Unkind hearts and Jews
Simon Heffer
ISRAEL RANK by Roy Horniman Faber Finds, £15, pp. 414, ISBN 9789571245482 It was the second or third time that I ever saw Kind Hearts and Coronets that I noticed in the opening credits: ‘Based on the novel Israel Rank, by Roy Horniman’. It prompted a ten-year search for the book in secondhand shops that finished in a dusty corner of a Suffolk village more than a quarter-of-a-century ago. I am not given to hyperventilation, but on that occasion came perilously close to it. I have never seen another copy, and a search on the internet returns only pleas by would-be readers to find them a copy. Mine is the 1948 reprint, with an introduction by Hugh Kingsmill. In its tatty but intact dust-wrapper, and with a scribble telling me I paid 60p for it in 1982, it is apparently now worth hundreds. A first edition, by Chatto in 1907, must be akin to the crown jewels. One remained in the Horniman family, and from it Faber Finds have made the book available again by print-on-demand from their websit (see details below).
It is the most superb idea to do this. The film that, 42 years after the book’s publication, grew out of it is now part of our folkmemory; why not read the work that gave birth to it? More to the point, Israel Rank is a superb book. It is beautifully written in that laconic, highly educated Edwardian tone (others call it Wildean, but that is to pre-judge several issues) so superbly emulated by Robert Hamer and John Dighton in their script for the film, and memorably enunciated by Dennis Price as the murderer and counter-jumper Mazzini. But in the book there is no Mazzini: and that may be where some of the problems and controversies about this book start.
Israel Rank, as his name will suggest, is a Jew. Actually, he isn’t. His father was a Jewish commercial traveller. He married a Miss Gascoyne, from the cadet branch of a noble family, and their child Israel was baptised a Christian. Israel is a boy who takes slights rather too keenly: and in Edwardian England, where he is coming to manhood, there are slights a-plenty to someone living in reduced circumstances in Clapham, in a house where his mother has to take in lodgers, but who wishes to have the life and opportunities his better-off friends take for granted. ‘A Semitic appearance, however superior,’ Israel notes, ‘is not the best recommendation to society’. When another boy wins the favour of the minx Sibella (‘She was superficially feminine and loved a brute’), on whom Israel has designs, he tries to cripple him on the athletics track. Israel is not merely a youth with a thin skin. He is a psychopath.
Israel narrates his own book: they are his memoirs, written in the condemned cell after he has been sentenced to death for murder ing one of the six victims who stood between him and the Gascoyne earldom. His reflections on the disabilities under which Jews live are technically those of a Jew himself — ‘it is this antagonism’, he says of society’s reaction to his people, ‘that makes the Jew what he is’. Horniman (himself a grammar-school boy from Southsea who achieved a stunning level of articulacy for one who left school at 15) does not fail to depict the repellent, casual anti-semitism of those with whom the socially ambitious Israel comes into contact — such as the dowager who, noting Israel joining a church congregation, does not care that he should overhear her expressing her amazement that he does not prefer a synagogue. However, one senses from time to time that the author is enjoying his character’s consciousness of the Jew-baiting to which he is subject rather more than good taste should allow: and by the end of the book the evidence of the cold-bloodedness with which Israel has committed murder, his ruthless using of people (notably women) and his greedy pursuit of position all seem to conform to the stereotype that the anti-semite has of the Jew. Israel Rank is not exactly a sympathetic figure.
He decides to murder his way to the earldom mainly as a means of giving himself a social position, not least in the eyes of Sibella and her circle, who mocked him as a youth when he said he had noble connections. ‘I was’, Israel notes, ‘hopelessly unfitted by temperament for the dreary, sordid life of shabby suburbanism that lay before me.’ The taking of life to achieve this preposterous aim gives Israel the odd qualm, but he is soon equal to them. As he comes closer to his goal, his main concern is being found out rather than of causing any suffering. Indeed, he watches the grieving of those members of his family whom he has deliberately bereaved not so much with indifference as with deep curiosity, as if seeing how those with normal human emotions react. One of the rare men he uses lends him the money to clothe and shoe himself properly, and Israel’s massive vanity goes into overdrive. Turning up to see Sibella, and preen himself in front of her, Israel is quickly — but temporarily — satisfied: ‘I had reason to believe that in spite of my half Semitic origin I conveyed an impression of distinction’. But Sibella, put on earth to make men miserable, is ‘unable to control her desire to set men at each other’s throats’; and it is precisely that that drives Israel on to put himself in a position that will demand other men to defer to him. And it is especially important that when Sibella decides to marry Lionel Holland — whom, as a boy, Israel hobbled on the running track by tripping him up — Israel should put him in his place.
This is difficult when Israel has a tedious job and no money, and lives so far beyond his means that he has to do a moonlight flit to avoid his landlord (he has no financial scruples either). He becomes lonely for want of money, and by the deaths of his parents. He reads a book about great poisoners, visits his family’s stately home as a day-tripper, is spurned by Sibella, and decides there is only one thing for it: his family must die so that he can be Earl Gascoyne (a peerage that, in default of heirs male, descends through the female line, and which he can inherit through his mother).
It is in the murders themselves that the book varies most from the film. They are carried out without a trace of humour, and with a cold-bloodedness that is at times chilling. The jokes in the film — such as shooting down a hot air balloon with a bow and arrow — are inventions after a book in which one of Israel’s family is burned to death in an arson attack, and another — a small child — killed by being deliberately infected with scarlet fever. Israel does eventually slip up, is arrested, tried and condemned, but is reprieved: a governess in the late Earl’s family whom Israel has deflowered kills herself and, in her suicide note, claims to have committed the murder for which Israel was to be hanged. There is a tremor of sentiment in the real murderer as he considers her sacrifice for him: but there is the sense that it was, after all, only her place to do so.
Israel Rank lives to enjoy his earldom and to produce an heir, ensuring the Rank succession. He gets away with several murders; his only punishment appears to be the disdain of his wife, a kinswoman who was the sister of one of his victims, ‘tries to hide a shuddering aversion for me’and who engages in a ‘pathetic’ amount of moral training for their children: she has ‘grasped the truth’. Israel, who now has Sibella as his mistress (the last line of the book is revealing), couldn’t care less.
It is a superb thriller, but also a disturbing study in human nature. The narrative pace never slackens, thanks to the spareness and elegance of Horniman’s prose. This deserves to be a very famous and celebrated book. The controversy will always be about its anti-semitism. It could not occur to Hamer and Dighton to make their character a Jew: Auschwitz had been closed just four years earlier, Alec Guinness (who plays the victims in the film) had seen his portrayal of Fagin in Lean’s Oliver Twist in 1946 condemned for its anti-semitism, and jokes at the expense of Jews were simply not funny. The reader must make up his or her own mind about the book: it skirts dangerous territory, and possibly even wades into it. But it is a book of its time, quite faithful to it, and (despite its 400 pages) over all too quickly. ❑ Faber Finds, dedicated to making available again lost classics, was launched in May 2008. Orders for Israel Rank should be made through Faber’s website (www.faber.co.uk). Spectator readers are now offered 15% off all Faber books plus free p&p (UK only). To use this offer you will need to sign up on the site and enter promotional code: Spectator in the designated space when you confirm your order.
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