BOOKS AND WRITERS
MR. Lovat Dickson's book about Richard Hillary, the young airman-writer who was killed in 1943, is not very interesting.* Most of it consists of a more or less straight- forward paraphrase of the account Hillary gave of his own life in his one book, The Last Enemy. That book, though uneven, was a " natural," and after it Mr. Lovat Dickson's has the flavour of dried egg. Even most of the details of Mr. Lovat D.ckson's own relationship with Hillary (primarily that of publisher and author, although, being a good publisher, Mr. Lovat Dickson was human enough to come under Hillary's personal spell) have been described before. The account, for instance, of the burnt and dis- figured Hillary insisting on reading the first chapter of his book aloud in Mr. Lovat Dickson's office has appeared verbatim in Mr. Eric Linklater's book of essays, The Art of Adventure, published in 1947 by Macmillan, who also published The Last Enemy, and of which firm Mr. Lovat Dickson is a director. A good deal of what is interesting in those letters of Hillary's which Mr. Lovat Dickson quotes was quoted by Arthur Koestler in his first-class essay on Hillary in Horizon, April, 1943. Only the long extracts from Hillary's letters and diary describing the night-fighter course on which he was killed, which form most of Chapter Eight, are new, and they are interesting because they are written by Richard Hillary. No, in itself, Mr. Lovat Dickson's book is not very interesting, but it does serve to spotlight the real question which forms easily in the mind at this distance from Hillary's death, and that is : Was Richard Hillary himself very interesting?
That he was brave, attractive, intelligent, athletic, a promising writer, and, until shot down and burnt in the Battle of Britain, a fine fighter pilot—all this is undeniable.
But such a combination of qualities, though rare, is not unique in any generation, and certainly was not in his. He was not all that intelligent (there is fumbled thinking and a certain inflexibility of outlook in The Last Enemy), not all that brilliant as a writer (" The air was like champagne "), and it was possible to be at Oxford with him before the war and take a fairly full part in the life of the University without ever being aware of his personality. And yet Richard Hillary does occupy a unique position among the many hundreds of young men of promise who died in the last war. Many people will have heard of him who never heard of Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis or Rollo Wool!ev, who were all better writers. The Last Enemy
* Richard Hillary: A Life. By Lovat Dickson. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.).
became an immediate best-seller, and the " idea " of Richard Hillary began to exercise a strange fascination on the imagination of Englishmen from the humblest reader of John O'London to the Editor of Horizon himself. In 1947 Eric Linklater compared the effect of his death on England with that of Rupert Brooke in the war before, and wrote that he had become a " national possession, an exemplar of his age, a symbol of the reverdissement." Mr. Lovat Dickson is content to see him as " symbolising the best that boyhood and manhood can be."
Koestler writing a few months after Hillary's death, described the myth that was already growing around him. " It is easy to foresee that it will wax and expand, until his name has become one of the symbolic names of the war. The growth of a myth cannot be influenced and one should not attempt it. For myths grow like crystals : there is some diffuse emotion latent in the social medium which strives for expression as the molecules in a saturated solution strive to form a coherent pattern, and as soon as a suitable core is found, they group themselves around it and the crystal is formed, .the myth is born." And Koestler proceeded to augment the myth himself by labelling Hilary as " a crusader without a cross."
Now how on earth did all this come about? The Last Enemy does not now seem a great book. To some it will not even seem an important book, although undoubtedly it was important in the effect it had on its time. The best passages are those of pure reportage, although they are not the passages with which Hilary himself was most con- cerned or even those which gave the book its sensational success. But in these descriptions of flying, of the Battle of Britain, of being shot down, and of the long, long, every- day business of being given a new face to replace his burnt one, there are undoubted signs that Hillary might have developed into an important writer. The passages from his later writings quoted by Mr. Lovat Dickson confirm these signs, for they show a distinct development towards maturity. But even so one cannot, if one is being quite unemotional and objective, put it at higher than "might." On the other hand the slightly narcissistic self-dramatisation, the uncon- scious identification of his own Shrewsbury and Trinity, rowing, Verlaine-reading self with the youth of England, the Byronic egotism, the building-up of one of the characters, who, to an outsider, appears as a noble but rather dull young English gentleman, into a sort of upper-class saint—a lot of this has the hollow sound of false maturity.
The main thread running through The Last Enemy is Hillary's attempt to explain the mainspring of his life, to explain why he is throwing himself into the war. The easy, elegantly swashbuckling selfishness comes first. Life is to him just a form of self-expression and he will get out of it what he can in peace or war. (" The war . . . promised a chance of self-realisation that would normally take years to achieve. As a fighter pilot I hoped for a concentration of amusement, fear and exaltation which it would be impossible to achieve in any other form of experience ".) Then came the deaths of his companions (" I was the last of the long- haired boys "—as if his particular group of " long-haired boys " were. the only one in the R.A.F. at that time), and he begins to feel that these deaths leave him with some strange responsibility. This responsibility is never really clearly defined, but it merges, after the first stage of his reconstruction in " the beauty shop " and a harrowing experi- ence in an air-raid, into a feeling that he must live and fight 'for humanity. And the book ends on a note of humility. " ' Le sentiment d'kre tout et l'evidence de n'litre rien.' That was me." But it was not the final Richard Hillary any more than any of the others he produced at different moments of his life. Koestler in his essay examined the motives that made Hillary take the decision to go back to flying—night flying on twin-engined night fighters—with his new face and burnt claw-like hands. He found that none of the possible explana- tions really fitted. Vanity? (" I wonder . . . whether, as some silly girl said, I am going back purely out of vanity ?") Self-destruction? Possible, but Hillary had love to live for at the end of his life. Patriotism ? (He hated the cheap phrases. He felt embarrassed when people saw his face and said : " How you must hate those devils.") Fellowship, with the living and the dead? Something of that, certainly, but he is touched on the raw by reading David Garnett's comment on T. E. Lawrence's going back to the R.A.F. (" One wonders whether his will had not become greater than his intelligence '°) and applying it to himself.
Koestler saw that there was no real coherence or con- sistency behind this fantastic decision, and so put him down as the desperate crusader in search of a cross. But even this is going too far, just as it is going too far to say that Hillary longed to know what it was he symbolised, what the myth was that was forming round him.
The truth is probably more simple and less romantic than Koestler made it. Richard Hillary, in spite of his terrible experiences, was still a very young man when he died. And like all young men in their early twenties he was intensely absorbed by his attitude to life and this was constantly changing. He didn't really stand for anything. He was in search of something more personal than a cross. The apparent single-mindedness that runs through The Last Enemy even lets him down (" It's no good . . . I just don't believe what I wrote in that book—sometimes I do ! I meant it when I wrote it, but now I don't "). And so the strange pattern of his life emerges, a pattern which is indeed no pattern at all but that of youth working itself out in danger- ous hideous times.
And why should it be otherwise? Why shouldn't he have been changing, altering his attitude, working out his own particular form of that pattern? This is the thing that youth is for. But a society which makes a practice of killing off its young men of 23 every few years has to salve its con- science in some way, and it does this by pretending that they were whole human beings, and that they stood for something, if only for crusading in search of a cross. This guilt might have attached to any one of thousands of promising, attrac- tive young men who died, and turned them into a symbol of heroism, of mass redemption. Circumstances (a moving book at the right moment, a romantic character, a brave decision) made it attach easily to Richard Hillary. So that, in his case at any rate, the last enemy, which is death, was
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