BOOKS

The Welsh Tolstoy

Victoria Glendinning

RICHARD HUGHES by Richard, Perceval Graves Deutsch, £20, pp. 491 citing, said Richard Hughes, is a 'life sentence'. He wrote two international best- sellers, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) and The Fox in the Attic (1961). He also wrote other fiction, plays, poetry, essays, and stories for children, and had a distin- guished career during World War II as a civil servant in the Admiralty. In 1945 he was offered the governorship of the Falklands. But Wales and the sea were his passions, and he died in 1975 at his home, Mor Edrin, facing Portmeirion across the estuary.

Since then, as Richard Perceval Graves writes, Hughes has been neglected and half forgotten as an author. The interest aroused by this biography, as well as the simultaneous republication by Harvill of his two major novels, will resurrect him.

The decline in his literary reputation began before his death. He had become an agonisingly slow writer. A 20-minute speech took him two months to write. Years passed between the idea of The Fox in the Attic and its triumphant completion. Most chapters went into 50 or 60 drafts. It was the first volume of a trilogy, conceived as a single work entitled The Human Predicament, in which the destinies of indi- viduals are interwoven with the rise and fall of Nazi Germany — 'a sort of War and Peace', as he said.

The second volume, The Wooden Shep- herdess, took another 12 years. When it appeared in 1973 the mood, morality and taste of the reading public had changed. Reception was lukewarm. He had started the third volume — 103 pages of draft, producing three pages of a chapter, abandoned as a false start — when his 'life sentence' came to an end.

The 'Welsh Tolstoy' was Welsh by ancestry, but born in Caterham. He fell in love with Wales as a boy, just as he fell in love with the Graves family, who were living there. Charles Graves, father of Hughes's biographer, was his contemporary at Charterhouse; the poet Robert was his idol. Hughes's father and sister had died in his early childhood, leaving him with a lasting sense of loss.

Nevertheless, the early years are a saga of precocious success. Mother was ambi- tious for her boy, and taught him to be ambitious for himself. At school, where he became head monitor and edited The Carthusian, he listed in a letter home all the influential people Robert Graves knew — 'people to cultivate', as he put it. At Oxford he was taken up by John Masefield, edited Public School Verse, contributed to The Spectator, met Virginia Woolf, had a play produced in the West End, and wrote

the world's first, ever radio play for the BBC. During vacations he trudged 190 miles in pouring rain to North Wales, travelled steerage to Ellis Island on an immigrant ship, and made a wild expedi- tion to the Balkans where he became embroiled with the Croat peasant leader, Stjepan Radic. Richard Perceval Graves has a good story to tell and, as the biographer of his uncle Robert Graves, is ideally placed to rescue the 'shamefully neglected' Richard Hughes from near oblivion. Graves had first supposed that the life of the 'Welsh recluse' could be dealt with in about 150 pages. But that was before he began grappling with 'box after box' of Hughes's personal archive in the Lilly Library in Indiana. Hughes hoarded absolutely every- thing. For a biographer, gratitude for such an overwhelming amount of documenta- tion must do battle with the need to select.

Graves has surrendered his sense of form to the mass of material at his disposal. There is an understandable weariness about sentences such as 'There were also more sheepdog trials, yet another garden party at Buckingham Palace . . .'. Neither the reader nor Richard Hughes is best served by the inclusion of details about which of Robert Graves's children did or did not have mumps, nor the faithful tran- scription, in capitals, of telegrams about travel arrangements.

Total immersion in the personal archive

has inhibited outside research. Arthur Waley's lover Beryl de Zoete appears as 'de Loete' (twice in the text, and in the index), obviously due to a misreading of Waley's handwriting in a letter. Richard de la Mare of Faber & Faber is 'Dick' in the index, which is a bit matey. An exchange about how many of Hughes's poems W. B. Yeats will put in his Oxford Book of Modem Verse is reported, but not the eventual figure. (Eight. What do you get when you cross Walter de la Mare with Edith Sitwell? A poem by Richard Hughes.) My only quarrel with Graves is his uncritical connivance in Hughes's attitude to his mother, and to the other women in his life, which seems pathological in the dreary English public-school way, though it was also the key to his empathy with children. Hughes's mother was very, very fond of him. But on the quoted evidence, her letters were not 'manipulative' or °dreadful', nor her illnesses necessarily strategic, nor her behaviour a 'combination of possessive love and moral blackmail'. Hughes found it perfectly easy to neglect her for long periods, as he subsequently neglected his wife, Frances Bazely, some- times leaving her in grossly uncomfortable Welsh houses with no drains, electricity or running water, with five children and no money. He apparently felt 'oppressed' by Frances; yet she believed in him as a writer, fitted in her own work as a painter as best she could, and in his long non-productive periods paid the bills from her dwindling private income. He should have been on his knees.

Hughes, as a young man, disliked the `intrusion' of sexuality into his female friendships. An early engagement (to the girl who later became the first Mrs Peter Quennell) brought on 'a complete nervous breakdown'. He had 'a real gift for friend- ship with pre-adolescent girls', like Lewis Carroll or, mutatis mutandi, J. M. Barrie, two other great writers of childhood. One mother, suspecting something unhealthy about Hughes's fondness for her daughter, had a talk with him. Her analysis, in a sub- sequent letter, seems sound:

Your anti-Mother complex may have led you subconsciously to devote yourself to the task of rescuing children from their parents. To this end you have yourself to become first a child so as to realise vividly where and how they have need of rescue, and then a parent to take the place of the parent you are rescu- ing them from.

Hughes believed children were like small animals, 'mad' in adult terms, their minds working in pre-human ways. His 'anti-Mother complex' is expressed with some malice at the beginning of A High Wind in Jamaica, when he explains how the children's mother believes she is the centre of their lives, whereas they are hardly aware of her existence.

This idiosyncratic vision justified his unease about all intimacy but threw the baby out with the bathwater. As a toddler, Hughes had 'the wicked habit' of pulling out the plug when his mother was in the bath. He himself had an utter terror of being sucked down the waste-pipe. When his father died, 'I broke like a dam, water and grief bursting out of me'. Two of his novels concern hurricanes and danger on the high seas. His wife had an obsession with painting waterfalls. Maybe that was the secret bond between them, which pre- vented the marriage from going down the plug-hole.