I don't quite remember when I first read Random Harvest, but I'm quite sure this was after I became interested in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Halliwell had given it three stars, and the movie itself was hokum, but sincerely done, with a magnificent cast.
It was only later that I really read it, and I found I enjoyed it very much.
Charles Rainier is an industrialist and a Conservative MP, to all intents and purposes, a very successful man, with a lovely wife who is also an accomplished hostess. But there's something that he's missing, an emptiness that he has been trying to fill in his life.
We learn that there is a gap in his memory, a period of three years he remembers nothing about, three years that took place after he was wounded in the great war, and then he woke up in 1920, recovering from an automobile accident, with no memory of what happened to him, from 1917 to the moment he regains consciousness from the accident.
The story is about how he tries to to recover those memories, but its also about the period between the two world wars. Chronologically, the story begins with Armistice Day, 1917, and ends on September 1, 1939, and the picture it draws of England between the wars is fascinating.
Rainier is upper middle-class, and after rejoining his large family, decides to go to Cambridge - something he thoroughly enjoys, but he gives it up to take control of the family businesses.
It's a portrayal of the English upper classes that's a great deal more affectionate than, say Waugh, even though there are characters who could move seamlessly between the two worlds.
Jill could afford once more her cruises and flirtations, with no handicaps to the latter except advancing middle age and none to the former save an increasing difficulty in finding new places to cruise to. Julia and her husband lived in Cheltenham, playing golf and breeding Sealyhams; George and Vera preferred town life and had taken a newly built maisonnette in Hampstead. Julian was at Cannes, doing nothing in particular with his usual slightly sinister elegance; once or twice a year he turned up in London, took Charles for lunch to the Reform Club, and worked off a few well-polished epigrams. Bridget had married an officer in an Irish regiment and lived in a suburb of Belfast. She had had one child, a boy, and was expecting another. With George's girl and Julia's boy and girl, this made a problematical five as against seven of the previous generation, unless (as Chet put it) Charles hurried up. They were not, however, at all anxious for Charles to hurry up; and as both Lydia and Jill were past the age when any amount of hurry might be expected to yield result, and as Vera was sickly and Julia (so she boasted) had nothing to do with her husband any more, the ratio really depended on Bridget—plus, of course, an outside chance from Charles. Nobody even considered Julian in such a connection.Hilton's prose is simple - and surprisingly economical. It doesn't thrust itself forward, but with a couple of sentences, he establishes the characters of Charles' family, individually and as a unit.
There's also the Al Stewart aspect - who I kept thinking of as I read the novel. Many of Stewart's songs - Post World War II Blues, A League of Notions, Trains - all take you through periods of history, painting pictures with a few words, and deceptively muzak-sounding music, until you realize that there's a considerable amount of artistry behind it. It's much the same way with Hilton. And this is about an England between 1917 and 1939. The very next paragraph to the one above switches from the personal to the political.
Much more, though, had happened between 1921 and 1924. The ancient Irish problem had apparently been settled; a conference at Washington had arranged limitation of naval armaments between England, Japan, France, and the United States; someone had almost climbed Everest; the German mark had collapsed and French troops had entered the Ruhr; Mussolini was rebuilding Italy and had already bombarded Corfu; there had been an earthquake in Japan, there had almost been another war with Turkey, there was still a war in Morocco, and there was going to be an exhibition at Wembley.And through it all is Charles Rainier, a decent man, but also, like so many of Hilton's heroes, curiously passive. Not to suggest that he isn't capable of action, quite the contrary, but it is disinterested action - a very Bhagavad Gita kind of action. He's as much observer as doer.
Hilton was a bestselling author in his time, and many of his books were filmed. And one of the greatest advantages he had were the actors who portrayed his heroes were definitive examples of decent, gentle Englishmen - Robert Donat in Knight without Armour and Goodbye Mr Chips, and Ronald Colman in Lost Horizon and Harvest. And their performances do so much to cement the idea of the decency of heroes.
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| Donat and Dietrich in Knight Without Armour |
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| Colman as Rainier and Garson as Paula Ridgeway in Random Harvest |
Nineteen twenty-five was another improving year, the year of Locarno, the false dawn. It was a year perhaps typical of the twenties in its wishful optimism backed by no growth of overtaking realism; another sixpence off the income tax, another attempt to harness a vague shape of things to come with the even vaguer shapes of things that had been. For the public would not yet look squarely into that evil face (publishers were still refusing "war books") and few also were those who feared the spectre might return. The England hoped for by the majority of Englishmen was a harking back to certain frugalities of the past (lower and lower income tax, smaller and smaller government expenditure) in order to enjoy more and more the pleasures of the present; the Europe they dreamed of was a continent in which everybody placidly "saw reason," while cultivating summer schools, youth hostels, and peasant-costume festivals in the best tradition of Hampstead Garden Suburb; in exchange for which the City would make loans, trade would thus be encouraged, and taxes fall still further. Mixed up with this almost mystic materialism was the eager, frightened idealism of the Labour Party (both the eagerness and the fright came to a head a year later, in the General Strike); the spread of the belief that the League of Nations never would be much good but was probably better than nothing, a belief that effectively converted Geneva into a bore and anyone who talked too much about it into a nuisance. Meanwhile a vast and paralysing absence of hostility gripped Englishmen from top to bottom of the social scale, not a toleration on principle but a muteness through indifference; they were not AGAINST the League of Nations, they were not AGAINST Russia, they were not AGAINST disarmament, or the Treaty of Versailles, or the revision of the Treaty of Versailles, or the working classes, or Mussolini—who had, after all, made the Italian trains run on time. "
I've called Hilton a "guilty pleasure", and I have often wondered why. I've read worse writers with pleasure and have made no bones about it. I sincerely believe that guilty pleasures are signs of snobbery (not that I'm immune to snobbery myself, but I try to guard against it myself ). But sometimes I feel embarassed that I like Hilton. Maybe it's because of the exaltation of a certain kind of Englishman, a certain kind of Englishness - which as an Indian, I instinctively distrust.
Consider this bit.
The very absence of all these things was English, Rainier said—something offhand but good-humoured, free but obedient, careless but never heartless.Naturally, as someone from one of England's former colonies, this irritates me.
"But tell that," he added, "to the Indians in Amritsar, to the Chinese who read the notice in a Shanghai park, 'No Dogs or Chinese Allowed,' to the tribesmen in Irak, to the peasant in County Cork, to the..." But then he laughed. "God, how we're hated! It isn't so much because we really deserve it. Even at the bottom of the charge-sheet I could quote Santayana's remark that the world never had sweeter masters. SWEET—a curious adjective —and yet there IS a sweetness in the English character, something that's almost perfect when it's just ripe—like an apple out of an English orchard. No, we're not hated altogether by logic. It's more because the world is TIRED of us—BORED with us—sickened by a taste that to some already seems oversweet and hypocritical, to others sour and stale. I suppose the world grew tired of the Romans like that, till at last the barbarians were excused for barbarism more readily than the Caesars were forgiven for being tough. There come such moments in the lives of nations, as of persons, when they just can't do anything right, and the world turns on them with the awful ferocity of a first-night audience rejecting, not so much a play it doesn't want, as a playwright it doesn't want any more... But wait till they've experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted. A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history..."
But then, the India I live is the India of Delhi in 1984, of Gujarat in 2002 and Delhi in 2020.
"But wait till they've experienced the supplanters—if we are supplanted. A time may come when a cowed and brutalized world may look back on the period of English domination as one of the golden ages of history..."
And I wonder.