The gourmet and the guru
David Lancaster
The Root and the Flower L. H. Myers (Seeker and Warburg £8.95)
The Near and the Far by L. H. Myers is a sequence of four novels set in 16th- century India during the reign of the Emperor Akbar. Although he wrote other books, Myers's reputation rests on this tetralogy, written between 1929 and 1940. You might call them 'philosophical novels'; that is, they deal mainly with ideas — in Myers's case, an investigation into how man can conserve spiritual values in an in- creasingly materialist society. Because of these intellectual interests, many critics have seen him more as a thinker than as a creative artist and consequently his work has been unfairly neglected, judged as cranky and interesting but, in the end, unimportant. So it's refreshing that Seeker and Warburg, in collaboration with the Arts Council, have re-published the first three books under the title The Root and the Flower. We all now have an opportuni- ty to make up our own minds.
Leopold Hamilton Myers was an oddity as a writer and as a man. He was the son of F. W. Myers, King's don, friend of George Eliot, and one of the founders of the Socie- ty for Psychical Research. Myers ',ere was an optimistic transcendentalist, and his son never escaped from that early influence, although the difficulties of his life eroded the optimism. Sexually, things were strange; according to Penelope Fitzgerald's introduction, he was seduced at the age of 16, and he also had a number of affairs with members of both sexes. After Eton and Cambridge — he hated both — he spent the First World War at the Foreign Office, married, and settled to a leisured life on a private income. He was a connoisseur of Stilton and port, owned shares in Boulestin's restaurant in London, rode in a chauffeur-driven Rolls and dined with Churchill at least once a year. It was a Dornford Yates existence, hardly the en- vironment for a writer concerned with great spiritual questions. But Myers was really
two men, the gourmet and the guru, and, in trying to fuse these intense conflicts in his personality, he produced a body of eccen- tric and highly individual writing which, at its best, is masterful. Writing was not the answer, however. In 1944, he committed suicide by taking an overdose of veronal.
The Root and the Flower works on two levels as a historical melodrama and as a moral fable. It is unique in that, unlike the later work of Huxley or of Charles Williams, the story and the ideas are inter- twined; plot doesn't exist just to tart up the abstract thought. The emperor has two sons — Daniyal and Salim — one of whom must succeed him. The country is split in its loyalties and is heading for civil war; Myers paints a convoluted web of social and political contacts which spread to destabilise a whole society. One aristocratic family finds itself caught in this upheaval, and each of its members must make their choice. But this isn't a simple political dilemma. Myers makes it clear that Daniyal is a nihilist, a sadist, who is bent on destroy- ing everything good. To support Daniyal's claim, therefore, is to encourage evil and using this as a guidestick, the story reveals the fundamental weaknesses in the family's spiritual values. Some are too materialistic; others ignore the world altogether. The only person who emerges with any dignity is an adolescent, Jali, who hasn't lived long enough to develop any firm beliefs. The trilogy's narrative impact is based on the ironic distance between what characters say they believe and how they interpret those convictions during a crisis. For instance, the head of the family, Rajah Amar, is a Bud- dhist bent on achieving a personal Nirvana. We are obviously meant to admire his dedication to spiritual values. But Myers shows that when Amar is faced with Daniyal's sadistic evil (the prince crushes a cat's skull with his foot), he is unable to act; at a vital moment, his obsession with the spirit has made him betray it. Ideas are not merely thought and expressed in these novels; they are also felt, and in the hands of powerful people these feelings motivate and destroy societies. There are a lot of n characters sit elegantly on verandahs and discuss the validity of their respective spiritual systems. But beneath the urbane life of philosophy, there is an underworld of ferocious dream-animals, constantly reminding you of a barbarity that is Waiting to be unleashed. The elephant, for example, is a recurring motif. Jali first encounters it when he is wandering through a palace ea" ridor and hears bellowing underground: It brought before his mind the scene as he had occasionally witnessed it — the great grey hulks of the elephants. • • e imagined the pungent stable smell, the sudden outbreak of sound that flurried one out of one's senses, and the constant dread of being crushed to death. The reader never escapes from these animals. They appear in dreams; AO° uses them to kill dissidents; Daniyal has a mad elephant which warns Amar of his closeness to an unspeakable evil. Snakes, rotting lilies,
the cool water of the lakes as Penelope Fitzgerald writes, --
'rrh dye passages hardly ever standsetidlle,sctrlYP give the sense of something about to hap- pen.' They are a tragic chorus reminding IS soefnws eh at ht Ironically, eisdaatnsgtet ainfdAamcr s family doesn't nothing hay]; The final novel, The Pool of Vishnu (1 0 p e ndse sapti tteh the tehned oaf n tt hi ciisp as tt ni or re-published here), is inconclusive. BY Myers was ill, lompleted this novel in 194u., and his growing interest 17 communism had blunted his fine sense ii°e moral distinction. Compared with t a preceding tune played o
the last all the w k is
familiarfa wrong struments. It must have been obvious that for him the near and the far would neve., suicide. hen is a sad inevitability about h i' Yet this failure is insignificant when Pail consider what was achieved. At its best._ novel can present us with a complete setno sibility, unhampered by any deference is convention or to what the writer thinks,,,, 'good literature'. In The Root and .nt; Flower, Myers transforms his personal into a multi-layered literary construct; 011_, you have read the trilogy, the world is never quite the same again, it is haunted bLae system, a mind, other than your own. 1..1,_ tension between spiritual and material teiv,t ing is so intensely communicated becaus_L was central to his own life, and the imager"__ aisliegqn hutalelywtariutetr,s own it is being used to much of the trilogy takpessypc one side of which is a villa belonging to family while, on the other, there is an oats" family colony ruled by Daniyal, where a laketiitie and sadism hold sway. The material a",. spiritual stare at each other across re water; characters row from one bank to n" opposite; it's a personal conflict made co lhaec.eFboyr compote_ crete, convincing as fiction, resonant; metaphor. Myers wrote at a time when„d world was being polarised and yet he _If sufficient individuality to think in tertfle, 94,3 reconciliation and synthesis. He he° that the world and the spirit were not separate and that social issues could not be solved merely by politics:
Man is under an obligation to act under a Psychological necessity that is also a spiritual obligation. And somehow in his action he must reconcile the pursuit of his on small definite and rightful ends with the working out of an inscrutable purpose. He must not
forswear the intimate knowledge that he is the chief instrument of the supernatural energy determining whatever in time shall come to pass.
That, in the end, is what this rich, abundant writer is telling us; for this reason alone, he should command our attention. A minor novelist? Perhaps. A crank? Definitely. But there is a touch of greatness in him.
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