Imperialism, Insularity and Indentity - The Novels of Paul Scott

IMPERIALISM, INSULARITY
AND IDENTITY
The Novels of Paul Scott
Martin Paterson
D.Phil.
The University of York
Department of English and Related Literature
July 1993
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to David Higham Associates for permission to quote from

the works of Paul Scott; to the publishers, Faber and Faber Ltd, for permission
to quote from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot; and to Dr Patrick
Swinden for permission to quote from his Paul Scott: Images of India.
I wish to thank Lan White, my supervisor at the University of York, and also
Bob Jones and Felicity Riddy for encouragement, suggestions and
constructive criticism. I am especially grateful to Professor David Moody for
what seemed, at the time, to be a devastating indictment of my work but has
since proved to be the stimulus for what is, I hope, a much better analysis
than I would otherwise have written.
I owe a great debt, literally, to Paul Caton who sold me the word processor
and still has not complained about not being paid.
This thesis could not have been completed without the patience,
proofreading, attention to detail, inspiration and support of my wife, Ann-
Marie. I dedicate the finished product to her, my son, Nat, and to the
memory of my cousin Jane.
i
The phrase ‘question of identity’ always makes me cringe with
embarrassment and amazement that it should be thought of as a
question that has not always lain modestly at the heart of our literature.
Paul Scott, ‘More Cucumber, More Conrad’
ii
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
iii
Chapter One Idea and Execution
Chapter One
Idea and Execution – History and Fiction
It is of execution we are talking – that being the only point of a novel

that is open to question. This is perhaps too often lost sight of, only to
produce interminable confusions and cross-purposes. We must grant the
artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to
what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean we are bound to like it or
find it interesting: in case we do not 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. Imperial 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
1
Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited with introduction by
Roger Gard (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 198.
2
Paul Scott, My Appointment with the Muse, edited with introduction by Shelley C. Reece
(London: Heinemann, 1986), p.115.
1
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
Orientalist, 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
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 Many Faces of Oliver Goldsmith’, Country Life, Vol. CLXII, No.
4176, July 14, 1977, p.114. For Malgonkar, see ‘Alice is Alive and Well’, Country Life, Vol. CLII,
No. 3930, October 19, 1972, p.1011.
6
David Rubin, After the Raj. British Novels of India since 1947 (Hanover and London:
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 Casebook Series (London:
Macmillan Education, 1970), p.56.
2
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. Besides, 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
India, 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
9
Paul Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, Essays by Divers Hands, XXXVI (1970), p.113.
10
Ibid., p.113
11
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.
13
‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, p. 117.
14
George Woodcock, ‘The Sometime Sahibs: Two Post-Independence British Novelists of
India’, Queen’s Quarterly, 86 (1979), pp.39-40.
3
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
‘there is 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.
15
Ibid.
16
S.P. Appasamy, ‘The Withdrawal: A Survey of Paul Scott’s Trilogy of Novels on India’, in
Literary Studies: Homage to Dr A. Sivaramasubramonia Aiyer, ed. K.P.K. Menon et al.
(Trivendrum: St Joseph’s Press, 1973), p.69. See also Arthur Pollard’s complaints of ‘tedious
repetition’, ‘Twilight of Empire: Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet’ in Individual and Community in
Commonwealth Literature, ed. Daniel Massa (Msida: University of Malta, 1978), p.171.
17
Appasamy, ibid.
4
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-moving 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 18 th 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’s techniques, however refined,

may not be able to do justice. For, in the end, what was decided by
governments depended upon their response to a whole series of
pressures, some of them no doubt at least in theory identifiable and
even quantifiable, others, however, much less easy to grasp and define.
What the British thought and felt about India between 1935 and 1947
was the product of a great many personal experiences of civilians and
soldiers, of businessmen and reporters, of missionaries and policemen
... For these reasons, the role of the novelist in exploring the
relationship between the two peoples has always been a crucial one;
and novels are an historical source that we are only now beginning to
exploit. For the novelist has the freedom to present the circumstances
of the case, and through his personages to evoke either directly or
through symbolic reference the complex of feelings, physical and moral,
that go to 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
18
The Times, May 3, 1952, p.3.
19
Max Beloff, ‘The End of the Raj / Paul Scott’s Novels as History’, Encounter, May 1976, pp.
65-66.
5
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 from the beginning? Did the
characters present themselves to the author in the round, or did they
take hold of the author’s imagination and develop along their own
lines? Is there a version of the events themselves that the author keeps
in reserve and never wholly reveals, so that all we ever get are the
conflicting versions of the participants in them, or of those who get to
know about them through the gossip of a club or bazaar?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,
20
Beloff, ibid., p.66.
6
fusing, for example, Merrick’s biography with those of the actual Martin Wynne and
Enoch Powell.
His 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 had wanted 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
21
Quoted in Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India (London: The Macmillan Press, 1980), p. x.
22
See Hilary Spurling, Paul Scott, A Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p.262.
23
7
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 of 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 read more than remembered – an absent turbulent political landscape
24
Ibid., p.162.
8
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, the history, I was

representative … of many of my countrymen who in the main had for
years been under the misapprehension that the upmost point
attainable – ultimate truth – lay midway between Dover and Calais, and
that everything else was bad 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 over 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] were aroused more strongly than I
had time to recognise because about fourteen years ago I wrote [a]
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.20
27
Paul Scott, The Chinese Love Pavilion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960), p.22.
28
Ibid., p.26
9
passage [in The Mark of The Warrior] describing a young soldier’s

reaction to his first Indian billet and I don’t think I could have 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.
An Indian critic…complimented me on getting all sorts of different

people right – a memsahib, a sahib, an Indian politician… I decided that I
had not really been very clever…I realised that…I’ve always asked myself
‘In this man’s or woman’s position what would I feel?’ and the most
useful answer has always been… ‘Perhaps what I would feel 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 of the same…What Plato had thought, he may
think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time 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. Visiting the
places Daphne did, even lying in the same bath, ‘One remembers and, having soaped,
29
The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.22.
30
Ibid., p.127
31
Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oxford Authors (OUP, 1990), p. 114.
32
Georges Poulet ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. with
introduction by Robert Con Davis (New York: Longman, 1986), pp. 350-55.
10
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 reader himself in the moral life,
inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that
reality is not as his conventional education has 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,
Should civilised man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral,
intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests,
we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely balanced relations of
organic and inorganic nature, as to cause… the extinction, of these very
beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to
appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that 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
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’s source was Walter Allen, The
English Novel, (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1958), p.14.
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.
11
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 like planting tea.’ … I saw
that he did not know whether I was laughing at him or not. I had been
quite serious.
…’Actually I’d thought of it.’
And then the walls of the room fell away and the wings of adventure
shook with a tremor of excitement.38
Scott, 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 herself in sunshine in

Pankot… everything in England was on a miniature scale. She thought
this had an effect on the people who lived there always. [They] seemed
to Sarah to lack a dimension that the others didn’t lack. Lacking this
dimension was what Sarah supposed came of living on a tiny island.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 describe the author who
38
Paul Scott, A Male Child (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956), p. 41.
39
Ibid., p.189
40
41
Paul Scott, The Day of the Scorpion (London, Heinemann, 1968), p.76
42
12
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 to establish the largest
empire the world has ever seen… Insularity, like empire-building,
requires superb self-confidence, a conviction of one’s moral
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 between the India he was in

and the India that was in his head there was no connection either
between paper and pencil and the page remained ominously blank.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 seemed 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 the world today that

might be of value?’… Three days later… I said that after mature
consideration I thought the most valuable thing I or someone like me
43
Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils (London: Heinemann, 1975).
44
Ibid., p.12.
45
Ibid., p.550.
46
Ibid., p.597.
13
had to offer the world, as an Englishman, was the uncertainty of having

anything of value too offer 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… had strange dreams that
drove him mad. One day the dreams went and he said, ‘Thank God,
now I can have a bit of peace.’ But he was wrong. He should have 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.
Mutual 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 in the way of background

and education. I was English… I was the raj, the elusive father image,
and I insulted them by counting it all cheap when circumstances 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
47
My Appointment with the Muse, p.113
48
Paul Scott, The Corrida at San Feliu (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), p.309.
49
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.
14
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, for example, 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 a man of Hari Kumar’s

type… yet… Kasim bears no more resemblance to Kumar that you
[Sarah] do to Miss Manners… there was some sort of fantasy in my
mind of Hari and Daphne being about to come together again.54
Jim 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
52
Margaret Scanlon, ‘The Disappearance of History: Paul Scott’s The Raj 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.
55
56
A Male Child, p.81
15
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 more consistently powerful use of
this device of substitution… in The Birds of Paradise, The Corrida at San
Feliu, and, most brilliantly of all, in The Quartet. There it becomes a
remarkably subtle method of linking narratives at a level far beneath
the crude 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 which can develop between…

brothers. Sometimes the blood relationship… is not so close, and in the
most deeply explored example – Ronald Merrick’s relationship with Hari
Kumar… - it is absent altogether. Scott shows no interest in any
complementary 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,
57
The Day of the Scorpion, p.216
58
Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India (London: The Macmillan Press, 1980), pp. 29-30.
59
Ibid., pp.21-22.
60
Johnnie Sahib, p.223
61
Paul Scott, The Alien Sky (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953), p. 279.
62
Ibid., p.202.
16
locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety that it

was no longer possible to know… what it was that held them together
and seemed to have confused the image of their 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 half 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. Daphne 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.
63
The Jewel in the Crown, p.1
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
17
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 self-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’t been discovered,

trampled on, littered with cigarette ends… not a social or political
concept that hadn’t been tried, tested and discredited, not an idea that
hadn’t been had before and been applied and been disowned; not an
instinct that hadn’t been written up by Freud and Jung… It had all been
done. The moulds were cast. They only had to be serviced, filled with
molten sub-standard iron of inherited good intentions and upended 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
67
68
The Day of the Scorpion, p. 17.
69
The Birds of Paradise, p.193.
18
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 pattern and 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
70
71
The Mark of the Warrior, p. 197.
72
Johnnie Sahib, p. 60.
19
Chapter Two Johnnie 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.
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
73
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, with introduction and notes by Cedric Watts (London: Penguin, 1986),
p. 46.
74
Ibid.
75
20
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 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 out differently, if, instead of
flying, you worked more like a coolie, at least the spirit of the promise
was still alive, because Johnnie made it stay 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 stature remained.80
76
Ibid., p. 98.
77
Ibid., p. 71.
78
Ibid., p. 71.
79
Ibid., p. 17.
80
Ibid., p. 19.
21
Faith in the unfulfilled promise of liberal imperialism – of fellowship between natives and
caring administrators who 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 old days Sir.’…
‘Nimu, if you hear any of the men or NCOs saying that I’m going or any
bloody fool nonsense like that you can tell ‘em I’m staying. You can tell
them too that the Captain Sahib isn’t just a fair weather friend either.’
‘Fair weather friend? What is the meaning 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
81
Ibid.
82
The Chinese Love Pavilion, p. 43.
83
See Francine S. Weinbaum, ‘Psychological defenses and thwarted union in The Raj Quartet’,
Literature and Psychology, 31(2) (1981), pp. 75-87.
84
Johnnie Sahib, p. 172.
85
Ibid., pp. 131-32.
22
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:
Dass dribbled … expertly … [Johnnie] barged against his shoulder and

