Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first novel I Am the World: “I can without hesitation say that this is the worst book ever published.” Just which critic wrote that, I’ve been unable to determine. But it’s the sort of absolute declaration that lends itself to endless repetition.
Was the judgment deserved? That’s very hard to tell because I Am the World has since become exceedingly rare. There are just three copies listed for sale, all well over $100, and six library copies listed in WorldCat.org. From the reviews I’ve been able to locate, I Am the World is, like several of Vansittart’s later novels, set in an abstract location — in this case, a country referred to simply as “The Land.” It tells of the ascent to the throne of absolute dictatorship of a charismatic peasant named Goran, aided by a Jewish banker named Finkenstein.
Vansittart’s descriptions of Finkenstein are difficult to read now. He’s a man “big-nosed in expensive glory” whose “slim tentacles swarmed everywhere.” Vansittart calls the Jews of The Land “mysterious people borm from the knowledge of Babylon darkly, living in the two worlds of race and nation, hiding disease and strength behind the glitter of their eyes.” Another Jew is “a short red figure with a snake’s tongue and a brain fertile and oozing like a grey sponge pressed by a hand seeking its own advantage.”
But the magnetic Goran is a bad piece of work, too. He beats up a blind old woman: “Goran smashed his fist savagely and with all his strength into her face, and she dropped recumbent and bleeding to the ground. With a single curse he stepped over her dragging the sack up from behind the wordless body.” When he ultimately rejects worldly power and seeks refuge in the sanctuary of a cathedral, he makes it clear that there is no place for the likes of Finkenstein there.
Though the “worst book” review may be apochryphal, the reviews I’ve managed to locate are hardly the kind to show off to Mom:
- • Kate O’Brien in The Spectator:
- “I am the World is a wordy first novel which might be ignored were it not that its sentiments leave a bad taste in the mouth, and one is forced to wonder why on earth it was published just now. It is a tale of a little country called The Land, which has some kind of “salvation” forced upon it by a thoroughly objectionable young peasan-dictator, who climbs to his curious power-vision on the back of a criminal Jew. The author is devoted to such words as lust and hatred, and is very free with his own loose conception of the deity. It is difficult to see where Mr. Vansittart is going in this over-lush study of a bad, crude megalomania.”
- • R. D. Charques in the Times Literary Supplement:
- “First novels are almost always the better for a certain modesty of intention, but there may be no great harm in striking an ambitious gesture. The abmition of I Am the World, however, is surely excessive even for a first novel by a young writer in these perplexing and difficult times…. But for the copiousness and polist of Mr. Vansittart’s language, it might have been kinder to ignore this first effort of his. He has, however, an unusual flow of words and a feeling for outward graces of style, and when he is not trying to be irresistibly eloquent he is at any rate engaged in expressing, however wordily, a point of view. But far too much of this lesser eloquence is merely bookish, while there are reams of empty sonorifics in the manner of “that chance of hope which could not now miscarry but must down upon the night’s frown.” As for the sentiment of the tale, one cannot but regret the evidences of a familiar and distasteful hysteria.”
- • J. D. Beresford in The Guardian:
- “… a first and very ambitious novel” but said Vansittart “as yet lacks something of the knowedgeableness necessary to make such a story as this convincing.”
- • Frank Swinnerton in The Observer:
- “Amid this verbiage are buried idealism and a serious idea, with an attempt to picture the rise of an ignorance man to power over a nation (imaginary) and his discovery that God moves in a mysterious way. But unfortunately Mr. Vansittart has not mastered the art of writing, which begins with a distinct knowledge of what one wants to say.”
- • Anonymous review in The Sydney Morning Herald:
- “Mr. Vansittart’s pseudo-allegorical style is baffling, but …it is possible to discern a trace of purpose behind the masses of turgid prose and ineffectual imagery….. This type of novel may appeal to a few readers in search of ‘something different.’ It is scarcely likely to be one of the year’s outstanding literary successes.”
V.S. Pritchett, Vansittart’s editor at Chatto & Windus, did suggest numerous changes, including toning down the language, all of which the author declined to make. This set a pattern that Vansittart repeated throughout his career. In a fascinating survey of Vansittart’s career packaged in a review of his 1986 novel, The Aspect in the London Review of Books, Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that, “The problem for Vansittart has always been that he is excessive: he wants to achieve too much within the bounds of a single volume. Nor will he give this ambition up – but by now his persistence has become courageous and impressive.”
Seymour-Smith identified this problem as far back as I Am the World. The book, he wrote, “is excessive (promisingly so): about the rise and fall of a dictator clearly based on Hitler, it seems to want to say everything that can be said about dictatorship. It is relentlessly and ambitiously unpleasant – the brutal and dark side of Vansittart has not, surprisingly, attracted the attention of reviewers – and is written in a curiously over-rhetorical, almost gushing style which sits very awkwardly with its sombre theme.”
Somehow, Vansittart managed to be a prolific producer of books despite his consistent habit of writing as he chose. Reviewing Vansittart’s novel Landlord in 1971, Auberon Waugh called him “one of those heroic people who just go on writing novels in English.” Francis King, reviewing Lancelot, Vansittart’s 1978 retelling of the Arthur legend, described the author as a noble eccentric: “Though he does not usually appear in histories of the modern English novel, though he has won no literary prizes and though his name is probably unfamiliar to the majority of the general reading public, he is a writer whose singularity is matched by his strength.” He continued to have advocates for his particular exceptionalism. In 1983, reviewing Vansittart’s Roman novel Three-Six-Seven: Memoirs of a Very Important Man, wondered, “When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?”
He did get formal due, courtesy of the Queen, just before his death in 2008, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. Although the New York Times obit said that Vansittart’s work was “like caviar to the critics and a stranger to the best-seller list,” he did crack the UK best-seller lists with his 1995 survey In the Fifties. And, as D. J. Taylor noted in Vansittart’s Independent obituary, the writer “belonged to a practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and supportive publishers, writes more or less to please himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of direst obscurity. Certainly none of Vansittart’s 40-odd books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into paperback.” Although Taylor called Vansittart was a marginal figure in English literature, he credited him with “the virtual reinvention of the post-war historical novel.”
Peter Vansittart at his best was the greatest historical novelist ever. No one even comes close to creating the past as a place of superstition and beliefs foreign to the modern reader. He was a master stylist able to do more in one sentence than many do in a paragraph or chapter.
Peter Vansittart was an artist. He is well worth your reading time!