Leonard Woolf’s first novel, the brilliant evocation of peasant life in Ceylon, ‘The Village in the Jungle’, was published in 1913. His second novel, the more conventional ‘Wise Virgins’, a thinly disguised account of his and Virginia’s Bloomsbury friends, was published the following year. There then followed a seven year hiatus while he concentrated on publishing the serious political and sociological works he wished to be remembered by:

• International Government – 1916
• The Future of Constantinople – 1917
• The Framework of a Lasting Peace – 1917
• Cooperation and the Future of Industry – 1918
• Economic Imperialism – 1920
• Empire and Commerce in Africa – 1920
• Socialism and Co-operation – 1921

Then, in among all these serious works about international affairs and the future of imperialism (of which he was a fierce critic) the Hogarth Press, which he had set up with Virginia in 1917, published a slim volume titled ‘Stories of the East’. There are just three stories:

1. A Tale Told by Moonlight
2. Pearls and Swine
3. The Two Brahmans

1. A Tale Told by Moonlight

The setup

This has the influence of Joseph Conrad all over it, from the narrator within a narrator structure, through to the pretty insignificant story itself, which is jazzed up to try and make it about treatment and atmosphere which, in my opinion, doesn’t come off.

The narrator is staying somewhere in the English countryside with Alderton, the novelist. The other house guests are Pemberton the poet and Hanson Smith, the critic. The fourth member of the party is Jessop who the narrator starts the story by telling us is generally unpopular for his habit of being blunt to the point of rudeness and incivility.

After dinner these chaps stroll down through the fields to the river and lie around chatting as dusk falls. When it’s dark they hear footsteps coming along the river and realise it’s a young couple out for a stroll. Concealed in the darkness and on a bank over the riverside path, our chaps hear the young couple murmuring sweet nothings then the sounds of kissing, before they stroll on.

This puts our chaps in a sentimental mood and they share stories about first loves and wooing. All except Jessop who hears the others out then weighs in with his unsentimental withering opinion, which is:

‘Think of it for a moment, chucking out of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages. A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. And instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting—yes that’s it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn’t tired or bewildered or ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars. And that’s love, the love which you novelists scatter about so freely…’

So Jessop ridicules all the soppy talk about love and moonlight and says real love is strange, uncanny, unpredictable, makes no sense, is the rarest thing in the world. He’s knocked around the world and only ever seen two cases of it, and he’s now going to tell us about one of them.

So all this has been by way of introduction and this it is so redolent of Conrad: the all-male company; after dinner, in the dark; all described by an unknown narrator who then introduces one of the party telling a story-within-a-story. Structurally, it’s identical with the famous setting of Heart of Darkness.

The story

Among Jessop’s many friends and acquaintances was a man named Reynolds, a novelist. They were at Rugby (public school) together. Jessop was living ‘out East’, in Ceylon, in the capital Colombo. Reynolds and he exchanged occasional letters until Reynolds announced he was heading in that direction and it was arranged he’d come and stay for a week.

He was a thin, weedy man who’s ‘stood aside’ from life, out of nervousness, a legacy of being bullied at school, knew all about people’s little tricks and mannerisms but didn’t know how they felt because he’d never felt anything except fear and shyness. So Jessop took him to all the expat clubs and they sat and talked about love and life and Jessop realised he’d never actually lived a day in his life.

So he determines to show him a side of life he hadn’t seen before, and takes him in a rickshaw out into the seedy, native part of town, to a dingy house which is a native brothel. Here they are greeted by ten or so beautiful young scantily-clad women, laughing and giggling. Poor Reynolds is terribly embarrassed at the bare boobs and golden bodies and doesn’t respond to their kisses or caresses so most of them gravitate over to Jessop who can speak their language and is prepared to listen to their stories about the native villages they come from and the arduous lives they’ve escaped to come to the big city. All except one.

She was called Celestinahami and was astonishingly beautiful. Her skin was the palest of pale gold with a glow in it, very rare in the fair native women. The delicate innocent beauty of a child was in her face; and her eyes, Lord, her eyes immense, deep, dark and melancholy which looked as if they knew and understood and felt everything in the world. She never wore anything coloured, just a white cloth wrapped round her waist with one end thrown over the left shoulder. She carried about her an air of slowness and depth and mystery of silence and of innocence.

Long story short, they fall in love and, Jessop insists, it was the real thing not the milk and moonlight version of English poets and novelists. It was something deep and inexplicable.

