L. H. Myers

Prof. K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR, M.A., D. Litt.

L. H. Myers was the son of Frederick W. H. Myers, a Victorian enthusiast of psychic research and the author of the popular monograph on Wordsworth in the English Men of Letters series. Born in 1881, Leo Myers had his education at Eton and Cambridge, but stood rather apart from the social groups of either place. After his father’s death in January 1901, Leo went with his mother to America, where he met his future wife, Elsie Palmer, 9 years his senior. Being financially well off, he wasn’t obliged to work for a living, but his extreme sensitiveness saved him alike from sloth and triviality. He could be sad, and he could laugh; but he wouldn’t sneer, or give way to cynicism. While still young, he had once sensed the infinite Real behind the play of Appearance, and this circumstance was to leave a permanent effect on his life and work.

L. H. Myers’s first creative work was a blank verse play entitled Arvat (1908), whose theme was the issue between the individual and the aggregate–

This is the life, of men,
The corporate life, Society, which I
Have made my God, slaying the God in me.

Fourteen years were to pass before his next work, The Orissers, was published. The success of this, his first novel, brought him many friends–among them the leading lights of ‘Bloomsbury’. But as he had earlier reacted against the muscular and formalistic ethos of Eton, he now recoiled from the humanistic and aesthetic modes of Bloomsbury. The ‘Clio’, Myers’s second novel, came out in 1925. This was followed by The Root and the Flower, a trilogy consisting of The Near and the far (1926); Prince Jali (1931), and Rajah Amar (1934). After a diversion in the shape of ‘my naive and sentimental little tale’, Strange Glory (1936), Mr. Myers returned to the theme of the trilogy, and published the massive sequel, The Pool of Vishnu (1940). The Root and the Flower and The Pool of Vishnu were issued as an ‘omnibus’ in 1943, with the title The Near and the Far. Next year, on the night of April 7, 1944, Myers sought the finality of death by taking an overdose of vernal, and became a casualty, like Virginia Woolf, of the moral offensive of the second World War.

‘The unhappy, gracious, witty man I knew,’ says L. A. G. Strong recalling L. H. Myers; Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick found him as a young man ‘melancholy, sceptical, detached, very fastidious and delicate and sensitive,’ while C. F. Meade’s predominant memory of ‘our youth together...is constant laughter.’ The active period of Myers’s life fell between the two world wars, and his sensitive mind was caught in the vortex of the clashing philosophies and careering disillusions of the time. The search for certainty, the hankering after serenity, was an exhausting and an almost hopeless task. Rejections and retreats were easy enough, but where was the Everlasting Yea? How see it? Where find it? Was it the ‘Magnetic Mountain’ of the Communists’ Utopia? Or was it the Huxleyan ‘Ground’ of true mysticism? The best that Myers could do was to put into his novels the rejections and the retreats, as also the undulating search, the confused groping towards the goal, the mirages, the sloughs and the chasms on the way, and–perhaps–a hint too of the still unrealized Infinite and the Harmony to come.

Of the 7 novels that L. H. Myers wrote, the tetralogy The Near and the Far is located in the India of Emperor Akbar’s time; The Orissers has a remote and exotic Welsh ground, The ‘Clio’ takes us to the Amazon on board a ship, and Strange Glory opens in the swamps of Louisiana. Myers was a careful and conscientious writer, and while readily responding to the imperatives of his inspiration, he was willing to take infinite pains to give them appropriate utterance. The pressure of the present was so insistent that if he was to render his responses or reactions into art, he bad to transmute them by achieving a feat of transportation of the scene and time. Of Myers’s novels it may be truly said that they imply a ‘criticism of life,’ and strive to articulate a reply to the question ‘How to live?’ The main preoccupations are the same in all the seven novels, but the whole arc of Myers’s striving and achievement is comprised in The Near and the Far his most ambitious work and one of the great imaginative creations of the twentieth century.

            The Near and the Far is, superficially speaking, a historical novel like the late Hannah Closs’s Alligension trilogy. Religion, philosophy and mysticism are alike woven into the texture of L. H. Myers’s and Hannah Closs’s novels. But another aspect of The Near and the Far, the kaleidoscopic pattern of court intrigues and sex entanglements, licks L. H. Myers’s novel rather with Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, which, according to L. P. Hartley, Myers greatly enjoyed. Yet, again, Myers had his affiliations with Dostoevsky, for they both saw their characters in their spiritual uniqueness more than in their material reality, and so characters and situations often acquired in their novels a psychical and symbolic quality.

