The Fox in the Attic

Last updated

The Fox in the Attic
TheFoxInTheAttic.jpg
First UK edition
Author Richard Hughes
LanguageEnglish
SeriesThe Human Predicament
Genre Historical fiction
Publisher Chatto & Windus (UK)
Harper & Brothers (US)
Publication date
1961
Followed byThe Wooden Shepherdess 

The Fox in the Attic, written by Welsh writer Richard Hughes and published in 1961, is the first part of the unfinished novel The Human Predicament. [1] In a note to the first edition, this was described by the author as "a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War." [2] This description left open the question of whether The Fox in the Attic was to be the first part of a trilogy, a tetralogy or an even longer work. [3]

Contents

Plot summary

The novel opens in 1923. The protagonist, a young Welsh aristocrat named Augustine Penry-Herbert, discovers the body of a young girl and is incorrectly suspected of having something to do with her accidental death. Augustine decides to leave England and visit distant relations in Germany. He falls in love with his cousin Mitzi amidst the rise of Nazism, including the Munich Putsch. At the end of the novel, Mitzi, who has lost her sight, enters a convent and Augustine returns to England.

Background

Richard Hughes was cadet in training when the 1918 armistice was signed and spent World War II as an Admiralty bureaucrat; it was this experience that caused him to write The Human Predicament. In order to adequately mix his fictional characters with historical figures, Hughes relied on firsthand accounts and family papers from German relatives and friends, including distant relation Baroness Pia von Aretin (whom he acknowledges in the 1961 US edition of the novel) and Helene Hanfstaengl, wife of Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had been a friend of Hitler’s in the early 1920s. [4] Hughes also gives an explanation for his unconventional description of the Munich Putsch saying that his narrative "is based on a vivid contemporary account by an actual Nazi participant, a Major Goetz. This account was contained in a letter to a friend dated 26th November, 1923, which some weeks later found its way into the German press."

Publication history

The Fox in the Attic was originally published in 1961 by Chatto & Windus: London as volume 1 of The Human Predicament, and then in the United States by Harper & Brothers: New York. [1] This was 23 years after Hughes's previous novel, In Hazard: A Sea Story, and 33 years after A High Wind in Jamaica , which was a best seller in the United Kingdom and America. [5] It was published the following year in Sweden (Stockholm: Norstedt) as Räven på vinden.

The second volume in The Human Predicament, The Wooden Shepherdess, was published in 1973 by Chatto & Windus: London; it carries on the story to 1934 and the Night of the Long Knives. [6] The third volume was left unfinished, but twelve completed chapters were included in the 1995 edition. [7]

Reception

The Fox in the Attic was featured in the 2 February 1962 Life Guide section of Life Magazine. [8] In this short blurb, Life introduced Hughes's attempt to write The Human Predicament trilogy, calling it a "vast, Tolstoyan novel sequence" while also saying of the first volume, "Hughes effectively interweaves the life of his hero...with the fortunes of top Nazidom." [8] Publication in Britain was accompanied by widespread critical acclaim for its mingling of truth and fiction. Goronwy Rees was moved to write: "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." At the same time, many critics felt that it would be impossible to judge the book until the completion of the whole novel. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Hughes (British writer)</span> British writer (1900–1976)

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isaiah Berlin</span> British philosopher and social and political theorist (1909–1997)

Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. F. Powys</span> British novelist and short story writer

Theodore Francis Powys – published as T. F. Powys – was a British novelist and short-story writer. He is best remembered for his allegorical novel Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1927), where Weston the wine merchant is evidently God. Powys was influenced by the Bible, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift and other writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as later writers such as Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietzsche.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. S. Byatt</span> British writer (1936–2023)

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constance Garnett</span> English translator of Russian literature (1861–1946)

Constance Clara Garnett was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English. Altogether, she translated 71 volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chatto & Windus</span> British book publisher

Chatto & Windus is an imprint of Penguin Random House that was formerly an independent book publishing company founded in London in 1855 by John Camden Hotten. Following Hotten's death, the firm would reorganize under the names of his business partner Andrew Chatto and poet William Edward Windus. The company was purchased by Random House in 1987 and is now a sub-imprint of Vintage Books within the Penguin UK division.

Richard Thomas Mabey is a writer and broadcaster, chiefly on the relations between nature and culture.

