Collected Essays (22 page)

All Mr Narayan’s comedies have had this undertone of sadness. Their gentle irony and absence of condemnation remind us how difficult comedy is in the West today – farce, savage, boisterous, satirical, is easy, but comedy needs a strong framework of social convention with which the author sympathizes but which he does not share. Miss Compton-Burnett is forced to place her stories in the Edwardian or Victorian past; Mr Henry Green substitutes elaborate conventions of his own for our social vacancies, so that his characters move in the kind of dance we learnt at kindergarten – ‘one step forward, one step to the right, twirl on the right toe’. But the life of Malguli – never ruffled by politics – proceeds in exactly the same way as it has done for centuries, and the juxtaposition of the age-old convention and the modern character provides much of the comedy. The astrologer is still called in to examine the horoscopes for a marriage, but now if you pay him enough he will fix them the way you want: the financial expert sits under his banyan tree opposite the new Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank. To push away a tumbler of milk is to insult a goddess; the caste of a great-grandfather is still of great importance, Margayya, astute about mortgages, consumed by the modern desire for wealth and motorcars, yet consults the priest of the Goddess Lakshmi and finds himself seeking a red lotus to pound up in the milk drawn from a smoke-coloured cow (the forty days of prayer have results: he becomes the owner of a pornographic manuscript called first
Bed Life or the Science of Marital Happiness
but afterwards, through the caution of the printer,
Domestic Harmony).

Margayya – the sad ambitious absurd financial expert – is perhaps the most engaging of all Mr Narayan’s characters. In his ambitions for his boy, his huge dreams, his unintended villainies and his small vanities, his domestic tenderness, he has the hidden poetry and the unrecognized pathos we so often find in Chekov’s characters who on the last page vanish into life.

He knew that he had a scheme somewhere at the back of his mind, a scheme which would place him among the elect in society, which would make people flock to him and look to him for guidance, advice and management. He could not yet say what the scheme would be, but he sensed its presence . . . he felt he ought to wait on that inspiration with reverence and watchfulness.

Whom next shall I meet in Malgudi? That is the thought that comes to me when I close a novel of Mr Narayan’s. I am not waiting for another novel. I am waiting to go out of my door into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and the certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching, past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet me, I know, with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open a door on to yet another human existence.

1952

RIDER HAGGARD’S SECRET

H
OW
seldom in the literary life do we pause to pay a debt of gratitude except to the great or the fashionable, who are like those friends that we feel do us credit. Conrad, Dostoevsky, James, yes, but we are too ready to forget such figures as A. E. W. Mason, Stanley Weyman, and Rider Haggard, perhaps the greatest of all who enchanted us when we were young. Enchantment is just what this writer exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years have been unable to wear away: the witch Gagool screaming as the rock-door closed and crushed her; Eric Brighteyes fighting his doomed battle; the death of the tyrant Chaka; Umslopagaas holding the queen’s stairway in Milosis. It is odd how many violent images remain like a prophecy of the future; the love passages were quickly read and discarded from the mind, though now they seem oddly moving (as when Queen Nyleptha declares her love to Sir Henry Curtis in the midnight hall), a little awkward and stilted perhaps, but free from ambiguities and doubts, and with the worn rhetoric of honesty.

I am glad that his daughter’s vivid and well-written biography
*15
leaves Rider Haggard where he was in the imagination: the tall bearded figure with the presence of Sir Henry Curtis and the straightforwardness of Quatermain. This life does not belong to the unhappy world of letters; there are no rivalries, jealousies, nerve storms, no toiling miserably against the grain, no ignoble ambivalent vision which finds a kind of copy even in personal grief. The loss of his only son in childhood nearly broke Haggard in middle life, but yet his grief had the common direct quality: he was not compelled to watch himself turn it into words. ‘Jock was dead, so he mustn’t be mentioned’, Sir Godfrey Haggard writes.

