itEVIEW OF BOOKS

Benny Green on Buchan, a hundred years on

Before the end of this century, some cultural historian will write a book which follows through in close textual detail the interaction between the acquisition by the British of an empire and the popular literature which the process inspired, a kind of anglicised imperial version of Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson's classic work on the literature of the American Civil War. This British variant would perhaps begin with the Henty-Marryat-Ballantyne school of derring-do, reach its artistic apogee with Kipling's not-so-plain tales from the hill stations, and come to a graceful dying fall with the tipsy tea-planters of Maugham's Far East. And somewhere towards the end of this remarkable catalogue, sandwiched between, say, A. E. W. Mason and Edgar Wallace, the reader will come across the exasperating figure of John Buchan*. I describe him as exasperating because although he was in grievous error on almost every major issue in whose interest he kept trotting down from the Sinai of his own presumption, his name and reputation have survived because of a few potboilers churned out in his spare time.

The great difficulty about coming to terms with Buchan is to know how to be fair to him, for of all the proponents of the imperial ideal, he appears to have been more unfair to more people than any other three bigots whose names spring to mind. The dilemma is of a kind familiar enough with regard to men of Buchan's kidney, and if already I seem to be considering issues like amiability and political sagacity, which ought to have less than nothing to do with assessing the craft of an artist, I can only defend myself by saying that this is what Buchan would have wished. One of his many snobberies was the curious one which believes that the duties of a functionary are somehow of a more elevated moral tone than those of the mere professional writer.

If we add to that delusion Buchan's other authorial asininity, which is that with writing as with cricket, amateur status is always to be preferred, we can begin to understand why a man who published more than ninety books could write to Hugh Walpole, "I love writers individually, but assembled in bulk they affect me with overpowering repugnance". As it happens, it was the cross Buchan had to bear that there were a great many things which filled him with overpowering repugnance, and with regard to the Walpole remark, it was an observation which posterity will no doubt take sardonic pleasure in turning against Buchan by applying it to those ninety books. Some of the

*To mark Buchan's centenary, Nelson are publishing this week The Interpreter's House, a critical study of Buchan by David Daniell, at

e3.95 „. novels remain readable despite a few regrettable outbursts of hysteria, in contrast to the rest, whose effect when assembled in bulk is symbolised by Frank Swinnerton's reported exchange between a publisher and the critic Robertson Nicoll. Having read the latest Buchan manuscript, Nicoll was heard to mutter disapproval, to which the publisher reacted with, "John says it improves after the first four chapters." "I fear," replied Nicoll, "that few but John will ever know that," All his life Buchan clung doggedly to certain beliefs whose unfashionability today only compounds the problem of getting a clear look at his narrative technique. Like Churchill, for instance, he believed in the sanctity of the Anglo-Saxon mission; like Macaulay, he was utterly sincere and indomitably provincial in foisting off English culture on the locals, whoever they happened to be; like Belloc, he suspected Jews of subversion; like half the games masters in the Empire, he thought that cold baths and long walks in the heather were

better calculated to boost a fellow's religiasity than a roll in the clover. As to his jingo fervour, there is a passage of quite wonderful uncouthness in Prester John, to which historians react with the sober joy of the modest wayfarer who, having munched his bread and cheese and smoked a quiet pipe in some clump of lilac by a bumside, tucks away his pocket edition of Izaac Walton, turns a bend in the road and finds an ascetic-looking gentleman assiduously gathering enough rope to hang himself. The passage leaps like a spring ,lamb from the pastures of Gertrude Himmelfarb's Victorian Minds, it vaults like a salmon from the pellucid stream of L. C. B. Seaman's Victorian England, and I see no good reason why it should not now soar like a champagne cork from the bubbles of the present context , which is written, by the way, by a Jewish subversive communistic Kremlin inspired capitalist exploiter who, in

the days of his youth, when he was not busy pursuing those ends which Buchan had ordained for him, like undermining the security of the Empire, polluting the bloodstream of the nation, espousing the cause of foreigners, casting longing eyes at young girls of impeccable Anglo-Saxon antecedents, and neglecting the stiffness of his upper lip, whiled away long hours revelling in the better Buchan narratives.

I am sorry to keep laughing like this over the solemn tablets of Buchan's Law, but I have always found the sheer parochialism of their prejudices so piffling that I really cannot take

much offence at them. Anyway, here is the notorious passage from Prester John:

I knew. ... the meaning of the white man's duty. He has to take all risks, recking nothing of his life or his fortunes and well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies. Moreover, the work made me pitiful and kindly. I learned much of the untold grievances of the natives and saw something of their strange twisted reasoning.

While we are on the subject of strange twisted reasoning, let us spare a charitable glance at something else Buchan once wrote, which gives us a rather clearer picture of what he had in mind when he spoke of finding one's reward in the fulfilment of the task: One day there will be a continued coming-and-going between England and Colonial society, till the rich man has his country house or shooting box as naturally in the Selkirks or on the East African plateau as in Scotland.

