Rogue Male (2 page)

Our rogue male’s journey into deep countryside moves him back through human history as well—from the modern world of trains and automobiles through Roman times to the world of the Paleolithic hunter. Household roots his character’s visceral experience in the relationship to the earth of Stone Age hunter-gatherers for whom killing is a religious practice, a holy exchange of energies around which both hunter and hunted observe the timeless rituals of impending death. Far from being anarchic, the world of predators and prey follows strict rules of conduct. In
Dance of the Dwarfs
, the unknown hunter’s “Declaration of Intent,” a high-pitched whistle, delivers fear and panic, then passivity, to the central nervous system of the hunted. In the late novel
The Sending
, the protagonist Alfgyf Hollaston remarks of the fear instinct: “When we were only hunted and hunters—in Europe a mere three hundred generations ago—we shared [with animals] this sixth sense which told us when we were in danger.” And Charles Dennim, hero of
The Watcher in the Shadows
, says, “I believe that for the animals always, and for man sometimes, fear is only a vivid awareness of one’s unity with nature.”

As part of this process, the narrator of
Rogue Male
undergoes his own rite of passage from civilized man to animal “deprived of ordinary human cunning” and working from blind instinct. Gradually he takes on the attributes of a wild creature, moving so quietly he startles a fox and experiencing low-level thought transference with the feral cat he befriends. He’s able to achieve this attunement to the animal world partly thanks to a previous so-journ with an African tribe. (In
The Sending
, Alfgyf communes with animals because of a similar experience with an Indian tribe and a genetic gift passed down in his own family.) For Household the descent into animal nature is an ascent that allows the human animal to experience a forgotten sense of identity with nature and all things living. Only “after much meditation” can civilized man experience the “mystic vision” that is the natural resting state of animals and primitive man. When he once achieved this communion, Alfgyf says in
The Sending
, “I had ceased to exist as a man; I was a molecule of the unity of earth and light.”

But Household would also like us to believe that the ancient rites and practices of hunters still resonate through the quiet countryside of England. In the comic story “The Twilight of a God,” a Mithras altar is uncovered in the Roman cellar jointly shared by a pub and a village butcher shop that makes outstanding sausage. (The secret ingredient is bull’s blood, obtained through barely remembered rites performed on the sacrificial stone.) In
The Courtesy of Death
, a delicate parody of his own philosophy of the hunt, Household presents a Somerset group devoted to “metaphysical animism” that tries to revive, along with a sinister salutation called “the Apology,” the hunting rituals of their ancestors as depicted in cave paintings they discover in the deep caverns of the Mendips.

During the relentless heat of the chase, meanwhile, and as much to his own surprise as the reader’s, the true motive of
Rogue Male
’s narrator slowly emerges. (Reader, stop here if you want to discover it for yourself.) Given the implausibility of assassination conducted as a “sporting stalk,” he protests at first, to himself as well as his initial captors, his own apolitical nature: “I haven’t any grievances myself. One can hardly count the upsetting of one’s trivial private life and plans by European disturbances as a grievance.” As he approaches the sunken lane in Dorset, however, he admits it’s a place he found while in love, and the person he loved and shared it with has perished. As the pressures of the hunt mount and the screw tightens, he must engage his adversary “Quive-Smith” in a battle of wits as the dictator’s operative conducts a Mephistophelian interrogation through the ventilator hole of his lair, using the narrator’s professed libertarian beliefs to persuade him to sign a paper confessing that he intended to assassinate the dictator with the knowledge of the English government.

For
Rogue Male
’s narrator, however, only the personal is legitimately political.
*
Like all Household heroes, he hates the state and respects the rights of the individual. He eschews all patriotism and believes in “dying against,” not “dying for.” Only under extreme mental duress, then, does he finally admit, to Quive-Smith and to himself, that “of course” he had meant to shoot. And with that admission comes a flood of self-knowledge about the depth of the feelings he has never fully acknowledged: his love, grief, and rage over the execution of the woman he loved by the dictator’s secret police. The man who had mocked, at the start of his adventure, the notion of “yowling of love like an Italian tenor” has been delivered into his higher, more authentic self by his deeper connection with the natural world as well as the conditions of his ordeal.

