FRANK KERMODE
forbid) he had put it on again it would have fitted." This superbly
careful opening inaugurates the double-plot of image and idea; for the
novel is "about" death anr selfhood.
Hughes's characters are "gentle"
in
an old complex sense--they
can be placed, perhaps, by their loathing for even the best hotels, their
slightly embarrassed dislike of the successful middle class. Augustine
would, in his youth, like to break with the past, and finds it hard, for
instance, to give orders to servants; but
noblesse oblige,
and "it's in–
tolerable for the ruled themselves when the ruling class abdicates."
Hughes has studied manners; the suggestion is that there are some
social facts which no political upheaval can alter, just as the Freudian
abolition of conscience does not save a beloved child from suffering
bad dreams. After the two chapters of sermon, we move to the German
house, where aristocracy, while much more closely united with re–
ligion, is inconceivable save
in
its military incarnation; where there
is a kind of gentle brutality
in
the treatment of children, and a fierce
sense of race. But in both countries there has
grown
up a separateness
between people, a failure of the ego to merge its limits
in
other
persons. The war itself was the world's revenge on these separated egos;
hate poured in through the gaps left by love.
The Fox in the Attic
is a very big, very systematic book, though
it is not wonderfully good sport for those who like novels to be puzzles;
Hughes is as open as he can be about a subject complex in itself and
further complicated by disciplined feeling. Whether the disease of the
social structure is correctly diagnosed as malignant egotism is a ques–
tion to which the answer need be no simpler than the book; whether
this is or isn't a magnificently good piece of a novel is an easier ques–
tion, and the answer is, "it is."
Mr. Waugh's trilogy is now complete, ten years after the publica–
tion of the first volume. This last volume
is
called in its English
edition
Unconditional Surrender;
the purpose of the change escapes
me, for the original title
is
exactly the right one. After the second
volume the author suggested that there might not be a third, but
fortunately he has got round to it, and the result is that one can
handle this work confidently (which seemed impossible before) as
part of the
corpus
of this extremely professional, greatly gifted, and
very original novelist. Guy Crouchback, whose story this is, is the
somewhat effete scion of a great recusant family, born into the in–
heritance of Broome (for years "a solitary outpost of the faith") but
childless, divorced, and living in Italy when the war starts. The re–
semblances to
Brideshead Revisited
are limited to the kind of family