To come on a book or a toy that once belonged to my young cousin (whom I never knew) was to strike a hush over the room such as might almost have been observed towards a relative who had been hanged for murder. There was a guilty silence. Jock haunted the house far more obtrusively because everyone there pretended they could not see him, and the poor schoolboy wraith seemed to be begging piteously for some notice, so that at last he might be laid to rest.

A few words from Allan Quatermain on how the joy of life had left him with his son’s death – ‘I have just buried my boy, my poor handsome boy of whom I was so proud, and my heart is broken. It is very hard having only one son to lose him thus; but God’s will be done. Who am I that I should complain?’ This is all Haggard allowed himself. He was a public author and the private life remained the private life in so far as he could control it.

The poetic element in Haggard’s work breaks out where the control fails. Because the hidden man was so imprisoned, when he does emerge through the tomb, it is against enormous pressure, and the effect is often one of horror, a risen Lazarus – next time he must be buried deeper. Perhaps that is why some of his early readers found his work obscene (it seems incredible to us). An anonymous letter-writer wrote to him:

As regards
She
, it is a tissue of the most sickening trash that was ever printed, the only parts worth reading are borrowed – I could quote the books if I liked. None but a foul-minded liar could invent such sickening details. I trace a good deal of diabolical murders that have been lately committed to the ideas promulgated by your foul trash. Of course, it
pays
and you don’t care a damn, nevertheless the opinion of the decent public is that you are a skunk and a very foul one.

Even of
King Solomon’s Mines
another anonymous correspondent wrote: ‘We approached this book with feelings of curiosity – we left with those of loathing and disgust.’

It is simple to trace the influence of the public life on his work, the public life of the boy as well as of the man. There is, for example, a neighbouring farmer, ‘a long lank man in a smocked frock, called Quatermain’. In Zululand, where he went whilst still a boy on the staff of the Governor of Natal, he met Gagool in the body (we suspect he had met her in the spirit long before). Pagéte’s warriors are performing a war dance.

Suddenly there stood before us a creature, a woman – tiny, withered, and bent nearly double by age, but in her activity passing comprehension. Clad in a strange jumble of snake skins, feathers, furs and bones, a forked wand in her outstretched hand, she rushed to and fro before the little group of white men, crying:

Umslopagaas with the great hole in his head above the left temple, carrying his spiked axe Imkosi-kaas, came down one day from Swaziland and became Haggard’s friend. All through his life we can find superficial material for his books, even for the dull adult books like
Mr Meeson’s Will.
His life provides Zulu impis, war, flight, shipwreck, a treasure hunt in Mexico, even the City of London, but what we do not so easily detect is the very thing that makes these books live today with undiminished vitality – the emergence of the buried man.

There are some revealing passages in his friendship with Rudyard Kipling. Fishing together for trout at Bateman’s, these two elderly men – in some ways the most successful writers of their time, linked together to their honour even by their enemies (‘the prose that knows no reason, and the unmelodious verse’, ‘When the Rudyards cease from Kipling, and the Haggards ride no more’), suddenly let out the secret. ‘I happened to remark’, Haggard wrote, ‘that I thought this world was one of the hells. He replied he did not think – he was certain of it. He went on to show that it had every attribute of hell; doubt, fear, pain, struggle, bereavement, almost irresistible temptations springing from the nature with which we are clothed, physical and mental suffering, etc., ending in the worst fate man can devise for man, Execution!’

Haggard’s comment starts shockingly from the page in its very casualness, and then we begin to remember the passages we skated so lightly over in the adventure stories when we were young and the world held promise: there was, for example, Allan Quatermain dying and resigned:

Well, it is not a good world – nobody can say that it is, save those who wilfully blind themselves to the facts. How can a world be good in which Money is the moving power, and Self-Interest the guiding star? The wonder is not that it is so bad but that there should be any good left in it.

Quatermain remembers the good things of life, how he ‘watched the wild game trek down to the water in the moonlight. But I should not wish to live again.’ And we remember too the Brethren and the quite casual comment, not unlike Haggard’s to Kipling. ‘So they went, talking earnestly of all things, but, save in God, finding no hope at all.’

