Rogue Male
GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD
(1900–1988) was born in Bristol, England, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, after which he traveled widely in Europe and took jobs in a range of fields, including banking in Romania and banana importing in France and Spain. Drawn to America by the Romanian-American woman who was to become the first of his two wives, Household worked there on a children’s encyclopedia and wrote radio plays for children before resuming his extensive travels as a salesman for a printer’s ink company. He had also begun to publish stories in
The Atlantic
, and by 1935 was able to devote himself to writing full-time. His first book,
The Terror of Villadonga
(aka
The Spanish Cave
), written for children, came out in 1936 and was quickly followed by two novels for adults,
The Third Hour
and
Rogue Male
, which was a runaway success. Household served as a security officer in the British military during World War II and was stationed in Greece, Central Europe, and the Middle East. After the war, he returned to England and continued his career as a writer. His works include eight collections of short stories, four books for children, an autobiography,
Against the Wind
, and twenty-two novels, including
Dance of the Dwarfs
and
Watcher in the Shadows
.
VICTORIA NELSON
is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her most recent books are
The Secret Life of Puppets
, a study of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies in 2001, and
Wild California
, a collection of stories. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing program.
ROGUE MALE
GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD
Introduction by
VICTORIA NELSON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Extract From the Letter Which Accompanied This Manuscript
Gone to Earth
An embodiment of that myth of foreigners, the English gentleman, the gentle Englishman. I will not kill; to hide I am ashamed. So I endure without object
.—Rogue Male
A
t the heart of the prototypical Geoffrey Household tale is a wilderness lair, often a cave, where a hunted man seeks sanctuary from his pursuers. In Household’s best-known novel,
Rogue Male
, the story’s narrator has painstakingly enlarged his cave from a rabbit hole in the sandstone bank bordering a sunken lane hidden under thick hedges in the Dorset country-side. At his most desperate moment, imprisoned by an implacable pursuer and suffocating in the accumulated fumes of his own excrement, he confides to his journal:
Space I have none. The inner chamber is a tumbled morass of wet earth which I am compelled to use as a latrine. I am confined to my original excavation, the size of three large dog-kennels, where I lie on or inside my sleeping-bag…. Now luck, movement, wisdom, and folly have all stopped. Even time has stopped, for I have no space.
The trapped man has left our world for the timeless allegorical realm—underlined by his own namelessness and that of the man he chose to hunt—of Kafka’s burrow. Now, with a hint of the cave mysticism of Empedocles, his bolt-hole will become a place of incubation where his metamorphosis into an animal makes possible the birth of his true self.
At the same time as it neatly conflates the rules of the herd with those of human society, this book’s title (and its hero’s sole sobriquet) lays down the blueprint for many of Household’s subsequent works: through circumstances not of his own making, a man becomes the quarry either of bad men or of society’s representatives, or both at the same time. In the course of a relentless and deadly chase he must flee civilization into nature, where he is forced to live like the
wodwose
, the mythical wild man of the woods. The climax is typically a duel between the pursued man and his equally matched adversary, who swap roles of hunter and hunted until the protagonist rises heroically from the bottom to successfully dispatch his opposite number. Even the lesser and more reflexive examples of this writer’s unique genre (the label “wilderness procedural” doesn’t quite do it justice) never fail to capture the vivid immediacy of the chase and its natural setting.
Notable also is the attractive character, effortlessly conveyed by Household, of his protagonist, who is typically a “Latinised Englishman.” The bicultural identity of this fictional alter ego results from genes (the Ecuadorian-English Claudio Howard-Wolferstan of
Fellow Passenger
, the Basque-English eponymous hero of
The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown
), upbringing (Owen Dawnay, Argentinian-born English botanist of
Dance of the Dwarfs
), costume and cosmetics (the narrator of
Rogue Male
in its concluding pages), or simply personal inclination (Household himself). The common denominator among these men of wildly different class and ethnic background is the practice (as Household noted in his 1958 autobiography
Against the Wind
) of “courtesy between man and man whatever the difference in education and income.” All belong to that elite category—determined by code of honor, spirit of fellowship, and an indefinable joie de vivre—identified as “Class X” by the narrator of
Rogue Male
, who reflects in the course of his deadly hide-and-seek scramble across the English countryside:
I should like some socialist pundit to explain to me why it is that in England a man can be a member of the proletariat by every definition of the proletariat (that is, by the nature of his employment and his poverty) and yet obviously belong to Class X, and why another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister or both and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the Saloon Bar if he enters the Public.
The first and most notable member of this international brotherhood was a real Spaniard whom Household encountered in his early days as a commercial traveler. After sharing a table and a few liters of wine in a Toledo café, he discovered that this “citizen of Christian birth and exquisite breeding who did not find it necessary to wear a collar and tie” had secretly paid the bill upon leaving. Such an act of quiet courtesy from a person of very limited means struck Household deeply, leading him to a small epiphany of unity with Spain and a decision to make the acquisition of “courtliness” his personal goal. This moment of solidarity would burgeon into a unity with a cosmopolitan league of Class Xers—dashing, often raffish, always courtly
pícaros
, from Polish aristocrats to black Cuban taxi drivers—whom Household would meet again and again in his travels through Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America (north of Mexico the count drops sharply) during a peripatetic life that clearly informed the picaresque structure of his fiction.