Quive-Smith, in contrast, whose courage, superior hunting skills, and intelligence superficially make him a Class Xer, is excluded from the brotherhood because of two overweening flaws—cruelty and ambition. Half English and half German, he resembles many other Household antagonists who serve as distorted mirror images of his heroes. The ex—Resistance fighter “Savarin” of
The Watcher in the Shadows
is a half-English, half-French vicomte who pursues Charles Dennim, the former Austrian aristocrat who served at Buchenwald as an English spy, for the same reason that the hero of
Rogue Male
hunted his prey—to avenge the death of a beloved woman at the hands of Hitler’s minions. Ultimately, however, the French aristocrat forfeits his membership in Class X for the same shortcomings as Quive-Smith—sadism, extremism, and political fanaticism.

In Household’s late masterpiece
Dance of the Dwarfs
(1968), the unknown adversary proves not to be human at all and delivers a particularly gruesome death to the hero and his Indian mistress.
Dance of the Dwarfs
further inverts this writer’s usual pattern to focus on the vast and chillingly impersonal wilderness of the New World, pitting the hero, Owen Dawnay, against a foe who is only gradually revealed to be a creature of the impenetrable jungle bordering the llano, the vast inland plain of Colombia.
*
The shared theme of sacrificing one’s life in the service of a doomed love makes
Rogue Male
and
Dance of the Dwarfs
Household’s two finest novels.

After
Rogue Male
’s narrator experiences his transcendent moment of clarity, the denouement unfolds swiftly. His prohibition against taking human life is lifted when Quive-Smith and his henchman kill the cat Asmodeus for sport and throw the body down the ventilator hole. Now that the rules of honor have been flagrantly breached, murder can be legitimized as an act of war. From the hide of his animal comrade he fashions a lethal sling-shot as his instrument of vengeance, and once this score has been settled he will decide to take on his original quarry once more and do the job properly. Offsetting this announced return to almost certain death is the good-humored in-joke with readers that closes
Rogue Male
(further proof, if needed, that Household himself is a member in good standing of Class X): the narrator appends a letter to his chronicle instructing his solicitor to have it “brushed up by some competent hack and marketed in his name.”

Robert MacFarlane rightly dubs Household the heir of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, but the scale, I think, must be tipped in favor of the egalitarian Stevenson. Buchan’s Richard Hannay is a bluff South African colonial who is patriotic in a way Household would have found highly unattractive. Household’s Englishman “with no national prejudices” is a thoughtful man of action, ethical in a way hard to codify in an imperial rulebook, democratic in a way no Boer could stomach, and frankly sensual in a way no Buchan hero ever dreamed of. Household himself cites Defoe as a prime influence on his writings, and
Rogue Male
is indeed a kind of inland
Robinson Crusoe
complete with feline Friday. The limpid style and vivid intensity of the physical descriptions compare favorably with the Old English—cadenced prose of
Pincher Martin
, William Golding’s saga of a self-deceived Robinson Crusoe marooned on a North Atlantic island of his own invention. Household’s topographic passion for the English countryside, the loving poetic accuracy of his landscapes, replete with marvelous throwaway observations (on, for example, the “gaiety of the insect world”), holds more than a few echoes of Thomas Hardy. His confessed preference for the picaresque adds the “Latinised” flavor of the land of
Lazarillo de Tormes
to his very English narratives. Taking a far more radical position than his near contemporaries Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene in their tales of “abroad,” finally, Household displays a rare identification with the non-English “Other” that anticipates the cosmopolitan postcolonial sensibility of the twenty-first century.

