Rumer Godden

International and Intermodern Storyteller

Lucy Le-Guilcher, Phyllis B. Lassner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754668282
• eBook ISBN: 9781317060901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From 1929 to 1997, Rumer Godden published more than 60 books, including novels, biographies, children's books, and poetry; this is the first collection devoted to this important transnational writer. Focusing on Godden's writing from the 1930s onward, the contributors uncover the breadth and variety of the literary landscape on display in works such as Black Narcissus, The Lady and the Unicorn, A Fugue in Time, and The River. Often drawing on her own experiences living in India and Britain, Godden establishes a diverse narrative topography that allows her to engage with issues related to her own uncertain position as an author representing such nomadic Others as gypsies, or taking up the displacements brought about by international conflict. Recognizing that studies of the transnational must consider the condition of enforced and elected exile within the changing political and cultural borders of postcolonial nations, the contributors position Godden with respect to different and overlapping fields of inquiry: modern literary history; colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies; inter-media studies; and children's literature. Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the richness and variety of Godden's writing and render the myriad ways in which Godden is an important critical presence in mid-twentieth-century fiction.

PART I
RUMER GODDEN’S INDIA

Chapter 1
The View from the Middle: Godden and her Literary Landscape

Mary Grover

Virginia Woolf famously anathematized the middlebrow writer as being “betwixt and between” the superior highbrow and the unpretentious lowbrow (“Middlebrow” 196-203). As an expatriate, Rumer Godden was “betwixt and between” cultures in a far more profound way; her lack of secure cultural identity is one of the main shaping elements of her writing. Her work often deals with the transition between childhood and adulthood. During her lifetime she was castigated for writing middlebrow fiction, a criticism often conflated with the assertion that it was difficult to distinguish between her writing for adults and children, in both of which she was prolific—another middlebrow vice, apparently. This chapter examines in detail the cultural and educational background that produced Godden’s complex and nuanced authorial stance. It argues that the middle ground, lacking the exoticism of polar opposition, is, perforce, a place of movement, shape-shifting and endless negotiation.

Although her ambition to connect adds to the clarity that has often contributed to her prejudicial literary reputation as middlebrow, the insistently fragmentary and open-ended nature of her earlier fictive and non-fictive writings has modernist elements. In her earlier books, her refusal to interpret her material, the recurrence of the epiphanic moment, and the sensuous and symbolic image probably owe something to Katherine Mansfield, another expatriate writer, whom she much admired.

“Your Majesty or Just Plain George?”

Unusually for an expatriate child during that period, Godden spent most of the first 14 years of her life in India, her single year in Maida Vale reinforcing her early sense that it was in India, not England, where she felt she belonged. The small expatriate community in Bengal, 12 miles from Dhaka, was connected to the literary world of home in varying ways. Though not a particularly scholarly family, during their early years the four daughters had the English classics read to them indiscriminately by their mother. They also had regular access to the British Tatler and The Sketch and to the Calcutta daily The Statesman which were available at the Club in Nayaranganj (Chisholm 1998, 17).

The world of Indian ritual and drama was, of course, always on the other side of the walls of the house compound. In the 1920s these indigenous cultural forms in Bengal were even more diverse than they were to become after Partition. For the expatriate child they were “mine own but not mine own” (Shakespeare 4.1.198). Not exotic, because so familiar, often invading the compound at festivals like Diwali, they feed the imagination of the child who knows nevertheless that, in that teeming world outside, there is no permanent place for her and no audience for her representations of that world. The narrative strategies developed to negotiate this absence of secure cultural identity and to imagine a readership she might call her own are particularly interesting in Godden’s work because she determined so early on to become a writer, and because her links with England were comparatively weak.

