Apart from the two short story collections by two men from America and England, or rather Wales, from the middle of the last century, I also in the weeks between my two Indian trips read a couple of novels by ladies of an earlier period. One of them has claims to be a classic of sorts, and I had long known the name, The Story of an African Farm. But I had thought of it as a sort of celebration of the African countryside, on the lines of Karen Blixen’s work, so I was surprised to find that it was an intensely human story, about children growing up oppressed and poverty stricken in a remote country farm in South Africa.
It is also intensely feminist, and the principal character Lyndall is anxious to affirm her identity but flounders between emotions and ideals in trying to achieve this. She is tough and cannot be bullied by the step-mother of her cousin, a caricatured Dutch woman who falls prey to the wiles of a tramp who tries to marry her but is finally thrown out when he tries to seduce her niece too. The step-daughter meanwhile endures all trials, including the transfer of the love of their tenant to her cousin.
Involved with them are a German who the tramp bullies, and his son, who is bullied too but, evidently also a portrayal of Schreiner’s aspirations, also endures, also in love with Lyndall. Both of them die prematurely, leaving the tenant and the cousin to jog on together. But what seems Grand Guignol stuff is relieved by the intensity of the feelings that are portrayed, with what for the 19th century in which the book was written would have been unusual reflections on the existence of God and the virtues of the scriptures.
Very different from this was A Spy of Napoleon by Baroness Orczy of Scarlet Pimpernel fame. I had not read her stuff for years, and had indeed left behind most of the books by her that I had found at Roshanara, but I thought I should try a couple again. The first was not a Pimpernel book at all, and the Napoleon of the title was not the great man but rather his nephew who was elected President and then made himself Emperor in the middle of the 19th century. The spy is a glamorous dancer who loves an aristocrat who is exiled, after suspicion of being involved in the attempt by a good friend to kill Napoleon. He is let off only because he agrees to marry the lady – with whom he is in love – but then leave the country as though dead, while she pursues a brilliant career as his widow, which gives her entry to aristocratic houses in pursuit of treachery.
All very exciting, if entirely implausible, and the descriptions of the torture of the young man, and his angst in Geneva while in exile, trying to get news of his beloved – who is of course in love with him too, but terrified of her spymaster – are gripping.
Having started this series two weeks ago, I substituted last week a review of a book I read recently, since it was extremely topical. Now, in starting on this new series, I will look first not at recent reading, but at a long ago book read when I visited Indonesia way back in 2005. I stayed with the Australian ambassador there, Peter Rowe, who had become a great friend when he was Australian High Commission in Sri Lanka in the last years of the last century.
I saw him twice that year, spending delightful days in his palatial residence in Jakarta, but also travelling to different islands, Sumatra and Kalimantan in April and Bali and Sulawesi in August. Most of these journeys were on my own, but the Bali visit was with Peter, though I went to a less expensive hotel than the grand Sofitel where he stayed. Mine was the very pleasant Bali Holiday Resort, built on the capacious lines which Geoffrey Bawa had introduced to Bali, and though I spent much time with Peter I also did a lot of reading there.
I had hugely enjoyed Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road which had won the Booker Prize in 1995 and in Jakarta I had found at Peter’s the first two books of the trilogy, which looked at the anguish of two of the most important poets of the First World War. But the main character of the first book, Regeneration, was the psychiatrist William Rivers, and much of the novel is set in the Craiglockhart War Hospital where he dealt with the shell shock suffered by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
As important as these three real characters is Barker’s fictional Billy Prior, a working class officer whose sexual antics are a vital part of all three novels in the trilogy. Though his bisexuality comes to the fore in the two latter novels, Regeneration focuses more on his affair with a munitions worker, Sarah, whose boyfriend had been killed early in the war. She finally sleeps with him, a physical consummation contrasted with the diffidence Sassoon feels about his homosexuality, and his concern about the nature of Wilfred Owen’s less inhibited feelings towards him.
These personal concerns are mixed up with the moral concerns Sassoon has about the war. He had protested about it but an official board had deemed him shell shocked, influenced by his friend the real life character Robert Graves. Rivers does not agree with this diagnosis and feels he must return Sassoon to the front, for his objects are humanitarian, and not religious, so he could not be excused as a conscientious objector. In the end however he is saved what would be seen as disgrace on a charge of cowardice, for he feels bad about being safe at Craiglockhart when his fellows are in the battlefield, and decides to get back to affirm solidarity with them.
