Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet: vast panoramic political cycle, yet mostly narrated by heroines

“It is by reading . . . that we imbibe those sentiments & gain that knowledge which by degrees is wrought into the very texture of our minds . . . ” (Anna Barbauld)

The original cover, focusing on the main
lovers, Daphne Manners, Hari Kumar, with Ronald Merrick just behind. To the side an Indian soldier.

Sarah Layton (Geraldine James) from series

Dear Friends,

It was just around 2 years ago that I finished watching the 13 part BBC mini-series, The Jewel in the Crown, screenplay by Ken Taylor and was so moved I wanted to read all four books so I could re-see the films and get more out of them. I just love these costume dramas.

I knew I didn’t have the time with all the other projects I was doing, my teaching, online participation (to say nothing of blogs and beloved friends), and I do love to listen to novels read aloud in my car. So for about 2 years on and off now I’ve been listening steadily to this quartet. The readers I listened to were Sam Dastor (The Jewel in the Crown), Garard Green (The Day of the Scorpion), and Richard Brown (The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils).

A recent cover

I can’t say they were great readers in the sense of making me feel I was in the presence of a stage with acting going on before my eyes, but they did read well dramatically and I was so moved at times. I was sad when the fourth one came to an end.

A fine new joint edition, with yet another sort of cover

I’ve wanted to write about them or the mini-series but never have done because I’m floored by all there is to say. They have been most unfairly and wrongly maligned; they are among the great series of novels of the 20th century. As I wrote on my Reveries under the Sign of Austen blog, I’ve had a proposal accepted to do a paper at the coming ASECS in Albuquerque, “‘What right have you to detain me here?’: Rape in Clarissa, where (among other things) I mean to explore attitudes towards rape and how rape is used in fiction, and tonight watching Part 1 of the mini-series, it struck me this is a another huge novel centrally hinging on a rape. The first sentence of the third paragraph of Volume I runs:

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.

Daphne Manners (Susan Woolridge) calling to Lilly Chatterjee as she crawls up the stairs after having been raped and run back home

Indeed I’ve already bought myself a rare book on rape in 18th century English novels (Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice); from the middle of the 19th through 20th centuries; apparently it was a topic much avoided after 1790, not that it was common before.

So I feel anew the desire to call attention to these books. What can I say about them. Let me begin with the unusual focus on women as narrators for a far-reaching post-colonialist book. The first volume of Jewel in the Crown opens
with three very long first person narratives told by aging women: Miss Edwina Crane, a virgin spinster who found a life in India where she couldn’t in England but when the troubles came was ejected, nearly beaten and saw her friend murdered and ended a suicide; Sister Ludmilla, probably a prostitute’s daughter in Germany who also found a life in India but remained a pariah; and then Lily Chatterjee, enduring the scorn of the whites, but herself a powerful decent woman, all trying to tell the story of a rape of another outcast girl, Daphne, outcast because ugly and so sincerely idealistic. It ends on letters by her Lilly Chatterjee, the upper caste Indian woman she lives with in the novel, good friend of her aunt, Lady Edith Manners (wife of a powerful English man, governor of the province) and Daphne’s own letter explaining how she came to be raped at its close. Scott is in the tradition of males in drag (beginning with Defoe and Richardson), but it’s fascinating how these are central.

As the novel moves on, we continue to have females at the center. Sarah Layton is the series’ real heroine: she is a true Elinor Dashwood character, appearing conventional and conservative in public, but living a wholly individual and radical life (she too has an Indian man as her lover), good, decent, loving, strong; she tells a good deal of the second volume (Scorpion where her sister, Susan, goes over the edge into insanity); It’s here we meet Count Brownofsky (played inimitably by Eric Porter) and how he loves her :). Towards the end of Volume II, her elderly aunt, Mabel Layton’s companion, Barbie Batchelor is introduced and by the Vol 3 is the center of the third novel, another spinster, gentle, retiring, a figure of integrity, who is destroyed by Sarah’s vicious mother, Mildred (out of jealousy and spite and scorn). Barbie was played by Peggy Ashcroft in the mini-series.

Peggy Ashcroft as Barbie

Hilary Spurling’s great literary biography (which I’ve read in the last two years also) goes a long way towards explaining all sorts of facets of Scott’s work. With respect to his use of heroines, we learn Scott was bisexual. His early life was spent as a gay person, not quite in the closet and he had xperiences very like those Simon Raven tells of in Fielding Gray. That is, he was severely demoted and almost throw out of his niche in the army once someone snitched on him (though it was fine for him to do all the sordid sex he wanted with women prostitutes say); his early life as a poet and his early friends and lovers before the draft were men except for their wives with whom he had close friendships. He was super-dominated by a frustrated mother; his father was a business failure and she lived vicariously through him. Then he resolved to live a heterosexual life, married, had children and worked a long hard time in a regular job (like Trollope), in his case as an accountant slowly also trying to write for publication and getting his stuff placed.