He looked into her eyes that understood nothing but seemed to understand everything, and then it came out at last; the power to feel, the power that so few have, the flame, the passion, love, the real thing. It was the real thing, I tell you; I ought to know…

So Reynolds becomes hooked and goes back to the brothel night after night in order to see Celestinahami. But Reynolds becomes so unhappy at the impracticality of the whole situation that he makes a feeble attempt to shoot himself. He buys a revolver but Jessop burst into his room to find him struggling with the mechanism which clips chamber shut and seized it out of his hands.

Then Jessop read him the riot act and this is the bit I didn’t really understand, or thought contradicted itself. Because Jessop tells Reynolds that the girl is nothing like he imagines:

not a bit what he thought her, what his passion went out to—a nice simple soft little animal like the bitch at my feet that starved herself if I left her for a day

BUT, at the same time, acknowledging that what Reynolds feels for her IS the real thing:

You’re really in love, in love with something that doesn’t exist behind those great eyes. It’s dangerous, damned dangerous because it’s real—and that’s why it’s rare.

So it’s real love, one of the only two times Jessop has seen ‘real’ love – and yet he’s perfectly aware that it’s love for something which doesn’t exist. Reynolds is utterly projecting something onto this girl which simply isn’t there. And yet this is what Jessop calls real love. See why I’m a bit confused?

Anyway, Jessop roughly tells Reynolds to either get on the next ship home or ‘practise what you preach and live your life out, and take the risks.’ So for the first time in his life, Reynolds takes a chance on life. He buys the girl out of the brother (for the bargain price of 20 rupees) and Jessop fixes them up in a nice cottage by the sea.

At first they were happy. He taught her English and she taught him Sinhalese. He started to write a novel about the East. But pretty quickly he comes to realise the truth. He comes to realise the vast difference in intellect and education and culture between them.

He couldn’t speak to her and she couldn’t speak to him, she couldn’t understand him. He was a civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she—she was an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful.

He loved her but she tortured him. She got on his nerves.

But the cruellest thing of all was that she had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her master.

Because:

There’s another sort of love; it isn’t the body and it isn’t the flame; it’s the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed women of the East. It’s the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami for Reynolds. But it wasn’t what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more than anything which got on his nerves.

So, the story tells us, there are two types of love: the big visionary type which, it has been clearly explained, Reynolds projected onto Celestinahami; and the dog-like, slave-like master-love of Celestinahami. Neither sound to me like ‘the real thing’, which Jessop set out to describe.

She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. And when he looked into her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in love with, what he knew didn’t exist. It began to drive him mad.

And so the story hurtles to its inevitable, Conradian end. She takes desperate steps to try and keep his ‘love’, the most florid being to dress up like the white women she sees in Colombo, in stays and white cotton stockings and shoes. But the more she tries, the more she destroys the image Reynolds had of her, the more angry he becomes, the more wretched she.

Eventually Reynolds realises he has to leave and carry on his travels. He swears to Celestinahami and Jessop that he’ll be back, he considerately makes over the house to Celestinahami’s ownership, then one fine day sails away on a P&O liner.

I never saw Reynolds again but I saw Celestinahami once. It was at the inquest two days after the Moldavia sailed for Aden. She was lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered room behind the court… They had found her floating in the sea that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little bungalow—bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and shoes.

I suppose this is all very well done, but very much in the manner of Conrad even down to the punchline. Just as in one of Conrad’s classic tales told by his sailor-narrator Charles Marlow, the storyteller ends his tale, there’s a pause, and then one of the company of listeners brings us back to reality with a down-to-earth comment.

Jessop stopped. No one spoke for a minute or two. Then Hanson Smith stretched himself, yawned, and got up. ‘Battle, murder and sentimentality,’ he said. ‘You’re as bad as the rest of them, Jessop. I’d like to hear your other case—but it’s too late, I’m off to bed.’

Commentary

The feel and structure of the thing are, as pointed out, very Conradian, from the double narrative structure through to the deliberately throwaway ending, designed to evince that mood of cynical, jaded, man-of-the-world indifference to what is, in essence a tragedy (reminiscent of the plot of Puccini’s opera ‘Madame Butterfly’).

And you don’t have to be a feminist to find the fundamental structure – or two narrative structures – objectionable. What I mean is the frame story, in which four comfortably-off men sound off to each other about love without much or any admission of the woman’s point of view – and then listen to a tragedy based around the innocence and ignorance of poor Celestinahami. The power imbalances in both these structures are there for everyone to see. And the worldly note of the throwaway ending may be designed to indicate the fundamental heartlessness of the world, but it highlights that none of the listeners has a word of lament over poor Celestinahami.

