His adventure story about seventeenth-century Virginia, Salute to Adventurers, was published by Nelson’s that month. It was dedicated to Susie’s uncle by marriage, Major-General Sir Reginald Talbot, who had been in the column that arrived too late to save General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885. As a young man he had been temporarily attached to the staff of General Sheridan of the Union during the American Civil War, so JB thought it fitting to dedicate a book about the early days of settlement in Virginia to this well-liked, retired regular soldier.
The tale, set in the 1680s, concerns an upright Edinburgh merchant, Andrew Garvald,* and his adventures both in Scotland and Virginia. Although written before the Hannay novels, its publication confirmed that JB was already keen, in this case subtly but unmistakably, to point up the long association between Britain and its former New World colonies, as well as the common ancestry of many of their people. He dealt confidently with themes that were to recur over and over again in his books: the potency of the frontier, both actual and as an idea; what really constitutes civilisation; and what hell can be let loose in the world when religious fervour turns to self-centred fanaticism, a theme that reappeared, with greater force, in Witch Wood.
In September he was sent out to the Western Front again, this time by the War Office, to observe and report on what became known as the Battle of Loos. He sent back dispatches to The Times at the same time, again making good use of his privileged access for gathering information to write the History. ‘I have written two very scruffy things for the Times, but it is impossible to publish details yet,’ he told his wife.23 The battle made him rage privately against the shortcomings of the senior military, especially Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, who, he thought, had sent men into battle without proper back-up and reserves.
He wrote in the History: ‘Mistakes were no doubt made, of which the future historian will have much to say. In such a work as this, criticism would be premature and improper.’24 However, in the revised version, published in 1921,25 he was more forthright: ‘Yet the exhilaration of victory, the sense that at last we were advancing, was tempered by a profound disappointment. We had had a great chance of which we had failed to take full advantage. Most of the results of surprise and of initial impetus had been lost during that tragic interregnum from Saturday at midday till noon on Monday, when a few weary and broken brigades clung heroically to an impossible front. There had been somewhere a colossal blundering.’26 In Greenmantle both Sandy Arbuthnot and Richard Hannay are wounded at Loos. During the battle, he himself came under German machine-gun fire when striving to ‘foregather’ (as he called it) with Cecil Rawling.
Once home again, he continued to work for the Foreign Office in public relations, for example conducting a delegation of Russian politicians (including Vladimir Nabokov’s father) to view the British Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Shetlands.* From time to time he showed high-profile civilians around the battlefields. And always there was work to do on the History, which he would mainly write at weekends when he joined his family, who spent much of their time in rented houses in rural Kent.
On 19 October 1915 the ‘shocker’, which he had spent the dreary six weeks in bed in 1914 writing, was published by Blackwood’s, under his own name, having been serialised in three parts in Blackwood’s Magazine under the pseudonym ‘H. de V.’ This may have referred to a friend, a Brasenose rowing Blue called H. C. de J. du Vallon, as a, now unrecoverable, joke.
JB defined the ‘shocker’ in his dedication to Tommy Nelson as ‘the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible’. He dedicated it ‘in memory of our long friendship, in these days when the wildest fictions are so much less improbable than the truth’.
For nearly twenty years before the outbreak of war, there had been a naval arms race between Germany and England, and novelists such as Erskine Childers,* William le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim had plugged into a widespread anxiety about possible invasion from the sea by Germany. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the plot of The Thirty-Nine Steps should be informed by those fears, and be conceived by a patriotic man trying to come to terms with being a non-combatant, and understandably anxious to find other ways of playing his part.
The book introduces Richard Hannay, the comfortably-off but unsophisticated mining engineer, of Scottish blood but reared in Rhodesia, alone and bored in London. Bored, that is, until the murder in his flat of a new acquaintance – a freelance secret agent – by a gang of German spies (the Black Stone) intent on smuggling the current dispositions of the British Fleet out of the country, sends him on the run. Hannay is chased by them for the knowledge they think he has acquired, as well as by the police, who suspect he is a murderer.
If Prester John was an encomium to the beauty of rural South Africa, then The Thirty-Nine Steps performed the same duty for Lowland Scotland. Hannay would have found it much easier to hide in plain sight in London, but decides to take a train to Scotland and disappears into the wilds (and they are wild) of Galloway, that same landscape where JB had slept out with Taffy Boulter in the summer of 1897, and which he also knew from his riotous sojourns at Ardwall. Harried by the Black Stone gang, Hannay moves eastwards and ends up in JB’s beloved upper Tweed valley.
JB maintained that Hannay was modelled on Edmund Ironside, later hero of Vimy Ridge and Archangel, whom JB had met when he was a young regular officer in South Africa, doing intelligence work. He was brave, resourceful and instinctive, as Hannay is, but there are substantial differences. Hannay is, in some ways, the ordinary man (which Ironside emphatically was not), conscious of his limitations but determined to do his best, and is thus someone with whom readers can readily identify. Hannay is far from cerebral, unreconstructed in his views and forthright and slangy in his speech – ‘of my own totem’; ‘a sportsman called Nietzsche’ – which is why it is so odd that anyone should ever mistake him for his creator.
