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标 题: Rereading John Buchan [The New Criterion
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“Realism coloured by poetry”:
Rereading John Buchan
by Roger Kimball
Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore c
autious of how we strip her.
—Dr. Johnson, quoted by John Buchan
The life of reason is our heritage and exists only through tradition. Now
the misfortune of revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their foll
y is that they wish to be disinherited even more than they are.
—George Santayana, quoted by John Buchan
“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from
barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here
, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Satan.”
—Andrew Lumley, in Buchan’s The Power-House
“Really?” I believe that was my cautious response when a friend urged me
to read John Buchan’s memoir Pilgrim’s Way. It was, he said, “a remarkable
spiritual testament,” or words to that effect. Hmm. The source of the recomm
endation was unimpeachable: one of the most intelligent and least frivolous pe
ople I know. Yet I had read Buchan—probably the same books you have: The Thir
ty-Nine Steps (1915), for example, the short, bracing spy thriller (or “shock
er,” as Buchan called it) in which the dashing Richard Hannay battles a perfi
dious German spy ring and—after a series of wild, pulse-rattling cliffhangers
—emerges triumphant in the nick of time. I had also read Greenmantle (1916),
the somewhat longer, but still bracing, spy thriller in which the dashing Rich
ard Hannay battles a perfidious German spy ring and—after a series of wild, p
ulse-rattling cliffhangers—emerges triumphant in the nick of time. I had even
read Mr. Standfast (1919), the moderately long spy thriller in which a dashing Richard … German … wild … emerges … nick of t.
I hasten to add that the preceding sentences are not fair to my experience
of reading those books. I gobbled them up gratefully if heedlessly. And that,
I suspect, is precisely how Buchan intended them to be read. His biographers
make a point of telling us that he disliked talking about his “shockers.” He
was pleased that people liked them—pleased that they sold—but at bottom the
y were a bit of a lark, a recreation rather than a vocation.
Buchan once said that if there were six literary categories from “highbro
w to solid ivory” he belonged in the middle, to the “high-lowbrow.” He unde
rstood perfectly that his popular fiction was a species of “romance where the
incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the po
ssible.” That indeed was part of its attraction. As the critic John Gross obs
erved in his review of Janet Adam Smith’s biography of Buchan (1965), “one o
f the main reasons for enjoying Buchan is because he is so preposterous.” But
do note that the emphasis here is as much on “enjoyment” as on “prepostero
us.”
In any event, there is nothing that prevents the preposterous from possess
ing contemporary relevance. I reread Greenmantle two years ago, just after al
Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Towers. It really is an extravagant period pie
ce. But I am surprised that the book has not made a conspicuous comeback. The
story turns on a German effort to enlist and enflame a radical Islamist sect i
n Turkey, where things are touch and go for the Allies. Sir Walter Bullivant o
f the Foreign Office summons Hannay and puts him in the picture. “The ordinar
y man” believes that Islam is succumbing to “Krupp guns,” to modernity. “Y
et—I don’t know,” Sir Walter confesses. “I do not quite believe in Islam b
ecoming a back number.” Hannay agrees (natch): “It looks as if Islam had a b
igger hand in the thing than we thought… . Islam is a fighting creed, and the
mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn swor
d in the other.” Indeed. Later in the book, another character observes,
There’s a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the wa
ters… . Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one was due about now. A
nd they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of t
he Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its
old purity.
Greenmantle was published in 1916. Perhaps we’ve finally caught up with i
t.
Buchan often deliberately poached on contemporary historical events and pl
aces in his shockers. He was aiming less at verisimilitude than at the piquanc
y that the appearance of verisimilitude provided. He did it all with a wink. I
n the dedication to The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan explains that, convalescing
from an illness, he had exhausted his supply of thrillers—“those aids to che
erfulness”—and so decided to write one of his own. He tossed it off in a mat
ter of weeks in the autumn of 1914 and was duly startled by its immense succes
s. (An earlier shocker, The Power-House, had been serialized in 1913 but wasn’
t published in book form until 1916.) A million copies of The Thirty-Nine Step
s sold, I read somewhere, and that is an old figure. Timing played a part in t
he huge sale. The book was published in October 1915, early in the First World
War. Tales about brave chaps hunting down dastardly German spies had an audie
nce primed and waiting.
But the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps was not due to timing alone. It i
s a remarkable book. Like Mr. Hannay himself, the book hits the ground running
and barely stops for breath in the course of its 110 pages. On your mark (fir
st sentence): Hannay, back from South Africa having made his pile, is “pretty
well disgusted with life”; he contemplates Albania, “a place that might kee
p a man from yawning.”
I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into some
thing; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.
