The Wooden Shepherdess Read online

  RICHARD HUGHES (1900–1976) attended Oxford and lived for most of his life in a castle in Wales. His other books include A High Wind in Jamaica, a New York Review Books Classic that was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century, and In Hazard.

  HILARY MANTEL is an English novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her novel, Wolf Hall, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Her latest novel, Bring Up the Bodies, was published in May 2012.

  THE WOODEN SHEPHERDESS

  RICHARD HUGHES

  Introduction by

  HILARY MANTEL

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  THE WOODEN SHEPHERDESS

  Some Characters First Introduced in Volume One

  BOOK ONE: The Wooden Shepherdess

  BOOK TWO: The Meistersingers

  BOOK THREE: Stille Nacht

  Historical Note

  Twelve chapters

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  THE WOODEN SHEPHERDESS was the child of success. It was the second volume of a projected work called “The Human Predicament,” a fictional account, at once panoramic and finely detailed, of the years between the First and Second World Wars, as seen through the eyes of Richard Hughes: upper-class Englishman and adoptive Welshman, sailor, screenwriter and poet, conscientious father and dutiful son, blocked novelist, best-selling success story. When The Fox in the Attic was published in 1961, the critic Goronwy Rees wrote, “There are few living writers of whom one would say that they had genius, but somehow it seems the most natural thing in the world to say about Richard Hughes.”

  The central character of the novel was Augustine Penty-Herbert, a guileless and likable young man, born with a “silver millstone hung around his neck” in the shape of a large house and estate in Wales. His sister Mary has an idyllic country life in Dorset, and a less-than-idyllic marriage to Gilbert, a Liberal Member of Parliament. In 1923, Augustine visited relatives in Bavaria and fell in love with Mitzi, his blind cousin. He had proved curiously unable to do anything about it, and was baffled and outraged when Mitzi elected to live out her life in the seclusion of a Carmelite convent. As a heedless atheist, he had not been able to comprehend her vocation; as an Englishman of the “jolly decent fellow” type, he had been unable to sense the vast collective malaise of a defeated and demoralized nation. The final pages found him stumbling through the snow, his possessions in a bag, on his way to “anywhere anywhere anywhere!”

  He fetches up in prohibition America, without a passport. Between books, he has spent a winter in Paris, then traveled to Saint-Malo, where he has been robbed at the dockside, hit over the head, and dropped through the open hatch of a ship about to sail. When they discover him the crew make him a “rum-running Able Seaman” who will land his contraband under fire.

  This is not the Augustine we left at the end of The Fox in the Attic. Hughes evidently saw the need to make him into a tougher character from the start. It is a weakness that so much decisive action occurs off the page, but the early chapters of The Wooden Shepherdess contain some brilliant, focused, effective writing: a car chase, deep-diving into a lake to fish up jars of illicit liquor, a storm in the woods where “the lightning was all around them, violet and blue and yellow—you smelled the discharge as it leaped from tree to tree.” Hughes is at his finest in describing action, and at his most creepily nasty when he describes sex. In these chapters Augustine loses his virginity, though the whole business is fraught with misunderstanding; he hasn’t grasped the fact that the American girls he meets consent to anything up to but not including penetration: so “Yes” means “No.”

  For Hughes, here and elsewhere in his work, girls are knowing and predatory, whereas the adolescent boy is passive and naive. (As a product of the English public-school system, he might have been expected to know better.) But Augustine’s bewilderment is convincing. He sleeps with an experienced, willing girl, and compares the experience to “cold porridge.” He rejects a girl called Ree, an underage child who offered him both friendship and love. It is a piece of pure and scrupulous cruelty. He has done the “right thing,” but her betrayed face haunts him. He is left in mental turmoil: curiously ashamed, yet asking himself why he should be. The episode will linger in the reader’s mind uncomfortably, and may have lingered in Hughes’s own, for when Ree reappears many pages later she is dismissed smartly from the narrative before she can open her mouth.

