The Last Englishmen
Page 35
And, in his dreams, still does.
43 Thurloe Square, South Kensington, London,
January 2002
Wystan Auden’s one visit to India was not a success. He had sulked over the lack of alcohol, the late nights, and indigestible food. During an interminable dance performance hosted by Prime Minister Nehru in his honor, he had walked out in a huff. Sheila didn’t entirely blame him for that. But once, over dinner, she accused her famous brother-in-law of having an antipathy to all things Indian. She went on to pronounce all the Audens hypocrites.
The next day, over John’s objections, Sheila wrote Wystan a note of apology, admitting she’d had too much to drink. After Sheila’s death in January 2002, her daughter found Wystan’s reply in her wallet.
“In vino veritas is not a proposition I believe—one knows and tells a greater part of the truth when one is sober,” Wystan’s letter began, with his customary portentousness. Resentments, however, particularly those regarding immediate family, were more likely to find an outlet under the influence. To his mind, it was just as well they did.
As far as India was concerned Wystan frankly acknowledged he was defensive. “The East is a whole world or several whole worlds, of religion, art, thought, which must be taken seriously, not dabbled in.” Since he wasn’t about to dedicate his all to a study of the East, “the wisest and most respectful course is not to consider it at all.” But he agreed with her about the Audens’ hypocrisy. His father had once ranted about Jews in front of Chester.
“It is not just the Audens, English society as a whole is an in-bred snooty family. Why do you think that I went to America? Try to be patient with us, though, my dear.”
Sheila Bonnerjee Auden had done her best.
CHAPTER 20
Night Falls
Night falls on Kipling’s Grand Trunk Road and all the deserted cantonments.
Night falls on the Murree Hills and the rhododendrons of Simla
Night falls on temple and temple car, on Moghul garden and Moghul tomb,
On jute mill and ashram, on cross and lingam.
On the dreaming sleeper on the railway platform
On the crop watcher on the gimcrack perch,
On the man who has never left the forest
On the last Englishman to leave
LOUIS MACNEICE, “INDIA DIARY”
Tapovan, near Gaumukh, Garhwal District,
May 6, 2015
At the foot of Shivling, not far from the snout of the Gangotri Glacier in the Garhwal Himalaya, is the glacial valley of Tapovan. Tapovan has been home to generations of babas. They live in caves under boulders or in crude stone huts in Shivling’s shadow. Even now three men share this valley. They are Shaivites, following the difficult path of the god Shiva. Each has taken a vow of silence and chastity. The pyramid of granite before them and the glacier beneath them bear witness to their austerities. One baba, a former accountant for a telecommunication firm, has lived there for three years, another for eleven.
Like the mountaineers who trek through here to climb Kedarnath or Kedarnath Dome, these babas are aware of their lineage. They know the names of the saints who preceded them, men who suffered greater privations than a snowbound winter brings for them. One of the saintly was the Nanga Baba. The babas keep his photograph among their few possessions. Just as Shipton and Tilman scaled great heights without nylon tents or Google Earth, the Nanga Baba did not have aviator sunglasses or a wardrobe of orange fleece. He was naked. The palms of his hands and the soles of his feet were as hard as stone. In search of a holy life, the Nanga Baba tested the limits of his body and mind. If asked about him, babas up and down the pilgrimage route speak of him with awe.
Yet despite the mystic powers acquired from self-denial, when a winter storm brought down a heavy snowfall the Nanga Baba was buried alive in his cave. Does the baba who now lives under his rock ever fear the same might happen to him? Does he not wonder about the Nanga Baba’s last thoughts? Alas, he is in Uttarkashi seeing a doctor; there is a sign warning the curious not to enter. An intestinal problem, the former accountant explains, whispering so as not to betray his vow of silence.
