A Writer's Notebook

  1937

  Sincerity in literary judgments is terribly hard to achieve. It is almost impossible to form one’s own opinion of a work without being to some small extent at least influenced by critical or common opinion. What adds to the difficulty is that with regard to works of acknowledged greatness common opinion has given them some part of their greatness. To try to read a poem with the eyes of the first reader who read it is like trying to see a landscape without the atmosphere that clothes it.

  Much of Henry James is what the French, whom he so extravagantly admired, dismiss with a shrug of the shoulders as littérature. He did not live, he observed life from a window, and too often was inclined to content himself with no more than what his friends told him they saw when they looked out of a window. But what can you know of life unless you have lived it? Something escapes you unless you have been an actor in the tragi-comedy. In the end the point of Henry James is neither his artistry nor his seriousness, but his personality, and this was curious and charming and a trifle absurd.

  Would anyone think he could get a useful knowledge of motor-cars by reading a novel of which the scene was a motor works and the characters car-manufacturers; and do you think the soul of man is less complicated than the engine of a car?

  Poe supposed he could obtain novelty and originality by taking thought. He was wrong. The only way to be new is constantly to change yourself, and the only way to be original is to increase, enlarge, deepen your own personality.

  Give us this day our daily bread, the devout pray. One would have thought it was an insult to a benign and omnipotent being to beg him for the bare necessities of life. When we treat our neighbour with common civility it is no favour we grant him; it is his right.

  Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

  There are books that are at once excellent and boring. Those that at once leap to the mind are Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s Essays, George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Landor’s Dialogues. Is it a chance that they belong very much to the same period?

  The writer should have a distinguished and varied culture, but he probably errs when he puts its elements into his work. It is a sign of naïveté to put into a novel your views on evolution, the sonatas of Beethoven, or Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

  Shyness: a mixture of diffidence and conceit.

  He had had so little love when he was small that later it embarrassed him to be loved. It made him feel shy and awkward when someone told him that his nose was good and his eyes mysterious. He did not know what to say when someone paid him a compliment, and a manifestation of affection made him feel a fool.

  Thirty years after. A lined, haggard, sallow face. A boring chatter-box. Stupid gush about her children and her house. Trivial, trivial. Every now and again an arch look that seemed to tell him that she remembered how mad he had been about her. He was ashamed to think that for that fool he had walked up and down the street in which she lived on the chance of meeting her, and had waited in an agony of suspense for the postman’s knock that might bring him a letter from her, and that to sit beside her he had sat through dreary musical comedies and had acted amusement and delight so that she should be pleased with him. For her he had pretended to take interest in actors and actresses, in gossip of the most inane sort; and the worst of it was that he had not only pretended, he really had been interested because she was. However stupidly she talked he was charmed to listen to her. For her he had abased himself to ask for favours that he would have been ashamed to ask for himself.

  Remorse. He was desperately in love with a woman and jealous of another man who was in love with her too. He was an honest and upright man and he prided himself on his integrity. But in his jealousy he played a despicably mean trick on his rival and so disposed of him. He married the woman. But little by little he became obsessed with the beastly, dishonourable thing he had done. It tortured him. He came to hate the woman for whose sake he had done it.

  Two men were sitting in the lounge of a hotel at Worthing and they were discussing a murder that the papers were full of. A man, sitting near them, listened to their conversation, and asked if he might join them. He sat down and ordered drinks. He told them what he thought of the murder they had been talking about. “It’s the motive you’ve got to go for,” he said. “When once you’ve found the motive it’s only a question of time before you find the murderer.” Then without warning, as though he were saying something quite ordinary, he said: “I don’t mind telling you that I committed a murder once.” He told them that he had done it just for fun and he described the thrill. Since there was no motive for it he knew he could never be discovered. “Someone I’d never seen in my life,” he said. He finished his drink, got up, nodded to them and went out through the swing doors. He left them flabbergasted.

  1938

  India. Major C. He was a tall, broad-built man, with close-cropped brown hair. It was hard to guess his age. He might not have been more than thirty-five and he might have been fifty. He had a clean-shaven face, rather large, but with small features and a short blunt nose. He had an expression of peaceful happiness. He spoke slowly, but fluently, in rather a loud voice. He smiled a great deal and laughed frequently. His manner was cheerful. He was very polite and anxious to do what he could to be pleasant. It was hard to tell if he was intelligent or a little stupid. He was certainly not widely read. There was something of the boy scout about him which was disconcerting; he was childishly pleased when the Yogi came into his room and sat on his chair, and he told me several times that he enjoyed privileges that no other inmate of the Ashrama was accorded. His attitude was a little like that of the schoolboy inclined to boast because he is in the headmaster’s favour.

  He has been living at the Ashrama for two years and by special favour has been allowed to build his own little shack with a kitchen behind it. He has his own cook. He does not eat meat or fish or eggs, but has a store of tinned goods from Madras to help out with the curry and curds that his cook prepares for him. He drinks nothing but tea.