tapped the ball gently from Dass’s feet … He … shouted suddenly, ‘Come
on one of you! Win it! ... Don’t let me have it all the time!’ He kicked the
ball high over their heads and let them run for it. Watching them
scrambling he thought, ‘They do it to please me.’ … He was conscious of
his power and of the fact that they were black and he was white. It had
never been so before and in his anger he found himself cheering
derisively whenever one of them fluffed the ball. Suddenly he turned
away and left 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 true only because he had let himself be afraid… Of his true 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 be saved. 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:
‘Scottie … can look at a map and see all sorts of things about lines of
communication. He sees roads and railways, towns and villages, all
86
The Birds of Paradise, p.87
87
Johnnie Sahib, p.32. Note that the last three sentences were deleted by Scott from the 1968
edition published by Heinemann, along with other passages totalling more than seven pages.
23
connecting up, but he sees ‘em as ways of lifting supplies from one
place to another. I see ‘em as places I’ve been or haven’t been. I see a
place and remember… what happened to one of the men say… It’s the
men. What they do and what they think.’ He seemed at a loss how to
go on.
‘What then Johnnie?’
‘You’re changing all that, changing that outlook.’…
‘…It changes itself Johnnie.’
‘I don’t agree.’ Again he hesitated. ‘It couldn’t change by 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 was doing… I was stuck in an
office. Started as an office boy when I was thirteen and I don’t kid
myself I’m going to go from office boy to managing director. 89
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 approached you were afraid he
would pass you by, and that, in a way, would be a matter for shame.
Then he had stood in front of you and you could feel how he measured
you as a man and made his own five feet eight inches seem inches taller
than your own 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
88
Ibid., p.111.
89
Ibid., p.110.
90
Ibid., p. 18.
24
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 lack of progress, than any paucity of talent. The Major recognises the
problem:
‘What’s going to happen to you when you lose the section? After all,
one day you’ve got to lose it.’
… ‘It’s simple. I don’t think about it because I don’t think about after
the war.’
‘I do. I think a hell of a lot. You’re talking balls again! Of course you
think about after the war. Christ! There isn’t a man out here who
doesn’t.’
Johnnie said, ‘Maybe. Things’ll sort 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 feel out of place, to feel
too, that practice had disproved the theories of a lifetime and of a
career. An army advanced as far as it could be supplied through ground
communication. Or did it?92
His discomfort is overcome by the same defence mechanism Johnnie and Nimu turn to –
memory.
91
Ibid., p.110.
92
Ibid., p. 11.
25
In the requisitioned houses were signs that the army had taken over
and established itself with an air of ownership, erecting signboards,
festooning telephone cables through the trees which lined the metal
road. The soldiers he saw walking in the town were predominantly
Indian, but here and there were British… The place had suddenly
become real for him. It bore the hall marks of an active service area and
relighted almost forgotten memories of other places, other times.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 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 answer from inanimate things

he looked up again and stared at the lantern, at the makeshift ashtray
with its dead stubs, at all the tokens surrounding him which were his
possessions. They had been with him at the beginning and were now
with him at the end. And they were nothing because 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
93
Ibid., p.12.
94
Ibid., p.146.
95
Ibid., p.160.
96
Ibid., p.215.
26
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 a 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 comfort Tamel lacked. But how
patently false an attitude it was. Man’s memories grew dull and at that
point imagination waved its wand. Tamel was no different from
Marapore; and life in it was petty and stupid as that in any cantonment.
The only way one could make it bearable was by looking facts in the
face. With the exception of Jim Taylor these others meant nothing to
him.
97
Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India, p.1.
98
A Male Child, p.213.
27
And Jim? Well, they had been very close at one time… One day Jim
would snap out of it and they would have a good laugh as they had
done in Marapore… 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 no communication between

them. Sometimes a duplication of action and desire would make it
seem as if it existed. But it was only there superficially; emotionally. It
did not go deeply to connect up the separate cores of their isolation.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 had no reality. Pyongiu was derelict, a place
dried up by the receding tide of war… the people who moved across its
99
Johnnie Sahib, pp.197-98.
100
Ibid., p.208.
101
Ibid., p.146.
102
Ibid., p.208.
28
hot sands… could not for all their talk of… places and people far away,
establish its connection with the outside world. Pyongiu was a name on
a map that a visiting plane could, for a brief moment, make recognisable
as a formation 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.
And the men were like Pyongiu; for an hour, for less than an hour, one
received an impression of them and thought one understood. the
words they spoke and the things they did made a pattern whose
intricacies seemed intelligible; but as one traced the pattern it began to
move in subtle bewildering 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 had never been to brought

him into a new perspective, and emphasised that Johnnie was part of
the irretrievable past.
One had not known this Johnnie who sat drunkenly and poured out his
heart to a serjeant in Prulli; and to that extent it was a new Johnnie;
perhaps the real one…
And it was easy, once an illusion had been swept away, to recreate a
man in the imagination… when the impact of his personality was lost
through his absence; to turn one’s judgement of him upside down; trace
back from the effect to find the cause; selecting the effects to find the
cause one wanted to find; to find in the end a Johnnie who had been
selfish, arrogant, childish and bitter; to find, like that, a Johnnie one
could resent, exorcise like an undesirable spirit from which one could
not escape… 105
103
Ibid., p.179.
104
Ibid., p.180.
105
Ibid.
29
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.
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.
106
Ibid., p.71.
107
Ibid., p.164.
108
Ibid.
109
110
Ibid., p.162.
30
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 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 truthfully be said that he was
sober only on those occasions when his movements from one job to
another, either as a civilian or as a soldier, involved him personally in
the checking of stores and equipment… Drunk, little escaped him;
sober, nothing. Yet his career had been so far undistinguished. This
surprised him: but whether failure led to his drunkenness or stemmed
from it, no-one in India could recall and he himself had 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 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:
111
The Alien Sky, p.17.
31
No amount of change in time and ownership (of the latter there had
been many and few could now recall the Smith who had given his name
in the hotel) had altered the gloomy and Victorian interior, although
both had introduced anachronisms such as the oil lamp on the oval
table in the lounge set directly beneath the electric ceiling fan; the table
itself covered by a green, bobble-fringed cloth and stared at, as it were,
down the chromium notes of ultra-modern wall lights purchased in the
Thirties by a new proprietor who had ended, like so many new brooms,
by metaphorically sweeping the dust of the 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 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
112
Ibid., pp.43-44.
113
32
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. The civil always expect us to
be on tap to pull their chestnuts out of the fire but when we do they
start complaining that we’ve burnt their fingers.’ She was stating what
was generally felt to be true. In Reid’s case community sympathy for
him was strong because… he commanded… a battalion of the
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 and 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
114
The Towers of Silence, p. 73.
115
Ibid.
116
117
The Alien Sky, p.13.
33
the introspection of A Male Child, the imposed formal simplicity of The Mark of the
Warrior, and to the complexity of the mature novels.
34
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 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
118
A Male Child, p.72.
119
Ibid., p.84.
120
Ibid., p.214.
121
122
35
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
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
123
Ibid., p.117.
124
Ibid., p.81.
125
Ibid.
126
127
A Male Child, p. 153.
128
Ibid.
36
and Rider Haggard’ 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 the great traditional

equipment of the novelist, but also as one who has found as yet no
novel to write that is worthy of his talents. The same might be said of
others, and perhaps they perfectly represent the age… Walking the
tightrope between out compulsion to speak and our search for
something to say perhaps we mostly seem to be playing. But then to
write in a major way 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:
Always uneasy about things I might call out in the midst of delirium I
asked him what I had talked about, more to re-assure myself than to
make it easier for him. He looked confused. ‘Oh, a lot of nonsense.’
‘Nothing clear?’
‘Something about a girl.’
‘Helena?’
‘That’s right. Helena.’
I said, ‘Helena’s my wife.’
Instantly I regretted telling him; so profound a look of astonishment and
sympathy came over his face that I could not bear to ask him what I had
said about her.133
129
Ibid., p. 37.
130
Ibid., p.29.
131
Ibid., p.109.
132
My Appointment with the Muse, pp.28-29.
133
A Male Child, p.15.
37
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 a biography of Isabella without

libelling you, defaming your character or holding you up to ridicule?’
‘I don’t think so. Some one else could, but not you old man.’135
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 themselves with the friendliness

she thought I ought to feel for her…
‘How’s the Commander?’, David had said.
‘All right I think. We still correspond.’
David’s eyes blinked. Is that all? 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
134
Ibid., p.100.
135
Ibid., p.154.
136
Ibid., p.20.
137
Ibid., p.11.
38
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
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 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
138
Ibid., p.35.
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.
146
147
Lord Jim, p.199.
39
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 then’, to avert superficiality.
Her failure recalls Emerson’s ‘History’:
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort
becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form
merely, - but, by watching for a time his motions and 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 for the skull beneath. the
beginning and end of a talent. She knew too much about painting to
produce a canvas which would get by on its integration of wrong values.
She had too little art to finish what she had started in the way she had
begun. She had reached the limit of her understanding.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
148
A Male Child, p.31.
149
Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Oxford Authors (OUP, 1990), p.119.
150
40
answer has always been, I think, “Perhaps what I would feel myself”’ 151 – is anticipated by
Ian’s defensive claim, ‘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, a man could go on turning out fatuous tripe
until the cows come home, without necessarily knowing it.’
‘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 than by
inner inspiration. Stella, too, lost conviction in the face of the physical:
‘I shall never paint…’ she said, and picked up the tube of yellow paint…
‘A plastic substance with 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,
151
152
153
Ibid., p.177.
154
Ibid., p.224.
155
Ibid., p.109.
156
Ibid., p.79.
157
Ibid., p.176.
41
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 caught the imagination of the
painter. They were deep and dark; a clever stroke of the brush gave
them a fire. Having observed this it was possible to believe the rest of
the picture had been flattened to heighten this effect. When you saw
the woman herself you were confirmed in that belief… 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, still
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. It was a magic… which would always touch
me with its solid unreality, would always dissipate the urgency of the
present, fire the clay of the distant past to a bright and burnished
immortality.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.
158
Ibid., p.105.
159
Ibid., p.46.
160
Ibid., p.105.
161
Ibid., p.104.
42
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 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 focused and free from distracting minor incidents. the
writing 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 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.
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
168
169
43
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’s estimate of himself, the face

he presents to the world, the estimate of that man made by other men.
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 – a 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 by the enemy. Our own
forces occupy the southern half. For the purpose of the exercise the
hills of the Chota Bandar will be considered as extensive and as forming
a natural barrier between 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 you fire at it?’
‘… I forgot. I don’t think I would have forgotten if it had been the real
thing.’173
‘So far as I can see we might be sitting on our fannies for ten days or be
rousted up a few hours after we’ve moved in. As it’s only an exercise I
thought it’d be nice to know how we stand.’
170
Ibid., p.107.
171
Ibid., p.9.
172
Ibid., p.113.
173
Ibid., p.55.
44
Craig said, ‘It’s more than an exercise… 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 – 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 it Baksh’s presence was a

threat. Not Baksh. Baksh’s presence. … Challenge a threat, reduce it,
twist it to advantage. If Baksh suffers, he does 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 its end as would, say,

