The Root and the Flower Read online

  L.H. MYERS (1881–1944) was the son F.W.H. Myers, an essayist and investigator into parapsychology, and Evelyn Tennant, an accomplished amateur photographer and famous Victorian beauty. Myers attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, traveled, underwent a transforming mystical experience in a Chicago hotel room, and fell in love with Elsie Palmer, a general’s daughter from Glen Eyrie, Colorado, whom he later married. His first novel, The Orissers (1922), was followed by The Clio (1925), Strange Glory (1936), and The Root and the Flower (originally issued as three separate books between 1929 and 1935). A final novel, The Pool of Vishnu (1940), revisits the Indian setting and some of the characters of The Root and the Flower while also reflecting Myers’s newfound commitment to communism. Increasingly unhappy in his later years, Myers struggled to write an auto-biography, but remained unsatisfied with the work, which he finally destroyed. He committed suicide in 1944.

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD (1916–2000) graduated with honors from Somerville College, Oxford, and worked at a variety of jobs until, in 1975, she published her first book, a biography of the pre-Raphaelite master Edward Burne-Jones. She was the author of two other biographies and ten works of fiction, among them The Blue Flower, Human Voices, and The Bookshop.

  THE ROOT

  AND THE FLOWER

  L.H. Myers

  Introduction by

  PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Book One: The Near and The Far

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29

  Book Two: Prince Jali

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

  Book Three: Rajah Amar

  Introduction

  Part One: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Part Two: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Part Three: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

  Part Four: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  L.H. MYERS (Leopold Hamilton Myers, 1881–1944) was born into a distinguished scholarly family. His father, F.W. Myers, was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research; their home in Cambridge was a center of hospitality and intellectual discussion, but it was also rather an odd place to be brought up in. Frederic Myers was set upon demonstrating the immortality, or at least the survival, of human personality by acceptable scientific methods, and his children were half frightened and half fascinated by the procession of mediums and “sensitives” who came to the house to give evidence. Leo’s mother was passionate and possessive, his father expected rather more of the family than they could give. When he died Leo had to cut short his time at university to take his mother abroad; F.W. Myers had made an appointment to manifest himself after death, and had named a time and place, but the meeting failed. Leo lost faith, but only in his father’s methods. He saw now that though reason must always be distinguished from intuition, it should never be separated from it. They must work together.

  He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and although he was always as popular as he would allow himself to be, he bitterly hated both of them. He rejected, in fact, every social structure to which he belonged, including the literary circles which London offered him. To Myers, all of these fell grotesquely short. “Just as an individual cannot live for himself,” says the Rajah in The Near and the Far, “so society cannot live for itself, but must keep a self-transcendent idea before it.” In holding this ideal, and in devoting his writing career to it, Myers was unflinchingly sincere, but his life was not consistent with it. He was neither an ascetic nor a revolutionary. Between his seduction at the age of sixteen and his marriage he had a number of affairs, some, he said, “very squalid.”[1] When in 1906 he came into a legacy he moved through society as a generous patron of the arts, but also as a detached and elegant young man, with a taste for racing at Brooklands. Even when, after running through every other political solution, he became a Communist, he still had a part-share in an expensive French restaurant, Boulestin’s. Myers, of course, noticed these discrepancies, since he possessed (in the words of his friend L.P. Hartley) “an exquisite wry sense of humor of which he was half-ashamed.” But Hartley has also described how, with the close of the 1930s and the threat of war, Myers’ self-knowledge darkened into pessimism. A slow and scrupulous writer, he had always depended greatly on the advice of his friends. Now he quarreled fiercely with most of them. As a young man he had asked himself the question: “Why should anyone want to go on living once they know what the world is like?” On the 7th April 1944 he answered it for himself by taking an overdose of veronal.

  Myers left his great trilogy, The Root and the Flower, to speak for him. Like his other books, it has an exotic setting, in this case sixteenth-century India under the reign of Akbar. He did not pretend to accuracy and indeed he had never been to India, though he visited Ceylon. His motive, as he said in his 1940 Preface, is to give us a clearer view of our own social and ethical problems from the “vantage-point of an imaginary world.”

  This world, though anything but safe, is a very seductive one. The slow rhythm of the palace, the desert and the river are like an audible pulsation of the Indian heat, but at any moment we may be asked to look at something as small as a mark in the dust or a dying moth, or stretch our ears for a minute sound. We do not, however, do this for nothing. The descriptive passages hardly ever stand still, they give the sense of something about to happen:

  At the door he paused again; from the roof there hung down wisps of dry, gray moss; ants had built a nest against the threshold and the droppings of wood-pigeons whitened the window-sills. Contrary to his expectations the latch came up when he tried it; the door opened and a curious smell spread upon the fresh air.

  The absence of the moon and stars made the night intimate and earthly; dry leaves, lifted from the ground, were swept across his hands and face. It seemed as if the earth’s secret energies were working upon him, and he yielded to a process which he felt to be beneficent. His spirit lay still in a quiet excitement; a sense of expectation gathered; it was like that of a woman who is awaiting the first pangs of her first childbed.

