Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The flamingo colours of an Indian sunset slant down the plains to crimson a sinking Union Jack. A last bugle sounds somewhere down the Lines. From the rear-verandah of a bungalow, a man in the dress of a low-caste Hindu slips into the dusk of a mango-tree, a man with heavy black hair, lean jaw and eyes brilliantly, curiously blue in so brown a face . . .

     I fell in with the Masters underground five years ago. I had drifted up from an Ian Fleming cell, where they discussed the name of Bond’s public school and the nature of his masochism; not, as I explained to a girl-comrade, that I’d suffered any moral or literary rearmament, it was simply that Commander Fleming’s discovery of the marine terrors of my Caribbean childhood removed the books, for me, from the realm of fantasy. Cryptically, she held out Nightrunners of Bengal, said: ‘Have you read any of this man?’ and in due course inducted me into the Kensington circle to which she had covertly switched loyalties some months earlier. Here discussion ran on the degrees of the Savage family’s hereditary father-fixations and of the implausibilities these had goaded them to in three centuries of Indian empire-building. ‘The best’s the bit in Lotus and the Wind where Lenya Muralev poisons all the Karakum wells.’ ‘Oh, what about the end of Deceivers, when the bees sting the entire Thug gang to death?’

     Our tone was the shameful glee of people confessing childhood indecencies or school crushes on Errol Flynn. It established our adult detachment from our frivolity, paving the way for semi-serious justification. ‘After all, the Thug’s material’s straight out of Sleeman, and the Mutiny detail . . . .’ ‘He’s fair enough to Congress in the last one — the anglophile prince is made pretty ineffectual.’ But these were ritual protestations. We knew our shared guilt: what we were indulging was intellectual vice blacker in our code than any gratified by Bond’s gloating torturers. We prided ourselves we were liberals, leftwing, ‘literary’. It was the bitter winter after Suez, our sodden pamphlets strewed Trafalgar Square. Yet here we were revelling in walnut-stained exploits beyond the Khyber, in last-minute rescues by John Company’s lancers, in the parrot-splendours, raw silks, jewels and regimentals, of a Calcutta Residency ball. We were allowing ourselves vanished, forbidden pleasures, nostalgia for the unrecoverable simplicity of a dead and deadly virtue. For us, the saga of the Savages, heroes and conquistadors of the Raj, was a political pornography in which we savoured the illicit sensualities of imperialism.

     Part of each age is its special unreality: the fantasies and falsifications it permits itself, its comforting myths. Serious literature has to recognize them — both ways, exposing and acknowledging — in comedy, by parody and satire. But they can also build a counter-literature of their own, equivalent in architecture and pretension, a pornography of those instincts the age denies. An era of conscience produces Madame Bovary’s reading; an era of sexuality its Julian Slade; an era of unbelief its Corvo and Charles Morgan. But their solemnity cannot survive the touch of the world; they have to clothe themselves in an insulation of unseriousness, a sheath of comic protection forced on their readers. You have to smile apologetically for owning them, laugh when challenged to defend them, protest their merits with mock-indignation. For theirs is the literature of tolerated pretence: which demands the suspension, not of disbelief, but of belief. That comic protectiveness is the price each period pays for flirting with illusions it knows it cannot have. It is the tone in which an age of agnosticism, insular domesticity and imperial retrenchment can devour the fiction of John Masters.

     It does, because his novels peddle discreetly three things such a generation yearns for. One is the lost simplicity of sexlessness. True, almost every Masters novel ostensibly revolves about a problem of the marriage-bed, thrashed out sweatily and graphically by each Savage heir and his bride beneath their mosquito nets. But the problem is always the same — the pull of the Savage men toward a masculine world of adventure, nomadry and stoicism. At night they seem to surrender to their women, but by dawn, while the sated victrix drowses confidently, they are off on India’s endless, blinding roads, vanished in her bazaars’ swarming anonymity, bound for the frozen solitudes of the Himalayas. It is the world of childhood reading, familiar, uncomplicated; of Henty, Ballantyne, Buchan, Conan Doyle; no more thrilling in its dangers thin in its safety from eroticism.

     But behind this escape to childhood lies an even greater contraband pleasure: the confidence and simplicity of an unquestioned image of virtue. Here again, Masters camouflages his wares with sophistication: each Savage, on the face of it, is a bundle of doubt, uneasy about power, the need to kill, about his own instincts. He is always a slight imperial anachronism, devoted to Indian India, hating the colour-bar, worried over Britain’s right to this sprawling empire. But this only reassures our modern consciences that his moral decisions will be right; and what he chooses is his imperial duty — taming the wild tribes, extending the Raj’s justice, resisting India’s many-armed blue goddesses. He accepts the white man’s burden of authority, and with secret delight we accept his acceptance. For he is the secure old image of the Good Englishman, the last of the golden moustaches: courageous, narrow, merciful and confident that the civilization he brings justifies all shifts of power and conquest. He can conform, for he believes what he conforms to. It is an image irrelevant to us, so inapplicable that to cling to it is moral abdication; but we have no new Good Englishman yet to take his place, and the charm of his certainty is overwhelming.

