Richard Cronin

The English Jacobins

At the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake makes a characteristically flamboyant promise: ‘I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no’ (plate 24). It was a promise that he kept, publishing in 1794 the Book of Urizen, and in 1795 the Book of Ahania and the Book of Los. Then Blake fell silent. For more than a decade he pursued his trade as an engraver, but kept his own writings private. He explained himself in a note written on the title page of the Bishop of Llandaff’s An Apology for The Bible in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine: ‘To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life’, and he added, in words that seem deliberately to recall and to retract the jauntily defiant conclusion of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I have been commanded from Hell not to print this, as it is what our Enemies wish’.1

Leigh Hunt, Keats and the Politics of Cockney Poetry

On the evidence of the poems it might seem that Keats’s recent critics are a good deal more interested in politics than he was himself.1 ‘At Dilkes I fall foul of Politics’,2 Keats told his sister-in-law, representing it as a social danger on a level with Hunt’s puns and the sentimen-talism of Reynolds’s sisters. But if his poems have similarly fallen foul of their modern readers, then there is at least good precedent for it. Contemporary reviewers shared with modern critics a sensitivity to the radical import of the poems curiously out of proportion to the provocation that the poems seem to offer. The opening of Book III of Endymion in which all the regalia of monarchy is dismissed as so much ‘tinsel, and the references to Isabella’s brothers as ‘ledger-men’ and ‘money-bags’ were passages repeatedly cited as evidence that Keats was as Cockney in his politics as his poetry. But the repetition works to undermine rather than to substantiate the charge. Tory reviewers had no need to characterize the politics of Shelley and Byron on the basis of two passages.

The English Indian Novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children

‘Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality?’, asks Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children. The answer is, I think, yes, but it is a disease to which only those like Rushdie, who write about India in English, are vulnerable. To write about India in any of its vernaculars, even in Hindi its national language, is inevitably to divide it. Rushdie knows as much. In 1956 Nehru divided India into six states: ‘But the boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers or mountains, or any natural features of the landscape. Language divided us…’ Writing in Gujarati, or Tamil, or Bengali confers on the writer a regional identity that unavoidably takes precedence over his identity as an Indian. That is why the Indian novel, the novel that tries to encapsulate the whole of Indian reality can, as yet, only be written in English. And this is odd, because English is the first language only of the smallest of India’s racial groups, the Anglo-Indians, and of the tiniest of its classes, the few thousand middle- and upper-class families who speak English in their homes, and educate their children abroad or in India’s English-style public schools.1

William Blake and Revolutionary Prophecy

The central difficulty of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the problem of who it was written for. In his ‘An Audience for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, John Howard offers one solution. Blake wrote a satire on Swedenborgianism designed ‘to amuse the Johnson circle’, that is, the group of writers including Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine who gathered around the London publisher Joseph Johnson, attended his Tuesday dinners, and wrote, many of them, for his The Analytical Review.1 In the years from 1789 to 1792 The Analytical repeatedly attacked the New Jerusalem Church of the Swedenborgians, and Priestley himself was engaged in a public controversy with its leader, Robert Hindmarsh. In the same period Blake did more engraving work for Johnson than any other publisher and it was Johnson who printed his The Trench Revolution.

Wordsworth at War

In Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807, Wordsworth speaks to a nation at war. Wordsworth presented his poems to their readers as a response to an urgent national crisis. The poems are divided into seven sections only one of which, the ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’, is exclusively concerned with the progress of the war, but this is the group of poems around which the whole collection revolves.1 In the first section, a note attached to ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ informs the reader that the poem had been written ‘soon after tidings had been received of the Death of Lord Nelson’. The firmness of mind that the poet finds in the leech gatherer becomes, in the poem’s title, ‘Resolution and Independence’, a summary of the qualities that Wordsworth demands of his nation in its struggle against the French. Rob Roy, in the poem that opens the second volume, is praised by contrasting him with Napoleon. Both trusted to the sword to impose their‘sovereign will’, but, unlike Napoleon, Rob Roy loved the ‘liberty of Man’. In the final section two neighbouring sonnets contrast the activity of Napoleon, who enslaves nations under the pretext of liberating them, with that of Wordsworth’s friend, Thomas Clarkson, whose life’s work had come to fruition in March, 1807, with ‘the final passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’. Most of the poems are written from Grasmere, from a position of rural retreat, and they celebrate the happiness that Wordsworth had found there, but even the most pastoral of the poems is likely to be infiltrated by an incongruous memory of the war in Europe, so that in March the snow retreats to the summits of the hills ‘Like an army defeated’.

