Another mid-century British writer recommended to me by my late friend Eric Brown (see earlier post on Patrick Hamilton) is Claude Houghton. He’s not well-known these days. Most of his large output is no longer in print, and the few books that are still available are only so because they’ve been reprinted by Valancourt Books, a company which specialises in bringing forgotten books back from obscurity. I’ve read three of these books now: I am Jonathan Scrivener, This was Ivor Trent, and A Hair Divides.
Ivor Trent and Jonathan Scrivener are in many ways very similar. Both are set between the two world wars. Both have an eponymous character who is not present at all for most of the novel. Both have a main viewpoint character who is seeking to learn more about this absent charismatic figure, and does so through a series of interactions with the friends, lovers and acquaintances of the missing character. Both too deal with the idea of a superior human being, who perhaps offers some hope in a world that seems to have lost any sense of direction. Shades of the Nietzchean superman? They are both engaging reads, and Ivor Trent in particular left a particular dream-like flavour in my mind that stayed with me, though (as with all dream-like flavours), I would be hard pressed to say what it was. None of the characters was very likeable, though, and they and their stories did not stay with me.
A Hair Divides I think is a fine book.
The main protagonist is a young writer called Rutherford, who at the beginning of the book is trying to make his way in London in the years before World War I. He is rather aloof and judgy, and seems to have only superficial and utilitarian relationships with others. He despises his father and older brother for being in business, which he considers beneath him, but at the same time he longs for their approval.
Rutherford meets a man called Feversham, who is charming, lively and a very talented artist. Unlike Rutherford he is not judgy, and not an intellectual snob. He brings out the best in people he talks to, and is interested in, and respectful of, all areas of life and not just (like Rutherford) the arts. He is another of Houghton’s superior humans, in a way, but also possesses some of the qualities of Patrick Hamilton’s decent competent people (see earlier post), while Rutherford is in some ways one of Hamilton’s status-conscious overgrown schoolboys.
Through Feversham, Rutherford meets an extremely beautiful, cultured and intelligent woman called Sondra. (These exceptionally clever, exceptionally beautiful women are a Houghton type, featuring in all three of the Houghton books I’ve read. There are no exceptionally clever women who are not also exceptionally beautiful. To be fair, the exceptional men are also all very good looking.) Rutherford spends time with Feversham and Sondra on a number of occasions, but can’t work out if they are lovers or just friends. He is very attracted to Sondra, who is different from all the women he’s known so far, and he is very jealous of Feversham, to the point of hatred, because Feversham is manifestly a better man than him in every way, and Rutherford is driven by a need to think himself one of the superior people. (Or one of the cool kids, as a schoolboy might say.)
Feversham shows Rutherford a play he has just written, and asks him for advice. Rutherford sees straight away that it is very good indeed, but he thinks he sees a way of advancing his own career. If he tells Feversham the play is seriously flawed, he thinks, and offers to help him rework it, he might be able to get credited as co-author. Feversham takes this bait, but eventually they fall out when Rutherford is so critical that Feversham says that he might as well proceed with the play as written and see where that gets him, and Rutherford promptly accuses him of wasting his valuable time. Their falling out, and Rutherford’s bitterness towards Feversham, is a matter of public knowledge among the people Rutherford knows.
The two of them meet again unexpectedly on a foggy day. Feversham bears no grudge and invites Rutherford to a very remote cottage he owns in Cornwall, where they can work together on the play uninterrupted. Rutherford isn’t grateful, but he sees the opportunity to resume his co-authorship scheme, and so they go to Cornwall, unknown to anyone else. Everyone thinks that Feversham has gone to Paris. He is a man who wanders from one place to another.
Rutherford pretends to find implausible a particular crucial scene in the play. It’s a murder involving a gun which to everyone else looks like suicide. Soon after arriving at the almost derelict cottage, miles from anywhere, Feversham suggests they act out the scene (using a gun he owns) to see whether it works. In the process of them doing so, the gun goes off, Feversham is killed and Rutherford now has a dilemma. He knows this will look like a murder, and there’s no way of proving it’s not. Since it’s widely known that he and Feversham had a bad falling out, it seems particularly unlikely he’ll be believed if he goes to the police and tells them this was an accident. So he must act like he really is a murderer, hide the body, return unseen to London, hide from everyone until he’s confident no one is onto him, and pretend for the rest of his life that he knows nothing about what became of Feversham other than the fact that he said he was going to Paris.
What follows is a thriller, in the sense that we of course want to know whether he is eventually accused of murder, and if so what happens, and that keeps us wanting to turn the pages. But it is also a kind of meta-thriller, in that the narrator refers on several occasions to the necessity of plot in fiction to keep people interested in a novel or a play, but also to the artificiality of plot devices. Feversham’s play, which comes back into the story towards the end, is also a thriller, but it is described as an unusual one in that, while it includes the necessary plot twists to keep the audience interested, does not do so at the expense of character, ideas or psychological depth. I guess that’s what Houghton was aiming to do with this book.
Forced to act like a murderer, Rutherford’s life hollows out. His writing dries up, he fills up his time with study and work. He moves abroad, he participates in the war, not on the front, but as a translator. He is haunted by what happened in Cornwall, which has forced him to live a lie for the rest of his life. Sometimes he himself wonders if he really did intend to kill Feversham.
He eventually moves back to London, hiding away in a lodging house which is actually the very same house where he grew up (his room is his former nursery), and there leading a miserable and solitary life. The unfolding of the story does provide some nice thrillerish twists, but is also a convincing psychological study, packed with ideas and observations. Events gradually force Rutherford to face up to himself in a new way and, towards the end, they offer him a certain kind of redemption.
Valancourt books have done well to make this book available. And dear Eric Brown has done me a favour drawing this writer to my attention.
