The Last Englishmen Read online

  THE LAST ENGLISHMEN

  Also by Deborah Baker

  The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism

  A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

  In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding

  Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly

  Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Baker

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Poetry excerpts from “Mountains,” “Letter to William Coldstream, Esq.,” “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” “Memorial for the City,” “Palais des Beaux-Artes,” and “Everest” © copyright 1930, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1994 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. and Penguin Random House. Unpublished excerpts from the letters and expedition journals of Michael Spender are quoted with the permission of the Estate of Michael Spender; unpublished excerpts from the letters and journals of J. B. Auden are quoted with the permission of Anita Money; quotations from W. H. Auden’s letters and his unpublished “Berlin Diary” are quoted with the permission of his executor, Edward Mendelson. Excerpts from “Autumn Journal” first published by Faber and Faber and the unpublished “India Diary” by Louis MacNeice, parts of which appear in Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice first published by the Clarendon Press, are quoted with the permission of the Louis MacNeice Estate and the David Higham Agency, Ltd.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

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  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55597-804-4

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-994-2

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953357

  Jacket design: Kimberly Glyder

  Jacket art: Photograph of John Auden in Karakoram courtesy of Philip Spender

  For Lila

  I am the last Englishman to rule in India.

  JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

  CONTENTS

  Cast of Characters

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  PART I – To Live as on a Mountain

  1. The Lakes

  2. The Steamship and the Spinning Wheel

  3. Bengali Baboo

  4. The Thrust Fault

  5. Triangles

  6. The School of Art

  PART II – The Impersonal Eye

  7. Perfect Monsters

  8. Goddess Mother of the World

  9. I Spy

  10. The Moscow Agent

  11. In the Ice Mountains

  12. Taking a Hat off a Mouse

  13. The Truth about Love

  PART III – The Fall of the Gods

  14. Somewhere a Strange and Shrewd Tomorrow

  15. The Magnified Earth

  16. A Representative Indian

  17. An Infinite Ocean of Sorrow

  18. A Boy Falling Out of the Sky

  19. Incompatible Gods, Irreconcilable Differences

  20. Night Falls

  Postscript

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Explorers and the Royal Geographical Society

  John Auden, geologist of the Geological Survey of India

  Michael Spender, surveyor and mapmaker

  Arthur L. Hinks, secretary of RGS and Mount Everest Committee

  Eric Shipton, explorer, leader of the 1935 reconnaissance of Everest

  Bill Tilman, mountaineer and leader of the 1938 Everest expedition

  Bill Wager, Greenland geologist and Everester

  Frank Smythe, leader of the 1931 climb of Kamet, Everester

  Hugh Ruttledge, leader of the 1933, 1936 Everest expeditions

  Sir Francis Younghusband, first president of Mount Everest Committee, explorer, soldier

  English Writers

  W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and George Orwell

  London Art Crowd

  Nancy Sharp, William Coldstream, and Sonia Brownell, the “Euston Road Venus”

  Calcutta Parichay Adda

  Sudhindranath Datta, poet, intellectual, founding editor of Parichay

  Apurba Chanda, school friend of Sudhin’s, secretary to Tagore, civil servant and later secretary to Shaheed Suhrawardy

  Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel laureate, patron of Parichay

  Basanta Kumar Mallik, Oxford flaneur, philosopher, author of the theory of conflict

  Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy, professor of art history, Russophile and anti-Bolshevist

  Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, rogue brother of Shahid, Muslim League politician

  Susobhan Sarkar, professor of art history, Calcutta University

  Hirendranath Mukherjee, lecturer in history and political philosophy, Calcutta University

  Humphry House, Oxford friend of Susobhan Sarkar, lapsed cleric, professor of literature, Calcutta University

  Michael John Carritt, Indian Civil Service officer

  Reverend Michael Scott, vicar

  Mulk Raj Anand, novelist, Indian nationalist

  Protap, Bharat, Minnie, Anila, and Sheila Bonnerjee, grandchildren of W. C. Bonnerjee, first Indian president of Indian National Congress

  Lindsay Emmerson, editor of the Statesman

  Sinbad Sinclair, Burmah Shell executive and husband of Elinor

  Jamini Roy, painter

  Sarojini Naidu, poet and Congress leader

  Secret diarist

  Relatives

  George Augustus and Constance Rosalie Auden, parents of Bernard, John, and Wystan

  Harold and Violet Spender, parents of Michael, Christine, Stephen, and Humphrey

  Aunt May and Uncle John Alfred Spender, editor of Westminster Gazette, writer on India, uncle to Spender children

  Uncle George Ernest Schuster, finance minister of India, uncle to Spender children

  Granny Schuster, guardian of Spender children

  Erika Haarmann, Michael Spender’s German first wife

  Margaret Marshall, John Auden’s analyst and first wife

  Nationalists and Communists, Die Hards and Conservatives

  Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Civil Disobedience campaigns of 1920–22, the 1930 Salt March, the 1942 Quit India Uprising, and the Indian National Congress

