The Fatal Englishman (31 page)

By the time he came to write
The Last Enemy
, Hillary had put the writers of the Auden group at arm’s length. He had by then undergone his change of conviction about the War and wished to distance himself from people who had been pacifist or non-combatant. Auden and Isherwood had gone to America, Stephen Spender was in the London Fire Service: these men were not fighting and dying. Hillary’s life and writing, however, fit comfortably into the cultural setting the writers of the 1930s had helped to define. He may not have been aware of it, but he shared many of their assumptions, and in his writing about ‘the pilot’ he acknowledged that literary background. His attitude to the outbreak of war was not very different from theirs. They believed that war would bring Western civilisation to an end and that the
only fate worse than that would be to live in a fascist state. They felt themselves to be a generation without ancestry, because the Great War had killed ten million men and irrevocably cut them off from the past. A new war, they believed, would eliminate also the possibility of a future. Hillary came to share this belief, though with the important qualification that victory by the Allied forces against the Nazis would ‘stamp for ever on the future of civilisation’ the values for which his comrades had died.

Under Mr McEachran at Shrewsbury and later at Oxford Hillary had read widely. His cultivation of an ‘alert philistinism’ did not prevent him from invoking Pound, Eliot and Auden in
The Last Enemy.
Since the whole enterprise of English literature in the 1930s had been devoted to the question of the private faces in public places, to the dilemma of what action a person should take in troubled times, and since a talent as great as Auden’s had been involved, it is hardly surprising that Hillary was both influenced by it and remembered in the terms that it had denned.

If Hillary’s life fitted the high cultural patterns these writers had created, his death appealed to a more popular taste: the mystery story.

Three months after Hillary died Arthur Koestler published an article about him in
Horizon
under the title ‘The Birth of a Myth’. Koestler had known Hillary quite well in London in his brief period of literary fame and they had corresponded. Koestler had an image for the growth of a myth. He compared it to the formation of crystal. The public and artistic backgrounds – books, newspapers, the word on the street – were like molecules trying to find a coherent pattern; the individual was the core about which they crystallised. Koestler had seen some, but not all of Hillary’s letters to Mary Booker from Charter Hall and he quoted selectively to show Hillary’s submission to a death he believed had become inevitable. Koestler made much of Hillary’s distinction between his ‘instinct’, which told him he would survive, and his ‘reason’, which told him he must die. What Koestler was trying to do was to suggest a degree of volition. Perhaps he had not read Saint-Exupéry, who used the same word, ‘instinct’, about his desire to fly as a fighter pilot. Koestler suggested that
Hillary was a more or less willing victim of the forces of myth. He rightly identified the sceptical, reluctant way in which such men as Hillary fought at first and fairly showed from his letters to Mary how difficult he was finding it to fly the machines at Charter Hall.

‘But why then, in God’s name, did he go back?’ Koestler asked. He looked at the influence of T.E. Lawrence, about which Hillary had written to him personally. He was scornful of the idea that Hillary could have returned only for the hope of comradeship, and quoted Hillary himself: ‘I ponder Koestler’s theory that
l’espoir de la fraternité
is always a wild goose chase unless one is tight or physically exhausted in a crowd – as after long marches.’

Koestler came to no simple conclusion about Hillary’s motivation, preferring ‘a pattern composed of all the threads we have picked up, and followed for a short while and dropped again. For the pattern is more than the sum of the threads; it has its own symbolic design of which the threads know nothing.’ This was the nub of what Koestler was suggesting: that while Hillary’s motives were mixed, he was affected by the pressure of public expectation into making some kind of exemplary death.

Koestler again quoted Hillary quoting him, about the distinction between the two planes on which people live: ‘Usually we live and move on the plane of the
vie triviale
, but occasionally in moments of elation, danger, etc we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the
we tragique
, with its uncommon-sense cosmic perspective. One of the miseries of the human condition is that we can neither live permanently on the one nor on the other plane, but oscillate between the two.’ Thus the casual, downbeat slang of the mess was the only way the pilots could deal with their experiences in the air. Artists, Koestler argued, have to move constantly between the two planes. He analysed
The Last Enemy
in the light of how well Hillary succeeded in viewing the trivial from the perspective of the eternal and was generous in his estimate of Hillary’s success. He compared him with, among others, Hemingway, Malraux, Saint-Exupéry and Raymond Radiguet. To Thomas Mann’s opinion that to survive a writer must leave bulk as well as brilliance Koestler had the elegant rejoinder: ‘This slim volume of Hillary’s seems to have a specific
weight which makes it sink into the depth of one’s memory, while tons of printed bulk drift as flotsam on its surface.’

