Lennard on Scott's Jewel in the Crown
Lennard, John.  [Dean, Shakespeare Program, British-American Drama Academy, London; Adjunct Professor, Notre Dame, London; Global Visiting Professor, Virtual Faculty, Fairleigh Dickinson, NJ].  "Paul Scott" - Email Correspondence, 3 Sept. & 4 Sept. 2002.

I found your site while researching the bibliography for an essay on [Paul] Scott in a forthcoming Scribners volume on World Writers in English (ed. Jay Pririni, due next year, I think).  As one contending in his own land with a common residual hostility to Scott (as imperial revisionist) I'm delighted to see him being taught, and wish I had in my own teaching the chance to construct such modules.

As it happens I disagree with [plot summaries 1] . . ., so I would myself summarise Scott's novels (which I have done! several times) quite differently.  That could go on all day, but there are some factual errors in the summaries you have posted which the pedagogue (and pedant) in me feels obliged to correct.

I have no copy handy to check, but I think you'll find the article ab[ou]t the Granada TV Jewel in the CUP [Cambridge University Press] volume ed. Brandt is by Brandt himself, not "Hugh Herbert" [2].

The "traveler" or "stranger" cannot be Guy Perron, who has an inset memoir in Division [of the Spoils, V. 4 of the Raj Quartet] and whose diaries are quoted by a different consciousness.  The enquiring mind reflected in the encounters in Jewel [in the Crown] between the Stranger and Lady Chatterjee, Mr Srinivasan, and Sister Ludmila is also plainly not Perron, nor any professional historian [emphasis added].  (Staying On reveals that by 1972 Perron holds a provincial chair of Modern History and hopes for a London appointment.)  The reading most fully consistent with the published facts is that the Stranger is a Publisher's Reader who found and was intrigued by a mention of the 1942 gang-rape of Daphne Manners in the memoirs of Brigadier Reid, A Simple Life.  Everything in the texts is consistent with their being the products of this man's subsequent 10 year investigation, and every step of his researches can be reconstructed: he went where he could, talked to all those still alive (except, of course, Kumar), and when he reconstructs the testimony of the dead, as for Teddie in Towers [of Silence, V. 3 of the Raj Quartet], he tells you so [emphasis added].

I realise of course that all this, like the last shimmering edge of uncertainty that Scott never lets vanish, even when you really really think you know what must have happened, is one of the major, inevitable losses in Ken Scott's very brilliant screenplay. [3] Alas that it is so.  But whatever, the Stranger cannot be Perron, and Perron's perspective (not least as a professional, establishment historian; like Rowan, a patrician at heart, however eccentric) is shown to be far more limited than the Stranger's [emphasis added].

The TV series is 15 hours, not 16 -- 13 x 1-hr episodes + a double to start with -- unless of course they recut it for US TV. [3]

It is not clear at all that Merrick 'framed' Kumar.  He certainly arrested him and improperly examined him; he almost certainly did all that Kumar says he did by way of torture by caning and prolonged binding to a trestle, and manual-genital sexual assault: but framed?  The only relevant issue is the bicycle, which some thought Merrick had planted, then chickened out of: the file shows only that there was an erroneous report and that Merrick correct the error as soon as he was aware of it.  Moreover, while it is perfectly clear that Merrick is enacting a collective punishment on Kumar for a rape he did not commit, and equially clear that his template for action reaches back through Forster to the real archetype the Bibighar at Kanpur in 1857, the role of Daphne's and Hari's uncooperative silences shouldn't be ignored. How many rapes are committed by complete strangers?  How many by boyfriends?  And if, after a rape, a boyfriend is clearly facially bruised, has no alibi, and refuses to answer any questions, what would one say to the policeman who ignored him as a suspect?  To all of this 'framed' does no justice: Scott is carefully much more complicated and contingent than that [emphasis added].

Merrick does not lose an eye in 1944. [1]  He does lose his left arm to above the elbow, and his facial burns cause one eyelid, now lashless, to pucker strangely, upon which various people muse or comment.  But he still has 20/20 vision, in most senses.  The crunch-point here is that if the gang who assassinate Ahmed Kasim and all the other Muslims on the train are from the Rashtriya Swayamsevakh Sangh or close equivalent (which they must be, though of course no-one is ever caught or changed), and if Merrick was murdered by Hindu extremists (which is what everyone thinks, and what all the evidence suggests), which means the RSS or close equivalent, then at some level in the extremists' hierarchy is someone who knew about and approved both Merrick's death and Ahmed's.  Two very violent and unusual events close together, the first being the murder of a man whose job was to prevent the second, suggests strongly that the painting of the word Bibighar on the mirror of the murder-room was misdirection, and the purpose of Merrick's murder not revenge for the past but facilitation of the future.  In 1947 as at other times, there are many things Merrick sees very clearly -- more clearly than woolier and nicer people with more money care to think about -- and while he is literally less able to manipulate things with one arm, he can still see them!  [emphasis added].

. . . .[typos Lennard pointed out, Cora corrected]

Sorry to shower you with errata, but these are all textual fact, not opinion (save, to be rigorous, in the inferences in the penultimate point: and he still doesn't lose his eye).  I care a great deal about Scott, but I also believe passionately that he needs and rewards care in reading and viewing; that the story he tells is largely about short-circuited judgements by most parties, and that demonising Merrick [1] or letting little factual errors creep in are two ways such short circuiting begins slyly to extend itself to readers as well [emphasis added].  Consider the hideous gulf between Forster's good intention in writing A Passage to India and the film of it made for its 60th birthday by David Lean, released to jingoistic approval while the aftermaths of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict roared on: it is, writ large, exactly what Scott so savagely exposes about Forster's book in Jewel.  The first novel of the Quartet is to Passage as Lord of the Flies is to The Coral Island -- and the rest of the Quartet goes so far past Forster he's out of sight.

Enough!  Do, of course, come back to me, if you'd care to.

Sincerely,

John Lennard . . .

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

[2] See Resources in The Making of The Jewel in the Crown ~ Online Course Pack
Brandt, George W., ed.  British Television Drama in the 1980s.  Cambridge, UK & New York:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993. [ORBIS - PN1992.65 .B682 1993.]  Includes article . . . on Jewel in the Crown (Paul Scott - Ken Taylor): "The Literary Serial; or the Art of Adaptation," by George W. Brandt.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htm

[3] See The Making of The Jewel in the Crown ~ Online Course Pack
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htm