A few mid 20th century writers have been mentioned here as being unjustly neglected today: Alec Waugh and Peter Fleming, both overshadowed by their younger brothers, William Sansom and now I have another name to add to the list.
He was born in Finchley in 1907, published his first novel in 1930 and five years later gave up his job in the advertising department of Colman’s in Norwich to write full-time. Cecil Day Lewis opined that he “is one of the two living novelists certain to survive”. I wonder who the other one is? Hugh Walpole said of him that he “should be of the first importance to the English novel”. Compton Mackenzie thought him”the best male novelist his generation has produced in England”.
Rupert Hart-Davis didn’t mince his words. “Genius is impossible to define, and the word has become tarnished by exposure, but I believe that RC Hutchinson had it, and that future generations will think likewise.” Well if they do they are keeping it to themselves. I have bought Testament published in 1938. This is what the back of my paperback promises.
Narrated by his friend, the soldier and painter Alexi Otraveskov, the story of Count Anton Scheffler opens in 1917, in a Russia mutilated by war and poised for revolution. In scenes of magnificent and vivid realism – on crowded streets and railway platforms, in prison camps and society drawing rooms – Hutchinson paints an epic canvas and, in the figure of Anton, gives us a rare and unsentimental portrait of greatness, and a masterly study of the mentality of heroism.
Hmm, sounds like Doctor Zhivago. I’m going to take it to read on holiday next month and will see if RC H is indeed unjustly neglected.
I will be interested to hear what you think. I read “Testament” some years ago when it was out of print. I agreed with all the things that Hart Davis and Co said of it and, subsequently, looked for other novels by Hutchinson in second hand bookshops ( I was not then a member of the London Library). One of them was quite compelling ( I forget the title) but the rest rather disappointing. But “Testament” is very powerful.
I am inclined to think Hugh Walpole might be in yr list of neglected-ones. I thought The Joyful Delaneys really very fine. Odd and romantic and urbane all at once. (Might suit you, also, as a Mayfair Boulevardier and London Flaneur.)
Yr friend R H-D thought highly enough of Walpole to write his biography. I haven’t read the Herries saga, for which he was most popular. I like the way Walpole was a needy people-pleaser, and knew it. Plus he was a Russia-hand, like yr Testament man, and Ransome.
R H-D’s biography of Walpole crops up a lot in his letters. I will try a H Walpole.