Raja Rao - The Serpent and the Rope

Julietta and the whole generation of young English people who had either fought in the war or matured during it — Julietta was eighteen in 1945—were fascinating to me. That is why for an outsider pub life seemed so valuable — he saw the new England, even when the English men and women he met were not particularly young. But England herself had become young— and sovran. Young Englishmen looked so open, so intellectually keen, and the girls seemed so feminine, so uninhibited. It was all so far from the world of Jane Austen or Thackeray, or even from the world of Virginia Woolf. Boys and girls met and mated and helped each other through life with, as one girl remarked to Savithri, the facility of eating an apple. ‘In fact I was eating an apple,’ said Marguerite Hoffner, ‘when he did it to me. What is there in it, anyway, to talk about so much?’ Indeed it was explained to me that the coupling of male and female had gone on more and more normally, and that a modern Lady Chatterley would not have to go so far as a gamekeeper, but would find her man beside her in a theatre, on Chelsea Bridge, or in a pub. I only knew the foul smelling bistros in France, and almost never went to any — could you imagine Madeleine, at the Café des Marronniers or in the Rencontre des Pecheurs? — but the pub, the Stag, was so civilized.

Julietta came in, accompanied by Stephen, a Logical Positivist with a curve of sparse golden hair, a high forehead and lilting green eyes. In his opinion Aristotle had proved that the world was very real: he could not understand how one could doubt one’s self.

‘And who doubts the doubter?’ I asked.

‘The doubter?’

‘Who sees the doubter?’

‘My mind,’ he answered.

‘Can my mind see itself?’ I pressed.

‘Of course. Why not?’

‘Can you have two thoughts at a time?’ I continued.

‘Come, come,’ he said, waving his glass and feeling very happy, ‘you don’t want me to grow mystical do you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I am talking to Aristotle.’

‘Well, Aristotle has decided on the nature of syllogisms.’

‘Why, have you never heard of the Nyaya system of Indian logic?’

‘Nyaya fiddlesticks,’ said Stephen good-humouredly.

‘Come, come,’ said Julietta, with womanly tenderness, pushing back Stephen’s golden hair. Her hands, I noticed, were not as elegant as the sensitivity on her face.

‘Can light see itself?’ I asked.

‘Obviously not,’ said Stephen.

‘Then how can the mind see itself?’

‘I told you,’ shouted Stephen, ‘not to talk mysticism to me!’

‘He’s talking sense — and you, nonsense,’ said Julietta, chivalrously.

‘And you, my love,’ he said, kissing her richly before everyone, ‘you own the castle of intelligence, and I am the Lord,’ He was obviously getting drunk. I stopped, bought them each a drink and sat down. There was by now a gay crowd of artists in patched elbows, old stockbrokers with indecipherable females, landlords with their dogs, writers who talked, their nose in the air, as though publishers belonged to the tanners or the drummers caste — writers, of course, being Brahmins — and there were silent, somnolent painters carrying the tools of their trade, with canvases hidden under some cover, chatting with the bartender. ‘Half of bitter, please,’ came the refrain, gentle and gruff, elegant and cockney, and the whole place filled with smoke, silence and talk. The smell of perfumes mingled with other smells of females and men, making one feel that the natural man is indeed a good man — lo naturale è sempre senza errore — that logic had nothing to do with life. Life was but lovely, and loveliness had golden hair and feminine intimacy, while the Thames flowed.

‘One last question,’ I said bringing more beer to Julietta and Stephen. ‘The brain is made of matter…’

‘That is so, my inquisitor,’ said Stephen, laughing.

‘… so the brain is made of the same stuff as the earth?’

‘That is so, my Indian philosopher.’

‘Then how can the earth be objective to the earth— understand, the earth?’

‘It’s just like asking — I beg pardon, Julietta — if I copulate with Julietta, as I often and joyfully do — and the nicer, the better when there’s a drink — then how do I understand Julietta? The fact is I don’t understand Julietta. I never will understand Julietta. I don’t know that I love her — even when I tell her sweet and lovely things. I’m happy and that’s all that matters. I’m a solipsist,’ he concluded laughing.

Julietta was pursuing her own thoughts, seemingly undisturbed by his statements. ‘I’m reviewing a book on the subject,’ she broke in, ‘which says God is because evil is. Is that what you mean?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by God. But it needs a pair of opposites to make a world. Only two things of different texture and substance can be objective to one another. Otherwise it’s like two drops of mercury in your hand, or like linking the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea — they are both water and the same. I ask you, how can the mind, made of the same stuff as the earth, be positive about the earth? Water is not positive to water — water is positive to nothing. Water is. So something is. And since isness is the very stuff of that something, all you can say is, “Is is”.’

‘I knew Indians were mad, that Gandhi was mad. And now, now I have the proof,’ said Stephen. ‘I’m an old anarchist. I believe that matter is true, that Julietta is true, that I am true, and you also my friend, who stands me drinks, and spends nine-pence each time on me and nine-pence on Julietta. Now, go and get me another. This time I don’t want a half. I want the whole damn’ thing, and long live Pandit Nehru.’

People from the counter turned to look and lifted their glasses to India, to me. How wonderful to be in an English pub, I thought. Such humanity you would get in France only amongst the working classes, never among the dark-faced, heaving, fingering bourgeois. The sensuality of the bourgeois is studied, it is a vice, because he was defeated before he went to it: Baudelaire was already defeated by his stepfather and his smelly mother before he went to his negress. You see the dark because you want to prove yourself the light; dialectic is on the lip of the rake. But in this young England, which I knew so little, I felt man was more primary and innocent, more inexhaustible. He did not have a ‘Judas’ on his door — he did not cultivate the concierge yet. Flowers grew in his gardens, red fluorescent lights lit the top of the buildings, and beneath them, the Thames flowed. White cliffs of chalk begirt the isle at the estuary, and you could see seagulls rising with the ferry lights and returning to the night. Soon I’d have to be back in France, and I shivered to the bottom of my spine. Lord, would that I could make the moment stay, and make the world England.

Walking beside Savithri the next day, towards the evening — we were on the Embankment — I told her of my premonition of England, of this new island, knowing she was going to have a queen: the king was already a little not there, he was so ill, and the leaves and the water in Hyde Park, the very sparrows and doves and dogs seemed to feel that there was something new happening to England, that the Regency was going soon to end.

‘What Regency?’ asked Savithri, with the air of a pupil to her teacher.

‘Why, don’t you see, ever since the death of King George the Fifth. Ever since the abdication of Edward the Eighth — that new King Hal who would have created his own Falstaff, and which a fat and foolish bank-clerk civilization drove into exile— this country, which chose her own church because her king preferred to choose his own wives — having become big, with an empire and all that involves; and she became so afraid of the stock exchange, and of what Mrs Petworth would say in Perth or Mr Kennedy would say in Edmonton, Alberta — for remember it’s all a question of wool-shares or the London Electric — this mercantile country drove away what might have been her best king, or at least the best loved since Henry the Fifth. Do you remember those broken French sentences addressed to his Kate: ‘Done vôtre est France, et vous êtes mienne?’ And England put in his place a noble Bharatha who apologized every time he spoke, saying, ‘You think I am your king, but I am only brother to the king; I tremble, I hesitate, I wish my brother were here.’ And he ruled the land with the devotion of a Bharatha, worshipping the sandal of his loved brother placed on the throne.