HUMAN COUNTERPOINT
Johnson, Lucy
Human Counterpoint The Fox in the Attic, by Richard Hughes. Harper. 352 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson Richard Hughes' third long work of fiction (the others were A High Wind in Jamaica,...
...On and on through the whiteness and the blackness of the endless snow-burdened forest...
...One of the most stunning ironic images in the book is of Augustine, ecstatically in love, riding in a sleigh with the two younger cousins, each completely absorbed in his own totally separate and shattering private crisis...
...The same pictures tell completely reversed stories," says the Associated Press...
...Augustine, a solitary watcher who understands very little of what he sees, moves from the tight circle of the nearby Welsh village to the less visible bondage of a Liberal politician's household and, further, from the English dream of "Reason" to the nightmare mystique of the "new" Germany...
...So the sleigh glided on with them, and slid—all three swaying together, these three separate identities bundled up in one bundle...
...Prints available for rental at ACLU affiliates in Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Des Moines, Detroit, Los Angeles, Madison, Miami, Newark, Pittsburgh, Portland and Seattle...
...The echoes of Hitler's beer hall putsch in Munich are distorted by the time they reach rural Lorienburg, but the reactions of three quite different cousins (a monarchist and a militarist of an older generation and a young visionary of his own age) are incomprehensible to him and not worth bothering to try to understand...
...From the first-page introduction of his young non-hero, Augustine, carrying a dead child's body across miles of rainy sea-marsh, Hughes is in complete control of his material...
...Uses the original 16 mm...
...The Fox in the Attic is a handsome beginning for this ambitious project...
...With so many elements still only tangentially connected with the central pattern, it is too obviously a part of a larger work to be considered alone...
...In the narrowness of his circle of consciousness, Augustine is not unique...
...With a deft and sensitive hand he plays scene against scene, character against character, in a complex counterpoint...
...Against the scenes at Lorienburg are played related happenings elsewhere, particularly in Munich—a boy's march with his Nazi brotherHood across the city, an intellectual's witty description of Hitler taking over the meeting in the beer hall ("Wagner staged by Hieronymous Bosch"), Hitler's own psychotic impressions of the putsch and its aftermath for him...
...Contact local ACLU for rental charges...
...Prints may be purchased or rented from American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, 503 Market St., San Francisco 5. Purchase Price: $100, postage paid...
...Running time: 47 minutes...
...a trio, pressed flank to flank in such close physical communion as almost to seem physically one person...
...It is the first volume in what the author describes as "a long historical novel of my own times culminating in the Second "OPERATION CORRECTION" ACLU's refutation of "Operation Abolition...
...Visiting his Bavarian cousins at Schloss Lorienburg, Augustine might be a sleepwalker in their midst, not affected by, or even understanding, what is going on around him...
...World War...
...film in the same sequences, but with an entirely new narration...
...For all of the book's compelling beauty, wit, and irony, it cannot be judged by itself...
...The overall title will be The Human Predicament, which indicates the full range he will try to cover...
...Right now what can be said is that, more than any other series of novels started in recent years, it promises a hypnotic combination of ideas with individual and historical drama...
...Another cousin, a lovely, deeply religious girl who is going blind, is to him, in spite of her intense suffering, merely an extension of his own romantic imaginings...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson Richard Hughes' third long work of fiction (the others were A High Wind in Jamaica, 1929, and In Hazard, 1938) is an exciting and masterful examination of human attitudes and behavior in England and Germany in 1923...
...Rental: $15, plus shipping costs...
...The fugue-like movement of the book is fascinating as Hughes plays his variations on the we-they, love-hate dichotomies seen in his large and complicated cast of characters...
Vol. 26 • March 1962 • No. 3
