TROUBLING LANGUAGE
Despite their merits, The Thirty-Nine Steps and its sequels are like many books of their time in that today they cannot escape scrutiny on questions of anti-Semitism and racism.
In the opening chapters of The ThirtyNine Steps, the dodgy secret agent Franklin P. Scudder speaks of a nefarious plot against England that’s masterminded by anarchist Jews: “A little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake … is the man who is ruling the world just now.” However, Scudder’s Jewish conspiracy turns out to be a red herring; the evil masterminds are in fact Germans.
Rather than any anti-Semitism on the part of Buchan himself, Scudder’s attitude appears to be an attempt by the author to portray the anti-Semitism that was rampant in Europe at the time. In fact, as a member of the British Parliament, Buchan chaired the parliamentary Palestine committee, dedicated to helping Jews settle in Palestine, and, during his tenure as Canadian Governor General in the 1930s, he was an outspoken supporter of the Jewish community in Canada.
A thornier issue emerges in the racist attitude displayed by Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay. Throughout the novels, Hannay displays a callously off-handed racism toward the black Africans in the Empire’s conquered territories. For instance, in describing a musical show in a seedy nightclub in The Three Hostages, Hannay says, “A n----- band, look- ing like monkeys in uniform, pounded out some kind of barbarous jingle.”
Hannay’s racism is all the more disturbing because he is supposed to be the hero of the story — Buchan portrays him as courageous, smart, resourceful, and gentlemanly. Did Buchan share Hannay’s attitude toward blacks?
J. William Galbraith, author of the 2013 biography John Buchan: Model Governor General, thinks it’s a mistake to equate Hannay’s attitudes with Buchan’s.
“It’s not the way that Buchan spoke. It’s not the way that he thought. It’s a reflection of the way people talked. You can’t write accurately about the period in fiction without those references,” he said. “Buchan himself had a deep humanity. His deep humanity stretched beyond the ‘white races.’“
Galbraith points out that, as Governor General, Buchan interceded with Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King to provide better health care in Aboriginal communities.
But professor Michael Gnarowski believes that Hannay’s attitudes may well have been a reflection of Buchan’s own, perhaps unconscious, beliefs — at least at the time he wrote the books. “He was a staunch British imperialist. They wanted to make Africa another India: to make it one grand British possession, the entire continent,” Gnarowski said. “When you’re involved in that kind of activity, you have to rationalize it somehow.” — Kate Jaimet