Imperialism, Insularity and Identity: The Novels of Paul Scott

IMPERIALISM,

INSULARITY AND

IDENTITY

The Novels of Paul

Scott

Martin Paterson

D.Phil.

The University of York

Department of English and Related

Literature

July 1993

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to David Higham Associates for

permission to quote from the works of Paul Scott; to

the publishers, Faber and Faber Ltd, for permission

to quote from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot; and

to Dr Patrick Swinden for permission to quote from

his Paul Scott: Images of India.

I wish to thank Lan White, my supervisor at the

University of York, and also Bob Jones and Felicity

Riddy for encouragement, suggestions and

constructive criticism. I am especially grateful to

Professor David Moody for what seemed, at the time,

to be a devastating indictment of my work but has

since proved to be the stimulus for what is, I hope,

a much better analysis than I would otherwise have

written.

I owe a great debt, literally, to Paul Caton who

sold me the word processor and still has not

complained about not being paid.

This thesis could not have been completed without

the patience, proofreading, attention to detail,

inspiration and support of my wife, Ann-Marie. I

dedicate the finished product to her, my son, Nat,

and to the memory of my cousin Jane.

The phrase ‘question of identity’ always makes me cringe withembarrassment and amazement that it should be thought of as aquestion that has not always lain modestly at the heart of ourliterature.

Paul Scott, ‘More Cucumber, More Conrad’

Contents

Acknowledgements...................................................i

Chapter One: Idea and Execution – History and Fiction..............1

Chapter Two: Johnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky.............................20

Chapter Three: A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior...................35

Chapter Four: The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise.............50

Chapter Five: The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu.....................69

Chapter Six: The Raj Quartet.........................................92

1. Standing where a lane ends and cultivation begins............92

2. The Influence of T.S. Eliot..................................99

3. Falsifying Patterns and Narrative Perspectives..............100

4. The Inescapable Continuity of Time..........................107

5. Affirmation through Negation................................114

6. The Outer Casing and the Inner Self.........................119

Chapter Seven: Staying On: A Conclusion............................126

Appendix: Book reviews by Paul Scott in Country Life, 1962-1977.....138

Bibliography.....................................................164

Chapter OneIdea and Execution

Chapter One

Idea and Execution – History and Fiction

It is of execution we are talking – that being the only point of anovel that is open to question. This is perhaps too often lost sightof, only to produce interminable confusions and cross-purposes.We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: ourcriticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do notmean we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we donot our course is perfectly simple – to let it alone.1

Academics have let Scott alone. Just an unpublished

thesis, dating back to 1976, and four books have been

devoted to his novels.

Most critics can be categorised by their relationship to

Scott’s alleged subject – ‘the British in India’ – which

prejudices, eclipses, even precludes analysis of his

execution. the ‘politically correct’ abhor any

suspicion of white nostalgia for the Raj. Insular

literary conservatives are essentially uninterested in a

theme ‘satisfactorily dealt with by E.M. Forster’.2

Writing-about-India specialists seek connections between

Scott’s work and an Anglo-Indian tradition from which it

is formally, emotionally and thematically so distinct.

1 Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited withintroduction by Roger Gard (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 198.2 Paul Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, edited with introductionby Shelley C. Reece (London: Heinemann, 1986), p.115.

6

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionImperial historians appropriate the novels for their own

non-literary ends.

Salman Rushdie’s review of the television adaptation of

The Raj Quartet typifies the politically correct response.

Rushdie claims that ‘The Quartet’s form tells us, in

effect, that the history of the end of the Raj was

largely composed of the doings of the officer class and

its wife’ and that the work thus ‘adopts, in its

structure, the very ethic which, in its content and tone,

it pretends to dislike’.3 This misinterprets Scott’s

genuine concern that attempting a comprehensive gallery

of divers Indian characters would have been imperialist

presumption, ‘that the whole process of imposing one’s

national personality on other people [would be] starting

again on a subtler and perhaps more insidious level’.4

Scott rightly preferred, in his novels, to imply other

versions that cannot be incorporated into his necessarily

partial vision and, in reviews, to recommend writers such

as Narayan, Desai and Malgonkar, for complementary,

independent fictions.5

The structure of The Raj Quartet perfectly reflects its theme

of how the British distorted India into a series of myths

duplicating their prejudices. far from being an

3 Salman Rushdie ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta 11 (1984), p. 128.4 My Appointment with the Muse, p.113.5 For Narayan see ‘Behind a Ducal Mask’. Country Life, vol. CXLI,No. 3666, June 8, 1967, p. 1486; ‘A Writer and His Heritage’,Country Life, Vol. CLVII, No. 4060, April 24, 1975, pp. 1073-74,and ‘Signs and Symbols of Conflict’, Country Life, Vol. CLXI, No.4164, April 21, 1977, pp.1047-48. For Desai, see ‘the ManyFaces of Oliver Goldsmith’, Country Life, Vol. CLXII, No. 4176,July 14, 1977, p.114. For Malgonkar, see ‘Alice is Alive andWell’, Country Life, Vol. CLII, No. 3930, October 19, 1972, p.1011.

7

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionOrientalist, Scott, in his awareness of enclosed

Eurocentrism and of the disparity between any actual

India and western representations, resembles critics and

analysts of Orientalism, such as Edward Said, Allen

Greenberger and David Rubin. His novels dramatise ‘the

circular process – preconception, failure to alter the

preconception in the light of actual experience, and the

subsequent regeneration and dissemination of the

preconceived image’6 in which ‘data that did not fit the

existing image were most often simply ignored’.7

The response by the more conservative and insular members

of the literary establishment to novels about India

epitomises such circularity. Thus J.B. Priestley

suspects that even A Passage to India may be superfluous or

misguided, lamenting that Forster ‘did not choose to

mirror contemporary English society in that astonishingly

just and sensitive mind of his. Anglo-India is caught

here, I imagine, as it has never been caught before’.8

Priestley must imagine this since he has no experience

of, or interest in, Anglo-India, so Forster automatically

becomes the only authority. Unconcerned by India even

when Britain was administering it, such critics accepted

that Forster had, through his singular genius, contrived

a masterpiece from it and that therefore it had its uses.

His portrayal must be accurate and comprehensive because

that is the illusion created, which it would be fruitless

to question as the reality is distant and unappetising.6 David Rubin, After the Raj. British Novels of India since 1947 (Hanover andLondon: University Press of New England, 1986), p.4.7 Allen J. Greenberger, The British Image of India (OUP, 1969), p.7.8 Malcolm Bradbury, ed., E.M. Forster: A Passage to India CasebookSeries (London: Macmillan Education, 1970), p.56.

8

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionBesides, the novel is primarily ‘art’ so any historical

errors are irrelevant and become more so as time passes.

Forster’s hazy knowledge of Indian politics and society

is unimportant because Indian politics and society are

inherently unimportant. The work is thus domesticated,

read as psychological, philosophical, symbolic.

As a result of this attitude Scott felt obliged, in his

1968 Royal Society of Literature lecture, to clear a

space for his novels in literary ground which ‘bears

permanent impressions of [Forster’s] footprints’,9

acknowledging that ‘to plant your own there is to invite

comparison’.10 In private correspondence he was more

heated: ‘As a novelist you find yourself contending with

the people who wrote about India 40 years ago ... I’ve

had to fight ... the awful literary-academic fixation on

Kipling and Forster.’11

Scott has indeed been dismissed as another unnecessary

writer about India, a pale imitation of Forster.

Literary academics usually discuss The Raj Quartet, if at

all, not as the logical climax of Scott’s career nor as a

novel reflecting his main literary influences, Conrad and

T. S. Eliot, but in a geographically defined context, an

Anglo-Indian ghetto outside the mainstream of British

fiction, following Kipling, whom Scott confessed – or

boasted – he had never been able to read,12 and A Passage to

9 Paul Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, Essays by DiversHands, XXXVI (1970), p.113.10 Ibid., p.11311 Quoted in Robin Moore, Paul Scott’s Raj (London: Heinemann, 1990),p.121.12 ‘Complete Men’, Country Life, Vol. CXLI, No. 3663, May 18, 1967,p.1269.

9

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionIndia, which by 1968 he had only read three times,13 or

beside such divers contemporaries as Prawer Jhabvala,

Masters and Godden.

George Woodcock, for example, ostensibly recognises

Scott’s difference from most writing about the Raj, which

‘tended to be descriptive and didactic rather than

formally experimental’,14 but nevertheless, considers

Scott alongside masters. While he prefers the former

this apparently ‘does not imply a derogation of masters’

achievement: his seven novels are a remarkable fictional

record of the British past in India, but they are written

with a different purpose from Scott’s’.15 Such largesse

is, however, an implicit derogation of Scott’s

achievement for his novels are surely not comparable with

Masters’: there is much more than a difference of purpose

between them; there is an unbridgeable gulf in talent,

or, as James would have it, in execution.

Ironically Scott’s very sophistication has hindered his

acceptance into a tradition in which ‘formal

experimentation’ counts for little. Critics with an

existing interest in Anglo-Indian writing are liable to

question ‘Scott’s repetitive technique’16 in which ‘there13 ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, p. 117.14 George Woodcock, ‘The Sometime Sahibs: Two Post-IndependenceBritish Novelists of India’, Queen’s Quarterly, 86 (1979), pp.39-40. 15 Ibid.16 S.P. Appasamy, ‘The Withdrawal: A Survey of Paul Scott’sTrilogy of Novels on India’, in Literary Studies: Homage to Dr A.Sivaramasubramonia Aiyer, ed. K.P.K. Menon et al. (Trivendrum: StJoseph’s Press, 1973), p.69. See also Arthur Pollard’scomplaints of ‘tedious repetition’, ‘Twilight of Empire: PaulScott’s Raj Quartet’ in Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature,ed. Daniel Massa (Msida: University of Malta, 1978), p.171.

10

Chapter OneIdea and Executionis no rapid development of the plot, but a deliberate

going over and over again old incidents and places and

people’.17 In fact, there is a controlled, realistic

balance in The Raj Quartet between very rapid, often violent,

developments – the attacks on Miss Crane and Daphne, the

deaths of Teddie, Mabel, Merrick and Ahmed, John Layton’s

release etc. – and the discussion of these ‘old incidents

and places and people’ which reveal the tellers’ and

listeners’ distorting perspectives.

Anglo-Indian fiction is defined by a neat separation of

form from content and the assumed dominance of the

latter. Any such categories could be invented with

equally absurd results: Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, say,

could be read alongside Godden’s The Greengage Summer,

having first noted that most English novels set in France

tend to be descriptive and didactic rather than formally

experimental, as if we did not know that at least ninety

per cent of all fiction has such a tendency, and that

there is no necessary dichotomy between didactic

description and formal experimentation. If the greater

socio-political importance of the Raj seems to justify an

Anglo-Indian category, ‘interminable confusions and

cross-purposes’ remain, to which James’ insistence on

execution alone is no adequate answer.

The difficulty stems from the failure to relate or

reunite the distinct academic disciplines of literature

and history. This division has plagued interpretations

of Scott since the Times’ review of Johnnie Sahib: ‘ a fast-

17 Appasamy, ibid.

11

Chapter OneIdea and Executionmoving tale which blends the integrity of a good

documentary with other qualities more pertinent to the

art of fiction’.18 the daunting challenge is to formulate

a comprehensive and coherent response to this blend,

while accepting that documentary integrity has been

pertinent to fiction since the rise of the novel in the

18th Century, if not before.

In the absence of such a response the field of Scott

studies has been largely left open to historians,

encouraged and typified by Max Beloff’s enthusiastic

response to The Raj Quartet, which though a fine, thoughtful

appreciation of Scott’s immense achievement by a

distinguished academic, nevertheless exhibits the

paradoxes inherent in the literary/historical divide

which so irritated Scott. Beloff initially seems to

question the traditional historian’s role as the

interpreter of Anglo-Indian relations:

The subject is one to which the historian’stechniques, however refined, may not be able todo justice. For, in the end, what was decided bygovernments depended upon their response to awhole series of pressures, some of them no doubtat least in theory identifiable and evenquantifiable, others, however, much less easy tograsp and define. What the British thought andfelt about India between 1935 and 1947 was theproduct of a great many personal experiences ofcivilians and soldiers, of businessmen andreporters, of missionaries and policemen ... Forthese reasons, the role of the novelist inexploring the relationship between the twopeoples has always been a crucial one; and novelsare an historical source that we are only nowbeginning to exploit. For the novelist has the

18 The Times, May 3, 1952, p.3.

12


freedom to present the circumstances of the case,and through his personages to evoke eitherdirectly or through symbolic reference thecomplex of feelings, physical and moral, that goto make up the experience as a whole.19

Far from conceding primacy of interpretation to the

novelist, Beloff insists that historians – his ‘we’ –

remain in authority. While the novelist is free to use

his imagination and narrative skills to evoke the

experience as a whole, it remains the historian’s duty to

interpret the novelist, not in order to understand his

mode of operation – which is a job he delegates to the

literary critic – but to compare these imaginative

evocations of the complex emotions and experiences of the

past with the historically ‘identifiable’ and

‘quantifiable’, and then add them to the available data.

Even his suggested literary critical questions are

literary historical, two of them couched in the past

tense – the third in the present arguably only because at

the time Scott was still alive – to be answered by

reference to facts about the novel’s composition and the

author’s intentions:

Was the whole design conceived as a unity fromthe beginning? Did the characters presentthemselves to the author in the round, or didthey take hold of the author’s imagination anddevelop along their own lines? Is there a versionof the events themselves that the author keeps inreserve and never wholly reveals, so that all weever get are the conflicting versions of theparticipants in them, or of those who get to know

19 Max Beloff, ‘The End of the Raj / Paul Scott’s Novels asHistory’, Encounter, May 1976, pp. 65-66.

13


about them through the gossip of a club orbazaar?20

Each answer can only be sought outside the text; literary

critics prefer to read a text – which, though it is ‘all

we ever get’, is all we usually want – to understand its

structure and strategy, its dramatisation of competing

ideas, then consider how it affects and enriches our

reading of other sources. In contrast, for Beloff, the

novel’s ‘literariness’ is a tool which can be ignored by

the literalness of the historian, rendering the text

another neutered source of information, another piece of

documentary evidence.

Beloff’s questions become Robin Moore’s agenda: Paul Scott’s

Raj examines the sources of his Indian novels, and

assesses their cogency as historical theses. It offers a

wealth of relevant, interesting material – quotes from

Scott’s reviews, notebooks, letters, and, of course, the

novels, and from innumerable other writings on India, the

letters and diaries of civil servants and soldiers, and

works by historians – but does not analyse how this

material is expressed or structured. Moore treats

language as a transparent medium that reliably conveys

the experiences and opinions of divers observers, which

added together will amount to a composite truth. Thus,

Moore rewrites the stories of Scott’s characters

chronologically in the past tense, interspersed with

accounts of real people to prove their authenticity and

relevance, fusing, for example, Merrick’s biography with

those of the actual Martin Wynne and Enoch Powell.

20 Beloff, ibid., p.66.

14

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionHis account of The Raj Quartet’s composition is symptomatic.

he explains that The Jewel in the Crown’s sequel was to have

been a single volume until Scott realised, while writing

The Day of the Scorpion, that another book was required. the

process was repeated during The Towers of Silence, giving A

Division of the Spoils. Throughout Moore implies the size of

history dictated the size of the book, that as Scott saw

how complex it all was he was forced into extending his

narrative. Though this is certainly true, it begs

important questions about how this extended narrative is

organised to operate as a finished product, an aesthetic

whole, how its different layers and perspectives interact

so finally there is, to use Kermode’s phrase, a sense of

an ending.

Any adequate appraisal of The Raj Quartet – or his other,

equally interesting, work – can begin only after studying

Scott’s development as a novelist, analysing his

persistent modes of discourse, his recurrent metaphors

and images. This would reveal that Scott’s subject and

primary concern was not consistently India or the Raj.

Only two of his first eight novels deal predominantly

with the subcontinent. While his last thirteen years

were devoted to The Raj Quartet and Staying On, he had expected

the sequence to be shorter and when it was completed,

said, ‘I have finished with India for ever. It just

needed some little valedictory thing.’21 During the

1960’s he intended extending The Bender into a sequence set

in England.22 As early as 1960 he had been depressed by

the oriental genesis of The Birds of Paradise because he had21 Quoted in Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India (London: The

Macmillan Press, 1980), p. x.

15

Chapter OneIdea and Executionwanted to write a novel set in Spain, not ‘in the Far

East again’.23

A chronological summary of his writing shows how Scott’s

creative response to India as scene, metaphor and

inspiration, developed from a vivid but limited wartime

immersion, through a decade of intermittent reminiscence,

to extensive historical research. ‘Pillars of Salt’

(published in 1947 in Four Jewish Plays – though Scott had

fewer Jewish connections than Indian) is set in an

abstract border town. The plot is cliché, the characters

stock: two brothers hoping for the big break, one in love

with the sweet girl next door; the caring aunt who

promised their dying mother she would look after them;

the Jewish refugee whom they must choose to help or

betray to the well-mannered Nazi who can get the brothers

passports to the land of opportunity. The dialogue, in

an unconvincing American idiom, resembles something a

computer might produce if fed an unremitting diet of

Clifford Odets. Scott’s wife was then not saying much

when she told him a radio play, ‘Lines of Communication’,

composed on his return from service in Burma and India,

was the best thing he had written. He realised it was

‘only a preliminary skirmish round a subject for a

novel’.24 This was Johnnie Sahib (1952), a generic war story

which introduces themes explored in his mature fiction

but only indirectly addresses imperialism. Another radio

play offshoot, The Alien Sky (1953), is a violent melodrama

22 See Hilary Spurling, Paul Scott, A Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990),p.262.

23 My Appointment with the Muse, p.13.24 Ibid., p.162.

16

Chapter OneIdea and Executionof adultery and mixed blood which exploits the drama of

Indian Independence rather than treating it seriously.

After its deficiencies, at least A Male Child (1956), set in

post-war London, has the virtue of authenticity.

However, its characters – publishers, writers, relatives

of writers – render it writing about writing; not, in

Shlovsky’s phrase, ‘literature without subject-matter’,

but literature searching for subject-matter, discontented

with what is on immediate offer. As if to escape its

drab introspection, Scott returned to the oriental war

genre for The Mark of the Warrior (1958). The Chinese Love Pavilion

(1960), though more ambitious, is also a military

adventure set mainly in Malaysia. The Birds of Paradise

(1962), Scott’s first serious Raj novel, is self-

consciously symbolist, more concerned with psychology

than political history, its India an unfocused romantic

backdrop. The Bender (1963) is a satiric, cynical, panorama

of London. The mainly Spanish Corrida at San Feliu (1964)

comprises fragments left after a writer’s mysterious

death. Had Scott himself died at this point he could not

have been described as pre-occupied by the Raj.

A brief trip to India in 1964, his first for eighteen

years, was the stimulus for The Raj Quartet. While Johnnie

Sahib was autobiographical, a dictation from and

amplification of sharp memory, the experience that

inspired The Raj Quartet – his visit to an Indian village

where he became uncomfortably aware of his latent racism

– was meditated on the mediated through a text which is

not an evocation but an extended metaphor of experience,

laboriously researched at his English desk. Its India is

17

Chapter OneIdea and Executionread more than remembered – an absent turbulent political

landscape reconstructed on the tranquillity of the page.

This has an important bearing on its structure, method,

and ideology, which goes far beyond the ‘objective and

intellectual stand’ which Zahir Jang Kattak has

attributed to Scott’s relatively short stay in India.25

The salutary effect the initial shock of military service

had on him should not, however, be underestimated. As he

explains in ‘After Marabar: Britain and India, a Post-

Forsterian View’ (a revision of his Royal Society

Lecture),

In my ignorance of the place, the people, thehistory, I was representative … of many of mycountrymen who in the main had for years beenunder the misapprehension that the upmost pointattainable – ultimate truth – lay midway betweenDover and Calais, and that everything else wasbad news.26

Many of Scott’s novels chart the transition from such insular

misapprehension to enriching experience. Jim Taylor in Johnnie

Sahib, Tom Brent in The Chinese Love Pavilion, Daphne Manners in The

Jewel in the Crown, come to India as unprepared as Scott was.

Bombay ‘took young Brent by the scruff of his neck and rubbed

his face in its own dirt as if to make sure the boy and

rubbed his face in its own dirt as if to make sure the boy

would be given a sharp lesson in reality’.27 The prototypical

Anglo-Indian lesson in reality novel, A Passage to India, is cited

25 ‘British Novelists Writing about India-Pakistan’s Independence’,Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Tuft’s University, 1987, p.2.26 My Appointment with the Muse, p.2027 Paul Scott, The Chinese Love Pavilion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode,1960), p.22.

18

Chapter OneIdea and Executionover a personal rite of passage, a twenty-first birthday

party which ‘confused the celebration of a man’s majority

with that of his last night of bachelordom’.28 Forster’s

novel, which also homologises sexuality/repression with

maturity/insularity, is an implicit intertext of The Jewel in the

Crown, emphasising Daphne’s responsibility and resilience in

contrast to naïve, virginal Adela: Daphne knew at least the

‘ultimate truth’ of Dover-Calais – had driven ambulances, had

had two lovers – which makes her disconcerting discovery of

India more telling.

That Jim, Tom and Daphne are partly projections of their

author is implied by Scott’s admission in ‘After Marabar’

that his own feelings animate his characters:

I think [my initial affections for India] werearoused more strongly than I had time torecognise because about fourteen years ago Iwrote [a] passage [in The Mark of The Warrior]describing a young soldier’s reaction to hisfirst Indian billet and I don’t think I couldhave written it, after the event, if I had not,however subconsciously, felt it at the time.29

Such authorial self-discovery, or self-deception, in which

the writer realises or imagines facets of his personality

otherwise hidden, retrospectively deducing subconscious

thoughts from the evidence of his text as if he were his own

reductive psychoanalytic critic tracing emotions recreated in

the novel back to what he necessarily felt at the time, need

not, however, be a retreat into a half-forgotten past but an

advance beyond his own experience.

28 Ibid., p.2629 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.22.

19


An Indian critic…complimented me on getting allsorts of different people right – a memsahib, asahib, an Indian politician… I decided that I hadnot really been very clever…I realised that…I’vealways asked myself ‘In this man’s or woman’sposition what would I feel?’ and the most usefulanswer has always been… ‘Perhaps what I wouldfeel myself.’30

If Scott should have asked, ‘In this man’s or woman’s

position what would he or she feel?’, his slip reveals the

contradictions in his epistemology that lead ineluctably to

tautology: a consciousness can only understand duplications

of itself and interpret others in terms of itself.

To articulate this modest egocentricity in The Raj Quartet Scott

chose Emerson’s transcendentalism, the apotheosis of the

liberal humanist assumption that humanity shares a stable

definable world which can be contained and conveyed in

realist narratives:

There is one mind common to all individual men.Every man is an inlet to the same and to all ofthe same…What Plato had thought, he may think;what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at anytime has befallen any man, he can understand.31

An individual’s potential is realised by projection into

other minds, most easily by reading: as Georges Poulet

observes, when one reads he (or at least the part of his mind

decoding the text) is thinking the thoughts of another.32

This is the narrative logic of The Jewel in the Crown, of a writing

process which was also a process of reading and research.30 Ibid., p.12731 Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oxford Authors (OUP,1990), p. 114.32 Georges Poulet ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, in Contemporary LiteraryCriticism, ed. with introduction by Robert Con Davis (New York:Longman, 1986), pp. 350-55.

20

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionVisiting the places Daphne did, even lying in the same bath,

‘One remembers and, having soaped, stands and scoops…and

attempts a re-enactment of Miss Manners refreshing herself.’33

the present tense conjures her emotions in narrator and

reader simultaneously; the indefinite ‘one’ (given,

occasionally, as the equally inclusive ‘the stranger’)

creates a void to be filled by the reading consciousness.

Similarly, the narrator/stranger/reader hears Sister Ludmila

narrating Hari’s past which all can experience: ‘I have… this

recollection, not my own but Kumar’s. From Kumar I have

inherited it. And feel almost as if I had been there. Am

there… In Kumar’s body.’34

Fiction exerts emotive and moral force as readers identify

with divers characters and consequently develop broadened

perspectives and greater tolerance. Scott often quoted

Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination on the novel’s efficacy:

Its unremitting work of involving the readerhimself in the moral life, inviting him to puthis own motives under examination, suggestingthat reality is not as his conventional educationhas led him to see it.35

Recognising the obligation to question one’s morality and to

understand other cultures, Scott also knew the perceiving

consciousness appropriates, distorts, even destroys, the

alien for its own needs. The Birds of Paradise ends with a

quotation from Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago,

lamenting that,

33 Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (London: Heinemann, 1966)34 Ibid., p.261.35 Quoted in My Appointment with the Muse, p. 75 and p. 136. Scott’ssource was Walter Allen, The English Novel, (Harmondsworth, Pelican,1958), p.14.

21


Should civilised man ever reach these distantlands, and bring moral, intellectual, andphysical light into the recesses of these virginforests, we may be sure that he will so disturbthe nicely balanced relations of organic andinorganic nature, as to cause… the extinction, ofthese very beings whose wonderful structure andbeauty he alone is fitted to appreciate andenjoy. This consideration must surely tell usthat all living things were not made for men.36

Even Scott’s own instant affection for India revealed in

Ramsay’s reaction to his billet – ‘He became aware of a scent

in which there was mixed… the tang of earth he had not

touched; and… the breath of men he had not met, and his blood

stirred’37 – could be considered an insidious imperialism, his

use of foreign earth and people for his literary ends

analogous to the preceding political and economic

exploitation which facilitated it. Stirring blood is as

dubiously populist in fiction as in politics. In dull,

domestic, A Male Child, irony cannot disguise Scott’s longing

for colonial excitement rather than –

‘…training to be an accountant.’‘Well, they say it’s a safe occupation.’‘Oh yes. Safe enough.’…’Or,’ I suggested, ‘you could do something likeplanting tea.’ … I saw that he did not knowwhether I was laughing at him or not. I had beenquite serious.…’Actually I’d thought of it.’And then the walls of the room fell away and thewings of adventure shook with a tremor ofexcitement.38

36 Paul Scott, The Birds of Paradise (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962),pp.263-64.37 Paul Scott, The Mark of the Warrior (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode,1958), p.23; quoted in My Appointment with the Muse, p.120.38 Paul Scott, A Male Child (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956), p. 41.

22

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionScott, feeling as restricted as David, who complains ‘There’s

no scope for a man anymore. We’ve won the war and lost the

Empire’39, protested that ‘to write in a major way about

Britain today is not so easily done’,40 and so turned to the

end of the Empire for his major work.

[Sarah Layton] had dreams sometimes… of herselfin sunshine in Pankot… everything in England wason a miniature scale. She thought this had aneffect on the people who lived there always.[They] seemed to Sarah to lack a dimension thatthe others didn’t lack. Lacking this dimensionwas what Sarah supposed came of living on a tinyisland.41

So the inter-racial, inter-cultural epic, prescribing

extension of self beyond Dover-Calais insularity but aware

that the individual may be dreaming, not understanding the

Other but imposing a selfish interpretation upon it, that the

epistemological object is always beyond reach, there is only

the phenomenology of reading, the illusion of presence, the

hope of a communicable moral continuum.

Recognising that any actual India cannot be presented purely,

only represented personally, Scott’s work necessarily repeats

the process it depicts, the actual represented by differing

voices, each expressing their views of life, their need to

conform to or differ from social preconceptions, and is

essentially and inescapably autobiographical or egocentric:

‘The last days of the British Raj are the metaphor I have

presently chosen to illustrate my view of life.’42 Guy

Perron’s musings on British imperialism could equally

39 Ibid., p.189 40 My Appointment with the Muse, p.29.41 Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion (London, Heinemann, 1968), p.7642 My Appointment with the Muse, p.115.

23

Chapter OneIdea and Executiondescribe the author who wrote one of the world’s largest

novels, broadening his mind and his readers’ while locked

alone in his study:

The most insular people in the world managed toestablish the largest empire the world has everseen… Insularity, like empire-building, requiressuperb self-confidence, a conviction of one’smoral superiority.43

Nevertheless, one can become morally superior to one’s former

self by recognising another’s equality. The empire may be

redeemed into a harmonious commonwealth when those in the ex-

imperial power examine their motives and realise that reality

is not as their conventions have led them to see it, but is

complex and various. Disparity between received ideas and an

actual Orient, undermining confidence in Dover-Calais truths,

structures Scott’s fiction. Guy faces the same sense of

disjunction as Scott, Jim, Tom and Daphne:

Just as there seemed to be no connexion betweenthe India he was in and the India that was in hishead there was no connection either between paperand pencil and the page remained ominouslyblank.44

Guy, however, is not entirely innocent of cultural

imposition. Much as John Brown’s men prefer a mythical

‘Johnnie Sahib’ to the problematic, knowable man, Guy reduces

Hari Kumar to a myth (that of Philoctetes) engendered by a

classical education.45 When he visits Hari to ask if this is

indeed his nom de plume, Guy, confronted by the alien reality

of the empty dwelling, dithers about leaving his card: ‘It

43 Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils (London: Heinemann, 1975).44 Ibid., p.12.45 Ibid., p.550.

24

Chapter OneIdea and Executionseemed like a cruel intrusion…Everything about my presence

was cruel.’46 He decides to leave the card, gets out a pencil

but, as before, writes nothing.

Scott wrote the two thousand pages of The Raj Quartet, but each

is motivated and underpinned by creative doubt. He recalls

an Indian’s question during his 1969 lecture tour:

‘As an Englishman…what do you have to offer theworld today that might be of value?’… Three dayslater… I said that after mature consideration Ithought the most valuable thing I or someone likeme had to offer the world, as an Englishman, wasthe uncertainty of having anything of value toooffer at all.47

After the cruel intrusions of patronising imperialism,

uncertainty is the best response. However, it should not be

equated with a withdrawal into insular silence, a distinction

made in The Corrida at San Feliu:

A man called Biddle who was a missionary… hadstrange dreams that drove him mad. One day thedreams went and he said, ‘Thank God, now I canhave a bit of peace.’ But he was wrong. He shouldhave said: Now I can begin to make discoveries.48

‘Wrong’ here is a moral, not a factual, judgement. Biddle,

freed of his dreams of imperial mission, could enjoy

untroubled peace, but the greater challenge is to explore the

alien with uncertainty and openness, with a page ominously

blank, not to exploit, consume or judge, but to make

discoveries which will thus also be self-discoveries, not

those of privileged metalinguistic description.

46 Ibid., p.597.47 My Appointment with the Muse, p.11348 Paul Scott, The Corrida at San Feliu (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964),p.309.

25

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionMutual respect for each other’s culture is essential. Jim,

the most sympathetic character in Johnnie Sahib, responds with

openness to a sepoy’s accordion which the pretentious

Eurasian Johns condemns as a ‘bloody din’: ‘I don’t

understand it and it gets monotonous – but I like it, yes.’49

Daphne feels a similar instinctive attraction, like Ramsay’s

stirring of the blood, while listening to an evening raga

which ‘savagely irritated’ Hari, who had brought the record

in a misguided attempt to alienate her.50 As the Eurasian or

Westernised Indian denigration of native culture in favour of

the colonial power is criticised, so is Brent’s corresponding

contempt for the English:

I had everything [some Indians] most wanted inthe way of background and education. I wasEnglish… I was the raj, the elusive father image,and I insulted them by counting it all cheap whencircumstances caused them to hold it dear.51

The quest for cross-cultural communion is undercut by a fear

that Emerson’s one mind common to all will promote repressive

homogeneity, not enriching diversity, reflecting the socio-

political dialectic of the increasingly multi-racial Britain

developing during Scott’s career, in which, to his

consternation, white fears of being swamped battled with the

value and convenience of exploitable immigrant labour and

cuisine.

Margaret Scanlon has discussed the psychological and

metafictive implications of The Raj Quartet’s pessimistic

interpretation of Emerson: identification with an other may

lead to the loss of individual identity. Barbie, for49 Paul Scott, Johnnie Sahib (London: Heinemann, 1966), p.55.50 The Jewel in the Crown, pp. 392-93.51 The Chinese Love Pavilion, pp.26-27.

26

Chapter OneIdea and Executionexample, is confined to an asylum where the nurse calls her

‘Edwina… or are we Barbie today?’52 This concern over the

vulnerability of the individual’s sense of self pervades the

earlier fiction too, through the curious recurrence of dead

siblings. Encountered briefly in Johnnie Sahib with the

serjeant whose brother died in Burma, assuming crucial

importance in The Alien Sky with MacKendrick’s obsession with his

dead brother, mirrored by Dorothy’s assumption of her dead

sister’s identity, the motif dominates A Male Child as Ian feels

obliged to replace Alan’s dead brother Edward. In The Mark of

the Warrior it is a device enabling Major Craig to re-enact

through Bob Ramsay the incidents leading to his brother John

Ramsay’s death, much as Reid attempts to turn Sutton into a

worthy replacement for the dead Ballister in The Chinese Love

Pavilion.

Obsessive re-enactment and re-placement, complemented in the

later novels by re-telling, is Scott’s persistent plot

mechanism; originating in the Major’s ‘absurd’ reaction to

Jim: ‘He’s a bit like Johnnie’,53 continuing through Mrs

Hurst’s seeing Ian as her dead son Edward, and exemplified by

Merrick’s reaction to Sarah and Ahmed:

I think subconsciously he’d impressed me as aman of Hari Kumar’s type… yet… Kasim bears nomore resemblance to Kumar that you [Sarah] do toMiss Manners… there was some sort of fantasy inmy mind of Hari and Daphne being about to cometogether again.54

52 Margaret Scanlon, ‘The Disappearance of History: Paul Scott’s TheRaj Quartet’, CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 15(2)(Winter 1986), p.163; originally Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence(London: Heinemann, 1971), pp.387-88.53 Johnnie Sahib, p.81.54 The Day of the Scorpion, p.216.

27

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionJim Taylor asks himself, ‘What would Johnnie do now? Then he

pulled himself together. He wasn’t Johnnie.’55 Ian Canning

wonders, ‘Edward’s intention? Was his intention to become my

duty?’56 While Jim is literally Johnnie’s deputy, Ian is

unemployed and has no tangible relationship to Edward, except

that created by Mrs Hurst’s psychosis. While Merrick admits

his substitution fantasy is Pavlovian, awful and mistaken,57

there is enough substantial realism in The Raj Quartet to offset

and sustain it. In A Male Child the here and now have all but

ceased to matter: most of the characters feel trapped in

unfulfilling jobs, the narrator considers suicide, while Rex

Coles thinks – and some readers might be forgiven for ageing

– that it would be a good thing if the bomb was dropped and

killed them all. As Patrick Swinden points out,

Scott [would] make more subtle and moreconsistently powerful use of this device ofsubstitution… in The Birds of Paradise, The Corrida at SanFeliu, and, most brilliantly of all, in The Quartet.There it becomes a remarkably subtle method oflinking narratives at a level far beneath thecrude patternings of the plot. In A Male Child,though, the substitution is the plot.58

However, Swinden does not connect substitution with the

recurrence of sibling relationships, but views the latter as

a quite separate and obsessive psychological theme:

the perverse often sadistic relationships whichcan develop between… brothers. Sometimes theblood relationship… is not so close, and in themost deeply explored example – Ronald Merrick’srelationship with Hari Kumar… - it is absent

55 Johnnie Sahib, p.54.56 A Male Child, p.8157 The Day of the Scorpion, p.21658 Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India (London: The MacmillanPress, 1980), pp. 29-30.

28


altogether. Scott shows no interest in anycomplementary relationship between sisters…59

If there is no blood relationship in the most deeply explored

example then sadism must be the theme; that it may exist

between brothers is accidental. the importance of brothers

and sisters – Sarah and Susan are central to The Raj Quartet – is

as a source of surrogation narratives. It is irrelevant that

‘[h]e knows he’s only a sort of substitute and I think he

sees that everything I feel for him is because he’s like

Johnnie in so many ways’60 refers to a friend of Johnnie’s,

while ‘[you’d always be thinking of Dwight. It’d never be

me’61 is spoken by MacKendrick to his dead brother’s lover who

admits that Dorothy was her white half-sister’s name while

hers is Amanda which she used to shorten to Daw, which became

D-o-r, or short for Dorothy.62 Eurasian, like Johns, she

foreshadows Hari, who, neither fully Indian nor English,

embodies the two nations,

locked in an imperial embrace of such longstanding and subtlety that it was no longerpossible to know… what it was that held themtogether and seemed to have confused the image oftheir separate destinies.63

What has confused them is the imperial embrace itself and

their consequent need to define themselves in relation to the

alien, familiar other. Amanda loses her intrinsic identity

as she assumes Dorothy’s; Jim asserts his by proving his

difference from Johnnie; Teena Chang in The Chinese Love Pavilion is

59 Ibid., pp.21-22.60 Johnnie Sahib, p.22361 Paul Scott, The Alien Sky (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953), p.279.62 Ibid., p.202.63 The Jewel in the Crown, p.1

29

Chapter OneIdea and Executionhalf Occidental, half Oriental, but denied individuality by

her literal prostitution to military occupation. Hari Kumar

and Ahmed Kasim suffer analogous erasure so that the MCO’s

chilling dismissal of the latter’s death in the most

grotesque denial of individual rights, a communal massacre,

‘What is one man among so many?’64 is also a metaphor for

Scott’s central ontological question: how is an individual

identity related to the social?

