Table Of ContentNEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
CLASSICS
ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR
GOVINDAS VISHNOODAS DESANI (1909-2000) was born
to Indian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in Sind, India
(located in present-day Pakistan). An intelligent butwillful child,
Desani ran away from home several times and was expelled from
school when hewas thirteen for "being unteachable." At the age
ofseventeen, he decided to educate himself, traveling alone to
England and spending a year as a reader at the British Library.
Still in his teens, Desani returned to India where he was a
foreign correspondent for several London newspapers. In the
late 1930s and duringWorld War II, heworked for the BBC
and traveled throughout England as a lecturer. AllAboutH.
Hatterrwas published in England in 1948 andwas one ofthe
best-selling books oftheyear. Settling in India in 1952, Desani
began a life ofnear seclusion whichwas to last for more than a
decade. During this period, he spent time in Buddhist mones-
taries and studied yoga and Hindu and Buddhist scriptures.
Soon after, he began lecturing on Eastern thought and contribut-
ing stories and an unsigned opinion column, "Very High and
Very Low," to The TimesofIndia's IllustratedWeekly. He moved
to the United States in 1970 to teach at Boston Universityand
subsequently the UniversityofTexas atAustin, where hewas a
professor ofreligion and philosophy.
ANTHONY BURGESS (1917-1993) was a prolific novelist,
composer, librettist, essayist, semanticist, translator, and critic.
He is best known for the novelA Clockwork Orange.
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2012
http://archive.org/details/allabouthhatterrOOdesa_0
ALL ABOUT HATTERR
H.
G.V. DESANI
Introduction by
ANTHONY BURGESS
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
I
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
1755Broadway,NewYork,NY10019
www.nyrb.com
Copyright©1970,1972,1986byUNICEF
Introductioncopyright©1970byAnthonyBurgess
Allrightsreserved.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
FirstpublishedinLondonbyAldor,1948.ResissuedbySaturnPressin1950.A
revisededitionpublishedbyFarrar,Straus&Young,NewYork,1951.Furtherrevised
editionissuedbytheBodleyHeadandFarrar,Straus&Girouxin1970.Additional
revisionsandfinalchapterpublishedinpaperbackbyLancerBooksintheUS,1972.
IssuedinpaperbackbyPenguinBooks,1972,alsorevised.PublishedbyArnold-
HeinemanninNewDelhiin1985.PublishedbyMcPherson&Company,Publishers
(NewYork),1986.TheNewYorkReviewBookseditionisbasedonthePenguin
edition,addingthefootnotesattheend,comprisingthefinalrevisions.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Desani,G.V (GovindasVishnoodas),1909-
AllaboutH—.Hatterr/byG.V.Desani; introductionbyAnthonyBurgess,
p.cm. (NewYorkReviewBooksclassics)
ISBN-13:978-1-59017-242-1(alk.paper)
I.Title.
PR9499.3.D472A792007
823'.914 dc22
2OO702799O
ISBN 978-1-59017-242-1
P1ri0nte9di8nt7he6Un5ite4d3Sta2tes1ofAmericaonacid-freepaper.
Introduction
It was F. W. Bateson who made the distinction between the
native English writer and the meteque - 'the writer with a non-
English linguistic, racial or political background' who, being on
the fringe of a language and the culture that begot it, lacks
respect 'for the finer rules ofEnglish idiom and grammar'. This,
says Bateson, leads meteques to 'attempt effects of style, some-
times successfully, that the English writer would feel to be a
perverse defiance of the genius of the language'.
Most of us would say that 'the finer rules' are essentially the
property of non-creative pundits who, at the higher level,
compile manuals of usage and, at the lower, scold children for
constructing verbless sentences. As for 'the genius of the
language', it is doubtful if English has a tutelary spirit or an
immanent form. It is plastic, and as ready to yield to the
meteque as to Mr Bateson. Indeed, if we are to regard Poles
and Irishmen as meteques, there are grounds for supposing
that the meteques have done more for English in the twentieth
century (meaning that they have shown what the language is
capable of, or demonstrated what English is really like) than
any of the pure-blooded men of letters who stick to the finer
rules.
This term meteque is pejorative, like 'wop' or 'dago', and I
am happy now to drop it. It is especially unpleasant to use it in
connection with a writer like G. V. Desani. Desani is an
Indian who received high praise in the nineteen-forties, not
only for his books but for his oratory. Of his public speaking
Edmund Blunden said, 'His personality, as I know it, is
exceedingly alive and interesting, and he promises to be an
outstanding representative of relations between East and West,
not necessarily in a political sense, but that of general inter-
pretation.' Desani came to England, in fact, to demonstrate in
live speech the vitality of the British rhetorical tradition -
:
brilliant in Burke and Macaulay, decadent in Churchill, now
dead. He reminded his hearers that England and India were
once alike inheritors of the great classical art of moving
through the spoken word, and that India kept faithful to the
tradition longer than the wardens of the Raj. Desani had to be
praised not as a dweller on a cultural fringe who did remark-
ably well when one considered his disadvantages, but as a man
squarely set in the great linguistic mainstream.
His prose-poem Had won the praise of E. M. Forster,
among others, as a work 'genuine, personal, and passionate'.