Get set (a few pages later): Hannay comes home to find the man with a dark
secret he’d met a few days earlier murdered in his apartment. Go: Hannay, pu
rsued by both the police (who suspect him of the murder) and the bad guys (who
done it), races from London to Scotland, clambers over endless Scottish moors
, is caught by the baddies, escapes, and zigzags back by the cliffs of Dover t
o reveal the secret of the Black Stone. Whew: “All Europe” had been “trembl
ing on the edge of an earthquake.” Not to worry: Hannay nabs the spy; England
is safe. (In his famous 1935 film version of the book, Alfred Hitchcock took
many liberties with the text, but he did manage to preserve Buchan’s uncanny
union of velocity and menace.)
The Thirty-Nine Steps recounts all this with an urgent but evocative econo
my. It owes as much to Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson (fellow Sco
ts and two of Buchan’s models) as E. Phillips Oppenheim (a less august though
no less favored model: “my master in fiction … the greatest Jewish writer s
ince Isaiah”).
Buchan did not invent a genre with The Thirty-Nine Steps. Conan Doyle, Wil
kie Collins, and others beat him to it. But he did supply some novel furnishin
gs, a distinctive tone and atmosphere instantly recognizable as the Buchanesqu
e. The scholar Robin Winks called Buchan “the father of the modern spy thrill
er,” a genre whose beneficiaries include Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John
le Carré. The chase scenes, the villain who belongs to the upper reaches of
respectable society, the breeding and derring-do of the hero: they’re reasona
bly fresh in Buchan, overripe in Fleming, often a bit rancid in later authors.
But the Buchanesque involved other elements. It has something to do with h
is breathless plots and flat but somehow compelling characters—not only Hanna
y (modelled, it is said, on the young Edmund Ironside, later Field Marshall Lo
rd Ironside of Archangel), but also figures like Peter Pienaar, the wiry Dutch
hunter; Dickson McCunn, the retired Glasgow grocer; Sir Edward Leithen, the h
igh-powered lawyer. None is three-dimensional; none seems “real”; all are cu
riously memorable in the context of their actions. I suspect that Buchan would
have agreed with—let’s see, Aristotle, wasn’t it?—that plot is “the firs
t principle and, as it were, the soul of the ‘shocker’; character holds seco
nd place.”
The Buchanesque also has something to do with the way place and landscape
are woven into the bones of his stories (vide Stevenson here). John Macnab (19
25) is in the form of a Buchan shocker. But it does not present a tale of high
-stakes espionage. Instead, it tells the story of three middle-aged Buchan cha
racters, Sir Edward Leithen, Palliser Yeates, and Lord Lamancha, who, at the p
innacles of their careers, find themselves bored and (like Hannay in The Thirt
y-Nine Steps) “disgusted with life.” They need a challenge, the stimulus of
danger, what William James called “the moral equivalent of war.” So they bet
ake themselves in secret to Scotland, where, under the name of John Macnab, th
ey announce to some local grandees their intention of poaching two stags and a
salmon over the course of a few days. The penalty if caught is public humilia
tion. As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observes in her classic essay on Bu
chan, there is a sense in which “the hunting and fishing scenes, … described in great and exciting detail, are not appendages to the plot;
they are the plot.” The relation between man and landscape, his behavior towa
rd the land and its bounty, are part of the moral compact of society. One is n
ot surprised to discover that Buchan was an avid, almost a compulsive walker.
Ten, twenty, thirty miles a day—like Richard Hannay or Peter Pienaar, he also
clambered over hill and dale, scouring the horizon, registering the lay of th
e land. Richard Usborne notes in his book Clubland Heroes (first published in
1953) that Buchan’s characters “are attracted to exhaustion as a drinker to
the bottle.” It was an attraction that Buchan himself seemed to share.
John Macnab is a tour de force—some regard it as Buchan’s best novel—an
adventure story in which the McGuffin (to use Hitchcock’s term) is deliberat
ely reduced to a minimum: fish and fauna instead of foul play. Yet the result
is more than a sprightly, slightly absurd adventure tale. Its theme, as Himmel
farb notes, “is not only the natural and rightful authority exercised by some
men by virtue of their breeding, experience, and character, but also the natu
ral and rightful impulse to rebel against authority.” That dialectic—the imp
lication of authority and independence, of conformity and innovation—are at t
he heart of Buchan’s world view.
It is one version of the Tory creed. Democracy, Buchan believes, is all we
ll and good. In fact, he is a passionate democrat. But it is essential to reme
mber that (as he puts it in Pilgrim’s Way) “Democracy … is a negative thing
. It provides a fair field for the Good Life, but it is not itself the Good Li
fe.” Buchan’s view of democracy owes more to Athens than to Jefferson. It is
a political arrangement that encourages striving and excellence—the agon of
superior achievement—but not the levelling imperative of equality. This sober
ing truth is at the heart of John Macnab: “It is a melancholy fact,” a chara
cter muses, “which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may b
e on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be prepos
terously unequal.” All of which is to say that if Buchan is constitutionally
a Tory, he practices a slightly seditious—some might just say “Scottish”—r
edaction of Toryism: its benediction is not upon the pastness of the past but its compact with the energies of the present. Hence Buchan’s (
qualified) admiration for such robust but un-Toryesque figures as Cromwell, to
whom he devoted a biography in 1934:
His bequest to the world was not institutions, for his could not last, or
a political faith, for his was more instinct and divination than coherent thou
ght. It was the man himself, his frailty and his strength, typical in almost e
very quality of his own English people, but with these qualities so magnified
as to become epic and universal.