Any sense of self nurtured by stable familial, particularly

filial, relationships is further undermined by colonialism,

as children at English boarding schools are separated from

parents who are separated, too, he on the plains, she in the

hills. While Kipling is the emotional chronicler of such

necessities, they attract Scott as ready-made modernist

plots. Edward Said’s generalisations – that ‘Childless

couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and

unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of

high modernism with remarkable insistence’65 – apply. The

Major feels isolated, dissatisfied with the impermanence of a

military career in which his experience ‘had never been

canalised, never brought to fruition’.66 Others in Johnnie

Sahib are equally rootless, as are the childless Gowers in The

Alien Sky, Ian in A Male Child (which features two abortions and a

faked pregnancy), Tom in The Chinese Love Pavilion, and Conway

seeking Indian roots in The Birds of Paradise, partly because of

his estrangement from his son. The Bender’s George Spruce,

whose niece attempts an abortion, is sterile. the orphaned

Edward Thornhill in The Corrida at San Feliu has no children.64 A Division of the Spoils, p.585.65 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber & Faber,1984), p.17.66 Johnnie Sahib, p.186.

30

Chapter OneIdea and ExecutionDaphne and Hari are orphans too, as, effectively, is their

child Parvati. Barbie is celibate, Lucy and Tusker

childless. Though the Layton’s are a traditional family

unit, separation, abortion and bereavement dominate, while

Susan and Sarah represent antithetical alternatives to the

definition of self.

Constructing her identity from her understanding of others’

behaviour and expectations, Susan tries to fill the vacuum of

her self by reminding herself of a social type she

recognises, drawing herself, ‘drawing and redrawing,

attempting that combination of shape and form which by

fitting perfectly into its environment would not attract the

hands of the erasers’.67 In contrast, Susan seeks to establish

her uniqueness, retorting to Major Clark’s ‘You’re quite a

girl, Sarah Layton’, with ‘I’m not quite a girl. I’m this

one’, so forcing his ‘recognition of her as a person and not

a type’.68

Scott dramatises this conflict of person and type in which

the individual must define self within a given structure of

language and socio-political expectation. The easiest way

out is Susan’s surrender to the herd instinct, her unthinking

assumption of the surrounding, protecting society’s values,

much as Scott attempted to suppress his homosexuality, and

fit the traditional pattern of marriage with two children.

The pressures of imperialism on rulers and ruled offer a

perfect extended metaphor of this, while his conflation of

imperialism and insularity as symptoms of British ‘supreme

67 A Division of the Spoils, p.133.68 The Day of the Scorpion, p. 17.

31

Chapter OneIdea and Executionself-confidence’ is used to question any confidence in Dover-

Calais truth, morality or a stable identity.

In Scott’s bleakest interpretation of Emerson, William

Conway, alienated by consumerism, reflects on the

impossibility of being, in Sarah’s full sense, a person.

Anyone can think what Plato thought but no-one can have an

original or unique thought:

There wasn’t a square inch of earth that hadn’tbeen discovered, trampled on, littered withcigarette ends… not a social or political conceptthat hadn’t been tried, tested and discredited,not an idea that hadn’t been had before and beenapplied and been disowned; not an instinct thathadn’t been written up by Freud and Jung… It hadall been done. The moulds were cast. They onlyhad to be serviced, filled with molten sub-standard iron of inherited good intentions andupended to produce little tombstones of inferior,repeat performances.69

Hence re-enactment, surrogation techniques and, in The Mark of

the Warrior, Ramsay’s desire to be alone, a free individual in

harmony with an Edenic nature which is symbolised in later

novels by Saxby’s plants, the birds of paradise which are

nevertheless killed for financial gain, the bulls which are

slaughtered for the sake of art, ‘The hawk outpacing the

cheetah…The girl running with the deer’,70 and the Smalley’s

flourishing garden at the Lodge.

Nevertheless, Ramsay knows that such an isolated self is

illusory; people are social and ‘fight each other in

patterns’;71 so too in Johnnie Sahib where, as I will discuss in

my next chapter, Johnnie fails to fit into Baxter’s pattern69 The Birds of Paradise, p.193.70 A Division of the Spoils, p.598.71 The Mark of the Warrior, p. 197.

32

Chapter OneIdea and Executionand is, to use A Division of the Spoils’ metaphor, ‘erased’, while

Ram, Dass and Nimu, unable to speak of their feelings for

Johnnie in the defining military context, offer paradigms of

each character’s attempt to articulate his or her own

individual meaning and values in a language that is give,

other, a socially predetermined pattern. All are ‘left with

the taste of formality in their mouths’.72

72 Johnnie Sahib, p. 60.

33

Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky

Chapter Two

Johnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky

The oxymoronic resonance of proletarian ‘Johnnie’ and

glamorously imperious ‘Sahib’ is so reminiscent of Lord Jim

that it is difficult to believe it was not an influence. It

encapsulates Johnnie’s, and Jim’s, belief that a man can

better himself and others by rising to a position of power

and respect through imperialism. Though their narrative

strategies are opposite, both novels undermine the initial

attraction of their titles by revealing the paradoxes

motivating them.

Jim’s duality is stated at the outset: among his own race he

is ‘just Jim – nothing more’;73 in the imperial context, he is

ennobled: ‘the Malays of the jungle village… called him Tuan

Jim: as one might say – Lord Jim’.74 The schism is dramatised

generically by the realism of the Patna incident followed by

the romance of his jungle life, as the spatio-temporal

division between the white men of the wharves and the Malays

of the jungle is maintained until Gentleman Brown crosses it,

and, as a consequence, Jim is killed.

73 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, with introduction and notes by CedricWatts (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 46.74 Ibid.

34


In Johnnie Sahib Britons and sepoys share time and space in an

air supply company advancing through Burma. ‘Johnnie Sahib’

is constructed in the enclosed dialect of a coterie of VCOs,

but deconstructed in the larger company’s surrounding,

through excluding language as ‘Captain Brown Sahib’, plain

‘Johnnie’ and ‘John brown, Capt.’ signed on a letter to the

dead Jan Mohammed.

Establishing degrees of formality as well as rank, forms of

address are crucial in a novel concerned, as all Scott’s

fiction is, with the creation and maintenance of social

patterns. The Major tells Jim Taylor, ‘Just call me “Major”,

all the other disrespectful dopes do’,75 foreshadowing the

difficulties when subordination into RAMO’s stricter

discipline makes such informality unacceptable. Though aware

of the absurdity of insisting on an alien formality which

will destroy the relaxed company spirit, the Major must then

demand a ‘Sir’ from Johnnie.76 Jim, a newcomer and so alien

himself, uses neither ‘Sir’ nor ‘Major’ when asking to handle

the ammunition, until asked ‘Are you a Bolshie?’ when he

finds “Sir” relieved the tension that had come’.77

Sepoys use ‘Sir’ when addressing a Briton in English; in Urdu

they use ‘Sahib’. Britons use ‘Sahib’ to address Indian

officers. When on Briton is discussing another with a sepoy,

‘sahib’ is affixed to rank or surname. When sepoys are

discussing a Briton amongst themselves, ‘Sahib’ is used in

the same way. These rules are broken, however, by the VCOs

Ram, Dass and Nimu concerning Captain Brown, producing a

title ‘Johnnie Sahib’, that does not designate a character

75 Johnnie Sahib, p.42.76 Ibid., p. 98.77 Ibid., p. 71.

35


but more an attitude of certain sepoys and an unfulfilled,

unattainable ideal of friendship between ruler and ruled.

The VCOs are introduced by a rare narratorial gloss,

suggesting their anomalousness as far as British soldiers or

readers are concerned: ‘There was no exact British equivalent

of the Indian Army rank of Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer.

The men who held such commissions guarded their traditions

and privileges jealously’.78 The following free indirect

speech reveals one of these privileges is to call Captain

Brown, ‘Johnnie Sahib’: ‘The feud between himself [Ram] and

Nimu… was… a battle in the use of the English idiom; most

enjoyed when Johnnie Sahib was there to hear.’79 The

diminutive is an English idiom in that all British Officers

and the narrator call Captain Brown, ‘Johnnie’. Richly

ironic then that Ram and Nimu most enjoy competing when

Johnnie can hear but cannot, due to military decorum, call

him ‘Johnnie Sahib’ in his hearing. This privilege is

‘guarded’, shared only with fellow VCOs. Dass drops even the

‘Sahib’:

…if the life he had promised had turned outdifferently, if, instead of flying, you workedmore like a coolie, at least the spirit of thepromise was still alive, because Johnnie made itstay alive with his look of caring about you,with the comradeship that was never too familiar,but familiar in the right way, at the right time,so that your own integrity and statureremained.80

Faith in the unfulfilled promise of liberal imperialism – of

fellowship between natives and caring administrators who

78 Ibid., p. 71.79 Ibid., p. 17.80 Ibid., p. 19.

36


respect their dignity and cultural integrity while leading

them towards the supposedly greater achievements of western

materialism, symbolised here by flying – lingers because of

Johnnie’s commitment, ‘with you, beside you, stripped to the

waist, sweating and dirty’:81 an equality in manual labour

when both parties are willing to get dirty which anticipates

Brent’s heaving coal in The Chinese Love Pavilion (‘You have the

face of a Sahib… but then in your heart you heave coal.’82)

and the positive dirt imagery in The Raj Quartet.83

The illusion of equality cannot be maintained, just as

‘Johnnie Sahib’ cannot be uttered: both are denied by the

assumed racial superiority behind imperialism. Dass is first

to doubt: ‘Johnnie Sahib is tired of us… He will become big

officer Sahib and we shall be forgotten’.84 This is doubly

ironic for while Johnnie’s commitment to his section finally

causes his leaving, Dass’s cynicism shows a deeper

understanding of the power structure which separates a white

officer from his men, and suggests the indifference of

officials in Britain to their colonies’ subjects.

Dass’s uncertainty is anticipated in a dialogue between

Johnnie and Nimu:

‘I’m not leaving Nimu. Not if I can help it anyway.’ ‘This is what I thought.’

‘Do the men think I am going then?’ ‘Not exactly Sir. It is just that everyone is unsettled. We should be back in Comitarla, working as in the

81 Ibid.82 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p. 43.83 See Francine S. Weinbaum, ‘Psychological defenses and thwartedunion in The Raj Quartet’, Literature and Psychology, 31(2) (1981), pp. 75-87.84 Johnnie Sahib, p. 172.

37


old days Sir.’… ‘Nimu, if you hear any of the men or NCOs saying that I’m goingor any bloody fool nonsense like that you can tell ‘em I’m staying. You can tell them too thatthe Captain Sahib isn’t just a fair weather friend either.’ ‘Fair weather friend? What is themeaning of this?’85

Nimu’s failure to understand signals the absurdity of

Johnnie’s assurances. He is a captain, subject to army

discipline which may oblige him to leave his section at any

time, but also in a position of power over his men which

precludes the expression of true friendship – the use of

‘Johnnie’ instead of ‘the Captain Sahib’ here for example.

Name and personal identity are subservient to rank. While

the origin of ‘Sahib’, the Arabic ‘Cahib’, meant friend ‘in

the old days’, it has been corrupted by imperialism, both

Mogul and British, into a euphemism which fails to mask the

reality of military domination. Nimu’s nostalgia for

Comitarla is understandable, but pathetic. After all, the

move to Prulli represents a military victory, the success of

their work at Comitarla.

Johnnie attempts to dispel the men’s suspicions in a game of

football. However he finds the spirit gone because it had

been based on a wilful ignorance of the true racial

subjugation which becomes revealed in play, anticipating The

Birds of Paradise where ‘The game was electrified by our freed

personalities. The conflict… came closer to the surface. In

the game we were enemies’86 and Merrick’s conscious acting out

of the situation with Hari. In a symbolic enactment of

conquest, native skill is overpowered:

85 Ibid., pp. 131-32.86 The Birds of Paradise, p.87

38


Dass dribbled … expertly … [Johnnie] bargedagainst his shoulder and tapped the ball gentlyfrom Dass’s feet … He … shouted suddenly, ‘Comeon one of you! Win it! ... Don’t let me have itall the time!’ He kicked the ball high over theirheads and let them run for it. Watching themscrambling he thought, ‘They do it to please me.’… He was conscious of his power and of the factthat they were black and he was white. It hadnever been so before and in his anger he foundhimself cheering derisively whenever one of themfluffed the ball. Suddenly he turned away andleft them. It wasn’t the men’s fault so much,nor Taylor’s; nor the Major’s. His own, surely,was the greatest? The Major’s words had come trueonly because he had let himself be afraid… Of histrue self he had allowed but little to remain.To alter that would be to prove the Major wrong.One man of spirit could save what needed to besaved.87

Teasing, jeering, kicking the ball for them to chase, much as

he might exercise a dog, Johnnie realises his contempt for

his men, diminishing their stature and his own: he can no

longer believe himself their ideal comrade and leader, hence

his anger. Still an egotist he blames himself, retaining his

faith in individual responsibility, his naively Victorian

conviction that an individual determines his own actions and

can control his environment, though this necessarily obliges

him to question his own integrity and identity. It is

because he became afraid that he lost the ideal relationship

with Section Three. By allowing his ‘true self’ to be all

but obliterated by the compromise alien discipline demands,

he, through his own weakness, let the Major’s words come true.

This alludes to an earlier dialogue:

87 Johnnie Sahib, p.32. Note that the last three sentences weredeleted by Scott from the 1968 edition published by Heinemann, alongwith other passages totalling more than seven pages.

39


‘Scottie … can look at a map and see all sorts ofthings about lines of communication. He seesroads and railways, towns and villages, allconnecting up, but he sees ‘em as ways of liftingsupplies from one place to another. I see ‘em asplaces I’ve been or haven’t been. I see a placeand remember… what happened to one of the mensay… It’s the men. What they do and what theythink.’ He seemed at a loss how to go on.

‘What thenJohnnie?’ ‘You’re changing all that, changing thatoutlook.’… ‘…It changes itselfJohnnie.’ ‘I don’tagree.’ Again he hesitated. ‘It couldn’t changeby itself.’88

While unemotional, practical Scottie views a map with a

vision of future action, ways of lifting supplies, Johnnie,

the voice of nostalgic, inflexible conservatism, remembers

and is ‘at a loss how to go on’. While implying he has no

future, this primarily illustrates his inability to

communicate his feelings of fellowship with his men. the

tragic paradox of the novel, that a feeling of communion

cannot be communicated within the rigid formality of military

decorum, ultimately destroys that communion. As Johnnie’s

intangible expression and extension of his self through his

section is lost, so is his sense of identity.

His personal investment in imperialism was determined by his

pre-war experiences:

I didn’t get much of a kick out of what I wasdoing… I was stuck in an office. Started as anoffice boy when I was thirteen and I don’t kidmyself I’m going to go from office boy tomanaging director.89

88 Ibid., p.111.89 Ibid., p.110.

40


He relishes the army where he is respected by those he

commands. Their respect is equally egocentric: to admit you

are subjugated by a white imperialist requires an initial

realisation of inferiority which is equivalent to an act of

self-degradation; to pretend you are working together in a

partnership with Johnnie Sahib requires nothing more

disturbing than mass self-deception. Johnnie engineers this

respect astutely:

He had come along the ranks, and as he approachedyou were afraid he would pass you by, and that,in a way, would be a matter for shame. Then hehad stood in front of you and you could feel howhe measured you as a man and made his own fivefeet eight inches seem inches taller than yourown five foot nine.90

In reality the native is taller, if not superior then at

least his equal, but the theatricality of selection empowers

Johnnie to inflict the shame of rejection, and so produces

corresponding pride at selection blotting out the

unappetising truth. Both Johnnie and his men are happier to

believe in a mythic ‘Johnnie Sahib’ than to come to terms

with the true nature of Captain John Brown’s position in the

hierarchy of the British military occupation of India.

Here, then, is Scott’s first portrait of one whose status is

impressed by imperialism, who cannot imagine a life

elsewhere: a return to an office job in England would

intolerably diminish him. As his self-confidence grows in an

imperial environment, he naturally develops as concomitant to

his unconsciously smug paternalism, a faith in self-

sufficiency and responsibility. No doubt in England he would

have more readily blamed rigid class structure for his lack90 Ibid., p. 18.

41


of progress, than any paucity of talent. The Major

recognises the problem:

‘What’s going to happen to you when you lose thesection? After all, one day you’ve got to loseit.’ … ‘It’s simple.I don’t think about it because I don’t thinkabout after the war.’

‘I do. I think a hell of a lot.You’re talking balls again! Of course you thinkabout after the war. Christ! There isn’t a manout here who doesn’t.’

Johnnie said, ‘Maybe. Things’llsort themselves out.’91

The ‘Victorian’ Johnnie would have asserted ‘I will sort

things out’, for things by themselves cannot sort themselves

out. Johnnie’s unconvincing use of the Major’s structure

conveys his refusal to face post-war reality; a difficulty

Scott himself was facing as a novelist, as we shall see in

later chapters. His response could be caricatured, with some

justification, as ‘I don’t think about it because I don’t

write about after the war’.

Though the ostensive apostle of change responsible for

Johnnie’s departure, Colonel Baxter is as conservative as

Johnnie. For him air supply is a threatening change that

must be structured to fit into his preconceptions and the

established army bureaucracy and strategy.

The scenery was strange to him. he hated to feelout of place, to feel too, that practice haddisproved the theories of a lifetime and of acareer. An army advanced as far as it could besupplied through ground communication. Or didit?92

91 Ibid., p.110.92 Ibid., p. 11.

42


His discomfort is overcome by the same defence mechanism

Johnnie and Nimu turn to – memory.

In the requisitioned houses were signs that thearmy had taken over and established itself withan air of ownership, erecting signboards,festooning telephone cables through the treeswhich lined the metal road. The soldiers he sawwalking in the town were predominantly Indian,but here and there were British… The place hadsuddenly become real for him. It bore the hallmarks of an active service area and relightedalmost forgotten memories of other places, othertimes.93

A potentially metaphoric jungle is rendered harmlessly

literal, assimilated into a pre-existing pattern of

experience. Without the imperial imposition of controlling

language, ‘signboards’, and lines of communication,

‘telephone cables’, the situation would remain not only

unfamiliar to Baxter but unreal because its mere alien

existence would question the assumptions on which his sense

of personal identity s based.

Though like Baxter, Johnnie needs the reassurance of memory,

his is of personal communion with his men, not of impersonal

military theory and efficient practice. Thus as Baxter

establishes his pattern of command, and the structure of the

novel follows the line of advance to Mandalay which Johnnie’s

and Nimu’s nostalgia for Comitarla attempted to resist – but

which Johnnie’s antithesis, dense, literal Scottie, traces

with his finger,94 enacting Johnnie’s remarks, seeing literal

lines of communication like Baxter’s telephone cables –

Johnnie disappears from the narrative. Johnnie’s need for a

93 Ibid., p.12.94 Ibid., p.146.

43


metaphoric, intangible, ‘communication’ of the sort evoked by

the title ‘Johnnie Sahib’ is unutterable in such a discourse.

Part Three ends with his thoughts:

‘What am I going to do?’ As if to find an answerfrom inanimate things he looked up again andstared at the lantern, at the makeshift ashtraywith its dead stubs, at all the tokenssurrounding him which were his possessions. Theyhad been with him at the beginning and were nowwith him at the end. And they were nothingbecause the end had come.95

Scottie’s and Baxter’s literalness reigns: things in

Johnnie’s room, assimilated by and into his sense of self

become the dispossessed inert objects they were before his

arrival. For the reader, however, the end has not come.

parts Four and Five remain but do not reveal what Johnnie is

going to do: a letter merely states ‘I am not in air supply

now’.96 This leads Patrick Swinden to ‘wonder whether Scott

has not risked too much by excluding him from almost half of

the novel’.97

Far from being a weakness, this absence of a central

character is the novel’s most important device. As Scott’s

characters develop values and beliefs which structure their

perception of reality and give them their sense of identity,

facts are not as important as interpretations; indeed they

may be unreachable. Johnnie’s absence renders him

unreachable, allowing others to form interpretations of his

behaviour without his presence confusing the issue. Scott

often employs this device: in A Male Child Stella explains,

‘When someone goes away they become legendary … you became a95 Ibid., p.160.96 Ibid., p.215.97 Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India, p.1.

44


legend … Fantasy with its roots in fact.’98 As fiction

itself can be so defined, in The Corrida at San Feliu, Scott

explores the emotionally destructive psychology of the

novelist, Thornhill, who remains absent, shirking

confrontation with his wife and her suspected lover, so that

he can develop narrative possibilities freed from the

limitations of knowledge. The Raj Quartet centres on the

relationship between Daphne, who dies in the first volume,

and Hari, who disappears roughly half way through the second.

What remain are other characters’ interpretations which

technically derive from the conversations between Brad and

the Major, Nina and Jim, and Jim and the serjeant in Johnnie

Sahib. In all three, one character reveals an aspect of

Johnnie unknown to the other, thus creating the multi-layered

drama characteristic of Scott’s best work where attention is

focused not only on facts and what these suggest, but the way

a character narrates, understands or receives these facts and

what this suggests about him or her.

Truth is a subjective contingency modified by the social

discourse formulating it and communicating it and by memory,

a faculty so malleable and unreliable it is indistinguishable

from imagination. Geoff Smith reflects,

They looked back to the past for the comfortTamel lacked. But how patently false an attitudeit was. Man’s memories grew dull and at thatpoint imagination waved its wand. Tamel was nodifferent from Marapore; and life in it was pettyand stupid as that in any cantonment. The onlyway one could make it bearable was by lookingfacts in the face. With the exception of JimTaylor these others meant nothing to him.

98 A Male Child, p.213.

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And Jim? Well, they had been very close at onetime… One day Jim would snap out of it and theywould have a good laugh as they had done inMarapore… in Cape Town… at Liverpool.99

Smith recognises the absurdity of living in a mythic past but

does so himself; ironically, his golden age is English,

insular, which distances him from Jim who hoped his coming to

India would prove a personal regeneration: ‘There was the

emptiness of Marapore, the emptiness of all India, the

emptiness that he had sought to escape and had succeeded in

recreating.’100

If self is transcendent, independent of external social

forces, then it is little more than a fixed set of

interpretations, prejudices and received ideas, that will

reproduce the same conditions and reactions wherever it is

placed. Johnnie, with blithe self-assurance, Daphne with

instinctive irresponsibility, and Sarah, with diffidence and

introspection, all assert the right not to fit into their

surroundings. However, such a concept of self, though

laudable, is an idiosyncratic version of the herd-instinct

insularity that produced those surroundings. As both Baxter

and Johnnie abhor change, and rely on memory, so the British

in India, like Daphne and Sarah whom they so alienate, do not

fit in, but isolate themselves in the civil lines, attempting

to duplicate a little England in an alien sub-continent. The

Major expresses this self-reflexivity and isolation most

succinctly:

Men were not connected. There was nocommunication between them. Sometimes aduplication of action and desire would make it

99 Johnnie Sahib, pp.197-98.100 Ibid., p.208.

46


seem as if it existed. But it was only theresuperficially; emotionally. It did not go deeplyto connect up the separate cores of theirisolation.101

The other can be assimilated only when recognised as a

duplication of self. While there is a strong need to

appropriate thus to fit self into a recognisable system, such

interpretations are false, denying the inherent identity of

the other. However, that identity cannot be reached, since

it is only in self-duplication that contact can be felt. So,

for Jim, although places, like people, have no inherent

identity: ‘a place like Pyongiu, without identity,

meaningless’,102 to recognise its meaning would impose an alien

order on it:

In the plane, he had already left Pyongiu behind.The picture of it that moved past the doorway hadno reality. Pyongiu was derelict, a place driedup by the receding tide of war… the people whomoved across its hot sands… could not for alltheir talk of… places and people far away,establish its connection with the outside world.Pyongiu was a name on a map that a visiting planecould, for a brief moment, make recognisable as aformation of earth and tree and sky.103

To pre-Copernican imperialism, Pyongiu is a mere moving

picture, though in fact it is the imperialist who is moving.

To seem real, a place must be colonised, related to the

centre, either by such homely signboards that reassured

Baxter and re-established an ‘air of ownership’, or by talk

of known places. Once left, it becomes unintelligible, a

word isolated from context.

101 Ibid., p.146.102 Ibid., p.208.103 Ibid., p.179.

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And the men were like Pyongiu; for an hour, forless than an hour, one received an impression ofthem and thought one understood. the words theyspoke and the things they did made a patternwhose intricacies seemed intelligible; but as onetraced the pattern it began to move in subtlebewildering rhythms.104

This insular-imperialist perspective recognises its

limitations: its shallow understanding will last only hours;

one then can choose denial, rejection, not fitting in, or an

attempt to understand an alien pattern which might undermine

the sense of self.

Jim’s final attempt to assimilate and understand Johnnie

elaborates the paradoxes of Scott’s epistemology and the

cogency of Johnnie’s narrative absence:

…a discussion about Johnnie in a place he hadnever been to brought him into a new perspective,and emphasised that Johnnie was part of theirretrievable past.

One had not known this Johnnie who sat drunkenlyand poured out his heart to a serjeant in Prulli;and to that extent it was a new Johnnie; perhapsthe real one…

And it was easy, once an illusion had been sweptaway, to recreate a man in the imagination… whenthe impact of his personality was lost throughhis absence; to turn one’s judgement of himupside down; trace back from the effect to findthe cause; selecting the effects to find thecause one wanted to find; to find in the end aJohnnie who had been selfish, arrogant, childishand bitter; to find, like that, a Johnnie onecould resent, exorcise like an undesirable spiritfrom which one could not escape…105

104 Ibid., p.180.105 Ibid.

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Speculation about the real Johnnie is fruitless since either

the impact of his personality may cause him to be misjudged

in his presence, or his absence may cause you to re-create in

the imagination the myth you want to find, as the men of

Section three seem intent on keeping the Johnnie Sahib myth

alive. Jim would prefer to find a selfish, arrogant child so

he can more easily assert his own independence, but though he

might be able to exorcise his spirit, he can never escape it,

since it is part of his memory and so an integral part of his

own identity.

The Major, whose identity we never learn, personifies this

lack of personality in his subordination of self to rank,

defining himself in terms of others: ‘His individuality had

gone: he was but a reflection of six other men; and a

reflection of himself. His every action was dictated by

majority will.’106

His naïve optimism – ‘The Company was still alive, and he

commanded it. It was his. He had created it, and if its

parts had changed its whole was indestructible’,107 - is mocked

by the next paragraph: the men came in ‘severally’ and the

dense, unimaginative Scottie unwittingly sums up the

absurdity of seeking a transpersonal, indestructible whole:

‘”Anyone know a chap called Smith?” As [the Major] said it

he realised how absurd a question it was, but only Scottie

bothered to say, “Probably all of us.”’108 Each knows a

different Smith, even if he happens to be the same one.

106 Ibid., p.71.107 Ibid., p.164.108 Ibid.

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Johnnie Sahib, written with self-confessed ‘sublime self-

assurance’109 out of personal experience, brings a received

omnisciently narrated psychological realism to articulate its

contrary vision of mutual unintelligibility, of contingently

constructed subjective worlds and identities in conflict and

collusion. However aesthetically inadequate, it is

substantively successful in introducing a theme which Scott

explores throughout his career. ‘Lines of Communication’ was

indeed ‘a preliminary skirmish around a subject for a novel’110

because Johnnie Sahib’s theme and title could only emerge in

free indirect speech; focalisation is accordingly sharp

throughout. There is no doubt which character perceives what

is described, which thinks what is mooted. Only occasionally

does a gloss depart from character consciousness, for

example, to explain the anomalous VCOs.

In contrast, The Alien Sky is over-ambitious fantasy, a panorama

of 1947 India based on neither experience nor research; its

source, ‘The Return of the Dove’, should have remained a

melodrama to entertain Home Service listeners. Its

characters are as stock as those in ‘Pillars of Salt’: a

hard-drinking major with a taste for half-caste girls; an

embittered, destitute young widow; an eccentric, benign

maharaja; a comically over-assiduous hotel manager; a shifty

servant with an eye for blackmail; a student revolutionary; a

tough young man of steel called Steele; an ineffectual white

liberal newspaper editor; his lonely wife with a guilty

secret or two; an enigmatic stranger who shakes the skeletons

from her cupboard while an experimental farm burns, rioters

109 My Appointment with the Muse, p.43.110 Ibid., p.162.

50


riot, guns are fired, suicide is attempted and the empire

crumbles.

The Alien Sky’s unfocused narrator glosses three clichés,

introducing, for example, that typical Major:

During the past fifteen years it could truthfullybe said that he was sober only on those occasionswhen his movements from one job to another,either as a civilian or as a soldier, involvedhim personally in the checking of stores andequipment… Drunk, little escaped him; sober,nothing. Yet his career had been so farundistinguished. This surprised him: but whetherfailure led to his drunkenness or stemmed fromit, no-one in India could recall and he himselfhad never thought to connect the two phenomena.111

While Major Milner might boast, ‘Drunk, little escapes me;

sober, nothing!’, he cannot be connecting his drunkenness and

failure as he has never thought to do so. The narrating

consciousness then is not its subject’s, nor another

observer’s because aside from a tonga driver, Milner is

alone. An extradiegetic narrator is describing him from a

privileged position: knowing, for example, his drinking

habits of fifteen years. Such omniscience begs questions:

why did he start drinking? Even if no-one in India can

recall, the narrator should know and tell us. An assumption

that he is selecting information he considers important for

the purposes of this novel breaks the fictional illusion by

referring beyond the narrated world of Milner. Narrative

criteria are authorially imposed, not organically developed

from the perspective of selected characters. Worse, the

author is inconsistent, vacuous, periphrastic: why such

redundancies as ‘it could truthfully be said that’? The

111 The Alien Sky, p.17.

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answer is incompetence. the narrating consciousness is

neither firmly rooted in divers characters, as it was in

Johnnie Sahib, nor is it the convincing epic reportage of

classical realism. It is the voice of a radio playwright

struggling to be a novelist, and it predominates:

No amount of change in time and ownership (of thelatter there had been many and few could nowrecall the Smith who had given his name in thehotel) had altered the gloomy and Victorianinterior, although both had introducedanachronisms such as the oil lamp on the ovaltable in the lounge set directly beneath theelectric ceiling fan; the table itself covered bya green, bobble-fringed cloth and stared at, asit were, down the chromium notes of ultra-modernwall lights purchased in the Thirties by a newproprietor who had ended, like so many newbrooms, by metaphorically sweeping the dust ofthe Hotel under the carpets.112

The cliché ‘sweep under the carpet’ is symptomatic of an

unnecessary authorial gloss. Scott would never write so

badly again. The forms he subsequently adopted to avoid such

problems of perspective are his methodological answers to his

association of imperialism, insularity and identity; should a

narrative be insular autobiography or imperial omniscience?

Both threaten the identity of the narrated while formulating

the identity of the narrator.

A Male Child, The Chinese Love Pavilion, The Birds of Paradise and The Corrida

at San Feliu each present the first person, limited perspective

of one character, while implying the views of others. The Mark

of the Warrior, though using the third person, scrupulously

maintains the perspectives of only two characters and avoids

any confusion by labelling each section by its governing

112 Ibid., pp.43-44.

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consciousness. In contrast, The Bender’s ostentatiously

omniscient narrative, combined with a remorselessly

determinist plot, mocks freedom and responsibility,

undermines individual consciousness. Characters are puppets;

narration and knowledge are foregrounded thematically, as

types of communication from telephone conversation to

television drama are examined and parodied. Similarly, Staying

On is a nostalgic evocation of innocent realism, a return to

the conventions of Johnnie Sahib. The Raj Quartet employs first

person narrators and the narrator-reader discussed in Chapter

One. However, particularly in The Towers of Silence, a pseudo-

omniscient mode of narration often articulates prejudiced,

trite Pankot. A technical triumph, its function is to beg

questions, to be unconvincing. Its roots are the immature

posturing of The Alien Sky.

In The Raj Quartet triteness maintains a sense of community:

well-worn phrases render the anomalous harmless. ‘The affair

of the stone, first reacted to with a sense of shock’ becomes

within a paragraph ‘mean, despicable, cowardly. Typical.’113

Unique events are distorted, neutered by communal

consciousness: ‘It had happened before, it would happen

again, but that did not make it any more palatable when it

was happening now’114 refers not to the rape of Daphne nor

Hari’s false imprisonment, but to the civil authorities’

failure to treat Merrick and Reid as heroes.

‘It seems to me Alec Reid did damned well. Thecivil always expect us to be on tap to pull theirchestnuts out of the fire but when we do theystart complaining that we’ve burnt their fingers.’She was stating what was generally felt to be

113 The Day of the Scorpion, p.165.114 The Towers of Silence, p. 73.

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true. In Reid’s case community sympathy for himwas strong because… he commanded… a battalion ofthe Pankots…115

Scott’s strategy is to pit one interpretive community against

another: readers of The Jewel in the Crown will have little

sympathy for Reid but to Pankot residents he belongs: though

they know few of the facts, a generally felt (thoughts are

dangerous) proverbial principal of chestnuts and burnt

fingers explains the particulars. This attitude is

personified by Susan, who ‘was capable of absorbing things

into her system without really thinking whether they were

acceptable to her or not; whereas [Sarah] absorbed nothing

without first subjecting it to scrutiny’.116

Distinguishing between a stock answer, accepted without

question, and more reasoned and sensitive appraisal is the

moral basis of Scott’s fiction: a distrust of herd instinct,

an obligation to test ‘Dover-Calais truth’ against a complex,

shifting ‘moral continuum’. However, The Alien Sky itself is

stock, the narrative voice uncertain as if it suspects this

but must struggle on: ‘Behind beauty was ugliness. Even as

the phrase came to him he knew it to be trite.’117

MacKendrick’s sense of triteness (unlike Sarah’s) adds

nothing to our understanding of the character’s psychology;

it is a defensive gesture to win sympathy and confidence, to

persuade readers that he and his creator are as perceptive as

us: knowing what triteness is they should not be labelled

trite themselves. Similarly, his questioning of his motives

for coming to Marapore is an unconvincing effort to pre-empt

the reader. MacKendrick has come to be mysterious and115 Ibid.116 The Day of the Scorpion, p.82.117 The Alien Sky, p.13.

54


activate the plot. This might be acceptable – because barely

noticed – in the rapid action of a radio melodrama, but it

cannot bear the scrutiny of an intelligent reader over the

course of a novel.

Perhaps The Alien Sky’s failure to find a convincing form to

realise its ambitious pretentions saved Scott from becoming

another glib imperial novelist like John Masters, led instead

to the introspection of A Male Child, the imposed formal

simplicity of The Mark of the Warrior, and to the complexity of the

mature novels.

55

Chapter Three A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior

Chapter Three

A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior

While narration in Johnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky could be

considered a mere tool to describe settings sound effects had

evoked and explore more thoroughly characters who already

existed as radio voices, its who and why are problematic in A

Male Child, Scott’s first independently conceived novel, for its

original hero, unimaginative, taciturn Alan Hurst could

hardly narrate his own story nor reveal himself in frank

dialogue. His mother complains, ‘What an odd, secretive boy

he is’118; ‘He tells us nothing, does he?’119 hence the

narrator, Alan canning, a would be novelist, currently an

occasional reader for a publishing firm. However, siting

Alan’s story in Ian’s literary career entails a metafictive

examination which obscures it; for Ian, like Stella, can only

‘interpret his actions’ which ‘can’t tell the whole story’.120

This introduces the themes of subjective perception versus

objective truth, inner conviction versus physical proof,

which preoccupy Scott in later novels, but which are neither

fully developed nor controlled in A Male Child.

If reading this novel is less literarily satisfying than

psychoanalytically intriguing, leaving, as Patrick Swinden

says, ‘the impression of being one of the most secretive of

118 A Male Child, p.72.119 Ibid., p.84.120 Ibid., p.214.

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Scott’s books, skating over depths of private obsession that

remain for the most part inscrutable and mysterious’,121 it is

largely because its central characters seem mere ciphers for

aspects of Scott’s personality: Edward, the youthful poet

killed in the way, could be a sketch of the young effete

Scott who mercifully did not survive conscription to India;

Alan is Scott back from the war, voluntarily entering the

prison of marriage, fatherhood and accountancy; Ian is Scott,

the writer, listless from a disease contracted in India.

Hence the novel’s furtive, centripetal exploration of the

nature of biography and autobiography. Ian considers writing

a book about Isabella but finally writes A Male Child which, as

Rex Coles feared, ‘isn’t a biography of Isabella. It’s a

book about us’.122 Thus he unintentionally realises Edward’s

intention as described to Adela: ‘He said the only book he’d

ever write about her would be a novel with her in it as a

minor character.’123 Mrs Hurst explains, ‘It was to have been

in the form of fiction… most first novels are

autobiographical.’124 Ian’s reply, ‘So Edward’s book would

have been more about himself than about Isabella?’125 implies

Ian’s narrative is about him more than Coles’ ‘us’, as do

Scott’s own comments in ‘After Marabar’: ‘The third [novel]

was about a man back home in London from the East, too ill

from tropical disease to do a proper job and feel he had a

stake in the future.’126

121 Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India, p.26.122 A Male Child, p.150.123 Ibid., p.117.124 Ibid., p.81.125 Ibid.126 My Appointment with the Muse, p.116.

57


However, A Male Child is better read not as Ian’s nor indeed

Scott’s autobiography but as an early exploration of

narration as subjective distortion, of the creation and

reception of structures to explain experience to narrator and

narrate, and thus as a preparation for The Raj Quartet, where re-

tellings from divers perspectives focus as much on how each

narrative is shaped to fit its narrator’s prejudices and its

audience’s perceived needs as on the narrated events.