  The second part of the book is “The Meistersingers,” lengthy, structurally complex, and with many narrative strands. For the first time, Hughes takes us into the world of the English urban poor, and introduces us to Norah, a child in the slums of Coventry. (Later in the book, Hughes writes precisely and evocatively of the world of the Welsh miners, whose plight leads Britain to the General Strike of 1926.) In Germany, we follow the progress of the blind girl Mitzi in her convent. Over his long years of work on “The Human Predicament” Hughes had become increasingly religious, and when one of his own daughters showed interest in joining a contemplative community he reacted with characteristic thoroughness and plunged into a course of reading in mysticism. This paid off; in a novel so energetic, so worldly, so pungent, it is a revelation to find a delicate elucidation of a point which escapes many people: “Even Carmel’s Enclosure itself ... is separate not from but deeply within the created world, like a beating heart.”

  However, it is German politics which form the beating heart of The Wooden Shepherdess. We take up the story at a low point for the Nazis—Hitler is imprisoned, the party is banned, its presses are silenced, its servants scattered. But Hitler’s trial makes headlines. Even the English newspapers learn how to spell his name. His imprisonment lasts only thirteen months. Hughes is blunt about what he takes to be the secret of Hitler’s leadership: it is not really leadership, but a kind of foul, calculated mimicry. Quite coldly and opportunistically, he works out the desires of the lowest of his followers. Then he articulates them before they can do it themselves, and does it with a touch of inspired madness; he pushes this articulation till it teeters on the verge of the ludicrous, but draws back from the brink. He sees the worst, plays to it; supremely egotistical, he can occupy no position but that of “cock-of-the-dunghill.”

  Augustine’s cousin Franz falls increasingly under Hitler’s spell, but we tend to lose sight of the intriguing German cousins, while Augustine himself is absent for much of the narrative. By now Hughes is juggling an enormous cast. He is trying to do something of immense technical difficulty—to move between the very large and the very small scale, to dramatize the workings of international capitalism and yet keep us involved with the minutiae of individual lives. A godlike eye and an inner eye must watch together, and the threads connecting the players must be drawn tight: at the same time, each of those players proudly and strenuously asserts his own individuality, and jostles for his space in the story. The Wooden Shepherdess is a novel which asks enormous questions. “I see increasingly as I get older,” Hughes wrote, “the great question-mark written on everything by the great questioner.”

  The final part of the novel is “Stille Nacht.” It takes us to 1934, and Hitler’s elimination of rivals in “the Night of the Long Knives.” There is a diversion to Morocco, where Augustine’s adventures replicate those of Hughes himself in 1928. Like his character, Hughes did not plan ahead much when he wrote. Fate was not just allowed, but encouraged to take a hand. His work’s motifs were plucked from his own dream-life, and his characters’ hopes and fears reflected his own; at seventy, he was still able to summon into consciousness a childhood foible, a
childhood nightmare, reattribute it to a character, and make it work for him. It was as if he had observed everything, processed everything, forgotten nothing. His observation can be cold, and prevents him from falling into sentimentality; his descriptive prose is exact, textured, fresh.

  Hughes was a slow writer, a perfectionist, and The Wooden Shepherdess was not ready until 1973. It was not kindly received. It came into a world quite different from that which had applauded The Fox in the Attic, the first part of the grand design. Readers and critics were now of an irreverent disposition, and Hughes’s persona as a Grand Old Man of English Letters must have seemed pitiably dated: here was a man who prayed each day before he wrote, and whose work had been described in pompous terms by a bishop as “the fruit of a lay vocation.” All his life he had subjected himself to a profound moral inquisition, and he had put his characters through the same process. He wanted to explore the interface between individual and society, and to work out what it costs to stand against the tide of the times, should that be necessary. He wanted to find out what had gone wrong in Europe after the Great War, what vacuum the Nazis had filled, and why so many intelligent and well-meaning people were unable to see the consequence of the Nazis’ rise to power. But by the 1970s, these questions seemed less urgent, and a writer who put moral questions at the heart of his book ran the risk of being stigmatized as a “moralizer.”