They seemed so straightforward to us once, those books we first encountered behind the steel grille of the school library, casting a glow over the dull neighbouring H’s: Henty already abandoned and Hope not yet enjoyed:
The Wanderer’s Necklace
(with the hero blinded by the queen to whom he remains faithful to the last),
Montezuma’s Daughter
(and her suicide beside her lover),
Ayesha
(with the mad Khan’s hunting),
Nada the Lily
(and the death of the beloved). We did not notice the melancholy end of every adventure or know that the battle scenes took their tension from the fear of death which so haunted Haggard from one night in his childhood when he woke in the moonlight:

He put out his hand . . . how odd it looked in the moonlight, dead – dead. Then it happened. He realized that one day that hand would be limp also, that he could not lift it any more – it would be dead – he would be dead. The awful, inescapable certainty hung over him like a pall of misery. He felt it would be better if he died at once – he wished he were dead, rather than have to live with that in front of him.

Haggard’s own melancholy end, with falling royalties and the alienation of the Norfolk lands he loved, departing from the doomed house with a flower in his buttonhole to the operation he guessed would be final, comes closer to adult literature perhaps than any of his books. It is not the sound of Umslopagaas’s axe that we hear, cracking the marble monument in the moment of his death, so much as the sound of trees falling, the strokes of the axe far away in the cherry orchard. We think again of how much we loved him when we were young – the gleam of Captain Good’s monocle, the last stand of the Greys, de Garcia tracked through the snows – and of how little we knew. ‘Occasionally one sees the Light, one touches the pierced feet, one thinks that the peace which passes understanding is gained – then all is gone again.’ Could we ever have believed that our hero wrote that, or have been interested if we had known?

1951

JOURNEY INTO SUCCESS

W
HY
is it, one asks about certain authors, in a kind of envy of their talent and in the belief that, if one had been given so much, one could have progressed a little further, they have stayed just there? Why didn’t they grow, with such a technical start – well, a little more worthy of consideration?

A. E. W. Mason was an admirable writer of detective stories – the modern fairy tales – and of such period pieces as
Clementina
and
The Watchers
which excited us when we were young and still hold a nostalgic charm. The year 1719, the country Italy, a vagrant Irishman with a lame horse, an early autumn morning, and a beautiful young woman in need of a postilion – he could do all this as cleverly as Weyman and his dialogue was sharper and better timed. How could a boy’s attention be more swiftly caught than by the opening of
The Watchers
?

It was a story of a youth that sat in the stocks of a Sunday morning and disappeared thereafter from the islands; of a girl named Helen; of a Negro who slept, and of men watching a house with a great tangled garden that stood at the edge of the sea.

One is reminded of another writer who began in much the same way, but when he died in his early forties had reached the height of
Weir of Hermiston.
Mason lived till old age, and perhaps, if we had been young when it appeared,
Fire Over England
might have seemed to us as satisfying as
Clementina.
But readers grow up and it is sad when an author does not grow up with them. Literature has no room for Peter Pans.

In Mr Green’s workaday biography
*16
we seek an answer to the problem: why did he not progress like Stevenson? We read of a young Mason, the son of a chartered accountant in Camberwell, and his education at Dulwich – a long way from General Faversham’s old house in Surrey with the portraits of the military ancestors on the walls, and a long way, too, from the courteous monocled member of the Garrick, a leading social figure who shot in North Africa and yachted in the Mediterranean and discussed his novels with the King. (At George the Fifth’s request, Mason temporarily abandoned a novel on Koenigsmark and, perhaps as a reward for his loyalty, was offered a knighthood. This eminently suitable honour, which had been accepted by his friends Anthony Hope and James Barrie, he turned down for the rather confused reason that he was a childless man.) Between the not very happy Camberwell boy and the first-nighter cartooned by Tom Titt lay Oxford and the stage and failure as an actor. Trinity wiped out the middle-class stain, but perhaps the stage gave Mason a fear of failure: failure in a sense would have been a return to Camberwell.