THE WOODEN SHEPHERDESS was the child of success. It was the second volume of a projected work called “The Human Predicament,” a fictional account, at once panoramic and finely detailed, of the years between the First and Second World Wars, as seen through the eyes of Richard Hughes: upper-class Englishman and adoptive Welshman, sailor, screenwriter and poet, conscientious father and dutiful son, blocked novelist, best-selling success story. When The Fox in the Attic was published in 1961, the critic Goronwy Rees wrote, “There are few living writers of whom one would say that they had genius, but somehow it seems the most natural thing in the world to say about Richard Hughes.”
The central character of the novel was Augustine Penty-Herbert, a guileless and likable young man, born with a “silver millstone hung around his neck” in the shape of a large house and estate in Wales. His sister Mary has an idyllic country life in Dorset, and a less-than-idyllic marriage to Gilbert, a Liberal Member of Parliament. In 1923, Augustine visited relatives in Bavaria and fell in love with Mitzi, his blind cousin. He had proved curiously unable to do anything about it, and was baffled and outraged when Mitzi elected to live out her life in the seclusion of a Carmelite convent. As a heedless atheist, he had not been able to comprehend her vocation; as an Englishman of the “jolly decent fellow” type, he had been unable to sense the vast collective malaise of a defeated and demoralized nation. The final pages found him stumbling through the snow, his possessions in a bag, on his way to “anywhere anywhere anywhere!”
He fetches up in prohibition America, without a passport. Between books, he has spent a winter in Paris, then traveled to Saint-Malo, where he has been robbed at the dockside, hit over the head, and dropped through the open hatch of a ship about to sail. When they discover him the crew make him a “rum-running Able Seaman” who will land his contraband under fire.
This is not the Augustine we left at the end of The Fox in the Attic. Hughes evidently saw the need to make him into a tougher character from the start. It is a weakness that so much decisive action occurs off the page, but the early chapters of The Wooden Shepherdess contain some brilliant, focused, effective writing: a car chase, deep-diving into a lake to fish up jars of illicit liquor, a storm in the woods where “the lightning was all around them, violet and blue and yellow—you smelled the discharge as it leaped from tree to tree.” Hughes is at his finest in describing action, and at his most creepily nasty when he describes sex. In these chapters Augustine loses his virginity, though the whole business is fraught with misunderstanding; he hasn’t grasped the fact that the American girls he meets consent to anything up to but not including penetration: so “Yes” means “No.”
For Hughes, here and elsewhere in his work, girls are knowing and predatory, whereas the adolescent boy is passive and naive. (As a product of the English public-school system, he might have been expected to know better.) But Augustine’s bewilderment is convincing. He sleeps with an experienced, willing girl, and compares the experience to “cold porridge.” He rejects a girl called Ree, an underage child who offered him both friendship and love. It is a piece of pure and scrupulous cruelty. He has done the “right thing,” but her betrayed face haunts him. He is left in mental turmoil: curiously ashamed, yet asking himself why he should be. The episode will linger in the reader’s mind uncomfortably, and may have lingered in Hughes’s own, for when Ree reappears many pages later she is dismissed smartly from the narrative before she can open her mouth.
The second part of the book is “The Meistersingers,” lengthy, structurally complex, and with many narrative strands. For the first time, Hughes takes us into the world of the English urban poor, and introduces us to Norah, a child in the slums of Coventry. (Later in the book, Hughes writes precisely and evocatively of the world of the Welsh miners, whose plight leads Britain to the General Strike of 1926.) In Germany, we follow the progress of the blind girl Mitzi in her convent. Over his long years of work on “The Human Predicament” Hughes had become increasingly religious, and when one of his own daughters showed interest in joining a contemplative community he reacted with characteristic thoroughness and plunged into a course of reading in mysticism. This paid off; in a novel so energetic, so worldly, so pungent, it is a revelation to find a delicate elucidation of a point which escapes many people: “Even Carmel’s Enclosure itself ... is separate not from but deeply within the created world, like a beating heart.”