In physical terms Myers was a perfect stranger to India, but he was widely and curiously read in Indian history and philosophy, and certain habits of imaginative concentration must have familiarised him with the landscapes of Indian thought and feeling. In his descriptions of places there is a vagueness as well as a definiteness, they call to mind nowhere in particular–not even Agra–yet we are free to recognize any cities, palaces, gardens, camps that we know in the Palace at Agra and the Royal Hunting Grounds,–Khanjo and the Valley Ravi, the Pleasance of the Arts, and the lake between–Kathiapur with the snake-infested path leading to the Temple–the half-ruined castle in the desert–the Old Summer Palace at Daulatpur–Hawa Ghar and the ‘Pool of Vishnu’. These are grounds that with hardly an essential change survive from age to age, and the characters who enact their many farces, melodramas, tragicomedies, comedies and tragedies are also prototypical of humanity. Akbar the Great Mughal; his warring sons, Salim and Daniyal: Mabun Das the chief of the Secret Police and Shaik Mobarek the evangelist of Din Ilahi, who support Salim and Daniyal respectively: Amar the Buddhist, the Christian Sita his wife, the Muslim Hari Khan her lover: Prince Jali caught between diverse religions and personal influences: a variety of women–Gonevati, the Yogini of the Vamacharies; Lalita, betrothed to the impossible Daniyal but Hari’s mistress; Ambissa, Srilata, Ranee Jagshri; Laksmi, Damayanti: a variety of young men too–the effeminate Ali, Dantawat the physical and moral wreck, the brothers Bhoj and Mohan, and Prince Jali himself: a convocation of teachers–Gokal, Mobarek, the Yogi, Smith the Christian humanist, the Guru: prophets, priests, politicians, kings, cranks, crooks, inverts, perverts, sadists, intriguers, social butterflies, ‘herb’ women, all crowd the epic canvas of The Hear and the Far, and the impression that is left on the mind is one of moving multiplicity in character and action. The range, the comprehension is so extensive, so all inclusive, that rival religions–Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity–meet here, they are presented alike in their strength and their weakness; the same ideal, the same character, is now an arc of fulfilment, now a mere caricature of perversion. The ‘action’ is played at different levels–the visible theatre of the world, to soul’s sanctuary within, the ineffable plateaus of the Spirit–and the planes are seen to intersect, mingle, fuse and separate again. It is a strangely attractive and perturbing world, exotic and intimate, murky but starlit, depressing and confusing yet touched with an ambrosial taste and pregnant with reserves of meaning.

The Near and the Far may be called a philosophical novel with an Indian ground. Problems are posed, beliefs are scrutinised, but it is seldom possible to detach these from the vivid spectacle of human life which the novel projects before us. The Near and the Far is thus an example of what Mrs. Virginia Woolf has referred to as philosophy being ‘consumed’ in a novel: philosophy being so perfectly integrated with action and character that it is impossible to think of them apart.

As a philosophical novel, The Near and the Far attempts an exploration of the perennial human problem; How to live? Shall the individual assert his uniqueness or compromise with the multitude? Or must he race beyond the immanent, and seek, as Amar does or would fain do, the transcendent? At the very beginning of the novel, the boy Jali is intrigued by the problem of appearance and reality:

“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.”

But when? We read on over 200 pages, and Prince Jali is as intrigued as ever:

‘How could that mystic There ever become a Here? It could not–without changing. It existed only in its thereness. No one ever got There–unless,perhaps, in the impossible Heaven of the Christians.’

Is the need for roots less imperative than the fascination for the flower and the fruit? Hari Khan the great amorist has an irresistible way with women, but the flowers fade, the fruit turns out to be dead-sea fruit: not until love is sustained by a spiritual intimacy or identity can it escape the sickness of surfeit. How is good fellowship or wise partnership to be established except (as with Amar and Gokal, or with Mohan and Damayanti) in terms of mutual trust and complete equality, and in tune with the promptings of the heart? Harmony no doubt is the prime need of humanity, but of what use is an imposed, regimented, atrophied
Harmony–the ‘harmony’ of mechanical synchronisation, the ‘peace’ of the grave? In The Pool of Vishnu, while Shaik Mobarek preaches the ideal of the totalitarian ‘god-state’, the Guru sternly replies:

“There is no greatness at the end of your road–only despair. Spirit, which must stream through the individual man, if he is to preserve a sane and living soul, must stream through society as well. Every civilization, every culture, that has ever existed has owed its life to this. When the Stream tarries the body politic stiffens into a prison-house; forms and institutions become manacles, and the State turns into a monstrous slave-driver.”