This resolution contrasts with the resolution of the second novel in the trilogy, The Eye in the Door, which I finished when back in Jakarta, which brings Prior to the fore, and his uncertainty about how to respond to the strong anti-war sentiments of the mother and the husband of a girlfriend of his youth. His renewed involvement with them arises from his having been assigned to an intelligence unit when the mother has been convicted of an assassination attempt on Prime Minister Lloyd George.
At the end of the novel Prior decides to get back to the front, turning down a job in London arranged by his lover, the upper class Captain Manning, who has to cope with blackmail about his homosexuality. Occasionally I wondered whether Barker’s detailed accounts of homosexuality bordered on prurience – as when in the last book of the trilogy, just before his death, Prior buggers a French peasant who had just before been buggered by a German officer – but perhaps this was an essential part of her exposition of the suffering in war of the most vulnerable of all classes.
The pictures are of Barker and Rivers, with the trilogy in between.
Fortunately, though I do not have my computer on which this text is, as I have noted these posts are taken from my Friday Facebook page, so I could copy this. Hence indeed the strange arrangement of the pictures.
In thinking I should also do a little more serious reading I turned again some weeks back to Henry James, whose The Wings of the Dove I wrote about some weeks back on the Coronavirus Reading series that appears on my blog, www.rajiva2lakmahalcolombo.wordpress.com. I did not include this here since mine was a fairly cursory account, given that I had read the book previously, albeit many years ago.,
What I found of James at Roshanara I also thought I had read before, a collection of four short stories. But I find that it was just two of them I remembered, one of them very well. This was ‘Daisy Miller’ which I had been introduced to by Aruna Gooneratne during my undergraduate days in England. She was shocked that I had not read this very easy short story, for we were both aficionados, and she saw herself as Isabel Archer, though I knew I was not generous or innocent enough for Ralph Touchett in the same book, Portrait of a Lady, whom she rather wanted to cast me at.
It was indeed in the Gooneratne home in London, in the upstairs attic room I used, that I finally completed The Golden Bowl which I had found impossible when I tried it as a schoolboy. I wish now I had recalled that, to include it in Places where I read, along with What Maisie Knew and The Portrait, read in Cornwall and Dubrovnik respectively in my first year.
Daisy is perhaps the most bouncy of James’ lovely young American ladies, and the tale is about her relationship with a much more proper young American who finds her fascinating. In the end the disapproval of high society worries the tellingly named Winterbourne when she is very free with Italians, though James also suggests he is having an affair with an older woman, which high society blandly ignores.
The story has a tragic end, unexpected given its even tenor for much of the way, and very moving. It has long stuck in my mind, which was not the case with the other story in the collection which I recalled reading after I had started it. The was ‘The Real Thing’ which was about an artist who lives by illustrating books, and realizes that for portraying the elite working class models are better than the real thing. So a distinguished looking couple who seek their living by posing for what they think they clearly portray have to be disillusioned, and watch a cockney young lady and an Italian ‘bankrupt orange seller’ fulfilling the roles instead.
The latter is yet another example of handsome young men of that country who seem to have been a passion for James. The equivalent in ‘Daisy Miller’ is a trifle vulgar, but Oronte, whom the narrator takes on as a servant when he turns up in tight yellow trousers with yellow stripes looked not only like an Englishman when dressed in his new master’s old clothes, but was well able to represent a public school protagonist.
Equally striking is Miss Churm who in a suitable if rusty costume could look ‘distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous’. Against her and Oronte, the distinguished Major and Mrs Monarch did not stand a chance. And James rather rubs this is, when they end up making tea and washing up, having turned up on the off chance of a sitting, to find Oronte and Miss Churm, who had occasionally made the tea, professionally engaged with the artist. Reading that ending, I quite understood again why my Dean, way back in Cornwall, had described Henry James as a wicked old pussy.
The pictures are of editions of the individual stories in the book, with the younger James in between.
In the last week I have read two collections of short stories culled from Roshanara, by two men who were deemed remarkable writers in their heyday. One was the Welshman Dylan Thomas, who was born the year the First World War started, and died 39 years later during a tour of America. The second was John Updike who was born 18 years after Thomas and died 56 years later, by when he was considered the grand old man of American fiction, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit.