  In his one room is a pallet bed, a table, an arm-chair and another chair, a small bookcase in which are perhaps fifty books. They are translations of works on the Vedanta, the Upanishads and so forth, books by the Yogi and books about him. On the walls are a few small pictures, one of Leonardo’s Christ, a few, hideous, of Vishnu, cheap coloured prints and a photograph of the Yogi. The walls are painted green. On the floor a rattan mat.

  He wears a sort of Chinese coat and Chinese trousers of white cotton and goes barefoot.

  He has an intense adoration for the Yogi and says that he looks upon him as the greatest spiritual figure that the world has known since Christ.

  He is somewhat reticent about his past. He said he had no one close to him in England and had travelled a great deal in years gone by, but now, having arrived there, he had reached his goal and would travel no more. He said that he had found peace and (over and over again) that the presence and the sight of the Yogi gave him a spiritual serenity which was beyond all price. I asked him how he spent his day. In reading, he said, taking his exercise (he has a push-bike and cycles regularly eight miles a day), and in meditation. He spent many hours a day sitting in the hall with the Yogi, though often he did not speak more than a few words to him in a week. But he was a strong man in the prime of life, and I asked him whether his natural energy had sufficient outlet. He said that he was fortunate in that he was one of the few persons who had a real desire and liking for meditation; and that he had always practised it. He added that meditation was a strenuous exercise and after spending some hours in it one was physically exhausted and had to lie down and rest. But I could not get from him exactly what he meant by meditation. I could not understand if he was actively thinking of a certain sub
ject. When I put before him the Jesuit contemplation of a particular theme, such as the Passion, he said it was not that at all. He said his effort was to realise the self in him in communion with the universal self, to separate the I that thinks from the self, for that, he said, is the infinite. When he had done that, and really seen, or felt, that the divine in himself was part of the infinite divine he would have reached enlightenment. He was of a mind to stay there till this happened or till the Yogi died.

  It was hard to make up one’s mind what sort of a man he was. He was certainly very happy. I had thought to discover something of the truth about him from what he looked like and from what he said, but I came away completely puzzled.

  Hyderabad. Passing along the road by car to Hyderabad from Bida I saw a large crowd, the usual Indian crowd, women in bright saris, men in dhoties, ox wagons, cows—I thought it was a small market, but my bearer told me it was the place where a healer lived and all these people were gathered from the surrounding villages to have their ills cured and women, if they were sterile, to be made fertile. I asked if I could go and see him. The driver told me he was a well-to-do contractor in Hyderabad who had felt the call to live the life of a Sadhu and had given over his fortune to his family and settled in that spot. He lived under a peepul tree and tended a small wayside shrine to Siva. We made our way through the crowd. There must have been three or four hundred people. Sick men were lying on the ground. There were women with sick children in their arms. When we got near the shrine the healer came forward and greeted us by humbly doing obeisance to us. He was dressed in a grubby white turban, a shirt without a collar, the ends hanging over his grubby dhoty. He had silver ear-rings in his ears. He was clean-shaven, but for a short stubble of grey moustache. Small, perky, quick in his movements, gay, bustling and cheerful. He looked not at all like a saint but like any wide-awake, active shopkeeper in the bazaar. You would have thought him an obvious fake, but for the fact that he had given up his house and belongings and accepted nothing for his ministrations. He lives on the rice and fruit that people bring him and gives away everything he does not need. He insisted on giving us some coconuts. He heals by saying a prayer to the god in his shrine and by the laying on of hands. I was much embarrassed when as I was leaving he asked me to give him a blessing. I told him I was not the proper person to do that, but he was insistent, and so, feeling hypocritical and very foolish, with all those people looking on, I did what he wanted.

  The Sufi. He lived in a little house in a poor quarter of Hyderabad. It was almost a slum. There was a veranda, and we waited there to find out from our guide if the holy man would see us. Taking off our shoes before we entered, we were ushered into a smallish room, divided into two, as far as I could see, by mosquito-netting, and I surmised that the part we could not see was his sleeping apartment. The greater part of the space in which we sat was taken up by a sort of dais or platform, about eighteen inches from the ground, covered with cheap rugs, and on these was a rattan mat on which the saint sat. He was very old, very thin, with a ragged white beard; he wore a fez, a white cotton coat and white trousers; and his feet were bare. His eyes looked very large in the extreme thinness of his face in which the cheek-bones stood out above the sunken cheeks. He had long beautiful hands, but fleshless, and his gestures were profuse, graceful and expressive. Though so old and so frail, he seemed full of energy and talked with animation. He was cheerful. The expression of his face was very sweet and kindly. I do not know that he said anything remarkable. I know nothing of Sufism and so perhaps was more surprised than I should have been to hear him speak of the self and the supreme self in the same strain as the Hindu teachers speak. The impression I carried away was of a very dear, tender, kindly, charitable and tolerant old man.