As this passage suggests, another element of the Buchanesque involves high
minded moral earnestness. Usborne notes that there is throughout Buchan’s fic
tion “a slight but persistent propaganda for the decencies as preached by the
enthusiastic housemaster—for cold baths, for hard work, for healthy exhausti
on in the playing-field, for shaking hands with the beaten opponent, for the a
ttainment of Success in after-life.” In Mr. Standfast (remember The Pilgrim’
s Progress?), Hannay has a clear shot at the evil Moxon Ivery, who is planning
to infect the British army with anthrax. He doesn’t fire because Ivery is si
tting down and facing away from him: a sportsman does not shoot a man in the b
ack. In Greenmantle, when it’s clear that the bloody battle of Erzerum is goi
ng the right way, Hannay’s sidekick Sandy Arbuthnot exclaims, “Oh, well done
our side!” It wasn’t only Waterloo that was won on the playing fields of Et
on.
Usborne rather deprecates the public-school, “success ethic” in Buchan.
It is I suppose easy to mock, though perhaps less easy to replace (apart from
the cold baths, I mean). Buchan’s characters are the best-est, most-est at wh
atever they do. The financier Julius Victor is “the richest man in the world.
” Sandy Arbuthnot was “one of the two or three most intelligent people in th
e world.” Everyone has made, or is about to make, a “big name” for himself.
Of a character at a dinner party of luminaries, “it was rumored that in the
same week he had been offered the Secretaryship of State, the Presidency of an
ancient University, and the control of a great industrial corporation.” That
is business as usual in Buchanland. Likewise Buchan’s villains. In Mr. Stand
fast, the good guys are not just hunting bad chaps, they are “hunting the mos
t dangerous man in all the world.” Hilda von Einem (Greenmantle), Dominick Me
dina (The Three Hostages, 1924), Moxon Ivery (a repeat character): When they are bad, they are very bad indeed (though few are without a rede
eming dollop of courage). Buchan was writing a species of romance, not tragedy
, but perhaps here, too, he followed Aristotle and aimed at presenting men “b
etter than in actual life.” At first blush, anyway, it is easy to see why Buc
han was an author approved by parents, teachers, pastors. As Usborne put it, h
e “backed up their directives and doctrines. Buchan wrote good English. Bucha
n taught you things. Buchan was good for you.”
In fact, I believe that Buchan probably is good for you, especially consid
ering the alternatives on offer. The question is whether the Buchan doctrine c
an still resonate meaningfully. In her essay on Buchan, Himmelfarb described h
im as “the last Victorian.” What she had in mind was that extraordinary Brit
ish amalgam of seriousness and eccentricity, energy and lassitude, adventurous
ness and propriety, world-conquering boldness and coddling domesticity; indust
ry, yes; duty, yes; honor, yes; even a certain priggishness—all that but so m
uch more: the whole complex package of moral passion at once goaded and stymie
d by spiritual cataclysm that made up (in Walter Houghton’s phrase) “the Vic
torian frame of mind.” Buchan, son of the manse, occupied a late-model versio
n of that frame as magnificently as anyone.
One tends to think—I certainly thought —of Buchan primarily as a writer
of thrillers. But that is like saying Winston Churchill was a painter. He did
a few other things as well. In fact, Buchan comes closer than almost anyone to
fulfilling Sydney Smith’s definition of an “extraordinary man”: “The mean
ing of an extraordinary man is that he is eight men in one man.” Born in 1875
in Perth, Scotland, Buchan was the eldest of five children. Buchan père, a m
inister in the Free Church of Scotland, was, his son later recalled, “a man o
f wide culture, to whom, in the words of the Psalms, all things were full of t
he goodness of the Lord”—solemn, perhaps, but with “none of the harshness a
gainst which so many have revolted.” It was a close family, with the tensions
but also the emotional bounty that closeness brings. In Pilgrim’s Way, Bucha
n described his father as “the best man I have ever known” and noted that “
not many sons and mothers can have understood each other better than she and I”—“indeed,” he continues with a smile, “in my adolescence
we sometimes arrived at that point of complete comprehension known as a misund
erstanding.”