Nevertheless, the great moral and political import of The Raj

Quartet’s events is unquestioned – a world war, the break-up of

an empire, the creation of independent states and the

accompanying communal conflict are an inescapable context

because the impact of Scott’s brief Indian experience

demanded he spend much of his life exploring it. By the same

token, A Male Child is self-consciously not Indian; unable to

assume domestic events are as significant, it so emphasises

perception that the balance between reality and its depiction

is lost. When Rex Coles complains, ‘I’m afraid one of you is

lying… It makes me every angry… to be lied to’,127 it is

difficult to share his annoyance. He supplies the reason

himself, immediately: ‘Why should anyone lie to me? I can’t

do them any harm.’128 When a trigger-happy brigadier or a

racist policeman are exceeding their powers in wartime India,

lies seem more important.

Scott ironically undercuts this assumption that the domestic

is inherently dull, much as he attempted to trump the

triteness in The Alien Sky, by implying that Ian’s interest in

the east is a childish love for adventure. He recalls his

boyhood books, ‘Henty, Stevenson, Marryat and Rider Haggard’

127 A Male Child, p. 153.128 Ibid.

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and laughs, thinking ‘King Solomon’s Mines! Trapped within

the four walls of the flat the wings of adventure lay folded

for ever.’129

Ian’s and Scott’s difficulty is to relate to a reality which

seems intrinsically futile and so must have significance

grafted onto it by force of will: ‘There was nothing in the

house of an old man at Wendover which could return to me what

was now lacking: the vital spark of reaction to people and

surroundings.’130 The spark was there in the imperial past,

and that is all Ian and Alan can talk about, or – we suspect

– Scott wants to write about: ‘”This is what’s mad,” I said.

“That you and I can only talk about Magpyin. You’d think

nothing else had happened.”’131 While Ian dreams of going back

to India to fight his disease on its own ground, the novel

remains grounded in England and Ian resembles Scott’s later

assessment of Angus Wilson:

He strikes me increasingly as a man with all thegreat traditional equipment of the novelist, butalso as one who has found as yet no novel towrite that is worthy of his talents. The samemight be said of others, and perhaps theyperfectly represent the age… Walking thetightrope between out compulsion to speak and oursearch for something to say perhaps we mostlyseem to be playing. But then to write in a majorway about Britain today is not so easily done.132

Ian has the traditional equipment of the novelist: he can,

for example, produce an effective narrative twist. The short

opening section closes with a tantalising revelation,

spurring readers on to discover more about his marriage:129 Ibid., p. 37.130 Ibid., p.29.131 Ibid., p.109.132 My Appointment with the Muse, pp.28-29.

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Always uneasy about things I might call out inthe midst of delirium I asked him what I hadtalked about, more to re-assure myself than tomake it easier for him. He looked confused. ‘Oh,a lot of nonsense.’ ‘Nothing clear?’

‘Something about agirl.’ ‘Helena?’

‘That’sright. Helena.’I said, ‘Helena’s my wife.’

Instantly I regretted telling him; soprofound a look of astonishment and sympathy cameover his face that I could not bear to ask himwhat I had said about her.133

However, ‘nothing clear’ is all we are ever given. Ian can

apparently no more confide in readers than ask Alan

questions. Why should he always be uneasy? What is he hiding?

He cannot inspire much trust if he regards delirium as a

dangerous state in which the barriers necessary for privacy

and the maintenance of the presented self are dissolved. Is

his whole narrative ‘more to re-assure’ and obscure than to

candidly state the truth? Even when he does confess, it is

for effect. He mostly seems to be playing, with Brian Selby

for instance: ‘I weighed the next words. It amused me to say

them. “Actually he stopped me committing suicide, so you

saved my life, so to speak.”’134

No wonder Coles does not trust him to portray Isabella:

‘Wouldn’t it be possible for me to write abiography of Isabella without libelling you,defaming your character or holding you up toridicule?’ ‘I don’t think so. Some one elsecould, but not you old man.’135

133 A Male Child, p.15.134 Ibid., p.100.135 Ibid., p.154.

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The Emersonian possibility of identifying with,

understanding, then representing for others to understand,

another consciousness is a precondition, if any, not just

first, novels are to be more than insular, even solipsistic,

autobiography. Ian, acutely aware of his inescapably limited

perspective, attempts to imagine the thoughts of others,

usually gauging their reactions, not from their words, nor

even from their actions, but from their eyes:

Peggy’s eyes, chameleon-like, coloured themselveswith the friendliness she thought I ought to feelfor her… ‘How’s theCommander?’, David had said.‘All right I think. We still correspond.’

David’s eyes blinked. Is thatall? No greater desire for intimacy than that?136

The lack of inverted commas around David’s unspoken comments

indicates their ambivalence. Neither of Ian’s narration nor

the dialogue, they are not David’s thoughts, for Ian has

access only to his own, but Ian’s formulation, in his voice

mimicking David’s, of what he assumes David thinks.

More important to the plot, Alan’s mind is also more

enigmatic and he prefers gestures to words, beginning with

his initial show ‘of mock dismay which, unaccompanied by

words, implied: We’d better watch our step! or so I came to

interpret it’.137 Much of the novel concerns Ian’s subsequent

efforts to interpret the unspoken, efforts made more

difficult by Alan’s attempts to hide his thoughts: ‘I looked

up at him, catching his eyes, his unspoken thought: Good

Lord! The chap’s done for!’138


61


Eyes are the most prominent feature of the portrait paintings

in A Male Child and the main image of Edward’s poem.139 the word

occurs nineteen times in the first chapter alone as the state

of each character’s eyes is noted: from Alan’s black eye and,

more significantly for the novel’s theme of imagination and

perception, ‘his unswollen eye as he took what was, I

imagine, his first real look at me (sizing up what sort of a

chap this Canning was)’,140 to Isabella’s, whose book ‘begins

as one thing and ends as another, as though in the course of

it her eyes were opened in a way they’d never before been

open’.141

Such a common figure of speech might pass unnoticed if Mrs

Hurst did not draw attention to it: ‘the particular

expression, the image of the opening of Isobel’s eyes, is

shared only by yourself and Edward’.142 Her obsession, ‘her

wish that [Ian] should feel [himself] and Edward one’,143

overrides the logic that sharing a cliché is not evidence of

common identity. Ian protests, ‘Anybody who has to do with

books and their authors would interpret ‘Opal’ that way.’144

Such people, especially those familiar with the echoes of

Conrad Scott would include in The Chinese Love Pavilion, may recall

Stein’s remark, ‘because you not always can keep your eyes

shut there comes the real trouble’,145 and speculate about Mrs

Voremberg’s ramblings: ‘men are never content with [this

world]… they are… so restless they make even a room which no

139 Ibid., p.197.140 Ibid., p.12.141 Ibid., p.31.142 Ibid., p.78.143 Ibid.144 Ibid.145 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, p.200.

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longer holds them restless’,146 which seems to restate ‘man he

will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so,

and again he want to be so’.147

Like Brigadier Reid in The Jewel in the Crown who reveals more

about himself than about Indian politics, Mrs Hurst reveals

more about her psychology than about Ian, Edward or Isabella,

and suggests allusions to Conrad and images transcending the

immediate dramatic context. However, this imagery concerns

perception, understanding, ‘books and their authors’, not a

felt reality such as Indian history. Hence the vertiginous

regress from presence, exemplified by this psychotic

character’s perception of a dead character’s perception of

another dead character’s out of print, and to the reader of

The Male Child inaccessible, novel which itself does not create a

fictional presence, but is read as a symptom of its author’s

personality change and a measure of her failure to transcend

her self by creating a living fiction.

Ian’s explanation for that failure seems an admission of

Scott’s own difficulties, after the contrived melodrama of The

Alien Sky, with A Male Child’s lifeless plot, its Cartesian

emphasis on mind: ‘She knew – or guessed – too much about the

conflicts of minds and personalities ever to pour all her

effects into the conflict of puppets.’148 Its inference that

had Isabella written pure escapism she might have been worth

publishing but that her limited realism is not enough to

enliven the book is echoed by Ian’s diagnosis of Stella’s

shortcomings as a portrait painter, her inability to ‘imagine

146 A Male Child, p.167.147 Lord Jim, p.199.148 A Male Child, p.31.

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then’, to avert superficiality. Her failure recalls

Emerson’s ‘History’:

A painter told me that nobody could draw a treewithout in some sort becoming a tree; or draw achild by studying the outlines of its formmerely, - but, by watching for a time his motionsand plays, the painter enters into his nature,and can draw him at will in every attitude.149

Stella lacks the empathy required to transform a mere

perceived object, ‘its form’, into a living subject ‘his

motions’:

The planes of flesh were there, the feeling forthe skull beneath. the beginning and end of atalent. She knew too much about painting toproduce a canvas which would get by on itsintegration of wrong values. She had too littleart to finish what she had started in the way shehad begun. She had reached the limit of herunderstanding.150

While Stella, like Isabella, is not content with the values

of physical puppetry, but can only represent Ian’s skull, not

his personality, Ian cannot get inside Isabella’s skull to

write her story. Instead he writes his own, questioning

whether the limits of understanding, the gulf between knowing

and guessing, biography and autobiography, transcendentalism

and solipsism, can be overcome. Scott’s tautological but

pragmatic solution - ‘I’ve always asked myself “In this

man’s or woman’s position what would I fee?” and the most

useful answer has always been, I think, “Perhaps what I would

feel myself”’151 – is anticipated by Ian’s defensive claim,

149 Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oxford Authors (OUP,1990), p.119.150 A Male Child, p.176.151 My Appointment with the Muse, p.127.

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‘Don’t tell me about Helena and how she felt. I know how she

felt’152 and Stella’s reaction to Ian’s sarcasm: ‘”You know a

lot about it Stella.” – “I know now how I’d have felt if I’d

done successfully what she did.”’153

What she did was have an abortion, which adds poignancy to

Ian’s observation of Stella’s pregnancy and Alan’s reaction

to the birth: ‘the joy he felt, the physical proof of his

convictions were more than he could bear.’154 This

reconciliation of conviction and proof answers Alan’s earlier

despair: ‘I made a mess of the physical side of things.’155

The birth of Alan’s male child, coinciding with the

completion of Ian’s narrative, A Male Child, suggests an analogy

between procreation and artistic creation in which the same

dichotomy between conviction and proof prevails. Ian, like

Alan, had despaired:

‘Ambition doesn’t exist without inner conviction,does it? And so long as the conviction remains, aman could go on turning out fatuous tripe untilthe cows come home, without necessarily knowingit.’ ‘So you lost your conviction?’

‘I suppose so.’156

Here conviction is no more than illusion, such as Isabella

enjoyed before her eyes were opened and her work ceased to be

marketable tripe, became informed by realism but failed to

live as art. Though continuing to write, she was

appropriately and ironically driven more by the external

pressure, the physical proof, of Rex’s badgering and debts

152 A Male Child, p.176.153 Ibid., p.177.154 Ibid., p.224.155 Ibid., p.109.156 Ibid., p.79.

65


than by inner inspiration. Stella, too, lost conviction in

the face of the physical:

‘I shall never paint…’ she said, and picked upthe tube of yellow paint… ‘A plastic substancewith three dimensions. It defeats me physically…It’s the same with you and writing, isn’t it?’157

While the mere existence of A Male Child refutes Stella’s

suggestion that Ian will never write, her portrait of Ian

operates, like ‘Opal’, to undercut such an easy victory, and

implies that the narrative might be little more than an

articulation of the limits of his, and Scott’s,

understanding. For a symbol of the artistic processes

shaping A Male Child we should turn from them, their victims, to

a better, more convincing portrait – of Adela Coles:

It was only the eyes that seemed to have caughtthe imagination of the painter. They were deepand dark; a clever stroke of the brush gave thema fire. Having observed this it was possible tobelieve the rest of the picture had beenflattened to heighten this effect. When you sawthe woman herself you were confirmed in thatbelief… she had witch’s eyes.158

Only observation and belief catch Ian’s imagination. Having

observed the painting a belief becomes possible: ‘When you

saw the woman herself you were confirmed in that belief’,

which is not to say ‘that belief was confirmed’ – which would

refer to proof beyond the confines of a perceiving you. How

much simpler to have written, ‘a clever brush stroke gave

them a fire; the rest of the picture had been flattened to

heighten this effect. She came in from the bedroom, her

witch’s eyes, which had so fascinated the painter, still157 Ibid., p.176.158 Ibid., p.105.

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burned, though in a middle-aged face.’ Such Alien Sky glibness,

however, would be the equivalent of a portrait at Aylward: ‘a

face to which the artist had failed to grant life. It was

almost Alan’s face, but older, unsmiling, unseeing,

unthinking: a bad portrait’.159 For Ian art must stress sight

and thought, so that even when Adela does come in he

scrupulously focalises the action through his perception:

‘She came in from what I presumed and later knew to be the

bedroom.’160 Though he could be accused here of a cheap

narrative trick – ‘how did he get to know Adela’s bedroom?’ –

to be answered bathetically later – the cumulative effect of

such hesitant precision is to flatten perspective, emphasise

his eyes not what he sees, and fail to grant life to anything

beyond him, an impression re-enforced by his description of

autumn:

Sunlight filtering through the London atmosphere…had softened and flattened the perspective. Itwas a magic… which would always touch me with itssolid unreality, would always dissipate theurgency of the present, fire the clay of thedistant past to a bright and burnishedimmortality.161

The novel too borders on unreality as the urgency of its

present is dissipated and its thirst for a temporally and

spatially distant past remains unquenched.

The Mark of the Warrior avoids A Male Child’s diffuseness by returning

to the themes and milieu of Johnnie Sahib. That novel’s

conflict of emotional, undisciplined Johnnie, cold,

mechanical Scottie, and the passive, impersonal Major becomes


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a complex, evolving relationship between Major Craig, who was

defeated in Burma because he was not brutal enough, and one

of his cadets, Bob Ramsay. Craig, like Johnnie, prefers

informality, but, knowing a soldier should be compassionless,

mechanical, transpersonal, encourages Ramsay to feel, like

the Major, that ‘His individuality had gone’;162 to look at a

map like Scottie, ‘see all kinds of things about lines of

communication’,163 not like Johnnie who remembers ‘what

happened to one of the men’.164 He succeeds: a cadet tells

Ramsay, ‘You don’t notice people. You only notice things.

You’re not human any more.’165

This shift from Johnnie Sahib’s many characters to the many

shifting characteristics of the two protagonists shows

Scott’s growing maturity. However, the reduction to

essentials means imperialism is not an explicit issue; Scott

is content to note, ‘the word went round: We’re Sahibs now’166

and leave it at that. This has advantages. As Swinden says,

it is Scott’s most

carefully constructed and unblemished narrative…The cast is small. the action is clearly focusedand free from distracting minor incidents. thewriting has a tautness, a thrusting efficiency…167

This greater concentration and control is a reaction away

from The Alien Sky’s glosses, A Male Child’s hesitancy, and the

panoramic pretentions of both, their antithetic failings

marking the progression from the misplaced self-confidence of

162 Johnnie sahib, p.71.163 Ibid., p.111, my emphasis.164 Ibid., my emphasis.165 The Mark of the Warrior, p.80.166 Ibid., p.21.167 Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India, p.30.

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Johnnie Sahib – ‘I didn’t stop to consider… I just felt it, and

had the sublime self-assurance to believe what I felt was

right’168 – to the conscious artifice of The Mark of the Warrior.

When Ramsay explains to Craig, ‘Above everything I want to

establish reality’,169 he is articulating Scott’s newly found

ambition, which would have been tautologous to the author of

Johnnie Sahib for whom reality was a recent memory waiting to be

chronicled, but which was an urgent need for the writer faced

with the ‘solid unreality’ of his London life, the conscious

artifice of his marriage.

Though carefully constructed, The Mark of the Warrior is ostensibly

at odds with its epistemology, for while Craig tells Ramsay

‘There are some things that we can never know. We guess at

them’,170 the narrator knows the lot, even Ramsay’s feelings at

the moment of death. This stems from the novel’s ambiguous

epigraph:

Three things are to be considered: a man’sestimate of himself, the face he presents to theworld, the estimate of that man made by othermen. Combined they form an aspect of truth.171

A logical objection that this aspect of truth is inaccessible

as no-one can be in a position to do the combining or

considering has been encouraged by the deletion from recent

paperbacks of the heading, ‘The Argument’, present in early

editions and Heinemann’s 1967 collected edition. Without it,

the epigraph seems prescriptive, platitudinous: three things

are to be considered in life. With it, a descriptive reading is

possible – three things are to be considered in this novel – a168 My Appointment with the Muse, p.43.169 The Mark of the Warrior, p.129.170 Ibid., p.107.171 Ibid., p.9.

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reading supported by its narrative synecdoche, the military

exercise, which, like any novel, tries to establish reality,

or an aspect of truth, through pretence.

The northern half of India has been occupied bythe enemy. Our own forces occupy the southernhalf. For the purpose of the exercise the hillsof the Chota Bandar will be considered asextensive and as forming a natural barrierbetween the forces.172

For the purpose of fiction certain falsehoods are considered

real, suspension of disbelief required. That a narrator can

alternate from one consciousness to another and combine their

perspectives to create an illusory objectivity is not too

difficult to swallow. martin and Blake are, however, so

unimaginatively pragmatic they find it difficult to swallow

anything:

‘What did my whistle represent?’‘The sound of approaching, low-flying

aircraft.’ ‘Then why did youfire at it?’ ‘… Iforgot. I don’t think I would have forgotten ifit had been the real thing.’173

‘So far as I can see we might be sitting on ourfannies for ten days or be rousted up a few hoursafter we’ve moved in. As it’s only an exercise Ithought it’d be nice to know how we stand.’

Craig said, ‘It’s more than anexercise… Stop thinking of it as an exercise…’174

Ramsay is Blake’s antithesis: determined to make him wait

until he is tired of patrolling, because that is what a real

garrison would be; determined to make his men suffer real –

172 Ibid., p.113.173 Ibid., p.55.174 Ibid., pp.116-17.

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as Esther puts it unreasonable – thirst; to humiliate and

persecute Baksh because that is how a real prisoner would be

treated. Ramsay loses his humanity as he denies it to

others; in a chilling echo of racist mentality, Baksh is no

longer an individual but part of a whole, forced to fit into

Ramsay’s pattern:

His land was growing to definition and to itBaksh’s presence was a threat. Not Baksh.Baksh’s presence. … Challenge a threat, reduceit, twist it to advantage. If Baksh suffers, hedoes so because of what he represents.175

Ramsay’s death, at which point the simulation becomes

tragically real, therefore has a triple import: it is an

appropriately ironic, if disproportionate, riposte to Ramsay

who has forced others to really suffer for the sake of his

fictions; it marks a triumph for Ramsay’s transpersonal

principles, enabling him to accept death, ‘he thought: But my

image is not destroyed after all, I’ve won, I’ve beaten

Blake: and he entered peacefully into the world which was

himself.’176 It is also an indictment of Craig for making

Ramsay into an inhuman warrior and the exercise into ‘more

than an exercise’. His unresolved guilt anticipates The Corrida

at San Feliu in which the bullfight, like the purpose of Ramsay’s

exercise, is both invalidated and confirmed by its end:

it seemed as an art to defeat its means by itsend as would, say, Rubens’s picture of the rapeof the Sabines if the action weren’t arrested andyou had to sit there watching… the end of HeddaGabler [would be] unbearable if the actressactually shot herself… the corrida is an art that

175 Ibid., p.160.176 Ibid., p.219.

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defies the principle of simulation and so isunique.177

The Mark of the Warrior depends on the principle of simulation for

its form and content. Ramsay is not only a character but a

paradigm of the author, determined to maintain illusion so

that the individual can transcend the limits of his

understanding, imagine himself in another’s position, answer

the question,

‘If you were Blake at this moment whatconclusions would you come to?’… a new illusioninto which his second-in-command and his platooncommanders could enter, one by one, as if intohimself.178

If the most useful answer is Scott’s tautological ‘Perhaps

what I would feel myself’, the most appropriate form for this

novel is a simulation in which the narrator conducts his

equivalent of an orders group, considering himself and his

second-in-command, the reader, in Craig’s then Ramsay’s

position, weaving a spell with their names but uncomfortably

aware of this deception because the inescapable exercise

within an exercise, the orders group within the simulation,

implies it as Craig breaks the spell Ramsay ‘knew he had

weaved with the names of Blake and Baksh. Through Craig’s

words they had come back from the illusion into the

exercise.’179

As a meditation on the role of imagination within the limits

of understanding, The Mark of the Warrior continues the agenda set,

rather pretentiously, by A Male Child: ‘Isobel has lived, and

Rex; Alan and Stella and Edward… Consider them. Pass through177 The Corrida at San Feliu, pp.299-300.178 The Mark of the Warrior, p.167.179 Ibid., p.166.

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the mirror of themselves that they show you as their

portraits. Analyse them, know them.’180 The Mark of the Warrior is

more successful because its third person narrative accepts

and exploits its metalinguistic status as a simulation,

whereas A Male Child remains confined by Ian’s self-conscious

determination only to perceive, never unequivocally,

presumptuously, to know. Though the first person narratives

of The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise are more

successful at evoking other independent voices, they are,

like A Male Child, inherently limited, dependent on the single

consciousness of the diegetic narrator. Hence the return to

the extradiegetic simulation experiments of The Bender and the

Corrida at San Feliu, in which Thornhill’s credo, ‘the work is all

that matters. It stands or falls by itself. But it stands

or falls as a game’181 echoes The Mark of the Warrior’s exercise

methodology while anticipating, indeed enabling, that most

confident and liberating opening to The Raj Quartet, ‘Imagine

then’. Nevertheless, Scott still needed the confines of a

single surrogate identity to anchor and focus The Raj Quartet –

to be in a position to do the combining,

an almost invisible figure running through it, atraveller looking for evidence, collectingstatements, reconstructing an event… I have alogical mind: I have to imagine this mancollecting the information. Unless I can explainwhy the book is being written I feel tooomniscient.182

This is why Scott’s first person narrators are professional

writers, Canning and Thornhill, or amateur memoirists, Brent

180 A Male Child, p.103.181 the Corrida at San Feliu, p.29.182 Caroline Moorhead, ‘Novelist Paul Scott: Getting engrossed in thedeath throes of the Raj’, Times, October 20, 1975, p.11.

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and Conway. Scott’s logic is subject/object dualism: an

isolated mind surrounded by data to be collected, structured

or manipulated; hence the split between conviction and

physical proof in A Male Child, overcome only by the birth of an

actual male child on its last page, much as Ramsay’s actual

death ends, and proves he possesses, the Mark of the Warrior; hence

also The Raj Quartet’s ‘Areas of dangerous fallibility between a

policy and its pursuit’183 which so fascinated Scott that his

novels seem illustration of Eliot’s lines, ‘Between the

idea/And the reality/…Falls the Shadow’184

The Mark of the Warrior begins with such a shadow: ‘The plan had

been to cross the river at first light, but it was well into

the morning’,185 and notes particularly the difference between

maps and reality, ‘On the map it was a simple black line

which curved through the valley. The reality of it was

different.’186 So Craig

carried in his mind a picture of the shapes andcolours of the map but for a moment… the groundahead of him would not fit the picture in hismind and he stood still, lost. And then he saidto himself: But it must fit, because I have givenmy life purpose. I create Ramsay in the image ofthe man I should have been, but could not be: theimage of a man who feels the need to destroy hisenemies, who finds this need greater than his ownneed to live, who therefore mocks his life.187

This anticipates The Chinese Love Pavilion, in which Saxby creates

God and Tom creates Teena in the image each requires, and The

183 The Jewel in the Crown, p.314.184 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faberand Faber, 1963, rpt. 1974), pp.91-92.185 The Mark of the Warrior, p.13.186 Ibid., p.68.187 Ibid., p.183.

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Birds of Paradise in which Conway loves the illusion of his father

as an embodiment of what he wants to be himself. it recalls

Jim’s creation of a mythic Johnnie, ‘selecting the effects to

find the cause one wanted to find’188 while the real Johnnie

does not fit the new pattern Baxter creates.

Johnnie’s ‘Where does this fit in?’, and the Major’s answer,

‘It doesn’t… It’s us who have to fit in to it’189 state the

difficulty of retaining an individual identity while

conforming to an alien pattern. Ramsay ‘mocks his life’ by

subordinating himself to the pattern, and so transcends the

limits of self in a military equivalent of the Emersonian

‘one mind common to all individual men’, though he wishes he

could decide his own fate, depend on himself alone, in a

restatement of Johnnie’s vain faith in individual

responsibility.

I have become a pattern which moves… to attackanother pattern… I have knowledge of the ridgebehind me that I have not myself trodden, and ofthe part of the forest where my eyes saw movementand from which part of me has yet to emerge… I amthe centre reaching out through the medium of thenerves… But this centre and this nerve pattern isnot myself. It is what I am forced to be… Iwould wish to sever the nerves from the centreand go back into myself so that I might be alonein the forest and move in my own safety towardsan end or a beginning of my own making.190

At the end of the novel Craig fails to explain to his wife

the causes and implications of Ramsay’s death, and so

paradoxically demonstrates their inescapable weight.

188 Johnnie Sahib, p.180.189 Ibid., p.107.190 The Mark of the Warrior, p.98.

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‘He died trying to save himself… His image. Whathe’d become. What I’d made him… I thought I washelping him to be what I thought he had it in himto be, but he had other things in him as well andI let him destroy them… Things we all need.’ Hecould not speak of them, even to Esther. Spoken,they would only be words. He thought: None ofthe words we use is any good, none of the thingswe say truly reflects what we think or feel. Theword forgiveness is an empty word, the wordcharity is a cold word…191

No words can adequately express an individual’s thought, for

language is a pre-existing system which leaves the taste of

formality in our mouths. Ramsay, like Craig, struggles with

its alien pattern and encoded social expectation which

influence emotions irrespective of individual consciousness:

He supposed he should be proud of his brother…But he was not proud… He was moved by John’scourage, sickened by his wound and awed by hiswide, far-reaching darkness which had come at theend. This was pride, perhaps; what people meantby pride.192

The initial attempt to resist the social convention that

pride should be felt cannot be sustained. Though ‘pride’ is

personally redefined as being moved, sickened and awed, this

new combination is subordinated to the existing pattern,

becomes what others must have meant in the first place. He

has similar difficulty with ‘affection’.193

This mutually redefining relationship between the individual

and the social – language, history, class convention or

military discipline – is the battleground of Scott’s fictions

which enact the conflict by involving individual readers in

191 Ibid., pp.223-24.192 Ibid., p.42.193 Ibid., p.92.

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their alien narrative structures, so that they enter their

illusions ‘as if into themselves’, and so better understand

their own shifting identities and the limits of their own

understanding. In A Male Child imperialism is absent and

equivocally desired; in The Mark of the Warrior it is present but

unexamined. As my next chapter demonstrates, in The Chinese Love

Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise – complementary military and civil

articulations of the same personality, a British liberal

struggling to come to terms with his family’s colonial

traditions after Indian Independence – imperialism is

confronted as the most extreme manifestation and most

appropriate extended metaphor of the struggle between self

and society.

77

Chapter Four The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds ofParadise

Chapter Four

The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise

While the dichotomy inherent in any first person narrator

between withdrawn, retrospective writer and involved,

evolving protagonist was avoided in A Male Child through

Canning’s determination to be a subjective biographer, it is

consciously and creatively explored by The Chinese Love Pavilion and

The Birds of Paradise, both of which try to represent ignorant,

innocent pasts while recognising that a past can only be

remembered in a present that colours the memory. As The Chinese

Love Pavilion’s narrator, Tom Brent, confesses, ‘It is time to

explain Greystone, but difficult to reconjure the picture I

had of him from Saxby… because my own picture of him has

interposed itself.’194 Similarly, The Birds of Paradise’s narrator,

William Conway, admits, ‘It is difficult to separate what I

guessed of Father’s work… then from what I knew of it later…

impossible to remember who told me what or when or why.’195

The novels use opposite strategies to exploit this

difficulty. The Bids of Paradise incorporates the scene and

circumstances of its narrating throughout, ‘here with me in

Manoba, now as I write, actually at this moment’196 because

thoughts ‘can’t be divorced from the place they’re thought

194 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.51.195 The Birds of Paradise, pp.44-45.196 Ibid., p.133.

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in’.197 The narrative is ordered according to Conway’s memory

and ‘an obsession which may prompt [him] to see parallels

where none exists’,198 beginning with a densely achronic series

of images which spills into the first paragraph of Chapter

Two, before the chronologically convoluted narrative starts

with Conway’s birth.199 There is almost no tension of plot;

indeed Conway seems to be more meditator and commentator than

narrator.

In contrast, The Chinese Love Pavilion is a military thriller which

subverts the protagonist-narrator dichotomy by structurally

separating eternal images and ephemeral actions in as imposed

a resolution of temporal perspective as The Mark of the Warrior’s

alternate focalisations were of spatial perspective. The

complete synchronic picture is explicitly evoked, by present

tense and locale, only in ‘the door by which men enter’ and

‘the door by which men go’ – ‘If I… open the top left-hand

drawer of the desk at which I write these words I can take

out and hold an object Teena held’;200 ‘I sometimes… look up,

half expecting to see her… watch me as I trudge back from the

fields’.201 These sections are differentiated by their

italicised titles from the chronological narrative which

intervenes as a would be fresh start, ‘The story begins’.202

By acknowledging the interposing teleological picture, the

frame emphasises the linear narrative’s unreliability and

contingency. For example, Brent claims that Greystone is ‘a

bit eccentric… but fundamentally a simple, practical man

197 Ibid., p.192.198 Ibid., p.203.199 Ibid., p.23.200 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.17.201 Ibid., p.324.202 Ibid., p.21.

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whose store of knowledge was being put to simple practical

use’,203 then contradicts this previous self, a few pages, if

many narrated months, later: ‘I allowed myself to be

convinced that those fits of [Greystone’s] were signs of

madness’.204 If Greystone is a mad, impractical dreamer,

Brent’s first appraisal exemplifies his own imperialist

mentality: fundamental, simple, practical (i.e. Western), men

should use their superior (theoretical, Orientalist)

knowledge to improve the Orient. Conway is taught equivalent

illusions: ‘when you’re a man like your father, it will be

your job to go on helping these people to live better

lives’,205 ‘There was so much we had to teach the Indians

before they could rule themselves.’206

To balance the distance such irony creates between Brent and

the reader, ‘The door by which men enter’ is also the door by

which readers enter The Chinese Love Pavilion and provides images to

be gradually contextualised in the narrative, inviting a

response from the reader like Brent’s on his journey across

India, feeling ‘that in the next hour… [he] should find that

matching image… that configuration of rock and earth which

matched the mind’s eye image’.207 Similarly, we feel the next

page will clarify implanted allusions: Teena from page 13,

returns on page 131; Hakinawa’s photograph, page 16,

reappears on page 178; the kris, page 17, is bought on page

86, given to Teena on page 255. Such manipulation of

information marks the beginning of Scott’s interest in how

people learn things: ‘To remember who told me what or when or

203 Ibid., p.59.204 Ibid., p.65.205 The Birds of Paradise, p.32.206 Ibid., p.35.207 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.50.

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why’ becomes increasingly important in Scott’s work, vital in

The Raj Quartet.

We react as Brent does, recognising ‘a place whose image [he]

had always carried with [him]’.208 Not only does this create

empathy between the reader and Brent, it also re-enacts the

novel’s philosophical proposition, because for Brent, such

recognition evokes Saxby’s romanticism, his concept of

‘mystical union’ that promises to lead ‘straight to the

truth, the querulous plus revealed’.209 According to Saxby,

There’s always a canker in [any man], the worm ofcuriosity eating… outwards… to confound thechemist who can explain everything except thatlast ounce of fret and wonder, that seed ofmystery, that final querulous plus in theequation… But show me a romantic, ah, there’s aman who puts the plus at the beginning of theequation… He works inwards to meet the worm… He’salways fighting… through layers of dream whichseem to promise sight of something inside.210

The novel romantically puts the seed of mystery at the

beginning in ‘The door by which men enter’; we read to

recover and comprehend its images. the first layer, the

section introducing Saxby, seems irrelevant until the kris

purchased on its closing pages promises a link.

Saxby’s concept of the romantic is derived from Lord Jim:

[Conrad] said directly a man is born he’s flunginto his dream as if into a sea, that he wouldsuffocate if he tried to climb out of his dream,out of the sea into the air. Commit yourself, hesaid, commit yourself to the destructive elementand by the exertion of your arms and legs keep

208 Ibid., p.53.209 Ibid.210 Ibid., pp.46-47.

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yourself up… You’ll notice he said men, any men.the realist may swim in the sea but he won’t finda dream in it or recognise it as a dream at all.Your romantic will.211

Brent’s affinity with Conrad, whom he admits he has not

read,212 rather than Kipling and Forster with whom he self-

consciously identifies,213 is implied by the many echoes of

Conrad in his narrative. His fear that ‘the dream is lonely

without people’214 recalls ‘We live as we dream – alone’215 from

The Heart of Darkness; while the jungle search for Saxby suggests

the quest for Kurtz. His leaving Saxby in the jungle

corresponds to Jim deserting the Patna; his walk unarmed into

the bandit camp repeats Jim’s surrender to Doramin; while

Conrad’s ironic portrayal of Jim is echoed in Brent’s

reaction to Saxby and alcohol:

He would forget himself and… live in his mind thesea-life of light literature. He saw himselfsaving people from sinking ships, cutting awaymasts in a hurricane, swimming through a surfwith a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefootedand half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs insearch of shellfish to stave off starvation. Heconfronted savages on tropical shores, quelledmutinies on the high seas, and in a small boatupon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairingmen – always an example of devotion to duty, andas unflinching as a hero in a book.216

I was drunk enough to give rein to fanciesinspired by his tales. We were in the warm, closecabin of a schooner, a pearling lugger, twosailors afloat on the vast magic of the Pacific:

211 Ibid., p. 41.212 Ibid.213 Ibid. p.21.214 Ibid., p.44215 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 39216 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, p.47.

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we were in the ramshackle hut, two castawaysbewitched by the pounding of surf and the criesof parrots: we were at ease, old hands, halfintent on the yarns we spun, but withknowledgeable ears on the drums which moaned andbeat their breasts in the jungle from which ourlamp-lit room protected us.217

While Saxby’s exalted romanticism is undermined by this

drunken escapism, his enthusiastic espousal of Stein’s

musings allows Scott to interpret Conrad’s themes; for Stein

and Saxby’s credos are uneasily poised between the binary

distinction – ‘the realist may swim in the sea but he won’t

find a dream in it or recognise it as a dream at all. Your

romantic will’ – and the universality – ‘he said men, any

men’ – of Scott’s paradoxical epistemology, in which there is

one mind common to all, but each interprets that mind

egoistically and defines self in opposition or alignment to

it.

He is romantic… We want in so many ways to be…This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap ofdirt and sits still on it; but the man he willnever on his heap of mud keep still. He want tobe so, and again he want to be so… He wants to bea saint, and he wants to be a devil – and everytime he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a veryfine fellow – so fine as he can never be… Andbecause you not always can keep your eyes shutthere comes the real trouble… it is not good foryou to find you cannot make your dream come true,for the reason that you not strong enough are, ornot clever enough.218

Jim’s romanticism implies non-romantics differentiated from

him. Gentleman Brown and the Captain of the Patna are

apparently realists, but are Stein and Marlowe romantics?

217 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.42.218 Lord Jim, pp. 199-200.

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Stein’s generalisations: ‘We want… but man, he will… not good

for you’, suggest that all are prone to romanticism. As in A

Male Child, the distinction lies in the metaphor of open or shut

eyes. While romantics see themselves as fine fellows, their

eyes are shut to anything undermining this concept. Realists’

eyes objectively record, untroubled by vain imaginings;

though it is as true that one cannot always remain with eyes

open.

‘The door by which men enter’ grammatically structures this

universal/binary ambivalence. Its opening externally

focalised section, which uses the third person to establish

and describe the Chinese merchant’s house and the exterior of

the pavilion, closes with a sentence formally inviting the

reader into the discourse: ‘And so after the first

pleasurable shock of the pavilion’s external appearance,

curiosity about its interior was aroused.’219 The passive

voice isolates the curiosity as if it is an emotion without a

mind. the second section introduces the mind: ‘It was the

ante-room you entered first, having climbed the steps and

pushed open the narrow door on the left of the south

window.’220

This indefinite ‘you’, a precursor of The Raj Quartet’s

narrator/void, is poised between an individual and everyone,

implying a common mind, comprising the as yet unannounced and

so universal narrator. By then presenting data in an

empirically chronological sequence – first the walls which

you would see as you pushed open the narrow door, then the

ceiling, doors, finally the floor which would attract

219 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.12.220 Ibid., pp. 12-13, my emphasis.

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attention so you would stare until you reeled221 - the everyman

protagonist’s observations and the narrator’s reporting are

synchronised, establishing a bond with the reader,

momentarily strengthened by the ‘we’ of the next paragraph.

‘The Golden… The Jade… The Scarlet… were the names we gave

the rooms’.222 The next sentence’s abrupt specificity shatters

any identification of reader with narrator by revealing the

latter to be a protagonist in possession of a woman unknown

to the reader: ‘The ante-room had no name although I lay with

Teena Chang all through one hot Malayan night and together we

tried to think of one.’223 Though this is incompatible with

the anyone ‘you’ who has entered the ante-room it is a

‘pleasurable shock’, arousing the desire to know.

This initial strategy of replacing the universal ‘you’ with

the individual ‘I’ prefigures the narrator’s answer that

Teena is enigmatic, double, a prostitute open to anyone, but

an individual sharing exclusive intimacies with an ‘I’:

‘There were too many possible names for the ante-room, no

name in itself definitive.’224 Where the I/you lies cannot be

defined because the I/you includes all interpretations.

