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Paul (Mark) Scott (1920-1978) |
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British writer, best known for The Raj Quartet (1965-1975), which describes from different points of view the events that led to the end of the British rule in India. Paul Scott was only noted as a master of his craft quite late in life. Just before he died, Scott received the prestigious Booker Prize for the novel Staying On (1977). "This is a 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 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." (from The Jewel in the Crown, 1966; part one of The Raj Quartet) Paul Scott was born in suburban North London, where he would continue to reside throughout most of his life. His father, Thomas Scott, was a commercial artist, and his mother, Frances, was a former shop clerk; she had written some novels which she destroyed after her marriage. George and Gilbert, his uncles, were commercial artists, who painted horses and hunting scenes with great success. Scott
was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate, a private school, but was
forced to abandon his studies at the age of 16 when the family's money
ran out. Scott then was sent to be trained in accountancy. Due
to his "photographic" memory he passed the examination
with great ease. During these dull years he read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,
which had a profound and lasting influence upon him. He had a lover, an
aesthetic estate agent called Gerald Armstrong. In 1940 he was sent for
officer training in Torquay. Something happened there with a senior
officer; whatever it was it took a long time before Scott obtained his
commission. At Torquau Scott met Nancy Edith Avery (Penny Avery), also known as
"Penny", whom
he married in 1941. They were soon separated when Scott was sent
to India as an air supplies officer. He arrived in Bombay in 1943
without much knowledge of the country, but also without Kiplingesque
prejudices. (Scott said that he had never been able to read Kipling.)
He served in India and Malaya (1943-46) and wrote during
this period various poems and plays. Primarily Scott was based in
Assam. He did not see combat, but his work occupied all his time and
thought, he found himself unable to write. Scott was promoted to
Captain in November 1944. In a letter to his friend Scott said that his
homosexual self, named Kapinsky, was dead. "I cannot let myself be
unfaithful to my wife, for there can be only one woman in the world for
me – I strongly believe this." (Paul Scott's "The Jewel In The Crown": A Novelist's Philosophy Of History And The End Of The British Raj by Kathryn Ann Hughes Nedegaard, 2016, p. 29) Upon returning to England, with amebiasis, from which he
suffered some 20 years but which was not diagnosed until 1964, he
settled in London with his family and worked as book-keeper for the
Falcon and Grey Walls Press. The publishing house was caricatured by
Muriel Spark in A Far Cry from Kensington. In 1950 Scott
joined Pearn, Pollinger & Higham as a literary agent. Its clients included John Braine and Arthur C. Clarke. After
abandoning poetry he wrote radio play and television plays. The Pillars of Salt, published in 1948, was not performed. Lines of Communication (1952) and Sahibs and Memsahibs (1958) were produced and broadcast by the BBC. But it was the novelistic narrative, its complexity and
flexibility, which gave Scott's ideas and experiences the scope and
variety he needed. He published a string of novels dealing more or less
directly with British military figures on duty in foreign lands. From
1960 Scott devoted himself entirely to literature, though it took many
years before he started to gain recognition as a novelist. However,
after getting rid of dysentry, there was a new joy and ease in his
writing. The manuscrip of Scott's novel The Gradual Day, later re-entitled The Dazzling Crystal, was rejected by 17 publishers. Johnnie Sahib (1952), set in the border area of India and Burma at the end of WW II, won Scott the Eyre and Spottiswoode Award. The Alies Sky (1953),
his second novel, was adapted for radio and television. In the
United States the book was published under the title Six Days in Marapore.