  She showed him the place where...the young man...was buried. There certainly were some suspicious marks upon the ground. The soil was cracked, having swollen up in a blister, and this seemed to indicate that the work was not the work of Thugs, for Thugs always drove a stake through the body to allow the gases of decomposition to escape without a sign.

  Myers wants us to look at his world of appearances and beyond it. Appearances cannot be dismissed as an illusion, for no illusion can be created except by reason. On the other hand, the life of the spirit is just as real as the pigeon dung and the bloated corpse. “I am” has no meaning without “There is.” How can the two be reconciled? On this problem depend the three great questions of the book. First, how can an individual be sure that he has found himself? “If everyone is pretending to be like others,” says Prince Jali, “who is like himself?” Secondly, if each individual is a solitary heart, how is he to unite with other human beings? Thirdly, if he does so, how can he be sure that the society he lives in acknowledges “the supremacy of the spirit as the guiding principle of life”?

  Reading a long book is like living a long life, it needs an adjustment of pace. Myers is asking us to slow down, and so to deepen the consciousness. At the beginning of the trilogy, a story of war, betrayal, torture and political power, we have to consider what seems a very small incident. The little prince, alone on the palace balcony,
sees a snake crawling along the gutter. The wind stirs a twig, and Jali, watching, “entered into the snake’s cold, narrow intelligence and shared its angry perplexity.” It strikes, loses its balance, and falls to its death on the roof below. The snake shares “the terrible numerousness of living beings, all separate, all alone, all threatened.” It could not tell that the twig was not an enemy. It was deceived by appearances. But a little earlier Jali had been gazing at the serene desert horizon, which had looked so different when they made the six days’ hot journey across it. “He clung to the truth of appearances as something equal to the truth of what underlay them... Deep in his heart he cherished the belief that some day the near and the far would meet.”

  The first book of the trilogy gives a sense of the imperial war game which will decide the fate of India. Akbar is the ruinous tyrant or “great man” of history. His dream of uniting India’s religions—the Din Ilahi—is folly, and he himself is at heart commonplace. His inheritance is disputed between his two sons, Salim, the brutal soldier, and Daniyal, the perverted intellectual. It is the duty of Rajah Amar, in his small kingdom, to decide where his allegiance lies before he withdraws, as he wishes to do, to a monastery. Almost perversely, he favors Daniyal, because he has always disliked him, and he wants to stand uninfluenced by the affections. Sita, the Rajah’s wife, is a Christian who prefers, for good or ill, to stay with the rest of humanity. These two, husband and wife, are far apart, and yet they are both searching for perfection. “The gulf is not between those who affirm and those who deny but between those who affirm and those who ignore.” The man whom Sita eventually takes for a lover, Hari, is a wild chieftain who relishes life as it comes, but all through the first book we can see him gradually driven, step by step, to concede that he cannot after all live through the senses alone. His love for Sita “seemed to play not upon the nerves of the flesh, not upon the machinery of the brain, but upon the substance of the very soul...and he said to himself, ‘What is this?’” On the other hand, the Rajah’s adviser Gokal, the Brahmin philosopher, is caught in sensuality’s trap. He is enslaved by a low-caste girl, Gunevati, who in turn is guided by sheer animal instinct.

  Myers, of course, saw the danger of all this. “The impression may come into the reader’s mind,” he wrote, “that what he has before him is a philosophical novel.” This, he knew, would mean neither good philosophy, nor a good novel, nor, before long, any readers. But his characters are not representatives of ideas, they are an invitation to think about them, which is a different matter. And in spite of Myers’s detached and elegant manner, they are all human beings. Gunevati, for instance, has been taken, I think quite wrongly, as standing for pure evil. Certainly she resorts to poison, and passively accepts the position of fetish to an obscene and forbidden religious sect. But at other times we are asked to pity her, as Hari does, when he realizes what a low price she puts on herself, in spite of her beauty. Beauty has no particular rights in the world as it is. Jali pities her, too, when she turns pale and ill as a captive in Gokal’s house. The truth is that she has no way of knowing herself. To destroy her is not justice.

  Book 2 is a Bildungsroman, the education of Prince Jali, the Rajah’s son. This, in a sense, is the simplest part of the trilogy, and, in terms of action, the most exciting. Jali’s ordeals are of the flesh, the mind, and the spirit. As a young adolescent he finds, under Gunevati’s tuition, that women are easy enough and he can get into any bedroom he likes. But he wants to understand life, or at least to see it clearly, and his passion for knowledge leads him to explore the secret cults of the Valley and to discover how they connect with the spying and counter-spying of the court. But Jali—for he is only a learner and a searcher—does not know enough, not enough, at least, to outwit his enemies by himself. And after his escape from the Valley he is in greater danger still, as he approaches the neighborhood of the Camp.