Teena can, however, name the doors, including this by which

the anyone has entered the discourse of an I split between

evolving narrating and inert narrated selves:

The little door that opens inwards, that is thedoor by which men enter in anticipation ofdesire. But the little door that opens outwards,that is the door by which men go in memory ofloving.225

221 Ibid., p.13.222 Ibid.223 Ibid.224 Ibid.225 Ibid.

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Thus Teena is a metaphor for the text, open to anyone who

desires to buy and read, yet wholly the possession of an

individual during, and in memory after, the act of reading.

Though Brent says, ‘She was expert in the occidental art of

selective self-presentation, of communicating herself in a

series of pictures that never quite interlocked to form a

unified whole’,226 he denies her self-presentation and presents

himself in his pictures of her. Neither forms a unified

whole since each defines him or herself in communication with

the other. Teena is Brent’s images of her, the East, the

West’s images of it, and vice versa – but those are stories

Scott cannot presume to write, only imply, by exploring the

creation and maintenance of such images, and how they re-

enforce or undermine individual and cultural identity.

As Scott explains in ‘Form and Function of the Novel’, the

phenomenology of reading depends on the desire to decode

black marks on white paper to produce images in the memory,

on the translation of the physical and objective into the

mental and objective:

It has not mattered that the book was a hardrectangular object, filled with words… which almostwithout exception [the reader] will have forgotten every one of.What he does not forget, so readily, are theimpressions, in the form of mobile, audible images…To him, what remains is the book. It is hisexperience of it.227

This relationship of thoughts and objects determines The Chinese

Love Pavilion’s chronology, between and informed by two226 Ibid., p.16.227 My Appointment with the Muse, p.80. Scott is drawing on a BBC radioseries, ‘Novelists of the Sixties’, by Bernard Bergonzi, the basisfor Bergonzi’s The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), wherethe phrase ‘hard rectangular object’ appears (p.29).

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paradigms, an empiricist, linear sequence of events leading

towards final understanding – the ‘lesson in reality’ Brent,

the naïve protagonist, requires: ‘I had been in India a

year. I had never been outside Bombay. I had never eaten a

proper curry. I felt pretty useless’228 – and a romantic

series of images, the retro-introspective re-arrangement

offered in The Bird of Paradise. Brent’s reactions are consciously

balanced on perception’s cusp, as cognisant as they are

conative:

If I had never met Saxby, if by pure chance I hadarrived in Greystone’s valley, I suppose I shouldnot have felt about it the way I did. But thething happened, the recognition of a place whoseimage I had always carried with me because it hadfallen with me, as Saxby would have it, into thedream… But the plainer fact was, I suppose, thatI recognized the valley as nothing more than theend of a journey.229

Every statement is modified, the first undercut by two

conditionals and undermined by ‘I suppose’. the thing

happened ‘as Saxby would have it’, not simply as it was. The

second ‘I suppose’ questions the concept of plainer facts

divorced from the rationalising of an engaged mind.

While Brent’s narrative is objectively sequential, his

epistemology is subjective, even solipsistic. The discovery

of Greystone’s madness is presented so empirically its

contradictions question the narrator’s reliability, for he

‘allowed himself to be convinced’ of the madness, suggesting

that he could have shut his eyes to it if he had wished.

228 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.33229 Ibid., p.53

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The novel ends with Brent (un)able to choose between two

mutually exclusive versions of Teena’s death. Alternately

convinced of suicide and murder, he knows his convictions are

based on an internal, psychological rhythm, not external

evidence:

I think he killed her… For in this mood I do notsee her… as a woman who would have loved mewithout my knowing it, or killed herself…230

When the hungers are sharp I sometimes… tellmyself that Sutton spoke the truth; that he woke,indeed, and found her lying there. Nothinghelps, then; least of all the knowledge that moodmust pass, the hungers be assuaged, the press ofheaven lightened, the certainty return thatSutton lied.231

Least of all because he realises the certainty must return

because without it he would find life unbearable.

Saxby epitomises such subjectivity, discussing Debi’s good

luck – ‘”He seems to think I had something to do with it.”

“Had you?” “Perhaps. Does it matter? It’s his point of view

that counts”’232 – then following this to absurdity by adopting

a psychotically independent point of view. Brent tells Reid,

‘He lived in a world of his own… the patrol had no

significance… you did not enter Saxby’s world with sten-guns

and rifles and make any impression on it.’233 Nevertheless,

Reid’s militarism is dominant. Brent makes no impression on

it when he walks unarmed into the bandit camp so

precipitating the tragic denouement.

230 Ibid. pp.322-23.231 Ibid., p.324.232 Ibid., p.37.233 Ibid., p. 279.

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Reid’s punishing Brent by awarding Teena to Sutton is

therefore appropriate for she seems more part of Reid’s

world, as he says with characteristically misogynistic

cynicism,

She knew what side her bread was buttered, didn’tshe? Lie down for the hare, open up for thehounds eh? I reckon she thought if you werealways on your back nobody would shoot youdown.234

Though aware of this ‘plainer truth’, Brent prefers

the dark room in which I could commit my mortalfollies and delude myself into thinking theywere…acts, somehow, of faith… perhaps in therebeing room for tenderness, time for love, amoment for giving as well as one for taking evenin places where lies were told, bodies claimedand people knew which side their bread wasbuttered.235

His point of view counts. If he manages to keep his eyes

shut for long enough what a fine fellow he will be, what a

fine couple Teena and he will make. Patrick Swinden misses

the point when he criticises ‘the inadequacies of the writing

about the pavilion, once it becomes absorbed into the

narrative and made the location of Brent and Teena’s less-

than-fully-convincing love affair’.236 On the contrary the

novel perfectly articulates a less-than-fully-convincing love

affair, an idealistic dream absorbed and undermined by

sceptical narration: ‘We… walked on down the curving road

like lovers strolling on a summer’s night. But we were not

lovers’237 is typical of Scott, akin to Merrick’s fantasy about

234 Ibid., p. 163.235 Ibid., p. 164.236 Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India, p.46237 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.220

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Ahmed and Sarah, Mrs Hurst’s confusion of Ian and Edward,

Jim’s recognition that he was not Johnnie.

Saxby’s delusions parallel Brent’s:

Saxby would compensate by inventing the quid proquo, … producing a vision all on his own so thathe could go round pretending God had been forcedto relent and give him a special mission… thevision was something to do with finding theorchid in unusual circumstances.238

Brent’s finding Teena, ‘the occasion of love, long sought…

pretending itself like a flower that opened its petals to the

moon’239, re-enacted by the reader recognising her as the

embodiment of the initial image, produces a comparably

egocentric vision:

A hard streak of male vanity persuaded me it wasonly a question of time; that whatever she feltor did not feel for me at the moment wasunimportant. She was a woman, one whom I loved…and could in time be conquered, translated intothe image of the woman she really was so thatknowing herself wanted she would respond,capitulate and want me, only me…240

‘Conquered’ and ‘capitulate’ suggest not merely arrogant

masculinity but the sten-gun and rifle context, imperialism.

While Brent condemns Reid’s ‘monosexual world of military

splendour, where… lying with women [was] merely a reward for

passing more important tests than those of natural love’,241

Teena is in Reid’s pay, so economically subservient that

natural love seems improbable, as Brent’s attitude – ‘I pay

238 Ibid., p.102.239 Ibid., p.239.240 Ibid., p.240.241 Ibid., p.290.

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for my own women’,242 confirms. His confidence in her

malleability is the sexual equivalent of Johnnie Brown’s

faith in the loyalty of Section Three. Brent’s reaction to

Teena and the East is his quid pro quo for the mundanity of

Bayswater, producing an autogenous, self-perpetuating vision

so that he could go around pretending he had ‘thrown away the

clutter of the past and bit by bit revealed to myself, like a

lost mosaic gradually uncovered, a sense of vocation’.243

His egoism, ‘whatever she felt or did not feel … was

unimportant’, compensates for his lack of inherent identity,

much as his remorse at abandoning Saxby is dictated more by

his own sense of insubstantiality than concern for the real,

unreachable, Saxby:

It was all very well to say to Saxby: To hellwith him. But which Saxby did I mean? Not the…rain-soaked giant… I could never say, To hellwith him, because part of me at least was boundto him: if only that previous self… I only meantthe Saxby I was about to leave behind in hisremote Malayan jungle, but were we reallydivisible in this way? I was conscious of havinginvoluntarily wished us to hell together.244

His analogous abandonment of Teena assures his damnation:

‘”Brent! You’re a bloody bad loser!...” But [Reid] did not

understand, really, what it was I had lost.’245 He has lost

his identity, for the insubstantial self must be defined in

relation to another to discover transcendence: ‘In the love

of one human being for another… there is all the glimpse on

earth that God will grant us of our souls.’246

242 Ibid.. 186.243 Ibid., p.53.244 Ibid., p.86.245 Ibid., p.326246 Ibid., p.326.

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Saxby’s wish for an intrinsic identity – ‘deep down there by

himself… Don’t crowd him… Don’t confuse him with people’247 -

is not refuted (Saxby manages, unfortunately, to live in ‘a

world of his own’) but irrelevant to Brent’s ‘proof of

identity’, ‘the Indian tradition’ which is not Indian but a

second-hand appropriation: his grandfather’s yellowing

photographs, his diaries and papers and the pale, amateurish

water-colours of the Punjabi plains’.248

Brent is an imperialist, happy to claim the alien as his own:

‘There was no known mind’s eye image; only an expectation

that when the actual scene came into view the mind would

claim it as its own conception.’249 He represents an

egocentricity in western culture originating in Longinus’

‘joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we had

heard’250, which reappears in Emerson’s self-reliant ‘History’:

This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt,Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church,Court, and Commerce… I will not make more accountof them. I believe in Eternity. I can findGreece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the Island, - thegenius and the creative principle of each and ofall eras in my own mind.251

In post-colonial America, struggling to escape the

marginality conferred upon it by Britain, the ‘Islands’ of

which he is so dismissive, Emerson had his quid pro quo

reason to create a new centre in his own mind, to appropriate

church, court etc. for independent uses. Scott inverts this

247 Ibid., p. 44.248 Ibid., p.21.249 Ibid., pp.50-51.250 T.S. Dorsch, transl. Classical Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 1965),p.107.251 Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson The Oxford Authors (OUP,1990), p.116.

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post-colonialism to show how the West has transformed into

its own conception an actual East, and so claimed it, if only

to know its own mind, to establish its own sense of identity.

The intrinsic, external India becomes thus a violated,

neutered reflection in the English consciousness: ‘India has

formed part of England’s idea about herself and… been forced

into a position of being a reflection of that idea.’252

Hence, as Robin Moore has pointed out: ‘Scott’s explanation

of the British departure in 1947 is radical in its

Anglocentrism.’253 Similarly, as Brent wishes Teena to be his

idea of her, defining herself in response to him, so Conway

admits that he did not relate to his father but that

egocentrically ‘It was the illusion of Father that I loved,

the concept of him as embodiment of what I was to be.’254 The

actual Teena/India/Father is as unreachable as the ‘real

Johnnie’ in Johnnie Sahib.

Particularly ironic, then, that Brent, confused by people,

seeks his sense of self in a prostitute who must

professionally create a different self to reflect the whims

of each client. Communion is impossible for his wishes

necessarily override hers in the power structure:

I wanted her to… say: As a friend. But shesimply stood there waiting for my answer and Iwas too proud to say: Do you mean outside thecontract, do you mean as a friend? Because shewould have had to say yes. It would have beenbad for business to say no.255

252 Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils, p. 105.253 Paul Scott’s Raj (London, Heinemann, 1990), p. 175.254 The Birds of Paradise, p.122.255 The Chinese Love Pavilion, pp.223-24.

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Brent can only find the Teena he wants to find in her

absence, outside the social contract, recreated in his

imagination with eyes emphatically shut: ‘This surely, was

the occasion of love… Closing my eyes when she left me alone

for a while I could conjure it… why should you have always

thought it would be an occasion shared?’256

Just as in Johnnie Sahib a feeling of communion could not be

communicated, so in The Chinese Love Pavilion the occasion of love,

the illusion of sharing, cannot be shared, though Brent seems

unaware of such implications, unconcerned by others’

interpretations. Uncommunicative, isolated, insensitive, he

as much as Saxby lives in a world of his own, and is thus a

target of the novel’s tragic irony, at its most intense when

he fails to understand Teena’s perfectly comprehensive if

somewhat poetic last note, and so pathetically, ‘said,

“Where’s the rest of it? … The part that told me what her

answer really was.”’257

Brent’s least admirable traits are channelled by The Birds of

Paradise into Anne, whose insularity leads to a domestic

equivalent of imperialism, consumerism:

For her nothing has any meaning until she has gother teeth into it. Whatever she touches sheravages with her ignorance of its previousexistence, her greed for it while she wants it,her destructive dismissal of it when she hasfinished with it. For her the world was born onthe day that she was born and will die when shedies.258

256 Ibid., pp.239-40.257 Ibid., pp315-16.258 The Birds of Paradise, p.261.

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Though Conway is appalled by this insensitivity and lack of

reverence, he admits that it structures all human behaviour,

which becomes a series of violations, exchanges and

substitutions which deny intrinsic value to any individual

item. the only ‘real sounds in the world’ are those of

capitalist exploitation, ‘the whirr of machinery turning

things into other things, the ring of hammers, the screech of

chisels, the crunch of bone on bone and mind on mind’.259

These are real by Saxby’s definition: dreams have been

removed and a reductive, good for business, reification put

in their place. In addition to The Chinese Love Pavilion’s bleak

solipsism in which individual consciousness is a self-

perpetuating prison, The Birds of Paradise postulates the equally

bleak antithesis and concomitant – a structuralist

determinism in which an inviolate self is illusory, man only

part of larger mechanisms alienated from any values other

than the economic and biological. Saxby had briefly reached

the same conclusion – that man is ‘a mechanism set in motion

and running its time out … a speck of waste in a wilderness

of waste’260 – until he produced a compensation fantasy to give

his life purpose.

Both novels try to reintegrate humanist values into social

and economic relationships but fear that Saxby’s figurative

‘seed of mystery’ is literal: ‘Only the seeds … are of

interest. After that the plant is waste.’261 In a biological

version of a most reductive superstructure-base ontology,

actions and emotions are waste and self-deception: ‘the

illusion… brought about by… the misunderstood mechanical or

259 Ibid., p.260.260 The Chinese Love Pavilion, pp.78-79.261 Ibid., p.73.

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chemical processes of our bodies’. 262 Brent’s protestation

that he has come to see an old friend naturally ‘sounded

hollow’ compared to Saxby’s economic seed: ‘You came for

money’.263

The Birds of Paradise extends this imagery of emptiness, of being

determined by external processes, blown by whichever wind is

strongest. Conway wonders,

Wouldn’t it have been nearer the truth to say Inever had much in me at all, but was content todrift in whatever direction the wind blew me?Hadn’t I been compensating for the revelation ofan empty hold by scratching around for memoriesof rich impossible cargoes?264

These are illusory because cargo is a commodity in economic

transit, not the transcendent self needed to fill the empty

hold with intrinsic truth: ‘The truth would have had to come

from outside’265 but ‘a hot gust of truth will have been cooled

down before it is allowed to penetrate’.266

Self is itself a well-defended compensation fantasy that

finally cannot disguise the base, as Harry Payton’s commodity

fetishism, a mercantile version of Greystone’s madness,

cannot deceive his wife, Dora, though she deceives herself

with the illusion of a transcendent Harry:

Harry was so damned conscientious about chemicalfertilisers it made her angry because she knewthat deep down he couldn’t care less about them,but had convinced his workaday self that chemical

262 Ibid., p. 81.263 Ibid., p.78.264 The Birds of Paradise, p.188.265 Ibid., p.116.266 Ibid., p.105.

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fertilisers were what made the world go round. Aman had to think something did.267

After his beloved army splits into opposing Indian and

Pakistani components in 1947, Harry too fragments, into a

‘workaday’ and a ‘deep down’ true self, repressed, like

Conway’s, ‘below the layers of everlasting compromise’.268 the

former’s necessary egocentricity, assuming his chemical

fertilisers are the essential complement to an incomplete

nature, is refuted by Conway’s recognition of the Kinwar

tiger’s rights, by accounts of the birds of paradise’s

reduction to cargo in an ironic attempt ‘to prove to fools

there was such a place as paradise’,269 and by the epilogue

from Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago which concludes that ‘all

living things were not made for man’.270

Dora’s attempt to change the subject from her unfulfilled

life with Harry is abortive. ‘Tell me about something that

isn’t depressing. Tell me about your job’,271 because Conway’s

job – ‘manipulating other people’s money, biting off a chunk

of it for myself, giving as little as possible in return’,272

dealing always with shadows, never with substance … sail[ing]

the seas by cable and telephone’273 – is even more alienated

than chemical fertilisers from nature.

Scott’s consumer society is Lukacsian but without hope of a

redeeming proletarian revolution, for there is ‘not a social

or political concept that hadn’t been tried, tested and

267 Ibid., p.235.268 Ibid., p.205.269 Ibid., p.251.270 Ibid., p.264.271 Ibid., p.239.272 Ibid., p.193.273 Ibid., p.181.

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discredited’.274 To quote Edward Said’s summary of History and

Class Consciousness,

Lukacs says, reification is the alienation of menfrom what they have produced, and it is thestarkly uncompromising severity of his visionthat he means by this all the products of humanlabor, children included, which are so completelyseparated from each other, atomized, and hencefrozen into the category of ontological objectsas to make even natural relationships virtuallyimpossible.275

While Conway is alienated from his son – ‘Stephen was the

product of my lust for his mother and of her lust for super-

tax status’276- Scott’s vision, and indeed Lukacs’, is even

starker, describing an individual’s alienation from his own

self which also becomes an ontological object:

How vulnerable is the illusion that a man has ofhis own importance, not… to others, but… tohimself, and how to speak of what drives him tosustain the illusion… of the dark that falls uponhim when the illusion is gone, is virtuallyimpossible.277

Conway’s own means provides the novel’s imagery: ‘I defended

an illusion by a progressive toughening of its skin’,278 but

‘the illusion was breaking up, losing all its protective

skins’.279 Skins, shells, armour, symbolise the division of

self from other. His grandfather ‘had no other way with his

passions than to spin a protective cocoon of silken ice about

274 Ibid., p. 193.275 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and

Faber, 1984), p.17.276 The Bird of Paradise, p.105.277 Ibid., p.262.278 Ibid., p.124.279 Ibid., p.129.

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them’;280 Aunt Sarah ‘protected herself…by wrapping herself

into the self sufficiency of her vagueness’;281 Uncle Walter

‘treated me… with a reserve I hardly noticed through the

thickness of my own’;282 Dora wishes Krish ‘could grow a

thicker skin’283 and says ‘”there should be tortoises…” and led

the way into the cage’,284 which extends the metaphor as the

birds are enclosed by both cage and lake, where Conway, after

fighting Krishi and emphasising a literal interpretation of

skin by boasting ‘I’m British and you’re only a wog’,285 feels

‘imprisoned, locked up’.286

‘Diminished by an intensity of feeling, wishing it had never

been said, knowing it can never be unsaid’,287 he is more

appalled by his expression of a protected, internalised

sentiment into a dangerous social discourse, than with the

sentiment itself, which had been instilled by his imperialist

upbringing. He had been taught to think of himself as ‘a

certain kind of Briton’ whose raison d’être was ‘to guide,

punish and reward those whose mother’s milk lacked the vital

element that would make real men of them: fair-skinned

rotters, for example, or dark-skinned heathen’.288 Bringing

such assumptions out into the open demands a conscious

reappraisal of his sense of identity.

Skin can then be far more sinister and repressive than a

metaphorical prison; like consumerism, it threatens

280 Ibid., p.113.281 Ibid., p.138.282 Ibid., p.121.283 Ibid., p.244.284 Ibid.285 Ibid., p.88.286 Ibid., p.89.287 Ibid., p.88.288 Ibid., p.30.

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individual dignity. Griffin, a white married to a Chinese,

prefers to live on the island of Manoba than face

‘civilization’s faint disgust’289 Similarly, Conway remembers

‘the air of untouchability attaching to’ the children of the

Scots Chief of Police in Shakura and his Eurasian wife.290

While Brent deluded himself that his relationship with Teena

could transcend economics, sexuality and race, Conway accepts

that love is out of the question with another prostitute,

Kandy. His ‘faint disgust’ at her dark skin adds the frisson

of taboo breaking, but precludes an emotional commitment.

Both parties are dehumanised products in and of a commodity

exchange:

There is nothing between us except this… physicalconnection. Its lack of restraint may be due alot to the different colour of our skins. thehappiness she gives me is heightened by theknowledge that neither of us could fall in lovewith the other. Nor does the passing of moneyspoil the happiness…291

Anne’s ‘flawless English complexion’292 allows illusory love in

a comparably materialistic transaction:

I married her because I couldn’t have her anyother way. her not letting me… was the result ofher built-in determination to maintain socialstatus by marrying for money, a determinationstronger than her physical appetites…293

The ensuing marriage fails because of ‘the satiation of

[Conway’s] lust for Anne as a body and the stubborn refusal

289 Ibid., p.17.290 Ibid., p.25.291 Ibid., p.203.292 Ibid.,p.261.293 Ibid., pp.95-96.

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to emerge of tenderness towards Anne as a person’,294 and so

states the novel’s main concern: how can an existential

subject, an individual person, a ‘who’, transcend objective

status as a body, a social function, a ‘what’? – especially

in an imperial or post-colonial context when socio-economic

pressures are intensified by cultural and racial dynamics, so

that,

We had to work hard at being fond even though wewere fond. [Dora] had admired me, and liked me,but had to admit she was also sucking up a bit tothe political agent’s son…295

People are transformed into commodities valued according to

their function and status, undermining all natural emotions.

much as military discipline maintains rank at the expense of

friendship in Johnnie Sahib, Conway’s father seemed ‘to be

diminished by his surroundings, by his knighthood which

somehow squeezed him in between its Sir and its KCIE’.296

While aggrandising themselves, British imperialists idealised

an ostensive suppression of self in favour of service. For

Indians encouraged to imitate these alien manners, the double

loss of self through duplication and effacement could be

psychologically crippling. As Dora says: ‘Krish comes off

worst… He doesn’t trust himself any longer. I don’t think he

quite knows who he is.’297 His inability to match his concept

of who he is with his knowledge of what he is describes the

paradoxes of becoming a copy of an alien model:

I speak the same language as you. we laugh atthe same kind of things. I don’t ape English

294 Ibid., p.97.295 Ibid., pp.236-37.296 Ibid., p.175.297 Ibid., p. 237.

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manners, they were drilled into me… Butunderneath my princely Indian flesh I have thebones of the serf I always was.298

While basically Krishi is a serf to British paramountcy,

superstructurally he cannot withstand the personality drilled

into and expected of him. As a result,

[Krish] would never be sure how genuine hisaffection for the English was. On the one handhe had someone like Old Mutton trying to turn himinto a carbon copy of an English publicschoolboy, on the other hand he lived in aramshackle palace and heard his elder saying rudethings about the English.299

Protective skins, Saxby’s ‘layers of dream’, thick enough can

create the illusion of a transcendent individuality; though

even this ‘rebel stronghold of our privacy’ is threatened by

‘the tyranny of the genes…imposing and reimposing on us

thoughts and behaviour that ought to be dead and done with’.300

The true self, like Brent’s occasion of love, cannot be

communicated because it would immediately be exposed, no

longer privately deep down, but social, contingent,

superficial. hence the novel’s imagery: the metaphorical

‘prison of my Indian boyhood’301 and of Stephen’s bedroom,

‘that fortress, that prison in which he prepares to launch

himself into the second half of the twentieth century wearing

the strait-jacket of nineteenth century compensation

fantasies’302 becomes the actual prison camp of Pig Eye, then

the hall of Four Birches which Conway ‘most disliked, being

298 Ibid., p.231.299 Ibid., p.236.300 Ibid., p.106.301 Ibid., p.92.302 Ibid., p.105.

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trapped in it’.303 After Conway’s release from Pig Eye, the

psychological prison of his reserve prevents the reunion he

had imagined. of course, his Aunt Sarah’s and father’s

reserve was equally responsible, which compounds the

difficulty of interaction. Conway ‘made the awful mistake of

putting my arms around her… she had no armour to withstand

the onslaught of a grown man’s sentiment, and I should not

have subjected her to it.304

Learning from this error, repressing all sentiment, Conway

briefly becomes a personification of objective realism,

observing from the terrace, ‘with open eyes and a receptive

mind’, as opposed to shut eyes and a distorting, emotional

mind. The defamiliarisingly detailed descriptions recall the

sensuous evocation of adolescent exaltation, ‘the whole joy

of being ‘man-in-environment’.305 Such pre-lapsarian immediacy

is temporary as the barriers of self return: ‘out of the

strange transparency back into the unique secret of being a

private person who only needed to reveal what he wanted to

reveal’.306 Naturally another’s unique secret self is

inaccessible; ‘When I say Cranston’s picture I mean… my

picture of Cranston’s picture;307 what another may choose to

reveal is partial, distorted. Thus when Daintree announces

‘Cran’s wrong’,308 Conway ‘saw how Daintree’s reading of the

scattered pages [i.e. the book itself] had served its end.

He had reminded me of the relativity of truth’.309 This

303 Ibid., p.99.304 Ibid., p.139.305 Ibid., p.33.306 Ibid., p.132.307 Ibid., p.191.308 Ibid., p.189.309 Ibid., p.190.

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reminder has a philosophical and a paradoxical physical

effect.

Firstly Conway is forced to admit that ‘It is hopeless trying

to get at what people call the truth’, because thoughts ‘are

affected by other people’s errors as well as your own and

probably can’t be divorced from the place they are thought

in’.310 Secondly, after Daintree finds his work, Conway locks

it up, asserting his rights as a private person but

emphasising the difficulty of answering Daintree’s question,

‘Why do you write all that stuff down?’

As The Chinese Love Pavilion exploits the phenomenology of reading

to realise its universal/binary ambivalence, so The Birds of

Paradise uses the phenomenology of writing to dramatise the

paradoxes of self-expression. Solitary, withdrawn from those

it seeks to touch, writing is both absence and presence.

Scott would exploit this most intensely in Tusker’s poignant

failure and simultaneous achievement in his love letter in

Staying On. In The Birds of Paradise, a similar suppression of the

spoken dominates, ‘the kind of silence that falls when… the

only sounds that would fill it are the sounds of words they

have grown unused to forming with their tongues’.311 Such

words can, however, be formed with the pen, though the

realisation in the (form of the) novel – a memoir after his

father’s death – is more distressingly mediate than Tusker’s

letter. The few letters they sent each other were

perfunctory, except one in which ‘for the first time in his

life [his father] had opened, if by no more than a fraction

of an inch, the door behind which he lived his private,

310 Ibid., p.92.311 Ibid., p.180.

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secluded life’.312 Conway ‘bitterly regret[s] that not once in

[his] life did [he] sit with him and let him feel that [he]

understood’.313 Nevertheless, while ‘to speak of what drives

him to sustain the illusion… is virtually impossible’, it is

ironically appropriate for him to write of it after that life

is over, as if to prove that people are transcendent, not

mere socio-economic objects, and that ‘only things like

bloody Residency dinners reached the stage where they were

over’.314

Exploring the social pressures imperialism places on such a

transcendent self, The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise’s

contingently constructed first person narratives mirror their

concepts of contingently constructed selves and their

subjective epistemologies. In The Bender and The Corrida at San

Feliu, Scott experiments further with narrative form to explore

the economic determinism Conway sought to escape, and

literature’s claims to transcend that determinism and the

limits of subjectivity.


105

Chapter Five The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu

Chapter Five

The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu

Scott found Anthony Hartlay’s A State of England, ‘the most

exciting [reading experience] I have had for years’,315

describing it as

the clearest, most constructive, and thereforemost important, statement we have had from anyrecent writer about the health of our society.It provides the background for a badly-neededreappraisal of our achievements and intentions,both as a nation, and as men and women who haveresponsibilities as well as privileges.316

The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu are products of the

reappraisal Scott, like his alter ego, Thornhill, underwent

in the early 1960’s, ‘reappraisal of himself, his talent, his

beliefs, and of the work he had done and wanted to do’.317 In

particular, he agonised over his function as a novelist, a

creator of illusions, in a society he felt had become

irredeemably disillusioned, content merely to consume ‘the

artefacts of so-called affluence’.318 Hence the uncertainty of

a hesitant, barely coherent 1963 lecture319 which draws heavily

315 Paul Scott, ‘Facts Britain must Face’, Country Life, Vol. CXXXIII,no. 3440, February 7th, 1963, p.277.316 Ibid., p. 279.317 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.27.318 My Appointment with the Muse, p.31.319 This lecture is incorrectly dated 1972 in My Appointment with theMuse, perhaps because Scott recycled it for his lecture tour ofIndia in that year.

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on Hartlay’s conclusions, ‘Literature and the Social

Conscience: The Novel’. in which forty-five of the last

sixty-four sentences are interrogative, as though he had,

like George Spruce, ‘changed the full-stop to a question

mark’ because ‘he hated to… find himself face to face with…

written evidence of dogmatic statements’.320 In contrast, the

closely related lecture, ‘Aspects of Writing’, written in

1965, is calm and assured, indicating the newly found

maturity and purpose with which he embarked on The Raj Quartet.

While The Birds of Paradise criticised contemporary consumerism in

a larger historical and geographical context, The Bender,

unrelieved by an exotic sabbatical or memories of an Indian

childhood, is, despite its panoramic pretensions, cramped.

This reflects what Hartlay called ‘a narrowing of horizons

and a sense of frustration in English society’,321 due, Hartlay

and Scott contend, to ‘the culminating success and slow

decline of the two great movements of reform’,322 anti-Empire

and pro-Welfare State. In ‘Aspects of Writing’, Scott almost

seems to resent their ostensive success, personified by the

Attlee government, as if political reformation has robbed him

of his traditional role as a reforming writer.

Everything seemed, if not won, at leastestablished as the new norm. the Welfare Statebegan and one felt that Dickens would have smiledapprovingly. Europe… was in ruins, but at leasttotalitarianism lay apparently dead in the rubble– and Spender, Auden and Isherwood were somehowvindicated… the Empire, that symbol of middle-class pretension and upper-class mercantilegreed, was clearly destined to go for the Burton

320 The Bender, p.48.321 My Appointment with the Muse, p.143, originally in Anthony Hartlay, AState of England (London: Hutchinson, 1963), p.15.322 Ibid.

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we all felt that Mr Forster had always hoped itwould.323

Scott claims that the remark, ‘We are the masters now’ – a

misquotation of Hartley Shawcross’s ‘We are the masters at

the moment’324 – ‘ended the hilarious party of traditional

English radicalism’325 and that ‘from that moment… the English

stopped knowing what they were and writers stopped knowing

what they were honour bound to say’.326 The implication that

radicalism was such fun that its means became more personally

satisfying than its end was a logical but disquieting

conclusion for Scott to reach since much of his fiction

concerns such absurdities in fields other than literature. The

Birds of Paradise, for example, almost laments medical progress as

the discovery of penicillin ends Daintree’s quest to cure

yaws. ‘He felt like a man who’d spent years climbing Everest

and when he got to the top found they were serving hot

soup.’327

A writer who believed novels should lobby for the end of

empire and the serving up of cradle to grave welfare must

have felt a comparable loss of vocation in the never-had-it-

so-good boom of the early 1960’s. Becoming increasingly

introspective and alcoholic, Scott may have recognised

Daintree as a self portrait he ‘had drawn on a mirror so that

[he] should not have to face the truth directly’328:

He drinks… to humiliate himself, because he… seesthe absurdity and madness of wishing in his heart

323 Ibid., p.29.324 House of Commons, 2nd April, 1946.325 My Appointment with the Muse, p.30.326 Ibid.327 The Birds of Paradise, pp.206-207.328 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.227.

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that the disease he dedicated himself toeradicate was still defying all his efforts tocontrol it. there is nothing you could tell himthat he doesn’t already know about the way themeans of a man’s job can become more important tohim than its end, and even more often blind himto the fact that the end will either never bereached, or if it is, reached probably as aresult of… an accident in a laboratory, say… orof an accidental conjunction of time, place andopportunity when action grows of its own accordout of inaction and inertia, and Empires fall;mark the end of duty, leave some of the dutifulbehind to contemplate their glory and folly, getdrunk, or make records of past history…329

The Bender tries to escape such imperial history, to depict

disillusioned, contemporary London. The key to Scott’s

assessment of the Attlee years is ‘seemed’: in reality

victory was not won; the new norm is dispiriting. In his

1968 Royal Society lecture he parodies his earlier optimism:

Europeanism was ending in the Berlin Wall: anti-colonialism in partition… if the Welfare Statehad not really succeeded in providing socialjustice for all at home it certainly providedfree false teeth for casual visitors fromVenezuela.

On fell, falls, back on the cynical joke, becauseit is difficult to be articulate about ideals,especially failed ones; which may be why today…politicians seldom seem to say anything unmarkedby simple parochial considerations… they reflect[us] as members of a disgraced species, gettingup false heads of steam to reach a place –perhaps of advantage but not of honour.330

329 The Birds of Paradise, pp.211-212.330 Paul Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, Essays by Divers Hands,XXXVI (1970), p.122.

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Scott argues in ‘Literature and the Social Conscience’ that

although all literature dissents from the status quo ‘because

no man will bother to create anything if he thinks a good job

has been done already’,331 the source and nature of dissent

shifted after Attlee. Social and moral ideals, realised but

found wanting, were replaced by materialistic goals in

popular and serious culture. Writers now create quasi-

pornographic ‘worlds we don’t quite recognise as our own, but

are encouraged to aspire to – the product of someone else’s…

switched on experience of sex, money or power’.332

The Bender is the cynical joke Scott fell back on in his

inarticulateness. Its amalgam of internecine moral

seriousness and indulgent comedy extends Stella’s

inarticulate response to Ian Canning’s cynicism in Scott’s

other London book, A Male Child:

Stella came through a door, clutching a bottle oforange juice. I nodded my head at it, ‘TheWelfare State?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The WelfareState.’ She was apt to kill jokes like that, bytaking them neither jokingly nor quite seriouslyenough for you to believe she rebuked you.Question: answer. A conversation was difficult tosustain.333

A novel based on such unpropitious premises is even harder to

sustain. Patrick Swinden infers The Bender is, uniquely among

Scott’s novels, ‘not a fully serious and accomplished work of

fiction’334 and disdains to discuss it. ‘Aspects of Writing’

implicitly acknowledges its inherent weakness:

331 My Appointment with the Muse, p.140.332 Ibid., p.36.333 A Male Child, p.158.334 Paul Scott: Images of India, p.x.

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So much of contemporary life seems at first to bemerely amusing. One smiles, and shrugs, havingscarcely the heart even for what Mr Angus Wilsoncalls gentle irony – which is how he summed upthe attitude a modern English writer needs toadopt towards his available material… [suchwriters] represent… an age of comment byimitation, rather than of creation by attack. Ofthe… cheap day excursion into the marginalcountry of local and broadly uninterestingcustom.335

Though its ironies are savage, perhaps uncontrolled, rather

than gentle, The Bender is a literary heartless shrug and

smile, like Gillian who ‘only shrugs her shoulders… the

answer to everything you ask their generation’.336 Indeed it

seems uncomfortably similar to the Wilsonian fiction Scott

attacks in ‘Aspects of Writing’ for its ‘smug, wholly

unserious, apparently supercilious attitude’.337

The Corrida at San Feliu is a far more serious examination of the

‘disgraced species’, concluding that it is but a ‘two-legged

animal with opposed thumbs’,338 that there has never been much

grace and that there is no longer any honour, only advantage

gained from power, money or sex. Thornhill decides that he

should not attempt a story with a contemporary setting

because it, like The Bender, ‘threatened to turn itself into a

story about what happened to people… when the money was

gone’.339 His characters, determinedly pursuing material

goals, ‘kept wanting to shrug their shoulders, go out and…

have a good time’.340 Its intended theme, disgrace, was

335 My Appointment with the Muse, pp.28-29.336 The Bender, p.58.337 My Appointment with the Muse, p.31.338 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.304.339 Ibid., p.114340 Ibid.

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‘inapposite when used to describe the kind of situation

people found themselves in nowadays’.341 While he realises

that ‘Playa de Faro was probably the wrong place in which to

write about this kind of thing. People went there for a good

time’,342 Playa de Faro remains the setting of The Corrida at San

Feliu, which bleakly, cynically, explores an agenda set by

David’s maudlin insensitivity in A Male Child:

‘Spain… That was so bloody wonderful once. Likewhat? Like the Holy Grail.’ He grinned. ‘Poetswith rifles. Civil servants with a conscience.’‘Some died,’ I said.

‘The lucky ones,’ he rejoined. ‘… The restof us stayed on to face the futility.’343

Seeking vicarious salvation, David is unconcerned by war’s

literal bloodiness, which he appropriates in his egocentric,

blasphemous grail. In The Corrida at San Feliu, the only civil

servant with a conscience is Rojas, once imprisoned by

Franco’s troops, now serving the public in the mundane sense

of running a bar for a contemporary manifestation of insular

imperialism, British tourists, ‘lost administrators… keepers

of the old conscience, puzzled now, beginning to be

defensively acquisitive’.344

Tourism is a perfect metaphor for the ‘cheap-day excursion’

mentality Scott derides in ‘Aspects of Writing’, exemplified

by:

the works of young men who get sent to Bangkok bythe British Council, or by a provincialUniversity on an exchange basis to the MiddleWest, and for whom, to judge by the stream of

341 Ibid., p.116.342 Ibid.343 A Male Child, p.189.344 The Corrida at San Feliu, pp160-61.

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definitive novels then published, the academicyear is long enough to absorb the ambiance eitherof the ancient orient or the new occident…345

Ambient writing is by definition egocentric: a transcendent

subject reveals not the inner logic but the effect on him of

his surroundings. The young Thornhill was equally arrogant,

‘armed… superbly, confidently, with more than two months

experience of [Buddhist and Hindu] cultures’.346

Though moving the story of the Craddock’s disgrace to the

days of the Raj, and thus anticipating The Jewel in the Crown, is

the logical outcome of Thornhill’s and Scott’s contempt for

the superficial present, The Corrida at San Feliu itself is a return

to discarded fragments from The Birds of Paradise. As Thornhill

‘had taken to spying on lovers, husbands, wives… storing them

up as made-to-measure images against the imaginative

bankruptcy of old age’,347 so Scott, before his trip to India

in 1964, was returning to the made-to-measure themes and

images of his previous work, concentrating them in a densely

complex new narrative.

