For Rogue Male’s narrator, however, only the personal is legitimately political.* Like all Household heroes, he hates the state and respects the rights of the individual. He eschews all patriotism and believes in “dying against,” not “dying for.” Only under extreme mental duress, then, does he finally admit, to Quive-Smith and to himself, that “of course” he had meant to shoot. And with that admission comes a flood of self-knowledge about the depth of the feelings he has never fully acknowledged: his love, grief, and rage over the execution of the woman he loved by the dictator’s secret police. The man who had mocked, at the start of his adventure, the notion of “yowling of love like an Italian tenor” has been delivered into his higher, more authentic self by his deeper connection with the natural world as well as the conditions of his ordeal.

Quive-Smith, in contrast, whose courage, superior hunting skills, and intelligence superficially make him a Class Xer, is excluded from the brotherhood because of two overweening flaws—cruelty and ambition. Half English and half German, he resembles many other Household antagonists who serve as distorted mirror images of his heroes. The ex—Resistance fighter “Savarin” of The Watcher in the Shadows is a half-English, half-French vicomte who pursues Charles Dennim, the former Austrian aristocrat who served at Buchenwald as an English spy, for the same reason that the hero of Rogue Male hunted his prey—to avenge the death of a beloved woman at the hands of Hitler’s minions. Ultimately, however, the French aristocrat forfeits his membership in Class X for the same shortcomings as Quive-Smith—sadism, extremism, and political fanaticism.

In Household’s late masterpiece Dance of the Dwarfs (1968), the unknown adversary proves not to be human at all and delivers a particularly gruesome death to the hero and his Indian mistress. Dance of the Dwarfs further inverts this writer’s usual pattern to focus on the vast and chillingly impersonal wilderness of the New World, pitting the hero, Owen Dawnay, against a foe who is only gradually revealed to be a creature of the impenetrable jungle bordering the llano, the vast inland plain of Colombia.* The shared theme of sacrificing one’s life in the service of a doomed love makes Rogue Male and Dance of the Dwarfs Household’s two finest novels.

After Rogue Male’s narrator experiences his transcendent moment of clarity, the denouement unfolds swiftly. His prohibition against taking human life is lifted when Quive-Smith and his henchman kill the cat Asmodeus for sport and throw the body down the ventilator hole. Now that the rules of honor have been flagrantly breached, murder can be legitimized as an act of war. From the hide of his animal comrade he fashions a lethal sling-shot as his instrument of vengeance, and once this score has been settled he will decide to take on his original quarry once more and do the job properly. Offsetting this announced return to almost certain death is the good-humored in-joke with readers that closes Rogue Male (further proof, if needed, that Household himself is a member in good standing of Class X): the narrator appends a letter to his chronicle instructing his solicitor to have it “brushed up by some competent hack and marketed in his name.”

Robert MacFarlane rightly dubs Household the heir of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, but the scale, I think, must be tipped in favor of the egalitarian Stevenson. Buchan’s Richard Hannay is a bluff South African colonial who is patriotic in a way Household would have found highly unattractive. Household’s Englishman “with no national prejudices” is a thoughtful man of action, ethical in a way hard to codify in an imperial rulebook, democratic in a way no Boer could stomach, and frankly sensual in a way no Buchan hero ever dreamed of. Household himself cites Defoe as a prime influence on his writings, and Rogue Male is indeed a kind of inland Robinson Crusoe complete with feline Friday. The limpid style and vivid intensity of the physical descriptions compare favorably with the Old English—cadenced prose of Pincher Martin, William Golding’s saga of a self-deceived Robinson Crusoe marooned on a North Atlantic island of his own invention. Household’s topographic passion for the English countryside, the loving poetic accuracy of his landscapes, replete with marvelous throwaway observations (on, for example, the “gaiety of the insect world”), holds more than a few echoes of Thomas Hardy. His confessed preference for the picaresque adds the “Latinised” flavor of the land of Lazarillo de Tormes to his very English narratives. Taking a far more radical position than his near contemporaries Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene in their tales of “abroad,” finally, Household displays a rare identification with the non-English “Other” that anticipates the cosmopolitan postcolonial sensibility of the twenty-first century.

One suspects that Geoffrey Household, were he alive today, would be delighted by new DNA research suggesting that those of Her Majesty’s citizens whose ancestors were long-term inhabitants of the British Isles are far more genetically homogenous (forget Viking, Celt, Saxon, Norman!) than previously thought. He would be even more delighted by the likelihood that most of these people, himself included, descend from a single population of Paleolithic hunters who migrated north from the Iberian peninsula some 16,000 years ago—back in those far-off days “when men could simply walk from France, following game,” in the nostalgic words of a character in The Courtesy of Death—speaking a language, for the best and final touch, very much like that still current among his beloved Basques.* And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that some future spelunker in the Mendips, taking a cue from this twentieth-century romancer, will uncover a cave painting or two that brings to life again, across three hundred generations, the timeless dance of Hunter and Hunted in Household’s native land.

—VICTORIA NELSON

*Granta, “The Wild Places,” September 2007.

*In Against the Wind, Household notes significantly that his own sentiment toward Nazi Germany “had the savagery of a personal vendetta.”

*In some respects, the predators in this novel resemble the worst sort of humans, including the Nazis in Rogue Male; they kill their own kind and kill for the pleasure of killing, acts that violate a kind of trans-species Class X code of honor.

*Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story, quoted in Nicholas Wade, “English, Irish, Scots: They’re All One, Genes Suggest,” The New York Times, March 5, 2007.

ROGUE MALE

To Ben

who knows what it feels like

‘The behaviour of a rogue may fairly be described as individual, separation from its fellows appearing to increase both cunning and ferocity. These solitary beasts, exasperated by chronic pain or widowerhood, are occasionally found among all the larger carnivores and graminivores, and are generally male, though, in the case of hippopotami, the wanton viciousness of old cows is not to be disregarded.’

I cannot blame them. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot boar and bear; so that when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions. And they behaved, I think, with discretion. I am not an obvious anarchist or fanatic, and I don’t look as if I took any interest in politics; I might perhaps have sat for an agricultural constituency in the south of England, but that hardly counts as politics. I carried a British passport, and if I had been caught walking up to the House instead of watching it I should probably have been asked to lunch. It was a difficult problem for angry men to solve in an afternoon.