Skip to main content

The Day of the Scorpion

According to his biographer, Paul Scott decided not to be homosexual. The risks in 1940s England were too great. With a significant act of sustained will, it was submerged, repressed. He married, had children and took to drink. He was borderline abusive as a result.

This tragic personal circumstance was transformed into art. In his masterpiece, the Raj Quartet, one of his central characters: Ronald Merrick is a repressed homosexual and manipulatively abusive. He is one of the great depictions of sustained 'evil' in literature and great precisely because Scott shows, from many perspectives, how he was formed with a sympathy and engagement that betokens a certain knowingness on his part.

I am happily making my way through the Quartet, now on the second volume, 'The Day of the Scorpion". This is my second reading, companioned by being a devotee of the Granada television series of the 80s that is a miracle of both compression and faithfulness.

The books are a thoughtful combination of the prosaic narrative and the experiment with form - narrators shift, journals and letters are included, different voices offer themselves - yet the language always remains utterly accessible, and rarely becomes lyrical.

I am struck that two of the most compelling novels of Britain's engagement with India (of the twentieth century) were both written by men, Scott and Forster, whose 'identity' remained hidden, and persecuted, and both chose 'rapes': actual and problematic to symbolize the relationship. There was an immediate sympathy with oppression on both authors part for which 'rape' is a meaningful sign. However, both complicate the rape with an another set of relations that evoke a different, more positive ordering of the relationship.

Daphne Manners in The Jewel in the Crown is in love with Hari Kumar. Their love is despoiled by Daphne's subsequent rape that Hari is powerless to prevent. Their child offers possibilities for the future but not one unclouded by doubt of her origin.

India and her past colonial masters are held in a complex relationship of love and hate.

It is this relationship that Scott tries, with consummate skill, to evoke and in the process illuminates history and its potential lessons through characters marvelously composed.

My favourite remains Count Vronsky, the premier of Mirat a small princely state. He is a force for good, reforming the state at a wise pace, and an acute observer of relationships both personal and political. He is, I think, a positive pole to Merrick. He is contentedly gay, and allowed to be so by his position - a Scott wish fulfillment perhaps...

Comments

  1. I do have to read this. Finally I'm reading Rebecca West, so the Raj could be next. We loved the tv series and Virginia did read the Quartet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Andrei abandoned Rebecca West for The Jewel in the Crown in Montenegro! He is greatly enjoying it. It remains one of my great reading experiences, and the second time around is only confirming the impression of the first.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev