Pirate or Peacemaker? A Spyglass on C S Forester

C S Forester found crafting a name for his fictional naval hero a challenge. ‘It would be desirable for him to have a slightly grotesque name – something more for his absurd self-consciousness to be disturbed about,’ he later wrote. ‘Horatio came first to mind, and oddly enough not just because of Nelson but because of Hamlet … it met an essential requirement because it was a name with contemporary associations. Nelson was by no means the only Horatio in late Georgian times. Then, from Horatio, it seemed a natural and easy step to Hornblower.’

On his own name Forester had already carried out much-needed surgery. Christened Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith, he had become ‘C S Forester’ at the suggestion of the woman who typed his first novel. A sensible nip and tuck of the name you might think, but according to his son John1, a symbolic rejection of his origins and a further thread in the skein of fantasies that Forster wove around himself.

The life in Forester’s own accounts – ‘Some Personal Notes’ (published in The Hornblower Companion, 1964) and Long before Forty (written in 1935 but posthumously published in 1967) tacks in the face of disaster before achieving eventual success. Born in Cairo in 1899, the son of an English official, Forester was transplanted to a shabby London suburb, from where he advanced through hard graft and a scholarship to Dulwich College. Trauma followed: a fatally diseased heart, diagnosed with savage abruptness when he presented himself at a London recruiting station. Stunned, Forester drifted into medical school but – despising doctoring and feeling outclassed by his successful surgeon brother – began to slide off the rails. He dropped out of medical school and sank almost to the gutter. At one point he describes singing in the streets to raise money.

Fiction saved him. Without any knowledge of the craft, Forester plunged into writing (so ignorant that he counted the words in a textbook to discover how long a book should be) churning out thousands of words every day before scoring his first hit in 1926 with Payment Deferred – a thriller picked up by Charles Laughton and eventually turned into a successful West End play and film. A few years later he found himself whisked off to Hollywood. But a bust-up with the producer Irving Thalberg put paid to his career as a scriptwriter, and Forester caught the next boat home. 

This time it was Hornblower who came to the rescue. The idea of a heroic, angst-riven captain – and his name – apparently occurred to Forester as his boat steamed across the Atlantic. He proceeded to write The Happy Return, the tale of a British captain in the Napoleonic wars on a perilous mission to the Pacific. An immediate hit, it spawned not just successful sequels but prequels. Fame and wealth were at last within Forester’s grasp. But again ill-health struck. Researching the background for a book on the US navy off the Aleutians in 1943, Forester fell victim to arteriosclerosis, and spent the rest of his life mostly in a wheelchair. While he fought back and continued to enjoy enormous success with the Hornblower saga, he never regained his full health. Following a stroke that left him incapacitated for the last two years of his life, Forester eventually died in 1966.

So much for the authorised version. A quite different figure emerges from his son’s account. A stupendous rap sheet, the book’s 826 pages portray a compulsive liar and breaker of promises, a class-wall climber driven by an unceasing sense of social inferiority, a relentless fornicator, a pornographer and a flagellant. The C S Forester that emerges is a bastard (literally as wel as figuratively: Forester was apparently convinced on the grounds of his darkish complexion and ‘pharaonic’ nose that he was the fruit of a brief adultery between his mother and an eminent Egyptian). Forester, his son reveals, never starved in a garret: he wrote in the warmth of his parents’ parlour, cushioned by their money and with his path already smoothed by family contacts in publishing. Covering up his rejection for military service in WWI, he maintained he had fought as a second lieutenant in France. He left Hollywood not because of a row with Thalberg (whom he never met) but partly because a sex scandal was looming over him. 

At all times to everyone, and about almost everything, C S Forster apparently told whoppers. On the spur of the moment he even once told one of John Forester’s girlfriends that he was fluent in Latvian (he wasn’t). ‘CSF was a storyteller,’ his son concludes, ‘and his most successful novel was the story of his own life.’ 