These were for two of his Rabbit novels, the nickname of a man who stood for the perversities of American middle class inadequacies. I do not think I have read any of the Rabbit books, because I found accounts of them tedious, exemplifying what I have long thought the meaningless navel gazing of much recent American fiction, at any rate that produced by men. And while he was widely acclaimed in America, satisfyingly I found that the one exception to the rule I had formulated, Gore Vidal, was scathing about Updike. He claimed never to have ‘taken Updike seriously as a writer’ and criticized his ‘blandness and acceptance of authority in any form’, adding that he ‘describes to no purpose’.
I should however note that many years ago, when I conducted classes for the perverse Advanced Level syllabus which was hopelessly conservative, I thought that Updike’s ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ was at least meaningful to students (as compared for instance with pre-Elizabethan poetry about English complexions). Updike dealt with a pathetic teacher, and I still remember highlighting for students his telling reference to the chap carrying an umbrella, a precaution that marked him as middle-aged, though he was prone to fantasize about his beautiful female students.
If I found Updike vulgar – high points of the first Rabbit tale were, it seems, fellation and masturbation on a wife disinclined for sex after pregnancy – Thomas was simply bonkers. I recall that I had liked some of his poetry, in particular
Do not go gentle into that good night
a poem to his dying father where the title begins a concluding couplet that ends
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
A moving protest against death.
I remember too enjoying his other famous work, ‘Under Milk Wood’, a radio play which reproduces the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing village, Llareggub, which typicall of Thomas’ whimsical playing with words is buggerall spelt backwards.
There his skill with words made sense, recreating the mindsets of a host of characters undistinguished individually but shining in ensemble. Conversely the self obsessed verbal meanderings of a collection of, not stories so much as meditations, entitled ‘A Prospect of the Sea’ seemed perverse when they were not incomprehensible.
This was wholly the case with the first part of the book, which dated from the thirties. The second part had four pieces from after the war which made sense, though as with Updike there seemed no purpose served by their lengthy descriptions of dotty situations, a men’s drinking party for instance, or two friends looking through a window at a lady they have followed randomly to her house – though there is some amusement in them being identified by a spirit the lady and her mother summon in a séance.
And one of these latter pieces was a take off of what it takes to be a successful poet, where the absurdities of asserting one’s creativity in the period between the wars involved verbiage that strikingly recalled the absurdities of Thomas’ thirties prose.
Instead of a post in the usual series, I reproduce my review of a book on education that appeared in the Daily News today. I do this because coincidentally the post about my travels on work which appears today on my regular blog http://www.rajivawijesinha.wordpress.com deals with this period, and in particular about how Ranil Wickremesinghe tried to destroy the English medium initiative which Tara de Mel and I had started a few months before he came into power.
Tara de Mel, who was the moving spirit behind educational reforms in the late nineties, has finally broken her long silence about this and produced a fascinating account of what she tried to do, and what went wrong. It covers a great deal of ground, from primary to university education, taking in the seminal reintroduction of English medium in 2001 plus efforts to provide better schools in the regions while also reforming the corrupt and corrupting effect of the enthronement of National Schools in the national psyche.
Challenges to Change is an interesting read, and provides food for thought in a context in which the need for educational reform is obvious. But it is unlikely to bear fruit without a capable Minister. Ironically this book comes out when we have a Minister who is the target of Tara’s most sustained criticism. She must have had hysterics when recently he declared that ‘The main issue with (students) is that they do not have qualified teachers for mathematics, science and English subjects’, a problem he failed to address despite having been Minister of Education several times over since 2000.
Unfortunately Tara is more diplomatic than she needs to be, and does not name names.
One reason for the failure of Tara’s reforms is that they required a radical change in teacher training, and this she was unable to ensure, given the stranglehold of the Ministry and the National Institute of Education on training and training institutions. This was held at bay briefly when English medium was first introduced, when as Tara puts it I used different personnel (not from Sabaragamuwa as she says but rather from Sri Jayewardenepura mainly), but that was put paid to by Ranil, with only the production of materials continuing for a second year under a lively team under Nirmali Hettiarachchi.
Dr. Tara de Mel
With regard to the seminal reforms in primary education, inspired by the dedicated Kamala Peiris, to whom Tara gives due credit, the failure to reform the curriculum at teacher colleges, and to develop decent materials, proved fatal. A recent attempt by Madhubhashini Ratnayake to introduce more activities has unfortunately not moved as quickly as it should have, though it would have done much to change teacher approaches. And I was able to see way back in 2004 how Tara’s idea of Activity Based Oral English was perverted when a good textbook was replaced when she was out of office by a bad one, with no effort make to train teachers in concentrating on activities and oral practice.