<i>A High Wind in Jamaica</i> (novel) 1929 novel by Richard Hughes

A High Wind in Jamaica is a 1929 novel by the Welsh writer Richard Hughes, which was made into a film of the same name in 1965. Hughes' first novel, it was set in the late nineteenth century and followed a group of children captured by pirates on a voyage from Jamaica. A critical success as well as a bestseller on its first publication in Britain, it was awarded the Prix Femina Vie-Heureuse in 1932.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Douglas</span> British writer

George Norman Douglas was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Garnett</span> British writer and publisher (1892–1981)

David Garnett was an English writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blake Morrison</span> English poet and author (born 1950)

Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

<i>After Many a Summer</i> 1939 novel by Aldous Huxley

After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death. It was published in the United States as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Written soon after Huxley left England and settled in California, the novel is Huxley's examination of American culture, particularly what he saw as its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth. This satire also raises philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in Huxley's final novel Island. The novel's title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a figure in Greek mythology to whom Aurora gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book was awarded the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Three-volume novel</span> Form of publishing a novel/series in 3 volumes

The three-volume novel was a standard form of publishing for British fiction during the nineteenth century. It was a significant stage in the development of the modern novel as a form of popular literature in Western culture.

<i>Sunset at Blandings</i> Unfinished novel by P. G. Wodehouse

Sunset at Blandings is an unfinished novel by P. G. Wodehouse published in the United Kingdom by Chatto & Windus, London, on 17 November 1977 and in the United States by Simon & Schuster, New York, 19 September 1978. Wodehouse was working on the novel when he died in 1975. The book's first edition publisher, Chatto & Windus, gave the book its title.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chloe Aridjis</span> Mexican-American novelist and writer (born 1971)

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican and American novelist and writer. Her novel Book of Clouds (2009) was published in eight countries, and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. Her second novel, Asunder was published in 2013 to unanimous acclaim. Her third novel, Sea Monsters (2019), was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020. She is the eldest daughter of Mexican poet and diplomat Homero Aridjis and American Betty F. de Aridjis, an environmental activist and translator. She is the sister of film maker Eva Aridjis. She has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">P. J. Kavanagh</span> English poet, lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist (1931 – 2015)

P. J. Kavanagh FRSL was an English poet, lecturer, actor, broadcaster and columnist. His father was the ITMA scriptwriter Ted Kavanagh.

Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (1853–1922) was an English journalist and author.

<i>Hitler: The Rise of Evil</i> 2003 Canadian television miniseries

Hitler: The Rise of Evil is a Canadian television miniseries in two parts, directed by Christian Duguay and produced by Alliance Atlantis. It stars Robert Carlyle in the lead role and explores Adolf Hitler's rise and his early consolidation of power during the years after the First World War and focuses on how the embittered, politically fragmented and economically buffeted state of German society following the war made that ascent possible. The film also focuses on Ernst Hanfstaengl's influence on Hitler's rise to power. The miniseries, which premiered simultaneously in May 2003 on CBC in Canada and CBS in the United States, received two Emmy Awards, for Art Direction and Sound Editing, while Peter O'Toole was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

<i>The Corner That Held Them</i> 1948 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Corner that Held Them is a novel by English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, first published in 1948. It details the life of and lives inside a convent, from its establishment in the 12th century through to 1382. The plot involves the Black Death and multiple narratives that do not combine into a plot. The novel was originally published by Chatto & Windus with the American edition being published by Viking Press. It is Warner's favorite novel that she wrote. The novel explores whether a community run by women is able to exist under patriarchy through portrayals of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Warner typed 58 pages for an unfinished sequel that was spread between four gatherings. The novel was reviewed favourably by Rachel Mann and Hermione Hoby.

References

  1. 1 2 Hughes, Richard (2000). The Fox in the Attic. New York, NY: New York Review of Books. ISBN   0940322293.
  2. Hughes, Richard (1961). The Human Predicament, Volume One: The Fox in the Attic (First ed.). Chatto and Windus.
  3. Poole, Richard (1987). Richard Hughes: Novelist. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. p. 187.
  4. Holmqvist, Ivo (2000). From Putsch to Purge. A Study of the German Episodes in Richard Hughes's The Human Predicament and their Sources (PDF). Lund, Sweden: Department of English, Lund University.
  5. "A High Wind in Jamaica". New York Review Books. Retrieved 15 November 2012.
  6. Hughes, Richard (2000). The Wooden Shepherdess. New York, NY: New York Review of Books. ISBN   0-940322-30-7.
  7. Hughes, Richard (1995). The Wooden Shepherdess. London: The Harvill Press. ISBN   9781860460135.
  8. 1 2 "Life Guide". Life. 2 February 1962. Retrieved 15 November 2012.
  9. Poole, Richard. Richard Hughes: Novelist. Poetry Wales Press. pp. 77–78.