Reviews

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, by W. H. Auden (Faber and Faber Limited, 24 Russell Square, London. Price 8s. 6d. net).

ALL experience is organised, is real. There is not just a blur of phenomena, but things separate themselves out into a spatial world. In the same way feelings are organised, they come to a point in the ego, they have stability and radiate out and have broad drives and homogeneities.” So writes Christopher Caudwell in his famous book, Illusion and Reality. History reveals the chronicled experiences of man in his struggle for security. The struggle has not ceased. Every moment of breathing is a moment of anxiety for man who is still ignorant of the triumph of death. After living anxious days in company with beasts he made weapons of war for defence and offence. His war was with the inhabitants of the jungle, waged not with knowledge of that ego, but with a permanent wish to assuage the pains of hunger and thirst. Man evolved and changed; he left the primeval caves to build universities. He studied the laws of economics, ownership of land and conditions regulating labour. He felt war is a necessity and that peace could prevail when swords flashed out of their scabbards. He had poets to teach wisdom, but that wisdom never percolated through the iniquitous terrains of the human heart. Poets got wild. In the West and in the East, the children of Cain, self-taught and self-possessed, appeared to tar the conscience of society. Man no more remained an individual. He belonged to a State or a Society. So the angry poets too belonged to a Society. They too had to spend days of anxiety and they could have no audience to hear love-lyrics and chamber music. In England Mr. T. S. Eliot brought to the well-meaning public a collection of his own ideas–poems in form–teaching that history betrays and poets too have a liberty to legislate for the progress of man. Eliot was a spiritual growth of a generation which steeped itself in multi-political ideals and destructive science. He never cared to give constructive ideas; he criticised; he warned of impending perils.

W. H. Auden in no surprise saw in the awakening a new gloom. Nature has given Auden a special strength to laugh at humanity: tearing it to shreds but without molesting its conscience. After the War of 1939, the conscience of humanity, especially the conscience of the society of the nations in the West, was in an etherised condition, corpse-like, dreadful, which this brilliant poet, more a psychologist, a student of Freud, could never hope to molest. He gazes on it in a moment of tense anxiety. The poet in him desires to be of another world while the thinker, the curious seeker in him wants to break from society and watch “The Age of Anxiety.” He is anxious to know of the elusive travels of human emotions. But for him emotions have a meeting point. They differ to unite, they fight for peace, they struggle for sustenence, and they lie for rising. They have no extinction. With the flow of time emotions are born with an ever-present doom. To Maurice Cranston Auden said: “In the war years, a poet had to be other-wordly. At any rate, I did. There was just nothing to say about the chaos of this world. All that could be said had been said. There was no point in my saying it again, a little more hysterically.”

Auden calls the poem A Baroque Eclogue. In the Prologue are presented four people: Quant, a clerk in a shipping office, Malin, a medical intelligence officer in the Canadian Air Force, Emble who “hoped to read in all those faces the answer to his own disquiet,” and Rosetta, a New York department store worker noted for her capacity in making money though possessed of “a sensible horror of being poor.” The place is, first a Third Avenue Bar, then a Manhattan apartment. The time is an All Souls’ Night during the War. The experiences of these three men and one woman have some significance to Auden which he does not sever and show.

Quant sees his image in a mirror. He starts thinking:

My deuce, my double, my dear image,
……………………………………….
To a soiled soul; does your self like mine
Taste of untruth?

An anxiety originating in doubt and introspection progresses to the ultimate knowledge (in the Epilogue):

Outside these decisions the cycle of Nature
Revolved as usual, and voluble sages
Preached from park-benches to passing fornicators
A Confucian faith in the Functional Society.

In the suggestion of Malin (in the Prologue):

Let us then
Consider rather the incessant Now of
The traveller through time, his tired mind
Biased towards bigness since his body must
Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope,
Acquisities, in quest of his own
Absconded self yet scared to find it
As he bumbles by from birth to death
Menaced by madness; whose mode of being,
Bashful or braggart, is to be at once
Outside and inside his own demand
For personal pattern ……………..
……………………All that exists
Matters to man.

Each of them wants to discover the Soul, the salvation of which is difficult to attain. There is no meaning for philosophy in a world of conflicts. War becomes a necessity and panic overwhelms the finer impulses of man who is caught in the whirlpool of anxiety.