  Here, perhaps, Myers let his prejudices run away with him. The Camp, or Pleasance, is, as he admitted, a monstrous version of the world of Cambridge and Bloomsbury by which he had once been deceived. It is the stronghold of Daniyal, the artificial paradise of the aesthetes, and to Myers the aesthetes were “trivial,” a word which for him meant the denial of life. They were the sterile self-regarders and self-indulgers; sterility leads to cruelty, and self-regard to the death of the spirit. The Camp, then the traveling court of Prince Daniyal and his entourage, entices Jali with the most degrading materialism of all. If we are in any doubt as to how dangerous it is—dangerous rather than merely absurd—we have only to follow, as Jali does, the fate of Gunevati. It is at Daniyal’s orders that this girl, who can express herself only through her body and her senses, has her tongue cut out; after that she is forced to learn to write. “She opened her mouth wide. Jali found himself looking into a cavern—black, swollen, horrible.” It is this which recalls Jali to himself, so that he will never again be mistaken as to the nature of the Camp.

  Jali will be the ruler of the future, but for the present power still rests with Rajah Amar. Book 3 returns us to the problem we set out with. Is the Rajah justified in giving up the near for the far, or is his longing for detachment only another name for the refusal of responsibility? In the face of Gokal’s misgivings, he still prepares to withdraw from earthly concerns. But on the very point of leaving he is summoned to the Camp; there the whole nature of evil is brought home to him by another of the book’s apparently unimportant moments, the horrible incident of the white cat. Now Amar has to decide, at his own risk, whether in the face of recognized evil a man can ever be absolved from action. The Rajah does not choose what happens to him, but Myers has shown that though there are strict limits to the human will, there are none to human vision. Amar sees what is to be done.

  When Gokal brings his fallen body back across the lake, we do not even know whether Amar is dead, or what effect, if any, he has made on Daniyal. Like the relationships of the characters, which have been, all along, subtle and ambiguous, the story never yields a conclusion. “There is no illusory sense of understanding,” Myers said, “only the realization of what is.” But the trilogy unmistakably ends with a return to life. The thought had come to Gokal that if the Rajah were to die without recovering consciousness, it might be as well. “But he condemned that thought,” and as he goes up the path towards the house on the farther side of the lake, he hears Hari, Sita, and Jali talking together on the veranda. With these quiet everyday sounds Myers concludes his strange masterpiece, which, it has been said, “brought back the aspect of eternity to the English novel.”

  —PENELOPE FITZGERALD

  [1] Some of these details are from G.H. Bantock: L.H. Myers: A Critical Study (1956). Myers began to write an autobiography shortly before his death, but he destroyed it.

  To Iris

  BOOK ONE

  The Near and the Far

  1

  LITTLE PRINCE JALI stepped on to the balcony and looked down upon the plain in awe. It was true that from the tower of his father’s palace at home there was an even wider view; but that view was familiar, this one was full of mystery. The wall of this strange palace went down and down, until it merged into the sweeping side of the fort; the fort itself crowned the summit of a hill; and the bare rock of the hill continued a precipitous descent down into the River Jumna. The red glitter of sunset lay upon the river; across the water shady groves alternated with sun-swept patches of millet and corn; beyond stretched the desert.

  For the last two years of his life—and he was now twelve—the desert had held Jali under a spell. Nearly every evening at home he would climb up into the tower to gaze upon it. Beyond the roofs, beyond the green of irrigated fields, beyond the glistening palms and the dark clumps of citron, cypress, and mango—beyond the little world that he knew there stretched that other world which his eye alone could reach. There it lay, a playground for the winds, a floor for the light of evening to flow along, the home of mirage and colored airs.

  It was a region that seemed to promise him a disem
bodied nimbleness, an unearthly freedom. Its very boundaries were unsubstantial—lines of hills penciled so lightly along the horizon that noonday melted them into the white-hot sky. Only at sunset did those hills become real. Then it was that they emerged, serenely yet with melancholy, out of nothingness into beauty. Cliffs, battlements, ranges, then took on a substance just solid enough to catch the tints of gold and rose that streamed through the air. The watery glitter of mirage was withdrawn from about their feet. They gave, in their remoteness, a measure of the desolate space in between. But this lasted for a few minutes only. Swiftly rising, the dusk submerged them, and what had been hidden day-long under the glare from above was now drowned in a darkness from underneath. Night rolled across the plain, sharp stars pricked the blue; in a moment nothing was left but the twin darkness of earth and sky.

  For the last six days Jali had been traveling over the desert and disappointment had befallen him—disappointment, but not disillusion. He clung to the truth of appearances as something equal to the truth of what underlay them. There were two deserts: one that was a glory for the eye, another that it was weariness to trudge. Deep in his heart he cherished the belief that some day the near and the far would meet. Yes, one day he would be vigorous enough in breath and stride to capture the promise of the horizon. Then, instead of crawling like an insect on a little patch of brown sand, swift as a deer he would speed across the filmy leagues; the wind would be singing on his ears, the blood tingling in his veins, his whole body would be a living arrow. Almost, already, in his imagination he could foretaste that joy—of seizing in his grasp, of clasping to his heart, the magic of things seen afar. To fling himself into the distance in one bound, to flash into the visionary scene before it had had time to transform itself—almost he knew how!