Born in Bristol at the turn of the last century, Geoffrey Household was the son of a lawyer who later became secretary of education for Gloucestershire. There were family memories of Bilney, the estate in Norfolk his merchant great-grandfather had acquired and his grandfather lost. At Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a double First in Classics and English and aspired to be a poet, he also claims to have shared with a friend “an almost oriental dislike of any intellectual, athletic, political or social activities.” Noting this quality in the young man along with his keen interest in shooting, the friend’s father (clearly an early member of the club) offered Geoffrey a post in the Ottoman Bank in Bucharest, an experience that first awakened in him “the civilized European who lies, half a litre below the surface, in the average introverted Englishman.”
After Bucharest, Household became a representative for Elders & Fyffes, banana vendors for the United Fruit Company, which led him to his deep encounter with Spain, chiefly in Bilbao and the Basque country, whose inhabitants were to figure frequently in his fictions. He met and married a Romanian-born American, Elisaveta Kopelanoff, who encouraged his first attempts at writing. After a stint in New York rewriting articles for a children’s encyclopedia, then in London writing children’s historical plays for the BBC, he advertised himself, accurately and memorably, as an “Englishman with no national prejudices” and was hired by the printer’s ink manufacturers John Kidd & Co., who sent him first to the Middle East and then to his last great regional love affair, with Latin America. In the New World, Household consolidated his personal ideal of the Latinized Englishman “accepting unhurriedly the local courtesies and conventions,” a role he would carry through his service first as fledgling saboteur and then as field security officer in World War II.
Household was sent to Bucharest and then to Greece, where one cannot help wondering if his path crossed that of the notable English
pícaro
Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose own life, from a teenage walking trip across Europe to Constantinople in the 1930s to his lighthearted caper of kidnapping a German general in Crete during the war, seems to leap straight from the pages of a Household novel. Later postings included Cairo and Jerusalem, where Household met his second wife, Ilona Gutmàn, a Hungarian national with whom he settled into a happy marriage, producing three children whose cultural and genetic blend must have been a source of particular satisfaction to their father.
Rogue Male
is Household’s best-known work. Published in 1939 and made twice into a film (Fritz Lang’s
Man Hunt
in 1942 and a television movie, scripted by Frederic Raphael and starring Peter O’Toole, in 1976), it was his second adult novel after
The Third Hour
and the children’s adventure novel
The Spanish Cave
(first published as
The Terror of Villadonga
in 1936, the same year that his first story, “The Salvation of Pisco Gabar,” appeared in the pages of
The Atlantic Monthly
). A less successful late sequel,
Rogue Justice
(1982), dots the i’s and crosses the t’s of its austere predecessor by giving the hero a name and a suitably bicultural identity (an Austrian countess for a mother).
The story opens as its narrator recounts in an offhand way how he decided on a sportsman’s whim to walk south across the border from Poland and stalk “the biggest game on earth,” an unnamed dictator who is clearly Hitler. Caught with the “great man” squarely in his telescopic sights, tortured outrageously and left for dead, he makes a daring escape back to England only to discover he’s still an outlaw, relentlessly pursued by the dictator’s minions and his own country’s police. After he determines he must go to ground like the hunted animal he is, a night spent on Wimbledon Common marks his first step down the evolutionary ladder to abjection and ultimate enlightenment. From there he makes his way to Dorset, then “from Dorset to the western corner of the county, and from that to four square miles” of countryside and his ultimate hiding place, the strip of ancient lane on a remote hillside.
It might seem incongruous that Household situated the stark encounter with Nature and human predators that ensues in a domesticated landscape to which the adjective “tame” is routinely appended. (Of the same Dorset countryside, the hero of
Bernardo Brown
notes: “Tame it was, but tame as some glossy, splendid animal conscious of love and answering.”) Robert MacFarlane, who has traced the novel’s fictional destination to a specific hillside in Dorset’s Chideock Valley, notes that it is a New World notion that wilderness must be divorced from the human. In the literature of Britain, MacFarlane says, “wildernesses have always been profoundly human landscapes.”
*
The lane itself, sunk fifteen feet below the level of the surrounding fields, has been “worn down by the pack horses of a hundred generations.” Even with farmhouses lying close by, however, the old Roman road snaking the hills has been reclaimed by the local animals. In prose that hints of the mystic animism that would play an increasingly larger role in Household’s later novels, we are told that in the moonlight “it was teeming with life: sheep and cows lying on it, rabbits dancing in and out of ancient pits, owls gliding and hooting over the thorn.”