If not into the truth, Forester was certainly into sex. By fourteen he was bedding a respectable woman in her late thirties, a neighbour called Carswell. (‘If it hadn’t been for her I would never have known anything about nice Edwardian – or Victorian – womanhood,’ he later disarmingly wrote.) Throughout his life, despite silting arteries and the attenuated appearance of an aging sub-librarian, Forester never stopped, according to John, trying to insert himself into every woman that he encountered. As well as being sexually omnivorous, he was also perverse, his son claims, with pronounced English tastes for spanking. 

But it was not Forester’s sexual predation or his habitual mendacity that really hurt his two sons but their father’s mean self-centeredness and his total inability, to give and accept love. Despite the fortune amassed from the Hornblower books apparently neither son was left a penny. His younger son, George, cut off by his father when he dropped out of college, delivers a savage verdict: ‘I see CSF as an unloving, faithless, money-hungry liar.’

C S Forester was undoubtedly a deeply flawed and complicated character. Try to investigate his life, and at every turn it shimmers off into unreality. Many areas of his career remain deeply mysterious. In 1937 Forester claims to have spent several months reporting on the Spanish Civil War, retained by a right-wing British press lord to furnish a pro-Franco view of the conflict and that he wrote a series of reports before quitting in disillusion. But where are they? I searched through British newspapers for 1937 and could find no despatches under Forester’s name. Was CSF up to his old tricks, spinning yarns? Or was Forester submitting despatches not to Fleet Street but to HM Government? Was C S Forester, in a word, a spy? 

Intriguing hints crop up. Forester acted on behalf of the British government after 1940 promoting the war effort in America and told his son that to do so he had access to secret information. He also spent time travelling in Germany and lived in Berlin right up to the outbreak of war – not an obvious choice of home for a British writer of historical fiction. Forester also claimed to have acted as a secret intermediary to the Czech government in 1938 and to have been shadowed on one transatlantic crossing by German agents. Another fantasy? In the absence of thoroughly researched biography these questions have to be left hanging. Personally and creatively, C S Forester was riddled with contradictions. But, I would argue, in his work it is precisely these ambiguities that lift him above a mere adventure writer. And the two issues on which they revolve are violence and war, and the scope of the individual to determine his own fate.

Conflict and violence were no strangers to the young Forester. He tells in his autobiography how, ‘a skinny bespectacled shrimp with … bristly hair’, he was subjected at school to the ritual of ‘racking’ (in which the victim was thrashed while suspended from some nearby railings). Dulwich he found a bedlam of organised violence:

‘Everyone seemed to be beaten at one time or other; one kind of offence called for the use of a cane, another kind for an O.T.C. swagger stick. Small boys beat each other, big boys beat small boys, and big boys beat each other as well, and the masters joined in when necessary.’

Violence at its most organised – war – had also long been a fixture in the Forester playroom. He had devoured military histories and played with his brothers at battles using paper shapes for ships:

Before I was ten I had marched armies in dozens to Berlin and Moscow, and directed uncounted squadrons to places like Cape Coast Castle and Singapore, while expressions like ‘breaking the line’ fell from my lips as mere commonplaces.

All the more shocking, then, to be summarily spurned in the recruiting office because of a bad heart. Quite apart from worrying about his chances of survival, Forester found himself caught, perceptually, in a cat’s cradle of double binds. He would be assumed, he thought, to be either relieved – a sign of cowardice in his own eyes – or disappointed, indicating endorsement of the war. In fact, Forester was privately sickened by the slaughter:

The attitude of civilians towards the war maddened me. When a man of fifty spoke complacently of ‘heavy casualty lists’ I could call up before my mind’s eye with terrible realism pictures of men torn open an carried shrieking on stretchers to the regimental aid posts, and of pleasant boys with whom I had been intimate rotting on the barbed wire in No Man’s Land … I was torn with doubt as to whether any ultimate victory would be worth the price that was being paid for it; despite the fact that at the same time I was convinced that victory was desirable.

Having to bottle up this witch’s brew only made it worse:

‘I kept my troubles to myself, just as a man will keep secret that fact that he is suffering from a disease, and with just as unhappy consequences. Until this moment of writing I have never disclosed them to a living soul. Even now the relief of confession is indescribable.’

Eventually his heart condition (the seriousness of which might have been misdiagnosed) seemed to clear up. But scars remained, and it is no wonder that, when he turned to fiction, war, and especially the First World War, played a dominant part in his work.