Rubens’s picture of the rape of the Sabines if the action weren’t
arrested and you had to sit there watching… the end of Hedda Gabler
[would be] unbearable if the actress actually shot herself… the corrida is
an art that defies the principle of simulation and so is unique.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,
174
Ibid., pp.116-17.
175
Ibid., p.160.
176
Ibid., p.219.
177
The Corrida at San Feliu, pp.299-300.
45
‘If you were Blake at this moment what conclusions would you come
to?’… a new illusion into which his second-in-command and his platoon
commanders could enter, one by one, as if into himself.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 through 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, a traveller looking for

evidence, collecting statements, reconstructing an event… I have a
logical mind: I have to imagine this man collecting the information.
178
179
Ibid., p.166.
180
181
the Corrida at San Feliu, p.29.
46
Unless I can explain why the book is being written I feel too
omniscient.182
This is why Scott’s first person narrators are professional writers, Canning and Thornhill, or
amateur memoirists, Brent 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 and colours of the map but
for a moment… the ground ahead of him would not fit the picture in his
mind and he stood still, lost. And then he said to himself: But it must fit,
because I have given my life purpose. I create Ramsay in the image of
the man I should have been, but could not be: the image of a man who
feels the need to destroy his enemies, who finds this need greater than
his own need 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 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.
182
Caroline Moorhead, ‘Novelist Paul Scott: Getting engrossed in the death throes of the Raj’, Times,
October 20, 1975, p.11.
183
The Jewel in the Crown, p.314.
184
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963, rpt.
1974), pp.91-92.
185
186
Ibid., p.68.
187
Ibid., p.183.
188
47
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 attack another pattern… I

have knowledge of the ridge behind me that I have not myself trodden,
and of the part of the forest where my eyes saw movement and from
which part of me has yet to emerge… I am the centre reaching out
through the medium of the nerves… But this centre and this nerve
pattern is not myself. It is what I am forced to be… I would wish to
sever the nerves from the centre and go back into myself so that I might
be alone in the forest and move in my own safety towards an 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.
‘He died trying to save himself… His image. What he’d become. What
I’d made him… I thought I was helping him to be what I thought he had
it in him to be, but he had other things in him as well and I let him
destroy them… Things we all need.’ He could not speak of them, even
to Esther. Spoken, they would only be words. He thought: None of the
words we use is any good, none of the things we say truly reflects what
we think or feel. The word forgiveness is an empty word, the word
charity 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’s courage, sickened by his wound and
awed by his wide, far-reaching darkness which had come at the end.
This was pride, perhaps; what people meant by pride.192
189
Ibid., p.107.
190
191
Ibid., pp.223-24.
192
Ibid., p.42.
48
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 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.
193
Ibid., p.92.
49
Chapter Four The Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise
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 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.
194
195
The Birds of Paradise, pp.44-45.
196
Ibid., p.133.
197
Ibid., p.192.
198
Ibid., p.203.
199
Ibid., p.23.
50
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 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
200
201
Ibid., p.324.
202
Ibid., p.21.
203
Ibid., p.59.
204
Ibid., p.65.
205
206
Ibid., p.35.
207
51
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 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 of curiosity eating…

outwards… to confound the chemist who can explain everything except
that last ounce of fret and wonder, that seed of mystery, that final
querulous plus in the equation… But show me a romantic, ah, there’s a
man who puts the plus at the beginning of the equation… He works
inwards to meet the worm… He’s always fighting… through layers of
dream which seem 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 flung into his dream as if into a
sea, that he would suffocate if he tried to climb out of his dream, out of
the sea into the air. Commit yourself, he said, commit yourself to the
destructive element and by the exertion of your arms and legs keep
yourself up… You’ll notice he said men, any men. 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.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
208
Ibid., p.53.
209
Ibid.
210
Ibid., pp.46-47.
211
Ibid., p. 41.
212
Ibid.
213
Ibid. p.21.
52
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 the sea-life of light
literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting
away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a
lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered
reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted
savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a
small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men –
always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a
book.216
I was drunk enough to give rein to fancies inspired by his tales. We were
in the warm, close cabin of a schooner, a pearling lugger, two sailors
afloat on the vast magic of the Pacific: we were in the ramshackle hut,
two castaways bewitched by the pounding of surf and the cries of
parrots: we were at ease, old hands, half intent on the yarns we spun,
but with knowledgeable ears on the drums which moaned and beat
their breasts in the jungle from which our lamp-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 of dirt and sits still on it; but the man he will
never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he
want to be so… He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil – and
every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow – so
fine as he can never be… And because you not always can keep your
eyes shut there comes the real trouble… it is not good for you to find
214
Ibid., p.44
215
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 39
216
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, p.47.
217
53
you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not
strong enough are, or not 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?
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 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
218
Lord Jim, pp. 199-200.
219
220
Ibid., pp. 12-13, my emphasis.
221
Ibid., p.13.
222
Ibid.
223
Ibid.
54
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 the door by which men enter
in anticipation of desire. But the little door that opens outwards, that is
the door by which men go in memory of loving.225
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 hard rectangular object, filled
with words… which almost without exception [the reader] will have
forgotten every one of. What he does not forget, so readily, are the
224
Ibid.
225
Ibid.
226
Ibid., p.16.
55
impressions, in the form of mobile, audible images… To him, what

remains is the book. It is his experience of it.227
This relationship of thoughts and objects determines The Chinese Love Pavilion’s
chronology, between and informed by two 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 had arrived in Greystone’s

valley, I suppose I should not have felt about it the way I did. But the
thing happened, the recognition of a place whose image I had always
carried with me because it had fallen with me, as Saxby would have it,
into the dream… But the plainer fact was, I suppose, that I recognized
the valley as nothing more than the end 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.
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 not see her… as a woman
who would have loved me without my knowing it, or killed herself…230
227
My Appointment with the Muse, p.80. Scott is drawing on a BBC radio series, ‘Novelists of the
Sixties’, by Bernard Bergonzi, the basis for Bergonzi’s The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan,
1970), where the phrase ‘hard rectangular object’ appears (p.29).
228
The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.33
229
Ibid., p.53
230
Ibid. pp.322-23.
56
When the hungers are sharp I sometimes… tell myself that Sutton spoke
the truth; that he woke, indeed, and found her lying there. Nothing
helps, then; least of all the knowledge that mood must pass, the
hungers be assuaged, the press of heaven lightened, the certainty
return that Sutton 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.
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’t she? Lie down for
the hare, open up for the hounds eh? I reckon she thought if you were
always on your back nobody would shoot you down.234
Though aware of this ‘plainer truth’, Brent prefers
the dark room in which I could commit my mortal follies and delude
myself into thinking they were…acts, somehow, of faith… perhaps in
there being room for tenderness, time for love, a moment for giving as
well as one for taking even in places where lies were told, bodies
claimed and people knew which side their bread was buttered.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-
231
Ibid., p.324.
232
Ibid., p.37.
233
Ibid., p. 279.
234
Ibid., p. 163.
235
Ibid., p. 164.
57
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 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 pro quo, … producing a

vision all on his own so that he could go round pretending God had
been forced to relent and give him a special mission… the vision was
something to do with finding the orchid 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 was only a question of

time; that whatever she felt or did not feel for me at the moment was
unimportant. She was a woman, one whom I loved… and could in time
be conquered, translated into the image of the woman she really was so
that knowing 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 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
236
Patrick Swinden, Paul Scott: Images of India, p.46
237
The Chinese Love Pavilion, p.220
238
Ibid., p.102.
239
Ibid., p.239.
240
Ibid., p.240.
241
Ibid., p.290.
242
Ibid.. 186.
58
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 hell with him. But which Saxby
did I mean? Not the… rain-soaked giant… I could never say, To hell with
him, because part of me at least was bound to him: if only that previous
self… I only meant the Saxby I was about to leave behind in his remote
Malayan jungle, but were we really divisible in this way? I was conscious
of having involuntarily 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
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
243
Ibid., p.53.
244
Ibid., p.86.
245
Ibid., p.326
246
Ibid., p.326.
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.
59
account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy,

Spain, and the Island, - the genius and the creative principle of each and
of all 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 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 she simply stood there waiting
for my answer and I was too proud to say: Do you mean outside the
contract, do you mean as a friend? Because she would have had to say
yes. It would have been bad for business to say no.255
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
251
Richard Poirier, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson The Oxford Authors (OUP, 1990), p.116.
252
Paul Scott, A Division of the Spoils, p. 105.
253
Paul Scott’s Raj (London, Heinemann, 1990), p. 175.
254
255
60
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 got her teeth into it.
Whatever she touches she ravages with her ignorance of its previous
existence, her greed for it while she wants it, her destructive dismissal
of it when she has finished with it. For her the world was born on the
day that she was born and will die when she dies.258
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
256
Ibid., pp.239-40.
257
Ibid., pp315-16.
258
259
Ibid., p.260.
61
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 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 I never had much in me at
all, but was content to drift in whatever direction the wind blew me?
Hadn’t I been compensating for the revelation of an empty hold by
scratching around for memories of 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 chemical fertilisers it made

her angry because she knew that deep down he couldn’t care less about
them, but had convinced his workaday self that chemical fertilisers were
what made the world go round. A man had to think something did.267
260
261
Ibid., p.73.
262
Ibid., p. 81.
263
Ibid., p.78.
264
265
Ibid., p.116.
266
Ibid., p.105.
267
Ibid., p.235.
62
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
discredited’.274 To quote Edward Said’s summary of History and Class Consciousness,
Lukacs says, reification is the alienation of men from what they have
produced, and it is the starkly uncompromising severity of his vision
that he means by this all the products of human labor, children
included, which are so completely separated from each other,
atomized, and hence frozen into the category of ontological objects as
to make even natural relationships virtually impossible.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:
268
Ibid., p.205.
269
Ibid., p.251.
270
Ibid., p.264.
271
Ibid., p.239.
272
Ibid., p.193.
273
Ibid., p.181.
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.
63
How vulnerable is the illusion that a man has of his own importance,
not… to others, but… to himself, and how to speak of what drives him to
sustain the illusion… of the dark that falls upon him when the illusion is
gone, is virtually impossible.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 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 individual dignity. Griffin, a white married to a Chinese, prefers
277
Ibid., p.262.
278
Ibid., p.124.
279
Ibid., p.129.
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.
64
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… physical connection. Its lack

of restraint may be due a lot to the different colour of our skins. the
happiness she gives me is heightened by the knowledge that neither of
us could fall in love with the other. Nor does the passing of money spoil
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 any other way. her not letting
me… was the result of her built-in determination to maintain social
status by marrying for money, a determination stronger 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 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 we were fond. [Dora]
had admired me, and liked me, but had to admit she was also sucking
up a bit to the political agent’s son…295
289
Ibid., p.17.
290
Ibid., p.25.
291
Ibid., p.203.
292
Ibid.,p.261.
293
Ibid., pp.95-96.
294
Ibid., p.97.
295
Ibid., pp.236-37.
65
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 at the same kind of things.
I don’t ape English manners, they were drilled into me… But underneath
my princely Indian flesh I have the bones 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 his affection for the English
was. On the one hand he had someone like Old Mutton trying to turn
him into a carbon copy of an English public schoolboy, on the other
hand he lived in a ramshackle palace and heard his elder saying rude
things 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
296
Ibid., p.175.
297
Ibid., p. 237.
298
Ibid., p.231.
299
Ibid., p.236.
300
Ibid., p.106.
301
Ibid., p.92.
66
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 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 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?’
302
Ibid., p.105.
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.
310
Ibid., p.92.
67
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,
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.
311
Ibid., p.180.
312
Ibid., p.183.
313
Ibid., p.262.
314
Ibid., p.174.
68
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 therefore most important,

statement we have had from any recent writer about the health of our
society. It provides the background for a badly-needed reappraisal of
our achievements and intentions, both as a nation, and as men and
women who have responsibilities 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 lecture 319 which draws heavily 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
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
319
This lecture is incorrectly dated 1972 in My Appointment with the Muse, perhaps because Scott
recycled it for his lecture tour of India in that year.
320
The Bender, p.48.
69
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 least established as the new norm.