The Buchan family, of decidedly modest means, moved south in 1876 to Pathh
ead, near the Firth of Forth. Buchan’s childhood was instinct partly with the
magic of bonny braes and burns, tarns, haughs, and other burry ornaments of t
he Scottish countryside, partly with the magic of a gentle though unwavering C
alvinism. The Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress loomed large, rich literary an
d rhetorical as well as spiritual reservoirs.
Buchan conjectured that his “boyhood must have been one of the idlest on
record,” yet he managed to get through one or two books.
Early in my teens I had read Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and a host of othe
r story tellers; all Shakespeare; a good deal of history, and many works of tr
avel; essayists like Bacon and Addison, Hazlitt and Lamb, and a vast assortmen
t of poetry including Milton, Pope, Dante (in a translation), Wordsworth, Shel
ley, Keats, and Tennyson. Matthew Arnold I knew almost by heart; Browning I st
ill found too difficult except in patches.
If Buchan was idle, what are we?
In 1888, the Buchans moved to Glasgow. John was educated at Hutchesons’ G
rammar School and then (from 1892–1895) at Glasgow University, where he studi
ed and became friends with the classicist Gilbert Murray. In 1895, he won a pl
ace at Brasenose College, Oxford, an institution of barely a hundred students
and known chiefly for rowdiness and prowess at games. Buchan distinguished him
self in other areas. He just missed a first in Mods but managed a first in Gre
ats the following year. He won (after a few tries) both the Stanhope and Newdi
gate Prizes. He was elected President of the Union and, by 1899 when he was gr
aduated, already had six or seven books to his credit, including a novel, a co
llection of essays, and an edition of Bacon’s essays. He was, Janet Adam Smit
h speculated, possibly the only person in the 1898 edition of Who’s Who whose
occupation was listed as “undergraduate.”
Brasenose both extended and mollified Buchan’s temperament. Growing up, h
e recalled in Pilgrim’s Way (Memory Hold-the-Door in England), he instinctive
ly subscribed to Lord Falkland’s famous dictum: “When it is not necessary to
change, it is necessary not to change.” But his exposure to philosophy led h
im to become “skeptical of dogmas,” which he more and more looked upon “as
questions rather than answers.”
The limited outlook of my early youth had broadened. Formerly I had regard
ed life as a pilgrimage along a strait and steep path on which the pilgrim mus
t keep his eyes fixed. I prided myself on a certain moral austerity, but now I
came to realise that there was a good deal of self-interest in that outlook,
like the Puritan who saw in his creed not only the road to heaven but the way
to worldly success. I began to be attracted by the environs as well as by the
road, and I became more charitable in my judgment of things and men.
Buchan considered staying on at Oxford and becoming a don or professor. He
concluded that he was not sufficiently devoted to any subject to give up his
life to it. “I wanted a stiffer job, one with greater hazards in it, and I wa
s not averse to one which offered bigger material rewards.” So after four yea
rs he traded Oxford for London and philosophy for the law.
In 1900, Buchan was in London working for The Spectator, reading for the B
ar, and, as always, writing, writing, writing. (One sees different figures for
his total output: one plausible sum is 130 books.) In 1901, he was called to
the Bar, practiced briefly, but then accepted an offer from Lord Alfred Milner
to join him in South Africa. Buchan became a distinguished member of Milner’
s “Kindergarten,” the brilliant young men who helped the British High Commis
sioner for South Africa establish order in the aftermath of the Boer War and r
aise the standard of civilization among the natives.
The youth and inexperience of Milner’s staff raised eyebrows, but he knew
what he was doing. “There will be a regular rumpus and a lot of talk about b
oys and Oxford and jobs and all that,” Milner wrote to a friend.
Well, I value brains and character more than experience. First-class men o
f experience are not to be got. Nothing one could offer would tempt them to gi
ve up what they have… . No! I shall not be here for very long, but when I go
I mean to leave behind me young men with plenty of work in them.
Buchan was one such, and South Africa was a revelation to him. For one thi
ng, invested with enormous administrative responsibility during his two years
in South Africa, this bookish youth discovered that “there was a fine practic
al wisdom which owed nothing to books and academies.” He met Cecil Rhodes whe
n the great imperialist was at the end of his life. Rhodes was a fount of prag
matic wisdom. “You can make your book with roguery,” he told the young Bucha
n, “but vanity is incalculable.”
Buchan was the perfect acolyte for Milner’s reformist zeal and benefits-o
f-Empire campaign. And if Milner discerned great potential in his youthful rec
ruits, at least some of his kinder returned the admiration. Milner, Buchan not
ed, was an administrative genius. “The drawback to a completely rational mind
is that it is apt to assume that what is flawless in logic is therefore pract
icable. Milner never made that mistake.” He possessed an unerring “instinct
for what is possible… . He could do what the lumberman does in a log-jam, and
pick out the key log which, once moved, sets the rest going.”