Erasmus Darwin: from the Bastille to Birmingham

Erasmus Darwin was the most popular poet of the 1790s, and his The Botanic Garden (1791), in which The Economy of Vegetation formed the first part, and The Loves of the Plants (1789) the second, was the decade’s most popular poem. In 1796 Coleridge was in a rather small minority in his distaste — ‘I absolutely nauseate Darwin’s poem’ — and even Coleridge remained of the opinion that Darwin was ‘the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man’.1 But if it was not at the time representative, Coleridge’s repugnance was at least prescient. Darwin’s posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature (1803), is in many ways his best, but it made little stir. The enthusiasm for Darwin’s verse had waned.

Riding the Beast: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in India

‘The most salient fact about India is that it is very poor’,1 writes Ruth Jhabvala, doggedly pointing out the obvious to the Western reader, and knowing all the time that she cannot make that reader understand what she means. She cannot, because the poverty of India is strictly unimaginable. To live in India is to be confronted many times a day — in the face of a hungry child, in the blunted fingers of a leper, in legs grotesquely twisted out of shape by a thoughtful parent anxious that his child acquire the professional qualifications for a life of beggary — with a human misery that one seizes on as absolute, only to be reminded just as often that there is no worst: that there is someone in India living a life more degraded than this, and someone else living a life more degraded still, and so on, and so on, in what seems an infinite recession of misery that plunges away into a darkness that the imagination cannot begin to penetrate. To live in India, to live with this knowledge, is what Ruth Jhabvala thinks of as ‘riding the beast’. It is a useless knowledge: ‘there is no point in making a catalogue of the horrors with which one lives, on which one lives, as on the back of an animal’. No point, because it would only be a catalogue, a dry listing of facts that the brain accepts, but that the imagination cannot comprehend. All the same, it is a knowledge on which Ruth Jhabvala’s achievement as a writer of fiction depends.

The Quiet and the Loud: Anita Desai’s India

‘Quiet writing, like Anita Desai’s, can be more impressive than stylistic fireworks’, wrote Victoria Glendinning in The Sunday Times.1 Anita Desai may let fireworks into her stories, but not into her style. At the end of The Village by the Sea, Han and his sisters celebrate Diwali: ‘Hari carried the basket of fireworks onto the grassy knoll in the coconut grove, and, to the sound of Bela’s and Kamal’s excited shrieks, he set off a rocket into the sky where it exploded with a bang into a shower of coloured sparks.’ The rocket bangs, the girls shriek, but the prose stays quiet. In Midnight’s Children the ‘saffron minutes and green seconds’ that separate India from its moment of independence tick by. Crowds — ‘the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women in saris of lime’ — watch a celebratory firework display, ‘saffron rockets, green sparkling rain’. There is a part of most English readers that distrusts such flamboyance, and recoils from it with relief to the sober, guilt-free pleasures of Anita Desai’s quiet prose. But there remains a nagging worry that it may not be easy at once to conform to English standards of good taste, and be true to the place Anita Desai writes about. India, after all, is not a quiet country.

Sex in the Indian Novel

‘I may as well say straight off that many of these adventures were sexual.’ This is the narrator of Ruth Jhabvala’s story ‘An Experience of India’1 beginning her account of her travels through the country ‘in third class railway carriages and in those old lumbering buses that go from one small dusty town to another’, but she might as well be speaking on behalf of almost any of the Europeans who have written about India in the past 60 years. It all started innocently enough with a strap breaking on Adela Quested’s binocular case. Miss Quested decides in the end that she only imagined that Dr Aziz assaulted her, but what happened to Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens was real enough. She made love with Hari Kumar, and then she was raped by five or six Indians, ‘Black shapes in white cotton clothing; stinking ragged clothing.’ It is a theme that Ruth Jhabvala has made her own. From Esmond in India until Heat and Dust and beyond she has written novels and stories that return almost obsessively to the theme of a sexual encounter between an Indian and a European. This is odd, and it seems even odder if we recall that in Indian novelists’ writing in the same period the possibility of inter-racial sex has aroused very little interest. Even those Indian writers whose main concern is to explore India’s relations with the West have usually resisted the temptation to represent those relations so literally.2

The Indian English Novel: Nation of Fools and The Man-Eater of Malgudi

Kim and Midnight’s Children are attempts at the great Indian novel, the novel that aspires to accommodate the whole of Indian reality, and what allows such aspirations is their Englishness. When Saleem Sinai first contacts the children of midnight, he finds that they think in languages he cannot understand: the radio in his head receives only a babble of alien tongues. He must learn to penetrate beneath Pushtu, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, all the languages of India, to an area of the brain where thought exists unclothed in words. It is the central fiction of the novel, the necessary fiction of the great Indian novel, that this language beyond language, this metalanguage, is identical with English. But most novelists are less overweening in their ambitions than the Kipling of Kim, or the Rushdie of Midnight’s Children. In Midnight’s Children the action extends from Bombay to Karachi, from Dacca to Delhi. In Kim the action wanders between Lahore and Benares and high up into the Himalayas. The events of Balraj Khanna’s Nation of Fools are confined to one small triangle of the Punjab, about 50 square miles.