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
Chapter OneIdea and Execution
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
Chapter OneIdea and Execution
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
Chapter OneIdea and Execution
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
Chapter OneIdea and Execution
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
Chapter OneIdea and Execution
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
‘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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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.
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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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
Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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.
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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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.
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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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.
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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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.
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Chapter TwoJohnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky
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.
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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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Chapter Three A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior
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.
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Chapter Three A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior
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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Chapter Three A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior
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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Chapter Three A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior
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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Chapter Three A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior
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
136 Ibid., p.20.137 Ibid., p.11.138 Ibid., p.35.
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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.
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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
159 Ibid., p.46.160 Ibid., p.105.161 Ibid., p.104.
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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.
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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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Chapter Four The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds ofParadise
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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Chapter Four The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds ofParadise
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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Chapter Four The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds ofParadise
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.
312 Ibid., p.183.313 Ibid., p.262.314 Ibid., p.174.
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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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Chapter Five The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu
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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Chapter Five The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu
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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Chapter Five The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu
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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Chapter Five The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu
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
423 Ibid., p.105.424 Ibid., p.205.425 Ibid., p.219.
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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
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
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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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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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Chapter Seven Staying On
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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Chapter Seven Staying On
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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Chapter Seven Staying On
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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Chapter Seven Staying On
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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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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Chapter Seven Staying On
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.
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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)
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