With regard to university education, Tara mentions the IRQUE project which she initiated during her first stint as Secretary, but it was perverted after the change of Government. Without her guidance it degenerated into formulaic approaches and rent-seeking, as when those who ran it later modelled improvements on an Indonesian initiative that was based on private universities seeking to attract students. And the Labour Market Observatory section was hived off, and its results have not been heard of since.
But she has to be congratulated for the establishment of the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology and starting the practice of state encouragement of private institutions, and also for the innovative Uva Wellassa University with its dynamic first Chancellor Chandra Embuldeniya. Though its innovations have slowed down, the spirit continues with his capable disciple who is now Dean of the Management Faculty and has just introduced a multidisciplinary degree programme which Susil does not seem to have registered. Otherwise he would see this as one way forward, instead of complaining that ‘75% of university students used to apply for arts and commerce faculties’. Without Tara to guide him, there is no way he will be able to think outside the box.
One area which Tara has omitted to mention, perhaps because her bete noir stopped it even getting off the ground, was a comprehensive curriculum revision which the Academic Affairs Board of the National Institute of Education undertook in 2005. She had not encouraged this when she came back into the office, thinking there was plenty of time, but then she realized time was running out and asked that it be done immediately. But though much work was done, progress was slowed by the archaic figures Chandrika had appointed, without consulting Tara, to head the National Education Commission and the National Institute of Education.
There is much in Tara’s book about Lakshman Jayatilleka, who headed both those institutions during the nineties, but instead of such a visionary Chandrika gave a job as head of the NEC to Prof. Suraweera, who was not at all amenable to new ideas. Even worse was Jagath Wickramasinghe, another USJP academic, who did not understand secondary education at all and was dominated by his dogmatic underlings at the NIE.
Tara could not supervise everything herself, but she does note some of the admirable officials at the Ministry who supported her. Sadly she does not mention her Deputy there in her first stint, Lalith Weeratunge, for they fell out later because of the hostility that developed between Chandrika and Mahinda Rajapaksa who made Lalith his Secretary when he became Prime Minister in 2004. That was a pity because by then the excellent additional secretaries Tara had had in 2001 had scattered, following the tenure of the appalling Secretary Ranil put in, ignoring for personal reasons the recommendation of those he had appointed to advise him that Lalith be appointed. This reinforces a point I have tried to entrench in constitutions since 2015, that secretaries should not be changed at whim. The continuity that educational reform requires will come only with a permanent secretary or at least statutory provision for handover mechanisms.
There is however another reason for things falling apart in the Ministry in 2005, which led Tara to begging me to reconsider when I resigned since things were not moving forward, adding that there was hardly anyone else she could talk to at the Ministry. Unfortunately talking to her when I most needed her had not been easy from the beginning of the year, for Chandrika, furious when Mahinda Rajapaksa seemed to have handled the tsunami devastation well when she was abroad, took charge of relief herself and appointed task forces of her favourites. Unfortunately Tara was amongst them and so had to dance attendance at President’s house.
She told me, when I informed her that the Ministry was disintegrating without her, that she would make sure she was there every afternoon, but the very next day she was summoned and kept for hours. As she says in the book, Chandrika could not and would not keep to time. That may not be the only reason that the reforms she promoted failed, but it is symptomatic of the lack of professionalism that vitiates public life and makes so sad the failure of Tara’s dedicated efforts.
A couple of years back I had started a series on this blog entitled ‘Places where I read’, which dealt with both places and books. That appeared on Sundays, but just under a year back, when I had contracted coronavirus, I changed to recording what I read in hospital and then during convalescence, a convalescence that has continued until now for my convalescence has been extended.
Parallel to this there is another series on this blog, entitled ‘Coronavirus Reading’, which appears on Thurdays. There is obviously some overlap in subject matter between that and the Sunday series for they both deal with books I have read recently. But I have tried some sort of a differentiation, in that what appears as ‘Convalescent Reading’ on Sundays is reproduced in fact from my personal Facebook page, though a few weeks later, and covers books that I think more significant. The Thursday series has a lot of potboilers, and I will continue with both for I am reading at a pace, having now passed for this year already the 150 books I finished last year.
