What first comes to mind when you look back at the writings of Henry Treece? For the majority of readers I suspect it will be scenes of war; Viking raids or battlegrounds of Celtic history. It is clear in Treece’s writing that despite his fascination with, and admiration of fighting men, he disliked war intensely. So why was he repeatedly drawn to write about scenes of conflict?

Part of the reason must lie in the way war shaped his own life. He was born in Wednesbury, Staffordshire in December 1911, a very small child at the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-18 and said he

 …grew to school-age with a fear of The Germans greater than that of witches, ghosts or vampire-bats. I still remember vividly my convalescence after a childish illness, when being left alone for an hour or so in a quiet, empty house, I watched the door in terror, expecting that at any minute it might open, to reveal fierce men with spikes on their helmets and bayonets in their hands^.[1]

He was an imaginative child, his fancies fed both by his grandfather’s tales of fighting men and hidden swords, and by the colourful melodramas of King Arthur and Dick Turpin that provided his early reading.

Educated at Wednesbury High School, he won a scholarship to Birmingham University, where he read English, History and Spanish, contributed verse to the university magazine and captained the boxing team.

Upon graduation in 1933, he began a career in education; a year later and in his second post he met Mary Woodman who taught Geography at the same school. After five years of careful saving, they were married and moved into the house in Barton-upon-Humber which was to be their home for the rest of his life, furnished “as I desired, with a grand piano, a Tudor chest, an oak dresser and a brass warming pan”^[2]. Two books of poetry, one of criticism and an anthology of prose and verse had already been published.

He had become a leader of the neo-romantic ‘Apocalyptic’ movement and was, when the Second World War was declared, a young man with a lot to lose; was an ambitious writer with much still to achieve. Not surprising then, that he likened himself to a “frantic beetle … when, having almost succeeded in climbing from the bath, he is pushed back to timeless labour and danger by a thoughtless hand.”^[3]

Nevertheless, he volunteered and served as an intelligence officer with R.A.F. Bomber Command. Stationed in England throughout, he saw himself as almost a “civilian soldier”^[4] – able as he was to see family and friends on a regular basis. All the same, war disrupted his life, interrupted his career and left him frustrated and in “some degree of emotional shock”.^[5]

He found himself unable to write war poetry, although he could describe his experiences in prose which he saw as a “more closely intellectual process”.^[6] He could not decide whether this was merely “poetic metabolism” -- a need for time to assimilate, or a “form of inhibition induced by fear, the same fear that prevents certain primitive peoples from naming the deity or the spirits of evil”^[7] . He continued to write and publish poetry into the early 1950s, but the stream had slowed; later he was to say it had dried up. He increasingly concentrated his efforts on critical work and anthologies.

 

After the war, despite feelings of alienation from ordinary civilian life that led him to note in his diary, “I’m not sure I want to do anything ever again!”,^[8] he returned to teaching at the Grammar School in Barton. At home with Mary, they started their family with David in 1945 “who has made me happy”^[9] but who sadly died in infancy, Jenny was born in 1947 and Richard in 1949.

A highly intellectual thinker, he was also an idealist with a strong sense of justice and an instinctive distrust of the profit motive which stayed with him when an early flirtation with communism faded away.  His political leanings were towards anarchism in its purest sense. Friendship with George Orwell helped him enter the world of radio broadcasting of verse plays, short stories and schools programmes.

 

Some readers may be wondering how any writer, as grittily realistic and ironical in tone as Treece often was, could consider himself a ‘Romantic’. Treece, speaking of the new Apocalypse movement, said

 … The writer who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety, is an Apocalyptic writer…. My attempt has been to approach life and art (with particular reference to poetry) from as many angles as possible, attacking chaos on all sides in an effort to attain something like a unified vision. The impulse behind that attempt is a Romantic one.^[10]

 

As Michael Moorcock notes, “he came from more or less the same part of the world as J.R.R. Tolkien and his romanticism has something in common with Tolkien’s, though his prose, his imagination, his eye on the world, are all far tougher than anything Tolkien … could come up with”.^[11]

His poetry often took narrative form and had always shown a sense of history, whether invoking the spirits of Roman soldiers, Viking raiders, Dido, Arthur, Jezebel, Electra, Caractacus, or,  for instance in this invocation of the isles of the Celtic fringe:

And standing on this shore I hear

The old songs and the ancient tongues

Curling and coiling back across the years,^[12]

Or in this image of ancient whales:  

Covered with barnacles as old as Spain ,

Living the glorious bloody days again

When dragon-prowed boats first thrust through their dream.^[13]

 

When, in 1952, he turned to historical fiction, Treece was to return to many of the images and people he had previously explored in poetry.