A hugely prolific writer, C S Forester penned twenty-six books even before he ‘discovered’ Hornblower. If there is one theme that unites these early works, it is war. Five are outstanding for their intensity and focus, three of which are directly set in WWI – Brown on Resolution (1929), The African Queen (1935) and The General (1936) – while two take place during the Peninsular War – Death to the French (1932) and The Gun (1933). But the suffering of the First World War hangs them over all. Even the Peninsular novels and the first Hornblower stories are a kind of fictional ‘calque’ of that terrible conflict a hundred years later, recreating its horrors in historical costume.

Brown on Resolution tells how a young British seaman, Albert Brown, captured after a Pacific sea battle, escapes when the victorious German ship moors for repairs at an atoll and, by sniping at the repair teams, delays the ship long enough for a British squadron to intercept it.  The twist is that the squadron commander steams away unaware that the sailor who made his victory possible was his own illegitimate son, the fruit of a brief liaison twenty years earlier with the spinster daughter of a London tradesman. Obsessed with her one-time lover’s career, she had reared Albert in ignorance of his origins with one aim in mind: to serve gloriously in the Royal Navy. 

The novel simultaneously celebrates and reviles war. Seen in one light it records an absurd obsession and a cruel, anonymous death; in another an unwavering, and ultimately triumphant, act of courage and resolve. The book is a strange blend of GA Henty and Wilfred Owen, fusing jingoism with an unremitting sense of ‘the pity of war’. This comes across in the hypnotic account of Brown’s lethally accurate sniping. ‘A rifle is a sweet tool, and gives of its best even in bungling hands,’ Forester writes chillingly at one point. But his narrative proceeds with a kind of double vision, switching between the marksman’s delight at repeatedly hitting a target on a rifle range, as Brown picks off ‘the little white figures in the bosun’s chairs’ and what it actually means to be soft, sentient human tissue on the receiving end of a high velocity bullet. 

Finally Brown, wounded in the shoulder just as the German search parties are being withdrawn, dies after prolonged agonies. Throughout, Brown’s ordinariness and indeed dullness had been emphasised. He is a blank, a cipher, an AB, an everyman, an unknown soldier – a surrogate not just for Forester but the millions who died similar deaths in the shell holes of no-man’s-land. But in his final Calvary amid the atoll’s thorns and razor sharp rocks, Brown becomes an almost Christ-like figure, ‘tormented with thirst, running a dry tongue round his cracked lips, agonised by the pain in his hands and feet’. In his dying delirium – oddly echoing Owen’s poem, ‘Strange Meeting’- he greets and is rebuffed by the spirit of the German youth he had earlier killed by a similar wound.

Forester’s verdict is characteristically two-edged:

All his happiness, all his talents, his life itself had been swept away in the tide of the Iron Age, the Age of the Twelve-Inch Gun. The achievements of Brown at twenty embraced nothing other than death and destruction. Brown might have died at eighty in a better-adjusted world and left behind him a long record of steady addition to the sum of human happiness … Yet if Brown had had the choice, just before his landing on Resolution, he would undoubtedly have selected for himself the career which has been outlined on these pages. 

The ambiguity of this verdict is underlined by the ironic anticipation in the novel’s final paragraph which looks ahead to the role Brown’s captain father will play in the ‘clamorous, bloody confusion’ of Jutland – that inconclusive clash that summarised the larger stalemate in which it formed an episode.

A recurrent image in Forester’s novels is of war as a machine, a huge unstoppable juggernaut that consumes the bodies of the humans that wage it. If a rifle played a prominent role in Brown on Resolution and Death to the French, in Forester’s next book, The Gun a cannon becomes the lead character, reducing the human actors to walk-on parts. Abandoned by a retreating Spanish army, the cannon is found by a band of guerrillas who haul it down from the mountains and use it to pick off French garrisons one by one. As it trundles across the enormous chequerboard of the Spanish plains the cannon takes on the role of a monstrous lethal token, passing from hand to hand, recruiting an army around it, firing the delusive ambitions of its respective owners and almost casually bringing about their destruction. Eventually it is ‘killed’ by a random shot in an inconclusive siege. 