  Hughes was as old as the century, and would live to complete only twelve chapters of what was intended as the final volume. They see Norah, the Coventry child, come to work in Dorset, drawing two important strands of the story together; Augustine falls in love with Norah, and we assume he is on the brink of radical self-appraisal.

  The views of Hughes’s critics have dated more quickly than his own work. His subversive wit and the almost childlike clarity of his vision stand apart from quirks of fashion. The Wooden Shepherdess is a sprawling, capacious book, but its moments of close focus are startling: we feel history moving inside us, feel its pulse jump under our hand. When we read it with its precursor, as one story, we begin to understand Hughes’s claim that the failure to read and learn from fiction marks a retreat from reality “like that of an autistic child.” Fiction, he believed, breaks us out of our solitary confinement. It allows us to experience other people as people, not as things: this experience is “the necessary ground of ethics.” Few artists have made so heartfelt a plea for their chosen form, and few writers have done so much to capture the spirit of a century.

  —HILARY MANTEL

  SOME CHARACTERS

  FIRST INTRODUCED IN VOLUME ONE

  IN ENGLAND

  AUGUSTINE PENRY-HERBERT: aged 24. Was “hero” of The Fox in the Attic.

  MARY: his sister. Married to a Dorset landowner and Liberal M.P.

  GILBERT WADAMY: her husband.

  POLLY: their only child, aged nearly six. She and her uncle Augustine are devoted to each other.

  NANCY HALLORAN: her nurse.

  MINTA: the under-nurse.

  WANTAGE: the Wadamy’s butler.

  MRS. WINTER: the Wadamys’ housekeeper.

  NELLIE: Mrs. Winter’s sister.

  [GWILYM: her husband (recently dead).]

  SYLVANUS: a baby, their 3rd and only surviving child.

  JEREMY DIBDEN: Augustine’s closest Oxford friend and a neighbor of the Wadamys in Dorset.

  IN GERMANY

  BARON WALTHER VON KESSEN: a distant relative of Augustine’s living at Schloss Lorienburg in Bavaria.

  ADÈLE: his wife.

  FRANZ: their eldest son.

  MITZI: their eldest daughter, aged 17, with whom Augustine fell madly in love, but before he could tell her so she went blind and vanished into a convent.

  OTTO: Walther von Kessen’s half-brother and general factotum: a retired Colonel who lost a leg in World War I.

  PUTZI HANFSTÄNGL: An ardent Nazi in whose cottage at Uffing Hitler was hiding when arrested after the Munich “putsch.”

  REINHOLD STEUCKEL: a distinguished Munich lawyer.

  LOTHAR: a starry-eyed young patriot, who took part in the “putsch.”

  [WOLFF: Lothar’s brother. A young guerilla and political assassin, who hanged himself in the attics at Lorienburg.]

  The Wooden Shepherdess

  BOOK ONE

  The Wooden Shepherdess

  1

  ABOVE, IN THE dried aromatic scrub, an early cicada churred.

  A watersnake flashed in the dwindled summer cascade scarcely tinkling into the one pool deep enough to swim in—yet high up these hollow banks wrack dangled from washed-out roots, spring’s melting snows must send a torrent down this wide gully of hot white stones.... Out of the quivering overhead heat a big butterfly flopped on the rock beside them, and opened its wings to the sun.

  “What a mean scar! How come?” the girl asked curiously, feeling the back of his head none-too-gently with her fingers.

  You couldn’t quite call her a child—but certainly not a grown-up.... Like him, she was stretched on the rock chin-on-knuckles: wide blue eyes gazed out of sunburn and freckles straight into his, so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. You couldn’t quite call her a child ... and he stirred on the hard stone, withdrawing a little—but then settled back on the same spot exactly, for anywhere else was too hot to touch.

  Her sun-bleached hair was cropped like a boy’s. She was dressed in a boy’s blue denim overalls bought at the village store, faded and softened almost to rottenness by much sun and much washing; a blue canvas work-shirt (ditto, and some of the buttons undone). When she had caught him there swimming stark naked, no wonder at first he had thought it was only a boy and hadn’t bothered! When it wasn’t a boy he had pulled on shirt and trousers without stopping to dry himself: she, though, had simply stood there and watched him and when he sat down to pull on his shoes had simply sat down beside him and started to talk. For this young English stranger arrived in New Blandford from nowhere, his six-foot frame adorned in such threadbare and clumsily-mended incongruous clothes ...“We” wanted to know every last thing about him, it seemed!