Buchan’s stint in South Africa—reading Euripides on the veldt, absorbing
that surprising new landscape—plumbed a current of almost mystical feeling t
hat, in fact, is an aspect of Buchan’s character often overlooked on account
of his worldly competence and the practical can-do bustle of many of his heroe
s. In South Africa, Buchan reported in Pilgrim’s Way, he enjoyed “moments, e
ven hours, of intense exhilaration.”
There are no more comfortable words in the language than Peace and Joy… .
Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown. But Joy is a positi
ve thing; in Joy one does not only feel secure, but something goes out from on
eself to the universe, a warm, possessive effluence of love. There may be Peac
e without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness. It
was Happiness that I knew in those rare moments. The world was a place of inex
haustible beauty, but still more it was the husk of something infinite, ineffa
ble, and immortal, in very truth the garment of God.
I cannot recall Richard Hannay expressing such feelings, but they are on v
iew in other books by Buchan—The Dancing Floor (1926), for example, or his la
st, posthumously published novel, Sick Heart River (1940, published in America
as Mountain Meadow).
In 1903, Buchan returned to London, resumed work for The Spectator and the
Middle Temple, and wrote, among other books, The Law Relating to the Taxation
of Foreign Income (1905), a work I have no intention of reading. In 1906, he
became a partner in the publishing firm of his old Oxford friend Tommy Nelson.
The following year, Buchan married Susan Grosvenor, a granddaughter of Lord E
bury, and great-great-grandniece of the Duke of Wellington. It was a splendid
match, which brought four children and much happiness. “I have,” Buchan wrot
e toward the end of his life, “been happy in many things, but all my other go
od fortune has been as dust in the balance compared with the blessing of an in
comparable wife.” Susan was not rich, but she was well-connected and her marr
iage came as an agreeable surprise to some. One friend wrote, “So you aren’t
going to be a fat Duchess after all. I had always looked forward to being giv
en one finger to shake at one omnium-gatherum garden-party by your Grace, and now you’re going to marry something like a genius instead.”
From his perch in the publishing world, Buchan naturally came into contact
with many writers and public figures. “With G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Bel
loc and Maurice Baring,” Buchan reports with Chestertonian slyness, “I never
differed—except in opinion.” He knew Kipling and Lord Asquith, Stanley Bald
win and Lord Balfour (“the only public figure for whom I felt a disciple’s l
oyalty”).
Pilgrim’s Way is a sort of memoir, but an impersonal one; it is less an a
utobiography than a portrait of an age. With typical decorum, Buchan leaves ou
t of his account contemporaries who were still living. Much of the book is dev
oted to sketches of Buchan’s Oxford friends who died in the War: Tommy Nelson
, Raymond Asquith, and Auberon Thomas Herbert, who was a model for Sandy Arbut
hnot.
Buchan’s recollections are invariably affectionate but seldom uncritical.
Of the famous lawyer Richard Haldane, Buchan noted that “to differ from him
seemed to be denying the existence of God.” Haldane was steeped in the philos
ophy of Hegel and his arguments, though brilliant, gave to the uninitiated “N
o light, but darkness visible,” as Milton might put it. Buchan recalls one ep
isode when the bench mistook Haldane’s use of the word “antinomy” to mean t
he metal “antimony.” It is clear that Buchan admired Haldane. It is also cle
ar that he regarded him as a sort of object lesson in the dangers of Teutonic
intellectualization. “A man who has been nourished on German metaphysics,” B
uchan observed, “should make a point of expressing his thoughts in plain work
aday English, for the technical terms of German philosophy have a kind of hypn
otic power; they create a world remote from common reality where reconciliatio
ns and synthesis flow as smoothly and with as little meaning as in an opiate dream.” This is an observation that aspiring graduate students
in the humanities ought to memorize and repeat three times daily before breakf
ast.
Although a man of immense intellectual cultivation, Buchan had his feet pl
anted firmly on the ground. He understood the dangers of political as well as
intellectual infatuation. He understood that responsiveness to the unexpected—
which means responsiveness to reality—was a key political asset. Of Prime Min
ister Asquith, Buchan concluded that he possessed “every traditional virtue—
dignity, honor, courage, and a fine selflessness… . He was extremely intellig
ent, but he was impercipient.”
New facts made little impression on his capacious but insensitive mind. Wh
atever ran counter to his bland libertarianism seemed an impiety. I remember,
when the audacities of Lytton Strachey’s Victorian Studies were delighting th
e world, suggesting to Mr. Asquith that the time was ripe for a return match.
It was easy, I said, to make fun of the household of faith, but I thought just
as much fun could be made out of the other side, even with the most respectfu
l and accurate presentation. I suggested a book to be called “Three Saints of
Rationalism” on the lines of Eminent Victorians, and proposed for the chapte
rs John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and John Morley. He was really shocked,
as shocked as a High Churchman would be who was invited to consider the comic
side of the Oxford Movement.