The Guru’s belief in human nature–like Jefferson’s belief in the common man in the context of American democracy–should yield rich dividends in an essentially egalitarian society. On the other hand, there are reservoirs of evil also in man–for example, Daniyal, Gunevati, Mujatta. How far they are evil because of the tangle of circumstances in which they are trapped, and how far as an ineradicable and essential law of their nature, must remain an open question. The danger really is not in the power of evil to do mischief but with the apparent powerlessness (or reluctance) of good to assert itself, fight evil, and destroy it. Mr. Myers builds up the rival entities of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ in Prince Daniyal and Rajah Amar respectively, and we are enabled to sense their nature through a multitude of hints and obscure actions; we see them slowly–as if unwillingly or unwittingly–gravitate towards each other, till at last they meet in the Pleasance of the Arts at Daniyal’s express request. There follows the incident of the lovely white cat–merely to vent his spleen, Daniyal lifts the sole of his right foot, places it on the unsuspecting cat’s head, and brutally tramples it to death.

This is a demonstration of pure evil, and Amar can have no further doubts: with a swift movement he draws his short sword–but Daniyal’s negro servant deals the Rajah a stunning blow from behind, and ‘good’ crumples to the ground and ‘evil’ is all but triumphant.

Nevertheless, that is not the end; the thread of the story is taken up again in The Pool of Vishnu. Amar, now a blind man, joins, a group of wandering Buddhist monks, and finds peace at last. We learn that Daniyal’s menagerie at the Pleasance of the Arts has been disbanded, that Gunevati has been trampled to death by an elephant; we learn too that Hari Khan has been received into favour by Akbar. While several of the old characters continue to engage our attention, the centre of interest in The Pool of Vishnu is in a new tangle of relationships involving Mohan and Damayanti, Bhoj and Lakshmi, the Guru and Akbar himself. Prince Jali is now more a bystander than an actor, but he sees things, he changes, he grows. He has lost his father, he presently loses Hari Khan; the past is peopled with ghosts and shadows, and he feels suspended between the past and the future. “The clouds, he thought, were gone in a breath, and human beings in only a few breaths more. Only Vishnu remained.”

It would be wrong, of course, to dogmatise about the central message of Myers’s tetralogy. He was still striving and groping towards the goal, constantly testing the philosophies of the past on the hard anvil of actuality, continually seeking filiations between the ‘outward things” and the ‘inner landscapes of the mind,’ and although in the course of The Near and the Far he seems to suggest various approaches to the problem of living, it is clear none the less that no simple rule will meet every situation. Truth has many facets, and to dogmatise is to distort and to stifle Truth. At first Prince Jali has one foot here, one there, he moves in and out of diverse worlds, and at this still experimental stage of his life he is merely puzzled, and rather uncertain of his own individual reality; he feels too that his is a developing personality, assimilating as much as possible from the numerous other worlds that come within the range of his experience. Knowledge came from the Right and from the Left, and he must grasp it all. This trying patiently to gather and integrate varied bits of reality into a full round of truth is one way of approaching the problem ofliving. But there is another, and a shorter and surer, way,–one doesn’t seek it, but stumbles upon it,–the mystic’s direct contact with Reality. Gokal describes such an experience toAmar:

‘It was a morning of the hottest, brightest sunshine, as you know; every ripple on the lake, every leaf upon the trees, was sharp and clear; the face of nature was distinct with a hard definition of outline, and yet–yet this same face of nature shivered and trembled as might its own reflection upon the surface of the lake. The thinness of the crust of tangible things, the emptiness of matter, the superficiality of appearances, suddenly were revealed...everything wavered as if it were threatened with the loss of its flimsy surface actuality. I think this had something todo with Time...’

However, arduous experimentation and sudden self-transcendence do not exhaust the range of human experience. There is the world of wickedness, there is the world of triviality, and there is the world of sexual depravity in the name of religion. The Yogi who blandly preaches that spirit and flesh are one, that sexuality and religion are one and that sex is the true religion of man is an evil force, however he may cloak his evil or carry conviction through an exhibition of ‘miraculous’ powers, and his realism is but a race towards death. Triviality is no less an invitation to spiritual suicide. Prince Jali, although first attracted by the superficial glitter of Daniyal’s Pleasance, is presently shocked to discover its pretentious shallowness and its futile negations. But Daniyal’s satirical shafts could only wound himself. So it must always be with people who seek to defame sacred things. But while the eternal is unaffected, on the temporal plane much immediate damage could ensue. Gokal see through Daniyal’s veneer of fastidious bravado and warns Amar against minimizing the propensity of triviality to evil; but later Gokal states clearly the existential problem and lays down the law of right action:

“Man is under an obligation to act–under a psychological necessity that is also a spiritual obligation. And somehow in his action he must reconcile the pursuit of his own small, definite, and rightful ends with the working out of an inscrutable purpose. He must not forswear his intimate knowledge that he is the chief instrument of the supernatural energy determining whatever in time shall come to pass.”

