John Buchan and the Dictators

Although John Buchan was raised to the peerage (as Lord Tweedsmuir) in 1935, it was by his name as a commoner that this “unrivalled teller of tales” continued to be most widely known. His death in February 1940 evoked a wave of sadness in Britain and in many parts of the empire. But did he, posthumously, lose some of this popularity after 1945? Late last year, a senior history academic was quoted in the Melbourne Age as saying that, in the period following the war, Buchan was somewhat out of favour because of the celebrated writer’s “fondness” for Hitler and Mussolini. This article attempts to assess the extent to which Buchan’s readers could legitimately infer, on the basis of his numerous writings, that he had supported the Nazi and Fascist dictators.

Whatever his private papers reveal about his attitudes to the Fuhrer and Il Duce, it is clear that John Buchan’s books, essays and public addresses provide the main evidence for anyone trying to understand what impression he might have given the general public as to his views of Hitler and Nazi Germany and of Mussolini and Fascist Italy. And although what he wrote and said in the 1930s must furnish the most relevant sources for such an investigation, those political and social attitudes, dating back to his earliest appearances as a writer and public figure, need to be drawn into the discussion as well.

Certainly in this background material there are elements suggesting that, in his later years, Buchan might have approved of Mussolini and Hitler. While his political conservatism does not indicate incipient extremism, the anti-Semitism and white supremacist views evident in his writings would appear to do so. Furthermore, in the devil’s decade (the 1930s), the evidence seems to accumulate: a certain sympathy he felt for Germany, because of the ill-treatment allegedly inflicted upon it after the Great War; his fears of a possible Bolshevik coup in Berlin; his distaste at the corruption that, he believed, disfigured public life in the Weimar Republic and in inter-war France; his apparent favouring of national revival movements of the sort that seemed, in the early thirties, to characterise the politics of Germany and Italy; his horror of a repetition of the carnage of the Great War and his consequent support of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, as well as his distrust of Churchill. All this appears, superficially, to amount to a formidable indictment. And such sentiments and attitudes have frequently been identified as typifying Hitler’s and Mussolini’s admirers in Great Britain during the 1930s.

To many people in our own time, Buchan offended the most grievously in his view of race. His published opinions can be usefully analysed under two headings: his attitudes to Jews, and the policies he advocated with respect to “subject peoples” in the British Empire. The former question is the more complicated, because we are dependent, by and large, upon his novels; and we can rarely be certain that the words he puts into the mouths of his various characters represent what is known nowadays as “the authorial voice”. For example, one of Buchan’s most notorious passages about Jews is in The Thirty-Nine Steps, but (as Andrew Lownie points out) these are the observations “of the crazed Scudder”, the American spy whose remarks are quickly dismissed by Sir Walter Bullivant (an authentic Buchan hero). Bullivant “considered the American unbalanced”, nurturing as he did “a lot of odd biases … Jews, for example, made him see red”. Similarly, the reference in Huntingtower to the disproportionately large number of Jews in the ranks of the Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia is “made by a character who is clearly talking through his hat”. Such, at least, is the view of Ann Stonehouse, a Buchan authority.

Other anti-Jewish statements in Buchan’s novels, however, are not quite so easily explained. In Prester John he launches a racialist trident at what might appear to have been his three favourite targets: “Well, it’s notorious that the Kaffirs on the diamond fields get away with a fair number of stones, and they are bought by Jews and Portuguese traders.” Of the central European Republic of Evallonia, Count Casimir laments: “The present misgovernors of our land have no popular following, and no credit except among international Jews.” One of the conspirators in this 1930 story (Castle Gay) is thrice identified somewhat disparagingly as “the Jew Rosenbaum”. In A Prince of the Captivity (1933), the irresponsible and unscrupulous spendthrift Camilla Melfort had been left “the prey to periodical demands which she had no means of meeting”. She could overcome “the tradesman’s pertinacity” but “the soft-spoken people with Scotch names and hooked noses would take no denial”. The hero of this novel, Adam Melfort, said of the German statesman Loeffler: “He has always been a Nationalist, remember—he had a first-class war record—he’s not a Jew—and he’s not a Socialist.” The most egregious examples of John Buchan’s anti-Semitism are probably to be found in The Three Hostages (1924), where we read of “seedy little gangs of communist Jews” and of a “hideous untameable breed” of parts of humanity such as “the young Bolshevik Jews” who inhabit exotic places in central Europe and western Asia.