That “Three Saints of Rationalism” is a volume still waiting to be writt
en.
“Experimentalism” in art (or life) had little appeal for Buchan. In the
the late Teens and early Twenties, he made an effort to read his contemporarie
s. “Alas! I had put it off too long. My ear simply could not attune itself to
their rhythms, or lack of rhythms.” T. S. Eliot’s poetry he regarded as “a
pastiche of Donne” that reproduced “only his tortured conceits… not his su
dden flute notes and moments of shattering profundity.” Still, Buchan’s inte
lligence admitted the merits of the great modernists, though his heart did not
respond. On Proust, for example: “I disliked his hothouse world, but it was
idle to deny his supreme skill in disentangling subtle threads of thought and
emotion.” Buchan befriended T. E. Lawrence (“a mixture of contradictories wh
ich never were—perhaps could never have been—harmonised”) and Henry James.
Although he did not care for James’s late novels (“tortuous arabesques”), h
e “loved the man” and “revelled in the idioms of his wonderful talk.”
Once Buchan acted as host at a relative’s country house where James was a
guest. He knew that James, like most sophisticated New Englanders of his day,
would appreciate a good Madeira. The house had a wonderful cellar. Buchan pro
mised James something special.
He sipped his glass, and his large benign face remained impassive while he
gave his verdict. I wish I could remember his epithets; they were a masterpie
ce of the intricate, evasive, and non-committal, and yet of an exquisite polit
eness. Then I tasted the wine and found it swipes. It was the old story of a d
ishonest butler who was selling famous vintages and replacing them by cheap st
uff from a neighboring public house.
On another occasion, an aunt of Buchan’s wife, the widow of Byron’s gran
dson, asked Buchan and James to examine the archives in order to write an opin
ion on the quarrel between Byron and his wife. Over the course of a summer wee
kend, Buchan and James “waded through masses of ancient indecency, and duly w
rote an opinion. The thing nearly made me sick, but my colleague never turned
a hair. His only words for some special vileness were ‘singular’ —‘most cu
rious’—‘nauseating, perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.’”
When Buchan was five years old, he fell out of a carriage and fractured hi
s skull when the back wheel rolled over his head. He spent the better part of
a year in bed recovering, but Buchan himself attributes a long run of good hea
lth to the episode. Before, he had been “a miserable headachy little boy”; a
fterwards he was in a nearly continuous bloom of health until 1911. From then
until his early death in 1940, Buchan was beset by painful stomach problems. T
he onset of World War I found him in bed for three months recovering from an o
peration for a duodenal ulcer.
Buchan was too old for the infantry, but he served the war effort well, fi
rst as a correspondent in France for The Times, then working for Lord Beaverbr
ook as Director of the Department of Information and, briefly, as Director of
Intelligence. In order to keep the presses of Thomas Nelson and Sons running,
he also undertook Nelson’s History of the War, which was published in twenty-
four volumes from 1915–1919. I have read in several places that Buchan’s quo
ta was 50,000 words a fortnight. That depressing number works out to 5,000 wor
ds a day, Monday through Friday. Try it sometime, especially when you are Dire
ctor of your country’s intelligence service, raising a family, and writing a
clutch of novels and a volume of verse. Buchan’s History is no piece of makew
ork, either. For sheer narrative verve, it may outdo even Churchill’s multivo
lume history of the Great War. Buchan had a genius for making military operati
ons clear to the layman. Writing as events were unfolding, in the confusing smoke-and-mirrors chaos of war, he nevertheless managed to see be
yond sorties, troop movements, and individual campaigns. His deep reading in h
istory allowed him to keep the larger picture in view. The larger picture conc
erned civilization: its requirements and enemies. Summing up toward the end of
his final volume, Buchan optimistically suggests that one benefit of the war
was to have shaken the world “out of its complacency.” The ensuing years sho
wed how resilient a trait is human complacency. We are never done with it—a f
act that Buchan implicitly acknowledged when he observed that “The world is a
t no time safe for freedom, which needs vigilant and unremitting guardianship.
”
Andrew Lownie said in his biography of Buchan, The Presbyterian Cavalier (
1995; shortly to be reissued by David R. Godine), that the War left Buchan “p
hysically and emotionally shattered.” That seems to me to overstate things. H
e suffered the loss of many close friends (including Tommy Nelson, who fell at
the Somme). His stomach problems had become chronic. But shattered men do not
continue turning out the books; they do not become Director of Reuters, as Bu
chan did in 1919, or buy and restore a manor house, as Buchan did with Elsfiel
d near Oxford that same year. In 1927, when he was first elected Conservative
MP for Scottish Universities, Buchan was working on five books. In 1929, he fi
nally resigned from Nelson’s. A few years later, he was created High Commissi
oner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the representative of
the Crown to the Church. (In 1929, Buchan had co-authored The Kirk in Scotland
, so he was prepared by industry as well as background for the pomp-filled post.) The apex of Buchan’s public career came in 1935 when he wa
s created Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield and was appointed Governor General of C
anada, a post he held until his death in Ottawa in February 1940.
