It was, essentially, as his daughter Carol saw, the prime cause of his alienation from Penny, the break-up of his long marriage.

The physical and emotional cost was appalling. It was then, in the early 1960s, that Paul finally discovered his great theme-the twilight and eclipse of the British Raj in India-and retreated further and further, during the decade that it took him to sweat out the four long volumes that emerged as The Raj Quartet, into a kind of creative solitude where the fictional world of British India that he conjured up became, more and more as time went on, virtually his sole reality.

The fictional world of British India that he conjured up became virtually his sole reality.īut from 1963 until 1971, my family and I were living in Greece, and after that I took up an academic post in the United States, so that during this highly important late period of his career my friendship with Paul was in essence restricted to letters. We both exploded with laughter, and I became his client on the spot. Summoned for an interview at the firm then known as Pearn, Pollinger and Higham, I found myself facing, across a desk, an elegantly suited gentleman who-I suddenly realized at about the same moment as the penny dropped for him-was none other than my Rice Corps bar companion. I did wonder at the time whether he might not have been trying to pick me up, a suspicion that Spurling’s biography and the new collection of Scott’s letters have done nothing to dispel.Ī decade later, with Cambridge behind me, I was trying to break into the London literary world, and decided I needed an agent. I was an NCO in what was euphemistically described as “Special Duties,” that is, intelligence, but more often meant taking on any odd job for which no one else could be found Paul was an air supply captain who had been commissioned into the Service Corps, unkindly known to the Rifle Brigade or the Gurkhas as, in the words of his biographer Hilary Spurling, “the Rice Corps, Flying Grocers, or Jam Stealers and generally considered to be about as low as it was possible to get in the Indian Army.” We eyed each other’s shoulder-chips with sympathy over drinks, and got on extremely well. I first met Paul Scott at Firpo’s bar on Chowringhee in Calcutta in 1944.

The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott