A. G. Macdonell'sEngland,
Their England (1933)
Who was who?by L. J. Hurst |
England,
Their England was awarded the
James Tait Black Prize in 1934. |
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Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich
Minister for Propaganda, in his diary entry for December 8th,
1940 wrote about
his
experience of reading A. G. Macdonell:
"I read a book by the Englishman MacDonell, Self-Portrait of a Gentleman, an unspeakably frivolous and cynical concoction that shows the English plutocrat without his mask. This is the face of the people whom we must overthrow." Translator Fred Taylor points out that this is a reference to Scottish author Macdonell's 1939 novel, Autobiography of a Cad. Dr Goebbels, despite his distaste, continued to read Macdonell. On Monday December 23, 1940 he wrote: "Carry on dictating and reading for a long while. Macdonell's Self-Portrait of a Gentleman. Simply horrifying. One can feel nothing but outrage as one finishes the book." The edition in question must have been Selbstbildnis eines Gentleman (Stuttgart: Franckh'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1940), translated from the English by Karin von Schab. While both Goebbels and Macdonell died before the end of the war, perhaps it would have been better for the world if the order of their demise had been reversed. Or if Goebbels had had a sense of humour. Unhappily, Dr Goebbels never had the time to read an earlier novel of Macdonell's, Lords And Masters, published in 1936. Chapter XVII contains the following rumination by a character recently returned from Germany: "Veronica [a Unity Mitford-like girl], who heartily despised the physical appearance of any male under about six-foot-three, was not so narrow-minded as to despise male intelligence simply because it was encased in a relatively dwarfish body. After all, no one could call the Fuehrer particularly handsome, and yet what a mammoth intellect he had got! Dr. Goebbels was positively ugly, but look how he scattered the non-Aryans with his inner fires of patriotism and genius!" A examination in July 2007 showed many German second-hand booksellers continuing to classify Selbstbildnis eines Gentleman as a (n auto)biography. |
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Archibald Gordon Macdonell (1895 - 1941)For Macdonell's biography, click here.
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Sources include:
Goebbels/Fred Taylor
spell
Macdonell's name with a capital D, "MacDonell". Other references do
not, which was Macdonell's own
usage.
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