Richard Arthur Hughes

Richard Hughes (1900-1976). Courtesy Goodreads.

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE (19 April 1900 - 28 April 1976) was an English poet, playwright, and fiction writer.

Life

Youth and education

Hughes was born in Weybridge, Surrey. His father was Arthur Hughes, a civil servant, and his mother Louisa Grace (Warren), who had been brought up in the West Indies in Jamaica.

He was educated at Charterhouse School. A Charterhouse schoolmaster sent Hughes's earliest published work to the magazine The Spectator in 1917. The article, written as a school essay, was an unfavourable criticism of The Loom of Youth, by Alec Waugh, a recently published novel which caused a furore for its account of homosexual passions between British schoolboys in a public school.

Hughes next attended Oriel College, Oxford. At Oxford he met Robert Graves, also a graduate of Charterhouse, and they co-edited a poetry publication, Oxford Poetry, in 1921. Hughes graduated from Oxford in 1922.

Career

Hughes's short play The Sisters' Tragedy was being staged in the West End of London at the Royal Court Theatre by 1922.

He was the author of the world's earliest radio play, Danger, commissioned from him for the BBC by Nigel Playfair and broadcast on 15 January 1924.

Hughes was employed as a journalist and travelled widely before he married painter Frances Bazley in 1932. They settled initially in Norfolk and from 1934 at Castle House, Laugharne in south Wales. Richard and Frances had 5 children: Rev. Robert (Bob) Elyston-Glodrydd (born 1932), later vicar of Harlech and Llanfihangel-y-traethau); Penelope (1934); Lleky Susannah (1936–2018); Catherine Phyllida (1940), who married historian Colin Wells in 1960); and Owain Gardner Collingwood (1943).

Dylan Thomas stayed with Hughes and wrote his book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog whilst living at Castle House. Hughes was instrumental in Thomas relocating permanently to the area.

During World War II, Hughes had a desk job in the Admiralty. He met architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, and Jane's and Max's children stayed with the Hughes family for much of that time. After the war, he spent 10 years writing scripts for Ealing Studios, and published no more novels until 1961.

Later in life Hughes relocated to Ynys in Gwynedd. He was churchwarden of Llanfihangel-y-traethau, the village church, where he was buried when he died at home in 1976.

Writing

Hughes wrote only 4 novels, the most famous of which is The Innocent Voyage (1929), or A High Wind in Jamaica, as Hughes renamed it soon after its initial publication. Set in the 19th century, it explores the events which follow the accidental capture of a group of English children by pirates: the children are revealed as considerably more amoral than the pirates. (It was in this novel that Hughes described the cocktail Hangman's Blood.)

In 1938, he wrote an allegorical novel, In Hazard, based on the true story of the S.S. Phemius that was caught in the 1932 Cuba hurricane for 4 days during its maximum intensity.

Of the trilogy The Human Predicament, only the initial 2 volumes, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died; 12 chapters, less than 50 pages, of the final volume are now published. In these he describes the course of European history from the 1920s through World War II, including real characters and event s— such as Hitler's escape after the abortive Munich putsch — as well as fictional.

He wrote also volumes of children's stories, including The Spider's Palace.

Recognition

Hughes was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in the United States, an honorary member of both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1946.

Publications

Poetry

• Gipsy Night, and other poems. Waltham St. Lawrence: Golden Cockerel, 1922.

Plays

• Plays: The Sister's Tragedy (1922); A comedy of good and evil; The man born to be hanged; Danger. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966; New York: Harper, 1966.

Novels

• The Innocent Voyage. New York: Heritage Press, 1072.
  • also published as A High Wind in Jamaica. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929; New York: Harper & Row, 1929; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965.
• In Hazard. London: Chatto & Windus, 1938; New York: Harper, 1938; Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1939; New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

The Human Predicament

• The Fox in the Attic (edited by Warren Hughes). London: Chatto & Windus, 1961; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964; ; London: Atlantic Books, 2012.
  • (edited by Warren Hughes). New York: New York Review of Books, 2000.
• The Wooden Shepherdess. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973
  • (including 12 chapters of Volume III). New York: New York Review of Books, 2000.

Short stories

• A Moment of Time. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926.
• In the Lap of Atlas: Stories of Morocco. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.

Non-fiction

• The Chinese Communes: A background book. London: Bodley Head, 1960.

Juvenile

• The Spider's Palace, and other stories (illustrated by George Charlton). London: Chatto & Windus, 1931.
• Don't Blame Me! and other stories (illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg). New York: Chatto & Windus, 1940.
• Gertrude and the Mermaid. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1960.
• Gertrude's Child. 1966; Harlin Quist, 1974.

• The Wonder Dog: Collected children's stories (illustrated by Antony Maitland). London: Chatto & Windus, 1977; Harmondsworth, UK: Puffin, 1980.

Collected editions

• An Omnibus. New York & London: Harper, 1931.
• Fiction as Truth: Selected literary writings (edited by Richard Pool). Seren Books, 1984.

See also

• List of British poets

References

• Richard Perceval Graves, Richard Hughes. A biography. London: A. Deutsch, 1994.

Fonds

• Hughes manuscripts collected at Indiana University

External links

Books

• Works by Richard Arthur Hughes at Project Gutenberg
• Richard Arthur Warren Hughes at Amazon.com
• Richard Hughes at Fantastic Fiction

About

• Richard Hughes in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Richard Hughes at Inspirational Wales