Next Thing, They'll Be SayingThat There's No Santa Claus

Oh dear, this debunking stuff is getting out of hand.

The correction of misquotations is often a relief. It is good to learn that the Duke of Wellington could not have made the foolish remark that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton"; apart from the absence of evidence, the school's fields were not used for organized sports when he was a schoolboy in the 1780s, and in any case he never played on them. But sometimes it is sad to find that well-remembered sayings--pithy, pungent, and redolent of the speraker--were never uttered, that Oliver Cromwell did not dismiss the Rump Pariament with the words "Take away these baubles," that he never told the painter Peter Lely to depict him "warts and all." These are the historical equivalents to learning that Sherlock Holmes never said "elementary, my dear Watson," or that Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca does not say "Play it again, Sam."

Now comes an even greater shock. ...

That's the excellent David Gilmour in the New York Review of Books, setting us up for the proposition that Henry Stanley never said "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" See Gilmour, "The Restless Conqueror," a review of Tim Jeal's biography of Stanley; NYRB Dec. 6, 2007 at 47.

The Colony and the Nation

Here’s a good pairing: The Ruling Caste (link), by David Gilmour, and English, August (link) by Upamanyu Chatterjee.

Gilmour’s subtitle is : Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, Chatterjee’s is An Indian Story, but it could be called “governing lives in the Indian republic”—governing through the Indian Administrative Service, the successor to Gilmour’s Raj. So, parallel stories, joined and separated by time, as in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

The parallel isn’t quite exact. Gilmour is retailing—and trying to generalize from—a welter of anecdotes that he culled from diaries, family records, and suchlike sources. There’s a great deal of “the personal” in this tapestry. But Chatterjee offers a more conventionally structured novel. You get the general context of misgovernment and squalor, but you also get the piercing particular isolation of one very lonely young man.

Neither Gilmour nor Chatterjee purports to offer a full-scale appraisal, but Gilmour makes his general perspective clear. In a New York Times, William Grimes offers a just summary (link):

Mr. Gilmour concedes that the British ruled by force, not consent. At the same time, the civilians, as members of the Indian Civil Service were known, took a high-minded view of their mission. The duty of the British was, they believed, to rule firmly but fairly, to improve living conditions wherever they were posted and to maintain high standards of integrity. It is a measure of their success that both India and Pakistan adopted the British model for their own civil services after independence.

Chatterjee is less explicit, but it is hard to find much solace in his world of dust, mud and careerism, where nothing much seems to work right (except, perhaps, the hero’s scabrous sense of humor). We are left, then, with a cruel paradox: British rule may have been arrogant and presumptious—but in many respects it may have been better than what followed.

There is the occasional convergence between the two books Example: one thing about the Brits is that they weren’t there to stay: unlike the Brits who went to Canada, to Australia, even to East Africa, the Brits in India all intended to (and most in fact did) return to their little cottage in Surrey. Perhaps surprisingly, a century or more later, one of Chatterjee’s characters finds that in this respect not much has changed. We’re considering “the Club”—the local social club, maintained as an island of solace in a hurricane. The District Collector has lately made an important decision, unaccountable to at least one of the locals:

“Idiot” said Sathe … “He’s messed up the Club. Once it was a good place to have a drink, play billiards and waste time. But he’s cancelled the license—did he tell you that? He wants all the families to come to the Club and chat with him or something. I can’t understand it, this move of his to keep what he calls the non-officials out of the club. It’s like the Raj, natives not allowed. … And in this case the natives of Madna not allowed. You officers are birds of passage, anyway … We are the ones who stay here with the Club. If we want to drink here we should be allowed to.”

— Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August 131
(NYRB Paperback, 2006)

“You officrs are birds of passage … we are the ones who stay…” It’s a complaint uttered at other times and other places by anybody who has to suffer under the ambiguous glories of “administration.”

"Maude, Get the Snaffle!"

I’m back into David Gilmour’s Curzon, which I started last fall and set aside (link). That would be George Nathaniel Curzon (“superior person”), the very model of a high-noon British imperialist. It’s smoothly and gracefully written, and it is full of chilling lessons about the risks and possibilities of empire. It is also, sometimes, simply funny, as in this account of Curzon’s kit list for a trip to Persia:

[A]s Persia had no railway and only two carriageable roads, he would be obliged to travel everywhere on the back of a horse or a mule. Following this experience, he therefore advised later travelers to take, among many other things, two Gladstone bags, an English military swaddle, a snaffle and a two-reined bridle, a Norfolk jacket, towels and a folding indiarubber bath (‘Persians do not wash in our sense of the term’), a revolver, a Cardigan waistcoat and tins of Crosse & Blackwell’s ‘quite excellent’ soup. The most important items, however, were a suit of dress clothes and a large flask which he kept in one of his holsters. Commiserating with a teetotaler who had to ride through Persia, he warned that a traveler would be tempting providence if he did not have some restorative at hand.

--David Gilmour, Curzon 76-7 (Papermac paperback ed. 1995)

“Maude, get the snaffle! We’re off to visit the Shah!”

The Last Leopard, with Pastry and Proust

Over dinner with my friends Michael and Linda, we fell to talking about Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, the celebrated (novelized) biography of his grandfather, the Sicilian prince. It was a happy reminder of David Gilmour's wonderful biography, The Last Leopard (1991)--this of the grandson, not the grandfather. I did an Amazon review which you can find here. I didn't think to include this sample:

Rising at about seven, he would be walking down the Corso Vittrorio Emmanuele toward the center of the city by eight. Turning west at the Via Roma or a little further on at Quattro Canti, he then walked westward until he reached one of his favorite cafes, the Pasticceria del Massimo in Via Ruggero Settimo. Then he had a long breakfast and read one of the books he had brought with him. He ate cakes and pastry with particular pleasure, recalled Francesco Orlando, if he had before him a volume of sixteenth-century French poetry. Once he sat in the Pasticceria for four hours and read a whole Balzac novel at a sitting. . . . Before leaving the Massimo, he bought some more cakes, which he put in his bag, and then wandered off to Flaccovio’s or one of the other bookshops. He felt guilty, however, about buying so many and used to pretend to Licy that he had found them in a sale.

Lampedusa in the crowded streets in mid-morning, recalled Orlando, was a sight difficult to forget: a large bulky figure, very distinct and shabby, his eyes alert and his leather bag always overloaded with books and confectionery which had to last him the rest of the day. Flaccovio had a similar memory of Lampedusa entering his shop not in the least embarrassed by his bag containing courgettes and several volumes of Proust.

Sorry, I didn't save the page number and I don't have the book any more. Gilmour went on to write an admirable biography of Lord Curzon, a bit of a "last leopard" himself; find it here.