I put together those books read while I was a schoolboy and then a student in a book called Places where I read, with pictures of Lakmahal and of holiday homes from childhood, and of places I lived in at Oxford, my two colleges as well as lodgings, and then also holiday homes and venues. Producing that book was an enormous pleasure for it brought back many happy memories.
It was the first in what I have termed The Coronavirus Collection, and came out early this year. Then, just last week, the second in the Collection, Places where they sang was published. That too sprang from a series on this blog, which appeared on Tuesdays. Coincidentally the book came out in the week in which the last post in that series appeared.
I was wondering whether to start another series, for this blog is not well patronized. But I know that I am doing this more for my own sentimentality than for the world at large, though I am of course always happy when the records are of interest to others, which happens occasionally.
As I wondered what to write about, it struck me that I had long now neglected long ago books and places. I had been wondering about a sequel to the book Places where I read for there had been much about later reading which was left out of that book. Going back to those pieces, I found too at the end notes on what else could have been included, the places I have noted ranging from Bali to Belize.
So that is what I will record here, though the first few pieces will be of recent reading, since I once again went travelling to new destinations this year, Georgia in July and Rajasthan at the end of that month. I do this because I had already written about some of what I read on those journeys for the Convalescent series. But though they have appeared on the Facebook page, I have not yet come to them on the Sunday blog, and they will now appear here on Thursdays instead of on Sundays in that other series.
The pictures are of the cover of the book published earlier this year, of the library at Lakmahal with the books of three generations, and then two gardens where I read, at Lakmahal and at Standlake where I had a wonderful summer in 1976.
In writing about both Agatha Christie and P G Wodehouse I mentioned the characterization of them by Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists, that they were both frivolous writers who ‘write without thought of posterity, to entertain the reader of the moment’. It is ironic then that the writers he thought wished ‘to make a contribution to literature, Mr Galsworthy, Mr Aldous Huxley, Mrs Woolf’ are much less read today, and indeed the first two are largely forgotten.
That process had begun with the very different social dispensation in England that followed the Second World War, but it was slow and those writers were still taken seriously when I was a schoolboy. I read them all avidly, and much enjoyed them, and even thought of looking at Galsworthy in my doctoral thesis, comparing his presentation of marriage in society with that of Trollope, who was the main subject of my thesis. I may have been affected in this by my memory of Cecil having described him as ‘the socio-logical realist, intent to diagnose society’, though in the end I decided that a comprehensive study of Trollope was matter enough for a thesis.
There is of course more to Galsworthy, as my planned focus on his treatment of marriage indicates, and there is more to Huxley than Cecil indicates in characterizing him as ‘the philosopher, to whom fiction is a vehicle by which to convey his considered – and discouraging – ideas about life (as there is more to Virginial Woolf than being ‘the artist, who uses human life as a carpet-maker uses his coloured skeins to weave a ravishing design’).
I had been impressed by Huxley’s range, the comedy of social manners of his first novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1921, the hortatory science fiction of Brave New World which came out in 1932, the didactically pacific Eyeless in Gaza of 1936. And I still recall much enjoying After many a summer, the satire he published in 1939 after moving to America, about the desperate desire he found for protracting life.
But unlike in the case of the other two, I have no recollection, after that schoolboy fascination, of either opportunity or desire to read Huxley again. But then I saw at Roshanara a novel by him which I remembered having read long ago, his titles having always been striking as the list above indicates.
This was Those Barren Leaves, his third novel, when the comedy of manners was giving way to philosophical reflections. It is set in Italy where the rich Mrs Aldwinkle seeks satisfactions she is not quite sure about, intellectual, artistic and sexual. The cast includes three gentlemen who reflect endlessly on life, two youngsters who ponder about romance, an older man who does get engaged in the book for understandable reasons under very strange circumstances. And there is also a young lord who has a passionate affair with Mrs Aldwinkle’s niece, though neither of them ponder very much about anything.
I did not feel when I had finished the novel that it said very much, for the reflections did not seem to lead anywhere, and the affairs were not very romantic. But I was glad to have read it again, for it had some wonderful details, the Oxford based mother of one of the young men who encouraged Morris Dancing in her garden and fed starving cats in Rome, the young lady novelist who took her cure about what to think from the other young man and had a passionate affair with him which was nevertheless subject to her thirst for material for her writing, the weak-minded English heiress waving to all creatures as she passed them in a car. And though I suspect there will be nothing more memorable about his work, I think it high time I opened again the prize books I bought in those long ago days of schoolboy fascination with David Cecil’s icons of the thirties.
