Somebody Loves Us
HAVING myself been ticked off for writing a book on Japan after only eighteen months there, I was amused to find that Mr. Chaud- huri's study of Britain followed a five weeks' visit. But his is a nice-minded book, and no one is going to complain, apart from those of his compatriots who consider him 'pro- British'. I hasten to add that Mr. Chaudhuri, if obviously a very nice man, is certainly no fool.
. He was in advance more intimately ac- quainted with English literature than most of us ever become. And the fact that the BBC invited him here and the British Council made a fine job of looking after him might have spiked what guns he was carrying. So it may appear, until we accustom ourselves to the tone of his writing. He is in fact a rather sophisticated person, willing (within the bounds imposed by honesty) to be thought rather ingenuous, readier to poke fun at himself than at his hosts and sometimes doing the latter when seeming to do the former. He tells of how he lectured a young English couple on the less-than-paramount im- portance of love. The girl replied, `I'll only say that but for the love I bear towards my husband I should not be what I am,' with such a light in her eyes and music in her voice that Mr. Chaudhuri felt properly put in his place. 'I have subsequently heard that they are now divorced,' he adds gently.
Mr. Chaudhuri excuses the offensive behaviour of Englishmen in India on the grounds that their mellowness is dependent on the 'temperate' English climate, the moral being 'never demand more from the spirit than the flesh has the power to give, and never . . . seek to put asunder those whom God or Nature has joined together, for instance, the Englishman and his weather.' Elsewhere he is more candid: 'An Englishman of this type resented our devotion to English literature as a sort of illicit attention to his wife, whore( he himself was neglecting for his mistress, sport.' He is similarly frank on 'the dreariness of the public behaviour of the English people', to which we can only admit, while adding the rider that our public behaviour shows none of that callousness which one notices in some parts of the East. But if Mr. Chaudhuri sounds rather like a much better educated Gulliver, he is certainly a much milder one, and we are likely to find the greater part of his book extremely gratifying. His responses to English architecture and landscape are impressively fresh, though in no way over- simple, and reinforced by authoritative reference to other European scenes as well as
to the Indian. And despite his remark that 'of all the things I saw in England contemporary conditions were those which interested me least', he is very sound on the Welfare State, the reality of which was particularly clear to him as an Indian. He is not interested in politics and observes a similar lack of interest in the English people at present, remarking of our military preparedness, 'All this is bringing a futile, and not ennobling, tragedy into the life of the English people. What a fine thing their farewell to politics would have been without it Mr. Chaudhuri is less convincing when, towards the end of the book, he asks what the British people, no longer imperial, have to fall back on. As he abhors the creations of our contemporary culture, there remains only our 'historic civilisation'. This—the 'Timeless England' to which Mr. Chaudhuri is devoted —appears, in the aspect of full houses at the Old Vic and Stratford and queues of visitors to Knole, to have over-impressed him as regards its contemporary strength. Is it a job for a grown-up and after all sizeable country? What is our 'national destiny?' he asks. Perhaps not to ask ourselves such a question, and to tease other nations out of putting it to themselves. But I have the feeling that Mr. Chaudhuri wouldn't welcome any theory about an 'international destiny', for he likes his nations to be nations.
D. J. ENRIGHT
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