In the Seven Stages (Part Three) each of them being reminded of the Seven Ages (Part Two) of man, gets into a state of dream. It is full of horrors and phantasies inadequate in expression, of chaotic ideas, culminating in an awareness in the Dirge (Part Four) where all lament the lack of a real saviour.

In the high heavens,
The ageless places,
The gods are wringing their great worn hands
For their watchman is away, their world-engine
Creaking and cracking.

A hero arises not to save but to rule and dictate. The blunders of the past crowd the present and the future is in the womb of chaos though the possibility of a regeneration could be entertained in an age of machine and ideologies when “the Eternal Objects drift about in a daze.”

“Prehistoric happiness” could only be experienced in an unconscious state which Auden calls the state of extreme wakefulness where time and destiny could never approach. So to the world the salvation of Jesus alone could be the only salvation. Auden creates a perfect simoom of words which disturbs the shanti of a devoted student to whom anxiety is unknown, who practises Yoga in a spot shared with the swans of India.

M. S. GOPALAKRISHNAN

Rajaji: A Biographical Study, by Nilkan A. Perumal (Maya Publications, Calcutta. Price Rs. 5)

RAJAJI occupies the most eminent position in our country today as the first Indian Governor-General of Free India, and by virtue of intrinsic personal qualities, he has won the respect and affection of millions in this country and abroad. The biography of such a distinguished person is therefore most opportune. The author, who has made a name as a writer of biographical sketches, makes no claim to give us an authorised biography, nor even a well-documented one. He desires to give a ‘black and white sketch’ and claims to write without bias of any kind. Though fully alive to the limitations of material at his disposal, the author does not ‘want some facts about him to lose their freshness’ and he has therefore ‘become bold to record them in a timely volume such as this.’

Rajaji’s early life, till he began to take a prominent part about 1917 with the advent of Gandhiji in Indian political life, are very briefly dealt with and occupy no more than about 30 pages of the book. There is little information of his scholastic period, which was brilliant, or of his legal career, which was certainly distinguished, considering that he had come to occupy a front rank in a District Headquarters town even before he was forty. Rajaji’s collaboration with Gandhiji and his Congress work are also but briefly sketched. Rajaji’s Premiership at Madras, the parting of ways (in 1942), the ‘cliques’ working against him and the still more recent events in his life as Governor of West Bengal and as Governor-General occupy more than half of the book. There are concluding chapters dealing with the contrast between Gandhiji and Rajaji, with Rajaji’s ideas and with Rajaji as the artiste.

In spite of a certain straightforwardness and raciness in phrasing and style, we are bound to say that the book is very uneven both in regard to quality and quantity. It is to be regretted, of course, that the author, on his own showing, has not had occasion to come into intimate contact with the subject of his biography, nor has he had the benefit of getting materials for the biography from those who had: he seems to have relied more on stray cuttings of speeches from newspapers. The result is that the earlier struggles, the sustained and patient effort, of trial, of misunderstanding and even frustration which Rajaji passed through and which are indeed responsible for his hold on the respect and affections of his countrymen–these receive very perfunctory treatment; and what Rajaji has achieved in the limelight, particularly his doings and going out and coming in as Governor or Governor-General, occupy more space in the narration. It is doubtless hard to gather, and give shape and proper expression to his days of effort and travail, but the significance of a life such as Rajaji’s is lost if such material which forms the ground is not given due prominence. Further, in spite of the author’s diligence in compiling the facts more well-known, a few slips
have occurred: e.g., Kasturiranga Iyengar is mentioned among those who lined up with Deshabandhu Das (p. 32), whereas he was a no-changer and in the other camp; the Congress at Gaya did not decide in favour of Council-entry as mentioned by the author (p. 32); the Swarajist Party did not just fade out on the death of Das, as suggested by the author (p. 33); it was not in 1929 but in 1930 that there was Civil Disobedience, the salt satyagraha in which Rajaji took part; (p. 37); Rajaji did not seek to introduce Hindi in the Primary Classes (p. 50), but at the post-primary stage; Gandhiji during the days of his Madras visit in 1946 did not spend a good deal of his time to compose the differences between the rival groups in the Congress camp (p. 103), etc.