The Bender, too, returns to the made-to-measure characters and

ploy of an earlier novel. Its fraternal trio of playwright,

accountant and unemployed divorcee with suicidal tendencies

repeats A Male Child’s poet Edward, accountant Alan, and

surrogate brother Ian. Both novels contain a progeny which

survives ‘gin, hot baths’,348 ‘an old wives’ specific for

bringing off a baby’.349 Though the role of the godfather – of

the child in A Male Child, of the mother in The Bender – is

345 My Appointment with the Muse, p.35.346 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.51.347 Ibid., p.233.348 A Male Child, p.174.349 The Bender, p.204.

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central to both, the frivolous anti-clericalism of A Male Child

has evolved through the intervening novels into the moral and

theological exploration of The Bender.

For Alan and Ian,350 and Tim as he snubs George,351 baptism is

merely a social convention. The Birds of Paradise critics such a

flippant, cynical view of the sacraments:

The vows Anne and I exchanged in the presence ofan old fool who didn’t know his soul from hiselbow were made blasphemously… the marriageservice was no more than a formal step to thebedroom and the joint account.352

For Conway God is so exiled from His creation that any

acknowledgement of His presence is blasphemous, as

hypocritical as the economic exploitation of the birds that

‘drop out of Heaven or Paradise’.353 Analogously Conway is

alienated from his work, unsatisfied by capitalist values,

and envious of Cranston’s fulfilment through his medical

vocation. the latter’s Quaker reverence for inner light

above canonical scripture is comparable to the replacement of

classical history by personal experience in Emersonian

transcendentalism:

The priest told him… he was nearly ready to bereceived. The phrase… suddenly appalled him. Hetold the priest that if he had to be receivedthat meant he was an outsider. He became aQuaker as a more practical exercise inhumility.354

350 A Male Child, p.138.351 The Bender, p.60.352 The Birds of Paradise, p.105.353 Ibid., p.12354 Ibid., p.165.

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the antithesis of such humility is the superb self-

confidence, the conviction of one’s moral superiority,

represented in The Chinese Love Pavilion by Saxby’s blinding inner

light, his homicidal individualism, which is a psychotic

version of Rex’s bitterness in A Male Child:

A chap who lives the way God made him couldn’tcare less. I often look back now and regret thatI never took my courage in both hands and wentout into the world. That’s really what a chapshould do… Get out and look… Otherwise you neverreally see yourself… And it’s all so small andpetty. A man isn’t a man any longer.355

Saxby’s relationship with God compensates for his lack of

vocation; Rex’s perverse fantasy of liberating godliness

compensates for his petty, restricted life; though both

remain pathetically ignorant of such interpretations. In The

Bender, George’s faith is more self aware, but ironically this

makes it weaker. His prayers are meditations, not appeals to

a personal god:

I only believe in the idea of there being somekind of you, and I suppose that’s only because,like everybody else, I like the idea of havingwhat we can’t get enough of here, somewhereelse.356

His aunt Ada also realises the futility of appeals, resolving

‘never to pray’ after her youthful prayers, that her father

should not come home drunk, that her brother and niece should

not die, went answered.357 Her catalogue of facts’

indifference to hopes is echoed as George considers his

failings, his compulsion to expect

355 A Male Child, p.155.356 The Bender, p.231.357 Ibid., p.80.

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the best instead of the worst… in spite of what Iknow about us. So I expected Alice to go onforever putting our marriage together again allthe time I was pulling it to pieces. So I expectSam to be kind to her even though I know thatwith a man like that she’ll end up listed withhis goods and chattels and depreciated ten percent a year… So I expected Tim to go on waitingfor two hundred pounds until it suited me to payit back which of course I knew it never would …358

Knowledge and expectation can only be reconciled by ignoring

objective reality or surrendering spiritual integrity. Lady

Butterfield does both, lives, like Saxby, in a world of her

own, favouring tape-recorded monologues advocating Neitzchean

amorality: ‘the ultimate end is always the same… Power! the

exertion of one’s will’.359 Hence her incomprehension of

George’s sensitivity and scruples:

Will nothing stop you thinking in terms of anexternal authority? … you have nothing to answerfor to anybody, and the idea of answering toyourself presupposes a state of schizophrenia.360

Scott’s novels presuppose such a state, a subjective self

which believes in transcendent moral values and expects the

best struggling to reconcile itself with an objective self

defined and governed by amoral economic and biological forces

which frequently produce the worst. ‘The causes of

[George’s] ruin were money and sex. Which meant that even in

a thing as personal to a man as his own ruin he had not

struck an individual note.’361 Although George insists on the

spiritual rights and obligations of his role as godfather,362

358 Ibid., p.189.359 Ibid., p.14.360 Ibid., p.182.361 Ibid., pp.21-22. 362 Ibid., p.237.

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his God is no different from and as indifferent to human

suffering as materialist imperatives:

I believe in God all right. He made ClickClayton and Gillian Spruce get careless and Hemade me offer you a drink out of my last quidbecause I don’t want you to go until you’vebought me a ham sandwich. And He made me want tosee my god-daughter before I agree to pay youback two hundred pounds.363

Like George’s God, the narrator’s ostentatious omniscience

mocks freedom and responsibility, reduces characters to

ignorant puppets who fear the intervention of malign fate.

George, Tim, and Wallingford are constrained by,

respectively, the mumps, a daughter’s pregnancy and a

client’s decision. Wallingford reflects on ‘what can go on

respecting one’s future without one’s slightest knowledge’.364

the narrative assumes everyone’s life is circumscribed, that

nobody is alone in Ramsay’s or Saxby’s sense, and ‘marrie[s]

irony to authority’,365 persistently using capitals like

George’s bank manager: ‘We aren’t Alone, Mr Spruce. We live

under the Surveillance of Head Office.’366

People are reduced to grammatical and ontological objects:

often a verb takes two syntactically or semantically diverse

objects, ‘He put on his slippers and the light’,367 equating

literature with pap, ‘George had finished Stendhal and

something in a tin’,368 and conversation with its mechanical

medium, ‘Returning to her escritoire from the telephone and

363 Ibid., p.60.364 Ibid., p.129.365 Ibid., p.73.366 Ibid.367 Ibid., p.8.368 Ibid., p.42.

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the conversation with George’.369 Long, convoluted sentences,

uninterrupted by commas, dissipate the subject in sequences

of verbs and objects, as characters are dissolved in plot

mechanism, and money and machinery escape George’s control in

a chain of conjunctions and relative clauses:

He fed fourpence into the slot and dialled Regentand then the last and uncrossed out of half adozen numbers pencilled in under ‘Mick’ in thepocket note-book which lay open on the top of thecoin-box.370

Saxby’s ‘mechanism set in motion and running its time out’371

becomes the central metaphor. George, ‘hopeless with

mechanism’372 accuses Tim of having a ‘brain ticking over like

a lousy book-keeping machine’.373 An actress criticises

George’s perfunctory coitus: ‘you make me feel too much like

a slot-machine’,374 ironically explicating the link between sex

and machinery implied by his play a bout a woman, ‘alone in a

world of mechanical contrivances that defeat her’, whose

geyser is fixed by the leather-jacketed man upstairs.375

Gillian’s similarly mechanical affair, ‘the main attraction…

was the leather jacket and the tight jeans’ which are ‘two a

penny’,376 results in ‘the embryo left behind… like a plumber’s

spanner in her works’.377

As life is sustained by mass-produced commodities, people

become isolated, inhuman:

369 Ibid., p.13.370 Ibid., p.17.371 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.78.372 The Bender, p.209.373 Ibid., p.242.374 Ibid., p.202.375 Ibid., p.110.376 Ibid., pp.102-103.377 Ibid., p.95.

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In time people would have no further need to meetface to face. Smedley’s could feed you by post.You could say all you needed to say aboutyourself (which was the only reason for what wascalled conversation) on postcards or thetelephone… and in time because you saw no otherhuman face, your own face would be revealed. Itwould come out of its lair like a naked animal,attracted by the sun and a feeling of repose, andno longer ashamed of having no fur.378

For George, face to face encounters are alienating since each

individual is egocentric, wrapped in a thick fur – a

continuation of The Birds of Paradise’s skin imagery – as

insulation from another’s insensitivity to his needs. the

true self is not an inner light but a pathetic animal,

perhaps like Saxby, ‘in need of care and attention’,379 though

forever to be denied these in its solipsistic enclosure.

Saying all he needs to say about himself is Guy’s motive for

writing ‘The Geyser’. Hence he determines its most important

caption, ‘by Guy Spruce’,380 should be held on camera to avoid

the anonymity that marred Millicent’s appreciation of ‘The

Pram in the Hall’.381 Nevertheless, ‘The Geyser’ fails to

strike an individual note: as Gillian says, leather jackets

are two a penny, and its unconvincing American idiom (a

parody of ‘Pillars of Salt’?) – a man in ‘his undershirt’ who

asks, ‘Needs fixing lady?’382 – proves it is, as Guy fears,

‘too much influenced by Paddy Chayevsky and Tennessee

Williams’.383

378 Ibid., p.42.379 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.108.380 The Bender, p.93.381 Ibid., pp.142-143.382 Ibid., p.111.383 Ibid., p.112.

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Guy, like Scott writing Johnnie Sahib, ‘didn’t stop to consider…

just… had the sublime self-assurance to believe what [he]

felt was right’.384 Such failure to consider can produce

writing as mechanical as the world it inhabits:

It is all too easy to think of… a situation, andcome up with… mental pictures to illustrate it…in automatic writing of this kind you seldomfeel, as a reader, that there is muchunderneath.385

Guy’s media-enclosed and media-directed writing relates to

himself and other writers – ‘Here I lie, he thought, naked

and more talented than Pinter’386 – not to readers or in his

case viewers, nor to the reality of George, Tim and countless

actual caretakers.

‘He’s a little hurt that… neither you nor Timhave been in touch… the critics used names likePinter…’ ‘Pinter?’

‘Thecaretaker.’George felt he might sort that one outpresently.387

The actual bomb is likewise ignored in a parody of post-

modern superficiality in which it only exists in terms of its

reporting which can be exploited professionally. His ‘kill

it stone dead’ is inopportune yet chillingly apt:

It won’t be fashionable to be a Nuclear Disarmerbecause if the campaign goes on much longersomebody like Lord Wolfenden will get attached toit… and that’ll kill it stone dead. Or perhapsTony will be caught photographing a demonstrationin Trafalgar Square and that will move the whole

384 My Appointment with the Muse, p.43.385 Ibid., p.54.386 The Bender, p.109.387 Ibid., p.11.

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thing onto the level of a sketch from Beyond theFringe, and only John Gordon in the Sunday Expresswill care.388

Lady Butterfield is as egocentric and image-conscious

regarding charity work, which she undertakes only in the form

of public gestures and ‘as an expression of force’.389 Such

cynicism pervades. Miss Bright refuses to bequeath anything

to Ada: ‘who… would stay for so many years in a job that paid

her thirty shillings a week unless she were on to a good

thing?390

This desperate, amoral logic reaches its reduction ad

absurdum, ad nauseum, in The Corrida at San Feliu:

Do we really care a damn about the murder of amillion Jews… or about a lone buck niggerlynched[?]… We don’t. We will only lineourselves up in good causes to the limit ofexpenditure of the time and energy we thinknecessary for the preservation of our own peaceof mind.391

Lady Butterfield explains ‘there is no such thing… as the

utterly altruistic action’; and she is sure George ‘wouldn’t

have to look far to find a reason why Tim thought it worth

two hundred pounds to keep [him] out of [trouble]’.392 George

has his own selfish reason for finding such a reason, and

imagines telling Tim that only selfish terror of having a

brother in jail prompted the loan, and that demanding

repayment would ‘remove the last shred of loving charity that

was ever connected to the original giving’.393

388 Ibid., p.198.389 Ibid., p.40.390 Ibid., p.45.391 The Corrida at San Feliu, pp.305-306.392 The Bender, p.180.393 Ibid., p.62.

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Gillian too contends that love is egocentric and suspects

that George is not concerned for her welfare but the two

hundred pounds, ‘Please don’t think I’m making a moral

judgement. It’s simply that I like the facts to be

straight.’394

As pregnancy threatens her contempt for concern, she tries to

abort and so kill her growing sense of responsibility, thus

allowing her to continue in illusory independence as a free

agent via the received wisdom of fashionable existentialism.

Her prediction that ‘everybody will blame themselves’ even

though ‘nobody is to blame for me getting into a boiling bath

and getting sizzled in gin except me’395 is accurate, at least

regarding her mother who feels it has all been her fault.396

However, the novel is ambivalent over the nature and extent

of freedom and responsibility. Gillian’s claim to be

exclusively to blame may express an adolescent need to break

family ties, just as her mother’s accepting blame attempts to

re-establish her illusory authority.

While Gillian is not literally drowned, people are

figuratively, as Mrs Morse says, ‘a floating population’,

which sets George ‘thinking not only of the flood but of the

commodious boat’.397 Individuals become atomised, scattered

objects as economic replace emotional and biological ties.

‘Gone are the old folk… the children are scattered’;398 ‘Does

she feel lonely dying alone… with all her family gone, or

394 Ibid., p.94.395 Ibid., p.204.396 Ibid., p.249.397 Ibid., p.39.398 Ibid., p.34.

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scattered and thoughtless’;399 ‘the old firm gone, scattered

like children’.400

Despite this atomisation, in a determinist world, everything

is to blame for Gillian getting into a hot bath except

herself. Tim’s denial of her rights, ‘She’s too young in may

opinion to know her own mind so why ask her’,401 sounds

pathetically ironic as his own self-knowledge is questioned

by a strictly chronological narrative which, having set

events in motion with Click and Gillian’s carelessness in its

‘Preamble for Minor Characters on a Hot July Evening’,402

charts the irreversible progress of ‘the enemy’, time.403

Seeking lasting transcendent satisfaction in the temporal and

material, Tim despairs

I want to be back in August… the last time Iremember really enjoying myself. On the otherhand, although I didn’t know it, Gillian wasalready pregnant… perhaps June or July would bebetter. But… what’s the good of being back inJune when August and September are still due tocome up?404

Not knowing what he wants, other than a cessation of time, a

regression into childhood, Tim implies no-one is old enough

to know their own mind. Consciousness, ‘ticking over like a

lousy book-keeping machine’, may be mere ‘words built up

around processes’; inner light, moral judgement, an illusion

incompatible with the human commodity, the plainer fact.

Everything costs, including people: ‘Guy, living, had become

399 Ibid., p.44.400 Ibid., p.253.401 Ibid., p.58.402 Ibid., p.8.403 Ibid., p.141.404 Ibid., pp.239-240.

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worth half of what George was worth dead’;405 Tim is a ‘five

thousand a year man’;406 Anina cost twelve pounds.407 All

occupations are commercial, all commerce amoral because

motivated by private profit not public good. People are

classified as competitors to be defeated or clients to be

exploited. Alice’s divorcing George and marrying Sam, a

personification of the commerce which in The Birds of Paradise had

contaminated the idyllic island of Manoba, symbolises its

victory. Alice ‘worked for a man Sam ran out of business

only it was called acquiring patents’.408 ‘Accord’, ‘Sam’s

private word for Deal’409 is probably another euphemism, a

further example of the irresponsibly enclosed linguistics of

business dramatised by Tim and Wallingford’s argument:

‘Dissolution is only a word.’‘So is ruin.’

‘Now you’re being melodramatic.’‘And what about our loyal

staff?’ … ‘That’s the sortof detail I haven’t gone into.’‘How can you call it a detail?’

‘How can I go into that sort ofdetail before you and I have reached anagreement?’‘Agreement? A dissolution strikes me as theopposite of an agreement.’410

Wallingford is a domestic version of an old colonial, ‘blind

to realities I have clung to out-moded ideologies’.411 His

complacent paternalism towards his ‘loyal employees’ is

little different from a sahib’s to servants and subjects. As

405 Ibid., p.175.406 Ibid., p. 148.407 Ibid., p.165.408 Ibid., p.218.409 Ibid., p.146.410 Ibid., p.132.411 Ibid., p.136.

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Tim protests, ‘Your whole attitude towards me has been one of

distant superiority’.412 However, Tim’s values are equally

questionable, his dismissal of employees as a ‘sort of

detail’, a petty bourgeois equivalent of the NCO’s

dehumanising question at the communal massacre, ‘What is one

man among so many?’ He sums up the incompatibility of

feelings and economics: ‘No, you’re not supposed to find it

offensive. We are talking about business, but you keep

making the whole thing so damned personal’.413 He has been

irrevocably bought as Wallingford recognises, ‘There was no

arguing with five thousand a year’.414

Not ruthless enough for this environment, George cannot

contemplate the supremely personal act of suicide without

calculating its emotional and economic effects on ‘people who

did nothing to deserve it, like drivers and casual

witnesses’;415 ‘there’d have been an awful mess for someone to

be and get out of… and I should have thought of that

before’.416

As ignoring these nameless others so that Gillian would

inherit ten thousand pounds may be more altruistic, a

redeeming self-sacrifice, George may be selfishly talking

himself out of self-destruction. Tim, in a cynical version

of Craig’s psychological reductionism – ‘He died trying to

save himself… His image’417 accuses George of ‘moral

blackmail’418 or pathetic subservience to economic dictates:

412 Ibid., p.132.413 Ibid., p.131.414 Ibid., p.136.415 Ibid., pp.211-212.416 Ibid., p.227.417 The Mark of the Warrior, p.223.418 The Bender, p.242.

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‘You were going to do it for fifteen miserable bloody quid…

How plainer can it be put?’ George replies, ‘No plainer. You

could fancy it up a bit though.’419

George’s short-lived attempt to transcend self-interest by

refusing the money Tim offers him to abandon his duty as

godfather ends as Sarah’s phone call reasserts the

ineluctable pull of money while the fancied-up job of

remunerated godfather promises a shred of honour: ‘”Money,

you mean?” His ears tingled. He couldn’t help it.’420 The

novel ends like The Chinese Love Pavilion with a character trying to

close his eyes to a plainer fact, which, though probable,

would destroy his notion of himself as ‘a fine fellow’: ‘I

musn’t think too closely about any of it, because it may seem

then less that suddenly I am loved and more that I am being

used’.421

The Corrida at San Feliu also ends with someone, Thelma Craddock,

trying to maintain an illusion of transcendent love by

rejecting the uncaring fact or rather Bruce’s equally

egocentric alternative interpretation,

‘He shot himself rather than face me. He couldn’thave cared much for you really, could he?’

‘He cared.’‘But he shot

himself. He cared only for himself.’‘He cared for me.’422

The Craddocks’ interpretations are undermined not only by the

psychological cynicism – well, they would think that wouldn’t

they? – applicable to Scott’s other characters, but by their

419 Ibid., pp.241-42.420 Ibid., p.251.421 Ibid., p.253.422 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.315

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dependent status as Thornhill’s creations. As Scott’s

fictions become less sublimely self-assured, their cynicism

becomes more inclusive, the source of their compensation

fantasies shifting from the described characters of Johnnie

Sahib, The Alien Sky, A Male Child, and The Mark of the Warrior, through

the dramatised narrators of The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of

Paradise, via the playful ironies of The Bender, to the novelist

in The Corrida at San Feliu. Thornhill’s would-be omniscient

explanation of Ned’s suicide, though contradicting the

Craddocks’ independently egocentric interpretations, is

itself Thornhill’s autobiographical version, a paradoxical

conflation of surface and depth, reflecting his vacuity, his

failure to break out of his insularity to find meaning

outside his own skin:

Ned peeled himself away analysing the nature ofhis disgrace… Perhaps he anticipated as he tookand told off his skins, loss of favour,dishonour, downfall, ignominy, that in the endthere would be left a kernel of hope or even ofabsolution, but there was only the last skin ofhis disgrace and inside it the seed of another.423

Such bleakness, like Thelma’s criticism of Bruce who paints

only the surface not what is in his or her mind,424 recalls

Stella’s failings as a portrait painter and Ian’s

shortcomings as a narrator in A Male Child. Thelma offers The

Mark of the Warrior’s orders group solution: in response to

Bruce’s plea, ‘Don’t ask me any more questions about Leela.

She was incalculable’,425 she claims,

‘No woman, no man, is incalculable. Before shemet you she was asleep… You woke her in a way she


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did not understand and when she understood sherealised you had woken her with pity, not withlove, and she didn’t have enough experience ofthe world to survive the shock.’

‘You speak as if youdid. Did survive.’ ‘Isurvived,’ she said.426

This restates Stella and Ian’s dispute, also about a former

wife’s motives, in which his sarcastic ‘You know a lot about

it’ is answered by her ‘I know now how I’d have felt if I’d

done successfully what she did’,427 which I have linked to

Scott’s tautologous epistemology. In The Corrida at San Feliu such

self-duplication dominates: Thelma’s interpretation, as Bruce

suspects, is autobiographical, based on her teenage

experience of Mr Scaithe. Thelma and Bruce are, as Thornhill

recognises, his autobiographical creations: the young Thelma

derived from Lesley Clibsy-Smith whom he met in his youth,

Leela an interpretation of his first wife Mitzi, the middle-

aged Thelma a distorted version of his present wife Myra.

His characters do not have ‘wills of their own’ as she

hopes,428 but are controlled explorations of his self and his

experiences, extended metaphors of his preconceived view of

life:

You have to lead them carefully step by step totheir logical conclusion, and you have to stopleading them if the conclusion you’re leadingthem to doesn’t fit in with the original pictureof them.429

426 Ibid.427 A Male Child, pp.176-77.428 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.115.429 Ibid.

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They are either ‘a picture I drew on a mirror to avoid having

to face the truth’430 or ‘my own reflection… the inner silence

that would be left if layer by layer y pretensions to

articulate compassion for human frailty were peeled away’.431

His writing is centripetal, ‘a personal investigation into

his obsession with the incapacity of men and women to love

unselfishly’.432 Like Ned, he finds no kernel of hope: all

other people, all alien events, are incalculable because a

subject can only understand an ontological object through

distorting identification, or regard it superficially as an

irrelevant phenomenon.

When I stop trying to identify with thecharacters or trying to project myselfemotionally into the action… I realise I don’tcare… the bull’s blood is its blood… its life itslife, its death its death. the same goes for thetoreros… In the crowded plaza de toros, I sitalone… a two-legged animal with… a tragicinheritance of speech; waiting for the personalrevelation of what he really means when he says…so glibly… I love, I care … hoping [for] … aglimpse of the reality behind the illusion that aman can care for someone other than himself.433

The inheritance of speech, ‘the subtle ramifications of

[words] evolved by a million years use’434 transforms the

animal from a mechanism to a consciousness with transcendent

expectations always tragically frustrated by biological and

economic forces:

For a man there is no season of desire, no wintersleep, no spring quickening, no summer browsing,

430 Ibid., p.241.431 Ibid., pp.241-42.432 Ibid., pp.16-17.433 Ibid., pp.304-305.434 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.81.

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or autumnal migration. In this way we aredistinguished from birds and bulls and leopards.In the spirit we are always hungry forincrease.435

As the bull has been deceived and corrupted by the corrida,

‘a travesty of the locked-horn conflict of an old bull with a

young… which he himself knew only instinctively,

atavistically… in the labyrinthine corridors of his racial

memory’,436 so humanity had fallen from an Edenic ‘awful

wholeness… between men and nature’,437 deceived by language and

imagination: ‘We all follow the cloth, we are all deluded.

Too late you will find that the cloth was nothing, that there

was no enemy at all other than your pride, your greed, your

self-esteem’.438

Such is the deliberate ambiguity of the bullfight symbolism,

a refinement of the solipsistic semantics of The Chinese Love

Pavilion, that ‘the corrida means anything you want it to

mean’.439 Depending on Thornhill’s attitude, the bull

represents injustice and all who are deluded by pride, greed

and self-esteem, especially his own pride which encourages

him to believe that anything he writes can combat injustice.

Scott explores the means and ends paradoxes of fiction’s

social function by conflating matador, novelist and cave

painter. If socially committed literature is only a

sophisticated development of the ‘wish-fulfilment’,

‘compensation fantasy’, and ‘sympathetic magic’ of cave

painting, which stone-age man ‘believed gave them the power

435 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.217.436 Ibid., pp.278-79.437 Ibid., p.316.438 Ibid., p.306.439 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.299.

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to kill [bulls] in reality’,440 the novelist’s role in

combating injustice may be as peripheral as Daintree’s in the

eradication of yaws. A chance combination of factors or a

vast organisation of forces probably means the bull would

have died anyway. ‘In Portugal the bulls are only killed

symbolically. Then they are led out of the ring and killed

in the slaughterhouse.’441 Either way, ‘It is foreseeably to

end in death and what lies between the beginning and the end

is therefore an exhibition of mystique and vanity.’442

The bullfighter’s vanity equates with the novelist’s,

especially Thornhill’s (or indeed Scott’s), who claims he

loves and cares while devoting himself more and more to the

mystique of his egocentric work, which though dedicated to

defeating social injustice loves social injustice as a source

of material. Scott restates the problem in The Day of the Scorpion

as Merrick condemns the ‘amateur’ psychology of the

professional soldier:

In a special way they love their enemies… It’scommon to most walks of life… To fall in lovewith the means as well as the ends of anoccupation… It’s a confusion… It blinds you tothe truth of a situation. It hedges everythingabout with a mystique.443

Much as self-esteem led George to fancy up explanations to

disguise selfish motives, so ‘the matador fakes it up with

some fancy cape work as the bull goes by and the crowd who

thought the bull was accepting the lure goes mad with

enthusiasm’.444 In fact the bull ‘is indifferent to the440 Ibid., p.185.441 Ibid., p.130.442 Ibid., p.130.443 The Day of the Scorpion, p.375. 444 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.119.

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matador’,445 is charging, selfishly, into its querencia, ‘the

particular spot in the ring that the bull favours’.446

Thornhill has ‘been faking it up with the cape for a long

time. In Playa de Faro… you can buy Penguin editions of some

of the novels’.447 As literature is an illusion making

irredeemable self-indulgence, and ‘”It’s ours,” … is two

people’s way of saying in unison “it’s mine,”’448 injustice or

infidelity should not be disguised by false sentimentality.

Echoing Reid’s reductive, mocking interpretation of Teena’s

art which deluded Brent into love, Thornhill understands that

Myra will not desert him because:

She had worked out which side her private breadwas buttered on… She had enjoyed their affair.I had enjoyed my jealousy. We were all wellsatisfied. Throw out the humbug and ten secondsfrom now who would care?449

‘Humbug’ occurs only twice elsewhere in Scott’s writings,

both in ‘Literature and the Social Conscience: The Novel’,

alluding to a long quotation from Henry James:

Prose fiction now occupies itself as never beforewith ‘the condition of the people’, a fact quiteirrelevant to the nature it has taken on. Worksof art are capable of saying more things to manabout himself than any other works whatever arecapable of doing – and it’s only by saying… asnearly as we can, all there is, and in as manyways and on as many sides, and with a vividnessor presentation that ‘art’ and ‘art alone’ isadequate mistress of, that we are able… to arriveat any sort of synthesis that isn’t, through all

445 Ibid.446 Ibid., p.118.447 Ibid., p.119.448 Ibid., p.292.449 Ibid., pp.261-62.

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its superficialities and vacancies, a base andillusive humbug.450

In this lecture, written at the same time as The Corrida at San

Feliu, and employing its cave-painting and duende imagery,

Scott struggles to reconcile the irrelevance to the novel of,

and the moral duty of the novel to improve, the condition of

the people: ‘the curious paradox of the illusion of a better

life existing in an artifice that still truthfully reflects

the ills of the life we know’.451 This illusion is achieved

because the literary image transcends the prejudices and laws

of society which have shaped the language the author must use

to articulate his dissent from a society determined by those

same indifferent, amoral forces. Art overcomes determinism

because it is

an attempt to reach beyond [the artist’s] owndisillusion, beyond the proven futility of actionin the world of reality[.] Shouldn’t he distrustthe limitations imposed on a man in the world ofreal action… isn’t it when he feels that… he mustjustify [his art] in terms of something otherthan itself, that he abdicates his uncomfortablevocation, and, lining himself up as a moreobvious contributor to Society, is then subjectto the laws and prejudices of that Society and inthe long run sinks with it into the quicksands ofits own disillusion?452

Similarly, the bull is subject to the law of the corrida only

if he accepts the lure of the capes. As Thornhill doubts his

social relevance as a symbolic matador, he identifies with

the bull, associating the querencia with his refusal to be

lured by his wife’s infidelity. His passivity, anticipating

450 My Appointment with the Muse, p.135.451 Ibid., p.147.452 Ibid., p.148.

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Hari’s sannyasa, seeks ‘the enviable stillness of the

saint’,453a ‘still centre’ which he can only find in ‘each book

as [he] write[s] it’454 in an endless struggle to transmute the

raw perpetual energy of life into the perfect immobility of

art’.455

Thornhill’s attitude to art is then religious, an

(unconscious) echo of Joyce’s portrait of the artist as ‘a

priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily

bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving

life’.456 The conscious echoes are of T.S. Eliot, whom Scott

identified as the greatest literary influence on him. As my

next chapter will analyse this in some detail, here I will

merely relate the concept of time in Four Quartets to The Corrida at

San Feliu.

Four Quartets ponders the nature of the temporal and eternal,

‘to apprehend/The point of intersection with the

timeless/With time’,457 defining that point as the incarnation

of Christ: ‘Here the impossible union/Of spheres of existence

s actual,/ here the past and future are conquered and

reconciled’.458 Scott shared Eliot’s premises but not his faith

and so concluded that the ‘impossible union’ was indeed so.

For Scott the ‘timeless’ lies in each individual’s sense of

indestructible personal identity which is alienated from the

relentless progress of time, ticking over like a lousy book-

453 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.306.454 Ibid., p.141.455 Ibid., p.289.456 The Essential James Joyce, ed. with an introduction by Harry Levin(London: Jonathan Cape, 1948) p.341.457 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963,rpt. 1974), p.212.458 Ibid., p.213.

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keeping machine, transforming subjectivity into a commodity,

and eventually, ineluctably, a corpse.

Thornhill thinks of a book as drawings on the walls of a

dungeon,459 uniting the image of cave painting with that of the

prison of an exiled self in The Birds of Paradise. Within these

constraints, the artist is ‘bound only by his version of the

truth and the words he can muster to record it’,460 which is

liberating, since he is answerable to no other versions, and

limiting since he has access to no others. Truth is

implicitly located outside time, in a spatial dimension that

can only be experienced individually, not explained to

others. Though Thornhill ‘might find reasonable

explanations… he would not have told the truth which, being a

territory, is explored more easily than told’.461

This distinction between exploration and explanation informs

that made in ‘Literature and the Social Conscience’ between a

humble inquiry and a morally superior tract which The Corrida at

San Feliu dramatises, as Scott fearing his own imaginative

bankruptcy, sought a still centre that was not a base and

illusive humbug:

Is a novel that is a work of art embarked upon byits author in a frame of mind that admitscertainty or preconceived opinions? The imageshe builds up will contain statements about lifeand society, good and evil, but should they bethe images of a dissenting, inquiring mind, or ofa dissenting, instructing one?462

459 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.117.460 Ibid., p.107.461 Ibid.462 My Appointment with the Muse, p.141.

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All texts are territories to be explored: a reader is a

mental traveller – thinking another’s thoughts, assuming

other identities, moving from age to age, place to place –

reading an incarnation, a transubstantiation. As Emerson put

it, ‘I believe in eternity. I can find… the creative

principle of each and of all eras in my mind’,463 arguing that

‘all inquiry into history’ including surely, as Scott

realised, the writing and reading of novels, is the desire to

replace ‘There or Then’ with ‘the Here and the Now’.464

By breaking down the temporal determinism that dominated The

Bender, The Corrida at San Feliu creates an internal timeless

territory of archetypical patterns as Ned, Lesley, Bruce and

Thelma recur in different roles, contexts and configurations.

However, this territory is only an egocentric variation on

Thornhill’s temporal life, psychologically determined by the

succession of events and thoughts that have formed his

character. The Preface feared the papers Thornhill left

‘would be of interest mainly to his biographers’.465 As this

would have limited their commercial appeal and commodity

value, ‘there has never been any real doubt in the

publishers’ minds that they should be published together.

They are, it is suggested, complementary and

interdependent.’466 Though the wisdom and good faith of the

publishers’ decision is doubted, the structure of the novel

encourages a reading to answer a question of interest mainly

to Thornhill’s biographers: did he commit suicide? Many

subsidiary questions are raised concerning the biographical

463 Richard Poirier, Ralph Waldo Emerson The Oxford Authors (OUP, 1990),p.116.464 Ibid.465 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.15.466 Ibid., p.17.

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sources of his fictions: his characters are not allowed to

transcend their creator, but are continually related back to

their originating centre. Paradoxically this strengthens the

text’s spatiality, since Thornhill is but another character

in Scott’s novel, not its author. His biography was not an

actual ‘Then and There’ but is a ‘Here and Now’ formulated in

the reader’s imagination.

Two years after writing The Corrida at San Feliu, Scott returned to

these issues in a review which criticises Norman Sherry’s

Conrad’s Eastern World for seeming to ‘question the novelist’s

right to have written what he likes in the way he liked’, and

for seeking to reduce Conrad’s creations, as he has reduced

Thornhill’s, to their sources. This ‘must be of interest to

future biographers… but he does tend to lose Conrad the

writer in the process’,467 implying Conrad the writer

transcends Conrad the man, as Gaffur, Scott’s invented poet

lives on through his work: ‘not is, was.. because he’s dead.

But he’s still famous as a classic’.468 This interpretation is

confirmed by a later review in which Scott insists on

Conrad’s ‘timelessness, his greatness’, to refute C.B. Cox’s

attempt to show his modernity.469

The Corrida at San Feliu therefore is in part a preparation for one

of The Raj Quartet’s themes. the relationship between a free

individual, able to change history, and a historical process

which determines that individual. One is simultaneously

conscious of the Craddocks’ stature as selves with whom to

identify, and of their status as mere puppets, an obsessed

467 ‘Lord Jim’s Life’, TLS, November 3, 1966, pp.993-94.468 The Day of the Scorpion, p.175.469 ‘More Cucumber, More Conrad’, Country Life Vol. CLVI, no. 4024,August 15, 1974, p.466.

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writer’s fantasies. Similarly, in The Raj Quartet one is

conscious of the coherence and pertinence of each character’s

views, but aware that they are the product of a particular

conjunction of time and place, and that the narrative

recreation of those views, however convincing or vivid, is

determined by the narrator’s access to historical sources.

Nevertheless, timeless greatness is the goal. ‘There is only

the fight to recover what has been lost… only the trying.’470

The Corrida at San Feliu’s final image of perpetual sexual union

evokes a prelapsarian joy, like Conway’s ‘full sensual

consciousness’, in which the spirit was not always hungry for

increase; ‘a union, an awful wholeness has been achieved

between man and nature’,471 recalling Eliot’s ‘hints’ of the

eternal in sudden, intense revelations in the ‘Whisper of

running streams, and winter lightning./The wild thyme unseen

and the wild strawberry’,472 which are themselves echoed by

Gaffur’s ‘fleeting moments’.473

In The Raj Quartet such a union, evoked by the luxuriance of the

Bibighar Gardens, Ahmed’s falconry and Siva’s ‘dance of

creation, preservation and destruction. A complete cycle. A

wholeness’,474 is differentiated from Western epistemology

rooted in Cartesian division:

An English person automatically thinks of a saintas someone who is going to be martyred, a manwhose logic isn’t going to work in a final show-down with the severely practical world… theyexpect these saints of theirs to be sounearthbound that they have one foot in heaven

470 Eliot, p.203.471 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.316.472 Eliot, p.201.473 A Division of the Spoils, p.598.474 The Jewel in the Crown, pp. 137-38.

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already. And of course by heaven they mean theopposite of earth. They divide the material fromthe spiritual with their usual passion fortidiness…475

So Lady Chatterjee refutes The Bender, ‘Literature and the

Social Conscience’, and any separation of the temporal from

the eternal, as Scott replaces the autobiographical,

centripetal peeling away of The Corrida at San Feliu with the

centrifugal extended metaphors and dramatic reconstructions

of historical epic, which is, nevertheless and therefore,

timeless, ‘saying as much as possible and in as many ways and

on as many sides, and with a vividness of presentation that

“art” and “art alone” is adequate mistress of’.