Throughout the mid-1930s Forester’s novels became increasingly anti-war in attitude, culminating in The General, the story of Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, ‘a man distinguished by nothing more than his desire to be indistinguishable’. Receiving his first promotion thanks to an absurd accidental victory in the Boer War, Curzon rises ineluctably, as his superiors are killed or sacked and, finally after some adroit backstairs manoeuvring, is put in charge of a brigade on the Western Front. The only idea in his head is to repeat what has already been tried but with more men and munitions. Eventually Curzon is crippled when the Big Push he is orchestrating is unexpectedly derailed by a German offensive. He ends up being wheeled on the front at Bournemouth by his wife: superficially a kindly presence but in reality ‘a butcher in a bath chair’. 

Yet Forester never became an out-and-out pacifist. The Peacemaker – written in 1934 as the threat of fascism was beginning to show its colours – is, if anything, a critique of naïve pacifism. An unsuccessful stab in the direction of science fiction, it tells the story of Dr Edward Pethwick, a physics master at a minor public school of the worst flogging, rugger and salute-the-flag kind, who discovers something called (splendidly) the ‘Klein-Pethwick Effect’: an electromagnetic beam that allows him to neutralise magnetism and thus stall machinery. In an attempt to regain the affections of the head’s daughter, an ardent pacifist with whom he has fallen in love, Pethwick tries to use his beam to blackmail the government into unilaterally disarming. But his efforts backfire, when a crowd, trapped on an underground train stalled by the beam, tramples some children to death. In the resulting uproar Pethwick is betrayed by his alcoholic wife to a vigilante mob and lynched. At their hands he dies as confused a martyr to the cause of peace as Albert Brown had been to the cause of war.

Forester’s most famous creation – the hypersensitive hero, Captain Horatio Hornblower – epitomises his creator’s double-edged view of war. A paradox, a chronological oxymoron, Hornblower is both a Napoleonic ship’s captain and a modern man, a character embedded in his age but at the same time gifted (or cursed) with a sensibility that transcends it. That double consciousness – brave and resolute but chronically unable to shut out the underdogs and losers, the weak and vulnerable – is our bridge into his time or, if you prefer, his into ours.

Hornblower can never lose sight of the savage double accounting of war, In A Ship of the Line (1938) it is through his eyes that we see the terrible effects on the Italian columns tramping along a Spanish coastal road that he is expertly raking from the sea: 

‘To his men down below the little uniformed figures scrambling over the hillside were not human beings suffering agonies from heat and thirst and fatigue; and the still figures which littered the road here were not disembowelled corpses, lately fathers or lovers. They might as well be tin soldiers for all his men thought about them.’

But as well as humanity, Hornblower possesses resource. Applying imagination and ingenuity Hornblower repeatedly turns the hard chances of war to his advantage. Hornblower sees himself as lucky. But as his lover, Lady Barbara, comments, when Hornblower escapes Napoleon’s clutches at the end of Flying Colours: ‘The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance’. Hornblower exemplifies what Forester described as ‘the Man Alone’, the Odyssean hero who, confronted with apparently overwhelming odds, keeps his own counsel and wins his battles through guile and daring. 

But in the battle of life are courage and resourcefulness enough? Hornblower may triumph episodically over adversity, but novel by novel  a quite different outcome emerges. If we take the eight full-length Hornblower novels (excluding his two collections of short stories and the unfinished final novel, Hornblower & the Crisis) seven end on a highly qualified, or even defeated, note. The title of the very first Hornblower novel The Happy Return, for instance, has a bitterly ironical resonance. Hornblower returns to England, after his futile mission to South America, to a loveless marriage to the dumpy Maria and with his relationship with Lady Barbara in tatters. In Flying Colours (1938), despite his daring escape, daring escape Hornblower is left him tormented by guilt over Maria’s death and sickened by the cynical way his heroism is being exploited by the ruling political elite. Happiness, he concludes, is ‘a Dead Sea Fruit’ as far as he is concerned.

