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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
After John Buchan, Nevil Shute. In the long progression of popular British writers who have woven stories around the social facts and cultural values of empire, a progression which extends from Charles Kingsley and G. A. Henty through Paul Scott and, arguably, Ian Fleming, Nevil Shute occupies a distinguishable and important place. Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt. This essay offers the elements of such an analysis and suggests some lines along which further inquiry might proceed.
For at least a decade before his death in January 1960, Nevil Shute had been the best selling of English novelists. Altogether, his nearly two dozen works of light fiction have sold over 14 million copies. When he died his books were earning him an income of about $175,000 a year. Such extended popularity can hardly have been fortuitous. Without venturing too far into the psychology of literary response, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shute must have gauged accurately the issues and situations which, imaginatively presented, would interest his readers, and further, that he must have expressed in his work a pattern of values which conformed generally to their moral predispositions (or at least did not offend them.) Hence it should prove worthwhile to take a close and comprehensive look at his themes and ideas on the premise that they can tell us something useful about his audience.
I wish to thank the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia for supporting some of the research which went into this paper.
1. In order to keep his engineering and literary careers wholly separate, Nevil Shute Norway refrained from affixing his family name to the books he began to publish in 1926.
2. For a rich explication of this subject, see Sandison, Alan, The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. Among the many essays which bear on this subject matter, see Annan, Noel (Lord Annan), “Kipling's Place in the History of Ideas,” Victorian Studies, III (1960), 323–48Google Scholar; Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “John Buchan: An Untimely Appreciation,” Encounter, XV (1960). 46–53Google Scholar; Robert Huttenback, “G. A. Henty and the Vision of Empire,” ibid., XXXV (1970), 46–53; and Hoffmann, C. G., “Joyce Cary's African Novels: ‘There's a War On’,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXII (1963), 229–43Google Scholar.
3. See especially Thornton, A. P., The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power (London, 1959)Google Scholar.
4. According to the New York Times (January 13, 1960), whose obituary writer put Shute in a different category from such fantastically successful mystery writers as Agatha Christie. For comparative purposes, consider that as of 1965/6 the James Bond books had already sold nearly fifty million copies: del Buono, Oreste and Eco, Umberto (eds.), The Bond Affair (London, 1966), p. 11Google Scholar.
5. In a recent discussion of the ways in which writers relate to their readers, John G. Cawelti observes that “we must exercise some caution in our inferences from stories about the social and political views of authors and audiences. Most audiences would appear to be capable of temporarily tolerating a wide range of political and social ideologies for the sake of a good yarn.” But he adds, almost at once, that “there still remains a need for the author and audience to share certain basic feelings about the world. If this sharing does not occur at some fundamental level, the audience's enjoyment of the story will be impeded by its inability to accept the structure of probability, to feel the appropriate emotional responses, and to be fascinated by the primary interests on which the author depends.” See “Myth, Symbol, and Formula,” Journal of Popular Culture, 7 (Summer, 1974), 6Google Scholar. Even more recently Cawelti has published Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar. For a lively, impressionistic discussion of British middle-class readership, see Cockburn, Claud, Bestseller: The Books That Everyone Read 1900-1939 (London, 1972), pp. 1–17Google Scholar.
6. The novels are: Chequer Board (1947); A Town Like Alice (1950); Round the Bend (1951); The Far Country (1952); In the Wet (1953); Requiem for a WREN (1955); and Beyond the Black Stump (1956).
7. This information comes from Shute's autobiography (to 1939), Slide Rule (London, 1954), and from the obituary notices of January 13, 1960, in the New York Times and The Times (London).
8. The books from this period are: Marazan (1926); So Disdained (1928); Lonely Road (1932); and Ruined City (1938). A collection of shorter stories dating from the mid-twenties was published posthumously under the title Stephen Morris (London, 1961Google Scholar).
9. The title of Lord Templewood's memoir of his years as Air Minister, Empire of the Air (London, 1957)Google Scholar, aptly expresses the doubly imperial impulse of those who achieved domination of the air as a medium of travel and did so in the name of strengthening (as they believed) the sinews of the Empire/Commonwealth.
Some of Shute's finest writing on the sensations of flight came in one of his last books, The Rainbow and the Rose (1958), where several sustained passages recall Hemingway at the top of his form. Overall, however, it must be admitted that Shute's prose never really approaches the singular and unforgettable lyricism of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars — he does somewhat better, actually, with his sea stories, of which Lonely Road and What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) are two of the best.
10. On this kind of literature, see Hugo, Grant, “The Political Influence of the Thriller,” Contemporary Review, 221 (1972), 284–89Google Scholar.
11. In addition to the books named in note 6 above, Shute published the following novels in this period: What Happened to the Corbetts (1939); An Old Captivity (1940); Landfall (1941); Pied Piper (1942); Pastoral (1944); Most Secret (1945); Vinland the Good (1946); No Highway (1948); On the Beach (1957); The Rainbow and the Rose (1958); and Trustee from the Toolroom (1960).
12. A. Calder Marshall, reviewing In the Wet on the B.B.C. European Service, May 21, 1953 (from a transcript in the possession of Shute's publisher, Wm. Heinemann of London).
13. Annan, , “Kipling's Place in the History of Ideas,” Victorian Studies, III, 337Google Scholar. A mid-nineteenth century observer neatly caught the essence of the equivalent stratum of his day when he wrote of “the non-commissioned officers of English society … the leaders of everyday English life;” quoted in Sandison, Wheel of Empire, p. 14. Further to this point about Shute's conception of work, John Masters, describing the planning of his novel Bhowani Junction, wrote: “Only Kipling and Nevil Shute have so far written novels about work, where a man's work is a part of him. Most novels are about what men do in their spare time, at home, etc. But his work is really part of a man….” Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (New York, 1971 ed.), p. 238Google Scholar.