Not far from Tapovan, a two-day walk at most, is the mouth of the Rudagaira Valley. After a four-day climb to the top of this valley, one reaches the treacherous pass that John Auden and Juin Singh crossed on June 29, 1939. Though it is higher than any mountain in the Alps, for the Himalaya an 18,000-foot pass is unremarkable. Crossing it involves a steep ascent from the valley floor and a roped descent to the heavily crevassed Khatling Glacier on the far side, in Bhilangna Valley. Nepali porters from Uttarkashi refer to this pass as Udan Col, which they translate as “so windy it will make you fly.” Indian guides with maps know it as Auden’s Col, named after some forgotten Englishman who once crossed it. It is one of the most dangerous passes in all the Garhwal.
In 1945 John Auden was sent to America to learn about hydroelectric projects as part of India’s postwar industrialization. On his way home he passed through London, seeing Eric Shipton at the RGS and delivering a pair of stockings to Nancy. Michael had been dead for five months. Enraged at John’s refusal to sleep with her, bitter that he was alive and Michael was not, Nancy taunted him. Here you are again, she said, standing witless and gutless at the gate of my nunnery. You only went to India because you couldn’t make it in England.
She had used this before to wound him. It still found its mark.
For someone of her intelligence, he wrote her on board a troopship returning him to India, it was narrow-minded to think that England held the sole measure of success. “No country has a monopoly on the first rate,” he said, pointing out that one aspect of Michael’s greatness was the restlessness that took him to the Great Barrier Reef, East Greenland, and India. He admitted that all he could recall of his own youthful dreams was his unrealized desire to climb Everest and to know something of the forces that had raised it. He admitted he had failed in both.
Though he never succeeded in being the first to climb the highest peaks, no other explorer of his time looked as closely at the mountains of the Himalaya and the rocks they were made of as John Auden. Like the most faith-filled pilgrim, he had also walked up the trail to the sacred wellspring of the Ganges and the glacial valley of Tapovan. But it was on mile 158 of the pilgrimage trek to Badrinath that he noted how the appearance of highly metamorphosed and massively dislocated blocks of stone provided surface evidence of an underlying fault deep within the Himalayan crust. He had seen similar dislocations elsewhere along the Himalayan chain, with the same thrusts of high-grade crystalline rocks. While John Auden always resisted the theory of continental drift, he knew in his bones that this fault had something to do with how the Himalaya first arose.
It was an Indian geologist who noticed that though John Auden had focused his conclusions on a single district, he was the first to suggest that the dislocation he mapped and described in his beloved Garhwal arced from west to east down the entire fifteen-hundred-mile length of the Himalayan chain. As indeed it did.
This fault is now known as the Main Central Thrust.
POSTSCRIPT
After a dinner at Minnie and Lindsay Emmerson’s in honor of a rare return of John Auden to Calcutta, Sudhin Datta died peacefully in his sleep on June 25, 1960.
Shaheed Suhrawardy, the “Butcher of Bengal,” became the fifth prime minister of Pakistan, forging a close relationship with the United States before being tossed from office. Some ascribed his early death to poisoning. His brother Shahid wrote many books on art, founded Pakistan PEN, and was posted as Pakistan’s ambassador to Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Vatican. He became a close friend of Nehru.
As a professor of history at Presidency College and Jadavpur University, Susobhan Sarkar nurtured a slate of scholars and intellectuals, among them the future Nobel Prize winner in economics Amartya Sen. Hiren Mukherjee became a member of the Lok Sabha and to the day he died never ceased to admire Joseph Stalin. Apurba Chanda was last seen co
mplaining about the dreadful people who managed to get elected as members to the Calcutta Club.
Noticing a pile of recently disturbed earth in the garden of the Carritt family home in Boars Hill, a vigilant Oxford constable unearthed a uniform case filled with official Government of India papers marked SECRET. In this way MI5 learned that Michael John Carritt, a high-ranking Indian Civil Service officer, had been a Communist spy. Carritt’s ICS pension was promptly revoked. Humphry House dedicated his most celebrated work, The Dickens World, to Sudhin Datta. Reverend Scott eventually fell out with the leaders of the Indian Communist Party, went on to work on behalf of the tribals in Assam and labored to end apartheid in South Africa. At his death, he was known in Namibia as the British Gandhi.
