea-marsh were bowed down with it, the small black cattle looked cobwebbed with it, their horns were jeweled with it. Curiously stumpy too these cattle looked, the whole herd sunk nearly to the knees in a soft patch.
This sea-marsh stretched for miles. Seaward, a grayness merging into sky had altogether rubbed out the line of dunes which bounded it that way: inland, another and darker blurred grayness was all you could see of the solid Welsh hills. But near by loomed a solitary gate, where the path crossed a footbridge and humped over the big dyke; and here in a sodden tangle of brambles the scent of a fox hung, too heavy today to rise or dissipate.
The gate clicked sharply and shed its cascade as two men passed through. Both were heavily loaded in oilskins. The elder and more tattered one carried two shotguns, negligently, and a brace of golden plover were tied to the bit of old rope he wore knotted round his middle: glimpses of a sharp-featured weather-beaten face showed from within his bonneted sou’-wester, but mouth and even chin were hidden in a long weeping mustache. The younger man was springy and tall and well-built and carried over his shoulder the body of a dead child. Her thin muddy legs dangled against his chest, her head and arms hung down his back; and at his heels walked a black dog—disciplined, saturated, and eager.
Suddenly the older man blew through the curtain of his mustache as if to clear it of water before speaking, but he thought better of it after a quick glance round at his companion. There was no personal grief in the young man’s face but it was awe-struck.
An hour later the two men had left the sea-marsh behind them: they had reached higher ground where a lofty but tangled and neglected wood traversed a steep hillside. So soft was this south-western Welsh climate, and so thick the shelter of all that towering timber round, that here a glade of very old azaleas planted in a clearing had themselves grown almost into gangling trees and dripping rhododendron-scrub had spread half across what had once been a broad graveled carriage-drive. Deep black ruts showed where in the war years the steel tires of heavy farm-wagons had broken through the crust of this long-derelict drive; but nowadays in places the roadway was blocked altogether with newly-fallen trunks and branches that nothing could pass.
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 tunneled 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 center 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 traveled 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.
Here, a flight of vast garden terraces had been cut in the hillside like giant stairs. Downwards, these terraces led to a vista of winding waterlily lakes and distant park with a far silver curl of river: upwards, they mounted to a house. The walking figures of the two men and the dog, ascending, and presently turning right-handed along the topmost of these terraces, looked surprisingly small against that house—almost like toys, for this ancient pile was far larger than you had taken it for at first. Nevertheless there was no hum from this huge house, no sign of life even: not one open window, nor a single curl of smoke from any of its hundred chimneys. The men’s sodden boots on the stone paving ma
de little sound, but there was none other.
This topmost terrace ended at a tall hexagonal Victorian orangery projecting rather incongruously from the older building, the clear lights in its Gothic cast-iron traceries deep-damasked here and there with dark panes of red and blue Bristol. In the angle this projection made with the main structure a modest half-glazed door was set in the house’s ancient stone-work, and here at last the two men halted: the young man with the small body over his shoulder took charge of the guns as well and sent the furtive, feral-looking older man away. Then the young man with the burden and the wet dog went in by themselves, and the door closed with a hollow sound.
2
Augustine was the young man’s name (the dog’s name I forget).
Augustine had the thick white skin which often goes with such sandy red hair as his, the snub lightly-freckled nose, the broad intelligent forehead. Normally this young face was serene; but now it was beginning to show the first effects of shock and for a full minute he stood stockstill in his dewy oilskins, staring round the familiar walls of this warm and cozy room with new and seemingly astonished eyes. Then Augustine’s dilated pupils focused—fascinated, as if seeing it for the first time—on his great-grandfather’s gun. This stood in the place of honor in the tall glass-fronted case which was the room’s chief furnishing: a beautiful double-barreled hammer-gun damascened with silver, its blue-black barrels worn paper-thin with firing. Pinned to the wooden back of the case behind it there was an old photograph of someone short and bushy standing with this very gun over his arm; and with him two bowler-hatted keepers, equally bushy. The print was faded to a browny-yellow, but now as Augustine’s abnormal gaze lit on it the faint figures seemed to him to clarify and grow—to take on for him an advisory look. At that his gaze widened to include the whole family of these beloved guns racked in that great glass gunroom case there: guns of all calibers from rook-rifles and a boy’s 20-bore by Purdey to a huge 4-bore punt-gun: grouped round the veteran, they too now seemed veritable councillors.