But what puzzled me, more than anything, was that the story, the first narrator, and then Jessop all promise some great revelation about The Truth of Love, and then it doesn’t arrive. Maybe the narrator and Jessop’s point is that such a thing doesn’t exist, and instead, what actually exists in the real world is more complex, unsentimental, irrational and almost unpleasant, than the moon-in-June sentimental clichés.

In which respect, then, it chimes very much with the heartless worldview which radiates from his wonderful if extremely bleak novel, ‘The Village in the Jungle’.

2. Pearls and Swine

The setting

The unnamed first-person narrator is staying at a hotel in Torquay. After dinner and a game of billiards he joins three other chaps sitting round the fire. They’re talking about India, which reminds him of the 15 years he spent out there. Two of the three – a stock jobber and a clergymen – have never been out East and so sound off with insufferably imperialist cant and clichés: the stock jobber says the Indians must accept our racial superiority; the clergymen says we are undoubtedly raising them up to our level of civilisation, not least through the work of earnest young missionaries, basing his views on:

‘I read the papers, I’ve read books too, mind you, about India. I know what’s going on.’

All this cant goads the third member of the group, a small man with dark skin and wrinkles round his eyes (the narrator recognises a fellow servant of empire) beyond endurance, and he bursts out with a Tamil proverb. When asked to translate he explains that it’s a polite way of indicating the foolishness of earnest young Englishmen who go out to idea full of naive ideas drummed into them by their School Board education and think that somehow, after just 18 months, they understand the place from top to bottom, from ‘Benares to Rameswaram’. Compared to the Tamils who have lived in India for at least 7,000 years, compared to the hundreds of races who share the continent (‘there are more races in India than people in Peckham’).

Mention of views and opinions provides the hinge or pretext for the little Anglo-Indian man to announce that instead of views, he will tell them some facts. And this is what he proceeds to do.

The story

This is the real point of the story. The Anglo-Indian gives a ten-page account of his time serving in southern India as government administrator of a peal fishery. This was based on a God-forsaken stretch of the coast which consisted of nothing but barren sand and scrub for hundreds of miles, without a town or village or river or fresh water. But off this coast were marvellously rich oyster beds and every year, for 6 to 8 weeks between monsoons, thousands of fishermen in hundreds of boats, come to farm the oysters, a varied crew including scores of different races of Indians, plus Arabs and their Black ex-slaves, a multicultural community devoted to one end, diving to bring up thousands of oysters every day, to leave them rotting in the sun for the flies to devour, in the hope they will reveal pearls of great price embedded in their flesh.

The British Imperial government taxes their catch, taking two-thirds of the pearls. And the small, dark intense storyteller once performed this role and now describes, in vivid and powerful detail, what it was like – the heat, the unbearable flies, the nauseating smell of thousands of rotting oysters, the babble of native voices. All the several thousand fishermen had to be confined in a compound for 6 to weeks, creating a madly unhygienic and disease-ridden environment.

So that establishes the ground base of the story. Into this environment come two more white men: one is Robson, a 24-year-old bright spark who passed the Civil Service exams and is overflowing with bright new ideas about reforming everything, who criticises the narrator for giving up on changing the East and instead letting the East change him.

He was too cocksure altogether, of himself, of his School Board education, of life, of his ‘views’. He was going to run India on new lines, laid down in some damned Manual of Political Science out of which they learn life in Board Schools and extension lectures.

Predictably, his body and mind are not prepared for the disgusting conditions of the compound, the heat and the flies, and he ends up vomiting lots of time every day, becoming sicker and sicker.

The other white man is (ironically) named White. He’s a drunk, a rummy, with a pinched face and sharp teeth with gaps between them. But he’s a white man so Robson and the (unnamed) narrator let him eat at the same table. White tells the others he went to public school, which is probable, failed in England and so came out East. But even here he has been bedevilled by ‘damn bad luck’ and tells sob stories about a succession of dubious-sounding jobs.

So that’s the setup: three white men in a huge barren hot inhospitable semi-desert next to the sea, trying to control thousands of native pearl divers from all across India and beyond. We expect trouble, if not tragedy.

Sure enough, things happen. First a fight breaks out between a group of Arabs and one of Tamils over a handful of oysters which fall out of a bag. By the time the narrator separates them one Tamil is dead and ten or so have been injured. Idealistic Robson, for all his fancy ideas of ‘Reforming The Empire’, turns out to be predictably useless, running around like a distracted hen and crying.