It is in Forester’s novel Lord Hornblower the spectre of defeat by circumstance looms most chillingly. Written in 1946 – that year of endings and reckonings – it is set against the backdrop of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and return to power. Hornblower, visiting a former mistress, Marie de Gracay, in France and surprised by Napoleon’s return, mounts a doomed campaign of guerrilla resistance. Out-manoeuvred, exhausted and with his mistress pumping out her life-blood in his arms, Hornblower is taken prisoner and subsequently sentenced to death. Hauled unheroically to the execution wall, he escapes death by the merest shaving of chance, when the news filters through of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. For all our will and decisiveness and courage, the novel seems to ask, are we little better than pawns of circumstance?

The theme of individual versus environment dominates the other novels that Forester wrote the same time as the Hornblower saga. Many have primitive natural settings as if to cast this relationship in the sharpest possible relief. The paradox is that the effect of the natural environment is generally benign, that of civilisation ultimately destructive of the individual.

The African Queen (1935) tells of the efforts of a conventional English spinster, Rose Sayer, to enlist an uneducated cockney mechanic, Charlie Allnutt (whose typical response to life is to say ‘Coo’) in her war against the German colonial powers in WWI. As the couple chug on their steamer, The African Queen, towards the lake on which her target, a German cruiser, is sailing, they pass through – and are irradiated by – an African version of Eden. Rose, at the outset a bitter taper of a woman, compressed by her faith and her domineering missionary brother, fills out, becoming an Eve-like African Queen herself. Charlie also grows in stature and demonstrates  a heroic readiness for self-sacrifice. As the crimping effects of the English class system fall away, they become lovers. 

Anti-climax follows. The attack ends in fiasco when their boat is sunk in a storm and they are captured by the Germans and handed over to the British forces. As they are re-absorbed into civilization, they revert to their old selves. Rose’s feelings for Charlie wither, and he fades back into a dim, cooing cockney. The social conventions click smartly back into place and, sensing the doubts that have arisen about their relationship, she opts to marry him but only to regularise their liaison.

The Sky and the Forest (1948) offers a kind of Darwinian object lesson on the race between the environment (the forces of civilisation) and the individual’s ability to adapt. Opening with the consciousness of an African god, it closes inside that of the rootless European mercenary who destroys him. Loa, a local chieftain and god, starts master and product of his environment, exercising easy sway with a lethargic childish cruelty. The steamy torpor and the ceaseless vegetal cycles of birth, decay and death of the surrounding jungle discourage enterprise and abstract thought. That stuporous world is wrenched apart when a band of a river-borne Arab slavers arrive. Enslaved, he eventually escapes, makes his way back to his village where he brutally reasserts his authority. Loa has learnt. His cruelty becomes more refined and strategic, and he goes on to found a savage empire. Then a brusque coda describes how a shambolic Belgian expeditionary force steams up the river and casually sweeps his dynasty aside. Loa falls in battle, alongside his loving wife. Neither guile nor desperate courage nor loyalty are enough to save him. Loa’s world has simply changed too fast and drastically, and he inevitably succumbs.

Forester’s most deliberate attempt to explore the theme of the individual rolled along by forces beyond his control is Randall & the River of Time (1950). In it he again returns to the conflict that left so deep a scar on his imagination: the First World War. The novel opens with Randall, a British infantry officer, surviving a trench raid, when he by chance takes over a different post on the line:

‘An invisible river was bearing him along, an immense flow of events to which he hardly gave a thought even when awake; the microscopic life carried in a river does not think about being swept along by the river around it.’

In the trenches Randall gets the idea for an improvement to the army’s battlefield flare, and when he next goes home on leave meets – again by chance – a patent agent who shows interest in the idea. The War Office takes it up and orders Randall back to England to work on the improvement, thus accidentally preserving him (as the diagnosis of a bad heart preserved Forester) from death or mutilation at the front. 

Then events take a disastrous turn. On a bus going home Randall meets a gold-digger, who, widowed shortly thereafter, inveigles him into an unhappy marriage. Bored by her husband, who has now become a rather ineffectual inventor, she pursues an affair with a lover. Randall surprises them in bed and in the ensuing struggle accidentally pushes the lover out of the window. Put on trial for murder, he is eventually found not guilty thanks to a pair of decent and skilful lawyers. The novel ends with him setting out – not unlike Forester – for a new life as an ‘inventor’ in America.