Tired after my Indian adventure, and racked with a cough and cold – with the worry that it was coronavirus, a neurosis I have not got over after I was first laid low with the menace last year – I picked from the crop of Roshanara books another that seemed easy reading, for my first few days back.
It was indeed an immensely easy read, a book called Waifs of Woollamoo, about children coping on their own in the Australian outback when the older generation leave them to join in a gold rush, which seems to have been a feature of life in that country a distant days.
When the book is set is not stated. It was published in 1938 but the story seems to belong to a more distant past, understandably so for it was written by a woman called Bessie Marchant who was born in 1862. This was fascinating enough, but it turned out that she had never left England, but wrote prolifically about children having adventures all over the world, including in Ceylon, other exotic venues being Trinidad and Uruguay and the Seychelles.
Even more remarkable was the fact that generally, though not always, the books were about girls, who coped admirably with difficult situations. In this book the principal character is a girl called Meg, who lived with her uncle, known as the Captain, along with a younger boy who was the orphan son of a friend of his, and a smaller girl who had been abandoned with a nurse.
Cap goes in search of gold, and then two neighbouring families, not knowing Cap has gone, also join the rush thinking their children would be safe in Cap’s charge. Meg feels she cannot send them away, so she provides shelter for all the other children, though the older boy in one family spends most of his time at his homestead, keeping the livestock going. But since his sister is much younger, and then there are two very little boys, it falls to Meg to look after them.
And while the other boy and girl are old enough to work, they need organization, and support with milking cows who are brought over to Woollamoo, so the pair stay over for evening milking, and then the morning too before they take the milk to the creamery and go to work on their farm.
The book was different from the classic tales I knew of boys looking after themselves in the wild, because though there was fun about cooking, in particular about a wild boar they killed, shadows hung over the whole story, the killing by the boar of sheep and also a dog, the rumours of gold freely available fading to stories of how difficult life at the claims was, and of course fears for the missing parents about whom there was no word for ages.
The climax of the story comes with a thunderstorm, when horses panic in the midst of the rescue of one father who has staggered back, but the two girls who found him do manage to get him back to the most distant homestead. And they get word of his wife, and the Captain, who have both been ill.
But they were nursed by a lady called Sister Bessie who does finally bring them back in a ramshackle car. She turns out to be the mother of the abandoned child and that story ends happily with her marrying the Captain. However there is no word about the parents of the family of four, and the boy who has had to grow up so suddenly accepts that they are lost for ever, and he has to bring up the other children on his own. Obviously the bonding of the tough times means he will have help, but it is a startlingly bleak note in what seemed a standard adventure tale for children.
I would love to read more of the dozens of books Bessie Marchant wrote, but it is clear that they are difficult to find, and would be expensive. But I am surprised that so early an exponent of girls’ adventures should not be better known.
More covers of Marchant’s books are depicted here, with their evocative period pictures.
I end this series with what were the last two operas I saw, until in July I was once again at the opera in Tbilisi. But that was too late to figure in the book that is now being printed, though it has taken a long time given paper shortages and other crises in this country.
The first opera here was in Vienna, in the opera house that had first gripped me way back in 1976, but this time I saw just a part for I had a plane to catch. And then there was a moving performance at the Champs Elysee Theatre in Paris, which I had not been to before.
The first two pictures are mine, of that evening in Paris, and then there are pictures of the productions I saw, Figaro and Iphigeneia, followed by the Iphigeneia and Pylades of the latter evening.
Opera with Aide et Action
It was almost exactly a year later that I was able to get to another opera. I had gone through Vienna on my way to Geneva for a meeting of the International Board of Aide et Action, an educational NGO with which I had worked in India and Sri Lanka. I was now the Chair of its South Asia Advisory Board, and was as such a member of the International Board too, and served as its secretary. Unfortunately the French, who had started the organization, but then internationalized it, were now trying to take back control, with a determination in particular to reduce the decision making input of the Africans.
On our last night in Geneva the Africans had thanked me for my efforts to prevent this neocolonialism, and the next morning were as appreciative when we travelled together to the airport. In Vienna I had a day before my flight back, to Thailand where I had been on holiday before Vienna and where I had another night before heading home.