It may be that to plead on Buchan’s behalf that his novels had sympathetic Jewish characters is to perpetrate the literary equivalent of the self-serving cliché, “some of my best friends are Jews”. Nor is it much of a defence that several of Buchan’s anti-Jewish references may have been motivated by the desire to invest his dialogue with verisimilitude. One of the many possible instances of this is in the 1919 novel The Island of Sheep. Mr D.C. Jonas, the Labour leader—into whose somewhat artless contributions to the discussion Buchan seems often to inject his own ideas—expressed the opinion that while labour respected the views of genuine experts and did not begrudge paying a high price for them, “it wants to know at the same time that the money isn’t being wasted in order to let some fat old Jew keep ten motor-cars”. About this kind of excuse (deploying anti-Jewish statements in order to give the narrative and dialogue authentic colour), Gertrude Himmelfarb has this to say: 

By way of extenuation—perhaps feeble extenuation—it should be said that such sentiments, commonplace at the time, were meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, not an incitement to social and political action but an attempt to express differences of culture and color in terms that had been unquestioned for generations. 

According to Richard Usborne, Buchan’s novels were “slightly anti-Semitic, but no more so than was polite in any author of the pre-Hitler period”. He was, in fact, guilty of no more, but no less, than the social or casual anti-Semitism that characterised many members of his class before the Second World War. It was precisely this form of soft anti-Semitism that the Holocaust drove out of polite society in Britain and the United States. Buchan died before the Wannsee Conference of Nazi hierarchs systematised the Final Solution in January 1942, but even so there is ample evidence that he would have had no truck with the genocide unleashed by the Third Reich, any more than he supported the Nazis’ persecution that preceded it. When Hitler “put an end to the casual anti-Semitism of the clubman”, Gertrude Himmelfarb points out, “the conspiracies of the English adventure tale became the realities of German politics”. And Buchan, she continues, “had the grace to realise that what was permissible under civilized conditions was not permissible with civilization in extremis”. As evidence to support this claim, she draws on his last tale, Sick Heart River. Finished only a fortnight before his death, it is widely acknowledged to have been, of all his novels, the most faithful depiction of the author’s own intellectual and spiritual condition: 

His last book … composed on the eve of World War Two and in the shadow of his own death, was a tract exalting “brotherhood”. Among the many financiers appearing in its pages, there is not a single Jew. 

If no connection can reasonably be made between Buchan’s intermittent expressions of casual anti-Jewish sentiment and his attitude to Hitler’s virulent hatred of Jews, what of the famous writer’s opinions about white supremacy? There is ample material for anyone who wants to build a case for Buchan’s racialism: his description, for example, in Prester John, of the odious Portuguese villain Henriques, “whose skin spoke of the tar-brush”; the references to “the squat and preposterous Negro lineaments” and, in The Three Hostages, to “a nigger band, looking like monkeys in uniform, [pounding] out some barbarous jingle”. In this book, also, there are the most candid expressions of what are, at least on the surface, Buchan’s opinions of the Irish. Some of these statements border on the rancid, particularly when (as Lisa Hopkins maintains) he associates the Irish with the blacks, thus adding a racial dimension to what Hopkins concedes was at the root of Buchan’s anti-Irish prejudice: conservative politics, specifically, the attempts by W.E. Gladstone to give Ireland Home Rule, a policy which, to Buchan, “involved the formal violation of a cherished constitutional doctrine, and to an orderly mind disruption is always repugnant”.

Yet in saying, as she does, that Buchan “despised” the African blacks, Hopkins goes too far. The only evidence she cites is that he “habitually calls them Kaffirs”. In itself this is insignificant: the word did not have the derogatory overtones that it had acquired by the time the Second World War ended. Admittedly, in his survey The African Colony (1903), Buchan claimed that “between the most ignorant white man and the black man there is fixed for the present an impassable gulf, not of colour but of mind”. But the operative words are “for the present”. He believed that the native races should be brought “under the play of civilising forces” to enable them to demonstrate that they were worthy of incorporation, eventually, into “the body politic”, or, alternatively, “show themselves eternally incapable”. None of this, understandably, finds much support today.

Still, despite the apparent common ground of their basic premise, at practically every point Buchan’s views on race were diametrically opposed to Hitler’s. Whereas Hitler advocated, and then put into practice, policies that encompassed the suppression, exploitation and ultimately the extermination of the “inferior” races in greater Germany, Buchan eloquently rejected any notion that “the subject races” should be enslaved; likewise he eschewed what forty years later became known as apartheid. As fictionally portrayed in the final pages of Prester John, the protecting and nurturing of the “Kaffirs” underpinned Buchan’s view of the native question. It is true that this paternalism has hardly endeared him to modern readers. There is, nevertheless, a vast difference between Buchan’s racial attitudes and the hideous ideological obsessions that coursed through Hitler’s repellent utopia. In 1935, in his appreciative retrospection of George V’s reign, Buchan criticised Germany for evolving 

a most unhistorical theory of an old Nordic culture … This had an ominous connotation. For it may be read in Tacitus how into the sombre grove of the High God of the Teutons none might enter save with a chain round his neck, to show his subjection to the divinity. The old legend is a parable; their gods were tyrants, and their mandate was to enslave. 

Members of an audience at the University of Montreal late the same year heard Lord Tweedsmuir, their newly-installed Governor-General, demonstrate the incompatibility of the Western mind with “those strange people who in Germany to-day follow the cult of Thor and Odin and the gospel of naked force”.      

Buchan was philosophically and temperamentally a conservative, although in politics not a partisan one. It is true that there were pro-Hitler elements on the right wing of British conservatism in the 1930s. It is also true that, to some extent, the novelist and polymath subscribed to some of the opinions held by these conservatives, despite his eloquent defence, and throughout his life in most things his practice, of what a Buchan scholar, Dr Edwin Lee, has analysed as his virtue of moderation. But the essential point is that Buchan did not own the qualified regard that such Tories, or some of them, had for the Fuhrer. Along with them, he had been appalled at the terrible toll of human life occasioned by the Great War. Like them, he held in contempt the “men who seemed to have done well out of the war” either in their acquisition of wealth, status and influence, or in their shameless and cynical demagoguery. In common with these conservatives, he dreaded that a disordered Europe would succumb to the horrors of a Bolshevik revolution, compared with which a political movement of right-wing nationalism was harmless, even (in a limited way) benign. Yet the view that conservatism of this type was by its nature a halfway house to fascism is invalid. The misconception may be partly the result of what Frank Knopfelmacher described as 

the very wide acceptance of the Stalinist theory of fascism, which the Communists succeeded in selling to the liberal public in England, America and Australia during the Popular Front days of the 30s. According to that theory Nazism is nothing but an extremist mode of enforcing capitalist-conservative social policies in a period of acute imperialist rivalry … Once the false premise is granted that Nazism is extremist conservatism, it is easy to see that non-Nazi conservatives … can be classified as pro-Fascist to the extent that they cling to their conservative social principles.  

From his published work, evidence abounds that Buchan was sceptical of the claims of democracy. But one of his bedrock beliefs, enunciated consistently throughout his life, was that the common people—be they electors where universal suffrage had been conceded, or the disenfranchised masses in a system in which the electorate was hedged by property, residence or other qualifications, or even if they were members of a subject race—had two inalienable rights.