14. In An Old Captivity and In the Wet, for instance, humbly born but enormously accomplished pilots fall successfully in love with the daughters of distinguished Oxford dons, and something roughly similar happens in The Rainbow and the Rose, but this time with a tragic outcome (which is not, however, a result of class tensions). In Trustee from the Toolroom, the unpretentious, under-paid technical writer from West Ealing wins admiring acceptance from fabulously wealthy American lumber barons because he is the acknowledged master of his recondite craft. And the formula works as well for women as for men. In the wartime novels, in particular, Shute charts a course which leads girls taken from the lower echelons of British society to win, by way of their quiet, cheerful competence in their war-related work, the hearts of pilot officers belonging to the middle class.
15. Round the Bend (U.S. ed., 1951), pp. 257–58Google Scholar.
16. Note may also be taken here of Alan Sandison's suggestive psychological interpretation of the ‘imperial’ mode in modern literature, which discerns in the work of writers like Conrad and Kipling a kind of dialectical process through which an insecure and anxious “self, by means of acts of cognition (which are also defined as acts of domination), seeks to bring an alien and chaotic ‘otherness’ under control. Wheel of Empire, pp. 58-63.
17. Shute had already begun to explore this theme in Chequer Board (1947), one of whose sub-plots develops the contrast between the mean and sterile life circumstances of suburbia's declining middle classes in Britain and the vibrancy and fertility of life accessible to resourceful and open-minded Westerners among, in this case, the Burmese people.
18. The book was extensively reviewed, sometimes on the front page, and created a real furor in the press. Shute's treatment of the monarchy struck sparks on both the Left (e.g., Daily Worker, May 7, 1953) and on the Right (e.g., Birmingham Mail, April 29, 1953). Only in such outposts of empire as Southern Rhodesia did the book's unsparing critique of the ‘heart-rot of demagogue-pseudo-democracy’ win unqualified approval (Bulawayo Chronicle, July 10, 1953).
19. On this episode, which affected Shute profoundly, see Slide Rule (U.S. ed., 1964), pp. 53-136, along with the following: Higham, Robin, The British Rigid Airship 1908-1931; A Study in Weapons Policy (London, 1961), pp. 298–313Google Scholar and passim; Robinson, Douglas H., Giants of the Sky: A History of the Rigid Airship (Seattle, 1973), pp. 296–313Google Scholar; Clarke, Basil, The History of Airships (New York, 1961), pp. 136–45Google Scholar; Templewood, , Empire of the Air, pp. 218–31Google Scholar; and Leasor, James, The Millionth Chance: The Story of the R. 101 (London, 1957), esp. pp. 166–74Google Scholar.
20. The intention here is obviously to reward and reinforce those kinds of behavior which promote social cohesion and stability. On the respective claims of social and psychological concerns to primacy as causative agents in ‘imperial’ literature, see the divergent views of Annan, in “Kipling's Place in the History of Ideas,” Victorian Studies, IIIGoogle Scholar; and Sandison, , Wheel of Empire, esp. pp. 105–06Google Scholar and passim (where the debate is mainly conducted in terms of Kipling).
21. Affectionate as he is, Shute cannot hold his tongue for long. At one point in the story David Anderson says that living in socialist Britain is like living in a home for incurables; and Rosemary remarks plaintively, later on: “I've never yet met anybody who could defend our way of doing things.”
22. This is not the place to discuss the cognate question of ‘neo-colonialism’ — except to acknowledge that it does exist and to add that it does not yet appear to have produced a distinctive body of imaginative literature, though Caute's, DavidDecline of the West (London, 1967)Google Scholar may be read as a step in that direction.
23. Some of the novels which establish the context suggested here are: Island in the Sun (1954); Bhowani Junction (1954); The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1957); Time for a Tiger (1956); The Enemy in the Blanket (1958); and Beds in the East (1959). The work of, among others, Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene could be included to enrich the mixture without changing its nature.
24. “Bond,” in Richler, Mordecai, Shovelling Trouble (London, 1973)Google Scholar.
25. In the course of a study of the book buying and borrowing habits of the British public, Peter H. Mann discovered that, in Sheffield at least, slightly more than half the persons (not students) borrowing books from the city's main public library in the period under investigation belonged to the occupation group described as “Supervisory, clerical, junior managerial, etc.” — what might be called, more broadly, the lower-middle class; Books: Buyers and Borrowers (London, 1971), pp. 126–28Google Scholar.
Data accumulated by Peter H. Mann and Jacqueline Burgoyne show that the most frequent users of books in Britain may be described as middle class, middle aged, and better than average educated; and further, that libraries deal mainly with fiction, and that an individual's fiction reading is most likely to have been borrowed from a library; Books and Reading (London, 1969), pp. 13–33Google Scholar.
How large a readership was actually reached by Shute's books can never be established with precision, but it is important to bear in mind that the British public makes much heavier per capita use of public and lending libraries than does the American, so that the total of sales may well represent only a small fraction of the audience a fiction writer reaches. To quote Frank Kermode:
“Public library loans (in Britain) run at over 600 million (annually), compared with 450 million in the U.S., which has four times the population. France, with about the same population, borrows only about 45 million. In 1965 Americans bought 14 books per household and borrowed 13; the British bought four and borrowed 38; the French figures are 10 and one. So the British are relatively heavy readers but light payers.” “London Letter 2,” New Republic, August 2, 9, 1975, p. 23Google Scholar.
26. See Price, Richard, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War 1899-1902 (London and Toronto, 1972)Google Scholar.