I am willing to concede that the effect of this sort of thing, allied to Buchan's congenital inability to understand even the most rudi mentary facts about women, rather detract from the pleasure to be had from following a Buchan narrative. He was weak on characterisation, disingenuous about passion, and I get the impression he would have much preferred a world without either.

But having said that, it remains true that it is the simplest thing in the world to dip into one of his narratives and be swept away by its sheer pace and clarity. What is Buchan doing that he can arrest, at least for the moment, so large a part of the critical faculty as to make us actually care what happens to his blackguardly heroes? His formula is the classic one of the Quest, sometimes amended to the Hunt. To look no further than two of the best-known

Buchan books, in The Thirty Nine Steps Hannay is on the run from a crowd of dirty

foreigners and spies; in Huntingtower Dickson McCunn starts his holiday adventure by flinging himself across the face of the map in his pocket. And in both cases Buchan places his hero in that Scottish terrain he knew so well, loved even better, and never tired of describing.

Behind me was the road climbing through a long cleft in the hills, which was the upper glen of some notable river. In front was a flat space of maybe a mile, all pitted with bog-holes and rough with tussocks, and then beyond it the road fell steeply down another glen to a plain whose dimness melted into the distance. To left and right were round-shouldered green hills as smooth as pancakes, but to the south there was a glimpse of high, heathery mountains, which I remembered from the map as the big knot of hill which I had chosen for my sanctuary. I was on the central boss of a huge upland country, and could see everything moving for miles.

The style is as conservative as one would expect in a writer who so revered Scott and Stevenson, and I sometimes wonder whether Buchan was not the last writer of English prose to use, unfacetiously, the word "yclept" when he meant "named." (4 occurs in Huntingtower, 1922.) Another useful weapon in his armoury Was his knowledge of how things were done by What a later age has been pleased to call The Establishment, for Buchan's insatiable appetite for the glittering prizes led him to those very dinner-tables he describes in his fictions. In a later book called The Gap in the Curtain, an undistinguished story of time-travelling, one of his fictional doppelgangers, Edward Leithen, lists his own duties:

Ever since Easter I had been overworked out of all reason. There was a batch of important Dominion appeals before the Judicial Committee, in every one 0. f which I was engaged, and I had some heavy cases in the Commercial Court. To make matters worse I Was chairman of a Royal Commission about to issue as findings, and I had been sitting as a one-man Commission in a troublesome dispute in the Ship-building trade. Also I was expected to be pretty regularly in the House of Commons, and the sittings had often stretched far into the next morning.

It is done convincingly enough, and the only complaint which Springs to mind is that with all that efficiency and dedication and strength and

Cleverness devoted to the playing of the Great Game, why in the last reckoning was it played so

execrably? Buchan's intrepid heroes fight the good fight and yet subversion, when it was discovered, came from inside the castle walls. What, I wonder, would Hannay have made of the chief of the British Secret Service working for the Russians?

I suppose that of all Buchan's books, it is The Thirty Nine Steps which retains the widest readership, but it might be fair to point out that part of the book's reputation stems from the Hitchcock mid-'thirties film starring Robert Donat as Hannay. I have little time myself for the elephantine jocosities of Hitchcock's style, but I must say that his injection into The Thirty Nine Steps of the heroine that Buchan omitted, had a most benign effect. Readers who come to the book after seeing the film, having been stimulated to nameless dreams by the episodes Where Donat, handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll, IS obliged to run his hand up her leg every time she does, are always astonished, and usually disappointed, to find that no such lady ever existed in Buchan's mind.

But in a sense, the most revealing of all Buchan's books is the biography of Caesar he wrote not long before his death. It is a curious affair, rickety with contradictions. At one Moment we read that Cicero had no gift for leadership because he was too conscious of Where he was going: a few pages later we learn that Cromwell learned that "no man goes so far as he who does not know where he is going." Even more amazing we are to gather from Buchan's text that Caesar was virtually a virgin to the end. Of Cleopatra he has this to say:

She had a son during the year whom she fathered Upon him. Caesar's friends disbelieved the tale of Caesarian's paternity, and later ages are free to decide as they please.

One again Buchan is working his antiquated 'idea that dalliance is for sluggards and that its I energies should be sublimated into channels of statecraft. Long before the end it is clear he is reshaping Rome in the image of Whitehall, and transmitting Caesar into the great leader he has Yearned for all his life, even if it means dancing With hobnailed boots all over Suetonius and Plutarch to do it. (He actually describes the seducer of Postumia, Lollia, Tertulla, Mucia, Servile, as a Calvinist.) Poor Buchan, who dreamed of Caesar and got Stanley Baldwin

instead, and who in retrospect is revealed as the perfect example of the brilliantly clever man without sagacity. Buried somewhere among those ninety books there is a phrase which has stayed with me ever since I first came across it years ago. He writes of a man "as full of silly prejudices as a minor poet." A dangerously perceptive phrase to have been coined by a minor poet like Buchan. Today he lies buried in Oxfordshire, alongside his faithful manservant. The two of them are separated by a hedge.