475 Ibid., p.66.

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Chapter Six The Raj Quartet

Chapter Six

The Raj Quartet

1. Standing where a lane ends and cultivation begins

Like the opening pages of the Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of

Paradise but with far greater assurance and sophistication, the

first sentence of The Jewel in the Crown anticipates scenes,

characters, incidents and recurrent images – gardens,

shadows, walls, darkness, roads – to be developed in The Raj

Quartet. It is one of the densest, most complex openings in

modern literature:

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for themoment, but even so conveying to a girl runningin the still deeper shadow cast by the wall ofthe Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, suchas years before Miss Crane had been conscious ofstanding where a lane ended and cultivationbegan: a different landscape but also in thealluvial plane between the mountains of the northand the plateau of the south.476

The invocatory imperative ‘imagine’, unlike the distancing

direct addresses to readers characteristic of eighteenth

century or postmodern fiction, applies to both reader and

author, confidently asserting the novel’s power and duty to

involve readers in a collaborative construction of mutually

relevant fictions. While any such construction is precluded

for the moment by the syntactic and referential scope of the

476 The Jewel in the Crown, p.1.

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rest of the sentence, the plethora of questions raised

creates tremendous momentum which propels the reader through

the starkly contrasting next paragraph, statically describing

the alluvial plane, on to the start of the narrative proper

in the next section.

‘Then’, rendered solemnly resonant by its surrounding commas,

denotes not only Scott’s struggle through the nihilistic

metafictive introspection of The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu,

everything indeed that led to his writing of the novel, but

also whatever experiences and motives lead readers to open

it. This contributes to the metafictive overtones of the

next, richly evocative, phrase, ‘standing where a lane ended

and cultivation began’, which itself stands at the threshold

of a leap from insular linearity into immense open space,

which is in part Scott’s growth beyond the relative

simplicity and limited scope of his earlier work. However,

‘standing’ suggests hesitancy, doubt, even paralysis, which,

when contextualised in the story of Miss Crane, symbolises an

immobility when faced with the irreconcilable opposition of

occident and orient analogous to Forster’s Mrs Moore’s

sitting ‘motionless with horror’ where Scott argued – as part

of a larger, complexly idiosyncratic interpretation of A

Passage to India, ‘we can… for Mrs Moore read E.M. Forster’.477

Ignoring Malone’s deathbed, Kafka’s castle, Mann’s Venice,

Lowry’s Quanhnahuac for example, but emphasising Forster’s

subsequent silence – ‘the only clear thing about it was that

it was the end of the road for the Forster who wrote novels’478

– Scott claims that ‘of all places in twentieth century

477 ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, Essays by Divers Hands, XXXVI (1970),p.115.478 Ibid., p.113.

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literature Marabar has a unique feeling about it of

terminus’.479 Yet, even though it was written on either side

of the 1914-1918 war, the event most commonly blamed for

ending what Scott describes as ‘the Renaissance, when man

emulated God’ and replacing it with a present in which ‘No

longer believing in God… we’re up against the apparent rock-

terminus of defining what, in heaven’s name, we are’,480 Scott

reads A Passage to India as ‘prophetic’, which means merely that

it anticipates a schism in European culture that Scott

unilaterally postpones by thirty years for the purely

autobiographical reason that he himself suffered his most

significant crisis during the Second World War. As we shall

see, his personal transformation, precipitated largely by his

military service in India, from a homosexual would be poet,

to a husband, father and accountant, becomes mythologised as

a great cultural, national process of terminus and

problematic redefinition in which ‘in Ranpur, and in places

like Ranpur, the British came to the end of themselves as

they were’.481

Unlike A Passage to India, which conforms to the inherited

conventions of psychological realism and opens with an

explicit, unambiguous and controlled composition of place, The

Raj Quartet structurally evokes its concern with immobility,

terminus and renewal, through the achronic convolutions of

its narrative, and immediately implies its theme of ethnic

conflict in the powerfully resonant conflicting signals of

Indian ‘Bibighar’ undermined by the English connotations of

‘lane’ in that first sentence.

479 Ibid.480 Ibid., p.122.481 The Day of the Scorpion, p.3.

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Miss Crane, finding life in England ‘tragically small’,482 had

come to India ‘to find a place in an unknown world that would

come to her as new and fresh and, if not joyful, then at

least adventurous and worthwhile’.483 Her motives were then

primarily selfish, akin to Canning’s yearning for adventure

in A Male Child. However, being governess to two Raj children

leaves her feeling ‘empty, starved’484 because, defying the

alien setting, it replicates life in England. Evenings when

she is nominally, but psychologically far from, ‘free’, are

spent ‘writing an occasional letter to another of her kind

who had exchanged this station for another or gone back to

England;485 an enclosed exchange, it is implied, between

virtual clones.

But now she began to feel restless and took toputting on her boots and – parasol opened andprotectively raised – walking down the lane ofthe civil lines in which the Nesbitt-Smiths’bungalow stood. the lane was shaded by treesthat thinned out gradually as the bungalows gaveway to open cultivated fields.486

This apparently positive gesture merely emphasises her

failure to open herself to indigenous India. Instead she

opens her parasol, protecting herself even in the shaded

lane, and walks in a direction which takes her away from the

native town which

frightened her with its narrow dirty streets, itsdisgusting poverty, its raucous dissonant music…its ragged population of men and women who looked

482 The Jewel in the Crown, p.6.483 Ibid.484 Ibid., p.8.485 Ibid., p.9.486 Ibid.

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so resentful in comparison with the servants andother officiating natives of the cantonment.487

This parody of racist mentality is so accurate and convincing

that it has deluded many into thinking these views are

Scott’s. The intrusive, presumptuous adjectives are

pathetically Crane’s: the music would be neither raucous nor

dissonant to the indigenous ear; as for the poverty, who does

it disgust more, those who must suffer it, or those who can

choose whether or not to witness it by walking the other way

down the lane? Small wonder the former are resentful.

Crane’s fundamental imperialism at this point is little

different from Brigadier Reid’s complacent pomposity later in

the novel:

I could not help but feel proud of the years ofBritish rule… the charm of the cantonment helpedone to bear in mind the calm, wise and enduringthings. One only had to cross the river into thenative town to see that in our cantonments andcivil lines we had set an example for others tofollow and laid down a design for civilised lifethat the Indians would one day inherit.488

The irony here is double-edged: while the Indians do

inevitably, perhaps tragically, inherit the mores and values

of Western capitalism, the years of British rule are

discredited, their concept of the ‘civilised’ dishonoured,

because such inequity was permitted, indeed encouraged.

To Miss Crane’s credit, she eventually becomes conscious of

such crassness, and struggles, if vainly, to overcome it.

For the moment, however, she remains ‘afraid to go further’

at the point when the comfortable English lane does not

487 Ibid.488 Ibid., p.269.

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simply end but, continuing, becomes a symbol not of shuttered

insularity but of endeavour and enquiry, ‘the road’ that ‘led

on into the far distance’, into ‘the open spaces’.489

When Miss Crane does attempt to open herself up, she

metaphorically ‘set[s] out on the long and lonely, difficult

and sometimes dangerous road’490 that leads ultimately to the

literal journey from Dibrapur where ‘ahead of them the

rioters were spread out across the road’,491 and so earns Lilli

Chatterjee’s respect: ‘She was not mediocre. She showed

courage and that’s the most difficult thing in the world for

any human being to show… physical courage’ which is Lilli

feels, ‘like an invitation… open’.492

Like most moral messages, that of The Raj Quartet sounds tritely

sanctimonious if disentangled from its symbolic and narrative

web: one should walk courageously beyond the insular lane

onto the open road where ‘cultivation’ begins. Thus Daphne,

perhaps the most courageous of Scott’s heroines, when she

falls in love with Hari, experiences the same ‘immensity’ as

Miss Crane sensed – the opening up of a previously limited

life: Mayapore changes, ‘extend[ing] to the other side of the

river and, because of that, in all directions, across the

enormous flat plain’.493 It leads particularly to the Bibighar

Gardens, a symbolic paradise, but tragically too open,

uncultivated:

green – wild and overgrown, a walled enclosure oftrees and undergrowth, with pathways and suddenopen spaces… At the back of the grounds the wall

489 Ibid., p.9490 Ibid., p.16.491 Ibid., p.54.492 Ibid., p.68.493 Ibid., p.378.

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is crumbled and broken… At the front of thegarden there is an open archway on to the roadbut no gate. So the garden is never closed.494

The more unequivocally positive images of cultivation are

provided by Mabel’s garden at rose Cottage – cut down after

her death and replaced by a sterile, rarely used, tennis

court by the insular Mildred – and M.A. Kasim’s garden,

created while he was in prison in Premanager,495 a physical

actuality which is transformed, in a fashion typical of The Raj

Quartet into a metaphor for his political idealism and

independence:

Let into your army one man of the suspect kind…and you plant the seed of a militarydictatorship… I do not want to see such agovernment of generals. I do not want to seesuch an India… So, for the moment… because I amout of rhythm with my country’s temporaryemotional feelings… I tell myself, ‘Go andcultivate your garden for a while.’496

Courageous and shrewd, if somewhat aloof, Kasim, the most

unambiguously heroic character in The Raj Quartet, embodies

Scott’s ideal of one ‘who feels he must do work of some

positive value – not in the context of society as such… but

in the context of the philosophy on which that society bases

its aspirations’.497

This is clearest in his measured, though passionate,

explanation of why he must remain a member of the Congress

party and hence be imprisoned for his ideals –

494 Ibid., p.366.495 The Day of the Scorpion, p.5.496 A Division of the Spoils, p.443.497 My Appointment with the Muse, p.118.

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Ends and means… are not what matter… What mattersis the idea to which the ways and means aredirected… the idea, you know, is not simply toget rid of the British. It is to create a nationcapable of getting rid of them and capablesimultaneously of taking its place in the worldas a nation…498

Curiously, however, in his lectures about The Raj Quartet, Scott

implies, not only be omission, that such idealism is

represented in the tetralogy by British administrators rather

than an Indian politician:

with the idea that while love, as T.S. Eliotsaid, is most nearly itself when here and nowcease to matter, life is most nearly itself whenhere and now not only matter much but can be feltto matter; when here and now are governed by aphilosophy in pursuit of whose truths and rewardsmen know they can honourably employ themselves.A story about men deeply involved in, obsessedby, their occupations is an extended metaphor ofthat idea. A story about men at work in BritishIndia is the same metaphor, particularized.499

This rather off-putting – and by today’s standards sexist –

description of The Raj Quartet is woefully inadequate. The

tetralogy itself is more concerned with women not at work in

British India, while the most significant British men at

work, such as Guy Perron, have grave doubts over the truth

and rewards of imperialism; are ridiculously or dangerously

conservative – Arthur Peplow, Teddie Bingham and Brigadier

Reid – or psychologically warped – Ronald Merrick. Clearly

Scott could not represent his ideal of honourable employment

through reactionary British imperialists without irony which

questions the whole basis of the Raj.

498 The Day of the Scorpion, p.18.499 My Appointment with the Muse, p.118.

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The Raj Quartet, then, does not share the simplistic faith in a

prelapsarian past, in which honourable employment was

possible, implied by and yearned for in The Corrida at San Feliu

where ‘disgrace was inapposite to describe the kind of

situation people find themselves in nowadays… downfall from a

position of trust or honour. But who is trusted? Who

honoured?’500 The Raj Quartet’s greater scepticism is exemplified

by Sarah Layton’s ‘mistaken belief’ that Lady Manners was in

an enviable ‘state of grace’, ‘undisturbed by any doubts

about the meaning and value of [her] life and the opinions

[she]’d formed while leading it501 and by Miss Crane’s response

to Clancy’s admiration for the painting glorifying Queen

Victoria’s role as empress of India. Clancy, in a naïve echo

of Thornhill’s petulant despair, assumes that ‘Things were

different those days, weren’t they? ... sort of simpler, sort

of cut and tried’, to which Miss Crane replies ‘More people

thought they were. But they weren’t really.’502

While The Raj Quartet demonstrates that things were not really

honourable, just that more people deluded themselves into

thinking they were through an enclosed, self-serving

philosophy divorced from politico-military and socio-economic

reality, Scott himself still hankered for such an illusory

‘golden age’, as an alternative to the bleak alienating

consumerism of contemporary Britain. His justification,

though apparently straightforward, implies the deep ethical

and cultural antimonies animating The Raj Quartet:

I have always tried to portray… characters… atwork, or trying to be at work, work in which they

500 The Corrida at San Feliu, pp.115-116.501 The Day of the Scorpion, p.48.502 The Jewel in the Crown, p.23.

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can believe, or work which doesn’t comfort orsatisfy them because there is… a limit to theirexpectations of reaching the point at which theirtalents will be fully extended. It is all partof the same view… of the importance to a man, orto a woman, of engaging himself honourably… inwork or acts that are not, to put it simply,entirely selfish.503

This bypasses the possible conflict between an individual’s

job satisfaction – through the realisation of personal

potential – and social conscience – satisfied through

altruistic employment – by implying that only through not

‘entirely selfish’ acts can the self be fully extended, fully

known. Scott therefore reconciles the ideals of imperial

service with those of liberal humanism, which Martin green,

for example, has argued conflict in the literature of empire:

[Kipling] affronts the humanist belief thatindividual fulfilment is the ultimate moralcriterion – Kipling says that individual livesexist to be used up in the service of socialcauses.504

Such lack of interest in the individual – personified in The

Raj Quartet by the young John Layton who ‘did not mind having no

special identity of his own. Life, in its fullest sense, was

a question of service’505 – led, Green contends, to Kipling’s

penchant for short stories, epigrammatic verses and

children’s fables; to his failure, in terms of the literary

orthodoxy, to write a novel.

In contrast, Scott tacitly identifies the liberal humanist

literary tradition with imperial administration and asks

503 My Appointment with the Muse, p.127.504 Martin Green, The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: the Doom of Empire(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p.xv.505 The Day of the Scorpion, p.58.

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analogous questions of each: ‘Does the man of letters take

credit only for progressive legislation and accept no blame

for the reactionary?’;506 ‘They [the British Raj] accept credit

for all the improvements they’ve made. But can you claim

credit for one without accepting blame for the other [i.e.

the disorganisation and division]?’507

Scott’s realisation that the vanished ‘golden age’ was indeed

blameworthy, paralleling his internecine yearning and guilt

over his homosexual past, leads to the intense emotional

economy of The Raj Quartet in which the conflation of individual

and social, imperialism and insularity, physical and

spiritual, literal and symbolic, animate an epic exploring

how individuals are both fulfilled and used up in and by

social causes.

2. The Influence of T.S. Eliot

After spending his twenty-first birthday book token on the

1941 edition of what was to become the most significant

ideological influence on The Raj Quartet, ‘East Coker’, Scott

quoted from and paraphrased Eliot’s poem on numerous

occasions, a tendency which reached near absurdity in his

1968 lecture – a part commentary on, part apology for The Raj

Quartet – ‘India: A post-Forsterian View’, where, as M.M.

Mahood complains, ‘Scott takes refuge in a very long

quotation from ‘East Coker’, culminating in ‘In my end is my

beginning’, and breaks off’508. This quotation is nothing less

506 My Appointment with the Muse, p.131.507 The Jewel in the Crown, p.256. 508 M.M. Mahood, ‘Paul Scott’s Guardians’ Yearbook of English Studies, 13(1983), p.246.

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than the entire thirty-eight lines of the last section.

Moreover, another six lines appear earlier, including ‘the

deep lane/shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon’,

which Scott associates explicitly with his homesickness

during his first visit to India. Clearly both references are

echoed and fused in that complex first sentence of The Jewel in

the Crown. Indeed, what Mahood criticises as evasiveness or

natural authorial reticence is, on the contrary, a frank

acknowledgement of a crucial source.

Nevertheless Scott was presumably exasperated with the

lecture himself, for when he tried to recycle it for his 1972

Indian tour, he saw that though he had come closer than

before to discussing his work and ‘explaining why so much…

has been about the British-Indian relationship during the

days of imperialism in decline,509 ‘the whole thing would have

to be completely rewritten’.510 the long quotation from Eliot

is cut to seven lines and placed in the middle of the new

version, entitled ‘After Marabar: Britain and India, A Post-

Forsterian View’, accompanied by an admission, which is

either disingenuous or reveals an astonishing lack, or at

least tardiness, of self-awareness:

Again to quote T.S. Eliot – whom, in middle-age,I begin to recognise as perhaps the greatest literaryinfluence on my life, although no-one exerts aninfluence unless there is already acorrespondence of outlook for the influence towork upon…511

Scott’s outlook corresponds with Eliot’s in three

interrelated ways fundamental to the philosophy behind, and

509 My Appointment with the Muse, p.112.510 Ibid.511 Ibid., p.119, my emphasis.

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the narrative methodology of, The Raj Quartet: the concept of

falsifying patterns, which Scott develops to explore the

partiality of individual perspective; the concept of the

continuity of time, which he uses to support his historical

concerns and, at a deeper, perhaps unconscious, level, to

explore his obsession with renewal; and the paradox of

affirmation through negation, which is linked to Scott’s

Emersonian psychology of identity. While each expresses

Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism, for Scott they evoke the defining

absence of such faith and facilitate the exploration of

secular, social issues.

3. Falsifying Patterns and Narrative Perspectives

Scott’s fascination with patterns, which we have seen develop

through the early novels, would have made him particularly

receptive to Eliot’s assertion that

There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been.512

However, while for Eliot experience is intrinsically

unproblematic, merely an inadequate source of knowledge

compared with the transcendent truth derived from spiritual

enlightenment and meditation, for Scott the patterning begins

at an earlier epistemological stage, rendering the nature of

experience, defined as the relationship between an individual

512 T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Collected Poems 1909 -1962, p.199.

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and objective data, contentious and therefore central to his

fiction in which experience is data patterned, hence

falsified, according to the individual’s perspective, that is

the attitude or prejudices that each develops in

psychological interaction with social and cultural forces.

This is dramatised most clearly in the ‘Civil and Military’

section of The Jewel in the Crown, which is as concerned with the

mentality from which Brigadier Reid’s and District

Commissioner Robin White’s policies on the 1942 riots develop

and the opposite narrative strategies to which they lead as

on the policies themselves. In neat contrast to

Laxminarayan’s ‘history of the origins of Indian nationalism…

his apologia for many years of personal compromise’,513 Reid’s

unpublished memoirs are an apologia for his lack of

compromise. In The Raj Quartet’s first sustained use of the

pseudo-omniscient style discussed in my Chapter Two, he

epitomises imperial presumption, criticising Nehru, for

example, who ‘had not found in himself the political strength

to resist the Mahatma’514 which in a mere twelve words

blithely infers, without recourse to any evidence whatsoever,

that Gandhi should have been resisted politically, that Nehru

must have shared this view and so tried to resist him but

failed due to weakness.

In antithesis, White is so conscious of other minds and of

the ineluctable partiality of any account that he doubts

truth can be narrated. Thus, as his ‘we’ below illustrates,

his relationship with narrator and reader is collaborative;

513 The Jewel in the Crown, p.245.514 Ibid., p.284.

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like Scott, he invites us to ‘imagine, then’, while Reid

expects us to ‘listen to this’:

We are not at all after the blow-by-blow accountof the politics that led to the action. Actuallyany one man would be incapable of giving such anaccount… There were so many blows he would spendmore than his lifetime recording them. To makethe preparation of any account a reasonable taskhe would have to adopt an attitude toward theavailable material. The action of such anattitude is rather like that of a sieve. Onlywhat is relevant to the attitude gets through.the rest gets thrown away… one is at once back onthe ground of personal preference – evenprejudice – which may or may not have anything todo with ‘truth’, so-called.515

White’s epistemology distinguishes between physical facts –

‘actions and events’ – ‘the truth of which, however

unascertainable now, was known to somebody at the time?’ and mental

‘doubts, decisions’,516 which, to paraphrase Beloff, may be, at

least in theory, identifiable and even quantifiable, but are

in practice impossible to grasp and define.517 Thus when White

imagines writing a history of the British-Indian

relationship, he finds his attempt to record ‘the unrecorded

moments of history’ – to expound its ‘moral drift’ in which

the human conscience mediates between doubt and decision,

decision and action – is drawn back inevitably to ‘the world

of describable events’:

When I attempt to relate the theory to all theevents in the lives of all the people who wereconnected with the action – however directly orremotely – my mind simply won’t take in the

515 Ibid., p.333.516 Ibid., p.332.517 Max Beloff, ‘The End of the Raj/Paul Scott’s Novels as History’,Encounter, May 1976, p.65.

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complex of emotions and ambitions and reactionsthat led, say, to any one of the single actionsthat was part of the general describablepattern.518

The Raj Quartet’s almost megalomaniacal ambition, stated at its

outset, is indeed to dramatise and examine ‘the lives of all

the people connected with the action’:

This is the story of a rape, of the events thatled up to it and followed it and of the place inwhich it happened. There are the action, thepeople, and the place; all of which areinterrelated but in their totality incommunicablein isolation from the moral continuum of humanaffairs.519

This moral continuum essential to communication restates

Trilling’s ideal of the novel as an agent of ‘the moral

imagination… involving the reader himself in the moral

life’.520 Without such involvement, as Thornhill found as he

disengaged himself from the bullfight, ‘the complex of

emotions and ambitions and restrictions’ would remain latent,

the actions become mechanical, dehumanised, trivial. Hence

that opening supplication to imagine, to construct a totality

of action, people and place, which is nothing less than an

attempt to relocate modern man in his environment and so to

define who in heaven’s name we are.

Such a sense of neo-Marxist alienation or dislocation,

intensified by the cultural, racial and geographical

displacement of imperialism, and by the immense, literally

global, ambition and presumption of empire, circumscribe most

of The Raj Quartet’s characters, whose psychological defence

518 Ibid., p.334.519 Ibid., p.1.520 My Appointment with the Muse, p.75.

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mechanisms vary from the insensitivity of, in their various

ways, Mildred, Teddie, and the Graces, to the ironic, almost

mocking, detachment and abstraction of Hari, Ahmed, and

Sarah, who carries on mechanically ‘filling the bloody little

jars, going through [her] brave little memsahib act’.521

Others are rendered immobile, such as the ‘standing’ Miss

Crane, or simply insane or at least mentally unstable, like

Barbie or Susan.

Robin White struggles to relate actions and people because

the former are so depressingly fixed, unalterable, finite,

while the potentialities of the latter seem unnervingly

infinite. The Raj Quartet thus refutes Henry James’ complacent

conflation of ‘incident’ and ‘character’ in ‘The Art of

Fiction’: ‘The terms may be transposed at will. What is

character but the determination of incident? What is incident

but the illustration of character?’,522 concentrating,

especially in Barbie’s story or lack of one in The Towers of

Silence, on the unillustrated aspects of character, the

thoughts and wishes that fail to determine an incident or

become facts. lady Manners’ reaction to the bitter

independence struggle which culminated in the murderous

failure of partition – ‘Such a marvellous opportunity

wasted’523 – is a political encapsulation of the personal

regret that is the tetralogy’s dominant, tragic mood, a sense

of vast consciousness funnelled into limited, or denied by

limiting, action.

521 A Division of the Spoils, p.592.522 Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. withintroduction by Roger Gard (London: Penguin, 1987), pp.196-97.523 The Jewel in the Crown, p.447.

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Scott’s increasing emphasis not on what happens and why but

on how people feel and think courts sentimentality. Nello

Chatterjee’s parody of Henry manners – ‘To hell with policy!

What are you thinking and feeling, dear chap? That’s the

point?’524 – articulates a narrative tendency to value thoughts

above facts which becomes marked in The Towers of Silence and A

Division of the Spoils, in contrast to the rough equiponderance of

perspective and action in The Jewel in the Crown and The Day of the

Scorpion.

In The Jewel in the Crown, the impulse to discover ‘a fact, the

truth of which, however, unascertainable now, was known to

somebody at the time’525 generates momentum until it is

satisfied by the delayed, somewhat melodramatically

contrived, revelations of Daphne’s posthumously found journal

‘in which she describes what actually happens in the

Bibighar’.526 While, as in all Scott’s work since The Alien Sky,

perspective is crucial, the succession of narrative voices

exist primarily to relate the story of Hari, Daphne and

Merrick, continually conjured, compiled and amended as a

developing composite of the complementary versions of Lilli

Chatterjee, sister Ludmila, Srinivasan, Reid, White, and

Vidyasagar. Thus Sister Ludmila, a mere narrator who is

literally blind, effaces herself, ‘put[s] on the garments of

modesty’,527 beside the extraordinary Merrick and Kumar: ‘Two

such darknesses in opposition can create a blinding light.

Against such a light ordinary mortals must hide their eyes.’528

This foreshadows Perron’s illusory blindness, his narratorial

524 Ibid.525 Ibid., p.332.526 Ibid., p.313.527 Ibid., p.119.528 Ibid., p.132.

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eclipse before an inalienable fact, which though strikingly

exceptional in A Division of the Spoils is the norm of the Jewel in the

Crown:

I have thought of Rowan’s experience of theKandipat often, tried to shed light on it, as ascene, but the light coming out from the scenealways seems stronger. One ends up being dazzledby it… momentarily there’s the illusion ofblindness, blankness.529

The otherwise comparatively straightforward device of

Daphne’s journal, in which the protagonist reveals the truth

soon after it occurred, is made more effective and affecting

by the device of doubled perspective which Scott increasingly

exploits later in The Raj Quartet. A footnote in the journal,

added presumably by the narrator/compiler of the whole

volume, ‘Section… shown to Robin White begins here’,530 invites

readers to share White’s ‘deep sense of shock’531: suddenly we

are reading with White’s eyes as well as our own. Similarly

the ‘End of section… shown to Robin White’ note532 lends

greater drama, metaphoric weight (her death does indeed carry

her off the rim of the world) and tragic finality to Daphne’s

words which simultaneously, such is the complexity and

subtlety of Scott’s manipulation of responses, recall the

opening sentence of the novel – ‘there were the plains and

the openness that made it seem that if I ran long enough I

would run clear off the rim of the world’. Equally we are

made aware of all that White was not shown, and thus feel the

ineluctable partiality of individual perspective.

529 A Division of the Spoils, p.289.530 The Jewel in the Crown, p.403.531 Ibid., p.314.532 Ibid., p.409.

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The Day of the Scorpion introduces so many new elements – a change

of locale to Pankot, a fresh set of characters, the Laytons –

that its relationship with The Jewel in the Crown is one of

contiguity rather than continuation. Merrick’s presence

provides its main point of contact, the Laytons’ chance

encounter with Lady manners another. Embedded in their

story, like a latent contagion, is the volume’s equivalent of

Daphne’s journal, an count of Hari Kumar’s interrogation in

the Kandipat jail, focalised through the observing Lady

Manners. While this supplies new information to the reader,

mostly concerning Hari’s treatment in custody, its most

dramatic and moving moment is again engineered by perspective

doubling when the reader identifies with Hari in his

insupportable discovery of what the reader has long known –

that Daphne is dead, that a child was born and that she did

not betray him by marrying another, thus confirming and

simultaneously denying their love. In A Division of the Spoils,

Perron’s retelling of this scene from Rowan’s point of view,

so it becomes Perron’s experience of Rowan’s experience of an

experience the reader shared with Lady Manners, exemplifies

the proliferation of perspective, the shift to interiority,

which The Towers of Silence initiates.

Such numerous accounts of the same events, emphasising the

thoughts of protagonists and narrators, the new elements in

each retelling, are paralleled by the persistent tactic of

separating two accounts of an event by an analeptic sortie

into one of the characters’ minds. For example, Merrick’s

remarks to Sarah, ‘There’s the palace now… You’re looking in

the wrong direction, Miss Layton’533 reappear seven pages

later, after the previously omitted earlier part of the533 The Day of the Scorpion, p. 140.

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conversation, preceded by Sarah’s musings on her mother’s

silences – ‘used to establish between them a closeness that

had never existed before’534 – and on the enervating effect of

the Raj’s ‘representative frame of mind’.535 This evokes that

dominant part of Sarah’s personality which can never be

expressed in conversation with Merrick, her mother or anyone

– except perhaps physically, and literally abortively, with

Major Clark. The second time around such phrases, having

lost their initial function of furthering the plot, gain

metaphoric weight: here implying Sarah’s whole outlook is

wrong, at least from Merrick’s point of view.

Mildred’s adultery with Kevin Colely, Sarah’s abortion, and

the return of Colonel Layton comprise the few new events in

The Towers of Silence, a claustrophobic evocation of narrow-minded

pettiness which seems to have courted Pollard’s pejorative

phrase, ‘tedious repetition’. Its central character, Barbara

Bachelor, provides little other than a tragic, emotional

perspective on incidents already narrated in The Day of the

Scorpion, notably Mabel Layton’s death. Barbie’s belief that

Mabel has been buried in the wrong grave is a new element,

but, like so much in Barbie’s life, merely an inner

conviction which cannot be physically proved or translated

into action. Bronowsky anticipates the volume’s narrative

strategy, ‘Ah well, the truth is always one thing, but in a

way it’s the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows

where people’s hearts lie’.536 Barbie’s failure to determine

an incident, to illustrate her character, epitomises the

534 Ibid., pp.141-42.535 Ibid., p.143.536 Ibid., p.189.

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theme of wasted opportunity, though in her case, the

opportunity seems barely to have existed.

While in a 1971 letter to his publisher, Scott called The

Towers of Silence ‘a quiet book… the slow movement… the sort of

contemplative pause… from which all the themes etc. will

emerge clearly enough to leave A Division of the Spoils as far more a

book of action’,537 when completed four years later A Division of

the Spoils proves, on the contrary, meditative, despite its

accounts of Merrick’s and Ahmed’s violent deaths and the

riots in Mirat. Its main new character, Guy Perron, apart

from saving a would-be suicide and making love with Sarah, is

more an observer, a fresh perspective on old characters and

incidents, than a protagonist. His passive, interpretive

role is exemplified by his reconstruction of Pinky’s story

which, like The Raj Quartet as a whole, doubles perspective by

narrating first the story from Pinky’s point of view and then

the experience of discovering the information from various

sources.

I have filled the story out with some imaginativedetails and also placed events in the order inwhich they occurred – not in the order in whichthey emerged during my talk with Potter. Forinstance, when Potter referred early on to…538

Similarly, the source for the reconstructions in the final

book of A Division of the Spoils are revealed to be extracts from

Perron’s diaries which are twice given verbatim, entailing

mid-sentence shifts dovetailing third and first persons and

past and present tenses,539 while in The Towers of Silence, ‘the

necessary imaginative readjustment to see most of the rest of537 Robin Moore, Paul Scott’s Raj (London: Heinemann, 1990), p.91.538 A Division of the Spoils, pp.261-62. 539 Ibid., p.520 and p.532.

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the short life of Edward Arthur David Bingham almost entirely

from Teddie’s point of view’540 entails a shift, enacted within

a single clause, to the diminutive of his name. Dual

perspective is engineered by a single footnote which

historically contextualises the contemporarily sufficient

vagueness of Teddie’s ‘an evening in the middle of July’ by

specifying the year - ‘1943’.541 Such reminders emphasise the

questionable partiality of any single source and, like the

recurrent instructions to the reader, the necessity of

‘imagining, then’ in order to narrate, that is, comprehend.

In The Raj Quartet the relationship between the imaginative

reconstructions and their sources is never assumed but

continually implied, monitored or questioned. the ‘almost

invisible figure running through it, a traveller looking for

evidence, collecting statements, reconstructing an event’

which Scott’s ‘logical mind’ had ‘to imagine… collecting the

information’ in order not to ‘feel too omniscient’,542

encounters others, such as Perron, who are equally scrupulous

in revealing their sources. One of the more disturbing

implications of this technique f following the story by the

source is the suggestion that Barbie’s incoherent,

unreliable, unposted letters in The Towers of Silence may have been

the basis for some of the convincing, seemingly omniscient

reconstructions of The Day of the Scorpion. Indeed, so little new

narrative information is given in The Towers of Silence that the

entire volume seems to serve a function similar to that Scott

discerned between the companion to Martin Gilbert’s biography

of Churchill and the biography itself: ‘These companion540 the Towers of Silence, p.103.541 Ibid., p.104.542 Caroline Moorhead, ‘Novelist Paul Scott: Getting Engrossed in theDeath Throes of the Raj’, Times, October 20, 1975, p.11.

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volumes of course are optional, since they simply set out in

full the major source documents.’543 Though acknowledging they

are ‘formidable and inaccessible to the general reader’,544

Scott, revealingly, finds them fascinating, for they prompt

reflections about the peripheral role the individual has in

determining history, first described, but not successfully

evoked, in The Birds of Paradise: the accidental conjunction of

time, place and opportunity when action grows of its own

accord out of inaction and inertia, and Empires fall’.545

The Raj Quartet’s attempt to comprehend the relationship between

‘the action, the people and the place’ clearly informed, and

was informed by, Scott’s response to Gilbert’s Winston S.

Churchill, Companion Vol. 3, Parts 1 & 2, August 1914-December 1916:

One is hypnotised. One reads on, attentionswitched from one fascinating subject to another.One knows the broad outline from the mainbiography. here it is under a microscope whichshows how from casual beginnings a situationgrows, becomes dangerous, gets out of hand. Nosingle person is to blame; but no one has said,‘Stop. What are we doing?’ Thus – Gallipoli.546

4. The Inescapable Continuity of Time

A curious feature of The Raj Quartet, related to this

investigation into the connection between individual

responsibility and the process, or to use Scott’s own word,

‘drift’, of history, is the unequal division of A Division of the

543 ‘Cool, Calm and Uncalculating’, Country Life, Vol. CLIII, No.3948,February 22, 1973, p.489.544 Ibid.545 The Birds of Paradise, pp.211-212.546 ‘Cool, Calm and Uncalculating’, loc. cit.

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Spoils into two books, of which the second, covering 1947, is

only one hundred and forty pages and mainly retrospective, an

example of Patrick Swinden’s generalisation that

The staple of Scott’s prose is a slow-moving,hesitant, grammatically complex and heavilyloaded sentence structure which gathers togetherfragments of what has already been, more than itpropels forward events that are about to comeinto being.547

The supposedly climactic end of empire, the transfer of

power, is rendered little more than an afterthought or

appendix: a logical, tragically inevitable outcome of less

interest than the past which shaped, even caused, it. The

Raj, and its ‘only justification for two hundred years of

power… unification’,548 like Ahmed, and its representative

victim ‘seem[s] to [fall] without protest and without asking

any explanation of the thing that [has] happened to it, as if

all that has gone before is explanation enough’.549

Such historical determinism structures Scott’s mature

approach to fiction, his consciousness of ‘carrying with

[him] every day of [his] life – the luggage of [his] past, of

[his] personal history and of the world’s history’,550 which he

clarifies in the later version of the ‘Post-Forsterian View’

lecture with lines from ‘East Coker’, including ‘The world

becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/Of dead and

living… And not the lifetime of one man only/But of old

stones that cannot be deciphered’.551 Scott infers that

because ‘One is not ruled by the past, one does not rule or547 Paul Scott: Images of India, p.99.548 The Jewel in the Crown, p.444.549 A Division of the Spoils, p.113.550 My Appointment with the Muse, p.118.551 Ibid., p.119.

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re-order it, one simply is it’,552 a now can only be illustrated

within history. the Raj is thus still relevant as its

absence characterises the present. The Birds of Paradise

illustrates this most clearly: Conway’s trunk containing his

relics of imperial boyhood s dismissed by his insensitive,

acquisitive wife as ‘What a lot to get rid of’,553 while the

novel itself examines that boyhood, seeks to understand its

influence on the present. If one forgets the empire, that

must be a conscious rejection, a personal, questionable,

inappropriate, even irresponsible, dialectical response to

the political, economic, and cultural importance of its

extinction: ‘There is genuinely [no] such thing as

forgetting, but there are tender conspiracies of silence –

and these may engender ignorance, always a dangerous thing.’554

In particular Scott is concerned, in both senses, by the vast

majority of British people’s ignorance of India, during and

after British rule, which contributed, while the tetralogy

was being written, to racial prejudice and abuse directed at

commonwealth immigrants, fuelled by the not so ignorant, but

intolerant, Enoch Powell. Staying On is perhaps most effective

in its subtle admonishment of the insensitivity and

ingratitude of the withdrawn Raj in the sad story of Ibrahim

who

regretted the passing of the days of the raj whichhe remembered as days when the servants weretreated as members of the family… Finally heinherited the silence which greeted his father’stwo letters to Colonel Moxon-Griefe inquiring

552 Ibid.553 The Birds of Paradise, p.98.554 My Appointment with the Muse, loc. cit.

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about the possibilities of work in England foryoung Ibrahim…555

In the Raj Quartet, Perron’s Aunt Charlotte personifies a more

ostensibly benign ‘indifference and the ignorance of the

English at home’,556 where – though it is, as Perron puts it,

‘the source’ – distant Indian problems ‘count for little and

seem to belong to another world entirely’.557 Isolated,

atomised, the alien event does not impinge on a detached

British complacency based on ‘superb self-confidence, a

conviction of one’s moral superiority’.558 Her response to the

massacres of 1947, the ‘punjabis would appear to have taken

leave of their senses’,559 further distances their behaviour by

implying a madness incomprehensible and unrelated to the

calm, sane, civilised mind, Perron reflects,

Needless to say, I ever told Aunt Charlotte thatshe, as well as I, was responsible for the onequarter million deaths in the Punjab andelsewhere. But I did ask her who, in heropinion, was responsible. She said, ‘But that isobvious. The people who attacked and killed eachother.’560

By exploring the history and implications of imperialism,

Scott hopes to alleviate such insidious smugness, though he

accepts:

The suspicion must immediately arise that towrite about British India is to express regretfor a here and now that mattered much and hasbeen lost Which would seem, certainly, to make

555Paul Scott, Staying On (London: Heinemann, 1977), p.22.556 A Division of the Spoils, p.222.557 Ibid., p.338.558 Ibid., p.106.559 Ibid., p.221.560 Ibid., p.222.

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me an imperialist-manqué, yearning for Poona andthe punkah.561

While evoking such yearning is essential to Scott’s strategy,

his assertion that ‘the one thing you cannot escape in life

is its continuity’562 betrays the animus behind his novels,

which is not nostalgia but, on the contrary, a futile attempt

to break away from, deny or neutralise a shameful,

threatening past.