At her death Nancy Sharp was memorialized as one of the most underrated painters of her generation. Her portrait of Louis MacNeice hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Bill Coldstream became director of the Slade. Sonia Brownell married George Orwell.
In 1949 Sir George Schuster heralded the British repayment of sterling balances as evidence of how much England was doing for India, “its own form of a Marshall Plan.”
When the Everest Committee replaced him as leader of the 1953 expedition Eric Shipton had to convince Edmund Hillary not to quit in protest; he ended his life as a scout leader. Bill Tilman, along with the entire crew of his sailing vessel, was lost at sea en route to the Falklands. He was eighty.
Stephen Spender was knighted. Wystan Auden wasn’t.
Winston Churchill may be living still.
NOTES
People
CRA – Constance Rosalie Auden
GAA – George Augustus Auden
JBA – John Bicknell Auden
HH – Humphry House
HM – Hedli MacNeice née Anderson
LM – Louis MacNeice
MC – Michael Carritt
MS – Michael Spender
NS – Nancy Sharp
SB – Sheila Bonnerjee
SD – Sudhindranath Datta
SS – Stephen Spender
WC – William Coldstream
WHA – Wystan Hugh Auden
Archives
PRIVATE ARCHIVES
AMA – Anita Money Archive
John Auden’s daughter correspondence with Sheila Bonnerjee; his 1929 and 1938–1939 journals, the latter of which often contained drafts of letters and cables to Wystan Auden and Sheila. Unpublished writings by Sheila Bonnerjee and John Auden are quoted with the permission of Anita Money.
PSA – Philip Spender Archive
The papers of Michael Spender and Nancy Sharp, including letters, typescripts of unpublished work, photographs, sketchbooks, dream journals, datebooks, as well as Violet Spender’s 1917 journal and a photocopy of Stephen Spender’s novel, “Miss Pangborne.” Unpublished writings by Michael Spender are quoted with the permission of the Estate of Michael Spender.
PUBLIC ARCHIVES
AHCUW American Heritage Center University of Wyoming
H. W. Tilman diaries 1934–1967
BERG Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature; the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
John Bicknell Auden’s papers are part of W. H. Auden Collection. The Berg also has two volumes of Louis MacNeice’s “1947 notes for radio programs about India,” and mimeographed drafts of three radio plays from the BBC 3rd Programme series.
BL British Library
BLASR British Library Archival Sound Recordings, National Life Stories Collection: Artists Lives.
Humphrey Spender Interview.
BL: Mss Eu British Library Private Papers
Papers of John Bicknell Auden, Michael Carritt, George Schuster, Sir Arthur Dash, and Leonard George Pinnell.
BL: IOR British Library, Indian Office Records
IOR/L/PJ/12 Indian Office Records, Public and Judicial Department (Separate) series
Scotland Yard Reports on Michael John Carritt and Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy.
IOR/L/I Indian Office Records Information Department
Ministry of Information records on India and America.
IOR/L/PS India Office Records: Political and Secret Department
Records of frontier expeditions to Everest, Tibet, and Northern India.
IOR/V Official Publications series
The Geological Survey of India and the war.
BOD Special Collections, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Papers of Louis MacNeice, E. R. Dodds, and Sir Isaiah Berlin. Diaries of Erika
Haarmann, Mrs. Michael Spender.
HL Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Christopher Isherwood Papers.
HRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
The Diary of Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Collection.
LHAC The Labour History Archive and Study Center, People’s History Museum, Manchester
Michael Carritt Papers and files relating to the Communist Party of India and the Indian National Congress.
MED The Medmenham Collection Archive in Wyton
Papers of Constance Babington Smith.
NLS National Library of Scotland
“Wings Over Everest: The Story of the Houston–Mt. Everest Flight,” 1934.
PMROK Police Museum and Record Office Kolkata
Special Branch and Intelligence Branch files up to 1947.
PRO Public Record Office at Kew
William Townsend journals, vols. 1–15.
RAFL Royal Air Force Museum, London
Oral histories of the RAF.
