This blog has not been updated much for some time. In fact, I've not done much writing of any sort for the past couple of years: getting divorced, concentrating was difficult, it's taken a while to get back in the swing. I thought a good way to restart — to press the reset button, if I may borrow from Hillary Clinton — would be with the book that ended it all. A while before I stopped writing altogether, the London Review of Books commissioned me to write a piece on Richard Hughes, pegged to a reissue of The Fox in the Attic: I ended up procrastinating so hard over it that the piece became an uneasy joke with the people I knew at the LRB; then came the divorce and the absolute cessation of activity, and finally I admitted defeat.
I think Hughes himself, a notorious procrastinator, was part of the problem. In his twenties he was a hugely successful and prolific literary man, publishing poetry, criticism and short stories, having plays staged in the West End, while
Danger was the first original radio drama broadcast by the BBC (it is set in a coalmine — complete darkness! It isn't very good). Then, in 1929, came his first novel,
A High Wind in Jamaica: it was a great success, commercially and critically, but it brought him to a halt. Perhaps Hughes was scared of not living up to it. At any rate, though he came up with lots of schemes for things he might write, it was nine years before his next novel,
In Hazard (1938).
In Hazard has many good points, but it repeats some of the more striking touches of
AHWIJ (extreme weather, odd pets, abrupt deaths), so that what looked like an original point of view starts to feel like a set of tics; it is also very short; reviewers were disappointed. Then came the war — evacuees at the Hughes home in Laugharne, then war-work at the Admiralty: he was a highly effective civil servant and was offered a permanent post when the war was over, but felt he had to continue writing. Then came more years of false starts and side-projects. At one point he had a contract to write films for Ealing, though
hardly anything got made. In 1955 he began work on a novel about the rise of Hitler, to be called
The Human Predicament; this sprouted into a projected trilogy:
The Fox in the Attic was the first volume, in 1961; the second
, The Wooden Shepherdess, came out in 1973; 12 chapters into the third, he became too ill to carry on writing. Four novels over 44 years, and only the first is unarguably good.
I don't say that if it wasn't for Hughes I'd have been banging out prose by the ream. But the extent to which I ended up thinking about his not writing, rather than his writing, was not healthy. I did not want a patron saint, but that is what he has ended up being, I think.
My theory, for what it's worth, is that Hughes didn't want to write so much as he wanted to be a writer — the difference isn't always obvious even for the person doing the wanting, and things like talent and productivity, which you feel ought to be clues, may be red herrings.
Anyway, here is the first Penguin edition from 1964, illustration by Ceri Richards: Richards gets the novel's surreal, naive tone very nicely; I particularly like the staircase echo of the fox's ears. Perhaps I'll get round to reviewing the novel properly some time, but don't hold your breath.
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