Across the Great Divide

Art Malik as Hari Kumar, Susan Wooldridge as Daphne Manners,

and Tim Pigott-Smith as Ronald Merrick

Granada TV, 1984

 

I have recently finished reading The Jewel in the Crown quartet of novels by Paul Scott, which was turned into a magnificent television series in the 1980s by Granada TV. The books are a powerful portrait of the Brits in India becoming ever more British even as their white-knuckled hold on the sub-continent is slowly weakened by war and inevitability.

The core story is set in 1942 in the fictional Indian city of Mayapore and involves a relationship between an English girl, Daphne, and an Anglo-Indian boy, Hari. Daphne is also courted by the local police inspector, Ronald Merrick, whose unassailable belief in the superiority of the white race runs like a toxic stream through the whole story. One evening he tries to warn Daphne about Hari and she gets indignant.

I said... I personally didn’t care what colour people were, and it was obviously only Hari’s colour, the fact he was an Indian that got people’s goat. Ronald said, “That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.” I started getting out of the car. He tried to stop me, and took my hand. He said, “I’ve put it badly. I can’t help it. The whole idea revolts me.”

This was a reminder to me of how long the fear of miscegenation continued in Western society. Obviously segregation continued in the US South until the 1960s, but I had imagined the British as having moved beyond that earlier. But while black GIs were being welcomed in Great Britain during the World War II, at the same time in India many Brits continued to treat Indians – even those who were their social and intellectual equals – as literally untouchable.

This fear of contact between the races was also at play in the Pacific theater during the war years if James Michener is to be believed. His stories were the basis for the musical South Pacific in which good old Nellie Forbush from Little Rock, Arkansas loves the French settler Emile de Becque but rejects his marriage proposal because he’d had a relationship with a Polynesian woman. According to the beliefs with which she’d been raised, this had tainted him and had put him beyond the pale (as it were) as a potential husband. Rodgers and Hammerstein included in the musical a song called You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught that addressed this learned racism.

You've got to be taught
To be Afraid
Of people whose eyes
Are oddly made
And people whose skin
Is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught.

When the show was on tour in the Deep South in the early 1950s, some Georgia legislators reacted by introducing a censorship bill. One of them claimed that “a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life.”

Yet this was an entire century after Alexander Salmon, a white Englishman, fell in love with and married a pure-bred Tahitian woman without a qualm. It made me realize anew just how remarkable that marriage was in its era. Of course Alexander understood discrimination very well himself, having been raised a Jew in London in the years when Charles Dickens was writing the grotesque character of Fagin in Oliver Twist. And he had to take some abuse in Tahiti from visiting Brits like Captain Henry Byam Martin, commander of the HMS Grampus, who called Salmon “a low swindling bankrupt Jew.”

John Brander too was familiar with discrimination because of his illegitimate origins, yet both he and Salmon were both proud to be seen strolling arm in arm with their Polynesian wives not only in Papeete but even in Sydney, San Francisco, and Paris. There were many ways in which these men were remarkable, but this absence of what we would now call racism was one of the most striking. As Paul Scott showed so well in The Jewel in the Crown, even 100 years later the same could not be said of many of their fellow countrymen living in the far flung corners of the world. 

The Circle of Existence

 

In Loving Memory of Pauline Winifred Ward

October 7, 1933 - August 21, 2012

In my youthful ignorance, I used to wonder why so many writers - John Updike and Philip Roth spring to mind - became so obsessed with mortality in their middle age. Well, now I know. After you turn 50, the awareness of your inevitable decay and death becomes inescapable. It’s no longer possible to ignore the fact that life is short and goes by at the speed of a runaway train.  

This undeniable fact is borne in on us middle-aged people by the deterioration and deaths of our elders. They are our forerunners in life – the people who have nurtured us and relished our joys and successes and commiserated with us in our disasters, both large and small. As they vanish, it’s as if a protective ceiling is gone and we’re now exposed to the elements in all their bleakness.

Having lost a very dear aunt last week, I am acutely aware of this phenomenon and have found it echoed in the reactions of my friends and contemporaries. It seems like only yesterday that we were in our 20s while our elders were the age we are now – still vibrant, fully engaged in life, and seemingly indestructible. And yet the 30 or so years since then have gone by almost without us noticing. A decade went by before I got used to writing a new century on the dateline on my checks. Now I wake up in the middle of the night in a panic at the thought that my 60s are only five years away. I want to plant my feet against the dashboard of time and shout Slow down for god’s sake!