Scott's early works received mixed reviews and did not sell well. In
1964 Scott's publisher sent him to India. He revisited the country in
1969 and 1971. Eventually Scott gained an international reputation with
the Raj Quartet. Most of Scott's works depict India or have Indian themes and characters. The Raj Quartet,
set in the final years of British India in 1942-47, was completed in
1974. It includes four novels, told from different point of views. Basically, Scott's perspective was that of an outsider. The Quartet looks behind the facade of Britain's idea of itself in India. Through his characters and their stories and selective blindness, Scott examined the moral and ethical decline of the last years of the colonial rule. Like in Forster's A Passage to India (1924), which by 1968 Scott had read three times, accusations of rape parallel with the reality of colonialism and issues of class and race. However, Scott denied any direct influence from Forster, and he thought that the novel has no "conscious moral purpose" apart expressing the novelist's view of reality. The Jewel in the Crown (1966) opens with an image of a girl
running – in an essay Scott said that for him the inspiration for a
novel always came in the form of an image. The novel presents for the
reader Daphne Manners, a young Englishwoman, her Anglo-Indian lover
Hari Kumar, and the homosexual sadistic police official Ronald Merrick, who feels
superior to Kumar. Daphne is raped by a group of men in the Bibighar
Gardens of Mayapore, when she is spending a night with Hari. She dies
in childbirth. Daphne's and Hari's love is seen through the eyes of Lady Manners, her aunt. In The Day of the Scorpion (1968)
Hari is imprisoned because of the rape and Merrick says that he
believes Hari is guilty. During the interrogation, Merrick sexually
abuses him as well. The Towers of Silence (1972)
focuses on the Layton family, the engagement of Susan Layton and Teddie
Bingham, their weddings, and the events before Teddie's death. A Division of the Spoils (1974)
continues the story, but the central character is Guy Perron, who
witnesses the independence process of India and hears about Merrick's
death. Staying On returns to the world of the quartet,
and depicts two of the minor characters, Tusker and Lucy Smalley, an
elderly couple, who live in an isolated retirement in India long after
independence. The novelist Salman Rushdie denounced The Raj Quartet for perpetuating colonial assumption and racial stereotypes. Both in E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India
(1924) and in Scott's work, imperialism and racism are associated with sexual abuse.
"...if rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo-British
connection," Rushdie said, "then surely, the interests of accuracy, it
should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of
whatever class." ('Outside the Whale', in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, 1991, pp. 87-101) Referring
to India's struggle for independence, Timothy Foote wrote from an
American point of view in his review of the first volume, that the
whole subject is "too remote to be any pressing interest" and as a
result, "The Jewel in the Crown,
like a long delayed letters from a soldier whose death has already been
announced by cable, sometimes seems touchingly irrelevant. ('Rape in India – Real and Allegorical' by Timothy Foote, Life, June 10, 1966) In has also been argued by many scholars that The Raj Quartet is nostalgic for the days of the Raj, even as it condems the exploitation of India under British rule. Adrift in his life, Scott spent his last years traveling between his Hampstead house and the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a visiting fellow. He suffered from cancer and his condition was weakened by heavy drinking, which had caused cirrhosis of the liver. Scott final published work, After the Funeral (1978), featured pen and ink illustrations by his daughter Sally. Paul Scott died on March 1, 1978, at the Middlesex Hospital, London, aged 57. According to Scott's biographer, the family also suffered from his violence – he often shut himself away for days in his study, working and drinking there. Eventually, after the Quartet was completed, his wife left him, seeking a first shelter at Chiswick Women's Aid. Penny Avery started to publish fiction late in life. The Raj Quartet was adapted for Granada Television under the title The Jewel in the Crown (1984). Anthony Powell noted in his journal, that Merrick "seem to some
extent a phantasm of Scott himself" but he "certainly makes the film
memorable." For further reading: Paul Scott by K.B. Rao (1980); Introducing The Raj Quartet by J. Tedesco and J. Popham (1985); Paul Scott's Raj by R. Moore (1990); Paul Scott by Hilary Spurling (1990); Paul Scott's Raj by R. Moore (1990); 'Outside the Whale' by S. Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands (1991); Belonging and not belonging: Understanding India in novels by Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and V.S. Naipaul by Janet Mariana Pug (1993); Paul Scott: His Art and Vision by V.R. Badiger (1994); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie by Michael Gorra (1997); Paul Scott's "Raj Quartet": History and Division by Peter Childs (1998); Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel by M. Keith Booker (1998); 'Images of Rape and Buggery: Paul Scott's View of the Dual Evils of Empire' by Janis E. Haswell, in Studies in the Novel 33.2 (2001); Paul Scott: The Raj Quartet and Staying On by John Lennard (2010); Paul Scott's "The Jewel In The Crown": A Novelist's Philosophy Of History And The End Of The British Raj by Kathryn Ann Hughes Nedegaard (2016) - See also: Kilping, Tagore Selected works:
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