The Dark Island (1952) is a novel of conquest, about the coming of the Romans to Britain and the falling away of the Celtic way of life. The story opens in the hall of Cunobelin (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), chieftain of the Catuvellauni. Celtic power and culture, bolstered by the mysterious druids, are at their height, yet trade and contact with Rome are on the increase and Cunobelin fears that his heirs will lack the wisdom to deal with Rome . As we follow the rise of the young King Caradoc and his kinsman Gwyndoc we see his fears fulfilled; companions from youth, their loyalties are tested by jealousies both sexual and political. When Rome moves in, they are split apart – the years pass in futile rebellion and when finally they attempt to come to terms with Rome and the new ways, they fail because those ways are so alien. This first novel was warmly received by his peers and in the press.

His little known second novel, The Rebels, leaps forward in time to the Black Country in the nineteenth century. The Fishers are ironmasters, the upwardly mobile children of tough and unpretentious ancestors. But although they are wealthy and increasingly accepted in local society, the Fisher family is riven with unhappiness, guilt and a consciousness of sin. The father is a dreamer; he yearns to travel the world but duty keeps him at his work, his frustrated wife seeks refuge in sickness while the children try to forge their own lives. The two older children are conventional; Tom devotes himself entirely to his work and his church, hiding his tender soul, pretty Phyllis dedicates herself unswervingly to the achievement of a wealthy marriage. Elijah is a rebel who will not stay to be taught but runs wild making friends with Dick Belcher – the outcast son of a murderer. Susan has a crippled foot; lacking her sister’s graces she is expected to remain a help to her mother. The youngest boy, Enoch is a golden child whose sunny temperament seems to hold the family together. When Elijah is blamed for his accidental drowning, the family and its aspirations start to fall apart. Susan brings matters to a head when she strays from the path of respectability and a happy resolution is only reached when the family learn to cease striving and accept each other as they are. The payment Susan makes in atonement for her sins (and maybe for the sins of the whole family) is a steep one but well in keeping with nineteenth century values.

As always, the language is wonderful and the evocation of the Black Country in the late nineteenth century is superb. The book is packed with strong, even at times grotesque, characters – having almost a Dickensian flavour. I liked this passage about the grandmother, who has listened to complaints from her maid about a man who has been molesting young women. Having caught him in the act…

…without saying a word she took him by that part of his body which he was so often anxious to display and so dragged him back through the streets without mercy.

“Oh Mistress, oh Mistress!” sobbed the wretch, “Leave me go and I’ll never do it again. I beg you Mistress! I’ll never do it again!”

But my grandmother never spoke until he fell down groaning. And then she turned and said, “May that teach you your manners, Samuel Smalley.” ^[14]

The background, whether the scene is with visitors in the parlour, at an illegal cockfight, or a working day in the mills, feels absolutely authentic and of course is set in the area where the young Treece grew up and about which he’d heard so many tales from his grandfather.  

The characters are beautifully delineated, with the attitudes of their time.

However, the sometimes lengthy conversations in dialect can slow the unfamiliar reader down, so perhaps it was less well received than its predecessor, at any rate Treece concentrated on fiction for children in the next few years, returning to fiction for adults in 1956 with two more books set in earlier periods; these are regarded by many as his finest.

The first was The Golden Strangers. Like The Dark Island, this book tells of a cross-road in history; the ending of one way of life and the starting of another. It tells of the dark folk, the barley people who worshipped Earth Mother and of the coming of the peoples of the sun who brought the Bronze Age. It gives an intricate portrait of a world:

Hedged about with ritual and taboo, in which the failing powers of a Chief might cause the failure of next year’s barley crop; in which forgetting to touch a sacred stone in passing or perform the correct ritual before setting out on the hunting trail could bring disaster on the whole community; in which Earth Mother, who gave life to all things, must be fertilised with the life of men at sowing time and harvest, and all men knew and accepted that it might be their life that she called for next.^[15]

All of the characters, from Garroch, the chieftain whose hair must never be cut, to simple Two-fingers the shepherd, Isca the bold princess of the Sun-people, or the scorned Rua Fish, are finely drawn. Treece had a great gift for making his people real – as Michael Moorcock says in his introduction to the Savoy paperback edition:

They are usually mature men and women who know the score. They do not necessarily have the information, but they certainly have the experience. They might see things in magical terms, but they are rational. They are of their own time.^[16]

The same can be said of the characters in The Great Captains which gives us a story of the end of Rome in and of Arthur, told from Mordred’s viewpoint, as such a man in such a time really might be. As Treece notes in his preface:

It is not easy now to throw off all the accretions of legend and later poetry, and to see the situation with an objective historical eye. They were men, yet to see them only as men, stripped of their doom-driven greatness, is to represent them on too trivial a scale. To draw them as massive heroes only would be to recreate them as inhuman ciphers. ^[17]

 

Treece applied the same principle to the novels that followed. In 1958, Red Queen, White Queen was published; a novel of Boudicca. The viewpoint character of this novel is a young Roman who as punishment for dueling is sent to assassinate the Queen who has just risen in rebellion. Treece exhibits a kind of fascinated disgust for his subject; he sympathises with her position but despises the brutality of her response. Treece consciously adopts an ironical tone, aiming for a sense of timelessness by using contemporary slang. As he says:

My mockery indicates no disrespect to history, or to my characters; it is a form of sympathy, a stoic recognition that we are all involved in mankind, as Donne said. And my use of contemporary language I defend by saying, that I am sure that all ages have their own slang; but because I do not know camp Latin I am driven to use the argot of my own day to produce the impression I need.^[18]

Generally this works well, though I feel that the 1950s feel of the epilogue (intended I presume to draw a moral point about the benefits of peace) lets the book down in a sense of anticlimax. The defensive tone of the preface suggests that maybe Treece had his own doubts. He returned to Boudicca in a series of novels for children, of which The Queen’s Brooch is perhaps the most successful.