But the main event in the story is that White comes down with a severe attack of delirium tremens or DTs. He starts raving and threatening violence so the narrator has to knock him out with a rifle butt. When he comes round, the narrator ties him to his bed. His raving, his tormented hallucinations are a trial for the narrator but tip young Robson over the edge, reducing him to sitting and crying.

All this allows Woolf to write some highly enjoyable bravura passages of the different mentality of the old India hand, of how you come to adopt the native mentality, become more passive, and accept the vast impersonal forces which dictate life, your life, everyone’s lives.

One just did one’s work, hour after hour, keeping things going in that sun which stung one’s bare hands, took the skin off even my face, among the flies add the smell. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was just a few thousand Arabs and Indians fishing tip oysters from the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t even new, one felt; it was old, old as the Bible, old as Adam, so the Arabs said. One hadn’t much time to think, but one felt it and watched it, watched the things happen quietly, unastonished, as men do in the East. One does one’s work,—forty eight hours at a stretch doesn’t leave one much time or inclination for thinking,—waiting for things to happen. If you can prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp, or getting cholera or plague or small-pox, and if one can manage to get one night’s sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied.

And again, a meditation on the profound difference between East and West:

Things here feel so different; you seem so far from life, with windows and blinds and curtains always in between, and then nothing ever happens, you never wait for things to happen, never watch things happening here. You are always doing things somehow—Lord knows what they are—according I suppose to systems, views, opinions. But out there you live so near to life, every morning you smell damp earth if you splash too much in your tin bath. And things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and you—you don’t do things, you watch with the three hundred millions. You feel it there in everything, even in the sunrise and sunset, every day, the immensity, inexorableness, mystery of things happening. You feel the whole earth waking up or going to sleep in a great arch of sky; you feel small, not very powerful. But who ever felt the sun set or rise in London or Torquay either? It doesn’t: you just turn on or turn off the electric light.

This is all rather wonderful. But White won’t stop raving, all through the night. He moves on from hallucinations to describing shocking, immoral, cruel and corrupt behaviour all through his life, which is worse, more demoralising. The narrator moves him from his bed and ties him to a pole near his official desk where he can keep an eye on him. Arabs and Tamils come to watch him silently. The narrator explains that he is ill, the heat has driven him mad, and they accept this as they accept everything and move away with the ‘calm patient eyes of men who watched unastonished the procession of things’.

For one long night White raves and then, as dawn arrives, he cries out and dies. The narrator cuts him down from the pole and lays him out. But at that exact moment he is called by some locals. An oyster boat is coming inshore with a dead body on it, an Arab who died in mid-dive.

Woolf creates a very deliberate and stark contrast between the two dead men: White is a symbolic figure, symbolising the absolute worst of white men in the East, a corrupt drunk and public scandal who dies with horrible indignity.

By contrast the dead Arab is brought ashore by his colleagues, his brother sits by his body quietly weeping, an Arab sheikh comes up, lays his hand on the head of the lamenting man, and quietly and calmly consoles him. He died doing his work, doing his duty as a man. Everyone – dead man, brother and sheikh – are drenched in dignity and honour as the dawn breaks.

At this point the little brown man finishes his story. As with ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ the ending is deliberately dismissive, realistic, indicating the place of this, just one more story among a million stories in the western realm of endless discourse.

There was silence in the smoking-room. I looked round. The Colonel had fallen asleep with his mouth open. The jobber tried to look bored, the Archdeacon was, apparently, rather put out.

This feels much better than the first story for two obvious reasons. The dichotomies or binaries are easy to spot and enjoy, namely: between the shallow pontificating of the stock jobber and the clergyman, and the little brown Anglo-Indian; then between young idealistic Robson and the narrator; and then between the dignified locals and the wildly undignified, drunken White. There is the deeper dichotomy between imperial rules and the ruled to unpick as well, if you want to.

But mostly what makes it enjoyable is Woolf’ couple of paragraph-length descriptions of the mentality of the East, the spirit of the East, so utterly different from the pampered ignorance of London clubland where the frame story is set. All very neat, well constructed and enjoyable.

The Two Brahmans

Description of Yalpanam, a very large town in the north of Ceylon, which always feels abandoned and sleepy as all the living goes on behind the high fences made of the dried leaves of the coconut palms which conceal the compounds in which sit the huts and houses.

In the north of the town is the section devoted to Brahmans, to most senior caste in India’s caste system, who must keep themselves from being defiled, losing caste and face in countless ways. For example they do no work for themselves, all their needs are catered to by lower cast workers devoted to trades such as fishing tending rice, digging wells and so on.

In order to avoid defilement, the 50 or so Brahman families in Yalpanam all live in the same part of town, on the northern edge abutting the big lagoon. And for centuries if not millennia they have all married off their sons and daughters to each other to preserve their purity.