The novelist Penelope Lively, also a writer for both adults and children, describes how, as a child growing up in Egypt towards the end of Britain’s imperial influence, she “was the product of one society but was learning how to perceive the world in the ambience of a quite different culture” (vii). This description fails to identify the full extent of the difficulty. Before adolescence, there tends to be, as Vyvyen Brendon’s survey demonstrates, an unusual degree of license and autonomy. All the Godden children had unusual license for imaginative play within the walls of a polyglot compound, abetted by servants and sisters. As Jon and Rumer Godden put it, “In India children are largely left to grow” (Two Under the Indian Sun 1967, 17). Here lies the real difficulty for any expatriate child: being brought up implies an adult society into which he or she is being brought up. As soon as the child becomes aware of the necessity of modeling an adult world, the normal confusions of adolescence are compounded by a growing realization that adult worlds are multiple, diverse, and possibly unstable in relation to each other. Godden must have been unclear into which of these worlds she and her fictions would have to make their way. In addition, the Godden girls grew up in India as British imperial power was declining. Many of Godden’s novels, as Phyllis Lassner demonstrates, dramatize her awareness that the structures of the expatriate world in which she grew up were about to crumble. This further complicates her sense of audience and cultural origins. What community could she represent and which should she interpellate?

It was in The Statesman that Godden first sought her readership and became a precocious player in the literary market when, at the age of ten, she placed her first piece in this paper. The significance of this achievement to the would-be author is demonstrated by its fictionalization in the autobiographical novel, The River. What was in fact a short article on sunburn is transformed into a short story. Its quality startles her loving but busy family into a momentary recognition of her gifts. This reception gives the fictionalized author first a sense of elation and then a sense of responsibility. “She had avowed herself” (River 2004, 66). Yet her sense of her readership would never be so secure again. Her readers were not to be drawn principally from India, whether expatriate British or Bengali. Godden gained popularity with both English and American readers both before and after World War II, winning these communities of readers from a “homeland” that was only notional.

Three periodicals which would have modeled cultures of these notional homes for the teenage Godden were available at the English Club of Narayanganj. Though of different levels of sophistication, the cultural reporting of both the London-based Tatler and The Sketch are linked to the celebrity culture of sportsmen, royalty, and theatrical personalities. This might have accounted for the sense that the Godden girls recorded in Two Under the Indian Sun, that this world was to be “their” England and that when they returned, their major social problem would be to find a suitable way of addressing the King: “Your Majesty” or just plain George? (Two 1967, 30).

However, in the Tatler, the consistent tone and values of the literary columns entitled “By the Fireside” by Richard King convey a sense of accountable cultural authority, resolutely unmodish in this, the most modish of publications. Much more difficult to place is the combined effect of the diverse ways in which the culture of Britain and Bengal are reported in columns of the Calcutta Statesman. The Statesman was a relatively liberal, family-owned newspaper that served the needs of the British business classes in Bengal. It was founded in 1875 and still flourishes. Its advertisements reveal that throughout the 1920s its readership was Indian as well as British. From the outset of my inquiry it was clear that I could draw no clear-cut conclusions about editorial values from the culture or indeed the news pages of The Statesman. Edwin Hirschmann warns against taking The Statesman as representative of anything; in his opinion it spoke for none but that “highly opinionated” gentleman, its founder Robert Knight (Hirschmann, “Using South Asian Newspapers” 143-50).1 The dangers of taking editorial stance as indicative of the values of the component parts of any paper are demonstrated by Adrian Bingham’s work on British print culture. The size and scope of The Statesman and the distance of Calcutta from the source of much of its material must have lent itself to scurried compilation from a number of sources. Stephanie Newell has pointed out that English newspapers in West Africa at this time were often compiled by a frantic process of cut and paste from the selection of British and other dailies that landed on the desk of the editor a month later than their original date of publication (personal comm. 2008).

So the sense that the periodical is a hybrid and eclectic production is even more acute in colonial English dailies than it was in indigenous British papers. Though Merrill and Fisher tell us that the newspaper had “a long-standing arrangement with The Times of London to use any of the material printed in it except for specifically copyrighted articles,” The Times does not seem to have been the source of the early 1920s culture columns, entitled “Society and Drama” (296). The huge range of sources for the cultural sections of The Statesman diminishes any sense that the metropolitan center is imposing a set of cultural hierarchies which replicate those of the motherland.