What can we do in the face of this daunting reality but seize the day. Smell the roses, take the leap, work through that bucket list. And do whatever makes life worth living – playing golf, making ships in bottles, bungee jumping, or, for those of us so inclined, writing.

For me writing is the only activity I know that has the potential to transcend losses and impermanence and aging. Not only does it give me solace and satisfaction to form an elegant sentence, a flowing paragraph, and a coherent chapter, but it gives me a sense that I am doing what I was designed to do.

Michel Foucault has described Scheherazade’s nightly telling of tales to the Sultan as “the effort... to exclude death from the circle of existence.” So even as I mourn the loss of my incomparable aunt, I am continuing to make up stories – from memory, research, or just my imagination – in the hope of keeping the darkness at bay just a little while longer.

 

An Isle Full of Noises

So the London Olympics are over. Never again in my lifetime will the Olympic rings hang from Tower Bridge, and the knowledge makes me sad. I’d become used to turning on my TV every day to live pictures of my country – the Thames at Eton Dorney for the rowing, Horse Guards Parade for the beach volleyball,  glorious Greenwich Park for the equestrian events. And those crazy Opening and Closing Ceremonies – random, episodic, tongue-in-cheek, iconoclastic, and yet with moments of grandeur and dignity that took my breath away. The forging of the ring in the Industrial Revolution segment, the lighting of that amazing many-petalled Olympic flame, and its even more astounding extinction as a Phoenix rose from its ashes. And the moment above all others for me – understated and weirdly pantomime-y as it was – when Kenneth Branagh dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel spoke the words of Caliban, the misunderstood monster of Shakespeare’s imaginary island in The Tempest:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.

I hadn’t thought much about this year’s Games in advance except to make a mental note not to fly home while it was all going on. But as I saw the images of the city and its environs unfold on my TV screen, I regretted not being there. Not necessarily in the stadium or at any of the other venues, but anywhere in the United Kingdom just to share in that amazing 17-day nationwide celebration. 

I’m sure that my friends in the US have thought me obsessed (if not possessed) as I cheered on Team GB and gloried in its remarkable medal haul. How do you explain to a country that wins everything almost all the time what it’s like to succeed after years and years of disappointment? No men’s champion at Wimbledon since 1936, no football World Cup winner since 1966, only 1 gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics... This is what we’re used to. The expectation of disaster and disillusion. The eternal morning after of the also ran. (Check out this interesting article in Tina Brown’s online magazine, The Daily Beast, on this very aspect of the British character.)

It’s a pattern that writers know well – the long apprenticeship, the recurring failures, the bursts of hope, and the subsequent false dawns. It makes some cynical and bitter and others more determined to succeed against all the odds. Although I have the occasional wobble, I count myself among those who refuse to give up, who think that it’ll all come right in the end. That’s the American in me coming out.  But just for this moment, I stand shoulder to shoulder with my fellow Brits and celebrate a very satisfying and most unusual triumph.

The Emerald Ghost

It’s the season of summer storms on the eastern seaboard. Every day the weather forecast includes a thunderstorm warning for our area, and it’s anyone’s guess if one will materialize over our particular neighborhood. Almost every day at some point the clouds gather and distant rumbles slowly get louder. Then it’s time to disconnect my laptop, make sure the windows are closed, and bring my hanging petunia plants inside. Sometimes it’s a false alarm. After little more than a brief shower, the sun comes out again and steams the faint moisture from the tarmac. But often we find we’re in for preview of Armageddon, with sheets of lightning, deafening explosions of thunder, and rain so torrential it turns our street into a river.

When these storms are accompanied by damaging gusts of wind as in the recent derecho or last year’s Hurricane Irene, it is best to stay away from the top floor of the house. After one freakishly sudden storm a couple of years ago, the entire giant oak tree at the corner of our road had fallen, barely missing our neighbors’ house. As with many urban trees, its root ball had been too small, so the violent wind was able to knock down that 60-foot tree like a skittle. And of course in the wake of these storms with painful regularity we lose power, often for several days, leaving us with no phone, no internet, no fridge, and, worst of all in the heat of a Washington summer, no air conditioning or even a fan. It’s at those times when it becomes completely clear why Washington DC used to be considered a hardship posting in the diplomatic world.

This poem by Emily Dickinson expresses the end-of-the world quality that these storms can have and how extraordinary it can feel to look around after it’s all over and see how much has survived.
 
