ROGUE MALE by
Geoffrey Household

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The NYT praised Geoffrey Household for developing suspense into an art form. The Times (UK) called it, “Simply the best escape and pursuit story yet written.”

What We Know About Geoffrey Household + the Narrator

A wealthy, well-known, unnamed Englishman, not yet 40, is a sportsman “who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible.” He has no grievances and has a “sense of adventure.” He’s not an anarchist or fanatic. He becomes obsessed with stalking the biggest game of all, a European “great man” in a country near Poland. The country resembles Germany; the dictator, Hitler. He’s caught before the kill and pursued across Europe by Nazi assassins.

Geoffrey Household had a sales job for an ink manufacturer and loved his adventurous life (Europe, South America). Britain entered the war on 9/03/39. He served in British intelligence. He said his feeling toward Nazi Germany “had the savagery of a personal vendetta” (Against the Wind).

“The Almighty looks after the rogue male”

Geoffrey Household writes: “The behavior of a rogue may be described as individual, separation from its fellows appearing to increase both cunning and ferocity. These solitary beasts [are] found among all the larger carnivores and graminivores, and are generally male.”

PART I – ESCAPE / SURFACE – The Hunter Becomes the Hunted (AUGUST)

The narrator is tortured and thrown off a cliff. He walks, crawls, curses, and cries, slipping in and out of consciousness, doing rather than thinking, using the “reasoning of a hunted beast.”

“In these days of visas and identification cards it is impossible to travel without leaving a trail that can, with patience, bribery, and access to public records, be picked up.”

“It was a convenience to have no existence. Had I stolen a watch instead of stalking the head of a nation, my photograph would have been in all the police stations.”

He has a passport, maps, and money. He speaks the language well.

Self-Reliance + Training Counts + “Conditioned to endure”

The narrator in Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household never feels sorry for himself (identifiable eye injury, his nails being pulled out, his fingers crushed, the skin on his body ripped from the fall, gunshot wound, burial)

The lay of the land: He climbs a tree to “watch the routine of the neighboring farms and to see if I had overlooked any danger.”

Space and time to heal: On a 12’ dinghy, “My object was to heal myself rather than hurry. I took no risks and expended no effort.”

Ingenious: He buys a trailer and has it towed to a campsite that he rents, exchanging the beach hut for a tandem bike. He rides on the old Roman road between 12-3 a.m.

Wild goose chase: He makes a false hiding place at a farmhouse, weaving a complex pattern to convince the police he left. He reassembles the bicycle, rides it north, makes sure he’s seen, and hides the bicycle and himself during a police search.

Focus on the present: “One’s instinct is against looking too far forward when the present demands all available resource.”

Escape Aided by Members of Class X

In Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household writes that A “man can be a member of the proletariat … and yet obviously belong to Class X, [while] another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister or both and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the Saloon bar if he enters the Public.”

The fisherman “did his best to look servile, but his eyes burned with courage.”

Mr. Vaner hides him in an empty underwater tank and transports him to England.

The man on the tandem bike is “equally contemptuous of the professed radical and the genteel.” The world is his.

PART II – CONCEALMENT / DEPTH – Robinson Crusoe Existence (Southern Dorset)

In Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, the narrator must flee civilization and go underground (in the Underground, in the burrow).

He sleeps underground by day and works on the burrow at night. The door to his lair is well hidden. His exit is the chimney. He lives on nuts, berries, cow’s milk, and rabbits, calling it his “Robinson Crusoe existence.” He feels at home.

The novel draws “tighter and tighter, down to a cave in the side of a lane whose shadowy interior seems ‘fifty feet of solid blackness.’” (Robert MacFarlane)The narrator undergoes a “rite of passage from civilized man to animal,” working from blind instinct, enabling him to identify with nature and all things living. (Victoria Nelson)He says he never loved the woman who died. He suffered little upon her death.

What we know: He unconsciously returned to the place where they had spent time together. He had begged her to stay in England or “temper her politics with discretion.”

Retaining His Humanity

He’s “morbidly anxious to assure myself that I was losing none of my humanity.”

He wishes “to God [Black Hat] had … shown himself in some way less human than I.”

Black Hat has a pistol. He punches him in the station tunnel, and he falls on the live rail.

“Guilt was on me. I had killed without object, and my fellows were all around me waiting lest I should kill again.”

Outmaneuvered by Worthy Adversaries

At the start of Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, the narrator, through reconnaissance, learns the great man’s routines. Yet a young guard, a “boy worth teaching,” beats him at his own game.

After 11 days in the burrow, he sees Quive-Smith is still at Patachon’s. He curses him in white-hot silence, a childish rage. He loudly collapses onto a pile of drinking troughs.

The major runs at him, and he pretends he’s Pat, who didn’t like trespassers. He runs back to his burrow, undergoing a “fanaticism of endurance.” 

He hears his name called. He’s knocked backward and crawls home. He has been shot in the arm. Quive-Smith had been suspicious of his false trails. “There was a pattern in my escape. I had a preference for hiding, travelling, throwing off pursuit by water.”

“I was hurt and shaken. So I went without thinking to Safety … my burrow — darkness, rest, freedom from pursuit. I hadn’t a thought … that the earth might mean death.”

The major “held all the cards.” He feels clear headed, “captain of my soul.”

PART III – SELF-KNOWLEDGE + REBIRTH

In Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, the narrator admits he intended to shoot, but he wasn’t a servant of the state. “I wanted to see whether it was possible, and his death would be no great loss to the world.”

