Catastrophe in Their Bones

THE FOX IN THE ATTIC (352 pp.)--Richard Hughes--Harper ($4.50).

When the generals, journalists and politicians have had their say, the last word on war and the portents of war belongs to the poets, playwrights and novelists.

For those much under 60, World War I is the creation of Graves and Hemingway, Remarque and Dos Passes, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End and Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory? World War II, though less well served, has had its Mailer and James Jones in the U.S., Monsarrat and Waugh in Europe. But where is the panoptic work which would survey the between-wars generations that carried catastrophe in their bones like a disease?

An unlikely candidate has addressed himself to this huge task: Richard Hughes, a 62-year-old Welshman, known mainly for a single, classic novel published in 1929, A High Wind in Jamaica (called The Innocent Voyage in the U.S.). Since then, like his compatriot, E. M. Forster, he has become a conspicuous example of that 20th century phenomenon, the great novelist who does not write novels. The Fox in the Attic, his first novel in 24 years, is the first installment of a grand design, The Human Predicament, intended as a fictional study of the demonic forces that shattered the ancient mosaic of European civilization.

The project might seem doomed to failure by its own pretension. Yet English critics have invoked the name of Tolstoy in praising The Fox in the Attic. No one has caviled that Hughes, who was too young for combat in World War I and too old for combat in World War II, should have chosen to write about both. After all, Tolstoy wrote War and Peace a half-century after Borodino. Hughes himself sets his sights even higher; it occurred to him in the middle of World War II, he explains, that "if I turned my back on it, it was rather as if Homer had turned his back on the siege of Troy."

Relics of Feudalism. Hughes begins his history of the time of troubles as history itself begins--in apparent inconsequence. Hughes does not endow his characters with his own hindsight but sets them moving blindly into orbit. Augustine Penry-Herbert is the protagonist. In 1923, he is a young aristocrat, just out of Oxford, who spends his time shooting geese and snipe on the wild marshes of the coast of north Wales. His ancestral house, Newton Llantony, is servantless, its furniture shrouded in dust cloths. He ignores his feudal standing in the village, which is peopled by eccentrics, beldames, drunks and brawlers. "These relics of feudalism," he muses, "such relationships . . . were equally ruinous to the servant and the served." Augustine is enlightened; he belongs to an age that Freud, Marx and Einstein have liberated from God and other superstitions.

The reader, told that this is supposed to be a history of the times, is baffled, but finding himself reading about a lonely aristocrat living in a remote Welsh backwater, through an art that is little short of magical, he slowly comes to understand and accept Augustine, with his pacifist, anarchist rationalism, as a type-figure of his English class and generation.

The Weakness. Augustine's "private dream" is honorable enough--a world of peaceful and reasonable men. How it becomes the "public nightmare" of World War II is adumbrated in this book, as Hughes makes clear his conviction that historic events are rooted in the mysterious metaphysics of the heart. The weakness of Augustine's England is reflected in Gilbert, his Liberal M.P. brother-in-law, a man with "permanently indignant eyes" who is concerned solely with his intrigues against "that nasty little goat," Lloyd George, and thinks "free trade" is the major issue of the day. There is also Jeremy, a cynical Tory friend from Oxford, who, thanks to Freud, is also "a member of the first generation in the whole history of the human race completely to disbelieve in sin." He gibes at Augustine for "his rooted dislike of ever giving orders." "Can't you see it's intolerable for the ruled themselves when the ruling class abdicates?" he asks, and predicts that Augustine's head will fall into the laps of the village tricteuses.*

Jeremy is right; it is the village women who set Augustine adrift on his voyage out of innocence. Shooting in the sea marsh, he has come upon the body of a young girl and carried it home to save it from being devoured by marsh rats. After the inquest, village tongues wag, stones are thrown, and Augustine leaves under a cloud of evil gossip to travel. He chooses Germany because he has cousins there.

Munich Was Hell. Here the novel begins to reveal its announced design. This may be reduced to a quasi-theological conundrum. In the absence of God, the English, victorious but emotionally drained, did not think it was necessary to invent a new one; the defeated Germans, humiliated and unreconciled to humiliation, invented, or reinvented, something sinister--the old tribal warrior-deities.