  Motilal Nehru, leader of the Indian National Congress, father of Jawaharlal

  Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian National Congress

  Subhas Chandra Bose, Bengali revolutionary, wayward member of Congress

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All India Muslim League

  P. C. Joshi, first general secretary of the Communist Party of India

  M. N. Roy, founder of the Mexican Communist Party, the Communist Party of India, member of the Comintern

  Ben Bradley, secretary, League Against Impe
rialism, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, convicted in Meerut Conspiracy Case

  S. S. Mirajkar, member of the Communist Party of India, convicted in Meerut Conspiracy Case

  Winston Churchill, former subaltern, Die Hard, prime minister of wartime Britain

  Lady Poppy Houston, Die Hard, aviation patroness

  Sir John Anderson, governor of Bengal, minister of civil defense of London, member of War Cabinet

  Victor Alexander John Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, longest-serving viceroy of India, 1936–43

  Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India during the war

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I first came across the papers of John Bicknell Auden while looking for a way to write about India during World War II. Very few books had looked at the war and the decade that preceded it from the point of view of those for whom the Second World War meant finally getting out from under British rule. From 1926 until 1953 John Auden was a geologist with the Geological Survey of India. Among his papers I found a number of letters from his circle of Bengali friends in Calcutta, as well as from his fellow Himalayan explorers. There were also decades of letters from his younger brother, Wystan. W. H. Auden is so closely identified with the English writers who came of age between the wars that they have come to be known as the “Auden generation.”

  I had always been curious about W. H. Auden’s reasons for staying on in the United States after England declared war on Germany. Auden had firsthand experience of the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He gave speeches and wrote poems and essays about the dangers posed by fascism and what was required to fight it. Inevitably, his failure to return to England when war was declared on September 3, 1939, did not sit well with many of his friends and contemporaries. From Auden’s letters to his brother John, I gained a fresh understanding of why he left and why he didn’t come back. And though John Auden’s Calcutta circle struggled with some of the same questions of political allegiance, manliness, and Englishness as their London-based cohort, as colonial subjects they had a different take on the politics that roiled the 1930s, views that framed how they experienced the war when it finally arrived in Calcutta. So I am deeply indebted to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and the library’s archivists, librarians, and support staff. It was Isaac Gewirtz, the Berg’s director, who first suggested I take a look at John Auden’s papers.

  In the course of writing and researching this book a number of titles on India’s wartime role appeared; most helpful among them was Yasmin Khan’s The Raj at War and Srinath Raghavan’s India’s War. Madhusree Mukerjee’s earlier Churchill’s Secret War was also an important source. I am also personally grateful to those who saw to my Indian education with patience. Any list would have to begin with my mother-in-law, Anjali Ghosh, and my late father-in-law, Shailendra Chandra Ghosh. I will always be thankful, too, to my sister-in-law Chaitali Basu and my brilliant niece Malini who read my Parichay adda sections and added page citations from the Bengali sources. Sukanta Chaudhuri, founder of the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, and editor of Sudhin Datta’s unpublished works, was extremely helpful. Supriya Chaudhuri introduced me to Sajni Mukherjee, who, in turn, passed along Humphry House’s quirky I Spy with My Little Eye and an equally rare copy of Parichayer-Adda, translated for me by Gouri Chatterjee. I am grateful to Sunanda K. Datta-Ray for his memories of the Bonnerjee family and to Prasad Ranjan Ray, former home secretary of West Bengal, who helped me access the archives at the Police Museum.

  A list of those who helped me with the sections on geology, all eminent geologists of the Himalaya, includes K. S. Valdiya, Shekar Pathak, Rasoul Sorkhabi, and most of all Djordje Grujic, who answered a long list of questions and was subjected to various drafts of my geological sections. Darya Oreshkina made tactful corrections to my chapter on surveying. Finally, the writer and naturalist Emmanuel Theophilus was a superb guide on a trek in the Gangotri region of the Garhwal Himalaya. Raju Koranga, our cook, kept me from losing my footing, and the dour triad, Moni Prasa Joshi, Moni Krishna Kafle, and Tularam, carried inconceivable loads up the steepest, most slippery slopes. One can read a lot about expeditions, but it helps to have a small taste of one.

  Foremost among the archivists whose skill, expertise, and knowledge I drew on was Christine Halsall of the Medmenham Collection. She saved me from the sort of errors a nonmilitary person might make. Sue Hodson at the Huntington Library, Rachael Dreyer at the American Heritage Center University of Wyoming, Natalie Zelt at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Samir Paik at Kolkata’s National Library, Dan Mitchell and Mandy Wise at University College London, Colin Harris and Charlotte McKillop-Mash of the Bodleian, Hannah Griffiths at the National Archives at Kew, Julie Parry at the People’s History Museum and Antonia Moon of the Indian Office Records at the British Library all answered endless questions or photocopied relevant material. I am also grateful to Julia Wagner, who translated a selection of Erika Haarmann’s journals from German.

