After Bucharest, Household became a representative for Elders & Fyffes, banana vendors for the United Fruit Company, which led him to his deep encounter with Spain, chiefly in Bilbao and the Basque country, whose inhabitants were to figure frequently in his fictions. He met and married a Romanian-born American, Elisaveta Kopelanoff, who encouraged his first attempts at writing. After a stint in New York rewriting articles for a children’s encyclopedia, then in London writing children’s historical plays for the BBC, he advertised himself, accurately and memorably, as an “Englishman with no national prejudices” and was hired by the printer’s ink manufacturers John Kidd & Co., who sent him first to the Middle East and then to his last great regional love affair, with Latin America. In the New World, Household consolidated his personal ideal of the Latinized Englishman “accepting unhurriedly the local courtesies and conventions,” a role he would carry through his service first as fledgling saboteur and then as field security officer in World War II.
Household was sent to Bucharest and then to Greece, where one cannot help wondering if his path crossed that of the notable English pícaro Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose own life, from a teenage walking trip across Europe to Constantinople in the 1930s to his lighthearted caper of kidnapping a German general in Crete during the war, seems to leap straight from the pages of a Household novel. Later postings included Cairo and Jerusalem, where Household met his second wife, Ilona Gutmàn, a Hungarian national with whom he settled into a happy marriage, producing three children whose cultural and genetic blend must have been a source of particular satisfaction to their father.
Rogue Male is Household’s best-known work. Published in 1939 and made twice into a film (Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt in 1942 and a television movie, scripted by Frederic Raphael and starring Peter O’Toole, in 1976), it was his second adult novel after The Third Hour and the children’s adventure novel The Spanish Cave (first published as The Terror of Villadonga in 1936, the same year that his first story, “The Salvation of Pisco Gabar,” appeared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly). A less successful late sequel, Rogue Justice (1982), dots the i’s and crosses the t’s of its austere predecessor by giving the hero a name and a suitably bicultural identity (an Austrian countess for a mother).
The story opens as its narrator recounts in an offhand way how he decided on a sportsman’s whim to walk south across the border from Poland and stalk “the biggest game on earth,” an unnamed dictator who is clearly Hitler. Caught with the “great man” squarely in his telescopic sights, tortured outrageously and left for dead, he makes a daring escape back to England only to discover he’s still an outlaw, relentlessly pursued by the dictator’s minions and his own country’s police. After he determines he must go to ground like the hunted animal he is, a night spent on Wimbledon Common marks his first step down the evolutionary ladder to abjection and ultimate enlightenment. From there he makes his way to Dorset, then “from Dorset to the western corner of the county, and from that to four square miles” of countryside and his ultimate hiding place, the strip of ancient lane on a remote hillside.
It might seem incongruous that Household situated the stark encounter with Nature and human predators that ensues in a domesticated landscape to which the adjective “tame” is routinely appended. (Of the same Dorset countryside, the hero of Bernardo Brown notes: “Tame it was, but tame as some glossy, splendid animal conscious of love and answering.”) Robert MacFarlane, who has traced the novel’s fictional destination to a specific hillside in Dorset’s Chideock Valley, notes that it is a New World notion that wilderness must be divorced from the human. In the literature of Britain, MacFarlane says, “wildernesses have always been profoundly human landscapes.”* The lane itself, sunk fifteen feet below the level of the surrounding fields, has been “worn down by the pack horses of a hundred generations.” Even with farmhouses lying close by, however, the old Roman road snaking the hills has been reclaimed by the local animals. In prose that hints of the mystic animism that would play an increasingly larger role in Household’s later novels, we are told that in the moonlight “it was teeming with life: sheep and cows lying on it, rabbits dancing in and out of ancient pits, owls gliding and hooting over the thorn.”
Our rogue male’s journey into deep countryside moves him back through human history as well—from the modern world of trains and automobiles through Roman times to the world of the Paleolithic hunter. Household roots his character’s visceral experience in the relationship to the earth of Stone Age hunter-gatherers for whom killing is a religious practice, a holy exchange of energies around which both hunter and hunted observe the timeless rituals of impending death. Far from being anarchic, the world of predators and prey follows strict rules of conduct. In Dance of the Dwarfs, the unknown hunter’s “Declaration of Intent,” a high-pitched whistle, delivers fear and panic, then passivity, to the central nervous system of the hunted. In the late novel The Sending, the protagonist Alfgyf Hollaston remarks of the fear instinct: “When we were only hunted and hunters—in Europe a mere three hundred generations ago—we shared [with animals] this sixth sense which told us when we were in danger.” And Charles Dennim, hero of The Watcher in the Shadows, says, “I believe that for the animals always, and for man sometimes, fear is only a vivid awareness of one’s unity with nature.”
As part of this process, the narrator of Rogue Male undergoes his own rite of passage from civilized man to animal “deprived of ordinary human cunning” and working from blind instinct. Gradually he takes on the attributes of a wild creature, moving so quietly he startles a fox and experiencing low-level thought transference with the feral cat he befriends. He’s able to achieve this attunement to the animal world partly thanks to a previous so-journ with an African tribe. (In The Sending, Alfgyf communes with animals because of a similar experience with an Indian tribe and a genetic gift passed down in his own family.) For Household the descent into animal nature is an ascent that allows the human animal to experience a forgotten sense of identity with nature and all things living. Only “after much meditation” can civilized man experience the “mystic vision” that is the natural resting state of animals and primitive man. When he once achieved this communion, Alfgyf says in The Sending, “I had ceased to exist as a man; I was a molecule of the unity of earth and light.”
But Household would also like us to believe that the ancient rites and practices of hunters still resonate through the quiet countryside of England. In the comic story “The Twilight of a God,” a Mithras altar is uncovered in the Roman cellar jointly shared by a pub and a village butcher shop that makes outstanding sausage. (The secret ingredient is bull’s blood, obtained through barely remembered rites performed on the sacrificial stone.) In The Courtesy of Death, a delicate parody of his own philosophy of the hunt, Household presents a Somerset group devoted to “metaphysical animism” that tries to revive, along with a sinister salutation called “the Apology,” the hunting rituals of their ancestors as depicted in cave paintings they discover in the deep caverns of the Mendips.
During the relentless heat of the chase, meanwhile, and as much to his own surprise as the reader’s, the true motive of Rogue Male’s narrator slowly emerges. (Reader, stop here if you want to discover it for yourself.) Given the implausibility of assassination conducted as a “sporting stalk,” he protests at first, to himself as well as his initial captors, his own apolitical nature: “I haven’t any grievances myself. One can hardly count the upsetting of one’s trivial private life and plans by European disturbances as a grievance.” As he approaches the sunken lane in Dorset, however, he admits it’s a place he found while in love, and the person he loved and shared it with has perished. As the pressures of the hunt mount and the screw tightens, he must engage his adversary “Quive-Smith” in a battle of wits as the dictator’s operative conducts a Mephistophelian interrogation through the ventilator hole of his lair, using the narrator’s professed libertarian beliefs to persuade him to sign a paper confessing that he intended to assassinate the dictator with the knowledge of the English government.