The Turning Tide

By Christopher Porterfield

THE WOODEN SHEPHERDESS by RICHARD HUGHES 389 pages. Harper & Row. $7.50. "All that nonfiction can do is answer questions," British Novelist Richard Hughes once said. "It's fiction's business to ask them." Yet Hughes is trying to have it both ways in his long multivolume historical novel about the roots of World War II, which began with The Fox in the Attic in 1962. He puts his imaginary characters through the usual novelistic hoops--love affairs, deaths, getting and spending. At the same time he trundles on historical figures like Hitler and Lloyd George to go through well-documented paces --speeches, rivalries, rises and falls from power. Fiction jostles with nonfiction, and questions are fitted to answers.

Or are they? The scheme worked well enough in The Fox in the Attic.

Hughes was widely praised for it, in part because the private concerns of characters had an ironic bearing on the public doings of the historical figures. The young hero, an enlightened Welsh aristocrat named Augustine Penry-Herbert, seemed to exemplify the misguided good will of his generation in England; he believed that 1917 had ended, not begun, the pattern of world wars. The Bavarian relatives whom Augustine visited for a while reflected the social and psychological disarray of Germany in the early 1920s. The concluding set piece of Hitler's abortive 1923 beer-hall putsch in Munich suggested the tidal pull of events in which all the characters were destined to be caught up.

Hughes' second installment is The Wooden Shepherdess. It carries Augustine and the story up through 1934, and ends with another Nazi set piece--Hitler's blood purge of scores of rivals and former associates in that year to consolidate his power. Hughes' creative tide, however, shows signs of slackening. Mitzi, the German cousin whom Augustine loved in Fox, has now gone blind and entered a Carmelite convent.

Augustine's brother-in-law, the M.P., is still dithering over Liberal Party and parliamentary infighting. Augustine himself roves through Prohibition America, falling in with a neither beautiful nor damned crowd of would-be Fitzgeraldian teenagers. He even trots off on an Arabian Nights adventure in Morocco. Effective and colorful as some of this is, what does it have to do with Hughes' larger theme? The interrelation between private and public realms seems to have broken down. The narrative tends to lurch from near-history to near-fiction ("But Hitler, Strasser--how could these distant rivalries ever matter to Coventry?").

The key to the problem is Hughes' passive protagonist. Augustine has intelligence, a keen eye and challenging ideas about the immorality of power. Yet as he seeks any diversion but work, as he shies away from marrying, or as he takes an interest in Welsh miners while avoiding involvement in Britain's general strike of 1926, Augustine begins to seem like some maddening dilettante who will not face up to what Hughes, in an endearing, old-fashioned way, calls the human predicament. Perhaps anticipating the reader's disenchantment with Augustine, Hughes has his cynical Tory friend Jeremy make a plea about "Augustine's knack of having things happen to him without ever needing to lift a finger to make them happen."

Well, one thing that presumably is going to happen to him is World War II. When it does, in some subsequent volume, perhaps the relevance of all that seems diffuse and maundering in Shepherdess will come clear. Perhaps the grand design that prompted some reviewers to invoke Tolstoy when Fox was published will emerge again. But Hughes is 73, and a painfully slow writer. When he conceived his ambitious project he had only two novels to his credit: the minor classic A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and In Hazard (1935). He took 17 years of research and writing to produce Fox. Between Fox and Shepherdess, he and his readers have aged more than his characters.

From here on, as Hughes cheerfully admits to inquiring reporters, it will be "a race between the publisher and the undertaker." Christopher Porterfield

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