the Welfare State began and one felt that Dickens would have smiled
approvingly. Europe… was in ruins, but at least totalitarianism lay
apparently dead in the rubble – and Spender, Auden and Isherwood
were somehow vindicated… the Empire, that symbol of middle-class
pretension and upper-class mercantile greed, was clearly destined to go
for the Burton we all felt that Mr Forster had always hoped it would. 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:
321
My Appointment with the Muse, p.143, originally in Anthony Hartlay, A State of England (London:
Hutchinson, 1963), p.15.
322
Ibid.
323
Ibid., p.29.
324
House of Commons, 2nd April, 1946.
325
326
Ibid.
327
328
70
He drinks… to humiliate himself, because he… sees the absurdity and

madness of wishing in his heart that the disease he dedicated himself to
eradicate was still defying all his efforts to control it. there is nothing
you could tell him that he doesn’t already know about the way the
means of a man’s job can become more important to him than its end,
and even more often blind him to the fact that the end will either never
be reached, or if it is, reached probably as a result of… an accident in a
laboratory, say… or of an accidental conjunction of time, place and
opportunity when action grows of its own accord out of inaction and
inertia, and Empires fall; mark the end of duty, leave some of the
dutiful behind to contemplate their glory and folly, get drunk, 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 State had not really succeeded in providing
social justice for all at home it certainly provided free false teeth for
casual visitors from Venezuela.
On fell, falls, back on the cynical joke, because it is difficult to be

articulate about ideals, especially failed ones; which may be why
today… politicians seldom seem to say anything unmarked by simple
parochial considerations… they reflect [us] as members of a disgraced
species, getting up false heads of steam to reach a place – perhaps of
advantage but not of honour.330
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
329
330
Paul Scott, ‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, Essays by Divers Hands, XXXVI (1970), p.122.
331
332
Ibid., p.36.
71
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 of orange juice. I nodded

my head at it, ‘The Welfare State?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The Welfare State.’
She was apt to kill jokes like that, by taking them neither jokingly nor
quite seriously enough for you to believe she rebuked you. Question:
answer. A conversation was difficult to sustain.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:
So much of contemporary life seems at first to be merely amusing. One

smiles, and shrugs, having scarcely the heart even for what Mr Angus
Wilson calls gentle irony – which is how he summed up the attitude a
modern English writer needs to adopt towards his available material…
[such writers] represent… an age of comment by imitation, rather than
of creation by attack. Of the… cheap day excursion into the marginal
country of local and broadly uninteresting custom.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,
333
334
Paul Scott: Images of India, p.x.
335
My Appointment with the Muse, pp.28-29.
336
The Bender, p.58.
337
338
339
Ibid., p.114
72
determinedly pursuing material goals, ‘kept wanting to shrug their shoulders, go out and…
have a good time’.340 Its intended theme, disgrace, was ‘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. Like what? Like the Holy
Grail.’ He grinned. ‘Poets with rifles. Civil servants with a conscience.’
‘Some died,’ I said.
‘The lucky ones,’ he rejoined. ‘… The rest of 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 by the British Council,
or by a provincial University on an exchange basis to the Middle West,
and for whom, to judge by the stream of definitive novels then
published, the academic year is long enough to absorb the ambiance
either of 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
340
Ibid.
341
Ibid., p.116.
342
Ibid.
343
344
The Corrida at San Feliu, pp160-61.
345
346
73
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 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 of an old fool who
didn’t know his soul from his elbow were made blasphemously… the
marriage service was no more than a formal step to the bedroom 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:
347
Ibid., p.233.
348
349
The Bender, p.204.
350
351
The Bender, p.60.
352
353
Ibid., p.12
74
The priest told him… he was nearly ready to be received. The phrase…
suddenly appalled him. He told the priest that if he had to be received
that meant he was an outsider. He became a Quaker as a more
practical exercise in humility.354
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’t care less. I often look
back now and regret that I never took my courage in both hands and
went out into the world. That’s really what a chap should do… Get out
and look… Otherwise you never really see yourself… And it’s all so small
and petty. 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 some kind of you, and I suppose
that’s only because, like everybody else, I like the idea of having what
we can’t get enough of here, somewhere else.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
the best instead of the worst… in spite of what I know about us. So I
expected Alice to go on forever putting our marriage together again all
the time I was pulling it to pieces. So I expect Sam to be kind to her
even though I know that with a man like that she’ll end up listed with
his goods and chattels and depreciated ten per cent a year… So I
expected Tim to go on waiting for two hundred pounds until it suited
me to pay it back which of course I knew it never would …358
354
Ibid., p.165.
355
356
The Bender, p.231.
357
Ibid., p.80.
358
Ibid., p.189.
75
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 an external authority? … you

have nothing to answer for to anybody, and the idea of answering to
yourself 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
his God is no different from and as indifferent to human suffering as materialist
imperatives:
I believe in God all right. He made Click Clayton and Gillian Spruce get
careless and He made me offer you a drink out of my last quid because I
don’t want you to go until you’ve bought me a ham sandwich. And He
made me want to see my god-daughter before I agree to pay you back
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
359
Ibid., p.14.
360
Ibid., p.182.
361
Ibid., pp.21-22.
362
Ibid., p.237.
363
Ibid., p.60.
364
Ibid., p.129.
76
‘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 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 Regent and then the last and
uncrossed out of half a dozen numbers pencilled in under ‘Mick’ in the
pocket note-book which lay open on the top of the coin-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:
365
Ibid., p.73.
366
Ibid.
367
Ibid., p.8.
368
Ibid., p.42.
369
Ibid., p.13.
370
Ibid., p.17.
371
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.
77
In time people would have no further need to meet face to face.

Smedley’s could feed you by post. You could say all you needed to say
about yourself (which was the only reason for what was called
conversation) on postcards or the telephone… and in time because you
saw no other human face, your own face would be revealed. It would
come out of its lair like a naked animal, attracted by the sun and a
feeling of repose, and no 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
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, and come up with… mental
pictures to illustrate it… in automatic writing of this kind you seldom
feel, as a reader, that there is much underneath.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.
378
Ibid., p.42.
379
380
The Bender, p.93.
381
Ibid., pp.142-143.
382
Ibid., p.111.
383
Ibid., p.112.
384
385
Ibid., p.54.
78
‘He’s a little hurt that… neither you nor Tim have been in touch… the
critics used names like Pinter…’
‘Pinter?’
‘The caretaker.’
George felt he might sort that one out presently.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 Disarmer because if the

campaign goes on much longer somebody like Lord Wolfenden will get
attached to it… and that’ll kill it stone dead. Or perhaps Tony will be
caught photographing a demonstration in Trafalgar Square and that will
move the whole thing onto the level of a sketch from Beyond the Fringe,
and only John Gordon in the Sunday Express will 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 a million Jews… or about

a lone buck nigger lynched[?]… We don’t. We will only line ourselves up
in good causes to the limit of expenditure of the time and energy we
think necessary for the preservation of our own peace of 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
386
The Bender, p.109.
387
Ibid., p.11.
388
Ibid., p.198.
389
Ibid., p.40.
390
Ibid., p.45.
391
392
The Bender, p.180.
79
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
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 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
393
Ibid., p.62.
394
Ibid., p.94.
395
Ibid., p.204.
396
Ibid., p.249.
397
Ibid., p.39.
398
Ibid., p.34.
399
Ibid., p.44.
400
Ibid., p.253.
401
Ibid., p.58.
80
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 I remember really enjoying

myself. On the other hand, although I didn’t know it, Gillian was already
pregnant… perhaps June or July would be better. But… what’s the good
of being back in June when August and September are still due to come
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 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 sort of detail I haven’t gone into.’
‘How can you call it a detail?’
‘How can I go into that sort of detail before you and I have reached an
agreement?’
402
Ibid., p.8.
403
Ibid., p.141.
404
Ibid., pp.239-240.
405
Ibid., p.175.
406
Ibid., p. 148.
407
Ibid., p.165.
408
Ibid., p.218.
409
Ibid., p.146.
81
‘Agreement? A dissolution strikes me as the opposite 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 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: ‘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
410
Ibid., p.132.
411
Ibid., p.136.
412
Ibid., p.132.
413
Ibid., p.131.
414
Ibid., p.136.
415
Ibid., pp.211-212.
416
Ibid., p.227.
417
418
The Bender, p.242.
419
Ibid., pp.241-42.
82
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’t have 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 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 of his disgrace… Perhaps
he anticipated as he took and told off his skins, loss of favour,
dishonour, downfall, ignominy, that in the end there would be left a
kernel of hope or even of absolution, but there was only the last skin of
his disgrace and inside it the seed of another.423
420
Ibid., p.251.
421
Ibid., p.253.
422
The Corrida at San Feliu, p.315
423
Ibid., p.105.
83
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 she met you she was
asleep… You woke her in a way she did not understand and when she
understood she realised you had woken her with pity, not with love,
and she didn’t have enough experience of the world to survive the
shock.’
‘You speak as if you did. Did survive.’
‘I survived,’ 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 to their logical conclusion,
and you have to stop leading them if the conclusion you’re leading them
to doesn’t fit in with the original picture of them.429
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
424
Ibid., p.205.
425
Ibid., p.219.
426
Ibid.
427
A Male Child, pp.176-77.
428
429
Ibid.
430
Ibid., p.241.
431
Ibid., pp.241-42.
84
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 the characters or trying to project

myself emotionally into the action… I realise I don’t care… the bull’s
blood is its blood… its life its life, its death its death. the same goes for
the toreros… In the crowded plaza de toros, I sit alone… a two-legged
animal with… a tragic inheritance of speech; waiting for the personal
revelation of what he really means when he says… so glibly… I love, I
care … hoping [for] … a glimpse of the reality behind the illusion that a
man 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 winter sleep, no spring

quickening, no summer browsing, or autumnal migration. In this way
we are distinguished from birds and bulls and leopards. In the spirit we
are always hungry for increase.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
432
Ibid., pp.16-17.
433
Ibid., pp.304-305.
434
435
436
Ibid., pp.278-79.
437
Ibid., p.316.
438
Ibid., p.306.
439
85
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 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’s common to most walks of
life… To fall in love with the means as well as the ends of an
occupation… It’s a confusion… It blinds you to the truth of a situation. It
hedges everything about 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 the matador’,445 is charging, selfishly, into its querencia, ‘the particular spot
in the ring that the bull favours’.446
440
Ibid., p.185.
441
Ibid., p.130.
442
Ibid., p.130.
443
444
445
Ibid.
446
Ibid., p.118.
86
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 bread was buttered on…
She had enjoyed their affair. I had enjoyed my jealousy. We were all
well satisfied. Throw out the humbug and ten seconds from 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 before with ‘the condition of
the people’, a fact quite irrelevant to the nature it has taken on. Works
of art are capable of saying more things to man about himself than any
other works whatever are capable of doing – and it’s only by saying… as
nearly as we can, all there is, and in as many ways and on as many sides,
and with a vividness or presentation that ‘art’ and ‘art alone’ is
adequate mistress of, that we are able… to arrive at any sort of
synthesis that isn’t, through all its superficialities and vacancies, a base
and illusive 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] own disillusion, beyond the