  Anita Money, Philip, Jason, and Jane Spender, and Miranda and Juliet Coldstream allowed me access to their parents’ letters, photographs, and writings. Nearly as important but equally impossible to footnote or convey is all that I internalized from Amiya Dev on Sudhindranath Datta, the late Jon Stallworthy on Louis MacNeice, John Sutherland on Stephen Spender, Peter Parker on Christopher Isherwood, and Humphrey Carpenter on W. H. Auden. Richard Davenport-Hines’s book Auden is a particularly sensitive and lucid look at that poet’s protean imagination. I am grateful to Edward Mendelson, Auden’s executor and editor of his collected poems, for slogging through the first monumentally long draft.

  Sarah Chalfant, my agent, was the first person to say yes. Fiona McCrae at Graywolf Press quickly followed. Between my editors in America, England, and India, I had my own triangulating to do. My tactful and tireless editor Ethan Nosowsky saw me through the briar patch of several drafts with unflappable grace. Mary Byers brought a keen eye to the copy-editing. Juliet Brooke at Chatto & Windus brought another fresh and bracingly sharp set of eyes. Meru Gokhale and Manasi Subramaniam at Penguin Random House in Delhi helped me clarify my more inchoate thoughts. I also had the generous financial support of both the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations, about which enough can’t be said and frankly without which this book wouldn’t have been written. To my earliest readers, Adina Hoffman and Deborah Cohen, apologies and thanks for your struggle to see your way to what I was trying and often failing to do.

  And for the leg ups, conversations, guest beds, and meals along the way, thank you (in alphabetical order now), Ravi Agrawal, Marisa Atkinson, Partha Chatterjee, Christopher Clark, Nicole Yoko D’Alessandro, Amlan Dasgupta, Rosie Dastgir, Kiran Desai, Katie Dublinski, John Gapper, D. W. Gibson, Lyndall Gordon, Christopher Harper, Edward Hirsch, Courtney Hodell, Pico Iyer, Mukul Kesavan, Melanie Locay, Yana Makuwa, Laura McPhee, Pankaj Mishra, Mary Mount, Prasun Mukherjee, Nandita Palchoudhuri, Cecil Pinto, Elizabeth Rubin, Madhumina Sen, Subrata Sinha, Rahul Srivastava, Michele Stephenson, Jean Strouse, Stella Tillyard, Jeannie, Peter, and Emma Vaughn, Jonathan Westaway, and Steve Woodward.

  Finally, I am deeply indebted to my husband, Amitav. I can’t imagine my life or my work without him and the books he has written, the meals he has cooked, and the people he has drawn into our lives. As for Lila and Nayan, I am wildly thankful to them for keeping me on my toes.

  PROLOGUE

  Lahore Refugee Camp,

  Wednesday, September 3, 1947

  The end of the Raj would doubtless be accompanied by the pomp and pageantry by which the British Empire had always set great store. Fireworks, marching bands, military parades in full regalia. Vast jostling crowds lining Delhi’s Kingsway from Government House to Memorial Arch. No elephants caparisoned in brocade and gold, but solemn oaths administered and new flags raised. All in all it would amount to the biggest story since the signing of the armistice two years before, and far more showy. With that in mind the BBC was sending a film crew to cover the festiv
ities and wanted their man Louis MacNeice to accompany them with an eye to writing a series of radio plays.

  But apart from what he’d read of Kipling and Tagore at school, Louis MacNeice knew next to nothing about India. He vaguely remembered a debate about India at the Oxford Union from his student days twenty-some years before, but that was about it. What does India have to do with me, he had asked himself, alarmed at the prospect of traveling all that way. There were other reasons for his reluctance. He didn’t really like Indians, for one. And the whole business of swamis really set his teeth on edge. His one Indian friend, a fine-featured writer who favored colorful shirts, had tried to convince him it was the English who concocted this notion of a spiritual India. The great Rabindranath Tagore, an otherwise fine poet, got his mystical cues from them, the man said.

  Even so, Louis thought, what was the point of looking at India through Western eyes? He was a poet from Northern Ireland. Who was he to mediate India and England’s everlasting quarrel? Destroyed our country and our culture, the Indians said. Developed your country and brought you education, the apologists replied. Divided and ruled, the Indians said. Brought law and order, the English replied. Tyranny. Trusteeship. Our foe. Your friend. On and on it went.

  Lastly, what did he know of India’s struggle for freedom?

  Seven years before, during that first awful winter of the war, Louis had given the idea of freedom some thought. Snowbound and brokenhearted in Ithaca, New York, he’d been torn between sitting the war out in disgust and returning to England to join up.

  Was this war, as some said, really being fought for freedom? It certainly hadn’t been about freedom for the Republicans in Spain in 1937. And England hadn’t come to the defense of the sovereignty of Austrians or the Czechs in 1938. So it had been hard for him to believe that the war was suddenly about the attack on Poland in 1939. For his Cornell University students, India alone justified America’s sitting it out. They’d been suckered into enabling the British Empire to see another day during the last war, they said. It wouldn’t happen again. Louis found them surprisingly well informed. Though he’d never given India much thought, he had known immediately they were right. The war would not be fought on behalf of freedom for India.