  A Holy Man. Sir Akbar Hydari sent his car to fetch him and at the appointed hour he entered the room. He was richly dressed and wore a great scarlet cloak of fine material. He was a middle-aged man, tall, of a handsome presence, and his manner was courtly. He spoke no English and Sir Akbar acted as interpreter. He talked fluently and well and his voice was sonorous. He said the things I had heard from others twenty times before. That is the worst of the Indian thinkers, they say the same things in the same words, and though you feel that it should not make you restive, for if they possess the truth, as they are convinced they do, and if the truth is one and indivisible, it is natural enough that they should repeat it like parrots, there is no denying the fact that it is irksome to listen interminably to the same statements. You wish at least they could think of other metaphors, similes, illustrations than those of the Upanishads. Your heart sinks when you hear again the one about the snake and the rope. Custom has too much staled it.

  I asked him how I could acquire the power of meditation. He told me to go into a darkened room, sit on the floor cross-legged and fix my eyes on the flame of a candle, emptying my mind of every thought so that it was a complete blank. He said that if I would do that for a quarter of an hour a day I should presently have some extraordinary experiences. “Do it for nine months,” he said, “then come back and I will give you another exercise.”

  That evening I did as he had directed. I took the time before I began. I remained in that state for so long that I thought I must have by far exceeded the quarter of an hour he had prescribed. I looked at my watch. Three minutes had passed. It had seemed an eternity.

  A week or two ago someone related an incident to me with the suggestion that I should write a story on it, and since then I have been thinking it over. I don’t see what to do. The incident is as follows. Two young fellows were working on a tea plantation in the hills and the mail had to be fetched from a good way off so that they only got it at rather long intervals. One of the young fellows, let us call him A., used to get a lot of letters by every mail, ten or twelve and sometimes more, but the other, B., never got one. He used to watch A. enviously as he took his bundle and started to read, he hankered to have a letter, just one letter, and one day, when they were expecting the mail, he said to A.: “Look here, you always have a packet of letters and I never get any. I’ll give you five pounds if you’ll let me have one of yours.” “Right-ho,” said A. and when the mail came in he handed B. his letters and said to him: “Take whichever you like.” B. gave him a five-pound note, looked over the letters, chose one and returned the rest. In the evening, when they were having a whisky and soda after dinner, A. asked casually: “By the way, what was that letter about?” “I’m not going to tell you,” said B. A., somewhat taken aback said: “Well, who was it from?” “That’s my business,” answered B. They had a bit of an argument, but B. stood on his rights and refused to say anything about the letter that he had bought. A. began to fret, and as the weeks went by he did all he could to persuade B. to let him see the letter. B. continued to refuse. At length A., anxious, worried, curious, felt he couldn’t bear it any longer, so he went to B. and said: “Look here, here’s your five pounds, let me have my letter back again.” “Not on your life,” said B. “I bought and paid for it, it’s my letter and I’m not going to give it up.”

  That’s all. I suppose if I belonged to the modern school of story writers, I should write it just as it is and leave it. It goes against the grain with me. I want a story to have form, and I don’t see how you can give it that unless you can bring it to a conclusion that leaves no legitimate room for questioning. But even if you could bring yourself to leave the reader up in the air you don’t want to leave yourself up in the air with him.

  I went to lunch with the heir apparent and his wife, the Prince and Princess of Berar. During luncheon the prince talked to me of my journey. “I suppose you’ve been to Bombay?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered, “I landed there.” “And were you put up for the Yacht Club?” “Yes,” I said. “And are you going to Calcutta?” “Yes.” “I suppose you’ll be put up at the Bengal Club?” “I hope so,” I replied. “Do you know the difference between them?” the prince asked. “No,” said I innocently. “In the Bengal Club at Calc
utta they don’t allow dogs or Indians, but in the Yacht Club at Bombay they don’t mind dogs; it’s only Indians they don’t allow.” I couldn’t for the life of me think of an answer to that then, and I haven’t thought of one since.

  The Swami. He was dressed in the saffron robes of the monk, but pinkish rather than yellow, with a turban of the same colour and a cloak. It looked an unduly hot costume. He wore white socks and very neat brown shoes, rather like dancing pumps. He was a tallish man, inclined to corpulence, with a large fleshy face, handsome shining eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, and a large sensual mouth. He spoke loudly in a resonant voice, which when he lectured was apt to be a trifle rasping. He smiled a great deal. His manner had an unctuous benevolence. He gave you the impression of being more than commonly self-satisfied. He was glad of adulation and fond of talking about himself. I asked him on one occasion whether he didn’t regret the pleasures that men in the world enjoy. “Why should I?” he answered. “I had them all in a previous life.”