To the innocent Augustine, Germany is full of "lovely people," its countryside under the snow as pretty as a set of picture postcards. He had expected to find the new Germany pacific and progressive. It is only slowly that he comes to see the Munich of 1923 as a hell "where justice is not being done and seen not to be done." He recognizes confusedly that "in England, the ending of the war had come like waking from a bad dream; in defeated Germany, as the signal for deeper levels of nightmare." Society had been fragmented into "men living desperately incommunicado like men rendered voiceless by an intervening vacuum." In their nightmare, "these suffering people" saw devils and named them "Jews, Communists, Capitalists, Catholics, Cabbalists."

The Microcosm. Hughes does not write with a researcher's smug wisdom-after-the-event but with an artist's power of recording the past as if it were the living present. His method is that of creating a system of related microcosms (thus saving nine-tenths of the wordage of the usual novel of public events). In the German half of The Fox in the Attic, the microcosm is the family of Augustine's baronial kin, who live in a huge old castle near Munich.

At first, the Von Kessens seem to Augustine merely odd. They shoot foxes, and twin children are punished by being dog-chained to the castle wall. Uncle Otto broods about the defeat of the German army and the insolence of the Red militiamen roaming the Ruhr. His young cousin Franz speculates on the nature of politics and violence with a mystical intensity that shocks the rationalistic Englishman. There is a pet fox in the attic. Also in the attic, though Augustine does not know it, is a young, half-crazed fanatic sought by the police as a member of a proto-Nazi assassin band dedicated to the murder of liberal politicians. This ur-Nazi hangs himself before he can enact his fantasies of "purifying" Germany through selective murder, leaving another fox in another attic, Adolf Hitler, to climb to his yet unimaginable destiny.

The long passages on the Munich beer-hall putsch of 1923, Hitler's escape, hiding and capture are a tour de force of dreamlike action. Hughes makes totally credible the incredible figure in the stained trench coat, hypnotically making his devil's incantations and stuffing cream puffs in his pockets--an ogre sowing the wind, though only the reader has a foreknowledge of the whirlwind to be reaped.

Competent Genius. The Human Predicament seems an overly ambitious undertaking for a man who has only two novels, and a collection of children's stories to his credit in 61 years. But Hughes shares the confidence in his genius that has been expressed by eminent men (T. E. Lawrence, Yeats, Graves) since his undergraduate days at Oxford, whence he was graduated with minimal honors. A High Wind in Jamaica was far more than just another story of children; it was a philosophical fantasy with a cutting edge, seeking to overthrow long-held sentimental notions of childhood, arguing that in reality children are fearful, secret, ritualistic, and innocent only in the sense that savages are innocent.

As a first installment, Fox alone has taken six years of work. To underpin his imagination, Hughes read through the entire Nuernberg trial transcript, traveled to Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Poland to interview "dozens" of people who knew Hitler personally in the Munich days--including a boy who used to call Hitler "Uncle Dolph." His prize find: an old newspaper file containing the diary of a participant in the 1923 Munich putsch.

Magisterially aloof, Hughes lives alone with his wife (his family of five is now grown up) in a cottage on the coast of Wales near the village his longtime friend Dylan Thomas immortalized in Under Milkwood. When not writing, he has kept busy enough, bustling around the world. He was a friend of Moroccan Chieftain El Glaui, has hobnobbed with Balkan rebels, shipped on freighters, and he has been described as a "sea pirate come to land." In 1924, he wrote what is called Britain's first radio drama. Danger, for which he still gets royalties; he served a wartime stint with the British Admiralty, and then wrote a history of naval procurement in World War II.

The Fox in the Attic, as a fragment of a larger design still only sketchily filled in. often has an exasperatingly patchwork quality. But Hughes has an uncanny ability to bring even his minor characters to haunting life with a minimum of means, and in the end, the book's scenes linger stubbornly in the memory. Fox becomes a more convincing parable of the sickness of Europe after the first of the two world wars than a hundred expositions on the public level of politics. For Hughes believes that the roots of the huge crimes of this century may only be sought in the dark and secret places of man's mind.

* The knitting women who sat at the feet of the guillotine during the French Terror.

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