The story spans four generations of two particular families, headed by two fathers Chellaya and Chittampalam whose compounds neighbour each other. To be brief, both Chellya and Chittampalam shame their families by undertaking manual work. They try to keep it hidden but words get out and the other Brahman families cut them off. Among other things, this means their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children, will not be accepted for marriage by anyone in the town. They’ll have to go to distant settlements to find Brahman families which have never heard of their shame.

Chittampalam is a miser. When the water in his well starts to become brackish he should have gotten an earth carrying caste member to dig him a new well. Instead, in order to save, money he dug it and carries the soil away on his head himself. People saw him and he lost caste.

But it’s Chellaya who gets the lion’s share of (this very short) story. He likes to spend his afternoons staring out over the big lagoon and slowly becomes obsessed with the fishermen who wade out into the water and cast their nets. It looks so idyllic, it looks so relaxing. So one day he shamefacedly asks one of the fisherman if he could show him how to cast a net. He comes up with a cock-and-bull story about having made a vow to some god to do it as reward for healing his son but nobody is fooled. So for a small payment the fisherman sells him a net and then on successive days, far away from the village, shows him how to cast it. But someone, inevitably, sees, and he, too, loses caste.

I was wondering how these two bad Brahmans were going to be brought into contact or conflict but they aren’t. Chittampalam dies soon after being discovered carrying earth and Chellaya a few years later. It’s their great-great-great grandchildren who are. Four generations later the male descendants of the two naughty Brahmans bear the same names, Chellaya and Chittampalam.

Everybody’s forgotten which one of them carried the earth and which one cast nets, but they are still shunned by the other Brahman families and still have to marry outside the town.

And so we reach the climax of this little tale. The descendant Chellaya and Chittampalam still live in the same compounds as their ancestors, next to each other. And Chittampalam has a very beautiful daughter and Chellaya has one son unmarried, who one day sees the beautiful daughter through the compound wall, and suggests to his father that he marries her.

So the two fathers meet up and are in agreement that it would be an excellent marriage. However there’s one sticking point, the same sticking point there always is in all these native marriages, the size of the bride’s dowry: the father of the girl wants the dowry to be small and the father of the boy wants it to be large.

Well, the denouement, climax or punchline of the story turns out to be that… each time they meet to discuss the dowry it isn’t long before Chittampalam loses his temper and calls Chellaya a fisher, Chellaya loses his temper and calls Chittampalam a pariah and they both storm off.

Chellaya’s son calms his father down and arranges for the two men to have another meeting a few days later, but the exact same thing happens, with negotiations which start sensibly ending in a shouting match and both men storming away. Oh well, they realise; like their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them, they will have to marry off their children to partners from some distant village which has never heard of their shame.

So the moral of the story, children, is that the sins or errors or mistakes of the ancestors continue to bedevil and stymie the wishes of their descendants. Silly, isn’t it? And yet it’s those values and traditions which give our lives their meaning and aren’t as easy to shake off as glib outsiders think.

In a poignant and symbolic coda, Chellaya’s son, lovesick for Chittampalam’s daughter, takes to going and sitting at the exact same spot where his great-great-great-grandfather Chellaya used to sit and watch the fishermen cast their nets.

Maybe it’s not just social conventions and transgressions which are passed down through the generations, but something deeper; something about gestures and longings and desires which are revived and repeated in every generation…

Thoughts

‘Pearls and Swine’ is clearly the best of the three stories, which is why Eland chose to include it in their paperback edition of ‘The Village in the Jungle’ but not the other two.

‘The Two Brahmans’ is fine as far is it goes, conveying not only the restrictions of Brahman life but, better, the sense of the yearning of the Brahman who wanted to become a fisherman, briefly standing for everyone who has a dream or desire beyond their station in life; but is too short to make a big impact.

‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ is clearly the worst story, because of the unsympathetic character of Jessop the blunt cynic; because it is based – like so many turn-of-the-century stories, plays and operas – on the immiseration and suicide of an innocent young woman; but most importantly, I thought it didn’t live up to the promise to be some kind of meditation on the nature of Real Love. Didn’t strike me as being that at all, but instead a cliché, and an unpleasant exploitative cliché at that.

Credit

‘Stories of the East’ by Leonard Woolf was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921. I read ‘Pearls and Swine’ in the 2008 Eland Publishing paperback edition of ‘The Village in the Jungle’ which includes it as a kind of bonus. The other two I read online.

Related link

• Stories of the East online

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews