Described as 'Britain's most under-rated novelist' and as having 'almost singlehandedly redeemed the historical novel from its middlebrow reputation', Peter Vansittart is characteristically modest about his literary achievements of over fifty years. Sir Angus Wilson called him 'one of our most ingenious, daring and brilliant novelists'. Yet he still expresses gentle surprise that publishers are willing to persevere with novels that have won wide critical acclaim while never quite gaining the public's affection. 'My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no signs of enjoying them at all,' he comments ruefully in a guide to historical writers.
Peter Vansittart's novels are notable for their poetic conciseness and depth of meaning, their determination to portray historical periods with all the agonies of the time left in – plague, famine, persecution, brutal wars – and their author's conviction that history has a profound continuing resonance for our own time.
While he has also written contemporary novels, he remains mostly known for his innovative and unique approach to historical fiction. Fifteen of his novels are set, or mostly set, in the past, and Vansittart frequently describes places and periods which are refreshingly unfamiliar to the reader: 16th century Germany at the time of the Anabaptist movement; late medieval France just when the age of chivalry is giving away to the first onset of modernity; the Dark Ages. He has also shown the imaginative strength to bring a dramatically new perspective to the two greatest British myth cycles, those of King Arthur and Robin Hood. And he was one of the first to experiment with continuities in time in the novel by portraying characters from different epochs connected by common motifs and undercurrents.
I asked Peter Vansittart what had drawn him to historical fiction. He said he thought it was the form which still offered most scope for new approaches. He had never acquired a taste for comparable genres such as SF or Fantasy, which to him often seemed at heart unconvincing. Writing of our past offers the possibility of working with the half-understood, sometimes only half-perceived images and experiences which still have so much influence over us today.
In a brief essay written over forty years ago, Vansittart correctly identified that 'the historical novel too often lacks prestige', perhaps because many of its exponents have been apt to depict our ancestors as 'only ourselves in fancy dress'. He seeks instead to restore the sense, the essence of a historical period. He has been especially concerned to draw upon a sustained consciousness of the prevailing inner life which would govern characters' responses to their world: the certainties, bewilderments, speculations, prejudices they would carry with them: and to ensure too that the 'grosser realities' of that world are not glossed over.
He is temperamentally and intellectually inclined to reject the 'black and white' view of history, which sees our past in terms of clear-cut conflicts between opposing forces, for example of tradition or progress, or heroism and antiheroism. He sees history as most often formed by muddle, chance, fickleness, fraud, failure of understanding. His perspective is mostly pessimistic yet leavened by a fascination with the sheer sprawling denseness of life and by a delicate handling of that desperate refuge, irony.
The immediate inspiration for one of his novels may be no more than a single line or phrase read somewhere, or overheard, which provokes his curiosity, and whole chapters may stem from a single image. He is a devoted literary craftsman who pieces together his work mosaic-like and redrafts repeatedly. A characteristic device is the sequence of sentences cataloguing with sudden, startling swiftness the tumult of bizarre myths and wondrous rumours which are swirling around in the time and domain he is depicting, as in this passage from the opening page of A Safe Conduct (1995):
Blessed Thomas Aquinas is invoked against thunder and sudden death, you can rout a demon by uttering his secret name, never easy to discover; a mistletoe twig, if carried into the underworld, assures your safe return . . . Midwinter yule fires have again revived the dying sun. To swallow dragon's blood is more effective than gulping Farmer Hegeber's over-priced beer, for it enables you to understand birds' speech; the difficulty is not in killing a dragon but in finding one. Astrologers value cocks' eggs for cock-eyed tricks of changing mud to silver. If you bend the sunlight you can overcome God himself, some whispering that King Siegfried did this so strenuously that light has never wholly recovered, thus explaining the lengthening winters, regular murrain, Turkish victories, collapsing morals, devil-worship.
Vansittart acknowledges that this highly personal style has sometimes taken precedence over storytelling qualities, and thus deterred readers, but he ads, 'Today I take narrative more seriously, though still relying, perhaps over-relying, on descriptive colour, unexpected imagery, the bizarre and curious – no formula for popular success.' First readers of his work might do best to start with one of his acknowledged classics, The Tournament (1958). Set in a fictional 15th century Duchy, a version of Burgundy, Vansittart depicts in brilliant detail the ceremonies, rituals, pomp and protocol of the court, exemplified by the empty charade of a challenge to mortal combat between the Duke and another noble, which everyone knows will never take place. The ravages of the Plague recall the Duke to the real business of a ruler, and the grim necessities necessary to defend a way of life in dire peril. Perhaps a more daunting beginning might be his tragically compelling novel, The Friends of God (1963: in the USA entitled The Siege), a humane and searing account of the suppression of the Anabaptists, that communitarian, freethinking, primitive Christian movement which swept across Germany and the Low Countries in the 16th century. One critic acclaimed the novel as a literary equivalent of 'the phantasmagoria of sixteenth-century woodcuts, the writhing bodies, the strange and bestial physiognomies . . . the stench, the filth, the callousness towards suffering, the demonic excesses of the age'.