The book would have gained greatly by a thorough revision and would have been free from slipshod sentences and school-boy errors: “Rajaji is the one Indian preferred to remain in the laps of the gods (p. 34)”; “I was pointed out to a plot of land (p. 11)”; “They (pamphlets) strike me of the enormous capacity of Rajaji…(p. 34)”. “(A Professor) developed a partical liking for him (p. 11)”; “books published for good purpose (p. 37)”; “it was alright (p. 46)”. Mr. Perumal repeats the old story about Gandhiji speaking of Cripps’ proposals as a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank, where, of course, the last phrase was a mischievous addition later.

In spite o£ these lapses, the author has the gift of the good sketch-writer, of seizing on the essentials and hitting off in a few deft strokes the outlines of a vivid picture. This, for instance, is very neat: “Rajaji is no orator to be sure. His speeches are not enthusiastic outbursts but calm personal conversations with large audiences” (p. 131) and the author has heard him but once! “He is firm-willed, steady, and knows his path as clearly as an eminent seafarer knows his route.”

There are eight illustrations provided in the body of the book, besides a very good portrait of Rajaji on the dust Cover. The book whets one’s appetite to know more about the hero of this biography, and the author’s labours have thus been to good purpose, and fully justified.
K. S. G.

Yoga: The Technique of Health and Happiness, by Indira Devi (Kitabistan, Allahabad. Price Rs.  9)

THE system of Hatha Yoga, consisting of Yoga-asanas, deep-breathing exercises, etc., as handed down from ancient days, conducive to the maintenance of sound health, is in need of no special pleasing at this time of day, There has been a great revival of interest in the theory and practice of Yogic exercises, and valuable pioneering work and propaganda have been done by numerous individuals and institutions all over India. The author of this book, a Russian by birth, and a society lady, got interested in Yoga, and underwent a course of instruction in the Yoga-shala at Mysore. She proved to be an apt pupil, and not only benefited greatly by going through the dietetic disciplines imposed on her and the exercises taught to her, but conducted a school in China and taught others as well.

The book is admirably written, full of information and practical hints. The autobiographical ground against which the material is presented adds to its interest. Twenty asanas are described, with brief notes on their curative effects and illustrations of the author performing the exercises. The concluding chapters deal with breathing exercises, Chakras and Kundalini and general rules on exercises, diet and hygiene.

Reading the book, one is tempted to ask the question that was put to the author in China: “Why is it that Indians are so poorly built, weak, and sickly, if Yoga practices result in a healthy, proportioned body with a strong power of resistance?” The author goes on to say, “To this I had to answer that although India was the cradle of Yoga, very few people there practice it.” Not a comforting remark by any means. One hopes that with our new-found Independence something would be done to popularise the practice of Yogic physical culture to the extent it is safe and feasible. But then, one must remember that many of those who have the ordering of these things still belong to an older generation and look upon all this as ‘nonsense’ even as the husband of the author did. For instance, the claims made by the very Yoga-shala at Mysore, from which the author of this book took her instructions, was not recognised by an expert committee of the Mysore University itself!

K. S. G.

Malayan Adventure, by S. K. Chettur (Basel Mission Press, Mangalore, Price Rs. 6).

MR. CHETTUR’S mission to Malaya was a flop–judging from the stories that appeared in the Press during the time that the author functioned in that country as Representative. Neither does his book correct that impression. Probably it is not meant so much as a “vindication” of the correctness of the stand that the author took as for affording him “psychological relief.”

Mr. Chettur tries to portray himself throughout the book as rather a much misunderstood man, but succeeds in emerging only as one who rather much misunderstood men!

Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen were awaiting repatriation after three years of occupation “hell” by the Japanese and had it not been for Netaji their morale should have gone to pieces. Shipping space could not be had for love or for money and it was an explosive situation calling for the most delicate handling. But Mr. Chettur was drinking or dancing most of the time with attractive Mrs. Cyril Wong and tucking away under him enough pulao to keep a couple of Malayan tigers going for a week-or that is the over-all impression the book leaves behind.

It has, however, one or two good stories such as, for instance, this. “He (Field-Marshal, Montgomery) told us he had recently met Stalin in Moscow....According to Stalin America was the perfect example of a well-ordered Communist State having already achieved the ideal of the greatest good to the greatest number.”

A Somerset Maugham setting done in Karaka style–about describes Mr. Chettur’s latest effort.

R. PARTHASARATHY