A Tale of Awe: Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica

Imagine a dinner party held for the hundred writers selected by Modern Library as the authors of the best novels of the twentieth century. Of course, everyone wants a glimpse of a drunken F. Scott Fitzgerald seated in second place. He’s just behind James Joyce, visibly ill-at-ease, wishing he were elsewhere. And Hemingway—who wouldn’t want a drink with him? (Maybe, anyone who doesn’t want to be maliciously gossiped about in a subsequent memoir). There’s Henry James, more interested in the image you impress on him than vice-versa; don’t confide in him, Partygoer, otherwise you might find yourself later in his fiction, depicted with chilling clarity. And Steinbeck—one would have expected dirty fingernails, a cloud of Okie dust and a whiff of mackerel . . . who knew he’d be so dapper?

Who would you circle—Faulkner, Forster, Greene, Wharton, Nabokov, Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Woolf, O’Hara, Salinger, Heller, Vonnegut ? Many of these names combine artistic genius, folk hero, and pure celebrity. Woody Allen’s recent hit, Midnight in Paris, attests to our longstanding fantasies about American authors gadding about Paris in the ’20s. By gad-ding, I mean drinking, screwing, more drinking, hobnobbing, and, once in a while, writing.

Across the English Channel at that precise moment, a contemporary of Fitzgerald and Hemingway wrote a novel, published in 1929, that remains one of the oddest and most unsettling works of that century. Modern Library agrees, listing the book at number seventy-one, right below Conrad and Sinclair Lewis, just above Naipaul and Waugh. Yet critics rarely dip into this work nor into the author’s subsequent novels, and, of the preeminent writers listed, his life has merited only one lengthy biography in decades. A shame—Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is a match for his contemporaries, and remains a startling reading experience. Hughes (1900–1976) is a reserved gentleman in this ballroom of celebrities. It would be an honor to chat with him if one wandered to his silent corner, but eyes do not rest on him for long. Too much glamour surrounds this shy dignified man. He is not forgotten, but sadly overlooked.

Why? A High Wind in Jamaica (AHW) was published when the author was twenty-nine and was esteemed on both sides of the Atlantic. But there were long gaps between novels, and none of his succeeding books captured the reading public’s imagination, as did his first. His personal life was outwardly prosaic—he remained married to the same woman for decades and was considered a loving and dutiful father. But these life circumstances were not unlike William Golding’s, and yet Lord of the Flies—which is now a part of the cultural psyche and number forty-one on the list—is such an obvious direct descendent of AHW that one wonders why Hughes is of minimal interest to critics.

It should be noted with gratitude that in 1929 Richard Hughes used his newfound clout to encourage his UK publisher to take a risk with a fascinating novel he discovered during a tour of the USA—The Sound and the Fury (number six), thereby introducing Faulkner to England. A few years later when Hughes was living with his young family in Wales, a young Welshman wrote a fan letter, asking to make a visit—this Welsh-man, an effusive teenager named Dylan Thomas, became protégé and friend. Among Hughes’s clique at Oxford were Robert Graves (whose nephew authored the most thorough biography of Hughes), the older literary fantasist, A.E. Coppard, and, through a mutual friend, a post-war T.E. Lawrence. Hughes went on to write film scripts for Ealing Studios. Yet he remains scarcely recognized by readers of 1920s literature, in much the same way that the narrator of AHW eludes the reader. Perhaps the reason why Hughes is simultaneously respected and undervalued is that he chose a method of narration so wildly out of sync with the majority of classics of the period that the critical world hasn’t...