BOOKS
467
upper classes between the wars can add somethlng to what we know
of that subject.
Hughes says in a note that this is not a self-contained volume, but
simply a length of novel which he decided to publish before the whole
was finished, because he is such a slow writer. This characteristic is
responsible also for the curious nature of his reputation; his has been
for years a name more honored than spoken. He has written two other
novels,
A High Wind in Jamaica
and
In Hazard,
the first over thirty
and the second over twenty years old. These books are very dis–
tinguished, the second and less celebrated being the more completely
achieved-it is an extraordinary and almost successful attempt to
over-go Conrad on the hurricane at sea, and combines a striking im–
mediacy of effect with the accomplishment of profounder purposes.
As it seemed that these books would have no successor,
The Fox in the
Attic
is an uncovenanted boon to modern English fiction.
In his earlier work this very elaborate writer cultivated, when it
suited him, a sort of ingenuousness, a let-me-tell-you-this-tale approach.
There are reminiscences of this in
The Fox in the Attic,
though it is a
sober, heavily-built piece, ambitious of permanence and grandeur. But
if
the scope is Tolstoyan, the manner is often more like Pasternak's,
and there are carefully inlaid emblematic elements. These, however,
do not prevent Hughes from speaking directly and at length to his
thesis, his explanation of the human predicament; and there are two
whole chapters
in
this volume which make no fictive gestures at all,
but simply set forth this explanation.
So far as it has gone, Hughes's novel focusses strongly on what may
for convenience be called the
ancien regime,
its privileges, its obliga–
tions, its changing posture, and the differences between English and
German
Junker.
His hero, a young man named Augustine, inhabits
"eremitically" a great house in Southwest Wales; but after being un–
justly suspected by the working classes of having had a part in the death
of a poor child, Augustine goes to live for a while
in
Bavaria with
his German cousins, witnessing the early days of Nazism. In the open–
ing chapter, which is certainly a fine achievement, Augustine (still
nameless) carries home the dead girl's body, which he has found while
shooting on the sea-marsh, on "a warm wet windless afternoon. . . .
In a sodden tangle of brambles the scent of a fox hung, too heavy to–
day to rise or dissipate." The fox (which also makes an appearance in
a dream-sequence of
In Hazard)
is thus associated with death and
the wish for death. Augustine finds himself alone in the house with
the stiffened body, no longer child but total cadaver:
"If
(which
God
