The jewel in his crown

Anthony Powell

PAUL SCOTT: A LIFE by Hilary Spurling

Hutchinson, £18.99, pp.438

PAUL SCOTT'S RAJ by Robin Moore

Heinemann, .£18.5D, pp.246

Paul Scott's reputation as a novelist rests on the four volumes of The Raj Quartet (1975), and Staying On (1977), a shorter sequel, written in a slightly differ- ent tone. Both made good television, the former sequence (called The Jewel in the Crown) particularly memorable for the haunting character of Merrick, District Police Officer, a homosexual sadist, played with great attack by Tim Piggott-Smith.

Paul Scott (1920-1978) was the son of a rather unsuccessful commercial artist, who at 50 had married a girl regarded in the North London suburb where they lived as socially beneath him. The Scott family, from Yorkshire, had been richer, there was a professional background on the mother's side of designing Christmas cards of hunt- ing and coaching scenes and such like. Scott himself could make amusing draw- ings. He was the favourite of two sons, getting on well with his brother and strong-willed, possessive mother, not with his inarticulate father, in later life extremely deaf. Scott remains a somewhat enigmatic figure, not- withstanding the detailed and subtle ex- amination Hilary Spurling has devoted to him. He possessed the contradictory traits of an inner self-dramatising egotism com- bined with a reserved exterior, usually goodnatured, though varied by sulks, vile temper, even violence.

The family was wholly inward-looking; Scott thought of himself as a poet, read everything he could lay hands on, did the best he could to be intellectual in a surrounding unintellectual world. Mrs Spurling thinks that all his life he felt an outsider. He also judged himself homosex- ual. It is hard to estimate to what extent this was merely a schoolboy/undergraduate condition, trying to get to grips with sex, or an engrained bisexuality.

This sense of not belonging was not due to any lack of ability. On the contrary, Scott was unusually good (especially for a novelist) at turning his hand to anything. Much against his will he was forced to go Into an accountant's office at 14 or 15. At 17, without any special training, he won a silver medal from the Royal Society of Accountants. He proved an excellent Army officer. When he became a literary agent his clients were all greatly upset that he left the profession for his own writing.

Scott was conscripted in 1940. He thought he would be granted a commission at once, but was turned down by the first selection board, supposedly because he said he wrote poetry, more probably be- cause he showed signs of being in the midst of enthusiasm for Dorian Gray and all that that state implied. His second try was obstructed for 18 months. There was some sort of homosexual row. This might have been serious. It has even been suggested that Scott was to some extent drawing on himself for the picture of Merrick, in this case, so to speak, in reverse, Merrick's persecution of the homosexual Corporal Pinker possibly owing something to this awkward incident.

While Scott was still in the ranks he married a nurse, Penny Avery, whom he met at a soldiers' dance. This could have been partly to establish his own heterosex- ual respectability, but there is no doubt that it became a very genuine marriage. Penny Avery herself, too, came from a happy home. She seems to have behaved with the greatest forebearance in what was often a difficult situation, leaving her husband at last, though returning during his final days.

A week after Scott became an officer cadet, the squad was formed up, a sergeant major inserted his pace stick between Scott and the next file, dismissing the remainder, Scott's section being earmarked for India. Robin Moore is incorrect in Paul Scott's Raj to say Scott volunteered. On the contrary, he was extremely fed up at the posting, which was to the Indian Army Service Corps.

Although Scott was eventually to fall in love with India, the immediate impression was not favourable. That was in 1942, when the Congress leaders had been im- prisoned, the Quit India riots in full swing. The atmosphere was far from pleasant. Scott held strong anti-imperialist views, sometimes of a somewhat simplistic order, as he himself found. By 1944, promoted captain, he was serving with an Indian Air Supply Company, sending materiel to Slim's Army during the battles of Imphal and Kohima. He showed himself an effi- cient, conscientious officer, who got on particularly well with Indian subordinates. One is struck by the number of people Scott met during the war, who were to turn up later in his civilian life.

When Scott was at last demobilised he took a job in a small publishing concern, the combined Falcon Press and Grey Walls Press, the fowler run by Peter Baker. Baker, after a dashing war career, found a similar recklessness not adapted to pub- lishing; in fact he ended up with a sentence of seven years for fraud and forgery. Nonetheless, Scott, who managed to clear out before the final explosion, met some useful contacts during this employ- ment, notably Roland Gant. Gant was to turn up again as Scott's editor at Heine- mann, not to mention introducing him to a doctor who cured the disease, amoebian- sis, from which he was suffering.

Scott now became a literary agent with David Higham. There I met him in about 1959, when standing in for Higham him- self. Scott was quiet, understanding, well up in whatever matter was to be discussed. It never occurred to me that he was a phenomenal drinker, at that moment suf- fering all sorts of acute worries, about to give up a regular job for making a living through his own books.

Scott was to return to India to polish up his own knowledge of the subcontinent, visits from which several of the characters in his novels may be easily recognised. There was also a disastrous fortnight's stay in the village of his former havildar (sergeant), to which romanticism led him In the face of stern warnings against from Indian friends.

Mrs Spurling's biography brilliantly cov- ers all this, and lots more. She seems equally at home everywhere: accountancy; the Army; India; literary life. The story is of absorbing interest.

Paul Scott's Raj, much shorter, lists the main events of Scott's life in a much less thorough manner. It does, however, in- clude an interesting critique of The Raj Quartet by John Bayley. Bayley thinks that Scott, a theorist, relied too much on documentation to create a 'world of his own'. It is certainly true that the anglicised Indian, Hari Kumar, and the Rajput lady, Lady Chatterjee, to mention only two characters of the sequence, come straight from the account of Scott's later Indian trips. Merrick, on the other hand, perhaps merely a phantasia of Scott's own private horrors, leaps from the page, yet more from the screen.

Bayley thinks that, owing to Scott's method, reliance on 'real people' rather than creative fantasy, the saga could only be fully realised in another medium, that is to say television, in order to fall into place. He says that no one watching The Jewel in the Crown will object that that is 'not my idea' of Daphne, Barbie, Tusker Smalley, because television does not require a world of the author's own, but a literal world, easily adaptable.

One would certainly agree that Hari Kumar never quite comes to life in the way Merrick does. Scott's writing, like Maugham's, is sometimes pedestrian, but

the construction of The Raj Quartet is

masterly. Whatever reservations may be held about the narrative method it suc- ceeds in what Maugham thought the most difficult achievement of a novelist, that is to stick to the point. The point, in Scott's case, was to express his own views on the birth of Indian Independence.