Its style may strike many readers as too much in the mode of
Tagore, or even of the youthful Blake trying to write in the
manner of the great fraud Ossian. but it is unquestionably
submissive tothe 'finer rules of English idiom and grammar'
Yonder, in the plains, is the desert. Sand, blinding, flying sand,
and the sun burns, and there is the lurid, lurid light, and none to
tend the flaming flashing earth, no rivers, but desert, vibrant, fierce,
kindled. Yonder, beyond the desert, is the sea. Pearl and blue, the
surrounding reefs and rocks, and the setting sun and the trail of
gold upon the sea, and waves high as the hills, oh, a thing of
beauty! a thing of beauty! And the sea will I see, and watch, watch
deep as I could see!
Submissive, yes, but not exactly sober. The rhetoric goes a bit
far. but it seems that the author knows it is going a bit far, and
he enjoys it. He is, for instance, aware of the homonyms sea
and see and glad, admittedly for a serious intent, to exploit
them. But we are not far from parody. If we hear that Desani,
the author of Hali, is also the author of All About H. Hatterr,
we need not feel too surprised.
This latter work appeared in 1948, and it was immediately
successful. It went into a second printing in the second week of
publication. For a first book (Desani had published previously
only a couple of brief papers - one of them a learned account
of Patanjalis Yoga Philosophy) it did remarkably well for
notices. T. S. Eliot said, 'In all my experience. I have not met
with anything quite like it. It is amazing that anyone should be
able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo at such
length.* Other distinguished critics were equally laudatory, and
8
. :
Desani's name should have been made for ever. But, inex-
plicably, unless the difficulty of classifying the book be a
sufficient explanation (this would, for instance, keep it out of
learned or journalistic surveys of the Modern Novel), All
About H. Hatterr went underground and became a coterie
pleasure. It is exactly contemporary with Mervyn Peake's
fantastic novel Titus Groan, which had a similar reception and
fate, and itjoins thatwork in being confirmed after twenty years
in the rank of modern classic.
Like many important novels, it is a sort of Bildungsroman.
It is about the education of its eponym, the son of a European
merchant seaman and a lady of Penang. H. Hatterr is, on the
surface, a grotesque autodidact who has built up a remarkable
vocabulary with the aid of an English dictionary and a French
and a Latin primer. His vernacular sounds like Higher Babu
Maybe, I am judging good and bad from my own sweet experi-
ence; by the standard how pro or anti myself an experience, a
country, or a feller has been.
You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours - you first! Not give and
take strictly; but take first, then give.
Maybe, I am a victim of the pleasure principle.
But a feller has got to measure things by the scale of pleasantness
and unpleasantness
. .
Is it Right? Hell, I won't controversy. Why the chick first or is
it the egg-ovum? Does a feller wear braces to keep his trousers up,
or is to stop 'em slipping down? Did he say, Kiss me, Hardy! or
Kismet, Hardy! ? Is Hanchow pronounced &cow, &Co., or what
the hell? Personally, I wear a belt. No braces or the buttons prob-
lem for me. I know, too, that chicken-goulash is a dam' fine diet
for any mother's son (not bar a vegetarian), and that egg-curry is
O.K., and as good a stuff as any going: regardless of the chicken
first or the last.
And so on. H. Hatterr is trying to be a philosopher and, as a
good Eurasian, he seeks his conclusions from Christianity
rather than Hinduism or Buddhism. But an Indian respect for
the Law leads to a bizarre kind of Manicheism 'H. Hatterr,
:
accused. Broke the law of Christian Behaviour by allying
himself with Satan. But observed the law of Consequence by
going to Hell. Not guilty of breaking Law. Recommendation
and reprieve: Both he, and his Master Satan, reprieved,
lauded and esteemed, for serving the Purpose of the Lord, by
being Awful examples^
The reader who expects the shapeless mind-wandering regu-
larly associated with an amateur search for Truth, must now
be informed that H. Hatterr's story is as carefully, even
pedantically, planned as Ulysses. There are seven long sec-
tions, each of which begins with H. Hatterr consulting a Sage.
That means seven Sages, each from a different Oriental city,
each specialising in a different aspect of Living (H. Hatterr's
capitalisation is infectious). The student, having learnt some
great Generality, then proceeds to an Adventure, in which he
attempts to spread the gospel to other aspiring minds. He ends
the section in a discussion with his friend Banerrji, then, re-
freshed and more hopeful than ever, he proceeds to the next
stage of enlightenment. Some such pattern, as Joyce knew, was
essential if the fine flood of language was not to take chaotic
control.
But it is the language that makes the book, a sort of creative
chaos that grumbles at the restraining banks. It is what may be
termed Whole Language, in which philosophical terms, the
colloquialisms of Calcutta and London, Shakespearian archa-
isms, bazaar whinings, quack spiels, references to the Hindu
pantheon, the jargon of Indian litigation, and shrill babu
irritability seethe together. It is not pure English; it is, like the
English of Shakespeare, Joyce and Kipling, gloriously impure.
Little more need be said, except that G. V. Desani was, till
recently, in much the same position as an author whom he in
some way resembles - Flann O'Brien (except that O'Brien is
dead and Desani greatly alive). I mean that, having produced a
masterpiece of somewhat like At Swim-Two-Birds - after
spending nearly two decades in retreat in monasteries in India,
Burma and Japan - he seemed content to give his time to
journalism and to be tied down to a weekly feuilleton for one
of the magazines of the Times of India group. It is not possible
to repeat uniqueness, and it is hard to decide what big comic
fiction we ought now to expect from Desani. Moreprofessional
than H. Hatterr, he lectures on philosophy in some of the
major universities of the world, and he has the satisfaction of
10
