A wild call and a clear call
Well before his death in 1967 John Masefield was starting to take his place among the Great Unread, that gallery of authors whose tumble into complete oblivion is more noticeable because of the critical and commercial success which has hitherto surrounded them. It is possible that prep-school boys are still made to learn 'Cargoes', with that recondite word `quinquireme' at its start, but this is proba- bly more a fogeyish cringe to parental demands for a traditional education than an encouragement to acquire the nuts and bolts of diction and prosody from the deck of a dirty British coaster with its cheap tin trays. A few hunting and racing enthusiasts might turn with pleasure to Reynard the Fox and 'Right Royal', while The Midnight Folk, remaining in print alongside its vastly over- rated sequel The Box of Delights, is a story whose originality, in its harum-scarum, any- thing-can-happen-now fashion, is as appetising to adults as to children, for whom it was intended.
Otherwise everything has sunk without trace, Eggs and Baker, Melloney Hotspur, The Tragedy of Nan, The Taking of the Giy, even The Everlasting Mercy, that extraordi- nary transmutation into poetry of the fetid, rancorous brutishness of life among the Edwardian rural poor. There they sit on the secondhand shelves in Heinemann's chaste, gold-stamped blue covers, awaiting the dramatic reappraisal which will almost certainly never happen.
Part of the difficulty lies with Masefield's cranky, cussed integrity as a writer. The courage to compose dismally bad laureate verse about the Queen on the 1954 Royal Tour returning 'from Afric's shores' or turgid mini-epics about Old King Cole and Tristan and Iseult was that of a poet to whom artistic reputation mattered less than servicing a literary instinct. His style mixed a flavour of Stevenson and Conrad with substantial dollops of Chaucer, Jacobean dramatists and Elizabethan travel writers. Even his love of country scenes and characters was distinct from the ruralism of his Georgian contemporaries in the Drinlcwater-Chesterbelloc mode, tramping the Sussex Downs in sensible boots, quaffing mugs of ale or hobnobbing with smockfrocked codgers and comely maid- ens. Masefield's bucolics are more intro- spective and deeply-felt because this was where he began as a writer, in a boyhood spent on the elysian Herefordshire border- land beneath the Malvern Hills.
What if anything places him within reach of our tormented fin-de-siecle sensibilities? On behalf of one work at least, the novel Odtaa first published in 1926, I've been lobbying uselessly for years, though I'm happy to note that at least four readers borrowed the London Library copy last year, so perhaps the cult has started in earnest. A spin-off from an earlier tale, the brilliantly imagined Sard Harker, based on the ogre-like figure of the Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, Odtaa tells the story of Highworth Foliat Ridden, son of a coarse, drunken Berkshire squire who hates the boy enough to pack him off to the South American republic of Santa Barbara.
By God, there's nothing I can do, short of pitching him in at the deep end, to see if he's got guts enough not to sink.
Of course, Hi, as we learn to call him, doesn't sink but falls hopelessly in love with the mesmerically attractive Carlotta de Leyva, fiancée of Don Manuel, leader of a coup against the crazed tyrant Lopez Bubi- aga. When Carlotta is captured it becomes Hi's mission to carry the news across coun- try to Don Manuel rallying his troops in the western province of Encinitas. He is aided in the enterprise by a bizarre Sancho Panza, Ezekiel Rust, an ex-poacher on his father's estate who has cheated the gallows after shooting a keeper.
The journey turns out to be a thorough- paced disaster. Hi's impulse to keep going is continually stymied by the lying, hostility and sheer oafishness of those he meets, and his progress through an increasingly inimical landscape of storm-battered mountains and snake-infested rainforest is marked by a sequence of hairbreadth brushes with death. On his final lap, half delirious with jungle fever, he watches his horse die and narrowly eludes murder at the hands of a mad English gold prospector who hunts him through the bush with a pack of Indians. Carlotta and her family are killed by Lopez's henchmen, and Hi, forced to escape on a ship bound for New York, hears the sailors singing 'Give me that old-time religion'.
`Ah, the old-time religion', Hi thought with the tears running down his face. 'Nothing but religion's any help to a man in my state. Oh God, I have made a mess of it.'
On the face of it, Odtaa is no more than quality adventure pap for flannelled fools in solar topees for whom a good read was to be found amid the pages of The Wide World and Blackwood's Magazine. There is little or nothing in the way of characterisa- tion, analysis of motive, moral dilemma or personal philosophy such as grown-ups demand from novelists. The narrative fea- tures, mirabile dictu, no sexual interest beyond Hi's spoony calf-love for Carlotta, and the reader's expectations of a ripping yarn are unfulfilled by any extraordinary resourcefulness or heroics on the part of this unlicked cub as he blunders towards disaster.
Yet by these very same tokens — what it doesn't achieve as opposed to what it does — the book seems possessed of a lonely, perverse intensity bordering on genius. The ever changing landscape of Hi's journey in which habitation gives way to images of ravaged solitariness like the house he enters guarded by corpses in which the only living thing is a sinisterly ringing telephone, is as fraught with symbolism as any mod- ernist in the age of Woolf and Joyce could desire. Within such perspectives Masefield's vision of humanity looks glum and unpromising. Nobody except us or the author cares whether Hi lives or dies.
Why we care is because the boy and his horse, in a way which somehow always manages to sidestep cliché, create an archetypal image of human nature's invin- cible persistence. His is not a hero, merely a survivor through instinct and luck, and we love him the more for that. 'Golly, I sup- pose this is what they call romance,' he mutters to himself in setting out, and so indeed it proves. As for Odtaa, it stands, as you might guess, for One Damned Thing After Another.
Jonathan Keates
Jonathan Keates"Books in General' column will appear once a month.
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