To understand how the formation of cultural hierarchies in Britain might have played out in this part of the declining British Empire, I examine The Statesman at three salient points in Godden’s life: at the age of 14, just before she left India to go to boarding school in 1921; at the age of 18 when she returned dissatisfied and confused to a Nayaranganj so deeply missed but now, in 1925, no longer “home;” and then in 1932 when at 25 she courageously founded the Peggie Godden School of Dance in Calcutta. The shifting nature of the tone and perspective within and between these periods disorientate any reader.

The component of culture reporting that changes least during the first five years of the 1920s is the formal book review. Entitled “Books of the Day” in 1922 and “New Books Reviewed” in 1925, the books reviewed are those no businessman would blush to hold: they seem to be selected and possibly reviewed in Calcutta. There is a slight shift over the period from military history and travel books towards a more literary choice in 1925 but there is still far more fiction in booksellers’ advertisements than in the review columns. The few novels reviewed often have an Indian or colonial theme, suggesting that the columns were generated in Calcutta and addressed an expatriate readership. However, even in 1925, when the emphasis on military history is weaker, it is difficult to imagine the 18-year-old would-be writer poring over such books as Men and Horses I have Known or Indian Election Petitions which appeared in what might have been the first Statesman she read on her return from boarding school in September 1925 (“New Books” 17).

Nevertheless, just to skim the titles formally reviewed is to touch on a world with which the teenager was, at least, familiar. Godden may not have aspired to be a headhunter in Borneo or an expert on the economics of India, but her father might well have discussed such books with the daughter whom he was, the next year, to involve in his own hunting and business trips in Bengal (Time to Dance 1987, 58). More entertaining and relevant to her literary ambitions might have been the less formal introduction to the literary world contained in the “Society and Drama” columns published until the mid-1920s and in “Writers and Readers: Occasional Notes,” published throughout the decade. To read these snippets of cultural news from India and London is to lose our compass entirely. Just when we are securely in Calcutta, being pointed towards local bookshops for a viceroy’s memoirs or manuals on how to treat children’s ailments in the East, a firsthand account of a dust-up in the Halcyon Club between the dramatist Cicely Hamilton and Hugh Walpole over the death of the novel whisks us off to London. Unlike the serious reviews, these snippets have no subtitles, so we have no warning about where we are going next. These paragraphs, alongside longer reports of talks by authors, create a company of talking heads, whose geographical and cultural provenance it would be difficult to locate were it not for the fact that the authors are often busy locating themselves, culturally at any rate. Both Leacock in 1921 (“Stephen Leacock” 11 December, 27) and Ian Hay in 1922 (“Writers and Readers” 9) position their own writing; in Leacock’s case as more sophisticated than the lowbrow fiction he satirizes, and in Hay’s defensive account as more fun than novels that described life “as it really was.” Although the self-positioning of these authors would stand in no relation to any community to which Godden might feel herself to belong, their posturing modeled the processes of hierarchical formation with which she had to perforce engage. The “Society and Drama” columns of the early 1920s demonstrate that such formations were principally the constructions of a metropolitan elite jostling each other in the theater circle bar, a world impossibly distant to the teenaged Godden.