Paul Scott as a young man

His career cannot be said to have taken off at any time; it was just success d’estime for English readers were not really interested in the realities of India, or war (like he worked in the supply side of the way, very necessary for winning a battle and equally exhausting but not filled with phony heroics) — until the Booker Prize gave him a spotlight with Staying On, the movie was made (the Johnson and Howard movie was made before the adaptations of Jewel in the Crown), and then the TV adaptation was picked up, partly because the 1970s and 80s were a remarkable period for film adaptation on TV and single one-off plays (under umbrellas words like “Shades of Darkness).

Why is his sexuality, marginality and very late success significant? Not only is Hari Kumar (the young Indian man educated to be an English man) is a cynosure or alter ego for Scott; so is Ronald Merrick (the police officer who tries to destroy Kumar out of sexual jealousy over Daphne but also a desire to be Kumar’s lover and racial self-contempt therefor). I was very bothered by the way Merrick was portrayed in the film, especially the cruel punishment at the end and depiction of him as what was evil about the Raj (everyone else being so good and well-meaning at least in the film — not in the book). Now I know that in the book Scott has compassion for Merrick too, and we are to feel Merrick committed suicide because for him there was no place to return to in England no place to survive in India once the Raj was dissolved.

In the first novel, there are more than a few hints Merrick is gay, is a man of real taste and sensitivity outside his job, is courting Daphne Manners not because he wants her, but because he’s after Hari Kumar, and it’s a love-hate relationship compounded of his exclusion from upper class English schools and manners and education. Scott experienced just this sort of thing: he was sent to a phony public school of a type that grew up in the later 1940s and cost a great deal, gave a classical education of sorts to boys, but no certificate, no connections, and deeply twisted resentments and ideals from being outsiders in such an environment of seething aspiration given phony substitutes.

Similarly, though in the four novels of Raj Quartet though, we first hear of Barbie Batchelor towards the end of Volume 2, and then only tangentially as the woman Martha Layton had living with her, a woman kind of to her granddaughters, she become a major presence early in the series. She first emerges as a full-blown personality thematized importantly for the book at the
opening of Volume III, Towers of Silence.

Ken Taylor has taken a character from Book 3 who is major and restructured the narrative to make her major dramatically. And as a measure of the difference even between the apparently faithful film, and its book-source: most people who watched, remember the brilliant performance of Peggy Ashcroft as Barbie Batchelor.

Throughout all four volumes we go over the same small group of events: the rape of Daphne Manners, the assault on Edwina Crane and murder of her male Indian companion-teacher (whose name I can’t spell and can’t find just now in the book). The consciousness the first book is divided among the women (with some parts given to Robin White); the second book has Sarah as a strong presence, the third Barbie Batchelor.

Each time we experience the events from the perspective of different people, from English women (mostly officer and adminstrator’s wives and daughters and sisters) to men, from Muslim politicians, and we get an array of brilliant pen portraits. I’ll point out Mildred Layton who seems to be alcoholic, a mean woman, narrow and sexually demanding of a subaltern while her husband is in prison camp, but even she is given sympathy here too, we see is attractive to Guy Perron, without Scott sentimentalizing what she is.

Judy Parfitt as Mildred Layton, cold, utterly without feeling for others

Scott removes circularly through his material again and again, a characteristic very like women’s novels. In Vol 3 he introduces Mr & Mrs Smalley (the name recalls Dickens’s uses of semi-allegorical names) and set up the situation we will meet 10 years later in Staying On (a gem which won the Booker Prize). Here they are satirized figures; in the coda novel they are poignant and again the story is told from Lucy Smalley (played by Celia Johnson in a fine movie, with Trevor Howard as her husband) and her perspective as someone whose husband never achieved high rank or any solid money.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the Smalleys in Staying On

(This one I have read on my own twice; I’ve never had the nerve to assign it to students. They wouldn’t understand and take it as offending everyone when it tells hard truths.)

There is also an extended third person free indirect presentation of Teddy Bingham. Scott does present male presences and voices, but usually not through first person narrative: when he does they are presenting
reports to superiors for public consumption. Hari never gets to tell his story directly

Art Malik as Hari Kumar

Since Jim was in the car with me when I was listening (long treks back and forth trying to get his Jaguar’s seat belt fixed), and agreed to listen, he asked me questions, and, as usual, they are interesting. Like, why spend such inordinate time over this dullard whose idealism is a function of a set of naive prejudices, prejudices which make him ideally fit to be a lower ranking British officer in a British colony. Surely, we don’t need to be told what are the densities and naiveities of this kind of mindset at this point.

Well in part I think we may do — colonialism is more than alive and well; it’s making horrifying wars. The rhetoric justifying these calamities in the US (whose government representing a cabal in the US with other governments representing cabals in other European countries) is often the same mix of naive idealism and supposed pragmaticism.

