Novelist, born in London, UK. He studied in London, then served with the Indian army in India and Malaya (19436), and worked as a literary agent until 1960. His reputation is based on four novels collectively known as The Raj Quartet (196674), comprising The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1972), and A Division of the Spoils (1974), in which he gave an exhaustive account of the British withdrawal from India. This quartet was adapted for the Granada television series The Jewel in the Crown (1982). He received the Booker Prize for his last novel, Staying On (1977).
Paul Mark Scott (25 March 1920 – 1 March 1978) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet, best known for his monumental tetralogy the Raj Quartet. His novel Staying On won the Booker Prize for 1977.
Early life
Paul Scott was born in Southgate, north London, the younger of two sons.
He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School (a private school) but was forced to leave suddenly, and without any qualifications, when 14, at a time that his father’s business was in severe financial difficulty.
Military service
He was called up (conscripted) in to the army as a private in early 1940 near the start of World War II and was assigned to Intelligence Corps.
In 1943 he was posted as an Officer Cadet to India, where he was commissioned.
After demobilisation in 1946 he was employed as an accountant for two small publishing houses and remained until 1950. In 1950 Scott moved to the literary agent Pearn Pollinger and Higham (later to be split into Pollinger Limited and David Higham Associates) and subsequently became a director.
Writing career
Scott published his first novel Johnny Sahib in 1952 (after seventeen rejections) to modest success. He continued to write and have published a novel every year or so and in 1960 decided to try to survive as a full time author.
His novels until this time had tended to draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces with strong subtexts of uneasy relationships between male friends or brothers. However in 1962, Birds of Paradise, which continued these themes, was not a success and Scott recognised that he had to look for alternative sources of inspiration.
Scott flew to India in 1964 to see old friends and recharge his batteries. Scott had suffered from amoebic dysentery since serving in India and had managed to handle it by what his biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes as “alarming” quantities of alcohol.
In June 1964, Scott began to write The Jewel in the Crown, the first novel of what was to become the Raj Quartet. Scott wrote in relative isolation and only visited India twice during the genesis of the Raj Quartet. He supplemented his earnings from his books with writing reviews for The Times, the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and Country Life.
In 1976 and 1977 he was visiting Professor at the University of Tulsa in the U.S. state of Oklahoma.
At the time of their publication, the novels of the Raj Quartet were, individually and collectively, received with little enthusiasm.
Scott stated that “For me, the British Raj is an extended metaphor [and] I don’t think a writer chooses his metaphors. As his biographer comments,
Probably only an outsider could have commanded the long, lucid perspectives he brought to bear on the end of the British raj, exploring with passionate, concentrated attention a subject still generally treated as taboo, or fit only for historical romance and adventure stories.
The Jewel in the Crown has at its heart the confrontation between Hari Kumar, the young, England-raised Indian liberal, and the police superintendent Ronald Merrick who both hates and is attracted to Kumar and seeks to destroy him after Daphne Manners, the English girl who is in love with Kumar and has been courted by Merrick, is raped. Is Merrick, a repressed homosexual with authoritarian leanings and an arrogant sense of his own racial standing a portrait of Scott in later life, or is he based on the strong authority figure in his life – his mother?
In 1980, Granada Television filmed Staying On, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson as Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, famously advertised at the time as "Reunited for the first time since Brief Encounter". The success of its first showing on British television in December 1980 encouraged Granada Television to embark on the much greater project of making The Raj Quartet into a major fourteen part television series known as The Jewel in the Crown, first broadcast in the UK in early 1984. In 2001 the British Film Institute voted it as 22nd in the all time best British television programmes.
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