     We can accept him because Masters presents him with conscientious good faith. He can do so because he himself is one of the last of those Good Englishmen. This is what emerges from his two volumes of autobiography, Bugles and a Tiger and The Road Past Mandalay. (1) Himself descended from a family with five generations of service in India, he went straight at nineteen from a centurion’s schooling (Wellington, Sandhurst) to the goal of countless Newbolt subalterns: the Frontier, the barbarian limit of the Raj which moves in his novels from the Mahratta borders, across Sind, to its resting-place on the Afghan foothills. Bugles and a Tiger told how the Indian Army shaped him: knocking off the corners of individualism, fastening him to his Ghurka regiment so that he could imagine no home but its glassed-in mess 3,000 feet above the Punjab, walls loaded with tusks and prints, tables with Victorian silver; no brothers closer than his smiling, ugly little troops whose favourite term of abuse was ‘O one pubic hair!’ He learned service, the unworried use of subordination and authority, how to kill without question. He can still write without embarrassment of the honour of a soldier’s profession, the honour of war.

     But The Road to Mandalay tells, frankly and movingly, how this training was put to practical test. When the war broke out, Masters was sent to Staff College at Quetta, where he fell in love with the wife of another officer. To have become involved in a divorce would have meant resigning his commission; they took furtive holidays together, finally she left home and bore him a child out of wedlock. Meanwhile, Masters was posted as a major to Wingate’s Chindits, to drop into Burma and harass Japanese communications. The American commander in China, Stilwell, demanded more: he asked for seizure of a strongpoint near the Burma Road, and Masters was ordered with his brigade to hold a hill code-named ‘Blackpool’, a low spur rising above the paddies and jungle. For seventeen days and nights the Japanese bombed, strafed and shelled the position, killing hundreds, wounding more, slowly reducing the redoubt to bloody mud. When he finally gave the dazed order for withdrawal, Masters had also to order the shooting of nineteen stretcher-cases too horribly wounded to be moved. When he was flown out, back to India, he found that the husband of the woman he loved had divorced her, naming him as co-respondent, and headquarters in Delhi wished to know what cause Major Masters might offer why he should not be called on to resign . . .

     The system in fact had broken down, unable to deal with modern love or modern war, as by 1945, faced with the Bengal famine, the rising tide of resistance, the hostility of Hindu and Muslim, the century-old Raj itself was breaking down. Mr Masters prefers to say it had come to an end. His book closes with a brilliant, rousing description of the Indian Army’s advance south at the end of the war from Mandalay:

This was the old Indian Army going down to the attack, for the last time in history . . . As the tanks burst away down the road to Rangoon and the torrent of guns and radios and trucks and machine-guns swirled and roared past in one direction, south, past the bloated Japanese corpses, past the ruins of the empire the Japanese had tried to build here, it took possession of the empire we had built, and in its towering, writhing dust clouds India traced the shape of her own future. Twenty races, a dozen religions, a score of languages passed in those trucks and tanks. When my great-great-grandfather first went to India there had been as many nations; now there was one — India; and he and I and a few thousand others, over two and a half centuries, sometimes with intent, sometimes in miraculous sympathy, sometimes in brutal folly, had made it.

     Of course that is not the whole story. Mr Masters knows it, and wrote Bhowani Junction about Partition, the millions killed in the communal massacres of 1947, the chaos our departing eagles left behind. Why else should he have spent the last twelve years weaving, in his new American home (where else could the last good Anglo-Indian go?), his huge myth-cycle of historic apology? What he has been pouring out from there has been his faith, against all fact we know to the contrary, that British India was for the best, and we desperately would like to believe it. If we could, he would give us back an imperialism purified, made innocent and beneficent; and with it the continuity of virtue, whole and unquestioning, which we have lost. So we go with him, defensively, half-laughing, half-credulous, as he unstitches the history of British India and weaves it afresh in untarnished colours, washing out the bloodstains, correcting the motives; backwards through time, releasing Gandhi from his prison, countermanding the order to fire at Amritsar, smoking out the Kipling wives from their hot-weather enclaves of scandal and privilege, undoing the Mutiny reprisals, cancelling the instructions for the greasy bullets, returning the Koh-i-noor from Victoria’s crown; all the way back until we are sailing once more for Coromandel, nothing but help and promise in our cargo, the Asian faces smiling from the shore in welcome and trust.