Although the words sink into Amar’s heart, not until the outrage on the cat does he really see Daniyal for the naked evil that he is, –now he acts without hesitation, and dare we assert that it is but a futile gesture?

Gunevati is evil too, but less consciously or determinedly such; hers is elemental animal cunning, she is the medium of mischief more than the mischief-maker. Yet the snake within the woman terrifies Jali. A lethargy comes upon him, the Present expands, stagnates, and reflects timelessness…“only there was no foretaste of beatitude in this experience; it was rather an invitation into a state of living death.” Is Jali escaping out of the fever of life and into the eternity of–not felicity–but death’s dream kingdom? In his puzzled waking moments Jali finds the world peopled by the wicked and the trivial–he sees fools, fools everywhere, and wickedness itself is but a form of folly. “If that was the case, if ‘nice’ people constituted only a handful–a poor, ineffective, inarticulate handful–than nothing was left but despair.” He has a long long way to go before he can gather up again the broken fragments of faith and chase the spectre of despair away. The ‘Pool’ of Vishnu will at last effect the baptism of rebirth, and Prince Jali will be able to face the future with hope and courage.

The Pool of Vishnu is on the whole less consistently wrought in terms of art than the superb trilogy, The Root and the Flower; philosophy is less fully consumed in the action and characterization and the complex of relationshipsrefuses to fuse completely into a unity. But there are compensations: we meet the Guru, we meet Akbar–and Myers even brings the two together. The Guru is shrewd and practical withoutever ceasing to be his true self. In a moment of divination, Emperor and Guru alike see identity between King and Peasant–as Hamlet, in a very different context, imagines the kinggoing a progress through the guts of a beggar or as Lear identifies himself with the bedlam beggar. Akbar enters into the life of Narodi Das the peasant and issues the edicts that givehope to the hopeless and a renewal of life to the dying.

The Guru, then, for all his mysticism, is nothing if not practical. But this isnot to be confused with cheap worldlywisdom. The path of duty is neither blind action nor determined inaction, but purposive action, action in tune withthe forces that make for a living future–“a new heaven and a new earth.” This involves, according to the Guru, “a constant dying, accompanied by a constant re-birth.” Jali’s education proceeds at a quick pace, and under the radiance of the Guru’s immaculate gaze he finds the veil torn asunder and ineffable reality revealed at last:

“Jali said nothing, and was content not to understand. He knew only that something withinhim was loosened, and that his spirit went forth. With the Guru’s it went forth intofreedom–to mix in the black leafiness of the trees, and mount to the growing light of the stars, and sail in the dusky, placid air.”

Aftersuch knowledge, what spur to action? All the more reason for action!

“One must cling to the memory. One must remember and one must act. The knowledge gained in communion, and ripened in solitude, must pour itslife into the world through action.”

The clue to right action is to act in accordance with the divine purpose–to act in close relation to the Centre. “When the relation of man with man isnot through the Centre, itcorrupts and destroys itself.” Rest on the Ground: don’t lose sight of the Centre: having tasted ambrosial life, don’t succumb to the ‘mock-life’ of the phenomenal world: act as the Spirit within directs, the Spirit that has experienced the communion of the world.

Prince Jali’s education is complete. He has travelled far afield, and the wheel of his journeyings has come full circle at last, for at the end of the tetralogy we find him at the Old Palace of Agra where we had seen him at the beginning. He is now a sadder and a wiser man. But he hasn’t forgotten the Pool of Vishnu, nor the Guru’s wise words. He will live, he will act. He will remember that Spirit is the world’s master. Man is no helpless thistledown of fate, but the instrument of divine destiny. It is his destiny–and quite within the range of possibility–to achieve here, sooner or later, the rounded efflorescence of the Life Divine.

The Near and Far is not just an English novel on an Indian historical theme: it is a novel and a philosophy and a prophecy. Here history and fiction mingle, the past and the present coalesce, and politics, intrigue and romance fuse with religion, philosophy and mysticism. Names, places, situations–vaguely familiar, yet exotic also as in a dream–jumble accepted categories, and 16th century and 20th century–India and Britain–seem to be but variations of an essentially unchanging human situation. L. H. Myres laboured at this epic of fiction for about 15 years, and in a sense it is the story of his prolonged and agonising search for certainty in the ‘waste land’ epoch of modern civilization. Although he broke under the strain at last, he has left behind the record of his spiritual quest, and this great work posterity will not willingly let die.