Koestler’s essay ended, like Hillary’s book, rhetorically. He could not answer the question he had set himself: ‘What makes this young author-pilot’s life into a symbol?’ His last, approximate answer is that it is something to do with causes: ‘a man’s longing for the Holy Grail may become so strong that he flies like a moth into the flame; and having burned his wings crawls back into it again.’ He suggested that Hillary was lost for something in which to believe – a redeeming emotion and an unembarrassing faith. This is not how Hillary himself presented his state of mind. Out of literary distaste at its rhetoric, Koestler seemed to ignore the meaning of the final paragraph of
The Last Enemy.

Koestler’s essay, if occasionally self-indulgent, is often shrewd and appears to have been written in good faith. The following year John Middleton Murry published an essay entitled ‘Richard Hillary’ in his magazine
Adelphi
in which he accused Hillary of ‘faking the record’. Murry was not concerned so much with material inaccuracies as with what he believed to be the falsehood of Hillary’s conclusions. He could not accept that Hillary really believed the War had become a moral crusade. Murry presented Hillary as a figure from tragedy who was pursued by the fates for his ‘dishonesty’ and forced to pay the ultimate price. Murry’s essay was too self-admiring to state anything so plain as a thesis, but what he appeared to believe was that any glory there might have been in the Battle of Britain was gone by late 1942 when the bombing of German cities had begun. Because, according to Murry, he had lied about his feelings, Hillary was condemned to tread the world in a ‘phoney literary role’ from which his only escape was through a willing death. Since Wilfrid Fison went down with Hillary, what Murry was suggesting was more than a sensational literary gesture. Murry was himself a pacifist and reprinted the essay in his own imprint in the hope of influencing the conduct of the War. However reasonable an aim that may have been, it seems now as though it was Murry not Hillary who ‘faked the record’. ‘In Hillary’, he concluded, ‘the deep urge of contemporary society towards death is made visible.’ He judged Hillary’s ‘self-inflicted’
death to be a fitting expiation for the sin of seeing war against the Nazis – or any war – as justified, and recruited him, cleansed by his ultimate act of literary self-criticism, to his own side. There was a rattle of tambourines in his evangelical climax: ‘What Hillary foreknew as an individual, Britain will discover as a nation.’

Murry’s essay had little influence except to give further currency to the idea that Hillary had killed himself: ‘It was no crusade on which he was flying. He was seeking death.’ If Hillary had wished to kill himself he could have done so in the early part of his course when he was flying solo. There is also the matter of Fison. Hillary could certainly be obnoxious (‘that shit Hillary …’), but he was not a murderer; indeed by January 1943 he had become obsessed by notions of fellowship. His letters from Charter Hall are frightening because they show a very young man contemplating his imminent and unheroic death. In some unconscious way he may have accepted this fate, or at least feared to go back on his decision; but that is not the same thing as seeking to die.

Middleton Murry was right to draw attention to one thing, however, and that was the effect on Hillary of being the author of a successful book. He took his success modestly, laughing incredulously at the queues of people at the bookshops. The popularity of it, however, had a perverse consequence. He had written the book to honour the memory of men such as Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney and to celebrate the efforts of the ‘Carburys and Berrys’, the men ‘who have come up the hard way’. He missed their company after his crash, and more than anything he wanted their approval: he craved ‘my right to fellowship with my dead’. Yet not only did he feel himself less of a human being than Peter Pease and less of an airman than Brian Carbury, he had, by telling their story, by breaking ranks and becoming famous, put himself beyond the circle of their downbeat comradeship. It was almost as though he were guilty of ‘shooting a line’. Although the book was modest enough about his own flying, to write a memoir was a showy, individual thing to do. He had lost the natural right to talk shop in the mess and read the
Daily Mirror
, now he was condemned to dinner at the
Garrick with Koestler, Linklater and Rebecca West. Peter Pease’s family was outraged at the portrait of their son, which they took to be an invasion of their privacy. Hillary had sought the love of his fellow pilots but had ended up in exile from them.