proven futility of action in the world of reality[.] Shouldn’t he distrust
the limitations imposed on a man in the world of real action… isn’t it
when he feels that… he must justify [his art] in terms of something
447
Ibid., p.119.
448
Ibid., p.292.
449
Ibid., pp.261-62.
450
451
Ibid., p.147.
87
other than itself, that he abdicates his uncomfortable vocation, and,

lining himself up as a more obvious contributor to Society, is then
subject to the laws and prejudices of that Society and in the long run
sinks with it into the quicksands of its 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 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-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
452
Ibid., p.148.
453
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.
459
88
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 by its author in a frame of

mind that admits certainty or preconceived opinions? The images he
builds up will contain statements about life and society, good and evil,
but should they be the images of a dissenting, inquiring mind, or of a
dissenting, instructing one?462
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
460
Ibid., p.107.
461
Ibid.
462
463
Richard Poirier, Ralph Waldo Emerson The Oxford Authors (OUP, 1990), p.116.
464
Ibid.
465
89
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 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 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
466
Ibid., p.17.
467
‘Lord Jim’s Life’, TLS, November 3, 1966, pp.993-94.
468
469
‘More Cucumber, More Conrad’, Country Life Vol. CLVI, no. 4024, August 15, 1974, p.466.
470
Eliot, p.203.
90
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 saint as someone who is

going to be martyred, a man whose logic isn’t going to work in a final
show-down with the severely practical world… they expect these saints
of theirs to be so unearthbound that they have one foot in heaven
already. And of course by heaven they mean the opposite of earth.
They divide the material from the spiritual with their usual passion for
tidiness…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’.
471
472
Eliot, p.201.
473
474
The Jewel in the Crown, pp. 137-38.
475
Ibid., p.66.
91
Chapter Six The Raj Quartet
Chapter Six
The Raj Quartet
1. Standing where a lane ends and cultivation begins
Like the opening pages of the Chinese Love Pavilion and The Birds of Paradise but with far
greater assurance and sophistication, the first sentence of The Jewel in the Crown
anticipates scenes, characters, incidents and recurrent images – gardens, shadows, walls,
darkness, roads – to be developed in The Raj Quartet. It is one of the densest, most
complex openings in modern literature:
Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so
conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of
the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, such as years before Miss
Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and
cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plane
between the mountains of the north and 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 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
476
92
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 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.
477
‘India: A Post-Forsterian View’, Essays by Divers Hands, XXXVI (1970), p.115.
478
Ibid., p.113.
479
Ibid.
480
Ibid., p.122.
481
93
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 to putting on her boots and
– parasol opened and protectively raised – walking down the lane of the
civil lines in which the Nesbitt-Smiths’ bungalow stood. the lane was
shaded by trees that thinned out gradually as the bungalows gave way
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, its disgusting poverty, its
raucous dissonant music… its ragged population of men and women
who looked so resentful in comparison with the servants and other
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 of British rule… the charm of
the cantonment helped one to bear in mind the calm, wise and
482
483
Ibid.
484
Ibid., p.8.
485
Ibid., p.9.
486
Ibid.
487
Ibid.
94
enduring things. One only had to cross the river into the native town to
see that in our cantonments and civil lines we had set an example for
others to follow and laid down a design for civilised life that 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 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 of trees and

undergrowth, with pathways and sudden open spaces… At the back of
488
Ibid., p.269.
489
Ibid., p.9
490
Ibid., p.16.
491
Ibid., p.54.
492
Ibid., p.68.
493
Ibid., p.378.
95
the grounds the wall is crumbled and broken… At the front of the
garden there is an open archway on to the road but 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 military dictatorship… I do not want to see such a government of
generals. I do not want to see such an India… So, for the moment…
because I am out of rhythm with my country’s temporary emotional
feelings… I tell myself, ‘Go and cultivate 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 –
Ends and means… are not what matter… What matters is the idea to
which the ways and means are directed… the idea, you know, is not
simply to get rid of the British. It is to create a nation capable of getting
rid of them and capable simultaneously of taking its place in the world
as 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. Eliot said, is most nearly itself when
here and now cease to matter, life is most nearly itself when here and
now not only matter much but can be felt to matter; when here and
now are governed by a philosophy in pursuit of whose truths and
494
Ibid., p.366.
495
496
497
498
96
rewards men know they can honourably employ themselves. A story

about men deeply involved in, obsessed by, their occupations is an
extended metaphor of that idea. A story about men at work in British
India 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.
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:
499
500
501
502
97
I have always tried to portray… characters… at work, or trying to be at

work, work in which they can believe, or work which doesn’t comfort or
satisfy them because there is… a limit to their expectations of reaching
the point at which their talents will be fully extended. It is all part of the
same view… of the importance to a man, or to a woman, of engaging
himself honourably… in work 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 that individual fulfilment is the

ultimate moral criterion – Kipling says that individual lives exist to be
used up in the service of social causes.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 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
503
504
Martin Green, The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: the Doom of Empire (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p.xv.
505
506
507
98
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 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 literary influence on my life, although no-one
exerts an influence unless there is already a correspondence of outlook
for the influence to work upon… 511
508
M.M. Mahood, ‘Paul Scott’s Guardians’ Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), p.246.
509
510
Ibid.
511
99
Scott’s outlook corresponds with Eliot’s in three interrelated ways fundamental to the
philosophy behind, and 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 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
512
T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Collected Poems 1909 -1962, p.199.
100
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; 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 account of the politics that led
to the action. Actually any one man would be incapable of giving such
an account… There were so many blows he would spend more than his
lifetime recording them. To make the preparation of any account a
reasonable task he would have to adopt an attitude toward the
available material. The action of such an attitude is rather like that of a
sieve. Only what is relevant to the attitude gets through. the rest gets
thrown away… one is at once back on the ground of personal
preference – even prejudice – which may or may not have anything to
do 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 the events in the lives of all
the people who were connected with the action – however directly or
513
514
Ibid., p.284.
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.
101
remotely – my mind simply won’t take in the complex of emotions and

ambitions and reactions that led, say, to any one of the single actions
that was part of the general describable pattern.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 that led up to it and followed it
and of the place in which it happened. There are the action, the people,
and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality
incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human
affairs.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 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
518
Ibid., p.334.
519
Ibid., p.1.
520
521
102
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.
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 eclipse before an inalienable fact, which though strikingly exceptional in A
Division of the Spoils is the norm of the Jewel in the Crown:
522
Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. with introduction by Roger Gard
(London: Penguin, 1987), pp.196-97.
523
524
Ibid.
525
Ibid., p.332.
526
Ibid., p.313.
527
Ibid., p.119.
528
Ibid., p.132.
103
I have thought of Rowan’s experience of the Kandipat often, tried to

shed light on it, as a scene, but the light coming out from the scene
always seems stronger. One ends up being dazzled by it… momentarily
there’s the illusion of blindness, 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’ note 532 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.
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
529
530
531
Ibid., p.314.
532
Ibid., p.409.
104
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 the 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 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
533
534
Ibid., pp.141-42.
535
Ibid., p.143.
536
Ibid., p.189.
105
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 imaginative details and also placed
events in the order in which they occurred – not in the order in which
they emerged during my talk with Potter. For instance, 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 of
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,
537
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.
540
the Towers of Silence, p.103.
541
Ibid., p.104.
542
Caroline Moorhead, ‘Novelist Paul Scott: Getting Engrossed in the Death Throes of the Raj’,
Times, October 20, 1975, p.11.
106
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
companion 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, attention switched from one

fascinating subject to another. One knows the broad outline from the
main biography. here it is under a microscope which shows how from
casual beginnings a situation grows, becomes dangerous, gets out of
hand. No single 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 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
543
‘Cool, Calm and Uncalculating’, Country Life, Vol. CLIII, No.3948, February 22, 1973, p.489.
544
Ibid.
545
546
‘Cool, Calm and Uncalculating’, loc. cit.
107
The staple of Scott’s prose is a slow-moving, hesitant, grammatically

complex and heavily loaded sentence structure which gathers together
fragments of what has already been, more than it propels forward
events that are about to come into 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 or 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
547
Paul Scott: Images of India, p.99.
548
549
550
551
Ibid., p.119.
552
Ibid.
553
554
My Appointment with the Muse, loc. cit.
108
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 which he remembered as

days when the servants were treated as members of the family… Finally
he inherited the silence which greeted his father’s two letters to Colonel
Moxon-Griefe inquiring about the possibilities of work in England for
young 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 that she, as well as I, was
responsible for the one quarter million deaths in the Punjab and
elsewhere. But I did ask her who, in her opinion, was responsible. She
said, ‘But that is obvious. The people who attacked and killed each
other.’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 to write about British India is
to express regret for a here and now that mattered much and has been
lost Which would seem, certainly, to make me an imperialist-manqué,
yearning for Poona and the punkah. 561
555
Paul Scott, Staying On (London: Heinemann, 1977), p.22.
556
557
Ibid., p.338.
558
Ibid., p.106.
559
Ibid., p.221.
560
Ibid., p.222.
561
109
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 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?
Besides which, of course, there is the other thing about us – I mean
about our tidiness. they say it’s characteristic of someone who wishes
to be the organising centre of his own life and who has no gift for
sharing.’567
562
Ibid., p.119.
563
564
565
Ibid., p.176.
566
The Day of the Scorpion, p.179
567
Ibid.
110
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
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 as the best method of
dealing with an experience too painful to face: ‘If one doesn’t talk about
a thing, it has never happened.’ The longest and most personal of the
love poems written at the time of Paul’s affair with Gerald was called ‘It
never happened’. Dorian’s strategy became habitual with Paul in later
life, but what seem to be echoes of the shock he sustained in January
1941 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’s recommended tactic of evasion: ‘He couldn’t bring himself to
568
Hilary Spurling, Paul Scott: A Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p.112.
569
570
Spurling, op. cit., p.94
111
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 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
571
572
Ibid., p.249.
573
Ibid., p.337.
574
Ibid., p.374.
575
576
577
Ibid., p.320.
578
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962, p.40.
112
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 spend the rest of my life
knowing what I think I know about the man who would be my brother-
in-law and say nothing? And the answer would be, no. the other
answer would be that knowing himself incapable f saying anything he
knew that his own hopes 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 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 a disruptive or abrasive

presence was not, but seemed to fit in and share with him this feeling of
repose… accentuated… by the way the coach absorbed the vibration
and clatter of the wheels without diminishing the flattering sensation of
a speed and movement forward that were absolutely effortless.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
579
580
The Jewel in the Crown, p.99
581
582
583
584
A Division of the Spoils, p. 208.
585
Ibid. pp.213-214.
113
sweetness and light’.586 Thus the Raj were able to slough off their 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 a violent situation…