The tense, fast-paced, first-person narrative, exciting chases by car and aeroplane of the fugitive hero, and deft descriptions of landscape and weather, made an impact on fiction readers in all strata of society. JB received many letters from men in the trenches: ‘It is just the kind of fiction for here,’ wrote one officer. ‘One wants something to engross the attention without tiring the mind. The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells.’27 Indeed, it has been said that the reason why there are so few first-edition copies of the book with their dust jackets still intact is because they were lost in the mud of the Western Front. Sandy Gillon, who was with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers at Gallipoli that winter, wrote to say that he had enjoyed it, even if it was ‘glaringly improbable’.28 In reply to Gilbert Murray’s congratulations, JB wrote, ‘I am very glad you like my “shocker”. It is the most restful and delightful thing in the world to write that stuff.’29
The book was reviewed favourably but not widely. The Spectator said that it had ‘just that quality of literary amenity which the average “shocker” conspicuously lacks; it lifts the book out of the ruck without being so pronounced as to repel the unlettered reader.’30 It was an immediate success, selling 25,000 copies by the end of 1915. It made JB known as a fiction writer to a degree that Prester John had not achieved. When giving his war lectures, he began to be referred to as ‘the famous novelist and war correspondent’.31
It is not hard to see why the book was so immediately popular: you could happily give it to anyone as a present, since without a female love interest there could be no troubling undercurrent of sex. Hannay is honourable, dutiful and patriotic, yet deliciously transgresses conventional behaviour by running away from the police, stealing cars and occasionally hitting people. (But this is emphatically not ‘snobbery with violence’, that appealing but, in the case of JB’s novels, misleading phrase of Alan Bennett’s.)* The prose is clean and spare, which was the hallmark of all his novel-writing, with occasional ‘parallelism’ derived from th
e Psalms: ‘The free moorlands were prison walls, and the keen hill air was the breath of a dungeon.’32 That could have been a sentence from one of his father’s sermons.
According to one academic, LeRoy L. Panek, ‘Buchan took the spy novel out of the hands of innocuous romancers like Oppenheim and gave it sinew and meaning.’33 That is some claim for a book that ran to only 245 pages of text in its first edition. Certainly, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and the other spy novels JB wrote, were to have an influence on other thriller writers. Indeed, according to Panek: ‘If John Buchan had not existed he would have had to have been invented. The modern novel of espionage simply would not have developed along the same lines without him.’34 It has also been said of JB that he ‘gave a model of form and an inner spirit to the spy story, giving it through his vision of the world a capacity to express in terms of contemporary international politics and intrigue the yearning for a lost world of fullness and heroism’.35 Raymond Chandler remarked that the dedication to Tommy Nelson at the beginning of The Thirty-Nine Steps was a pretty good formula for the thriller of any kind. Graham Greene and Ian Fleming both acknowledged their debt to him. To take just one example, we would call the Black Stone’s use of powerful cars and aeroplanes to pursue the hero in the novel ‘pure James Bond’, if JB hadn’t got there first. Pursuit and escape, omnipresent danger, often from more than one side, and the hero not knowing who to trust and prey to paranoia, are all important elements of twentieth-century British spy fiction. Interestingly, there is a direct homage to JB (more likely than John Bunyan) in John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy when George Smiley is asked his name and he replies ‘Mr Standfast’.
The Thirty-Nine Steps is not JB’s best novel; there are several that are better plotted, with subtler characterisation. It is an obvious piece of British war propaganda. However, it will always be the book with which JB is associated and remembered. It is solemnly debated by academics, in sometimes mystifying but always sincerely earnest terms. It has never been out of print in more than one hundred years; precious few novels survive so long. It is therefore a ‘classic’, according to Leslie Stephen’s definition: ‘It takes a very powerful voice and a very clear utterance to make a man audible to the fourth generation.’36 By 1960, it had sold 355,000 hardback copies, only slightly outdone by Greenmantle and, when the book went into Penguin and Pan paperback in the 1950s, it sold twice as many copies as it had done in hardback. By the time Janet Adam Smith’s biography, John Buchan, was published in 1965, The Thirty-Nine Steps had sold about 1.5 million copies in English, and there were translations into a number of languages, including Persian and Arabic. JB’s works are now out of copyright, and editions of the book are published frequently, both in print and as digital downloads. There is no possibility of keeping track of its sales.
His most famous creation, Richard Hannay, has become, truly, an iconic figure. His name only has to be mentioned, without comment, and a whole world of meaning opens up to the reader or listener. Even now. Take just one of countless examples: in a 2007 biography of the cerebral poet, R. S. Thomas, the author, Byron Rogers, mentions a war hero, General Pugh, who came to live in Thomas’ remote Welsh parish: ‘He was Richard Hannay.’37 No more was, or needed to be, said.