There came a Wind like a Bugle

There came a Wind like a Bugle-
It quivered through the Grass
And a Green Chill upon the Heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the Windows and the Doors
As from an Emerald Ghost-
The Doom's electric Moccasin
That very instant passed-
On a strange Mob of panting Trees
And Fences fled away
And Rivers where the Houses ran
Those looked that lived-that Day-
The Bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings told-
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the World!

On the Dock of the Bay

I’ve just returned home after a long weekend at a house on the Chesapeake Bay. This is the fourth or fifth time that my friend Jan and I have had the opportunity to borrow this house for a writing retreat, and every time we amaze ourselves with how much work we get done. 

The house sits on a bluff overlooking the place where the Susquehanna River enters the head of the Chesapeake Bay. It has been in the same family for over 70 years. Two generations were raised here – a son and daughter who each in turn had a daughter and a son ‒ and pictures of them are in every room. I am a fortunate friend of this generous family and have met many of its members, including the patriarch and matriarch, both now sadly gone to their maker. Two years ago, Mike and I were privileged to be present when their granddaughter got married under the holly trees overlooking the water. 

There’s a plaque embedded on the lawn that is engraved with this quote from the Rudyard Kipling poem, Sussex:

“God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove, Beloved over all.”

The views across the tidal Chesapeake are both grand and profoundly restful. At low tide kayakers negotiate the shallow channels, and long lines of seagulls stand along sand bars far out in the bay. Closer to shore, great egrets stalk the barely submerged mudflats on their long black legs, looking like they’re walking on water. High tide brings out the jet skiers from the nearby marina who zip and roar across the water, which is fun to watch.

When I look up from the sunroom where I work, I can see geese stalking the steep hill that dips down to the water, grazing on grass and fallen apples. And just beyond the water’s edge, an osprey nest sits on a platform. On our various visits over the last few years, Jan and I have seen the ospreys in mating season, as they tended their eggs, and as they nurtured their chicks. This time we watched as they squabbled over a fish with their adolescent offspring who seemed to be on the verge of leaving home to create his own family next spring. Ah, the cycle of life. A telescope in the sunroom is trained on the nest, so we were able to watch every move the ospreys made. Sometimes one of the powerful-looking birds would turn its head and look straight at the telescope with its yellow-hazel eyes as if to say, “I know you’re there.”

There is no Internet access at the house on the water. So my days at the computer were disturbed only by the clink of ropes against fiberglass masts in the marina and the occasional mysterious boom from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to the south. When I looked up from my laptop, the weather had often changed so completely that I could no longer see the far shore of the bay. 

The peace and lack of distractions meant that my mind was free to bury itself in the siege of the town of Kimberley in South Africa during the Boer War or in the rhythms of the English city of Nottingham in 1923, the settings of the two chapters of Albion’s Millennium I was writing. Daily life being what it is, I rarely get the chance to immerse myself so completely in the world I’m creating, but the house on the bay gives me that opportunity every time and I relish it.

In the evenings Jan and I relaxed, had dinner and some wine, and talked about what we'd each worked on that day. This time we were only able to get away for 3½ days, but it was balm to our souls, particularly for me as I’d had no time to write anything other than blog posts for a very long time. So those days in the house on the bay were a gift beyond price, and my gratitude to the givers is profound. All writers should be lucky enough to have such friends.

 

A Place of Extremes

Sun and rain clouds over Moorea on the ferry to Tahiti, December 2007

Here in the Washington D.C. area we have just emerged from the grip of a brutal heat wave with temperatures above 100 degrees F and sky-high humidity. Meanwhile, my other country across the Atlantic has had the wettest June since records began with no end to the deluge in sight.

Both kinds of extreme weather are hard to handle while you’re living through them, but both can be a powerful atmospheric force in fiction. For sheer tropical heat, you can’t beat the last section of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust when Tony Last goes on an expedition to the Brazilian jungle to try to forget his cheating wife. And for a good British drenching rain, there is the passage from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations describing the wretched weather on the night that Magwitch comes back into Pip’s life “...stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind.”

My own fiction has ranged from the cold incessant rain of Belfast in The Province of the Imagination:

As she had expected, the cemetery seemed to be deserted. She paused after locking the car to turn up her collar, savoring the chance to be away from inquisitive eyes. There was a light in the window of the lodge by the car park, and Sandie imagined a pair of gravediggers straight out of Shakespeare brewing up a pot of tea. Who would want to be out digging graves in this eternal, bone-crushing damp, she thought as she walked through the wrought-iron gates. It was drizzling, but she had deliberately left the umbrella in the car. She felt wet both inside and out, drenched to the core. The fine drizzle clung to the ends of her hair like a bridal veil.

.....to the furnace-like temperatures of the India plains in the first book of Albion’s Millennium: 

The horizon was already blurry with heat and each step of his horse's hooves kicked up a puff of terracotta-coloured earth. He rode past scrubby bushes with leaves caked in red dust, springing out of the bare rock of the ridges that broke the surface of the plain. Ahead of him, swirls of dusts would arise and sink, stirred up by nothing that was visible to the naked eye. In the distance, he could just see the hazy outlines of the great swathes of rock of the Amarapuna Hills like a row of sleeping elephants, their hides ranging from grey to dun to ochre and then to almost amber as the sun slowly encroached across them. Vultures circled around high above on some bare wisp of breeze that could not be felt at ground level. Makepeace felt sweat pool inside his hat and roll down his back and soak into the waistband of his jodhpurs. There were dark patches on his horse's hide. The cicadas were so loud it seemed like the earth itself was making noise, a hissing and rattling that crescendoed to the pitch of a scream before subsiding only to begin all over again.

But only in Tahiti in the rainy season have I ever experienced both kinds of weather in the exact same place and time – scorching heat, soup-like humidity, and then torrential, monsoon-like rain that felt both hot and cold on the skin. Thus did the extremes of my two Midatlantic climates come together with a vengeance in the far reaches of the South Pacific. 

The Wild Nights of June

Die Jungfrau (The Maiden) by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Before the lovely month of June is over with its steamy days and firefly nights, I want to put in a plug for a wonderful novel called Centuries of June. Full disclosure requires me to tell you that the author, Keith Donohue, is a friend and neighbor and that I once profiled him for Bethesda Magazine. But that is neither here nor there when it comes to my admiration for this book. Keith was already the author of two remarkable earlier novels, Angels of Destruction and the bestselling The Stolen Child, so much was expected of novel no. 3 – and much was delivered. Reviewers have called it “vivid,” “ambitious,” “impressive,” and a “tour de force.” 

Be prepared for something that’s unlike anything you’ve ever read before. The Washington Post called it “part ghost story, part psychological mystery, and part vaudeville show,” and that’s just a taste of how the book refuses to be pigeonholed.

Waking up at exactly 4.52am on a warm June night, the narrator pads his way to the bathroom, falls and smacks his head open. When he recovers enough to sit up, he discovers an old man who could be his long-dead father – or maybe Samuel Beckett – sitting on the edge of the tub. And it gets curiouser and curiouser from there.

When the narrator leaves the bathroom to fetch his strange guest a glass of whiskey, he pauses at the top of the stairs, thinking he hears a sigh “so delicate it may not have been a sound at all, but only the thought or memory of a whisper from some other point in time and some space beyond the walls or perhaps within the walls themselves. I could not tell whence it came, so I delayed my trip downstairs and sought its source.” And he opens the door to the spare room and finds eight naked maidens entwined on the bed.

“They appeared at once and altogether, a floating cloud, flower and flesh, jumbling of limbs, hands, a bare breast, the curve of a hip, a half-dozen bare arms, skin and hair of assorted hues, some beribboned with garlands, others loose and unbound. Lips, faces at odd, unnatural angles. Eight women in a tangle, pretzeling bodies at rest. All but one of their faces were turned my way. One pair of eyes opened. Another blinked in my direction. The patterns on the blankets shimmered like colored glass in a kaleidoscope, stirring to life. The colors moved like a wave, the blankets parted like the sea. Another woman cracked alert and stared at me, caressed the shoulder of her neighbor as if to wake her, and I stepped back from the threshold and quickly shut the door. Someone sighed again, but I was not sure if this time it was not me.”

Now who wouldn’t want to find out what that was all about?

One by one the women show up in the bathroom and regale the narrator and the strange old man with their stories, which are witty, moving, disconcerting, sexy and everything in between. Like a Hydra-headed Scheherazade, they lead the men - and us - on a feminist romp through centuries of American history. And between each story, we return to the magical bathroom where the time is always 4.52am, the space is never too small for its ever-expanding population, and we become increasingly, uneasily aware that some sort of reckoning is in store for the mild-mannered narrator.

The last half dozen pages of “Centuries of June” are some of the finest and most moving I have ever read, and I hope that one day I manage to write anything half as good. As the firefly dusks give way to the hot nights of the cicadas, go buy this book and let yourself be transported.