In Johnnie Sahib this was ‘the emptiness that [Jim] had sought

to escape and had succeeded in recreating’563; in The Alien Sky,

Dorothy’s mixed blood, her affair with Dwight and the

deceptions built over both; for Canning in A Male Child, his

broken marriage and his failure as a novelist, his ‘turn[ing]

back on defeat and fear’564; for Craig in The Mark of the Warrior,

John Ramsay’s death; for Brent in The Chinese Love Pavilion, Saxby’s

and Teena’s deaths; for William Conway in The Birds of Paradise,

his adulterous, blasphemous marriage and his dead father’s

secretive, forbidding personality; in The Bender, George

Spruce’s theft and consequent unpaid debt to his brother; in

The Corrida at San Feliu, Thornhill’s ‘three betrayals’. In The Raj

Quartet, the weight of Britain’s imperial neglect of India,

culminating in partition and massacre, reflected in

individual guilt – Hari’s and Daphne’s at deserting each

other, Sarah’s at abandoning Ahmed – and in Merrick’s twisted

response to his behaviour at Mayapore. Only in Staying On is

nostalgia predominant, in Mr Bhoolabhoy’s longing for the

days before the Shiraz overshadowed, literally, Smiths, and

561 My Appointment with the Muse, p.118.562 Ibid., p.119.563 Johnnie Sahib, p.208.564 A Male Child, p.176.

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in Lucy’s memories of childhood summers, old films and

Tusker’s courtship.

Bronowsky’s explanation to Merrick – incidentally flatly

contradicting Stella’s complaint to Ian, ‘A man can always

start again’565 – that ‘Compulsively tidy people… are always

wiping the slate clean, trying to give themselves what life

denies all of us, a fresh start’,566 hints at the fiction’s

psychological roots:

‘You are married’ he asked casually.‘No – ‘

‘Neither am I. Far better not.We’d drive our wives crazy wouldn’t we? Besideswhich, of course, there is the other thing aboutus – I mean about our tidiness. they say it’scharacteristic of someone who wishes to be theorganising centre of his own life and who has nogift for sharing.’567

Scott was married in 1941 after a perfunctory courtship and

deliberate repression of ‘this other thing’ about himself,

Bronowsky and Merrick – homosexuality. His determination to

forge a ‘new self’568 and his inability to share his secret

with his wife – a most dangerous ‘tender conspiracy of

silence’ – had, by the time The Day of the Scorpion was written,

almost literally driven Penny Scott crazy. In part, Merrick

is a viciously unflattering self-portrait, a distorted

projection of his arcane side: ‘He is one of your hollow men.

The outer casing is almost perfect and he carried it off

almost to perfection. But, of course, it is a casing he has

designed.’569

565 Ibid., p.176.566 The Day of the Scorpion, p.179567 Ibid.568 Hilary Spurling, Paul Scott: A Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p.112.569 A Division of the Spoils, p.171.

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The full realisation of Scott’s invented persona of husband,

father and accountant was postponed until 1947 by military

service in India and a brief bohemian respite of playwriting

in London, ended when Penny’s pregnancy forced him into a

steady job. Therefore, as India was partitioned so,

metaphorically, was Scott into an ‘almost perfect outer

casing’ and an alienated inner self. This conflation of

personal and national, implicit in the sketch of Harry

Payntor in The Birds of Paradise, became the inspiration of the Raj

Quartet.

The successful disguising of his homosexuality prompted his

obsession with knowledge, silence and forgiveness that

surfaces in the more autobiographical, metafictive novels A

Male Child and the Corrida at San Feliu and paradoxically underpins The

Raj Quartet; paradoxically for Scott’s covert strategy is

analogous to the national, political response to India that

the tetralogy is overtly written to challenge.

Dorian Gray had urged silence and suppression asthe best method of dealing with an experience toopainful to face: ‘If one doesn’t talk about athing, it has never happened.’ The longest andmost personal of the love poems written at thetime of Paul’s affair with Gerald was called ‘Itnever happened’. Dorian’s strategy becamehabitual with Paul in later life, but what seemto be echoes of the shock he sustained in January1941 sound constantly in his books.570

While the poignant failure of Hari’s and Daphne’s bald denial

is the most dramatic refutation of such a tactic, Scott

directly attempts to exorcise his guilt by confronting his

past in A Division of the Spoils where, paradoxically again, Pinky

and Captain Richardson successfully adopt Dorian’s570 Spurling, op. cit., p.94

169


recommended tactic of evasion: ‘He couldn’t bring himself to

mention the thing that Richardson had only referred to… so

obliquely that it was almost as if he hadn’t referred to it

al all… smiling as if nothing much had happened.’571

The forbidden files, from which Pinky illicitly learns about

‘intelligent and well-balanced’572 patients’ sexuality,

symbolise the dichotomy between an outer casing, a public

persona, and a locked-away self. Pinky’s innocent,

liberating, and fulfilling action, of which Merrick’s

cynical, calculating, contemptuous violation of Susan’s

psyche is the bleak antithesis, convinces Pinky that he is

not unique or alone and so exemplifies the liberal ideal of

the reading process itself, especially the socialising

function of the novel which through the capacity to ‘imagine,

then’, transcends the barriers between constructed identities

to forge a common, transpersonal mind.

As in The Birds of Paradise, however, the distinction between

controlled therapeutic reading/writing and dangerous,

traumatic speaking/listening is implicit. Knowing what to

say is so problematic that silence often seems the easiest

option. Thus Guy, having just made love to Sarah, thinks

‘There are situations in which it is very difficult to know

what to say’,573 while Sarah fails to establish any intimacy

with her father, returned from prison-camp, when he prevents

her discussing her abortion, preferring to stay ‘silently

abreast’ of her.574 This mirrors her mother’s silences, which

Sarah first interpreted as attempts to establish ‘a closeness

571 A Division of the Spoils, p.258.572 Ibid., p.249.573 Ibid., p.337.574 Ibid., p.374.

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that had never existed’575 but finally considers unforgivably

irresponsible: ‘utter disregard, her pretence of knowing

nothing while knowing everything about the sordid abortion’.576

Most pathetically, if ‘faintly ludicrous[ly]’,577 such

uncertainty ends Nigel Rowan’s potential romance with Sarah.

His tragedy results not from his actions but his knowledge

and thus exemplifies the increasingly epistemological

concerns of The Raj Quartet which ‘Gerontian’ may perhaps have

influenced and can certainly serve as a commentary: ‘After

such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now/ History has many

cunning passages, contrived corridors/ And issues, deceives

with whispering ambitions,/ Guides us by vanities.’578

Rowan’s integrity, his code of conduct, his inherited

identity, render him unwilling to go along with a tender

conspiracy of silence. However, he lacks the courage to

force the issue into the open:

Imagine him thinking this: Could I honestly spendthe rest of my life knowing what I think I knowabout the man who would be my brother-in-law andsay nothing? And the answer would be, no. theother answer would be that knowing himselfincapable f saying anything he knew that his ownhopes had to be abandoned.579

Thus, despite Rowan’s relative liberalism, there is, as

Daphne felt about Merrick, ‘a lack of real candour between him

and whoever he’s dealing with’.580 This is evoked by the

enclosed, almost furtive, circumstances in which Rowan

575 The Day of the Scorpion, p.141.576 A Division of the Spoils, p.343.577 Ibid., p.320.578 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.40.579 A Division of the Spoils, p.320.580 The Jewel in the Crown, p.99

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typically appears, first lowering the blinds of the car in

which he escorts Lady Manners into the ‘glimmers of filtered

light’581 of the Kandipat jail, later likened to ‘a closed and

undiscovered mine’;582 then as Ahmed’s escort into another

prison, the Premanager Fort, where ‘the night was black and

there was no view’.583 In A Division of the Spoils he travels to

Pankot on the overnight train in the ostentatiously luxurious

cocoon of the governor’s special coach, which symbolises, at

least in Perron’s mind, ‘our isolation and insulation, our

inner conviction of class rights and privileges… our

fundamental indifference to the problems towards which we

adopt attitudes of responsibility’,584 and where he is

explicitly associated with Merrick whom he invites onboard:

The one man he might have expected to be adisruptive or abrasive presence was not, butseemed to fit in and share with him this feelingof repose… accentuated… by the way the coachabsorbed the vibration and clatter of the wheelswithout diminishing the flattering sensation of aspeed and movement forward that were absolutelyeffortless.585

Here the easy speed of their snug carriage symbolises the

indifferent haste of the scuppering Raj in the transfer of

power which was presided over by, one might say disguised

under the fine outer casing of, ‘the fine-weather figure of a

smart toy-soldier (Mountbatten), magnificently uniformed,

taking the salute, smiling excessively and exuding sweetness

and light’.586 Thus the Raj were able to slough off their

581 The Day of the Scorpion, p.227.582 A Division of the Spoils, p.290.583 The Day of the Scorpion, p.463.584 A Division of the Spoils, p. 208.585 Ibid. pp.213-214.586 Ibid., p.463.

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responsibilities with smug self-congratulation and withdraw

so suddenly from India without any apparent concern for the

bloody chaos their departure precipitated. Like the movement

of the trains carrying refugees to or from Pakistan,

It was the smooth gliding motion away from aviolent situation… Suddenly you had the feelingthat the train, the wheels, the lines, weren’tmade of metal but of something greasy andevasive.587

The Peabodys drinking malted milk alone in their first class

compartment, Mrs Peabody with her ‘hand over her eyes’,

personally exemplify a blinkered insularity which

politically, as Lady Manners puts it, ‘divided one composite

nation into two’ while

everyone at home goes round saying what a swellthe new viceroy is for getting it all sorted outso quickly… The slogan is still insular. India’sindependence at any cost, not for India’s sake,but for our own.588

5. Affirmation through Negation

The insular imperialists’ final, actual withdrawal is the

physical, public culmination of psychological processes

explored throughout The Raj Quartet. The crucial issue, as it

was for Scott himself, is whether the creation of a stable

self in harmony with its environment invariably entails the

suppression of individuality or a retreat into interiority.

The story of Miss Crane giving herself to the task of

missionary school superintendent introduces the theme of587 Ibid., p.112.588 The Jewel in the Crown, pp.444-45.

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threatened identity, for she becomes nothing more than her

occupation and status, ‘not looked on… as a person, but only

as a woman who represented something’589 and is therefore

lonely, unable to ‘point to [anyone] as a friend of the sort

to whom she could have talked long and intimately’.590

According to Lilli Chatterjee,

She had no gift for friendship of any kind. Sheloved India and all Indians but no particularIndian. She hated British policies, so shedisliked all Britons unless they turned out to beadherents to the same rules she abided by… Topunish someone whose conduct didn’t coincide withher preconceived notions of what he stood for shetook [Gandhi’s] picture down. How ineffectual agesture that was. But how revealing, howsymptomatic of her weakness.591

Sarah Layton feels the whole Anglo-Indian community reveals

equal weakness, governed by a collective responsibility that

precludes individual responses: ‘In India, for them, there

was no private life… only a public life’.592 The most intimate

and emotionally significant events, courtship and marriage,

seem to her to be rituals conducted ‘in a representative

frame of mind’593: ‘A dead hand lay on the whole enterprise.

But still it continued: back and forth, the constant flow,

girls like herself and Susan, and boys like Teddie Bingham’.594

Sarah’s self-conscious determination to retain a

consciousness of self is a more cerebral version of Daphne’s

natural antipathy to the Raj’s automatic, collective

589 Ibid., p.34.590 Ibid.591 Ibid., p.104.592 The Day of the Scorpion, p.139.593 Ibid., p.143.594 Ibid., p.133.

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consciousness, its imprisoning club camaraderie, exemplified

by the ‘blundering judicial robot’595 represented by the

predictable Merrick and Poulson: ‘there was no originating passion

in them. Whatever they felt that was original would die the

moment it came into conflict with what the robot was geared

to feel’.596 Hence Sarah’s exasperation with her passive,

pliable sister, Susan: ‘Why so you say we?... there’s too

much… ‘we’. Us… I don’t know what we are any longer, either.

Stop thinking like that. You’re a person, not a crowd.’597

Sarah retains her sense of uniqueness, which – though

inexpressible within the constrictions of Raj mores and

values, hidden and ‘in darkness’ – ‘remained the nub, the

hard core of herself’.598 However, her attempt to break

through the ritual by surrendering her virginity on a

loveless, contemptuous one night stand, merely to establish

herself ‘as a person and not a type’599 merely conforms, as she

later realises, to another type, ‘equally false’, that of the

‘well-brought up young woman who had betrayed her upbringing

by lying on her back for the first man with the power to

persuade her on to it’.600

Her efforts to establish and maintain a sense of self by

asserting her difference from her environment, thus, becomes

a battle between her own primarily sexual impulses, a purely

physical variant of Daphne’s love for Hari, and the ‘group

595 The Jewel in the Crown, p.425.596 Ibid., p.432.597 The Day of the Scorpion, p.344.598 Ibid., p.83.599 Ibid., p.429.600 A Division of the Spoils, p.355.

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expressions arising from group psychology’601 which seek to

normalise and influence her deviant behaviour:

I was not debasing myself… Nor was I hoping… Icould have my own back on Clark-Without, on menin general. Perhaps all these possibilities werethere, in my mind, like echoes of explanations,other people’s explanations, but fundamentallythere was only the desire…602

Her love and respect for Ahmed are therefore natural: they

‘recognised in each other the compulsion to break away from

what [Sarah] can only call a received life’.603 His apparent

acquiescence in his received, literally bloody, death in the

communal massacre, therefore physically and ideologically

negates everything they had striven for:

He knew there was nothing to say because therewasn’t any alternative, because everybody else inthe carriage automatically knew what he had todo. It was part of the bloody code.604

His futile attempt to defy the code by ignoring it, ‘to shut

himself off’,605 recalls and in its failure refutes Hari’s

assertion that ‘the situation would cease to exist if I

detached myself from it’.606

Suffering at the hands of Merrick more for what he represents

than for what he essentially is, Kumar nevertheless, clings

to his identity, recognising that though, ‘to the outside

world he had become nothing… he did not feel in himself that

601 The Day of the Scorpion, p. 139.602 A Division of the Spoils, p. 356.603 Ibid., p.592.604 Ibid., p.593.605 Ibid.606 The Day of the Scorpion, p.303.

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he was nothing. Even if he was quite alone in the world he

could not be nothing.’607

I wasn’t to be categorised or defined by type,colour, race, capacity, intellect, condition,beliefs, instincts, manner or behaviour.Whatever kind of poor job I was in my own eyes Iwas Hari Kumar – and the situation about HariKumar was that there was no one anywhere exactlylike him. So who had the right to destroy me?608

However, this sense of self, though noble, cannot be

expressed: indeed it is radically internalised, based on

denial of, and withdrawal from, the outside world; and so

fittingly Kumar detaches himself from The Raj Quartet,

disappearing midway through the second volume.

The gulf between Hari’s relative success at forging a

personal insularity – trying to be ‘his own kind of Indian’609

– and Ahmed’s tragic failure dramatises the dichotomy between

the mental/subjective and physical/objective worlds which The

Raj Quartet realises and refutes by exploring White’s

distinction between thoughts and events through Perron’s

insight that while India had formed part of England’s idea

about herself…[,] in the Indian mind English possession has

not been an idea but a reality; often a harsh one’.610

In The Raj Quartet, figures of speech become physical actions,

and psychological states prefigure political events. The

image of Susan’s struggle for inherited identity – ‘Susan

drawing Susan, drawing and redrawing, attempting that

combination of shape and form which by fitting perfectly into

607 The Jewel in the Crown, p.241.608 The Day of the Scorpion, p.302.609 A Division of the Spoils, p.499.610 Ibid., p.105.

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its environment would not attract the hands of the erasers’611

– becomes the literal means of identifying and killing Ahmed:

‘All they had to do was look for the chalk-mark… he noticed a

fresh smear low down on the door, where the chalk-mark had

been wiped off.’612 Similarly, while Susan is psychologically

‘dangerously withdrawn’, the British are politically

‘dangerously withdrawn’ from India, leaving partition and

deadly communalism in their wake. Sarah’s metaphorical

rebuff to Susan, ‘You’re a person not a crowd’ is converted

into a literal tragedy anticipated in The Jewel in the Crown when

Miss Crane imagines another mutiny, in which her servant

attacks her in revenge for ‘wrongs she had not personally

done him but had done representatively because she was of her

race and of her colour, and he could not in his simple rage

any longer distinguish between individual and crowd’,613 and

realised when Ahmed is slaughtered, after ironically

claiming, ‘It seems to be me they want,’ when in fact, of

course, any representative Muslim would have done.

Such literal realisations of metaphors, mirrored by the

metaphorical readings of the literal encouraged by

perspective doubling and narrative loops, persistently

undermine, even while conveying, any simplistic Cartesian

split. Internecine paradox and parody are The Raj Quartet’s

fundamental strategies, so much so that even paradox is

literally parodied, and paradoxically proved to be

metaphorically true. For example, Pandit Baba’s strictures to

Ahmed are ostensibly absurd, comic if morally indefensible

611 Ibid., p.133.612 Ibid., pp.590-91.613 The Jewel in the Crown, p.23.

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because Ahmed’s father, M.A. Kasim, is suffering in a literal

prison while the Pandit is free to pontificate thus:

‘Do not think of it as a prison… It is those whocall themselves jailers who are in prison, andperhaps all of us who are outside the walls. Forwhat is outside in one sense is inside inanother. In time we must break the walls down.This duty to break them down is our sentence ofimprisonment. To break them down will be to freeourselves and our jailers. And we cannot sitback and wait for the orders of release. We mustwrite the orders ourselves.’ In English he added,in case Ahmed had misunderstood, ‘I speakmetaphorically.’614

Nevertheless, when these insufferable platitudes are removed

from their dramatic context, and read as part of a symbolic

matrix they recall and confirm Kasim’s own sentiments: for

Kasim in a sense chooses imprisonment as a positive

alternative to violating his integrity by joining the

administrative council. Though expressed without

obfuscation, his ideals are akin to Pandit Baba’s:

Unifying India, of making all Indians feel thatthey are, above all else, Indians… because wehave never had that kind of India, we do not knowwhat kind of India that will be. That is why Isay we are looking for a country. I can look forit better in prison, I’m afraid, than from a seaton your Excellency’s executive council.615

Kasim even implicitly confirms Baba’s conceit that the

British at their desks are the ones really, that is

metaphorically, in prison though for Kasim, who, unlike the

Pandit, has to physically endure the real prison, the thought

is sickening:

614 The Day of the Scorpion, p.102.615 Ibid., p.18.

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‘…one day this desk will probably be yours’ [thegovernor said.] Kasim … said, ‘Yes. Youare probably right,’ and, still, smiling, turnedand took the last few paces to his more immediateprison.616

Such strategies imply the third correspondence of outlook

with Eliot: the mysticism in ‘East Coker’ is a sublime

version of Pandit Baba’s ridiculousness, provided you can, as

Scott could but many critics cannot, respond to its bald

paradoxes:

In order to arrive at what you do not knowYou must go by a way which is the way

of ignorance. In order to possesswhat you do not possess Youmust go by a way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you arenot You must go throughthe way in which you are not. Andwhat you know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do notown And where you are is whereyou are not.617

6. The Outer Casing and the Inner Self

Gandhi’s philosophy and behaviour (between which there should

theoretically be no distinction), as interpreted by Lilli

Chatterjee and Robin White, offer a liberating alternative to

the bleak antithesis of a repressed inner self and shifting,

shifty, public personae, breaking through the ritual f

politics – that most public of crafts – much more effectively

than Sarah was able to undermine the relative privacy of a

courtship, as if

616 Ibid., p.20.617 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.201.

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a well-known man actually… said exactly what wasin his mind… in a genuinely creative attempt tobreak through the sense of pre-arranged emotionsand reactions that automatically accompanies anygeneral gathering of people.618

Nevertheless the Gandhian model presupposes that the mind

transcends, or at least stands apart from, the pre-arranged

social situation. Naturally The Raj Quartet questions such a

view, suggesting the mind is a mere product, itself pre-

arranged. Ahmed, instructed by the bad Gandhian Pandit Baba

to speak what is in his mind, thinks: ‘there are two

categories of things in my mind… the stuff people like you

have put into it and my own reactions to that stuff. The

result is cancellation, so I have nothing in my mind.’619

Paradoxically again, since consciousness of nothing is

something though it remains unspoken, Ahmed, like Kumar,

prefers the tactic of detachment because: ‘To challenge an

idea as an alternative to accepting it was to be no less a

slave to it.’620

An imperial power structure, thus, renders all individuals

metaphorical slaves to collective will, particularly

demeaning those denied literal power – the subject race. As

Duleep Kumar admits, ‘everything I said, because everything I

thought, was in conscious mimicry of the people who rule

us’.621 So his son punishes himself, ‘in a disgusting

jailhouse… wondering what he’d gained by acting like a white

man should when a girl made him a promise… How typical! You

tell an Indian to say nothing and he takes it literally’.622

618 The Jewel in the Crown, p.320.619 The Day of the Scorpion, p.101.620 Ibid., p.102.621 The Jewel in the Crown, p.198.622 Ibid., p.439.

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Thus Nello Chatterjee asserts himself and his equality by

consciously mimicking Henry Manners: ‘saying, in Henry’s

voice, “Policy? Policy? To hell with policy! What are you

thinking and feeling dear chap? That’s the point!”’623 And the

point of the Raj Quartet, also, but its answer remains

necessarily negated by the context which evokes it, for what

you are feeling and thinking is merely a reaction to social

events beyond your control, a blundering robot, a bloody

code, a mistaken policy.

This unstable distinction between the individual and the

communal, which Sarah’s, Ahmed’s and Hari’s struggles for

identity articulate and undermine, is evoked most subtly yet

powerfully by the competing narrative voices which open The

Towers of Silence. the first chapter, narrated like most of the

volume in the third person, is precariously balanced on the

ill-defined cusp between Barbie’s individual voice –

‘Secretly she was rather proud of her voice. It carried.’624-

and the pseudo-omniscient voice of Pankot which threatens to

overwhelm, define and dismiss it as the insignificant

chattering of a frustrated, possibly lesbian, old maid. If

her pride is secret, then hers must be the consciousness

animating this narration which, however, alternates, and

emphasises the difference, between the public and private.

Barbie ‘outwardly accepted the situation with her usual

bustling equanimity. Inwardly she accepted it with mingled

relief and apprehension’.625 Similarly a paragraph describing

what ‘it seemed Barbie wanted’, what ‘she let… be known’626 is

followed by the contradictory inner ‘facts’, while the623 Ibid., p.447.624 The Towers of Silence, p.3.625 Ibid.626 Ibid., p.4.

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remainder of the first section elaborates, that is

publicises, her ‘secret sorrow’.

The next section, though entirely focalised through Barbie,

dramatises the public pressure on her individual self,

symbolised by the fate of her writing desk. ‘It rather

annoyed her to see Miss Jolley using it as if it were mission

property and not Barbie’s private possession.’627 Using it to

write to Mabel, Barbie wishes to establish the existence of

her luggage as ‘inseparable from her own’.628 (Later,

influenced by Emerson, she states explicitly that her trunk

is her history and without that she is not explained,629 while

her death, precipitated by the trunk’s weight causing her

tonga to crash, becomes yet another variant, like Ahmed’s

death, on historical determinism.) However, just as she is

getting into her epistolary stride, expressing herself about

her self: ‘”I have always travelled fairly light. A long

experience of postings…”… [she] realised she had set off on a

tack that could well have the effect of boring poor Mrs

Layton to tears.’630 Her solution is to suppress her

idiosyncrasy: ‘common sense prevailed’,631 which curiously

echoes Lady Manners’ retort that ‘the second-rate is the

world’s common factor’, itself a pessimistic variation on

Emerson’s ‘one mind common to all individual men’.

So Barbie ‘crumpled the letter, began again, determined not

to put herself into the recipient’s place as she had been

taught by her earliest mission instructor’.632 This version of

627 Ibid., p.8.628 Ibid.629 Ibid., p.273.630 Ibid., p.8.631 Ibid., p.9, my emphasis.632 Ibid.

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the letter, which the narrator does not deign to give, is,

then, the product of Barbie’s inherited identity, her

received life. Equally, however, that crumpled, repressed

private self is a pathetically inarticulate amalgam of

borrowed phrases, shifting uncomfortably for example from

periphrastic formality to colloquial vagueness in ‘Conditions

here do not easily permit of other people’s stuff lying

around for long’. hardly Barbie’s voice, more a surrender to

the lowest common linguistic denominator which is

indistinguishable from the narrative voice: the cliché

already quoted of ‘bore to tears’, aggravated by its

redundantly periphrastic verb-noun-preposition-gerund

formulation – ‘have the effect of boring’ – coupled with the

singularly inappropriate adjective ‘poor’ to describe Mrs

Layton who certainly is not poor, literally or figuratively.

Stylistically reminiscent of the heroic inelegance in the

‘Eumaeus’ episode of Ulysses, which, Hugh Kenner notes, ‘has

been called cliché-ridden, therefore tired. Tired it is not.

there is no one… who could write three consecutive sentences

of it, fatigued or alert’,633 The Towers of Silence suffered a

similarly misguided critical response: J.G. Farrell

complained of ‘a few signs of weariness’,634 while R.R. Davis

was dismissive:

Such a lot of cardboard… The novel is of a granddesign, and meticulously detailed, but thepicture could not have come out looking more flatand uninviting if it had been painted bynumbers.635

633 Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, (London, Faber and Faber, 1978), p.38.634 TLS, May 23, 1975, p.555.635 The New Statesman, November 19, 1971.

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Davis is almost right: while Eumaeus is a comic, parodic

celebration of verbal infelicity, The Towers of Silence is a

satiric, tragic rendering of the inarticulate, repressed,

flat and uninviting Raj, whose lives, devoid of ‘originating

passion’, are painted by numbers.

Barbie’s unrealised fantasy of breaking through the stifling

social convention at Susan’s wedding reception by dashing her

glass into the hearth merely emphasises the gulf between the

‘blessed privacy’ of her thoughts and the surrounding

‘condition of Babel’,636 which the reader has become

increasingly contaminated and smothered by since Chapter

Three in which the insufferable ‘inner circle of Pankot

women’637 highjack the narrative, resorting to the passive to

stress their collective impersonality – ‘Mildred Layton

refused to be drawn on the subject but when a question was

put to her in any one of several oblique ways…’638 – producing

a nauseating mixture of military administrative English –

‘This situation was the one arising in regard to

accommodation in Pankot’639- and coy sentimentality, akin to

another Joyce parody, ‘Nausica’ –

It heartened one just to look at her. She seemedto know it, and that could be dangerous, butpresently she would settle and the gravity ofAnglo-Indian life would touch her pretty facesoon enough.640

The cumulative effect of such second-rate prose is

agoraphobic rather than claustrophobic: longing for the

636 The Towers of Silence, p.188.637 Ibid., p.27.638 Ibid.639 Ibid., p.26.640 Ibid., p.28.

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‘blessed privacy’ of an articulate confessional narrator, the

sharply defined individual voices that told and characterised

The Jewel in the Crown, the reader sympathises with Barbie’s desire

to ‘create around herself a condition of silence’,641 to

withdraw from society as Mabel has into indifferent deafness;

a response akin to Hari’s detachment and stubborn adherence

to his promised silence.

The moment at the end of the ‘Moghul Room’ section of A Division

of the Spoils (pp.337-38) when Perron, through an imaginative

leap rather than the falsifying pattern of language,

understand the reason for Hari’s silence, managing therefore

to transcend the barriers of self, is thus as dramatic and

significant as any of the physical events in the tetralogy.

Indeed it enacts the premise upon which all fiction is based,

that if we ‘imagine then’ we have access to another’s

experience, that ‘there is one mind common to all individual

men’ and one can, as Barbie knew we should, put oneself in

the recipient’s place.

Scott naturally undermines this premise, for Perron claims to

refute Emerson, while Sarah, whose insistence on discovering

her own self her own way and scepticism of ‘other people’s

explanations’ would make her impervious to Emerson’s

collective mentality, finds him ‘tiresome and self-

righteous’.642 It is only Barbie who responds with the

appropriate empathy and conviction, yet her enthusiasm is

almost certainly based on the emptiness of her own life, her

need to find meaning, self-justification and vicarious

adventure: ‘”Each new law and political movement has meaning

641 Ibid., p.188.642 Ibid., p.382.

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for you” Barbie read and was convinced that this might be so

because Emerson told her.’643 Her loss of any sense of

identity in her final madness illustrates the dangerous

psychological implications of Emerson’s naïve optimism.

So, in reading Emerson, or of course, anyone else, readers

bring their own personalities and prejudices to the text. If

‘The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be

credible or intelligible’,644 then as Merrick says, ‘You heard

what you wanted to hear. You’ve proved the point’.645

Similarly Sarah wonders, ‘Perhaps we all heard only what we

wanted to hear’.646 All knowledge is a closed system, like a

rose, ‘merely a convoluted statement about itself’.647

Translation symbolises this epistemology: Gaffur’s original

Urdu is not given and can only be inferred from the

alternative English translations. Barbie’s is typically

muddled, trite and melodramatic: ‘It is not for you to say,

Gaffur, that the rose is God’s creation. Howsobeit its scent

is heavenly’,648 which deteriorates into ‘even if, though, its

scent is of Heaven, heavenly’,649 which may be her attempt to

remember ‘Colonel Harvey-Fortescue’s Victorian effusions’.650

While the insufferable Major Tippit boasts to Kasim, that he

has ‘managed to convey something of the splendour and

simplicity of the original,651 his version is a mere dilution

of the original, a museum piece reflecting his reprehensible

643 Ibid., p.84.644 Ralph Waldo Emerson, p.114.645 The Towers of Silence, p.146.646 A Division of the Spoils, p. 593.647 The Towers of Silence, p.276.648 Ibid., p.166.649 Ibid., p.169.650 A Division of the Spoils, pp.161-62.651 The Day of the Scorpion, p.28.

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insensitivity to the world around him, his sterile nostalgia:

‘I’m a historian, really. The present does not interest me.

The future even less’652:

It is not for you to say, Gaffur,That the rose is one of God’s

creations, Although itsscent is doubtless that of heaven.

In time rose and poet will both die.Who then will come to this

decision?653

In contrast, the politically astute and down-to-earth Count

Bronowsky is concerned with the future, particularly of the

state of Mirat, and his version may be interpreted as advice

to the Nawab couched in an appropriately modern idiom. In

his remarks to Perron he makes no reference to the original:

he is only interested in successors, translations,

retellings. His interpretation will be a poem in its own

right. Indeed he fancies himself ‘quite a little Pushkin’654:

You oughtn’t to say, Gaffur,That God created roses,

No matter how heavenly theysmell. You have tothink of the time when you’re both dead and smellnasty And people are only interested in yoursuccessors.655

Such ineluctable partiality of perspective, the falsifying

pattern of individual experience, need not be a prison but a

refuge, as Sister Ludmila recognised as a young refugee in

Berlin. Unable to afford the sweets on the other side of the

shop window, thus unable to possess their actuality,

652 Ibid., p.28.653 The Towers of Silence, p.166.654 A Division of the Spoils, p.162.655 The Towers of Silence, p.166.

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alienated from their specificity, she is nonetheless able to

control the medium separating her inner self from the outer

world:

the way the breath could transform a window andfill the heart with a different kind of warmth.Ah, such safety. Such microcosmic power. Totranslate, to reduce, to cause to vanish with thebreath alone the sugary fruits in their next oflace-edged paper. To know that they are there,and yet not there. This is the magic of thesoul.656

The magic of The Raj Quartet is the startling coherence of its

paradoxes and conflicting strategies; its utilisation of the

microcosmic power of the imagination to create characters who

are historically determined free agents constructed by the

narratives they construct; its status both as a convincing

historical treatise, praised for its veracity and pertinence

by historians such as Beloff and Moore, and as a ‘first-rate

performance in a literary form where merit largely depends on

an obsessive and enclosed ability to deal in lies and

approximations’.657

656 The Jewel in the Crown, pp.261-62.657 Paul Scott, ‘Complete Men’, Country Life, Vol. CXLI, no. 3663, May18, 1967, p.1268. Scott is discussing what he considers C.P. Snow’ssecond-rate performance as a novelist.

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190

Chapter Seven Staying On

Chapter Seven

Staying On: A Conclusion

The church service Lucy attends is, like Staying On, ‘a strange

mixture’,658 its contrasting elements reflecting those of the

novel. The ‘popishness’ of the service, anticipated by Mr

Bhoolabhoy’s desire to ‘confess aloud, unburden himself not

to God directly but through the comfort of an intermediary,

another human being’,659 implies its painful autobiographical

nature, negated – or neutralised in Scott’s paradoxophilic

psychology – by its exploration of how human contact is

undermined by a preference for the mediacy of the written

over the immediacy of the spoken. The ‘funny’ but

‘sophisticated sermon’ in which ‘towards the end Father

Sebastian stopped making little jokes and became serious,

even solemn’,660 parallels its astutely judged modulation from

almost farcical humour – the Bhoolabhoys’ marital disputes

and Ibrahim’s attempts to master the English language – to

the tragedy of Lucy’s bereavement, while the naivety of the

‘jolly and rousing and nostalgic’ hymns661 reflects the

simplicity of its seemingly innocent, natural shifts of

narrative focalisation, so refreshing after the contrived,

painstaking proliferation of voices and sources in The Raj

Quartet, and the restricted perspectives of the earlier novels.

658 Staying On, p.154.659 Ibid., p.122.660 Ibid., p.154.661 Ibid.

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Feeling too omniscient was clearly no longer an issue. Staying

On, like Johnnie Sahib, is the product of supreme self-

confidence, but that based on experience and achievement, not

on youthful arrogance.

When Staying On won the Booker prize, Scott commented, ‘I have

finished with India for ever. It just needed some little

valedictory thing.’662 That unclear ‘it’ cannot denote an

actual India, which never ‘needed [n]or needs [n]or has been

one jot the better for’663 any novel; nor simply The Raj Quartet –

though Staying On reveals the fates of the Laytons, Guy Perron,

Minnie, Ashok, and of course Lucy and Tusker; rather it must

denote Scott’s complete oeuvre in which the British

relationship is a ‘metaphor for his view of life’. Patrick

Swinden’s description of Staying On as ‘the end of a long and

important phase in Scott’s career’664 is, then, valid but

understated: Staying On recapitulates, without particularly

furthering, Scott’s life-long interrelated themes of

transcendent identity undermined by economic forces, here

explored through Mr Bhoolabhoy’s surrender to his wife’s

dictates; of withdrawal into interiority, represented by Lucy

and Tusker’s ‘almost total self-absorption’;665 and of an

enclosed wilful epistemology, typified by Mr Bhoolabhoy’s

suppression of unwelcome data – ‘the thought had so

thoroughly frightened him that he had stopped thinking it’666 –

and his wife’s conviction that though ‘not proven… it was a

fact and when Mrs Bhoolabhoy was convinced of a fact one had

662 Patrick Swinden Paul Scott: Images of India, p.x.663 Staying On, p.196.664 Loc. cit.665 Staying On, p.16.666 Ibid., p.113.

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to assume that a fact was what it was’.667 As Swinden claims,

‘the thirteen novels as a whole add up to a finished

achievement’;668 so much so that Scott’s death within months

seems a sadly logical enactment of Faulkner’s dismissal of

literary biography which Scott was fond of quoting: ‘He wrote

the books and he died’,669 while Staying On, like that final

brief book of A Division of the Spoils, can be read as a logical,

even necessary, conclusion to which ‘all that has gone before

is explanation enough’.

As we have seen, Scott’s preoccupation with how economic

forces undermine moral certainties was expressed most

explicitly in The Birds of Paradise in which the idyllic island of

Manoba is contaminated by Western consumerism, and in The

Bender, in which George Spruce is a, literally impotent,

victim of economic logic. During the 1960’s so strong did

Scott’s impulse grow to reduce all human activity to

commercial terms that he claimed on the dust jacket of the

1968 reissue of Johnnie Sahib that it was not a war novel:

[The characters] are running a business. True,the dividend for the shareholders is survival,but as in any other business that was ever runthat consideration isn’t necessarily uppermost inthe minds of the management.

Staying On explores how spiritual or moral integrity can be

maintained within such a cynical determinist environment

through the unambiguously positive figure of Joseph. Devoted

to the pure, intrinsic worth of gardening, uninterested in

its indirect value or material rewards, he is a literal

restorer of life:667 Ibid., p.17.668 Loc. cit.669 My Appointment with the Muse, p.41.

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He went first to the wooden shelves where oldMali had left several pots of geranium cuttingswhich had died for want of attention. Or hadthey? The boy fingered one and finding a greenbud amid the sear leaves muttered something tohimself.670

He is an image of freedom, detached from the petty mercantile

concerns of Ibrahim, the grander economic designs of Mrs

Bhoolabhoy, and the old Mali’s assertion of his rights,

‘appropriat[ing] his fair share of what he had hoed and

sweated to grow’.671 With more success than Hari or Ahmed in

The Raj Quartet, perhaps because uncontaminated by a western

education, and with greater sincerity than the English hippy

– who ‘came begging at the coffee shop… [and was] adept at

catching [coins] in mid-air but never seemed to resent

scrabbling in the dust for those he muffed’672 – Joseph

illustrates the efficacy of his own version of sannyasa.

Nevertheless, Joseph remains inescapably part of the socio-

economic system he ignores; his naivety is exploited by the

shrewd Ibrahim while the issue of his employment and who pays

his meagre wages provokes Lucy and Tusker’s final argument.