In these columns of 1921, a distinct aesthetic emerges. In December, for example, Laurence Housman’s nativity play, set in the trenches, and a play by Cicely Hamilton are praised; the one for its simplicity and the other for its timeless, universalizing effect. The value set on simplicity and the universal finds echoes in the vehement defense of naturism and nude bathing in the Serpentine. The stories of Somerset Maugham are invoked to defend anti-prudery; they demonstrate, apparently, that “[p]rudishness [is] a vice of democracy, of the lower-middle-classes” (“Society and Drama” 3). This has similarities to later attacks on the middlebrow, but the context is certainly not highbrow. Maugham, though later dismissed (by Edmund Wilson, for example) as decidedly middlebrow,2 is here aligned with the timeless values and aesthetics of the cognoscenti which are set against the class-bound conservative values and aesthetics of the lower middle classes. But to read this column in an Indian context is to see how very class-, period-, and culturally-specific this attack is. Not only would the virtues of social nudity be utterly inexplicable to most Indian readers of The Statesman, but by 1925 it is clear that the expatriate readership was uncomfortable with the way in which life at home was being represented in the East. The liberal, would-be avant-garde, dismissal of repression as “lower-middle-class” prudery cited above was accompanied in the 1920s by more exposed flesh in the commercial cinema. By 1925 cinema seems to have driven commercial live theater out of Calcutta. On October 18, 1925 a half-page article entitled “Dangerous Films in the Orient” cites the view of an Indian commissioner of police that the sight of “half-clad Western women being dragged and pulled about by Western men”3 would fuel lack of respect for the British among the Indian rural classes, the implication being that this could only fuel the “outrages” reported at that same period (“Dangerous Films” 18).

By 1925 the column “Society and Drama,” with its London perspective, has been dropped. If we look at the Amusement columns for that year we can appreciate the way in which the talkies were undermining any attempt to align expatriate culture with the British metropolitan, haphazard though those earlier attempts had been. Though all the delights advertised are obviously taking place in Calcutta, the relationship between colony and motherland is altered because the cinema is as almost as current and live in Calcutta as in London. An additional blurring effect is created by the difficulty in distinguishing between live and cinematic entertainment in the way shows are advertised. Consequently, on September 8, 1925, the film of Sabbatini’s bestseller, Scaramouche, a show by an Indian girls’ school, and two columns of advertisements for patent medicines appear alongside each other in exactly the same font and format (“Society and Drama” 12).4

Seven years later, in 1932, category boundaries are slightly clearer. There is still no attempt to distinguish live theater from the movies, but that may be because there appears to be no live theater. Cinema is king. And on February 26, 1932, half a column is given over to a film billed as “the first 100% Colossal Indian Talkie […] Bilwamangal, to be realized simultaneously in the ‘Theatres in Calcutta and in 20 towns in India Burma and Ceylon’” (“Amusements” 4). Also the first Indian film in color, this had a cast from various ethnic groups and was in English, presumably to ensure success throughout polyglot India. Bollywood was born in Calcutta. How important a part Eurasians played in popular entertainment can be gauged by the billing of the Anglo-Indian star of Bilwamangal, Patience Cooper, alongside details of Rumer Godden’s own show, the “Scrap-Book” put on by her dance school whose staff and pupils were often Eurasians. The association of popular cinema and dance during that period in Calcutta with the Anglo-Indian community was enough to devalue the way in which Godden made her living before she became a commercial novelist. The experience inspired her sympathies for a community caught “betwixt and between” even more painfully than herself, but also demonstrated the commercial advantages of an indeterminate cultural identity.

The absence of advertisements for live theater during the 1920s is curious. There was, of course, a community in Calcutta who acted works of serious drama and who were familiar with the plays of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare, which were being staged in the West End. This was the community of Bengali intellectuals, heirs, at that time, not only to Bengali but also to European literary traditions. Their most famous proponent is the Nobel Prize-winning poet, novelist and dramatist, Rabindranath Tagore. In 1926 the English Renaissance scholar C. J. Sisson sneered at the Bengali Brahmin intelligentsia, comparing their ill-attended high-culture performances of Tagore’s plays in Bengali with the hugely popular free versions of Shakespeare’s plays on the Bombay stage. These were in Maharati, Malayalam, Urdu, and Gujerati. Sisson suggests that the Bombay lowbrow, knockabout artistic tradition had more in common with the hybrid eclecticism of Shakespearean drama than had the etiolated and culturally pretentious dramas of the internationally renowned Tagore. Sisson also deplores the fact that the marriage of the traditions of the East and West that these Bombay remakings represented...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: RUMER GODDEN’S INDIA
• PART II: GODDEN AND BRITISH CULTURE
• PART III: SEXUALITY AND LONGING
• PART IV: RUMER GODDEN’S LIFE AND CAREER
• Bibliography
• Index