Racing Through the Century

...By means of this rather mechanical device, Hughes essays a difficult historical comparison between victorious England and defeated Germany in the early '20s that presumably adumbrates the more violent conflict between the two countries 16 years later...

...For if none of the historical events are plausibly related to the characters, those who are moved, lifted, buoyed, or destroyed by the intractable tyrannies of external forces, then one is merely paraphrasing history rather than creating an art which encloses it...

...Now, there is nothing special about having an actual historical figure onstage in a novel...

...Yet this one brilliant sequence does not really compensate for a book that is largely flaccid, fragmentary and haphazard, a compendium of tiresome pointings and parallels that reveal little about the inexorable ways history and human character entwine...

...The novel falters and stumbles precisely where it should move with the confident logic of facts, the decisive momentum governing all the subtle interconnections between private fate and public catastrophe...

...Flaubert (L'Education Sentimentale) employs public events-the Revolution of 1848-to resolve private dilemmas and define the character of those fictional persons who must commit themselves in the course of the historical action...

...In England the ending of the war had come like waking from a bad dream...

...Engine or Freud) from ocean to ocean thousands of half-grown young had suddenly all like that burst out of their families, cut themselves loose and advanced on this dangerous rudderless postwar world in packs of their own: self-sufficient as eagles . . . like some latter-day Children's Crusade...

...But where Sol-zhenitsyn's Stalin in The First Circle, for example, is depicted with extraordinary veracity and power as he crouches in paranoid terror in a high-windowed, cavelike room, unmistakably the psychotic cause behind the concentration camp's repression and torture, Hughes' Hitler never attains anything like that overwhelming personal malignancy...

...In Tolstoy (War and Peace) and Stendhal (The Charterhouse of Parma), on the other hand, public events provide the context of the narrative, and historical figures like Napoleon or Kutuzov are introduced directly into the action in order to supply authenticity, or merely the force of identification...

...What is more, Hughes tries to cover too much too quickly, too superficially, as though sheer quantity alone will magically add up to "a long historical novel of my own times...

...Suddenly it struck Augustine with force: how was it so great a gulf divided his own from every previous generation, so that they seemed like different species...

...Hughes expects us to take the verisimilitude of The Fox in the Attic simply on the faith of historical hindsight...

...yet because he is a relative, he cannot be altogether a stranger...

...This empty cipher of a central character, of course, is one of the principal reasons for the novel's exasperating patchiness and unsettling disunity...

...Hughes' plan is to construct a huge panorama interweaving the devices of fiction with the convulsions of history...

...Only Hannah Arendt has managed to give the desiccated phrase any apposite freshness and relevance...

...What a pity, one is reminded, that in the past few years the term "the human condition" has been sprayed like graffiti paint on everything from primal screams to infected hangnails...

...Yet even when he does return to England, Augustine remains stubbornly resistant to growth, to becoming a living, breathing, acting, thinking, feeling person who has learned from experience...

...The decent Briton Augustine, with his temperate values ("Any relationship which involved one human being constraining another repelled him"), is an outsider in Bavaria...

...an Austrian upstart calling himself Adolf Hitler is beginning to attract a devoted rabble of violent malcontents that no solid citizen of Weimar -certainly no von Knessen-thinks worth more than a moment's upper-class contempt...

...On the evidence of The Wooden Shepherdess, Hughes' own choice of treatment is anything but clear, and one cannot feel sanguine about the second installment of The Human Predicament...

...That tocsin tolled on October the 29th, 1929: the climactic day of the Great American Stockmarket Crash was the day little Gillie Wadamy reached the momentous age of three...

...It had come out into daylight again at the Present Day, but as something quite different...

...his connection with Augustine, with the von Knessens, with Augustine's Jewish friend Ludovic, is never made dramatically persuasive...

...There he is succored by an obligingly carefree pack of summer youngsters, who are closer to the countercultural teenagers of the 1960s than to the adolescents of Prohibition America: "In these last few years (whether due to the War or the I.C...

...The year is 1923, and inflation has reduced the German economy to bales of wastepaper...

...Since he is as old as this century and an excruciatingly slow writer-the first volume of the series, The Fox in the Attic, appeared over a decade ago-his chance of completing the entire enterprise will depend on a superhuman, mortal sprint...

...To understand the book's shortcomings, one must really begin with The Fox in the Attic...

...in defeated Germany, as the signal for deeper levels of nightmare...

...Unfortunately, this spurious profundity about "something quite different" is exactly what Hughes solemnly embarks on dramatizing in The Fox in the Attic...

...We are hurtled on a journalistic roller-coaster from Liberal party politics to the General Strike of 1926 (Galsworthy handled that crisis far more competently in the Forsyte volumes), from cursory portraits of Stanley Baldwin and Lloyd George to the limp facetiousness of " 'America's final bell...

...How he got to the United States is too improbable and boring to be worth the telling...

...In the past century, history has been used by great novelists in two distinct but equally rewarding ways...

...Writers &Writing RACING THROUGH THE CENTURY BY PEARL K. BELL As the Welsh novelist Richard Hughes informs us in the preface, The Wooden Shepherdess (Harper & Row, 389 pp., $7.50) is "the second of a group of novels . . . which is conceived as a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second World War...

...His best friend complains about his "knack of having things happen to him without ever needing to lift a finger to make them happen...

...The Wooden Shepherdess, Hughes' spastic locomotive of history derails its coach of private lives still more erratically...

...Suddenly recharging his literary batteries, he recounts with appalling eloquence the Night of the Long Knives, in June of 1934, when the Fiihrer consolidated his power once and for all by wiping out Rohm and other former comrades-inarms...

...In that work, Augustine Penry-Herbert, a patrician innocent, ripe with good will and vast landholdings in Wales, is only recently down from Oxford...

...Although this episode makes lush descriptive use of the Connecticut landscape-where Hughes spent some time in the 1930s-augustine's American idyll has no discernible connection with the historical scheme of the novel, and lessens one's sense of its seriousness and coherence...

...Though Augustine is blameless in the matter, the tragic drowning of a working-class child on his manor forces him to absent himself from home for a while, and he chooses to make an extended sojourn in Bavaria with his aristocratic relatives, the von Knessens...

...The kind of Time called 'History' ended at the Battle of Waterloo: after that, Time had gone into a long dark tunnel or chrysalis called the Victorian Age...

...The time is now 1924 and Augustine, having fled the Continent when the cousin he hoped to marry goes blind and becomes a Carmelite nun, is living illegally in the Connecticut woods...

...There is more than minor poignancy to the vast undertaking Hughes has drawn for himself...

...This leads, far too often, to the easy out of making lists: "This summer of 1925 was indeed a notable summer: the Rhineland summer when Gobbels joined the Nazis, the Mellton summer when Mary [Augustine's sister] had really begun to convalesce, the West Wales summer when Newton Llantony grew a new roof...

...Hughes brings him and his followers directly into the narrative, recounting in meticulously researched detail the failure of the beer-hall Putsch in 1923 that landed Hitler in the Landsberg prison and gave him the chance to write Mein Kampf...

...To the whole of this ambitious project Hughes has appended the rather pedestrian title The Human Predicament...

...At the end of The Wooden Shepherdess, Hughes, in a desperate attempt to redress some semblance of the unity he has carelessly forfeited, reaches once again for his fictional lifeline-hitler...

...Fictional persons and historical personages are also thus brought together in the same arena...

...His puerile ruminations on the nature of history and power, however, make one wonder what it was he actually spent his time doing there...

...Hitler is not merely an irritating topic of conversation among the novel's characters...