Randall & the River of Time contains much excellent detail, for instance, on the technicalities of inventing, or in its wonderfully realised and extended passage on the exhausted British troops’ advance in the final days of the war. But as an exploration of the tensions between the efforts and ethics of the individual on the one hand, and the uncontrollable randomness of life on the other, it fails. At its heart lies an unresolved inconsistency. The pessimist and fatalist in Forester seems to be saying one thing (that chaos is king) the patriot another (that British military professionalism and the integrity of its courts eventually triumph). The novel peters out inconclusively. Forester himself seems to have felt this. He planned to write a sequel tracing Randall’s life in America but never followed the idea through.

In Forester two figures co-exist: the unconscious oracle for deeper, darker obsessions and the consciously dextrous craftsman. Forester described his working methods in ‘Some Personal Notes’. An idea would strike him:

‘It sinks into the horrid depths of my subconscious like a waterlogged timber into the slime at the bottom of a harbour, where it lies alongside others that have preceded it. Then, periodically – but by no means systematically – it is hauled up for examination along with its fellows, and, sooner or later, some timber is found with barnacles growing on it.’

Then, conscious intent would take over, as he crafted the lines of the plot, carpentering and wiring it together. Finally: 

‘it is a matter of a series of visualizations. Not two-dimensional, as if looking at a television screen; three-dimensional, perhaps, as if I were a thin, invisible ghost walking about a stage while a play is in actual performance … I can run through a scene again, like a Hollywood director in his chair in a projection room … ‘

But in the process Forester’s artistic vision all too often falls short. The most disappointing example of this is The Nightmare (1954), a collection of short stories in which Forester tries to think his way into the minds of those who perpetrated the Nazi evil, not its main actors but those lower down the ladder: the mechanics and, ultimately, dupes of the regime. Like Macbeth, its theme is the ultimately delusive nature of evil, its self-defeating emptiness. One story, ‘The Physiology of Fear’, tells for instance how the nephew of a concentration camp surgeon carries out a series of experiments designed to identify a reaction to stress and fear unique to the untermenschen. Later he falls from favour and is arrested and used as a guinea pig himself. Finding the experimental notes, the surgeon is appalled to find not a whit of difference between his nephew’s physiological reactions and those of his non-Aryan victims. 

One can salute the ambition behind these stories while acknowledging their ultimate failure to penetrate the heart of Nazi darkness. There is something not only inappropriate but almost distasteful in applying the practised techniques of the Argosy or Saturday Review shortstory teller – the sudden ironical reversal, the ingenious plot twist and the oh-so-telling use of a dramatic detail – to such a titanically infernal theme. It is Crime & Punishment as a puppet play. (This image, incidentally, is rather fitting: Forester was a keen amateur marionetteer and wrote a book on the subject.)

Surface tarmacs over depth, the seer yields to the middlebrow technician, and Forester ends up doing what he always did supremely well – spinning and twisting a suspenseful yarn. Forester’s failures as a novelist may well also, incidentally, have a biographical connection. If – as I believe – the ambiguities in C S Forester’s work spring from the contradictions of his own personality, then his inability as an artist to face and resolve those ambiguities and his recourse to novelistic legerdemain may also be rooted in the personal shifts and evasions so mercilessly dissected in his son’s biography. 

C S Forester’s non-Hornblower books are now mostly forgotten. Even the Hornblower novels have been largely eclipsed by later retailers of Napoleonic sea stories like Patrick O’Brien, or mined as source material for romantic costume dramas (for instance the recent TV series, a sort of maritime extension of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe-shooting stories). Either outcome represents a signal disservice to Forester. He may not be a great novelist but he is in some ways a more interesting figure. C S Forester was a fascinatingly flawed writer who ultimately failed to realise his vision. Like so many of his protagonists he was a man alone who ended up, in artistic terms, ultimately defeated. But, as well as victories, some defeats deserve to be remembered.

*Novelist & Storyteller: the Life of C S Forester, the two-volume biography John Forester privately published in 2000 in a very limited edition in California.

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