Georgette Heyer A New Perspective

LESS THAN GOLD- Re-reading The Grand SophyMUKUL KESAVANmukulkesavan@yahoo.co.ukMost of us have had the disconcerting experience of discoveringindefensible prejudice in favourite books by much-loved writers. Last week Iwas re-reading (for the twentieth time perhaps) The Grand Sophy, a novel byGeorgette Heyer. Heyer was (for those who have never read her) a romanticnovelist most famous for some two dozen novels set in the late eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries, and her characters generally belong to thearistocratic, dandified world of Regency England. Her romances, though theyobserve the conventions of the genre, are not to be confused with the pulpfiction mass-produced by factories like Mills & Boon and Silhouette; Heyerproduced a wonderfully realized period world and her romances wereaccomplished historical novels. To have read Heyer is to have lived themannered, slightly absurd social world presided over by the Prince Regent,later George IV.Sophia Stanton-Lacy is the heroine of The Grand Sophy. She’s had anunusually cosmopolitan upbringing on account of her father being a diplomat,and when the novel opens we find her father arranging to have her stay withhis sister, Lady Ombersley, in London, because he’s being sent on a missionto Brazil.Sophia, known to her friends as the Grand Sophy, is a tall, unusuallyconfident young woman, with a propensity for setting other people’s affairsto rights. The novel’s plot turns have mostly to do with the way in whichshe sorts out her cousins’ lives and the novel ends with her marrying theoldest of her cousins, Lady Ombersley’s older son, Charles Rivenhall. Midwaythrough the novel, Sophy takes an interest in cousin Hubert’s affairs.Hubert, Charles’s younger brother, has fallen into debt and borrowed a largesum of money from a loan shark by pledging an emerald ring that happens tobe an heirloom. Sophy takes it upon herself to redeem the emerald and Hubert’s bond. One morning, she slips out of the house and hires a hackney to takeher to the squalid street where the money-lender lives.The moneylender’s name is Goldhanger and this is where the modern reader’stroubles begin. That he is Jewish is not in itself a problem, because thisis, after all, a period novel, and Jewish moneylenders abounded in RegencyLondon. No, the problem is that well before the reader actually meetsGoldhanger, he has been given to understand that Goldhanger is aparticularly depraved sort of usurer. Respectable moneylenders (with properGentile names like Howard & Gibbs) would never lend to minors like Hubertwho is still a student at Oxford.Goldhanger lives off a filthy, smelly lane and when he opens the door toSophy, this is what she sees: “...a thin, swarthy individual, with longgreasy curls, a semitic nose, and an ingratiating leer. His hooded eyesrapidly took in every detail of Sophy’s appearance.”In what follows, Goldhanger is wholly the villain, ingratiating at first,“wiping his hands together”, because “the instinct of his race made himprefer, whenever possible, to maintain a manner of the utmost urbanity”.WhenSophy insists on redeeming the emerald and the bond without paying theusurious interest, Goldhanger turns sinister and threatens her with violenceand worse. Sophy checkmates him by producing a pistol and forces him to doher bidding. Just before leaving, she says, “...I see that you are a veryevil man, and I cannot help wondering if a really courageous person wouldnot shoot now, and so rid the world of someone who has done a great deal ofharm in it.”No one reading this passage in the novel can mistake its systematicallyanti-semitic tone. And yet, I had read it more than a dozen times overthirty years, admired Sophy’s intrepidity, laughed at Goldhanger’sdiscomfiture without once stopping to consider the prejudice that animatesthe narrative. Why, then, did it suddenly seem appalling? More to the point,why hadn’t I been appalled before?I can try to guess. Part of the explanation might lie in the way in whichGoldhanger figured in my mind as a stock villain from some period repertory;perhaps I just assimilated him to the string of out-and-out filmi villains Ihad been raised on, starting with Pran, on through to Sadashiv Amrapurkar,or it might have been that Goldhanger seemed no worse than the graspingbania preying on innocents, a stereotype most Indians know and take forgranted. I’m not sure.But I know why I abruptly woke up to the vileness of this passage. Sometwenty of Heyer’s novels had been published in a handsome new paperbackedition by Arrow and I had bought the whole lot on impulse. Heyer died in1974 and since I had so many of her novels at hand, I spent a while turningto the copyright page of each one, just to date them, to see when she hadwritten the good ones. The Grand Sophy, without doubt one of her best, hadbeen first published by William Heinemann in 1950.The date stayed in my mind and when I revisited The Grand Sophy and read myway through the Goldhanger scene it occurred to me that it had been writtenat the end of the decade of Hitler and the Holocaust. Heyer had invented hergreasy, servile, hook-nosed, hooded-eyed, sinister, blood-sucking Jew insidea few years of Hitler killing six million men, women and children for beinghook-nosed, hooded-eyed, sinister, blood-sucking Jews.I didn’t gag and retch and toss the book away. I got to the end and evenexperienced some of the old pleasure at the comically contrived union ofCharles Rivenhall and Sophia Stanton-Lacy. But I can say, truthfully, andwithout reaching for effect, that reading Georgette Heyer will never quitebe the same again.It’s difficult to understand a world where such a passage could have beenwritten and respectably published within years of the Holocaust. Heyer was apopular, much reviewed, critically respected writer. A.S. Byatt has writtenan appreciation of her work and Anthony Burgess admired her fiction. ReadingThe Grand Sophy it struck me that for her to have written the Goldhangerscene when she did, she had to be able to assume that her readership sharedher prejudices. I also realized that it was a little bit deluded for anIndian to try to insert himself into this communion between Georgette Heyerand the readers she wrote for, because in that view of the world, an Indianis much more like Mr Goldhanger than Miss Stanton-Lacy!I don’t think anything comparable happened here. I could be wrong, but I can’t think of any mainstream Indian writer publishing villainous caricaturesof sinister Muslims or Hindus inside five years of the pogroms and killingsof Partition. If anything the problem was the reverse: with the exception ofManto, post-Partition fiction was almost tiresomely politically correct.Still, better politically correct than bigoted.I was depressed for a while after the Goldhanger revelation. It’s hard toget used to the idea that a writer you’ve loved most of your life is more orless a cloven-hoofed alien. But a week afterwards, reading Bernard Lewischeered me up. This was his famous passage about the immemorial clash ofcivilizations between the Islamic world on the one hand and theJudaeo-Christian world on the other. Judaeo-Christian? He couldn’t have readThe Grand Sophy.http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050306/asp/opinion/story_4458577.asp