Suddenly you had the feeling that the train, the wheels, the lines,
weren’t made of metal but of something greasy and evasive.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 swell the new viceroy is for
getting it all sorted out so quickly… The slogan is still insular. India’s
independence 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 of 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. She loved India and all
Indians but no particular Indian. She hated British policies, so she
disliked all Britons unless they turned out to be adherents to the same
rules she abided by… To punish someone whose conduct didn’t coincide
with her preconceived notions of what he stood for she took [Gandhi’s]
586
Ibid., p.463.
587
Ibid., p.112.
588
The Jewel in the Crown, pp.444-45.
589
Ibid., p.34.
590
Ibid.
114
picture down. How ineffectual a gesture that was. But how revealing,
how symptomatic 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 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
591
Ibid., p.104.
592
593
Ibid., p.143.
594
Ibid., p.133.
595
596
Ibid., p.432.
597
598
Ibid., p.83.
599
Ibid., p.429.
600
115
physical variant of Daphne’s love for Hari, and the ‘group expressions arising from group
psychology’601 which seek to normalise and influence her deviant behaviour:
I was not debasing myself… Nor was I hoping… I could have my own
back on Clark-Without, on men in general. Perhaps all these
possibilities were there, in my mind, like echoes of explanations, other
people’s explanations, but fundamentally there 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 there wasn’t any alternative,
because everybody else in the carriage automatically knew what he had
to do. 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 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 I was Hari Kumar – and the
situation about Hari Kumar was that there was no one anywhere exactly
like 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
601
602
603
Ibid., p.592.
604
Ibid., p.593.
605
Ibid.
606
607
608
116
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 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
609
610
Ibid., p.105.
611
Ibid., p.133.
612
Ibid., pp.590-91.
613
117
Ahmed are ostensibly absurd, comic if morally indefensible 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 who call themselves jailers

who are in prison, and perhaps all of us who are outside the walls. For
what is outside in one sense is inside in another. In time we must break
the walls down. This duty to break them down is our sentence of
imprisonment. To break them down will be to free ourselves and our
jailers. And we cannot sit back and wait for the orders of release. We
must write the orders ourselves.’ In English he added, in case Ahmed
had misunderstood, ‘I speak metaphorically.’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 that they are, above all else,
Indians… because we have never had that kind of India, we do not know
what kind of India that will be. That is why I say we are looking for a
country. I can look for it better in prison, I’m afraid, than from a seat on
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:
‘…one day this desk will probably be yours’ [the governor said.]
Kasim … said, ‘Yes. You are probably right,’ and, still, smiling, turned
and took the last few paces to his more immediate prison.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 know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by a way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
614
615
Ibid., p.18.
616
Ibid., p.20.
118
You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you 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
a well-known man actually… said exactly what was in his mind… in a

genuinely creative attempt to break through the sense of pre-arranged
emotions and reactions that automatically accompanies any general
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
617
618
619
620
Ibid., p.102.
621
119
promise… How typical! You tell an Indian to say nothing and he takes it literally’. 622 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 the 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
622
Ibid., p.439.
623
Ibid., p.447.
624
The Towers of Silence, p.3.
625
Ibid.
626
Ibid., p.4.
627
Ibid., p.8.
628
Ibid.
629
Ibid., p.273.
120
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 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 grand design, and

meticulously detailed, but the picture could not have come out looking
more flat and uninviting if it had been painted by numbers.635
630
Ibid., p.8.
631
632
Ibid.
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.
121
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 seemed to know it, and that
could be dangerous, but presently she would settle and the gravity of
Anglo-Indian life would touch her pretty face soon enough.640
The cumulative effect of such second-rate prose is agoraphobic rather than claustrophobic:
longing for the ‘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
636
637
Ibid., p.27.
638
Ibid.
639
Ibid., p.26.
640
Ibid., p.28.
641
Ibid., p.188.
122
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 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
642
Ibid., p.382.
643
Ibid., p.84.
644
Ralph Waldo Emerson, p.114.
645
646
647
648
Ibid., p.166.
649
Ibid., p.169.
650
A Division of the Spoils, pp.161-62.
651
123
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 its scent 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 they smell.
You have to think of the time when you’re both dead and smell nasty
And people are only interested in your successors.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, 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 and fill the heart with a
different kind of warmth. Ah, such safety. Such microcosmic power. To
translate, to reduce, to cause to vanish with the breath alone the sugary
fruits in their next of lace-edged paper. To know that they are there,
and yet not there. This is the magic of the soul.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;
652
Ibid., p.28.
653
654
655
656
The Jewel in the Crown, pp.261-62.
124
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
657
Paul Scott, ‘Complete Men’, Country Life, Vol. CXLI, no. 3663, May 18, 1967, p.1268. Scott is
discussing what he considers C.P. Snow’s second-rate performance as a novelist.
125
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’ hymns 661 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.
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’.
658
Staying On, p.154.
659
Ibid., p.122.
660
Ibid., p.154.
661
Ibid.
662
Patrick Swinden Paul Scott: Images of India, p.x.
663
Staying On, p.196.
126
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 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 run
that consideration isn’t necessarily uppermost in the 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:
664
Loc. cit.
665
Staying On, p.16.
666
Ibid., p.113.
667
Ibid., p.17.
668
Loc. cit.
669
127
He went first to the wooden shelves where old Mali had left several
pots of geranium cuttings which had died for want of attention. Or had
they? The boy fingered one and finding a green bud amid the sear
leaves muttered something to himself.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 excessive 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 glanced round as if to check that

there were no lurkers who would go back to report to the Government
that there was a plot afoot in the Christian Church to go for growth in
India by stepping up the 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
670
Staying On, p.48.
671
Ibid., p.17.
672
Ibid., p40.
673
674
675
676
Staying On, p.106.
128
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
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 still master of this bloody house’,684 merely emphasises that
677
Ibid., p.107.
678
Ibid., p.117.
679
Ibid., p.9.
680
Ibid., p.118.
681
Ibid., p.199.
682
The Bender, p.129.
683
684
Staying On, p.178.
129
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
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 his total and abject surrender…
It was like composing a warrant for the execution of an old friend. To
hack the halting sentences out he had to keep reminding himself that it
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.
692
Staying On, p.162.
130
was also like composing a warrant for his own lifelong imprisonment.
He and 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 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 the taciturnity of Alan Hurst in A Male Child, became centrally
693
Ibid., p.199.
694
695
Staying On, p.71.
696
Ibid.
697
698
Staying On, p.85.
699
Ibid., p.120.
700
131
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 face to me and that I have
always been following behind, or so dazzled by sunlight that I could not
see the face when it once turned to me. Did you see the green bag,
Tusker? Did it glitter in the sunshine that dazzled me? How will you
remember 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
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’:
701
702
Staying On, p.196.
703
Ibid., p.208.
704
Staying On, p.141.
705
132
My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my

thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my
own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements
alike, every sphere is opaque to the 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 and then his boots as the
truck carried him and his comrades away, and then had to let go
because she couldn’t keep up, and there had been that lovely shot from
the back of the lorry showing her receding into the distance, alone and
forlorn on the muddy road.708
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
706
Ibid., p.86.
707
Staying On, p.86.
708
Ibid., p.167.
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.
133
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 his own person. He must sit
solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires,
but know that he is greater than all the geography 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, 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 mean something more durable

than temporary respite from the prick of ambition, and the soaring and
sinking fever of passion. Perhaps it is an art that this more durable
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.
718
719
720
The Corrida at San Feliu, p.217. For ‘the likeness of
134
peace is to be found; … in the 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 yet unlit corridors of the castle of her
history and her future in the arms of a man who would one day love her
and whom she would love.724
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
721
Ibid., p.290.
722
‘After the Funeral’, p.xxx.
723
Ibid., p.xxxi.
724
Ibid.
725
Staying On, p.59.
726
Sally Dennison, ‘Course Notes’, in After Paul, ed. Alice Lindsay Price (Tulsa: HCE
Publications/Riverrun Arts, 1988), p.23.
135
almost any 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 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 invisible carapace of unknown

shape, dimensions, texture and strength. I couldn’t break through it. I
never did break through it.733
727
728
Ibid., p. 598.
729
Staying On, p.152.
730
Ibid., p.177.
731
Ibid., p.179.
732
733
Ibid., p.137.
136
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
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, nothing he can do to molest or change or halt it. What
he paints or draws or sculpts or writes is done with this knowledge, but
to make his life bearable.
But it is only paint, only words, only thought, only imagining. It is an

artifice, a malformation, a malpractice, a mask, a joke, a game. If he’s
lucky some of his games are good enough to be handed on as proof of
what can be done when you play the game hard enough, well
738
enough.
734
Ibid., p.74.
735
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962.
736
737
738
137
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. 1
J.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)
‘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, June 28, 1962, pp. 1599-1601
Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (Heinemann)

Graham Greene, ed., The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford. Vol. 2
John T. Appleby, Henry II (G. Bell)
138
Bibliography
‘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, August 9, 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
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, September 6, 1962, pp.545-547
Jennifer Lash, The Climate of Belief (Gollancz)

David Lytton, the Paradise People (MacGibbon & Kee)
Thakazhi S. Pillai, Chemmeen (Gollancz)
‘Struggle for an Africans’ Paper’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3424, October 18, 1962, pp. 984-986
Tom Hopkinson, In the Fiery Continent (Gollancz)

H.E. Bates, A Crown of Wild Myrtle (Michael Joseph)
Hammond Innes, Atlantic Fury (Collins)
139
Bibliography
‘Elizabeth I on Tour’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3426, November 1, 1962, pp. 1117-1119
Ian Dunlop, Palaces and Progressions of Elizabeth I (Jonathan Cape)

Mark Bonham Carter, ed., The Autobiography of Margot Asquith
(Eyre & Spottiswoode)
Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan. Vol. 1 (1897-1945) (MacGibbon & Kee)
Eric Ambler, The Light of Day (Heinemann)
‘History in the Human Face’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3428, November 15, 1962, pp. 1243-1245
John Brophy, The Human Face Reconsidered (Harrap)

Edwin Diamond, The Science of Dreams (Eyre & Spottiswoode)
Isoko and Ichiro Hatano, Mother and Son. A Japanese Correspondence
(Chatto & Windus)
‘Men and Animals in Burma’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3430, November 29, 1962, pp. 1367-1369
Susan Williams, The Footprints of Elephant Bill (William Kimber)

Eric Newby, Something Wholesale (Secker & Warburg)
Harold Nicolson, Monarchy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
David Lodge, Ginger You’re Barmy (MacGibbon & Kee)
‘The True Image of Chopin’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3432, December 13, 1962, pp. 1569-1571.
Arthur Hedley, ed. and trans., Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin

(Heinemann)
Encore: The Sunday Times Book (Michael Joseph)
W.R.D. McLaughlin, Call to the South. A Story of British Whaling in Antarctica
(Harrap)
Agatha Christie, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side (Collins)
‘A Masterpiece of Englishness’, Vol. CXXXII, No. 3434, December 27, 1962, pp. 1666-1667
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time (Heinemann)

Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: the Era of Excess (Faber)
‘Maturity’s Pain and Pleasure’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3436, January 10, 1963, pp. 80-81
Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods (Collins)

Mladen Oljaca, A Prayer for my Brethren (Hutchinson)
Jennifer Dawson, Fowler’s Snare (Anthony Blond)
140
Bibliography
‘From Caesar to Henry VII’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3438, January 24, 1963, pp. 185-187
W.O. Hassall, How they Lived: 55BC-1485 (Basil Blackwell)