Hillary gave Denise Maxwell-Woosnam a copy of Wilfred Owen’s poems, explaining that Owen was a poet he much admired, and Owen’s life helps illuminate the dilemma at the end of Hillary’s. When war broke out in 1914 Owen was working as a tutor near Bordeaux and made no hurry to enlist. A passive, gentle man with a soft, velvety voice, Owen did not respond to patriotic calls. Eventually, however, he did join up and spent the bitter winter of 1916-17 on the Somme. His battalion had been involved in prolonged fighting and had operated from shellholes for twelve days. One night Owen was taking cover against a railway embankment when he was blown into the air by a German shell. He lay for several days in a hole by the cutting, with the dismembered body of a fellow officer all about him.

Two weeks later, his colonel noticed that Owen was confused: his hands were shaking and his memory was unreliable. The Medical Officer diagnosed ‘neurasthenia’. Owen wrote to his mother: ‘Do not suppose that I have had a “breakdown”. I am simply avoiding one.’

He was sent to Craiglockhart, a hospital for officers near Edinburgh that had been converted from a hydropathic spa. Here he met Siegfried Sassoon, and the meeting had a powerful effect on Owen’s poetry. When he arrived he was writing sub-Decadent whimsy, full of gloomy gardens and fake archaisms. By the time he left he had written
‘Duke et Decorum Est’
and a draft of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. Sassoon had helped him find his subject – war, and the pity of war – and Owen was on the way to becoming one of the most substantial British poets of the twentieth century.

Owen’s compassion for other men was not a gentle feeling, but a fierce and positive emotion. His determined apprenticeship as a poet meant that he had most of the technical means to control and express it. His life changed and became fulfilled. His voice was the most glorious and the most celebrated of those raised
against the inhuman slaughters of the Western Front; he was the only writer who could justifiably call one of his greatest poems an ‘anthem’.

Yet he went back. Willingly, almost eagerly, he chose to rejoin the men of his battalion. He felt that he belonged with them; that while such terrible things continued he had no right to hold himself apart. To stay in England was simply to beg the question.

This finally was what Hillary felt too. Of course there were differences: Owen was a front-rank creative writer and Hillary was not; Owen had become an officer and felt a fatherly duty to protect the young men under his command; his sexual feelings were also for men, and this may have complicated the issue in a subtle way. But the main reason for Owen’s return was that he felt, like Saint-Exupéry in 1942, that he could not be a spectator –
‘Je ne peux plus rester témoin.’

In the Great War many men joined up from a sense of patriotic duty and were then disillusioned. Their motivation after that point was sometimes no more than a will to survive, but in many cases the lost cause of patriotism was replaced by a desire to honour their dead friends: only by seeing it through to the end, only by enduring, could they make some sense of the sacrifice that had been made by so many.

This feeling was less common in the Second World War because in 1939—45 most men felt they had a proper moral cause to fight for; they therefore had less need of the subtler claims of the dead. Hillary, however, made it quite clear that this ‘14-18 feeling was a powerful if not primary motivation for him.

On his return to the Western Front, Owen participated more eagerly than before. His war records are lost somewhere in the Ministry of Defence, but reading what one can between the lines of his letters to his mother (he was another mother-dominated boy) it appears that he almost ran amok. After leading one assault beyond the call of duty he was awarded the MC and was killed crossing the Sambre Canal under heavy machine gun fire in November 1918.

Owen had been forced by circumstances into an unbearable position, from which only physical action offered some redemptive escape. He felt that in moral or existential terms he had no
alternative. So it was with Hillary-not because he had in Murry’s sinister phrase ‘faked the record’, but because he had filled it in. He had set down what he and his fellow-pilots had done and their reasons for doing so. He had no choice but to ‘finish the job’ that Peter Pease and Colin Pinckney had started.