  She had proved full of questions. Indeed she had asked much too much that she mustn’t be told (or allowed to find out, if he wanted to keep out of trouble). However, he liked her.... If not any longer entirely a child it was clear she didn’t yet know it: she seemed still as open and friendly and—unadolescent as one. “That, on the back of my head? Where somebody slugged me,” he told her, and smiled.

  She felt it again (having nothing finer to sew with had left a raised seam on his scalp, like a sail). “It’s scary!” she said: then hitched herself on her elbows an inch or two even nearer and lay like a lizard, smelling sweetly of sun. Out of his damp iridescent wet mop (each hair a miniature prism to split this intense white light) she saw droplets of water still trickle to dry on the golden tan of his broad intelligent forehead, his peeling nose....

  The water glittered. The glassy air warped in the heat: heat struck up at them both from the rock as well as down from the sky. Their faces touched, almost. A tiny sweat-bead had formed on one of her freckles, and crept down the nose one inch from his own. She screwed up her eyes, and puckered her lips like someone beginning to whistle.... Then—with her eyelids still shut so tight that they quivered—her hand fumbled open the front of his shirt and slid right inside, warm against skin still froggy a bit from the creek: “Sakes!” she exclaimed, “What makes your heart hammer so?”

  Firmly he felt for those fingers and gently withdrew them: let go the moment he got them outside, and asked in a voice as flat as he could what her name was....

  Blinking incredulous eyes wide open and suddenly sitting bolt-upright, “Ree” she said absently. Then for no obvious reason she shot away six feet from him, skiddering over the rock on her pointed behind the way little apes do. “Anne-Marie” was volunteered huffily, over her shoulder. Then she relented a little, and told him: “Was named for a Louisiana grand-mother.... Yeah, and your name too’s.... ‘Augusteen�
�: that sure is French!”

  She’d pronounced it almost as French; but before he had time to protest (or even to wonder how she’d discovered it) back she was, close: “Lookee!” she urged, and was making him look at her shirt’s breast-pocket under the bib of her overalls. “REE” was clumsily chain-stitched across it in colored wools, below a colored-wool turtle: “You feel my turtle—it’s sure s-soft!” she invited, and tugged at his hand (but he wouldn’t).

  The next thing she said was: “Loan me your shirt, so I embroider your name like all ours,” and “T,I,N,O”—she was spelling it out on his chest with her finger, glancing sideways up at him: “‘Tino’: is that what folks call you, back home?”

  He told her firmly that none of his friends called him Tino. Whereon she relapsed at last into silence: yawned, stood up, and began to undress.

  “All the same, I don’t smoke cigarettes!” she shouted, apropos of nothing, her shirt over her head and her jeans round her ankles: “Do you smoke cigarettes for Chrissake—or what do you do?” She wriggled her feet out of trousers and sneakers together. “And I don’t drink liquor, I hate it!”

  Expecting just tomboy bare skin as she peeled off her tomboy attire, it came as a shock to see all the modish crêpe-de-chine she wore under it.

  “Well? My hair fell out with the fever—so what?”

  Then—peach-colored crêpe-de-chine nonsense and all—she dived straight in off the rock; and Augustine’s thoughts reverted to Mitzi with rather a bump.

  *

  Mitzi ... Unseeing gray eyes, spread fingers among the breakfast things finding her coffee-cup for her like feelers....

  The passage of months and oceans had shrunk her image to something small and bright and picture-like: something seen as if looking back through a tunnel, or down the wrong end of a telescope. Something that danced in the air like a kind of medallion above this alien Connecticut pool, and yet was enough to convince him he’d never love anyone quite like Mitzi again for the whole of his life. If only he’d had a fair chance before she went in her convent to teach her there isn’t a God to go in to.... Sorrow rose stale in his throat.