Peter Twiss, Faster than the Sun (Macdonald)
Peter de Polnay, A Man of Fortune (W.H. Allen)
James Mitchell, Among Arabian Sands (Peter Davies)
‘Facts Britain Must Face’ Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3440, February 7, 1963, pp. 277-279
Anthony Hartlay, A State of England (Hutchinson)

Jack Bennett, Jamie (Michael Joseph)
Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar (Heinemann)
‘A Young Girl’s Look at Life’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3442, February 21, 1963, pp. 389-391
Charlotte Bingham, Coronet among the Weeds (Heinemann)

Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower (Hogarth Press)
James Baldwin, Another Country, (Michael Joseph)
Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Methuen)
‘English Champion of the Decadents’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3458, June 13, 1963, pp. 1426-1427
Roger Lhombreaud, Arthur Symons. A Critical Biography (Unicorn)

Irving Stone and Jean Stone, eds., I, Michelangelo, Sculptor. An Autobiography
through Letters (Collins)
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Night and Silence Who is Here? (Macmillan)
James Clavell, King Rat (Michael Joseph)
‘Harrowing Realism and Fantasy’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3459, June 20, 1963, pp. 1522-1523
Graham Greene, A Sense of Reality (The Bodley Head)

I. Schapera, ed., Livingstone’s African Journal, 1853-1856. Vols. 1 and 2
(Chatto & Windus)
Barrie Reynolds, Magic, Divination and Witchcraft among the Barotse of Northern
Rhodesia (Chatto & Windus)
‘Collapse of the Old Order’, Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3460, June 27, 1963, pp. 1590-1591
Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties. The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905-1922
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Sarah Patton Boyle, The Desegregated Heart (Gollancz)
Lorus J. Milne and Margery Milne, The Senses of Animals and Men (Andre Deutsch)
Mary MacCarthy, The Stones of Florence (Heinemann)
Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare Vols. 1 to 4 (Batsford)
141
Bibliography
‘Forerunner of Hemingway’, Vol. CXXXIV, No. 3461, July 4, 1963, pp. 50-51
Arthur Calder Marshall, ed., The Bodley Head Jack London

Colette, The Blue Lantern (Secker & Warburg)
Ivor Brown, How Shakespeare Spent the Day (The Bodley Head)
Beverley Nichols, Garden Open Today (Cape)
‘Private Life of Boswell’, Vol. CXXXIV, No. 3462, July 11, 1963, pp. 112-113
Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle, eds., Boswell: The Ominous Years,
1774-1776 (Heinemann)
Michael Astor, Tribal Feeling (John Murray)
H.M. Denham, The Aegean. A Sea Guide to its Coasts and Islands (John Murray)
‘Good King Edward’s Golden Days’, Vol. CXXXVII, No. 3564, June 24, 1965, pp.1624-1625
Sir Charles Petrie, Scenes of Edwardian Life (Eyre & Spottiswoode)

Richard O’Connor, Jack London. A Biography (Gollancz)
Libero Bigiaretti, The Convention (Macmillan)
Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast (Chatto & Windus)
‘Private Faces in Public Places’ Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3566, July 8, 1965, pp. 128-129
Anthony Shrimsley, The First Hundred Days of Harold Wilson

Arnold J. Toynbee, Between Niger and Nile (Oxford University Press)
Major-General J.G. Elliott, A Roll of Honour. The Story of the Indian Army, 1939-1945
(Cassell)
Heinrich Boll, The Clown (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Elizabeth Bowen, A Day in the Dark (Cape)
‘Inside the Soviet Mind’, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3568, July 22, 1965, pp. 256-257
John Gooding, The Catkin and the Icicle: Aspects of Russia (Constable)
Tom Cullen, Autumn of Terror. Jack the Ripper: His Crimes and Times
(The Bodley Head)
Arvid Klemensen, Strange Island: The Noona Dan in the South Seas (Souvenir Press)
‘Sire to Genius’, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3570, August 5, 1965, pp. 362-363
John Lock and W.T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev.
Patrick Bronte (Nelson)
I.M. Parsons, ed., Men who March Away: Poems of the First World War
(Chatto & Windus)
Cecil Beaton, The Years Between: Diaries, 1939-44 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
142
Bibliography
‘Chronicler of the Countryside’, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 3572, August 19, 1965, pp. 476-477
Samuel J. Looker and Crichton Porteous, Richard Jefferies: Man of the Fields
(John Baker)
Malcolm Bradbury, Stepping Westward (Secker & Warburg)
Anthony Carson The Sin of Summer (Methuen)
‘Complete Men’, Vol. CXLI, No. 3663, May 18, 1967, pp. 1268-1269
C.P. Snow, Variety of Men (Macmillan)

Bonamy Debree, Rudyard Kipling – Realist and Fabulist (OUP)
Arthur Swinson, North-West Frontier (Hutchinson)
Giles Playfair, The Prodigy. A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty
(Secker & Warburg)
‘Behind a Ducal Mask’, Vol. CXLI, No. 3666, June 8, 1967, pp. 1485-1486.
Gervas Huxley, Victorian Duke: The Life of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, First Duke of
Westminster (OUP)
Leonard de Fries, ed., Panorama 1842-1865 (John Murray)
J.E. Holroyd, ed., Seventeen Steps to 221B (Allen & Unwin)
R.K. Narayan, The Sweet Vendor (The Bodley Head)
‘Those were the Days’, Vol. CXLI, No. 3668, June 22, 1967, pp. 1642-1643
Colin MacInnes, Sweet Saturday Night (MacGibbon & Kee)

William Charles Crocker, Far from Humdrum (Hutchinson)
Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays Vols. 3 & 4 (Hogarth Press)
Christian Isherwood, A Meeting by the River (Methuen)
‘Grande Dame to the Last’, Vol. CXLII, No. 3670, July 6, 1967, pp. 50-51
Elizabeth Salter, The Last Years of a Rebel. A Memoir of Edith Sitwell

(The Bodley Head)
A. Nutting, No End of a Lesson. The Story of Suez (Constable)
Simona Pakenham, Sixty Miles from England. The English at Dieppe 1814-1914
(Macmillan)
‘An Indian Past that Lingers’, Vol. CXLII, No. 3672, July 20, 1967, pp. 174-175
Mollie Panter-Downes, Ooty Preserved. A Victorian Hill Station in India

(Hamish Hamilton)
Daphne du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall (Victor Gollancz)
David Boulton, Objection Overruled (MacGibbon & Kee)
143
Bibliography
‘Writing Versus Christianity’, Vol. CXLIV, No. 3735, October 3, 1968, pp. 858-859
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot. A Biography (OUP)

Victor Bonham Carter, ed., Surgeon in the Crimea: The Experiences of George
Lawson Recorded in Letters to his Family 1854-55 (Constable)
Beverley Nichols, Garden Open Tomorrow (Heinemann)
‘The Dreams of Gordon Craig’, Vol. CXLIV, No. 3737, October 17, 1968, pp. 1026-1027
Edward Craig, Gordon Craig. The Story of his Life (Gollancz)

Angus Davidson, Edward Lear. Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet, 1812-1888)
(John Murray)
Nicholas Bentley, The Victorian Scene: 1837-1901. A Picture Book of the Period
‘From the Rhondda to Bloomsbury’, Vol. CXLV, No. 3772, June 19, 1969, pp. 1634-1635
Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot. An Autobiographical Beginning (Heinemann)

Anita Leslie, Jennie. The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill (Hutchinson)
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Jonathan Cape)
‘The Drama of Gordon’, Vol. CXLVI, No. 3774, July 3, 1969, pp. 52-53.
John Marlowe, Mission to Khartum: The Apotheosis of General Gordon

(Victor Gollancz)
Vivian de Sola Pinto, The City that Shone. An Autobiography (Hutchinson)
Gore Vidal, Reflections upon a Sinking Ship (Heinemann)
‘A Country Diary of Genius’, Vol. CXLVI, No. 3776, July 17, 1969, pp. 192-193
William Plimer, ed., Kilvert’s Diary Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Cape)

Spike Mays, Reuben’s Corner (Eyre & Spottiswoode)
Brian Roberts, Cecil Rhodes and the Princess (Hamish Hamilton)
‘A Glittering Disaster’, Vol. CXLVI, No. 3778, July 31, 1969, pp. 308-309
David Dilks, Curzon in India. Vol. 1: Achievement (Rupert Hart-Davies)

David Farrer, G- For God Almighty. A Personal Memoir of Lord Beaverbrook
144
Bibliography
‘The Appeal of a Mad Monarch’, Vol. CXLVIII, No. 3822, July 23, 1970, pp. 260-261
Wilfred Blunt, The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (Hamish Hamilton)

Pat Barr, A Curious Life for a Lady. The Story of Isabella Bird
(Macmillan and John Murray)
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Muriel Spark, The Hothouse by the East River (Macmillan)

Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (Chatto & Windus)
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Carola Oman, The Wizard of the North. The Life of Sir Walter Scott
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Heinrich Boll, Group Portrait with Lady (Secker & Warburg)
Richard Hughes, The Wooden Shepherdess (Chatto & Windus)
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Ian Anstruther, I Presume. Stanley’s Triumph and Disaster (Bles)
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Naomi Mitchison, Small Talk. Memories of an Edwardian Childhood
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway’s Party (The Hogarth Press)
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Dougal Robertson, Survive the Savage Sea (Elek Books)

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Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings (Heinemann)
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Patrick Beaver, ed., The Wipers Times (Peter Davies)
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Ian Robinson, The Survival of English, (CUP)

William Gernhardie, Memoirs of a Polyglot (Macdonald)
Michael Holroyd, Unreceived Opinions (Heinemann)
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W.P. Crozier, Off the Record. Political Interviews 1933-1943 (Hutchinson)

David Ayerst, ed., The Guardian Omnibus 1821-1971 (Collins)
Frank Davies, Not in front of the Servants. Domestic Service in England 1850-1939
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James Sambrook, William Cobbett (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Piers Paul Read, The Upstart, (The Alison Press)
‘Meditating on the English’, Vol. CLIV, No. 3978, September 20, 1973, pp. 827-828
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Ronald W. Clark, Einstein. The Life and Times (Hodder & Stoughton)
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William Trevor, Elizabeth Alone (The Bodley Head)
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Fredric Warburg, All Authors are Equal (Hutchinson)

John Keay, Into India (John Murray)
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside (Collins)
‘At Home and Abroad’, Vol. CLIV, No. 3988, November 29, 1973, pp. 1853-1854
Oxford English Memoirs and Travels (OUP)

C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain (Constable)
Osbert Lancaster, The Littlehampton Bequest (John Murray)
‘A Sphinx without a Riddle?’, Vol. CLIV, No. 3990, December 13, 1973, pp. 2063-2064
Reginald Pound, Albert. A Biography of the Prince Consort (Michael Joseph)

John Wain, ed., Johnson as Critic (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
G.E. Aylmer, The State’s Servants. The Civil Service of the English Republic 1649-1660
‘Our Man in Berlin…’, Vol. CLIV, No. 3992, December 27, 1973, pp. 2192-2193
Martin Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold. Portrait of a Diplomat 1869-1941 (Heinemann)