A Safe Conduct fuses both these early successes by re-evoking a similar figure to the Duke of The Tournament, in a similar dilemma, while a peasant insurrection rages outside his gates. Unlike Prince Prospero in Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death', Vansittart's aristocrat, weary, harried, recovers enough of his humanity to understand and accept the hardships and hard decisions he must endure with his people.
Readers with a taste for a similarly bold and clear-eyed view of the Arthurian myths would do well to read his Lancelot (1978), in which the mythically fallible hero stands as an archetype for the time as a whole, with its doomed Romano-British culture. While admiring the storytelling qualities of past Arthurian writers such as John Masefield and Rosemary Sutcliffe, Vansittart regards their work as still imbued with the heavily romanticised Arthur of Tennyson's poems. His approach is confessedly the antithesis of this: ripely realistic, his novel was an early attempt to sweep away the later, anachronistic accretions of chivalry and mysticism and show us uncompromisingly the dilemmas of men and women struggling in a dark time.
Vansittart returned to the Arthurian myth cycle with Parsifal (1988), in which the character type of 'the Holy Fool' is explored and exposed as wanting, as a reckless abdication of the full burden of being human: his Parsifal is redeemed not by his miracles of sanctity but by an act of selfless love.
Three Six Seven (1983) takes us to the period immediately before Arthur, as the barbarians first challenge Roman rule. Peter Vansittart told me how the impetus for the novel came from a single glimpse of the number 367 somewhere while on a journey: it nagged away at the back of the author's mind until he reached his destination and feverishly riffled through his host's books to find the reference he was looking for: 367 was the year of successful attacks on Britain by Scots, Picts and Saxons. Set in Calleva Atrebatum (now Silchester), the novel depicts this crucial year through the eyes of a successful Roman trader, Drusus, brooding in exile on what the incursions will mean for his society, his culture. The novel inspired one reviewer to demand, 'When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?', while another, acknowledging the book was 'the very opposite of the easy, idle read', stressed that 'it demands full attention, sends one scurrying back to re-read . . . leaves me eager to read it again'.
Similarly, in The Death of Robin Hood (1981), Vansittart is not content simply to retell the greenwood legends, but instead seeks to show how the outlaw is still an abiding presence through later centuries: he is evoked in episodes focusing on the Luddite agitations of the early 19th century and the depression of the Nineteen Thirties. This technique is used in other novels, including Parsifal: since both figures are eternal archetypes, Vansittart sees them as 'totally independent of actual time and history . . . big enough for one to want to see how they would affect different ages'.
Now in his eighty-second year, Peter Vansittart has more recently devoted his writing to memoirs and anthologies. This is historical fiction's loss. While his harder-eyed approach to the past has now become more accepted among fellow writers in the field, few of them can match the brittle beauty of his language, the rich fecundity of his imaginative identity with the eras he depicts and the profundity of his historical insight.
Last year, however, brought a welcome return to the historical novel form with Hermes in Paris. This depicts the Hellenic god of magic, messages, thieves and trickery as a jaded dandy in the fakely gorgeous city of the Second Empire, adorned with a scarlet cravat, and a serpent-entwined cane, slyly ubiquitous, amusing himself at mortal antics, tipping a peacock's feather into the great scales of events to unbalance them just sufficiently to stimulate disorder and change, his preferred state. He pervades the opulent and operatic city like a mood, a caprice, a fleet-footed rumour. He observes, and guides, not always to their advantage, a radical columnist who frequents the old, unboulevarded underworld of the city, and a young schoolboy, a roamer and a loner, a reader of strange signs in the dark streets, who understands symbols that adults do not.
Hermes is depicted as both flaneur in human form and as shape-shifting deity, a subtle and swift spirit that achieves its ends by the most delicate and unassuming of interventions. There is a hint of a much lighter, much more allusive version of Woland, the incarnation of Satan in the Moscow of the Thirties, in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, who transforms that city by a series of more surreal and shocking escapades. There is also much, in Vansittart's novel, of the world of café conspiracies, backstreet freak-shows, slum sorcery and revolutionary broadsides which characterised the underside of the baroque cosmopolis that was Paris just before it was brought down by the disastrous war with Prussia, helped along, it seems, by a delicate touch from the hand of Hermes, god of chance, god of change. The quicksilver virtuosity of this late-vintage novel proves him once again to be a fine votary of that immortal who was also the patron-god of high arcane literature.
In A Safe Conduct, both the Castle authorities and the villagers shun a strange vagabond scrivener since for them 'writing is another manifestation of magic . . . a handful of words, nevertheless arranged in particular positions, could somehow unite the ends of the world in a brilliant growth of suggestion and discovery. A threefold dome, an isle of reeds, the wings of the dawn.' Lacking the excuses of illiteracy or superstition, it is surely time we ceased shunning the scrivener's art of Peter Vansittart.