In reference to Red Queen, White Queen, Margery Fisher notes that Treece’s portrait of Boudicca (“a figure of power, at once sexual and maternal, which has been directed wholly towards war”^[19]) was coloured by his reading of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, “a book which he knew almost by heart”.^[20] To my mind, many of his portraits of women, both near and far in time are coloured in this way; bold and direct, they all exhibit aspects of the Goddess.

The 1950s had been extremely productive years for Treece who was by now head of the English Department at Barton school; his busy schedule included public and radio lectures. He was head of the Barton Dramatic Society and produced plays both for theatre and radio. It is perhaps not surprising that his health began to suffer as a result; in 1959, he retired from teaching to concentrate on writing, although he continued his work with children through visits to schools and libraries.

Certainly he enjoyed the chance to spend more relaxed time with his own children. Margery Fisher notes:

His relationship with his daughter Jenny and his son Richard was a very happy one. He watched with absorption as they developed tastes and talents of their own and seems to have been able to keep from interfering – no small achievement in a father who was teaching at the school where his daughter was a pupil.^[21]

Perhaps it was spending time with family that inspired him to return to his grandfather’s tales in the subject matter of his next novel. A Fighting Man (1960) has as its subject the rise and fall of a bare-knuckles fighter of the Regency age. Ned Ashton is the son of a dissenting Black Country farmer, and an innocent abroad in the corrupt world of prize-fighting where the aristocracy mingle with working men, gambling and thrilling to the primeval excitement of the ring. He reaps early fame when he meets the great Mendoza and falls for two women, an aristocratic lightskirt and a high-class prostitute. In form this is a traditional moral tale of a foolish young man swept up by fame and abused by those who were supposed to be his friends. The careful, warts and all, depiction of a world now gone, and of a man with moral choices who does not know how to make them, lifts it higher.   

Next, Treece turned his attention to Greek mythology in Jason (1961), Electra (1963) and Oedipus (1964). In these three books he attempted, as he had in The Great Captains to get to the root of a myth and tell a story of what might have been.

Although these books were more commercially and critically successful than the earlier Celtic novels, in their time, (they were all issued in paperback within a few years of publication) many critics today sense that Treece ‘felt’ the Celtic novels more deeply, which made them more successful on an emotional level. His final novel, the Green Man, published in 1966, returns to Northern Europe after the fall of Rome and is based on Amleth’s Revenge, part of the Gesta Danorum or Exploits of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus which was of course also the source material for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Treece’s version serves up a heady mix of murder and ritual incest wrapped in with adventure that links Amleth with Beowulf and with an aging Arthur.

Tragically Henry Treece died, far too young, in June 1966.

He is remembered as a writer full of energy and ideas. Conversation with Henry Treece must have been a stimulating affair. Rosemary Sutcliff remembers that:

His letters were like no one else’s letters, just like his books are like no one else’s books, being mostly concerned, not with day to day events but with such matters as the Divine Kingship or the origins of the great Myths.^[22]  

He brought great energy and enthusiasm to his tales of the past. As Sutcliff goes on to say, he:

…understood the true meaning of sacrifice and atonement and its place in human life as very few people seem to have done since we became ‘civilised’ and lost the keys to the truths our forefathers knew. He had an intuitive feeling for what it must have been like to be a man in the time when awareness of one’s own individuality – or possession of a human soul – was still a comparatively new and a very frightening thing. He understood better than any other writer I have ever read, the appalling intricacy of life in a primitive society.^[23]

Although poetic truth was a keystone of his view of the past, Treece worked very hard at the details to bring us his rich evocations of other times. He researched carefully, reading widely and deepening his knowledge with visits to ancient sites.  According to Margery Fisher, he often “used a tape recorder to check the rhythm of his sentences”^[24] so that they would fall perfectly on the reader’s inner ear. His colourful adventures always had a backbone of rigorous scholarship, coupled with a depth of moral vision.

 

I know I’m not alone in thinking him one of the greatest British writers of historical fiction; it seems to me scandalous that none of his books are currently in print.^[25] He was in many ways a writer ahead of his own time; since reissues of Graves and Duggan have seen success recently, dare I hope that new issues of the great novels of Henry Treece will soon join them in our bookshops and libraries?