Gordon Waterfield, Professional Diplomat. Sir Percy Loraine (John Murray)
Alan S.C. Rose, Don’t Say It (Hamish Hamilton)
‘An 18th Century Whizz Kid’, Vol. CLV, No. 3994, January 17, 1974, pp. 104-105
Douglas Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (Michael Joseph)

Mary Stocks, Still More Commonplace (Peter Davies)
W. Heath Robinson, Inventions (Duckworth)
‘The Lower Slopes of Parnassus’, Vol. CLV, No. 4000, February 28, 1974, pp.454-455
Anthony Curtis, The Pattern of Maugham (Hamish Hamilton)

Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London (George Allen & Unwin)
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Andrea Giovene, The Dice of War (Collins)
A.O.J. Cockshut, Truth to Life. The Art of Biography in the 19th Century (Collins)
‘The Tragi-Comedy of Swinburne’, Vol. CLV, No. 4004, March 28, 1974, pp. 755-756
Philip Henderson, Swinburne. The Portrait of a Poet (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Ray A. Kelch, Newcastle. A Duke without Money (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Gore Vidal, Burr (Heinemann)
‘The Real Shock of the Sahara’, Vol. CLV, No. 4006, April 11, 1974, pp. 891-892
Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Fearful Void (Hodder & Stoughton)

Harry Franklin, The Flag Wagger (Sheapheard-Walwyn)
Paul Gore-Booth, With Great Truth and Respect (Constable)
‘From the Couch to the Horoscope’, Vol. CLV, No. 4008, April 25, 1974, pp. 1021-1022
A.L. Rowse, Simon Forman. Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age

Ludovic Kennedy, Pursuit. The Sinking of the Bismark (Collins)
Edith de Bon, Mutual Observations (Eyre Methuen)
‘The Ghost in the Machine’, Vol. CLV, No. 4010, May 9, 1974, pp. 1156-1157
Arthur Koestler, The Heel of Achilles. Essays 1968-73 (Hutchinson)

John Arlott, The Snuff Shop (Michael Joseph)
Auberon Waugh, Country Topics (Michael Joseph)
‘The Mistakes of a Night’, Vol. CLV, No. 4012, May 23, 1974, pp. 1314-1315
Catherine Turney, Byron’s Daughter. A Biography (Peter Davies)

Brian Fothergill, The Mitred earl. An Eighteenth Century Eccentric (Faber & Faber)
Edward Ardizzone, Diary of a War Artist (The Bodley Head)
‘Living like a Lord and a Poet’, Vol. CLV, No. 4014, June 6, 1974, pp. 1481-1482
Doris Longley Moore, Lord Byron. Accounts Rendered (John Murray)

Margot Strickland, The Byron Women (Peter Owen)
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Antonia Ridge, The Men who Painted Roses. The Story of Pierre Joseph Redoute
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‘Tradition and the Indian Army’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4018, July 4, 1974, pp. 50-51
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Oxford English Memoirs and Travel (OUP)
‘Miss Barrett and Mr Boyd’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4020, July 18, 1974, pp. 182-183
Elizabeth Berridge, ed., The Barretts of Hope End. The Early Diary of Elizabeth Barrett
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Katherine Moore, Victorian Wives (Allison & Busby)
Elizabeth Crawford Wilkin, Dekho! The India that Was (Leo Cooper)
‘A Shelley to Believe In’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4022, August 1, 1974, pp. 326-327
Richard Holmes, Shelley. The Pursuit (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Cecily Mackworth, English Interludes (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Andrew Mylett, ed., Arnold Bennett. The Evening Standard Years. Books and Persons.
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‘More Cucumber, More Conrad’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4024, August 15, 1974, pp. 466-467
C.B. Cox, Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination (J.M. Dent & Sons)
Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Alas! The Love of Women. Byron’s Letters and Journals
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‘Women In and Out of Time’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4026, August 29, 1974, pp. 586-587
Jane Vantissart, ed., From Minnie, with Love. The Letters of a Victorian Lady
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Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Alan Jenkins, The Twenties (Heinemann)
Sarah Howell, The Seaside (Studio Vista)
‘Parkinson and the Law of Five’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4030, September 26, 1974, pp. 891-892
C. Northcote Parkinson, Big Business (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

J.B. Priestley, Outcries and Asides (Heinemann)
Robert Gathorne-Hardy, ed., Caroline at Garsington. Memoirs of Lady Caroline
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J.C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (A & C Black)

Richard Hough, Louis and Victoria. the First Mountbattens (Hutchinson)
‘Fragments of Reality’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4034, October 24, 1974, pp. 1239-1240
Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness (Faber & Faber)

V.S. Pritchett, The Camberwell Beauty (Chatto & Windus)
Ian Niall, A London Boyhood (Heinemann)
‘Tribe, Tradition and Taboos’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4036, November 7, 1974, pp. 1403-1404
W.G. Archer, The Hill of Flutes (Allen & Unwin)

Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming. A Biography (Jonathan Cape)
Elizabeth Yandell, Henry (The Bodley Head)
‘The Image of an Explorer’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4038, November 21, 1974, pp.1612-1613
Richard Hall, Stanley. An Adventurer Explored (Collins)

Fitzroy Maclean, To the Back of Beyond (Jonathan Cape)
Ganga. Sacred River of India Photographs by Raghibar Singh (The Perennial Press)
‘Perchance to Sleep’, Vol. CLVI, No. 4042, December 19, 1974, pp. 1970-1971
Hilary Rubinstein, The Complete Insomniac (Jonathan Cape)

David Garnett, The Master Cat. The True and Unexpurgated Story of Puss in Boots
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Pamela Horn, The Victorian Country Child (The Roundwood Press)

Georgina Battiscombe, Shaftesbury. A Biography of the Seventh Earl, 1801-1885
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‘The Survival of the Trickiest’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4046, January 16, pp. 170-171
Jean Orieux, Talleyrand. The Art of Survival. A Biography (Secker & Warburg)
Major-General Frank Richardson, Napoleon’s Death. An Inquest (William Kimber)
Lawrence Durrell, The Best of Antrobus (Faber & Faber)
‘A Traveller’s Gifts’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4048, January 30, 1975, pp. 290-291
Lucy Moorhead, ed., Freya Stark. Letters Vol. 1. The Furnace and the Cup. 1914-1930
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A. Lytton Sells, Oliver Goldsmith. His Life and Works (George Allen & Unwin)
‘The Light inside Stendhal’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4050, February 13, 1975, pp. 404-405
Joanna Richardson, Stendhal. A Biography (Victor Gollancz)

Olwen Hedley, Queen Charlotte (John Murray)
Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan. A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605-1675
(Faber & Faber)
‘A Woman’s Lot in War’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4052, February 27, 1975, pp. 526-527
Veronica Bamfield, On the Strength. The Story of the British Army Wife
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Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, Crowded Hour (John Murray)
‘Andersen the Traveller’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4054, March 13, 1975, pp. 670-671
Hans Christian Andersen, A Visit to Spain 1862 (Peter Owen)

Maurice Ashley, The English Civil War (Thames and Hudson)
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Elspeth Huxley, Florence Nightingale (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
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R.K. Narayan, My Days. An Autobiography (Chatto & Windus)

David MacNeil Doren, Winds of Crete (John Murray)
Iris Murdoch, A Word Child (Chatto & Windus)
‘Master of Style’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4062, May 8, 1975, pp. 1209-1210
Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Gore Vidal, Myron (Heinemann)
Peter Gay, Style in History (Jonathan Cape)
‘The Desire and Pursuit of Success’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4064, May 22, 1975, pp. 1354-1355
Philippa Pullar, Frank Harris (Hamish Hamilton)

Dan Davin, Closing Times (OUP)
Colette, Looking Backwards. Recollections (Peter Owen)
‘Trade Before the Flag’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4066, June 5, 1975, pp. 1503-1504
Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (Hutchinson)

R. Houwink, Sizing Up Science (John Murray)
‘An Idealist in Action’, Vol. CLVII, No. 4068, June 19, 1975, pp. 1643-1644
Zareer Masani, Indira Gandhi. A Biography (Hamish Hamilton)

Martin S. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill Vol. 4 1917-22 (Heinemann)
Alberto Moravia, Lady Godiva and other Stories (Secker & Warburg)
‘Whereby Hangs a Tale’, Vol. CLVIII, No. 4070, July 3, 1975, pp. 39-40
James Sutherland, ed., The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

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Imperialism, Insularity and Indentity - The Novels of Paul Scott

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IMPERIALISM, INSULARITY

The Novels of Paul Scott

The University of York

Department of English and Related Literature

I am very grateful to David Higham Associates for permission to quote from

Paul Scott, ‘More Cucumber, More Conrad’

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 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

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

Idea and Execution – History and Fiction

It is of execution we are talking – that being the only point of a novel

The subject is one to which the historian’s techniques, however refined,

In my ignorance of the place, the people, the history, I was

passage [in The Mark of The Warrior] describing a young soldier’s

Such authorial self-discovery, or self-deception, in which the writer realises or imagines

An Indian critic…complimented me on getting all sorts of different

stands and scoops…and attempts a re-enactment of Miss Manners refreshing herself.’33

[Sarah Layton] had dreams sometimes… of herself in sunshine in

So the inter-racial, inter-cultural epic, prescribing extension of self beyond Dover-Calais

Just as there seemed to be no connexion between the India he was in

‘As an Englishman…what do you have to offer the world today that

had to offer the world, as an Englishman, was the uncertainty of having

I had everything [some Indians] most wanted in the way of background

Obsessive re-enactment and re-placement, complemented in the later novels by re-telling,

I think subconsciously he’d impressed me as a man of Hari Kumar’s

the perverse often sadistic relationships which can develop between…

locked in an imperial embrace of such long standing and subtlety that it

In Scott’s bleakest interpretation of Emerson, William Conway, alienated by consumerism,

There wasn’t a square inch of earth that hadn’t been discovered,

Johnnie Sahib and The Alien Sky

The oxymoronic resonance of proletarian ‘Johnnie’ and glamorously imperious ‘Sahib’ is so

such informality unacceptable. Though aware of the absurdity of insisting on an alien

Dass’s uncertainty is anticipated in a dialogue between Johnnie and Nimu:

‘I’m not leaving Nimu. Not if I can help it anyway.’

Nimu’s failure to understand signals the absurdity of Johnnie’s assurances. He is a captain,

Dass dribbled … expertly … [Johnnie] barged against his shoulder and

His personal investment in imperialism was determined by his pre-war experiences:

He relishes the army where he is respected by those he commands. Their respect is

A potentially metaphoric jungle is rendered harmlessly literal, assimilated into a pre-

‘What am I going to do?’ As if to find an answer from inanimate things

Truth is a subjective contingency modified by the social discourse formulating it and

Men were not connected. There was no communication between

To pre-Copernican imperialism, Pyongiu is a mere moving picture, though in fact it is the

…a discussion about Johnnie in a place he had never been to brought

A Male Child and The Mark of the Warrior

He strikes me increasingly as a man with all the great traditional

No wonder Coles does not trust him to portray Isabella:

‘Wouldn’t it be possible for me to write a biography of Isabella without

Peggy’s eyes, chameleon-like, coloured themselves with the friendliness

Sunlight filtering through the London atmosphere… had softened and

carefully constructed and unblemished narrative… The cast is small. the

Three things are to be considered: a man’s estimate of himself, the face

‘What did my whistle represent?’

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

His land was growing to definition and to it Baksh’s presence was a