The major tells him to sign a form saying he attempted to assassinate the great man with the knowledge of the British government. Sign, and he’ll be free. “I don’t sign lies.”

“Their methods of interrogation are devastating to the muddle-minded – ninety percent of us, whatever class we belong to. It’s easy to make a man confess the lies he tells to himself; it’s far harder to make him confess the truth. … They make us see our own motives, and in the horror of that exposure we are ready to confess to any enormity.”

“I am a man who has only loved once, and did not know it till she was dead.”

When he went to Poland, he planned “to go out and kill something in rough country in order to forget my troubles. I had not admitted what I meant to kill.”

Extreme mental duress leads to a flood of self-knowledge about his love, grief, and rage over the woman’s execution. (Victoria Nelson)

Quive-Smith “destroyed all possible self-deception.” “He had made me see myself.”

His “access to his buried emotions is enabled by literally digging down into the bedrock.” (Robert MacFarlane) Once he’s unburied, he is transformed/reborn.

Dying For vs. Dying Against

In Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household writes, “They caught her and shot her. … Reasons of state. Surely the preservation of such an individual is why we suffer, why we fight, why we endure this life. Causes? Politics? Religion? But the object of them is to produce such a woman — or man, if you will. To put her, her, against a wall — there is no cause that justifies an act so Satanic. It is the life of such a creature which justifies any cause she chooses to adopt. What other standard have we?”

The narrator respects the rights of the individual but not the state – any state.

“I distrust patriotism; the reasonable man can find little in these days worth dying for.”

For the narrator, “only the personal is legitimately political.”

“No man would do what I did unless he were cold-drawn by grief and rage, consecrated by his own anger to do justice where no other hand could reach.”

Channeling trauma and grief, “I declared war upon the men who could commit such sacrilege, and above all upon the man who has given them their creed.”

The Death of Asmodeus

In Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household writes, “By shooting Asmodeus, Quive-Smith condemned himself to death …. Patachon would have shot the old poacher without hesitation. I should have grieved for him no less, but admitted Patachon’s right. The same way I admitted Quive-Smith’s right to shoot me by the stream. [The] shooting of this cat … released me. I had intended to escape without bloodshed. From then on all my plans were directed towards a swift and deadly break-through into the lane.”

He skins Asmodeus and cuts his hide into strips to create a hand-drawn ballista. He works on the tunnel, distracts Muller, rests, waits, then shoots a missile up the tunnel.

The climax “involves his unlikely breakout from the den. Like some proto-MacGyver, he realizes the means of his liberation are … lying around in his prison … Asmodeus’ body is ingeniously weaponized; cat is converted to catapult.” (Robert MacFarlane)

The climax is a duel between the pursued man and his equally matched adversary, who swap roles of hunter and hunted until the protagonist rises heroically from the bottom to successfully dispatch his opponent. (Victoria Nelson)

An Honorable Man

An outlaw, he has committed an extraditable offense. Yet he won’t let Saul pull strings.

He formed a Tenants’ Co-operative Society where tenants pay themselves rent and do their own repairs, with the right to purchase their land by installments at a fixed price.

He asks Saul to send money to the fisherman who helped him.

Police protection isn’t possible, as he couldn’t risk embarrassing his country’s officials.

He longs to surrender but wants to avoid death, disgrace, and an international incident.

He gives Muller £500 to start a new life: “Give me away, and I’ll kill you! Play straight … and there’s a new life open to you!”

Reason for publishing: “First, I have committed two murders, and the facts must be placed on record in case the police ever got hold of the wrong man. Second, if I am caught, there can never again be any possible question of the complicity of H. M. Government [George VI]. Every statement [can] be checked, amplified, and documented. The three parts of the journal … form an absolute answer to any accusation from any quarter that I have involved my own nation.”

The Ending

At the end of Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, the narrator  adopts the major’s identity. He books a hotel, heads into the hills, shaves his moustache, dyes his hair, stains his face and body, and buys a Latin suit. He boards a ship to Marseilles with no record he had entered or left Tangier.

“To preserve my [objectivity and] sanity it is necessary that I take things in their order. That is the object of this confession: to tell things in their order, reasonably, precisely: to recover that man with his insolence, his irony, his ingenuity. By writing of him, I become him for the time.”

Extract from the letter accompanying the manuscript – “I want these papers published. … You won’t, of course, mention mine, nor the name of the country to which I went from Poland and to which I am about to return. Let the public take its choice!”

He falls asleep in the valley “in the short grass by the water’s edge,” his “body drawing strength from that warm and ancient earth,” preparing himself to go to war.” He knows where he went wrong. “One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat; and the natural habitat of man is — in these days — a town. … My plans are far advanced. I shall not get away alive, but I shall not miss; and that is really all that matters to me any longer.”

Influences: Pacing and the Narrative Power of the Hunt (Robert MacFarlane)

Geoffrey Household cited Daniel Defoe as an influence on his writings, and “Rogue Male is indeed a kind of inland Robinson Crusoe complete with feline Friday” (Victoria Nelson).

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) launched the “hunted man” genre. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) updated it for the age of geo-politics and aerial warfare. (However, Richard Hannay is far more patriotic than the rogue male.) Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) extended its geographies and reversed the logic of pursuit so that the assassin became the quarry.

Rogue Male was an instant bestseller + a formative book for post-war English boys. It had a Services and Forces special edition for British troops.

Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household influenced Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal), and David Morrell.