One suspects that Geoffrey Household, were he alive today, would be delighted by new DNA research suggesting that those of Her Majesty’s citizens whose ancestors were long-term inhabitants of the British Isles are far more genetically homogenous (forget Viking, Celt, Saxon, Norman!) than previously thought. He would be even more delighted by the likelihood that most of these people, himself included, descend from a single population of Paleolithic hunters who migrated north from the Iberian peninsula some 16,000 years ago—back in those far-off days “when men could simply walk from France, following game,” in the nostalgic words of a character in
The Courtesy of Death
—speaking a language, for the best and final touch, very much like that still current among his beloved Basques.
*
And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that some future spelunker in the Mendips, taking a cue from this twentieth-century romancer, will uncover a cave painting or two that brings to life again, across three hundred generations, the timeless dance of Hunter and Hunted in Household’s native land.

—V
ICTORIA
N
ELSON

*
Granta
, “The Wild Places,” September 2007.

*
In
Against the Wind
, Household notes significantly that his own sentiment toward Nazi Germany “had the savagery of a personal vendetta.”

*
In some respects, the predators in this novel resemble the worst sort of humans, including the Nazis in
Rogue Male
; they kill their own kind and kill for the pleasure of killing, acts that violate a kind of trans-species Class X code of honor.

*
Stephen Oppenheimer,
The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story
, quoted in Nicholas Wade, “English, Irish, Scots: They’re All One, Genes Suggest,”
The New York Times
, March 5, 2007.

ROGUE MALE

To Ben

who knows what it feels like

‘The behaviour of a rogue may fairly be described as individual, separation from its fellows appearing to increase both cunning and ferocity. These solitary beasts, exasperated by chronic pain or widowerhood, are occasionally found among all the larger carnivores and graminivores, and are generally male, though, in the case of hippopotami, the wanton viciousness of old cows is not to be disregarded.’

I cannot blame them. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot boar and bear; so that when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions. And they behaved, I think, with discretion. I am not an obvious anarchist or fanatic, and I don’t look as if I took any interest in politics; I might perhaps have sat for an agricultural constituency in the south of England, but that hardly counts as politics. I carried a British passport, and if I had been caught walking up to the House instead of watching it I should probably have been asked to lunch. It was a difficult problem for angry men to solve in an afternoon.

They must have wondered whether I had been employed on, as it were, an official mission; but I think they turned that suspicion down. No government—least of all ours—encourages assassination. Or was I a free-lance? That must have seemed very unlikely; anyone can see that I am not the type of avenging angel. Was I, then, innocent of any criminal intent, and exactly what I claimed to be—a sportsman who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible?

After two or three hours of their questions I could see I had them shaken. They didn’t believe me, though they were beginning to understand that a bored and wealthy Englishman who had hunted all commoner game might well find a perverse pleasure in hunting the biggest game on earth. But even if my explanation were true and the hunt were purely formal, it made no difference. I couldn’t be allowed to live.

By that time I had, of course, been knocked about very considerably. My nails are growing back but my left eye is still pretty useless. I wasn’t a case you could turn loose with apologies. They would probably have given me a picturesque funeral, with huntsmen firing volleys and sounding horns, with all the big-wigs present in fancy dress, and put up a stone obelisk to the memory of a brother sportsman. They do those things well.

As it was, they bungled the job. They took me to the edge of a cliff and put me over, all but my hands. That was cunning. Scrabbling at the rough rock would have accounted—near enough—for the state of my fingers when I was found. I did hang on, of course; for how long I don’t know. I cannot see why I wasn’t glad to die, seeing that I hadn’t a hope of living and the quicker the end the less the suffering. But I was not glad. One always hopes—if a clinging to life can be called hope. I am not too civilized to be influenced by that force which makes a rabbit run when a stoat is after him. The rabbit doesn’t hope for anything, I take it. His mind has no conception of the future. But he runs. And so I hung on till I dropped.

I was doubtful whether I had died or not. I have always believed that consciousness remains after physical death (though I have no opinion on how long it lasts), so I thought I was probably dead. I had been such a hell of a time falling; it didn’t seem reasonable that I could be alive. And there had been a terrifying instant of pain. I felt as if the back of my thighs and rump had been shorn off, pulled off, scraped off—off, however done. I had parted, obviously and irrevocably, with a lot of my living matter.