But it’s more than that. Like Trollope, Scott wants to go into male psychologies he is alien from, watch their delusions, their mistakes. Scott is much more fascinated by their impaired sexuality (as he sees it), the not-so-hidden secrets of vulnerability and hurt ego. Scott was bisexual so he has subrisive tone towards Susan Layton’s way of controlling Teddy Bingham’s sexual aggression (such as it is). (She marries him.) What a jackass is this heterosexual male Scott seems to suggest; look at him. The equivalent in Trollope is Fawn. Class, class, class, how it is at the heart of this. Susan Layton can keep Teddy off since he perceives her as a white upper caste female.

Scott’s way is to intersperse the first person narratives: speeches, letters, meditations, reports interwoven with the subjective story rehearsed repeatedly from different angles, each one identifiable not only as an individual but a member of a class, a race, an ethnic group, sexually (her position there whether daughter, wife, mother, sister, and of whom — for Scott knows women are connected to the public world still through men mostly).

Elizabeth Avery, Scott’s wife who became a novelist in her own right late in life (The Margaret Days

By the end of the third volume I came to love Barbie and Mabel, her protector someone who has enabled her to flourish, stand up for herself, be efficient. And then Mabel dies. Here is a story of an employer who has been a benign figure to her companion, and whose companion has become a quietly beloved friend. Now that’s she’s suddenly gone Barbie finds herself again disrespected, and thrown off. Mabel who is protected by status and money, was able to withdraw from her world altogether, keep a cold mean step-daughter-in-law at bay (the actress playing Mildred Layton is the same actress who played Lady Catherine de Bourgh brilliantly in the 1979 P&P), Judy Parfitt) spend all her time gardening, and use Barbie as a barrier).

It’s unbearably moving the way Scott slowly depicts the death and then aftermath. But it also figures forth the positions of the people for each is further embedded in a complicated history, and Mabel and Barbie are decent humane people who treat their Indian servants with respect. Not Mildred; once she’s in charge she’ll kick and beat down and scorn. Lady Catherine de Bourgh updated.

Some parts of A Division of the Spoils seemed to me a falling off. Scott wanted too much to include wider history and didn’t dramatize it through the story and characters quite enough (though I learned a lot). But it has power too, and ends memorably. It opens with a man determined to commit suicide by drowning himself in a bath; how Guy Perron attempts to save him and after he manages at first, the man does throws himself off a roof. a man driven wild and desperate by the job he is forced to stay in and travel around the world obeying. Scott uses this opening to begin to lay bare the undergirding of the colonialist empire and its miseries in individuals. His central consciousness is also for the first time an ideal kind of male hero — perhaps this is one of the causes of its relative weakness.
Geraldine James as Sarah, Charles Dance as Guy

The concluding section of the fourth novel is told by Sarah Layton, our conventional heroine, and it is almost unbearable in its stoic account of of loss. At the end the Muslims and Hindus are hacking one another to death, and in a train on the way to Ranpur Ahmed Kassim to save the English people in their car and Minnie, the ayah for Susan’s little boy (and because he cannot save himself) gives himself up to a horrible death. What is most striking is how Sarah cannot do anything to change her situation vis-a-vis the family she has found herself with, and her only hope is to move back to England where she may live with an aunt-cousin (if the person will take her in). She has such a beautiful soul: by this time she is quietly promiscuous, and like Daphne at the opening having an affair with an Indian man, in her case, Ahmed, only she does it discreetly, and so alone when it comes to any permanent companionship. Ahmed was to be the groom of the Nawab’s daughter whom Sarah was bringing out of her shyness. Her one hope is her father and they are alike, but he hasn’t the strength to talk it.

We are made to feel she has come to love India, it is what has made her.

A shot near the end of the mini-series

As I’ve seen the film adaptation, I know how the book ends for its terrible anti-hero-villain, Ronald Merrick, and that the final scene takes us to the wreck of Hari Kumar’s life. It struck me that Merrick plays the same role as Widmerpool in Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time: they both stand for all that a decent person hates in this book’s perception of modern experience.

All on this vast canvas which so brilliantly analyzes the politics of colonialism, sexism, racism, sexual orientation, family and crony-capitalism, really nothing is left out and all is connected. Probably my favorite books will be the 1st (the story of the rape told by several women narrators) and the third (Barbie Batchelor’s book).

One problem I’ve noticed with the mini-series is that since voice-over is eschewed, we lost the centrality of the women, and the first three parts of the series may be seen as a conflict between the two marginalized males of the British Empire and Raj, the grammar school boy, Ronald Merrick, played unforgettably by Tim-Piggot Smith, and the Indian turned Englishman despised for his skin color, played so poignantly by Art Malik. The promotional stills encourage this and are daring in bringing out the homoeroticism of Merrick:

But sexual exploitation and jealousy and fear is part of racism and classism, central to it when it comes to colonialism, and this is a rape story of not only Daphne, but Hari, Edwina, Barbie Batchelor, Susan Layton, Ahmen, and in the end even Merrick himself comes in for pity. Count Bronofsky has the last words of the novel in a translation we are to suppose he gives Guy Perron of an Indian poet. I shall look forward to seeing how the series ends (I’ve forgotten) and comparing.

Ellen