The first was to be well governed. Buchan seems to have defined this as such an administration of public affairs as was disinterested, efficient and free of corruption. This, he believed, characterised the rule of the Emperor Augustus: “If people were forbidden to misgovern themselves they must be satisfied that they were well governed. A wise paternalism seemed to him [Augustus] an essential concomitant of autocracy.” To take another example, this theme—the right of the masses to good government—emerges strongly in his study Gordon at Khartoum. When Charles Gordon had been governor of the Khedive’s Equatorial province between 1874 and 1877, 

it was a thankless labour to make a civilised state out of the squalid little towns and immense trackless hinterland, and to enforce law and order with penny steamers and fever-ridden soldiers “as brave as hares”. But he never faltered and rarely despaired. He dreamed of a great Central African state where the well being of the natives would be the Government’s first care … 

Buchan made much of the woes of the Sudan’s hapless inhabitants when that vast region had been nominally controlled by Cairo: the Egyptian empire “was miserably and corruptly governed”. Gladstone’s ministry sent Gordon to Khartoum, in order to organise the evacuation of forces which were loyal to the old regime, and which were about to be obliterated by the Islamic hordes. His achievements as Viceroy—providing, under enormous difficulties, a just and efficient administration during those desperate days—are analysed in detail in Gordon at Khartoum. Although Gordon’s death in January 1885 at the hands of the Mahdi’s forces was avenged by Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman in 1898, for Buchan it was more significant that the imperial army “broke for good the power of the fanatics who for fifteen years had burdened the country”. The end, 

as in all great tragedies, was peace—the Gordon College in Khartoum, a just law for all, protection for the weak, bread for the hungry, square miles of tillage where once the Baggara raided … In 1919 the son of the Mahdi offered his father’s sword to the British king as a token of his fealty. The old unhappy things had become far-off and forgotten. 

Second, even the lowliest subject had the right to be treated equally before the law. Buchan’s insistence on this is conclusive evidence of the fundamental differences between his ideas and the ideology that dominated the Nazi and Fascist regimes. True, he was sceptical of governments that were totally beholden to the irrational foibles of the popular majority. For example, in his analysis of the Gordon affair, his criticism of Gladstone’s ministry had little if anything to do with the popular feeling that had been whipped up by the news of the plight of the Victorian hero trapped in Khartoum; rather, Buchan excoriated the government’s “stubborn illogicality”, “the short range imagination of Ministers” preventing them from “grasping the rudiments” of Gordon’s difficulties; and the Prime Minister himself for having been “slow to realise a situation, having … little power of visualizing unfamiliar things”. Yet Buchan was no champion of the tyranny of dictatorship. In his biography of Augustus, he attributed the loss of the elements of organisation and the capacity for government in the Roman empire not only to the disintegrating action of democracy but to the demoralising influence of despotism. Buchan wrote to Stanley Baldwin that “a good deal of Mussolini’s Corporative State … comes straight out of the policy of Augustus”. But he added—with reference to Mussolini’s regime—the significant qualification: “only badly misinterpreted”.

In 1935 Buchan published The House of the Four Winds. Set in the imaginary central European country of Evallonia, it was one of his less happy efforts. Here, what weaknesses he had as a writer of fiction are somewhat in evidence: sexual stereotyping, naivety in some of his characterisation, and the contrived situations and the coincidences that result in a loss of credibility. The attempt to inject humour into the story is a little ham-fisted; the locale of this book is considerably inferior (for example) to the author’s brilliant creation of an imaginary South American republic in The Courts of the Morning. It is fortunate that it was in this relatively minor work that Buchan seems to have come the closest to endorsing Hitler and the Nazis. Evallonia’s political movement, Juventus, described as an “upstanding lot of lads”, is clearly a sanitised version of Hitler Youth, with its insignia that resembled the swastika, its rural ideology and concomitant disdain for the corrupt and degenerate life of urban-dwellers, its military organisation, nationalist fervour, determined anti-communism and contempt for the “old guard” which was an “antiquated … part of the old rotten system”. Even so, the book is by no means an apologia for Nazism. Far from aiming to install a dictator, much less one modelled on Hitler, Juventus was bent on restoring the country’s monarchy. 

Well into the period after the Second World War, Buchan’s “shockers” continued to appeal to the reading public. Yet in the seventy years that have passed since his death, his reputation in the exalted circles of the intellectual elite has suffered. This is not because of his supposed affection for Hitler and Mussolini but because, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has pointed out, his Calvinism, the personal brand of his conservatism, and his romanticism have made him “the antithesis of the liberal”; therefore he has tended to be out of favour among much of the intelligentsia. His moral seriousness, and his powerfully expressed religious faith, have likewise failed to earn him respect in certain circles of the literati. The same could probably be said of the blatant lack of political correctness in the theme of one of his most acclaimed novels, Greenmantle. Set in the Great War, “the story turns on a German effort to enlist and inflame a radical Islamist sect in Turkey; where things are touch and go for the Allies”.

What of the common reader? The revived enthusiasm for his work notwithstanding, Buchan is not esteemed by the current generation, at least to the extent that he had been by their grandparents. His alleged Nazi and Fascist sympathies seem not to have played a part in this. Rather, the clubbish atmosphere of his tales, the upper-class snootiness of many of his characters, his apparently patronising attitude to the working classes (in the 1919 version of The Island of Sheep, Mr Burford, a former Labour MP, made Colonel Lamont think “of an old collie” his father had. “Same jolly, trusting eyes”), his unashamed love of the British Empire (that he had a subtle conception of dominion nationalism and that he was, in maturity, by no means an imperial primitive probably did not occur to much of the late-twentieth-century reading public), the unbelievable coincidences that are often pivotal in his plots, and his obsession with success, all had combined, by our own time, to make him an interesting period piece rather than the wildly popular writer that he had been.

Not all, of course, would agree with these criticisms of Buchan’s “shockers”. In the opening years of the new century, his work keeps being rediscovered and reconsidered. John Keegan, for example, finds his writing “unfailingly compelling” because of “the dimension of the mysterious”. He continues: 

It is the other ingredients—strong characters (often, with minor participants drawn with brilliant comedy), exact and evocative scene setting, highly authentic dialogue … sudden surprises and, above all, rapid change of location—that make him so readable. 

What is beyond dispute is that the decline in Buchan’s reputation after the Second World War was less extensive and more gradual than the way that it was identified by the Melbourne historian whose comment my article is attempting to assess. The public did not perceive Buchan as one who was fond of the dictators, and there is no evidence that he was—a point made convincingly by his biographers, notably Janet Adam Smith. Somewhat lacking in expertise in central and eastern European affairs, he was guilty of no more than having underestimated Hitler. In this he was in good company—a large section of the Foreign Office, for example, shared this fault, along with not a few Conservatives, several Labour people, and some members of the royal family.

Unwittingly, in a number of his tales of adventure and derring-do, he created a character that might serve as a symbol of the malaise that afflicted many of Britain’s policy-makers in her “twenty years of indecision”. This was Archie Roylance, described by Richard Usborne as “a local laird with more money than brains … He fought a good war, and got a DSO.” In the aftermath he “enjoyed a rich, idle, bird-watching bachelor peace, popular with all”. But here is the rub. In The House of the Four Winds, this wealthy, intellectually challenged amateur appears as Parliamentary Secretary “to some Foreign Affairs dignitary”. Sir Archie’s qualifications for such a position would appear to have been meagre. In the early 1920s he had confessed: 

I’m goin’ to speak about foreign policy, and I’m dashed if I can remember which treaty is which, and what the French are making a fuss about, or why the old Boche can’t pay. And I keep on mixing up Poincaré and Mussolini … 

Certainly no one could say of Archie’s creator that he was a man of very little brain. Yet, in common with Roylance in fiction, and with many of his fellow countrymen in reality, John Buchan—despite his quite severe criticisms of the Nazis, some of which are quoted above—failed to see Hitler as a threat, as one who would likely not only jeopardise the peace of Europe but destroy that Christian civilisation which throughout his life Buchan had cherished and celebrated. This ideal was best summed up in what many believe was the greatest of his biographies (Montrose, 1934): “The purpose of human government is to give the citizen a free, secure and an ordered life.” 

Paul Nicholls, a Fellow of the Melbourne University School of Historical Studies, wrote on the Australian historian A.G. Austin in the December 2010 issue.