In Hazard

RICHARD HUGHES
(1900–1976) was born in Surrey, England, but his ancestors came from Wales and he considered himself a Welshman. After an early childhood marked by the deaths of two older siblings and his father (his mother then went to work as a magazine journalist), Hughes attended boarding school and, with every expectation of being sent to fight in the First World War, enrolled in the military. Armistice was declared, however, before he could see active service, and Hughes was free to go to Oxford, where he became a star on the university literary scene, with a book of poems in print and a play produced in the West End by the time he graduated in 1922. Hughes's first novel,
A High Wind in Jamaica
, came out in 1928 and was a best seller in the United Kingdom and America.
In Hazard
followed ten years later. Hughes also wrote stories for children and radio plays, but his final major undertaking was the Human Predicament, an ambitious amalgamation of fact and fiction that would track the German and English branches of a single family into the disaster of the Second World War while offering a dramatic depiction of Hitler's rise to power. The work was planned as a trilogy, but remained incomplete at the time of Hughes's death. The first volume,
The Fox in the Attic
, appeared in 1961, to great critical acclaim; volume two,
The Wooden Shepherdess
, was published in 1973. All of Hughes's completed novels are available from NYRB Classics.

JOHN CROWLEY
is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including
Love & Sleep, Aegypt
, and
Little, Big
. He lives in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters.

IN HAZARD

RICHARD HUGHES

Introduction by

JOHN CROWLEY

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

In November 1932, well after the hurricane season ought to have been over, the Holt Line steamer
Phemius
was caught in a horrendous Caribbean storm that, rather than passing over the ship, sucked it into its circular motion, where it was stuck for six days. The main funnel of the ship, guyed to withstand wind pressures of up to two hundred tons (a hurricane wind of seventy-five miles an hour, Richard Hughes tells us, creates wind pressures of fifteen tons) was torn from the ship and flung out into the seas. When the damaged ship at last limped into port, the captain, D.L.C. Evans, submitted a detailed report of the struggle and survival of his ship, its officers, and its (largely Chinese) crew. Laurence Holt, chairman of the family line better known as the Blue Funnel Line, was so taken by the dramatic story that he sent Evans's report to the poet laureate, John Masefield, an old sailor himself and the author of
Cargoes
and
Salt-Water Ballads
(“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”), to see if he could work it up. Masefield showed no interest, so through mutual friends Holt got the report to a novelist who had had a huge success with a first novel set on a sailing ship. The novelist was Richard Hughes, and the book was
A High Wind in Jamaica
.
[1]

Hughes was fascinated, and agreed to take on the project. He had always been a sailor, and a lover of ships and boats. He told Holt that he would stick closely to the facts, but would make up his own fictional captain and crew, so that he could look more deeply into minds and characters than he could otherwise. He was invited to meet Captain Evans, now of the Holt Line ship
Myrmidon
, and take a brief coasting voyage with him. Captain Evans found him “a very agreeable shipmate.” Hughes interviewed other crew members, and took extensive notes. The book, however, would not appear for another six years.

It wasn't that Hughes was a dilatory writer, or a lazy one. He was a busy man of letters, and piled up a good amount of work—radio plays, screenplays, essays, travel writing, memoir, as well as five novels. He did find the process of writing agony much of the time—his children could remember him groaning aloud behind his study door—and unlike the nine-to-five worker, a writer can always find something to do rather than sit at his desk. Hughes had houses in Wales and Morocco that forever needed seeing to; he loved his children and loved playing with them on the water or in the mountains; and he was given to accepting new projects in the middle of those he had already contracted for.

Then, in January 1936, another Blue Funnel Line ship, the
Ulysses
, was caught in heavy seas in the Bristol Channel, near where Hughes lived. In a lull in the storm, the crew was ordered out to try to repair the damaged forecastle head, where water was pouring in. A huge wave washed over the ship, killing three men and injuring others. Hearing that no one had been able to reach the ship to take off the dead and wounded, Hughes commandeered a pilot boat, went out with a volunteer crew, and after the seas subsided, got the dead and injured off the
Ulysses
. He made a report on what he did, but he never spoke about the incident in later life. Richard Perceval Graves, his biographer, believes that this experience reawakened Hughes's interest in the story of the
Phemius
. After another research trip, this time to the Caribbean on the
Eurymedon
(the Blue Funnel Line had from the beginning named their ships after characters in Homer), Hughes began seriously to write the book that would become
In Hazard
, one of the great gripping true sea stories of modern literature, for much of its length rich with salt spray and engine oil and skillful desperate men doing unimaginably difficult tasks. You can almost hear the sea and the wind.

Beyond that undeniable virtue, and perhaps less apparent at first, is the astonishing grace and craft of the writing. Take for example the account of the
Archimedes
(as Hughes names his ship, perhaps for its being so long stuck in an unbreakable perfect balance of wind and water) in port at Norfolk, Virginia. The junior officer Dick Watchett is invited to a bootleg party in a wealthy house. A pretty big-eyed teenage girl entrances him, lies in his arms telling him some remarkable lies, and drinks far too much moonshine.

