Profile of Paul Scott on Famous Like Me

Paul Mark Scott (25 March 1920 – 1 March 1978) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet, best known for his monumental tetralogy the Raj Quartet. His novel Staying On won the Booker Prize for 1977.

Early life

Paul Scott was born in Southgate, north London, the younger of two sons. His father, Thomas, was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s and was a commercial artist specialising in furs and lingerie. His mother, Frances, was from south London. In later life Scott differentiated between his mother’s creative drive and his father’s down to earth practicality.

He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School (a private school) but was forced to leave suddenly, and without any qualifications, when 14, at a time that his father’s business was in severe financial difficulty. He worked as an accounts clerk for CT Payne and took evening classes in bookkeeping. He started writing poetry in his spare time. It was in this environment that he came to understand the rigid social divisions of suburban London, so that when he went to British India he had an instinctive familiarity with how it worked.

Military service

He was called up (conscripted) in to the army as a private in early 1940 near the start of World War II and was assigned to Intelligence Corps. He met and married his wife, Penny, in Torquay in 1941.

In 1943 he was posted as an Officer Cadet to India, where he was commissioned. He ended the war as a Captain in the Indian Army Service Corps organizing logistics for the Fourteenth Army’s reconquest of Burma, which had fallen to the Japanese in 1942. Despite being initially appalled by the attitudes of the British, the heat and dust, the disease and poverty and the sheer numbers of people, he, like so many others, fell deeply in love with India.

After demobilisation in 1946 he was employed as an accountant for two small publishing houses and remained until 1950. His two daughters (Carol and Sally) were born in 1947 and 1948. In 1950 Scott moved to the literary agent Pearn Pollinger and Higham (later to be known as David Higham Associates) and subsequently became a director. Whilst there he was responsible for representing Arthur C Clarke, Morris West, M M Kaye and Muriel Spark amongst others.

Writing career

Scott published his first novel Johnny Sahib in 1952 (after seventeen rejections) to modest success. He continued to write and have published a novel every year or so and in 1960 decided to try to survive as a full time author.

His novels until this time had tended to draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces with strong sub texts of uneasy relationships between male friends or brothers. However in 1962, Birds of Paradise, which continued these themes, was not a success and Scott recognised that he had to look for alternative sources of inspiration. His next two novels, The Bender and The Corrida at San Feliu, are a clear attempt to experiment with new forms and locales. However neither was successful, either financially or artistically.

Scott flew to India in 1964 to see old friends and recharge his batteries. Artistically he was drained and felt a failure, feelings that were reinforced by being financially desperate and physically weak. It was, as we now know, self evidently successful but did not appear so at the time. Scott had suffered from amoebic dysentery since serving in India and had managed to handle it by what his biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes as “alarming” quantities of alcohol. The condition was exacerbated by the visit and he had to undergo painful and debilitating treatment.

In June 1964 he started to write The Jewel in the Crown, the first novel in what was to become the Raj Quartet. It was published in 1966 to minor and muted enthusiasm. The remaining novels in the sequence were published over the next nine years – The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and The Division of the Spoils (1974). Scott wrote in relative isolation and only visited India twice during the genesis of the Raj Quartet. He worked in an upstairs room at his home in Hampstead overlooking the garden and Hampstead Garden Suburb woodland – a far view from Mayapore. He supplemented his earnings from his books with writing reviews for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and Country Life.

In 1976 and 1977 he was visiting Professor at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. His coda to the Raj Quartet, Staying On, was published in 1977 just before his second visit. Soon after its publication, and while he was in Tulsa, Scott was diagnosed with cancer.

At the time of their publication, the Raj Quartet were, individually and collectively, received with little enthusiasm. Only Staying On achieved success with the award of the Booker Prize in 1977. Sadly Scott was too ill to attend the presentation in November. He died at the Middlesex Hospital, London on 1 March 1978.

Scott stated that “For me, the British Raj is an extended metaphor [and] I don’t think a writer chooses his metaphors. They choose him.” From his earliest experiences in north London, he felt himself an outsider in his own country. As his biographer comments, “Probably only an outsider could have commanded the long, lucid perspectives he brought to bear on the end of the British raj, exploring with passionate, concentrated attention a subject still generally treated as taboo, or fit only for historical romance and adventure stories. However Scott saw things other people would sooner not see, and he looked too close for comfort. His was a bleak, stern, prophetic vision and, like Forster's, it has come to seem steadily more accurate with time.”

The Jewel in the Crown has as its heart a confrontation between Hari Kumar, the young liberal, and the police superintendent Ronald Merrick who pursues and seeks to crush him. Critics have seen this as being fundamentally drawn from Scott’s own deeply divided bisexual nature with Kumar standing for everything that was young, bright, looking to the future that had been brutally crushed in Scott’s own youth. Was Merrick, a repressed homosexual with authoritarian leanings and an arrogant sense of his own racial standing a portrait of himself as he now existed or is it drawn from the strong authority figure in his life – his mother? Whatever the well of inspiration the result is widely seen as a substantial, and to date definitive, exploration of the underbelly of the Raj in India.

In 1980 Granada Television filmed Staying On, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson as Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, famously advertised at the time as “Reunited for the first time since Brief Encounter”. The success of its first showing on British television in December 1980 encouraged Granada Television to embark on the much greater project of making The Raj Quartet into a major fourteen part television series known as The Jewel in the Crown first broadcast in the UK in early 1984. In 2001 the British Film Institute voted it as 22nd in the all time best British television programmes. It has also been adapted as a 9-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation under its original title in 2005.

Sources

H. Spurling, Paul Scott: a life; Hutchinson, London (1990)

External links

• Paul Scott Collection at Tulsa University, Oklahoma
• Paul Scott Collection at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center University of Texas at Austin,

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