Buchan was schooled to an intelligent toughness—to an independence bred i
n reverence—that would twist and bristle in the self-self-self moral atmosphe
re of today. There was a strong streak of lyricism in his make up, yet candor
and forthrightness were among the primary virtues he cultivated. Heckling, he
noted with some pride, was an art “pursued for the pure love of the game” in
the Border Country. Candidates were sometimes heckled to a standstill by thei
r own supporters. Buchan recalled an incident shortly after Lloyd George’s In
surance Act had been introduced. A speaker was defending the welfare policy on
the grounds that it was a practical application of the Sermon on the Mount. A
shepherd rose to chivvy the speaker:
“Ye believe in the Bible, sir?”
“With all my heart.”
“And ye consider that this Insurance Act is in keepin’ with the Bible?”
“I do.”
“Is it true that under the Act there’s a maternity benefit, and that a w
oman gets the benefit whether she’s married or no?”
“That is right.”
“D’ye approve of that?”
“With all my heart.”
“Well, sir, how d’ye explain this? The Bible says the wages of sin is de
ath and the Act says thirty shillin’s.”
Of the Border folk he represented in Parliament, Buchan said he particular
ly admired their “realism coloured by poetry, a stalwart independence sweeten
ed by courtesy, a shrewd kindly wisdom.” These were qualities that by most ac
counts Buchan himself embodied.
One cannot read far into the commentary on Buchan, however, before encount
ering some stiff criticism of some of his attitudes and language. The criticis
m resolves into three main charges. Buchan was a colonialist, a champion of th
e British Empire. Buchan was a racist: he said and believed unpleasant things
about Negroes. Buchan was an anti-Semite: he said and believed unpleasant thin
gs about Jews.
On the first matter, Buchan must stand guilty as charged, though “guilty”
is assuredly not the right word. Buchan was a partisan of the British colonia
list enterprise; he did believe in the civilizing mandate of the British Empir
e. The only question is whether that is something of which Buchan ought to hav
e been ashamed. In fact, what was already crystal clear in the early 1900s whe
n Buchan was with Milner in South Africa has become sadly, grimly reinforced i
n recent decades: everywhere Britain went benefitted immensely from its wise a
nd beneficent intervention. Were there mistakes? Yes. Were there unnecessary c
ruelties, stupidities, miscalculations? You bet. But the British colonial adve
nture was an incalculable gain for the colonized. The British brought better h
ygiene, the rule of law, better schools, roads, industry, manners. Santayana w
as right about the colonial rule of the Englishman: “Never since the heroic d
ays of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, co
nspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.” What’s happened in
Africa in the period of de-colonization—better call it rebarbarization —is
stark evidence that Santayana was right.
But what about the other charges against Buchan? In Mr. Standfast, when Ri
chard Hannay is asked to pose as a pacifist, he objects: “there are some thin
gs that no one has a right to ask of any white man.” You’ll find similar loc
utions salted through Buchan’s novels. You’ll also find, as you will in the
novels of Mark Twain or Joseph Conrad (for example), the use of the word “nig
ger.” Is that objectionable? Today it would be. Indeed, a few decades ago a p
ublisher refused to re-issue Buchan’s adventure novel Prester John (1910) bec
ause of the “N” word.
You will find similar language about Jews. At the beginning of The Thirty-
Nine Steps, Franklin Scudder is ranting about the international Jewish conspir
acy and conjures up the evil figure of the mastermind behind the scenes, a “l
ittle white-faced Jew in a bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake.” Of cou
rse, Scudder is potty and winds up a few pages later with a knife in his back.
But Buchan’s portrayal of Jews, at least in his early novels, is not glamoro
us. With some exceptions, they are rag dealers or pawnbrokers or else nefariou
s anarchists or shady financiers. There are exceptions—Julius Victor, for exa
mple, “the richest man in the world,” who is a thoroughly noble chap. But th
en he is described by the dyspeptic American John S. Blenkiron as “the whites
t Jew since the apostle Paul.” It was meant as praise, but still …
Buchan’s biographer Lownie said that “It is difficult to find any eviden
ce of anti-Semitism in Buchan’s own personal views.” Well, maybe. It’s much
more likely that—up to the 1930s, anyway—Buchan was anti-Semitic (and anti-
foreigner) in the way nearly everyone in his society was. At the time, Gertrud
e Himmelfarb notes, “Men were normally anti-Semitic, unless by some quirk of
temperament or ideology they happened to be philo-Semitic. So long as the worl
d itself was normal, this was of no great consequence… . It was Hitler … who
put an end to the casual, innocent anti-Semitism of the clubman.” And by the
time the Nazis came along, Buchan had abandoned any casual aspersions against
Jews in his novels. Moreover, he publicly denounced Hitler’s anti-Semitism i
n 1934. (Which was one reason, no doubt, that he was on the Nazi’s post-invas
ion list of people to be imprisoned for “Pro-Jewish activity.”) Like Milner,
Buchan was ardently pro-Zionist, and his name was later ceremoniously inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund.