However, it is German politics which form the beating heart of The Wooden Shepherdess. We take up the story at a low point for the Nazis—Hitler is imprisoned, the party is banned, its presses are silenced, its servants scattered. But Hitler’s trial makes headlines. Even the English newspapers learn how to spell his name. His imprisonment lasts only thirteen months. Hughes is blunt about what he takes to be the secret of Hitler’s leadership: it is not really leadership, but a kind of foul, calculated mimicry. Quite coldly and opportunistically, he works out the desires of the lowest of his followers. Then he articulates them before they can do it themselves, and does it with a touch of inspired madness; he pushes this articulation till it teeters on the verge of the ludicrous, but draws back from the brink. He sees the worst, plays to it; supremely egotistical, he can occupy no position but that of “cock-of-the-dunghill.”
Augustine’s cousin Franz falls increasingly under Hitler’s spell, but we tend to lose sight of the intriguing German cousins, while Augustine himself is absent for much of the narrative. By now Hughes is juggling an enormous cast. He is trying to do something of immense technical difficulty—to move between the very large and the very small scale, to dramatize the workings of international capitalism and yet keep us involved with the minutiae of individual lives. A godlike eye and an inner eye must watch together, and the threads connecting the players must be drawn tight: at the same time, each of those players proudly and strenuously asserts his own individuality, and jostles for his space in the story. The Wooden Shepherdess is a novel which asks enormous questions. “I see increasingly as I get older,” Hughes wrote, “the great question-mark written on everything by the great questioner.”
The final part of the novel is “Stille Nacht.” It takes us to 1934, and Hitler’s elimination of rivals in “the Night of the Long Knives.” There is a diversion to Morocco, where Augustine’s adventures replicate those of Hughes himself in 1928. Like his character, Hughes did not plan ahead much when he wrote. Fate was not just allowed, but encouraged to take a hand. His work’s motifs were plucked from his own dream-life, and his characters’ hopes and fears reflected his own; at seventy, he was still able to summon into consciousness a childhood foible, a childhood nightmare, reattribute it to a character, and make it work for him. It was as if he had observed everything, processed everything, forgotten nothing. His observation can be cold, and prevents him from falling into sentimentality; his descriptive prose is exact, textured, fresh.
Hughes was a slow writer, a perfectionist, and The Wooden Shepherdess was not ready until 1973. It was not kindly received. It came into a world quite different from that which had applauded The Fox in the Attic, the first part of the grand design. Readers and critics were now of an irreverent disposition, and Hughes’s persona as a Grand Old Man of English Letters must have seemed pitiably dated: here was a man who prayed each day before he wrote, and whose work had been described in pompous terms by a bishop as “the fruit of a lay vocation.” All his life he had subjected himself to a profound moral inquisition, and he had put his characters through the same process. He wanted to explore the interface between individual and society, and to work out what it costs to stand against the tide of the times, should that be necessary. He wanted to find out what had gone wrong in Europe after the Great War, what vacuum the Nazis had filled, and why so many intelligent and well-meaning people were unable to see the consequence of the Nazis’ rise to power. But by the 1970s, these questions seemed less urgent, and a writer who put moral questions at the heart of his book ran the risk of being stigmatized as a “moralizer.”
Hughes was as old as the century, and would live to complete only twelve chapters of what was intended as the final volume. They see Norah, the Coventry child, come to work in Dorset, drawing two important strands of the story together; Augustine falls in love with Norah, and we assume he is on the brink of radical self-appraisal.
The views of Hughes’s critics have dated more quickly than his own work. His subversive wit and the almost childlike clarity of his vision stand apart from quirks of fashion. The Wooden Shepherdess is a sprawling, capacious book, but its moments of close focus are startling: we feel history moving inside us, feel its pulse jump under our hand. When we read it with its precursor, as one story, we begin to understand Hughes’s claim that the failure to read and learn from fiction marks a retreat from reality “like that of an autistic child.” Fiction, he believed, breaks us out of our solitary confinement. It allows us to experience other people as people, not as things: this experience is “the necessary ground of ethics.” Few artists have made so heartfelt a plea for their chosen form, and few writers have done so much to capture the spirit of a century.
—HILARY MANTEL