I had a very full day on October 1st, going as I landed to the Albertina which also had a wonderful Monet exhibition. And then in the evening I got a ticket for ‘The Barber of Seville’ at the fabulous opera house which I had so much admired from my first time there in 1976. But I could only stay for the first act, since I wanted to make sure I was at the airport in time for my flight. This was I think the only time I went into an opera knowing I would have to miss some of it, but having seen so little opera in preceding years I thought this would be worthwhile.
In June 2019 I was able to get to an opera in Paris after a very long time. This too was in connection with a meeting of the International Board of Aide et Action, which took place in Paris, the second there for the year, Geneva which was the headquarters of the International body having now been abandoned.
We finished on the 22nd and I had planned to go to Luxembourg the next day for I had not explored the place, having simply passed through on my way to and from the airport when I visited the United States in 1973. But we had the afternoon of the 22nd free in Paris, and I went first to the Cathedral of St. Denis which I had not been to before. I found it much more impressive than I had expected, and then later I wandered through the city, seeing an old church which is supposed to house the relics of St Helena, mother of Constantine, and the nearby redeveloped Les Halles, a mall now rather than a market.
But then I got a ticket for Gluck’s ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’ at the Theatre de Champs-Eysees, an opera and a place I had not known before. It was a starkly impressive production, and the cast sang forcefully, all French youngsters except for a lovely Italian tenor in the role of Pylades.
The theatre is near the Seine, and as I went back to the underground I could see, in the twilight, the Eiffel Tower glowing red across the river. And that was my last evening at the opera before the limitations of coronavirus were imposed on the world.
In the midst of all the age old riches of Roshanara, I did read a very recent book, by Salman Rushdie. His first great work, Midnight’s Children, had impressed me considerably and I found even more remarkable Shame which came out a couple of years later. They covered respectively the recent histories of India and Pakistan, illuminatingly and incisively, the latter book conveying vividly what was going wrong in Pakistan as well as the personalities of the two leaders who had dominated the seventies.
After that it seemed to me Rushdie tailed off, though he was still generally most readable. The Satanic Verses which got him into trouble because of what seemed excessive criticism of the Prophet Mohammed and the origins of Islam, was also intended as a critique of Thatcher’s Britain but that has now been largely forgotten. Then there were a series of novels which moved between India and the West, the more successful it seemed to me the more they were rooted in India, as was The Moor’s Last Sigh. Often they dealt with dramatic contemporary issues, such as racist violence in India in that book and international terrorism in Shalimar the Clown.
But the books seemed to me to become less and less memorable as Rushdie went on and on with his strange mixture of history and fantasy, and I cannot describe any characters in The Enchantress of Florence which I know I have read or in Fury which I thought I had, though looking at its plot I now doubt it.
The same I suspect will be true of Quichotte, his latest novel, which came out in 2019. It has parallels to the story of Miguel Cervantes’ early 17th century classic Don Quixote, and we have a Sancho who is a son the protagonist creates; but Quichotte himself is a creation, of a writer who is called just Brother through much of the book.
He has a sister, as does Quichotte, the latter’s known as the Human Trampoline, who supports worthy causes in New York as Sister supports worthy causes in London. The novel begins with both pairs being in a state of hostility, the brothers having accused the sisters of cheating in dealing with parental property, but in both there is reconciliation which ends up in sourness. Interspersed with all this is drug-dealing, with Quichotte supplying the destructive drugs she craves to his ideal woman, Salma R, the equivalent of Cervantes’ Dulcinea.
Salma seems to be based on a fourth wife I did not know previously Rushdie had. This was the first of Indian origin, an actress and reality tv show hostess, but it was his shortest marriage, ending in 2007 after just three years. Like the fictional Salma, the other characters were born in India which allows Rushdie to introduce murderous racism in America and tokenism in England where Sister is offered the Speakership in the House of Lords. He also suggests in the novel and in the novel within a novel that the world is falling apart, though the ending in which Quichotte guides Salma to another world is vintage Rushdie, for they emerge into the office of their creator, being miniatures which are crushed in its dust.
I am glad I finished the book, which was more than Nirmali Hettiarachchi who had loaned it to me had done. But despite the striking images, there is so much self-indulgence that I do feel sad that the genius we all saw way back in 1981 has dissipated itself.