Buchan wrote at a time less constrained than ours by the imperatives of po
litical correctness. He didn’t try to second-guess his audience. He had confi
dence not only in his knowledge, but also, as Himmelfarb observed, in
his opinions, attitudes, intuitions, and prejudices. What he wrote for the
public was what he felt in private; he did not labor for a subtlety or profun
dity that did not come spontaneously, or censor his spontaneous thoughts befor
e committing them to paper. He had none of the scruples that are so inhibiting
today. He was candid about race, nation, religion, and class, because it did
not occur to him that anything he was capable of feeling or thinking could be
reprehensible… . What some have condemned as insensitivity or condescension m
ay also be taken as a forthright expression of opinion—or not so much opinion
, because that is to dignify it as a conscious judgment, but rather impression
or experience.
In The Three Hostages, Sandy Arbuthnot gives voice to feelings of exaspera
tion that, I suspect, come close to Buchan’s own feelings:
“The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish an
d rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world.
That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic
justice. But now we have to go into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fightin
g on the floor. We take violent sides, and make pets, and of course if you are
-phil something or other you have got to be -phobe something else.”
It was precisely that unreasoning attachment to ideology—to the grim nurs
ery of human passions—that Buchan resisted.
Himmelfarb described Buchan as “the last Victorian” because the world th
at could nurture such a character has long since vanished. But one may hope th
at Buchan will have successors, for the creator of Richard Hannay, Sandy Arbut
hnot, and the others was a great and potent friend of civilization. Robin Wink
s remarked that “What Buchan feared most was unreasoning passion”—that, and
the complacency which renders passion toxic. In his biography of Augustus (19
37), Buchan wrote that the Emperor’s “true achievement … is that he saved t
he world from disintegration.” At the end of his life Buchan saw the world on
ce again threatened by a storm of irrational violence and hatred. Yet again it
was revealed that (as his character Dickson McCunn put it) “civilisation any
where is a very thin crust.” Nevertheless, what Buchan feared above all was n
ot “barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civili
sation, which is civilisation gone rotten.” In his posthumously published memoir, he describes a “nightmare” world in which science had tr
ansformed the world into “a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism.”
Everyone would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand fo
r intellectual exertion everyone would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow
minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be larg
ely a quest for amusement… . Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know e
verything and understand nothing… . In the tumult of a jazz existence what ho
pe would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and philosophers
and poets? A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality woul
d in truth have killed that personality. In such a bagman’s paradise, where l
ife would be rationalised and padded with every material comfort, there would
be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity
Fair. … The essence of civilisation lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal
universe. It makes no difference that a mechanised universe may be his own cre
ation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends b
ecome its master.
Buchan thought the dictators of the 1930s and 1940s had paradoxically “do
ne us a marvellous service in reminding us of the true values of life,” awake
ning men to the dangers of complacency.
Yet Buchan knew that, whatever questions the war answered, the compact of
routinization and unruly passion—the marriage of hyper-rationalization and ir
rationality—was a problem that transcended the savagery of war. It was a prob
lem built into the nature of modernity. How that problem would be solved—or,
rather, how that unthinking version of life was to be avoided, for it was not
a problem susceptible of any one solution—was something Buchan regarded with
a mixture of foreboding and faith. He regarded the extinction of eccentricity,
the homogenization of the world with a distaste bordering on horror. What he
feared was failure bred in success: “a deepening and narrowing of ruts” that
technological and economic success regularly brought in their wake. “The wor
ld,” he wrote towards the end of Pilgrim’s Way, “must remain an oyster for
youth to open. If not, youth will cease to be young, and that will be the end
of everything.” Buchan speculated that “the challenge with which we are now faced may restore us to that manly humility which alone gives p
ower.” The campaign against genuine individuality is much further advanced to
day than it was in 1940 when Buchan wrote. We seem further than ever from the
“manly humility” he prescribed. Which is one reason that rereading John Buch
an is such a tonic exercise. His adventures are riches that help remind us of
our poverty. If, as Montaigne wrote, admonition is the highest office of frien
dship, that counsel is a precious bounty.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
Note: This is an expanded version of the essay on Buchan that appears in t
he September 2003 issue of The New Criterion, pages 16–23.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
From The New Criterion Vol. 22, No. 1, September 2003
© 2003 The New Criterion | Back to the top | www.newcriterion.com
The URL for this item is:
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/sep03/buchan.htm
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