Paul Scott Biography and List of Works

British writer, best known for THE RAJ QUARTET (1965-1975), which describes from different points of view the events that led to the end of the British rule in India. Scott was noted as a master of his craft quite late in his life. He received the prestigious Booker Prize for the novel STAYING ON (1977) just before he died.

"This is a story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened. There are action, the people, and the place; all of which are interrelated but in their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs."
(from The Jewel in the Crown, 1966; part one of The Raj Quartet)

Paul Scott was born in suburban North London, where he would continue to reside throughout most of his life. His father, Tom Scott, was a commercial artist, and his mother, Frances, a former shop clerk. He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, but was forced to abandon his studies at the age of 16 when the family's money ran out. Scott started a career in accountancy and met an aesthetic estate agent called Gerald Armstrong, who became his lover. During these years he read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which had a profound and lasting influence upon him.

At the outbreak of World War II, Scott enlisted as a private - he was a supply officer. In 1941 he married Elisabeth Avery, who became a novelist. They were separated when Scott was sent to India as an air supply officer. Scott arrived in Bombay in 1943 without much knowledge of the country, but also without Kiplinesque arrogance. He served in India and Malaya (1943 -1946) and during this period wrote some poems and plays. After returning to England, with amebiasis, from which he suffered some 20 years, he settled in London with his family and worked as bookkeeper for the Falcon and Grey Walls Press. Muriel Spark caricatured the publishing house in A Far Cry fom Kensington. In 1950 he became a literary agent, and published a string of novels dealing more or less directly with British military figures on duty in foreign lands. From 1960 Scott devoted himself entirely to writing, but it took many years before he started to gain recognition.

17 publishers rejected Scott's first novel, JOHNNIE SAHIB, before its publication in 1952. THE ALIEN SKY (1953) was adapted for radio and television. Scott's early works received mixed criticism and did not sell well. Scott gained an international reputation with The Raj Quartet, which was adapted for the Granada television series The Jewel in the Crown (1982). Most of Scott's works depict India or have Indian themes and characters.

The Raj Quartet, set in the final years of British India in 1942-47, was completed in 1974. It includes four novels, told from different point of views. Through its characters and their worldview Scott examines the moral and ethical decline of the last years of colonial rule. THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN (1966) presents for the reader Daphne Manners, a young Englishwoman, her Anglo-Indian lover Hari Kumar, and the sadistic police official Ronald Merrick, who feels superiority over Kumar. Daphne is raped by a group of men in the Bibighar Gardens of Mayapore, when she is spending a night with Hari. She dies in childbirth without accusing Hari. In THE DAY OF THE SCORPION (1968) Hari is imprisoned because of the rape and Merrick believes Hari to be guilty. THE TOWERS OF SILENCE (1972) focuses on the Layton family, the engagement of Susan Layton and Teddie Bingham, their weddings, and the events before Teddie's death. A DIVISION OF THE SPOILS (1974) continues the story, but the central character is Guy Perron, who witnesses the independence of India and hears about Merrick's death. STAYING ON (1977) returns to the world of the quartet, and depicts two of the minor characters, Tusker and Lucy Smalley, an elderly couple that live in isolated retirement in India long after independence. The novelist Salman Rushdie has criticized The Raj Quartet for perpetuating, perhaps unintentional, colonial assumption and racial stereotypes.

Scott spent his final years travelling between his Hampstead home and the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a visiting fellow. He suffered from cancer and heavy drinking, which had caused cirrhosis of the liver, weakened his condition. He died on March 1, 1978 in London. According to Scott's biographer, the family also suffered from his violence - he often shut himself away for days in his study, working and drinking. Eventually his wife left him, seeking shelter at Chiswick Women's Aid.

For further reading: Paul Scott by K.B. Rao (1980); Introducing The Raj Quartet by J. Tedesco and J. Popham (1985); Paul Scott's Raj by R. Moore (1990); Paul Scott by Hilary Spurling (1990); Paul Scott's Raj by R. Moore (1990); 'Outside the Whale' by S. Rushdie (1991, in Imaginary Homelands); After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie by Michael Gorra (1997) - Other widely acclaimed novels by British authors about India: E.M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924); Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981) - see also: Kilping, Tagore

I, GERONTUS, (1941)