Scarcely a book review of a new spy thriller is complete without John Buchan’s name being mentioned as a result of The Thirty-Nine Steps. These books are sifted by reviewers into categories – as exciting as Buchan, with Buchan characteristics, not as good as Buchan and so on. As for those thirty-nine steps, they turn up in company reports on how to grow a business, in travel-writing, in advice to teenagers about how to live their lives38 and in innocent games. As I learned very young, they are a Bingo call: ‘39, all the steps’. The Thirty-Nine Steps has so penetrated our consciousness that we do not puzzle at its mention, whatever the context. Writers continue to write books that they are proud to admit are strongly influenced by it.39 In 2003, The Thirty-Nine Steps came 44th in The Observer list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, one above Ulysses and two above Mrs Dalloway, which would have afforded JB a wry smile.
The Thirty-Nine Steps changed his life, both because he now realised he could make very useful money out of writing fiction and because people began to view him in a different way. For better or worse, he was now pigeon-holed as a writer of exciting thrillers, a reputation which was augmented by the publication of The Power-House and Greenmantle the following year.
Despite the hustle of the war, JB continued, from time to time, to amuse, distract or console himself by writing poetry. He produced, for example, a privately printed, pseudo-heroic ‘eclogue’,* Ordeal by Marriage, a poetical discussion on the subject of marriage, supposedly by seven old friends of his, who were both bachelors and Knights Bachelor. Susie later wrote that it was ‘a private joke written for a group of friends and quite incomprehensible to anyone else’.** And he continued to write for newspapers and periodicals: The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Land and Water, and even the Chicago Daily News, to which he cabled a succession of weekly pieces in 1916.
Meanwhile, Susie was far from idle. Despite being pregnant again (William, their third child and second son, was born in January 1916), she helped Lady Wolmer found and run a nursery for children in Gospel Oak, a poorish area of north London. Gospel Oak caught JB’s fancy and the name and area appear in his 1924 novel, The Three Hostages. She also did part-time work for the Voluntary Aid Detachment, which provided auxiliary help by the genteel to trained nurses. Her mother and sister, Marnie, had been doing much the same thing in Paris in 1915.***
In May 1916, hard on the heels of the success of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Blackwood’s brought out a hardback edition of The Power-House, which they had serialised in their magazine in 1913. This story stretches the suspension of disbelief beyond breaking point; there are just too many coincidences and it contains a most uncharacteristic, if necessary, blunder by the clever lawyer, Edward Leithen. It is best remembered for the most famous short passage in the entire Buchan canon, the description of civilisation by the arch-villain, Andrew Lumley: ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.’* For once, a Buchan character can safely be assumed to be expressing the views of his creator. As far back as 1901, in the short story ‘Fountainblue’, he wrote much the same: ‘There is a very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors … You call it miles of rampart; I call the division a line, a thread, a sheet of glass.’40
There is no ducking the fact that JB was stimulated by the work in France, despite the depressing or terrifying nature of many of the sights. Nor is it so surprising. For one thing, he admired the ordinary British soldier, and for another he was as close to the action as he could be for a patriotic non-combatant, convinced of the rightness of the Allied cause. He was also popular at GHQ. Howard Spring, a clerk there and later a well-known novelist, recalled: ‘I remember John Buchan, a cavalier if ever there was one, always commanding our respect but never forgetting how to unbend.’41
Journalist that he was, he enjoyed producing despatches from the front for The Times, even if his copy was sometimes censored unnecessarily or when he feared that indiscreet comments by its military correspondent, Colonel Repington, might redound badly on him. He told his wife on 23 May: ‘That fool Repington, who was out here last week as Sir John French’s guest, went home and wrote a thing which gave away one of our front positions. The result was that the place was shelled next day and a lot of men killed. The 1st Army are furious, and a lot of people who don’t know me think I am responsible. The result is that no visitors are allowed in that part of the line.’ He had been going to spend the night in the trenches with the Scots Guards but the visit had been cancelled. ‘The truth will be known very shortly but meanwhile it is very annoying.’42
JB’s brother Alastair went out to France in 1915. In the early pa
rt of 1916 the 6th Battalion, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill, who found a temporary berth there when he left the Cabinet after the disaster of Gallipoli, and Alastair served under him for a short while. The lad sustained a shrapnel wound to the right thigh in February and was sent back to Scotland to recuperate. He was based that summer at North Queensferry, on the north bank of the Forth, and managed to get home to Peebles at weekends. Anna remembered him as a kindly uncle to Alice and Johnnie, playing mock trench-warfare games with them by the banks of the River Tweed.
In June 1916, Lord Newton, JB’s boss at the Foreign Office News Department, visited GHQ in France to speak to General Charteris (Head of Intelligence) about the press and propaganda, especially the need for morale-boosting stories. Charteris made it clear that he would help, provided ‘the boosters confine themselves to boosting what has happened and not what they hope may happen’.43 Charteris ‘told him [Newton] what we were already doing in the way of facilities and offered to improve them in any way he could suggest, subject only to censorship requirements. He suggested a free-lance man from his own department to which I agreed.’44 The man chosen by Newton was JB. When at the Foreign Office, JB had been very keen (pushing against War Office reluctance) that trained reporters be employed to move freely behind the lines, to provide accurate, unsensational information that could be given to the public. That is why Newton recommended him to GHQ.
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