Richard Hughes

Greetings! I just bought a copy of The Fox in the Attic by Richard Hughes in a San Francisco used bookstore. I had never heard of this writer, yet this novel looks quite interesting. I plan to start it shortly. I thought this might be a place where I could find folks who knew of Hughes in general and perhaps of this book in particular. From a quick look online, it seems the book is the first of what was intended to be a three novel series called The Human Predicament, but that Hughes never finished the third volume.

Does anyone here have any insight on Hughes?

Thanks!

I think Richard Hughes is best known for a book called A High Wind in Jamaica about a family forced to leave the island in the wake of a hurricane. Their ship is attacked by pirates and the childern end up being taken captive and thrust into a rather different world than the one they were brought up in. I read it years ago, and enjoyed it, but that is about as much as I remember.

I'm not sure that A High Wind in Jamaica is called that in the US - it definitely had a different title when first released. (A nice piece of trivia is that Martin Amis is one of the child actors in the 1965 film of the novel). His second novel, In Hazard, is also sea related - I believe he was an admirer of Conrad.

Hughes first came to prominence in the 1920s as a playwright, and in the immediate post-war years was a scriptwriter for Ealing. Hughes was a slow writer - there was a 23 year gap between In Hazard & A Fox in the Attic, 12 years between that novel and The Wooden Shepherdess - hence the HP trilogy wasn't finished. There are also a few collections of stories (some aimed at children), and one of poetry, published.

Thanks! jargoneer, have you read any of Hughes' works?

I've read The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess - I enjoyed them but I wasn't totally convinced that Hughes was in complete control of his material: the two volumes are quite disconnected. (Of course, perhaps everything would have been tied up subsequently). Perhaps not a great writer but certainly deserving of more readers and recognition than he now has. The opening sequence of Fox is a good example of how effective his writing could be.

It could be that he ends up a footnote in English literature - he was very good friends with Dylan Thomas and it seems their friendship inspired DT to write Under Milk Wood.

I was given a NYRB reprint of A High Wind in Jamaica for my birthday. In it, I should certainly say Richard Hughes was in control. But to say that one has enjoyed it, or give a synopsis of the plot, doesn't really get across the book's quality. (Not, chrisharpe, that you're in any way wrong in either.) It's brutal-farcical-fantastic.... and yet not, quite. Only the 'not, quite' is a bit jangling, off-key, like a day that's greyish overcast and yet just feels.... wrong. The style and plot and the book's concerns, as it says in the introduction I have, don't match each other. Yet, intentionally, and it's an interesting disconnect.

It is, as concerns human nature, and the limits of each human's sight, fascinating. Brilliant. A compelling and.... carnivalesque..... book, in scenes which stick in the mind, vivid, murky, colorful, a mix of brutality and play and highly uncertain morals. Hughes has no illusions about children.

(In fact, I rather think too few.)

I fear I'm borrowing, a bit, from the introduction, and yet haven't right now the time to re-read it. Will do so later, and, if need be, correct my own comment. (Apologies to Francine Prose, in case.)

Actually Eurydice, your comments ring a bell and I think that is precisely what I liked about the book - I was afraid that my recollection wasn't reliable though. I thought I remembered it having something of the feel of Malcolm Lowry / Flann O'Brien - not magical realism, but a dream or nightmare-like quality that was quite appropriate to the plot. Was this quality an attempt to convey the idea of a frightening story seen through the eyes of the children? I don't recall. In any case, I can see why Hughes might have been a friend of Dylan Thomas.

Definitely nightmarish. In the very sense of creativity and anarchic freedom and color and jumble that conveys.

It is, partly, what you suggest. But it's also to suggest something about the nature of children, of humans, of evil. "Like the much more simplistic Lord of the Flies, to which it is sometimes compared....", I think Prose began. And we hear plenty about the competing, different, fragmented views of adults. (Who are, by the way, always wrong and often deluded.)

And, yes, sorry - I should have read Lowry, but haven't. The quality you're talking about is one I recognize in O'Brien, of course. It's certainly shared by Richard Hughes, in this.

Hey folks, thanks for all the insights so far. I'm to about page 45 of The Fox in the Attic now and enjoying it quite a lot, enough so that I'm sure I'll read The Wooden Shepherdess and, now, A High Wind in Jamaica, which sounds fascinating.

The New York Review of Books, which previously reissued A High Wind in Jamaica, The Fox in the Attic and The Wooden Shepherdess, has now reissued Hughes' In Hazard, a maritime adventure. Introduction by John Crowley. My copy should be arriving soon, and based on the strength of the other Hughes novels, I'll try to read it toute de suite.

I'll be interested to hear about it.