RABARDY a novel & THE SOUTH-PACIFIC SHORT STORIES OF LOUIS BECKE: A CRITICAL STUDY Victoria Warren Thesis submitted for the qualification of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of East Anglia, Department of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. February, 2017 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Word Count: 95,221 ABSTRACT This thesis consists of a novel, Rabardy, and an extended critical analysis of the South- Pacific short stories of Louis Becke. Rabardy is based on events which took place around 1882, in what is now the Bismarck Archipelago, Papua New Guinea, a place I know personally. The story follows the activities of white traders and a missionary, who negotiate and sometimes violently conflict with the indigenous Melanesians, and who become embroiled in the dissolution of a disastrous French Catholic settler colony. My protagonist is a French sea captain in his late fifties, a man admired for his competence by traders yet considered a monster by the colonists he serves, who believe he is cynically imprisoning them. Rabardy’s ultimate disillusionment with the wider Western colonial project is suggested by the final documentary section – his journal, which redirects the story towards its hidden subject: the Melanesian people. In both elements of this thesis, one problem is addressed in different ways: how to narrate colonialism. With stories from Sebald’s The Emigrants and Louis Becke as a model, the novel incorporates different voices and documents to build up a fragmentary image of a complex picture. My frame narrator is based on Louis Becke, who sat beside the dying sea captain. My critical essay reappraises Becke and his stories – long out of print – which I encountered during my research. Through close readings and a re-examination of his biography, I reject certain myths and uncover a more aesthetically and ideologically complex engagement with the anxieties of empire than Becke’s current reputation permits. I show how Becke uses polyphony to dramatise and ventriloquise voices from either side of the colonial conflict, nesting different mindsets, types of narration and consciousness in a way which demonstrates the proto-modernist impressionism which is usually associated with Conrad and Ford. !2 LIST OF CONTENTS 2 Abstract 3 List of Contents Rabardy - a novel. 5 Chapter One 11 Chapter Two 28 Chapter Three 43 Chapter Four 53 Chapter Five 71 Chapter Six 103 Chapter Seven 128 Chapter Eight 149 Chapter Nine 172 Chapter Ten 188 Chapter Eleven 199 Chapter Twelve 215 Louis Becke: A Critical Study 274 Bibliography !3 ‘In time, perhaps, your country will think about its colonial crimes… Everybody has to empty their own latrine.’ Günter Grass: A life in writing. Guardian Books ‘The fundamental purpose of both romance and utopias is to remake the world in the image of desire.’ Patrick Parrinder: Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature !4 RABARDY a novel CHAPTER ONE Rabardy was here again last night. He called Beck! Beck!– like a finger tapping the iron bed frame. I sat up, every muscle alert, but the door remained bolted, the room empty. I did not light the lamp, for fear I might knock it off the stand when my fatigue returned. Instead I lay back down, resolved to keep him out of my mind, remembering where I was, thinking only certain thoughts. I pulled the sheets and blankets close in the coolness, and soon felt warm as a tropical evening. The shush of my breath seemed far off, and the motion of my chest was a wave which reared back from a strand, sucking and gathering, heaving upwards till it swooshed in its collapse, like the tide fizzing out among damp grains of an equatorial shore. Fool, said the wave. Half-dead old fool. I could hear the surf closing in on every side, felt it reverberate beneath my heels. I perceived I stood between the twisted trunks of palm trees, on a spit beside a lagoon where a crowd had gathered, like the ones who used to come to my readings in London or Paris or here in Sydney. The gentlemen wore bowler hats, and the ladies wore gloves while all sat upright in semi-circles of chairs half-sunk in the sand, waiting. A man in a tailcoat told them about my book and I heard them applaud while I hunted round the lectern and in the pockets of my pyjamas. My feet scuffed clouds of tiny flies from a ridge of dead fronds and husks, of the tiny bleached skeletons of crabs which a storm had spat back onto the strand, but I couldn’t find the book. The back of my neck grew hot in the afternoon sunlight, as I realised I hadn’t written the story yet, and I should have to make it up on the spot. The audience, which had already started to murmur, now began to screech and flap, walking in circles with their heads thrown back, beaks wide. I !5 had to stop them flying away and my throat burned with the strain, but no words came, only a voice which rumbled in the air like the sound of breakers on a reef – Beck! Beck! I saw a green chaise-longue beside an ebony table, a pile of papers bound with cord, younger hands – mine – receiving them. A face I had not seen in half a lifetime: its grizzled sideboards; the jellied blood vessels of Rabardy’s sixty-odd years and sun- cracked sailor’s skin; eyes which turned to stare straight back at me, dense as wolframite. And I heard the voice again, speaking clearly beside me as he did in that room where we sat – speaking as if in thirty years he had not stopped but had kept flowing on another plane, gathering his vitriol behind some dam wall out in the ether and now the dam had broken, filling my ears till they overflowed. What do you think you are doing? You think you know, but you are nothing. Outside, insects whirred. He said I deserved to fail; spoke cuttingly of my elderly parents and children, of things he could not have known because they had not happened yet. Not pausing for breath, he raged until a blow sounded, then another, and he was gone. Yet they weren’t blows at all, only a knocking on the wall. I woke in the dark, skin smarting where the rumpled sheets had stuck. My throat hurt and I felt shaky from all the shouting and denials. Yet the hotel was still, not a living soul about, not even rats chittering in the alley below, only the rapping of my pulse which kept on and on, so that I lay exhausted till long after dawn, till the kitchen workers had arrived and the maids had started their rounds. *** These last weeks since I came here I’ve become almost a stranger to myself. It was in order to be by myself that I returned to this city, to escape from people and duties which seemed intolerable to me, all of which clamoured daily for more than I could give. I love my family more than I can bear, yet when we are together I find I must be cruel and spiteful, till even I begin to wonder who this man may be they are looking at !6 with consternation and mistrust. I’ve been unwell, it’s true, and so might with reason set down these changes as mere symptoms of my affliction. I’ve seen often how good men can transform into vicious ones under the influence of pain, fatigue or incapacitation. I have myself been many men in the course of my life though always with vigour and spirit. Where that yen for life is now, I can’t say. It troubles me to think that a man’s nature might be no more than a set of responses to physiological circumstance. I hoped by taking myself away from the strain of a situation I could no longer endure that I should give my constitution the opportunity, like my conduct, to right itself. Or, failing that, I should leave my loved ones in peace and finish a few matters long neglected. But morning after morning instead of writing I read the papers and reread until the decision of some French politician or the construction works of the German navy appear to me overwhelming and unstoppable. As if the wheels and pistons which drive our daily course, generating the advance of civilised nations, now exercised the minds of the very men they served. And when my own mind cuts loose, the past, which was ever my friend and storehouse of tales, returns to me for hours at a time in a manner I barely recognise. *** I am the same age he was now, and what would Rabardy think to see me here? My entire wealth accommodated in seven drawers, a thin wardrobe, and a desk wedged under the window as an afterthought. This room on the ground floor, which was never designed for guests, I occupy courtesy of Mr Kinsela, proprietor of the Paradise Hotel, who generously discounts the cost: “I always enjoyed your books, Mr B,” he says. I don’t ask why he uses the past tense. And I can’t complain that my counterpane smells of must, that the window never gets direct sunlight but leaks when it rains, that damp wicks up from the rug on the floor and curls the corners of my papers.