Despite flourishing under his ministrations, the garden, an

unequivocal image of creativity and self-reliance in The Raj

Quartet, is transformed in Staying On into the symbol of Tusker

and Lucy’s subservience to and dependence on Mrs Bhoolabhoy.

As Staying On sites Joseph’s spirituality within its material

context and consequences, so it subjects the Pankot church to

economic laws, thus continuing a theme developed in The Raj

Quartet in which the spiritual credibility of the missions was

undermined: ‘its members [were discouraged] from excessive670 Staying On, p.48.671 Ibid., p.17.672 Ibid., p40.

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displays of zeal’673; ‘The children come… mainly for the

chappattis’674 and ‘to learn things that would be useful to

them’.675 the Reverend Stephen’s hopes are mocked as

commercial expansionism:

‘If we are to advance – ‘ and here he glancedround as if to check that there were no lurkerswho would go back to report to the Governmentthat there was a plot afoot in the ChristianChurch to go for growth in India by stepping upthe conversion business…676

Mr Bhoolabhoy’s dream that the ‘rosy prospect’ of the Nansera

Valley Development Scheme will bring ‘an influx of engineers,

technical experts and advisers’ which would benefit the

church and the hotel677 is shown to be a delusion. the

development is irredeemably materialistic and emotionally

destructive, revealing to Mr Bhoolabhoy that, to his wife,

Smiths ‘has always been a site, not a hotel. It has always

been the rupees you were thinking of, never the guests’;678 he

therefore is ‘only part of the fixtures and fittings’,679

‘caretaker of a development site. Now bulldozers come in.

New monstrosity goes up’.680 Similarly, absurdly, self-

pityingly, he feels his role in the church is undermined,

largely because the organ is restored without his knowledge

or participation, so that, in an egocentric confusion of ends

and means so typical of Scott’s characterisation, ‘The sudden

673 The Towers of Silence, p.5. 674 The Jewel in the Crown, p.12.675 The Towers of Silence, p.4.676 Staying On, p.106.677 Ibid., p.107.678 Ibid., p.117.679 Ibid., p.9.680 Ibid., p.118.

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pealing of the organ yesterday which should have been a joy

had been a shattering blow to his self-esteem.’681

More significantly the schism between Mr Bhoolabhoy’s

emotional and economic selves is laid bare, for the Nansera

Development entails the termination of the Smalley’s tenancy,

forcing him – in his capacity as Management – to evict

Tusker, who is his friend – in his personal capacity of Billy

Boy – and thus directly, and knowingly, precipitate his fatal

heart attack.

The Smalley’s ignorance of their fate, extending even to

Lucy’s unawareness that Tusker had died while she was at the

hairdressers, is a more poignant version of Wallingford’s

ignorance of the boardroom decisions of Ripley Coyne and

Marples in The Bender. Both cases illustrate ‘the [remarkable]

things that can go on respecting one’s future without one’s

slightest knowledge’682 and so highlight the chasm between the

vulnerable, expectant human consciousness and an indifferent,

alien reality, a chasm which promotes ‘the hysterical belief

in the non-recurrence of the abysmal’683 that the suicidal

Purvis ridicules in A Division of the Spoils. The structure of

Staying On, a vast analeptic loop circling back from and then

again towards Tusker’s death can be read as either an

affirmation of the independence of consciousness as an

ordering centre transcending the remorseless processes that

determine his fate, or as a denial of consciousness, an

intimation of the inevitability of death. Tusker’s digging

in his heels, his pathetically obdurate assertion that ‘I’m

681 Ibid., p.199.682 The Bender, p.129.683 A Division of the Spoils, p.27.

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still master of this bloody house’,684 merely emphasises that

he is no longer master anywhere else and will not be master

in the Lodge very much longer. Equally his protest, ‘I see

more than you think’685 ironically implies how little he really

knows.

Tim Spruce’s guilty conscience over Wallingford’s hardship

becomes Bhoolabhoy’s remorse over Tusker’s death. His sense

of contamination by economic necessities is reflected in his

lie to Lucy: ‘Please tell Colonel Sahib that tonight he and I

should not be convivial. I too perhaps have fever… I may

have infected you already.’686 The image of contagion

foreshadows Tusker’s death while symbolising the ineluctable

spread of an alienating capitalism which reduces people to

economic puppets.

Imagery characteristic of The Bender reappears. Ibrahim

resents ‘being treated… as if he were merely a machine and an

anonymous one at that’;687 Mr Desai ‘who had no conversation

that wasn’t about money… turned over in his computer-like

mind’ the idea of his daughter’s elopement,688 repeating Tim’s

contemplation of George’s suicide, his ‘brain ticking over

like a lousy book-keeping machine’.689 Tusker’s love-making –

he ‘seemed to have been wound up in such a way that Saturday

night was the night he rang… He went through the motions…

there was an average of thirty’690 – recalls Guy’s making

Antigone ‘feel too much like a slot machine’.691

684 Staying On, p.178.685 Ibid., p.179.686 Ibid., p. 128. 687 Ibid., p.22.688 Ibid., p.62.689 The Bender, p.242.690 Staying On, pp.73-74.691 The Bender, p.202.

197


Mr Bhoolabhoy’s ‘misfortune to be married to a greedy woman

who is Ownership’692 restates George Spruce’s ruin which he

blames on money and sex. George’s awareness that he is not

loved but used foreshadows Mr Bhoolabhoy’s degradation in

writing to Tusker. the difficulty he experiences in

conforming to the formal requirements of a curt business

letter, which will be signed not only by himself but by

Ownership, is a tragic intensification of Barbie’s loss of

identity in The Towers of Silence, implied in her crumpling and

discarding her original, more personal, reply to Mabel:

Writing the letter would put the seal on histotal and abject surrender… It was like composinga warrant for the execution of an old friend. Tohack the halting sentences out he had to keepreminding himself that it was also like composinga warrant for his own lifelong imprisonment. Heand Tusker were both victims of a system.693

These underlying concepts of a lifelong imprisonment and a

malign system surface throughout Scott’s work, linked almost

certainly with his own victimisation by a social, and

particularly military, system intolerant of his

homosexuality. In trying to escape this distressing aspect

of his past by constructing a ‘perfect outer casing’ of

respectability around a repressed ‘deep down’ self, primarily

by getting married – or as A Male Child puts it, ‘going

voluntarily into prison’694 – Scott adopted tactics that

reappear in the portrayal of Tusker: ‘I deliberately kept

what nowadays they call a low profile. I wanted to be thought

dull… but thoroughly reliable at desk work.695 Living at

692 Staying On, p.162.693 Ibid., p.199.694 A Male Child, p.215.695 Staying On, p.71.

198


Smiths Hotel helps him to ‘merge unobtrusively with the

background’696 and so achieve what Susan Layton, too, had

hankered for: ‘that perfect combination of shape and form

which by fitting perfectly into its environment would not

attract the hands of the erasers’.697

However, in Tusker’s case, as in Scott’s, conventional

dullness does not promote marital harmony. Lucy’s complaint

that Tusker was always ‘hiding [himself] behind a desk and

has all his life buried himself in paper698 is Scott’s self-

accusation, a confession that he too, like Thornhill in The

Corrida at San Feliu, had cultivated and satisfied his sense of

self more successfully in the intrapersonal fictional world

of his novels than in the interpersonal creation of his

marriage. It is therefore cruelly ironic that Tusker, whose

only barely articulate or coherent expression of his true

feelings had been through a letter to Lucy, dies suddenly as

a result of discovering information in the letter written by

his friend, Mr Bhoolabhoy who, showing an analogous lack of

courage, had not thought ‘he could face an evening chatting

amiably to a man whose days themselves might be numbered and

whose days at the Lodge certainly looked like being. He

would not dare tell him’.699 This cowardly capitulation to the

destructive power of knowledge re-explores the ‘faintly

ludicrous’ inability of Nigel Rowan to tell Sarah what he

knew about Merrick.700

These failures to speak directly and Tusker’s stubborn

silences further the motif which began obliquely with the696 Ibid.697 A Division of the Spoils, p.133.698 Staying On, p.85.699 Ibid., p.120.700 A Division of the Spoils, p.320.

199


taciturnity of Alan Hurst in A Male Child, became centrally

important in the withdrawn relationship between father and

son in The Birds of Paradise and between writer and wife in The

Corrida at San Feliu, and entered the narrative and semantic

structure of The Raj Quartet through Daphne’s journal, which,

addressed to her Aunt, was written ‘to set the record

straight and break the silence we both seem to have agreed is

okay for the living, if not for the dead’.701

Lucy’s interior monologue under the drier echoes Tusker’s

admission that he ‘can’t talk about these things face to

face. Difficult to write them. Brought up that way… Don’t

want to discuss it’702 and unites it with other themes and

images from earlier in the novel to evoke the tragic

loneliness of mediacy in a complex analepsis which is typical

late Scott and especially reminiscent of Barbie’s meditations

in The Towers of Silence:

It seems my love, my life, has never had its faceto me and that I have always been followingbehind, or so dazzled by sunlight that I couldnot see the face when it once turned to me. Didyou see the green bag, Tusker? Did it glitter inthe sunshine that dazzled me? How will youremember me? What is your image of me?703

For her first date with Tusker Lucy had invested more than

she could easily afford on new shoes, gloves and the green

bag, thus initially placing their romance within an economic

system which is beyond her reach or control and which

continues to undermine their relationship throughout their

marriage. Her suspicion that Tusker may not have even

701 The Jewel in the Crown, p.349.702 Staying On, p.196.703 Ibid., p.208.

200


noticed the bag is her first intimation that true love,

regard, concern and respect, represented by the trite, and

therefore for Lucy touchingly appropriate symbol of sunshine,

are absent, making ‘you feel your heart is undernourished and

eventually you are dying, very slowly. Of neglect’.704 This

suspicion can never be verified naturally since she will

never have access to Tusker’s image of her. the ‘lifelong

imprisonment’ that Mr Bhoolabhoy feels condemned to is

equally an ineluctable epistemological confinement which can

be elucidated by the quotation from F.H. Bradley’s Appearance

and Reality which glosses the lines ‘I have heard the key/ Turn

in the door once and turn once only/ we think of the key,

each in his prison/ Thinking of the key, each confirms a

prison’705 in the notes to Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. Ineither case my experience falls within my owncircle, a circle closed on the outside; and, withall its elements alike, every sphere is opaque tothe others which surround it…706

Lucy’s sense that she has merely been ‘following behind’

combined with her fear of being left ‘alone here and weeping

amid the alien corn’707 recall ‘the Great Parade’,

Rene Adoree clung on to Jack Gilbert’s hands andthen his boots as the truck carried him and hiscomrades away, and then had to let go because shecouldn’t keep up, and there had been that lovelyshot from the back of the lorry showing herreceding into the distance, alone and forlorn onthe muddy road.708

704 Staying On, p.141.705 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.79.706 Ibid., p.86.707 Staying On, p.86.708 Ibid., p.167.

201


These images foreshadow Tusker’s confession that he no longer

thinks of life ‘as staying on, but just as hanging on’.709 the

echoes of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in ‘forlorn’ and ‘amid the

alien corn’ inform Staying On’s interrelated themes of

imagination and of the compulsion to escape from the

ineluctable process of time, which were also central to

Thornhill’s attempt to create stasis in The Corrida at San Feliu and

to The Raj Quartet’s attempt to ‘imagine then’, a narrative of

characters subject to historical forces but transcending

them. While Keats’ nightingale, reached through ‘the viewless

wings of Poesy’, apparently offers an intimation of

changeless immortality, Lucy’s attempts to transcend or at

least extend the limits of self through assuming cinematic

fantasy roles, like the time-denying reminiscences in her

long-ago shoes, leave her ultimately ‘Forlorn! the very word

is like a bell/ To toll me back from thee to my sole self!/

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is famed to

do’.710 Although, in another echo of Emerson, ‘She could be

anyone and anything she wished. Within the darkness of her

closed eyes’711 and ‘in these indoor things [she] can recognise

[her] own life and through them project and live so many

lives, not just the one [she has]’,712 Lucy is eventually left

alone with the meagre external actuality of her existence:

‘the magic formula for transformation and transmigration was

not working today. The Lodge was not Tara.’713

709 Ibid., p.195.710 John Barnard, ed., John Keats, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin,1973; 2nd ed., 1977), p.348.711 Staying On, p.167.712 Ibid., p.167.713 Ibid., p.80.

202


As Sister Ludmila claimed in the Jewel in the Crown, the magic of

the soul is to know that the sweets are both there and not

there, that the Lodge both is – in the transforming, shaping

imagination – and is not Tara, in that distant alien thing,

reality. Lucy’s imagination, however undermined and

contextualised, is thus celebrated. her wishful, wistful

interpretation of herself as Cinderella on that first date

with Tusker – ‘I was going to the ball… and the coach called

promptly’714 – becomes the basis for Scott’s final work, ‘After

the Funeral’, a laconic reworking of the fairy tale which

condenses the paradoxes inherent in the Cartesian division

that structures all his novels.

Scott’s Cinderella enacts Emerson’s strictures on the value

of insularity and supreme self-confidence:

He should see that he can live all history in hisown person. He must sit solidly at home, and notsuffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires,but know that he is greater than all thegeography and all the government of the world.715

Sitting at home, she realises the self-sufficiency of

interiority, the independence of imagination from spatial

confines and social obligations: ‘you did not have to go to a

ball, because the ball would come to you if you heard the

music and saw the pictures in the fire’.716 The fire itself

glows with ‘a flame both of memory and desire and of longing

and of a tale and of the likeness of tranquility’717 and is

therefore a symbol not only of imaginative literature but

also of the transforming, transcendent capacity of language,

714 Ibid., p.140.715 Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson, p.115.716 Paul Scott, ‘After the Funeral’, Times, November 25, 1977, p.xxxi.717 Ibid.

203


of the ‘tragic inheritance of speech’,718 those ‘words, dreams

built up around processes’719 which distinguishes man from

animals and by enabling him to sense, if never grasp,

abstract concepts and absolutes, ensures that ‘In the spirit

we are always hungry for increase’.720 For, ‘the likeness of

tranquility’ cannot be tranquility itself but a displaced and

displacing linguistic image of it; and so as The Corrida a san

Feliu explains, for ‘men who seek that tranquility without

having themselves to die’,

peace itself is an illusion, if by peace we meansomething more durable than temporary respitefrom the prick of ambition, and the soaring andsinking fever of passion. Perhaps it is an artthat this more durable peace is to be found; … inthe contemplation of what has been created,endless Edens…721

‘After the Funeral’ evokes this hunger for fulfilment, this

desire for peace: ‘It is an old tale but somewhere in it

there is the magic of a persistent wish, as old as earth but

ever present.’722 Hence Cinderella’s belief that in her

imagination ‘she could dance not just through the night but

forever’,723 and that

The shawl had become a gown which transformed,transported, she could dance through the as yetunlit corridors of the castle of her history andher future in the arms of a man who would one daylove her and whom she would love.724

718 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.304.719 The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.81.720 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.217. For ‘the likeness of721 Ibid., p.290.722 ‘After the Funeral’, p.xxx.723 Ibid., p.xxxi.724 Ibid.

204


Similarly, Lucy dances ‘backing gracefully away from the

machine, gently turning and twisting her body, her arms round

an invisible partner, balanced a little precariously on the

soles of her long-ago shoes’.725

Scott’s fictions, then, explore and seek to bridge the gulf

between an imprisoned subjective imaginative consciousness

with apparently vast potentialities and the absurdly fixed

physical limits within which that consciousness must operate.

The novel is the perfect medium for such an exploration

because, like the human mind confined within a physical body

subject to biological and economic dictates, the novel is –

as Scott told his University of Tulsa students, alluding

again to Bernard Bergonzi - ‘a series of images… [which]

exists in a prison, a book, a small, hard rectangular

object’.726 As we have seen, Scott began consciously to

exploit those parallels in The Chinese Love Pavilion in which Teena,

an independent consciousness, is reduced to a sexual object

in the imperial occupation of her country, then transformed

in Brent’s imagination and presented to the reader as his

images of her. In the subsequent novels the actual is

repeatedly internalised, mythologised, transformed by the

magic of the soul, into an image or symbol which may have

little connection with the original source. This may be a

physical violation, such as the deadly appropriation of birds

of paradise or the intricate, ritual slaughter of bulls, or a

more insidious process, the rewriting of the actual story of

Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar, which, as ‘One knew nothing

about Kumar’s feelings[,]… could be made to fit almost any

725 Staying On, p.59.726 Sally Dennison, ‘Course Notes’, in After Paul, ed. Alice LindsayPrice (Tulsa: HCE Publications/Riverrun Arts, 1988), p.23.

205


theory one could have of Kumar’s character and intentions’.727

Equally, it may be an Emersonian creative response to the

external world, such as Gaffur’s realisation that ‘Everything

means something to you’.728 Hence The Raj Quartet’s persistent

recourse to paradox, its transformation of the literal into

the figurative and vice versa.

In Staying On, eggs exemplify this duality of mundane fixed

actuality and discrete symbolic significance. Lucy shifts

from the spoken observation, ‘You’re spilling egg on your

shirt’, which stresses Tusker’s, and by extension her own,

geriatric frailty, the breakdown of the physical, the

imminence of death, to an internalised, unspoken meditation:

‘An egg was symbolic too’.729 In the immediate context, eggs

symbolise Easter: resurrection, the soul’s transcendence of

the very frailty evoked by the physical spilling of the egg.

Soon, however, eggs become a more idiosyncratic symbol of

Tusker and Lucy’s relationship. To Tusker, they represent

their self-sufficiency, their ability to manage without

chicken pulao at Smiths’ dining room. Metaphorically they

suggest a more profound self-sufficiency threatening their

relationship, a self-absorption in which Lucy cannot break

through the shell of Tusker’s obfuscation, especially at the

point when he fails to respond to her reasonable complaint,

‘I’m not sure about egg for breakfast and egg for lunch.

It’s very binding’.730 The silences that have grown between

them are a symptom of verbal constipation, a lack of

communication that Lucy attempts to break by throwing a pan

727 A Division of the Spoils, p.304.728 Ibid., p. 598.729 Staying On, p.152.730 Ibid., p.177.

206


at Tusker: ‘it bounced off him as if he were made of

something other than flesh and bone’.731

Eggs, the potentiality of life encased within a shell,

develop the skin, armour and shell imagery of The Birds of Paradise

and particularly The Corrida at San Feliu in which they first appear

as an evocation of atomisation within the triple casing of

turtle and egg and sand: ‘the turtle… buries her eggs in the

sand and then goes back to the sea, leaving the eggs to hatch

and the young to scrabble their own way into the air,732 and in

which Thornhill’s inability to penetrate Myra’s consciousness

anticipates Lucy’s recourse to the frying pan:

[Myra’s] was a head protected by an invisiblecarapace of unknown shape, dimensions, textureand strength. I couldn’t break through it. Inever did break through it.733

If Staying On exploits the comedy of the misunderstandings

which stem from such isolation and lack of communication –

most notably in Ibrahim’s misinterpretation that Lucy would

like a boy for sexual rather than horticultural purposes –

its tone remains tragic. It is nevertheless motivated by a

faith that the imagination nurtured by and within the novel

itself can transcend the prison of individuality, produce ‘a

terrible peace, an awful wholeness’,734 a new communal identity

of reader and written, that ‘Here’ on the page, ‘the

impossible union/ Of spheres of existence is actual,/ Here

the past and future/ Are conquered, and reconciled’.735

731 Ibid., p.179.732 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.223.733 Ibid., p.137.734 Ibid., p.74.735 T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962.

207


Like all Scott’s work, Staying On is balanced precariously on a

cusp between realism and symbolism, history and fiction,

society and interiority, determinism and transcendentalism,

modernism and tradition. While imprisoned in the hard

rectangular object and evoking the self-regarding insularity,

the Bradlerian consciousness of its protagonists, it is open,

through the phenomenology of reading to a shared experience,

a sense of wholeness, an immediacy engineered by the mediacy

of the book. These paradoxes are self-aware, however,

acknowledging that the impossible union is a contrived

fiction and may be nothing better than a distortion of a pure

actuality beyond reach.

Thornhill’s duende ‘aching with the pain of his

imprisonment’736 therefore represents not just the artist in

general, and Scott in particular, striving to reintegrate man

within the alien environment, but any severed individual

consciousness appropriating, distorting and pretending, in

order to preserve its sanity and identity, ‘attempting that

combination of shape and form which by fitting perfectly into

its environment would not attract the hands of the erasers’.737

At night the Universe looks intolerable to him,unbearably different. There’s nothing, nothinghe can do to molest or change or halt it. Whathe paints or draws or sculpts or writes is donewith this knowledge, but to make his lifebearable.

But it is only paint, only words, only thought,only imagining. It is an artifice, amalformation, a malpractice, a mask, a joke, agame. If he’s lucky some of his games are goodenough to be handed on as proof of what can be

736 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.117.737 A Division of the Spoils, p.133.

208


done when you play the game hard enough, wellenough.738

738 The Corrida at San Feliu, p.118.

209

Bibliography

APPENDIX

Book reviews by Paul Scott in Country Life, 1962-

1977

‘The Passions of a Cramped Life’, Vol. CXXXI, No. 3403, May 24, 1962, pp. 1265-1267

James Hanley, Say Nothing, (Macdonald)Daphne Rook, The Greyling (Gollancz)Frank Tuohy, The Admiral and the Nuns, with other Stories

(Macmillan)

‘The Most Humane of the Tsars’, Vol. CXXXI, No. 3404, May 31,1962, pp. 1329-1331

E.M. Almedingen, The Emperor Alexander II (The Bodley Head)Elspeth Huxley, The Mottled Lizard (Chatto & Windus)

‘The Drama of a Civil War’, Vol. CXXXI, No. 3405, June 7, 1962, pp. 1391-1393

Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury. Vol. 1. Centennial History of the American Civil War (Gollancz)Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness (Eyre & Spottiswoode)Dudley Pope, At 12 Mr Byng was Shot (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

‘An Amorous Edwardian’, Vol. CXXXI, No. 3406, June 14, 1962, pp. 1463-1465

Graham Greene, ed., The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford. Vol. 1J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Heinemann)J.B. Priestley, The Shapes of Sleep (Heinemann)H.E. Bates, the Golden Oriole (Five Novellas) (Michael Joseph)Robert Kost, A Kid Nobody Wants (Rupert Hart-Davis)

210

Bibliography

‘The Human Web’, Vol. CXXXI, No. 3407, June 21, 1962, pp. 1537-1539

Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose (Chatto & Windus)Robin Fedden, The Enchanted Mountains (John Murray)

‘Life Between the Two World Wars’, Vol. CXXXI, No. 3408, June28, 1962, pp. 1599-1601

Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (Heinemann)Graham Greene, ed., The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford. Vol. 2John T. Appleby, Henry II (G. Bell)

‘Fanatical Fighter for Animals’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3410, July 12, 1962, pp. 103-105

Ronald Hardy, Act of Destruction (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding (Gollancz)Joseph Wechsberg, Red Plush and Black Velvet (Weidenfeld &

Nicolson)

‘Studies of a Mad Monarch’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3412, July 26, 1962, pp. 223-225

J.C. Long, George III. A Biography (Macdonald)Sir Lewis Namier, Crossroads of Power: Essays on England in the 18th Century (Hamish Hamilton)Trevor H. Hall, The Spiritualists (Duckworth)Philippe Jullian, Chateau Bonheur (Macdonald)Susan Yorke, The Agency House (Macdonald)

‘A President’s Wife Remembers’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3414, August9, 1962, pp. 325-327

The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (Hutchinson)Mary Patchett, In a Wilderness (Hodder & Stoughton)Josephine Bell, Safety First. Four Stories (Bles)John le Carre, A Murder of Quality (Gollancz)

‘Groping towards True Education’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3416, August 23, 1962, pp. 435-437

211

Bibliography

Adam Arnold Brown, Unfolding Character, The Impact of Gordonstoun (Routledge & Kegan Paul)Edward Upward, In the Thirties (Heinemann)Erskine Caldwell, Close to Home (Heinemann)

‘The True Face of a Priest’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3418, September6, 1962, pp.545-547

Jennifer Lash, The Climate of Belief (Gollancz)David Lytton, the Paradise People (MacGibbon & Kee)Thakazhi S. Pillai, Chemmeen (Gollancz)

‘Struggle for an Africans’ Paper’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3424, October 18, 1962, pp. 984-986

Tom Hopkinson, In the Fiery Continent (Gollancz)H.E. Bates, A Crown of Wild Myrtle (Michael Joseph)Hammond Innes, Atlantic Fury (Collins)

212

Bibliography

‘Elizabeth I on Tour’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3426, November 1, 1962, pp. 1117-1119

Ian Dunlop, Palaces and Progressions of Elizabeth I (Jonathan Cape)Mark Bonham Carter, ed., The Autobiography of Margot Asquith(Eyre & Spottiswoode)Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan. Vol. 1 (1897-1945) (MacGibbon & Kee)Eric Ambler, The Light of Day (Heinemann)

‘History in the Human Face’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3428, November 15, 1962, pp. 1243-1245

John Brophy, The Human Face Reconsidered (Harrap)Edwin Diamond, The Science of Dreams (Eyre & Spottiswoode)Isoko and Ichiro Hatano, Mother and Son. A Japanese

Correspondence(Chatto & Windus)

‘Men and Animals in Burma’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3430, November 29, 1962, pp. 1367-1369

Susan Williams, The Footprints of Elephant Bill (William Kimber)Eric Newby, Something Wholesale (Secker & Warburg)Harold Nicolson, Monarchy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)David Lodge, Ginger You’re Barmy (MacGibbon & Kee)

‘The True Image of Chopin’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3432, December 13, 1962, pp. 1569-1571.

Arthur Hedley, ed. and trans., Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin (Heinemann)Encore: The Sunday Times Book (Michael Joseph)W.R.D. McLaughlin, Call to the South. A Story of British Whaling in Antarctica (Harrap)Agatha Christie, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side (Collins)

‘A Masterpiece of Englishness’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3434, December 27, 1962, pp. 1666-1667

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time (Heinemann)Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: the Era of Excess (Faber)

213

Bibliography

‘Maturity’s Pain and Pleasure’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3436, January 10, 1963, pp. 80-81

Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods (Collins)Mladen Oljaca, A Prayer for my Brethren (Hutchinson)Jennifer Dawson, Fowler’s Snare (Anthony Blond)

214

Bibliography

‘From Caesar to Henry VII’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3438, January 24, 1963, pp. 185-187

W.O. Hassall, How they Lived: 55BC-1485 (Basil Blackwell)Peter Twiss, Faster than the Sun (Macdonald)Peter de Polnay, A Man of Fortune (W.H. Allen)James Mitchell, Among Arabian Sands (Peter Davies)

‘Facts Britain Must Face’ Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3440, February 7,1963, pp. 277-279

Anthony Hartlay, A State of England (Hutchinson)Jack Bennett, Jamie (Michael Joseph)Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar (Heinemann)

‘A Young Girl’s Look at Life’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3442, February 21, 1963, pp. 389-391

Charlotte Bingham, Coronet among the Weeds (Heinemann)Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower (Hogarth Press)James Baldwin, Another Country, (Michael Joseph)Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Methuen)

‘English Champion of the Decadents’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3458, June 13, 1963, pp. 1426-1427

Roger Lhombreaud, Arthur Symons. A Critical Biography (Unicorn)Irving Stone and Jean Stone, eds., I, Michelangelo, Sculptor. An Autobiography through Letters (Collins)Pamela Hansford Johnson, Night and Silence Who is Here? (Macmillan)James Clavell, King Rat (Michael Joseph)

‘Harrowing Realism and Fantasy’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3459, June20, 1963, pp. 1522-1523

Graham Greene, A Sense of Reality (The Bodley Head)I. Schapera, ed., Livingstone’s African Journal, 1853-1856. Vols. 1 and

2(Chatto & Windus)Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Chatto & Windus)

215

Bibliography

‘Collapse of the Old Order’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3460, June 27,1963, pp. 1590-1591

Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties. The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905-1922

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)Sarah Patton Boyle, The Desegregated Heart (Gollancz)Lorus J. Milne and Margery Milne, The Senses of Animals and Men

(Andre Deutsch)Mary MacCarthy, The Stones of Florence (Heinemann)Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare Vols. 1 to 4

(Batsford)

‘Forerunner of Hemingway’, Vol. CXXXIV, No. 3461, July 4, 1963, pp. 50-51

Arthur Calder Marshall, ed., The Bodley Head Jack LondonColette, The Blue Lantern (Secker & Warburg)Ivor Brown, How Shakespeare Spent the Day (The Bodley Head) Beverley Nichols, Garden Open Today (Cape)

‘Private Life of Boswell’, Vol. CXXXIV, No. 3462, July 11, 1963, pp. 112-113

Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776 (Heinemann)

Michael Astor, Tribal Feeling (John Murray)H.M. Denham, The Aegean. A Sea Guide to its Coasts and Islands (John

Murray)

‘Good King Edward’s Golden Days’, Vol. CXXXVII, No. 3564, June 24, 1965, pp.1624-1625

Sir Charles Petrie, Scenes of Edwardian Life (Eyre & Spottiswoode)

Richard O’Connor, Jack London. A Biography (Gollancz)Libero Bigiaretti, The Convention (Macmillan)Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast (Chatto & Windus)

216

Bibliography

‘Private Faces in Public Places’ Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3566, July 8, 1965, pp. 128-129

Anthony Shrimsley, The First Hundred Days of Harold Wilson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)Arnold J. Toynbee, Between Niger and Nile (Oxford University

Press)Major-General J.G. Elliott, A Roll of Honour. The Story of the Indian Army, 1939-1945 (Cassell)Heinrich Boll, The Clown (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)Elizabeth Bowen, A Day in the Dark (Cape)

‘Inside the Soviet Mind’, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3568, July 22, 1965, pp. 256-257

John Gooding, The Catkin and the Icicle: Aspects of Russia (Constable)Tom Cullen, Autumn of Terror. Jack the Ripper: His Crimes and Times (The Bodley Head)Arvid Klemensen, Strange Island: The Noona Dan in the South Seas

(Souvenir Press)

‘Sire to Genius’, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3570, August 5, 1965, pp. 362-363

John Lock and W.T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev. Patrick Bronte (Nelson)I.M. Parsons, ed., Men who March Away: Poems of the First World War (Chatto & Windus)Cecil Beaton, The Years Between: Diaries, 1939-44 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

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‘Pillars of Salt’ in Four Jewish Plays, ed. with introd. by H.F. Rubinstein. London: Victor Gollancz, 1948

Johnnie Sahib. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1952 Revised edition, London: William Heinemann

The Alien Sky. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953

A Male Child. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956

The Mark of the Warrior. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958

The Chinese Love Pavilion. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960

The Birds of Paradise. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962

‘Wanted on Voyage’. Times, November 8, 1962, p.15

The Bender. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1963

The Corrida at San Feliu. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1964

‘Bitter Potion for Circe’s Swine’. TLS, December 2, 1965, p.1093

‘How Well Have They Worn? – 1: A Passage to India’. Times, January 6, 1966, p. 15

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‘Neither Saint Nor Charlatan’. TLS, April 11, 1968, p. 368

The Day of the Scorpion. London: William Heinemann, 1968

‘The End of the Raj’. TLS, October 30, 1969, pp. 1257-1258

‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’. Essays by Divers Hands, XXXVI (1970) pp. 113-132

The Towers of Silence. London: William Heinemann, 1971

‘The Raj’. John Kenneth Galbraith Introduces India, edited by Frank Moraes and Edward Howe. London: Andre Deutsch, 1974

The Division of the Spoils. London: William Heinemann, 1975

‘Twilight of the Princes’. TLS, July 16, 1976, p. 894

‘Introduction’ to Smith, Saumarez, A Young Man’s Country. Letters of aSub-Divisional Officer of the Indian Civil Services, 1936-37. Salisbury,Wiltshire: Michael Russell, 1977, pp. xi-xiii

Staying On. London: William Heinemann, 1977

‘After the Funeral’. Times, November 25, 1977, pp. xxx-xxxi

My Appointment with the Muse, ed. with introd. by Shelley C. Reece.London: William Heinemann, 1986

Secondary Sources

Ahmad, Jamil-Ud-Din The Middle Phase of Muslim Political Movement.Lahore: Publishers United Ltd, 1969

Allen, Charles, ed. Plain Tales from the Raj. New York: Holt,Reinhart & Winston, 1985

Allen, Walter The English Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1958

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Baines, Jocelyn Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. London:Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960

Beloff, Max ‘The End of the Raj/Paul Scott’s Novels asHistory’, Encounter, May 1976, pp. 65-70

Bergonzi, Bernard The Situation of the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1970

Bernstein, J.M. The Philosophy of the Novel. Lukacs, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1984

Bonarjee, N.B. Under Two Masters. OUP, 1970

Boyer, Allen ‘Love, Sex and History in The Raj Quartet’, Modern Language Quarterly, 46 (1) March 1985,pp. 64-80

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Campbell-Johnson, A. Mission with Mountbatten. London: Robert Hale, 1951

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Conrad, Joseph An Outcast of the Islands. London: Penguin, 1975

Conrad, Joseph Youth. The End of the Tether. London: Penguin, 1975

Conrad, Joseph The Shadow Line. London: Penguin, 1986

Conrad, Joseph Lord Jim, with introd. and notes by Cedric Watts. London: Penguin, 1986

Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1973

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Desai, Anita Fire on the Mountain. London: Penguin, 1981

Desai, Anita The Village by the Sea. London: Penguin, 1988

Desai, Anita Baumgartner’s Bombay. London: Penguin, 1989

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Godden, Rumer The Peacock Spring. London: Penguin, 1977

Godden, Rumer Breakfast with the Nikolides. London: Futura, 1983

Gooneratne, Yasmine ‘Paul Scott’s Staying On: Finale in a Minor Key’, Journal of Indian Writing in English, 9 (2),July 1981, pp.1-12

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Greenberger, Allen The British Image of India. OUP, 1969

Hanley, Gerald The Journey Homeward. London: Abacus, 1984

Hanley, Gerald Noble Descents. London: Abacus, 1983

Hannah, Donald ‘”Dirty Typescripts and Very Dirty Typescripts”: Paul Scott’s Working Methods in The Raj Quartet’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXVII (1), 1992, pp. 149-170

Hartlay, Anthony A State of England. London: Hutchinson, 1963

Hitchens, C. ‘A Sense of Mission The Raj Quartet’, Grand Street,4 (2), Winter 1985, pp. 180-199

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Islam, Shamsul Chronicles of the Raj. London: Macmillan, 1979

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Jhabvala, R. Prawer Esmond in India. London: Penguin, 1980

Jhabvala, R. Prawer Heat and Dust. London: Futura, 1976

Jhabvala, R. Prawer How I Became a Holy Mother. London: John Murray, 1976

Johnson, Richard M. ‘Sayed’s Trial in Paul Scott’s A Division of the Spoils: The Interplay of History, Theme and Purpose’, Library Chronicle of University of Texas, 37, 1986, pp. 76-91

Joyce, James Ulysses. London: The Bodley Head, 1960

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Kipling, Rudyard Wee Willie Winkie, with introd. and notes by Hugh Haughton. London: Penguin, 1988

Kipling, Rudyard Kim, with introd. and notes by Edward Said. London: Penguin, 1987

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Macauley, Lord The Complete Works Vol. 11: Speeches, Poems & MiscellaneousWritings, Vol. 1. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898

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Malgonkar, Manohar The Devil’s Wind. London: Penguin, 1988

Masters, John Bhowani Junction. London: Michael Joseph, 1956

Mende, Tibor Conversations with Mr Nehru. London: Martin Secker &Warburg, 1956

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Mitchell, Kate L. India: An American View. London: The Bodley Head, 1943

Moon, Penderel Warren Hastings and British India. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947

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Moore, Robin Churchill, Cripps and India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979

Moorhead, Caroline ‘Getting Engrossed in the Death Throes ofthe Raj’. Times, October 20, 1975, p. 1

Moorhouse, Geoffrey India Britannica. London: Paladin, 1984

Morris, James Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979

Mosley, Leonard The Last Days of the British Raj. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961

Muir, Ramsay The Expansion of Europe. London: Penguin, 1968

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Naipaul, V.S. India: A Wounded Civilisation. London: Penguin, 1979

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Narayan, R.K. The Bachelor of Arts, with an introd. by Graham Greene. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980

Narayan, R.K. The Dark Room. London: Mandarin, 1990

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Nehru, Jawaharlal The Discovery of India. London: Meridian, 1946

Nichols, Beverley Verdict on India. London, Cape, 1944

Pandey, B.N. The Break-Up of British India. London: Macmillan, 1969

Panikkar, K.M. A Survey of Indian History. London: Asia Publishing House, 1947

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Popham, J. & Tedesco, J. Introduction to’ The Raj Quartet’. Maryland: University Press of America, 1983

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Rao, K. Bhaskara Paul Scott Twayne English Authors Series 285, Boston: Twayne, 1980

Ringold, Francine ‘A Conversation with Paul Scott’, Nimrod,21 (1), 1976, pp.16-32

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Rushdie, Salman Midnight’s Children. London, Picador, 1982

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Rushdie, Salman ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta, 11, 1984, pp. 123-138

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Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London, Faber & Faber, 1984

Scanlan, Margaret ‘The Disappearance of History: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet’, CLIO, 15 (2), Winter 1986, pp.153-169

Spear, Percival A History of India. Vol. 2. London: Penguin, 1978

Spurling, Hilary Paul Scott: A Life. London: Hutchinson, 1990

Stewart, Nigel, ed. Selected Tales from Conrad. London: Faber & Faber, 1977

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Imperialism, Insularity and Identity: The Novels of Paul Scott

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