This vision of Sukie naked is going to haunt Dick unmercifully, even convince him that he's lost God's favor, but it will also save him when for many sleepless fasting hours he's at the crucial task of pouring oil drip by drip onto the roiling seas to still them (this actually works, apparently). But previous to the Norfolk visit we've been told about the first mate's pet lemur, who sleeps all day in the foghorn and prowls at night. “He liked the human eye, and he did not approve of it being shut, ever.” He goes around prying open the eyes of sleepers with his minute primate hands. After Dick, back on ship, lying awake for hours fixated on Sukie's image, falls sleep, he is awakened by those fingers prying his eyelids apart, and “found himself staring ... into large, anxious, luminous eyes, only an inch from his own; eyes that were not Sukie's.”

So the lemur, an amusing and faintly spooky character in the earlier passage, here becomes representative of Sukie, of Dick's obsession, of the sleeplessness of lovers— and also foretells Dick's sleeplessness as he coats the tempestuous seas with oil hour after hour while holding the hallucinatory Sukie before his open eyes.

It is scenes of this kind, so strong and delicate at once, so certain and yet seeming spontaneous, like a ballet-dancer's leap, that contribute to Hughes's reputation as a “writer's writer.” What this commonly used and somewhat dismissive phrase is usually taken to describe (insofar as it conveys anything to most readers) is a writer whose pages are glittering or spectacular or glamorous in their own right, irrespective of the story they tell. But what writers would mean if they used the phrase (in my own experience they don't) is a writer who, whether in plain prose or fancy, effusive or restrained, accomplishes things in fiction that writers know to be difficult to do, whether readers perceive this or not. Writers of fiction often do care less about the characters and story in the fiction they read—they find it harder to suspend disbelief and be touched by made-up troubles and triumphs—but they notice a skilled and unexpected use of the tools of fiction. It's reported that Virginia Woolf, greeting luncheon guests, told them she was exhausted, having spent the whole morning moving her characters from the drawing room into the dining room. Writers—conscientious ones—nod in recognition.

A fictional tool that Hughes often used is the first-person narrator who both is and is not the writer, who plays no part in the story but wanders everywhere in it, sometimes making guesses as to characters' motivations and at other times opening their hearts to us in omniscient fashion. Sometimes this narrator figure places the story within his own experience (“Among the people I have met, one of those who stands out the most vividly in memory is a certain Mr. Ramsay MacDonald,” Hughes opens his tale), and at other times seems to brood godlike and disembodied over the whole wide story world. This odd device—odd when you think about it, highly artificial and yet seeming plain and down-to-earth—descends from the chatty narrators of Victorian fiction, who in turn derive from fireside gossips and tavern storytellers speaking from experience and general knowledge; but by Hughes's time it has lost almost all embodiment and character; it is no longer the writer, or someone like him, or a person at all, but a sort of ghost: in writing elsewhere about Hughes I have called the device the Vestigial Raconteur.

It's hard to think of an American writer, a Hemingway or a Faulkner, employing this observing, conversing figure who is half in and half out of the story, maybe because American writers are more committed to “showing” over “telling.” But British writers of Hughes's period liked it; it was used, for instance, by Hughes's near contemporary T. H. White in
The Once and Future King
, where the first-person pronoun is rarer but the sense of a person participating in the story is strong. Speaking of the castle where his young Arthur grew up, White himself sees it in his own day: “It is lovely to climb the highest of them [the towers] and to look out toward the Marches ... with nothing but the sun above you and the little tourists trotting about below, quite regardless of arrows and boiling oil.” Hughes is the most daring deployer of the device I know, and the one who uses it the most subtly and yet most plainly. His success with it can be measured by how unquestioningly we accept it. We don't wonder who this fellow is who both is and isn't on board, who saw the dolphins at play in the wake of the
Archimedes
, who is a plainspoken Englishman and yet can recount the life history of a Chinese Communist that no one could know but the Communist himself. He tells us how Captain Edwardes feels the confidence and bravery to save the ship rise up within him—“plainly this was no longer an issue between himself and the Owners, but become an issue between himself and his Maker”; then he has to rush back to catch Captain Edwardes in mid-sentence: “But back to the saloon. He was talking about the coming lull. ‘—shall need all hands then,' he was saying.”

I don't think that this coming and passing of a personal voice who was somehow
there
and somehow not there but remembering it all, and somehow never there but constructing everything, is a trivial matter of craft. I believe it's central to Hughes's art. It allows him all the resources of the essayist and the teacher—he instructs us about the operation of an oil-burning steam-turbine ship, or muses that the Owners are, like the captains, for the most part honorable men who care more for their ships and their crews than for maximizing profit. (This device, the offering of opinions and truths to the reader in the present tense—“The powerful innate forces in us, the few prime movers common to us all, are essentially plastic and chameleonlike”—does not require me to make up a name, for it already has one: it is called the
gnomic present
, from
gnomon
, Greek for “wise saying.”) It helps him to confront the necessities of a difficult hybrid form:
In Hazard
is both a documentary and a novel, wherein invented characters act out in detail dilemmas that actual people underwent and later recorded.