TGA Tate Gallery Archive
Papers of William Coldstream and Claude Rogers.
UVASC Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia
Papers of Louis Arthur Johnson.
Prologue
Apart from what he’d read … teeth on edge. MacNeice, “India at First Sight,” 2. BERG.
His one Indian … the man said. MacNeice, The Strings Are False, 209.
Even so, Louis … Our foe. Your friend. MacNeice, “India and Pakistan,” 6. BERG.
Snowbound and … to join up. Dodds, Missing Persons, 136.
For his Cornell University … well informed. LM to NS, March 26, 1940. BOD. MacNeice, Selected Prose, 95.
Though he’d never … they were right. MacNeice, Letters of Louis MacNeice, 366.
Or was freedom simply … his own defeat. MacNeice, Autumn Journal, 4.
“If one’s going to be … mind out of it.” MacNeice, Letters of Louis MacNeice, 319.
Finally, Louis tried … other half lives. MacNeice, “India at First Sight,” 3. BERG.
Perhaps, he thought … into them. LM to NS, March, 13, 1940, MS. Eng. c. 7381. BOD.
He read translations … Muhammad Ali Jinnah. MacNeice, “1947 Notes.” BERG.
The first woman he saw … cut open with a penknife. MacNeice, “India at First Sight,” 29. BERG.
Twenty miles away … or set on fire. Times, August 29, 1947.
They lay in a field hospital … wound in her side. MacNeice, “India at First Sight,” 29. BERG. And LM to HM, August 31, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
The scene … miserably insufficient. LM to HM, September 16, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
From Lahore Louis … Protestants in Ireland. LM to HM, September 6, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
On his arrival in Delhi … turn on each other. LM to HM, August 16, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
The London papers … unfit for self-government. LM to HM, September 16, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
But who were we … bore no responsibility for this? MacNeice, Selected Prose, 195.
Traveling to Srinagar … given it a spine. LM to HM, September 6 and 16, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
A fortune-teller … he most wanted. Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 211.
It was Nancy who had once … poem about Gandhi. LM to NS, January 20, 1940. PSA.
From Srinagar … “The Ascent of C3.” LM to HM, September 6, 1947. Box 64, BOD.
Once upon a time … once been England’s. Isserman, Fallen Giants, 148–49.
With its white mane … heaven and earth. MacNeice, “India at First Sight,” 44. BERG.
1. The Lakes
The path … fell away into the valley. Violet Spender, “1917 Diary,” 2. PSA.
On their arrival on August … would climb. Stephen Spender, “Miss Pangborne,” 196–98. PSA.
“Daddy! What’s that noise … was a war on. Spender, “1917 Diary,” 3. PSA.
Not long after Violet’s death … Skiddaw itself were reciting. Spender, “Miss Pangborne,” 196–98. PSA. World within World, 87.
In the summer of 1917 … off to die in France. Spender, “1917 Diary,” 4. PSA.
“Our laughing children … English blood are wet.” http://femalewarpoets.blogspot.com/2014/04/violet-spender-one-of-her-poems.html.
Harold’s engagement … their little duty. Humphrey Spender interview, BLASR.
One day before he left … out yourself?” Spender, “Miss Pangborne,” 196–98. PSA
In the summer of 1917 … mail important letters. Spender, World within World, 324.
Michael was a demigod. Sutherland, Stephen Spender, 23.
When the sun returned … best corrective.” Spender, “1917 Diary,” 25. PSA. The quotation is from Tagore’s Reminiscences.
She’d ruined her husband’s … all this.” Spender, “Miss Pangborne,” 196–98. PSA.
The mist made it easier … distant prospect. Spender, World within World, 5, 6–7.
When war was … force of five thousand. Harold Spender, The Fire of Life, 193–96.
In weekly Downing Street … publish any of it. Ibid., 207.
Yet when Harold’s idol … call that never came. Ibid., 218.
He would not have a good war. Sutherland, Stephen Spender, 31.
That fall every day … cuffs and collars. Violet Spender, “1917 Diary,” 22. PSA.