Paul Scott (novelist)

Paul Scott was born at 130 Fox Lane in the district of Palmers Green/Southgate, in North London, the younger of two sons. His father, Thomas (1870–1958), was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s with family members from Headingley. He was a commercial artist, specialising in drawing for calendars and cards. Scott's mother, Frances, née Mark (1886–1969) was the daughter of a labourer from south London. In later life Scott noted the tension in himself between the pull of his mother's creative ambition and his father's real world, grounded approach to life. Scott was educated at the private Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, but had to leave early, without any qualifications, as his father's business met financial difficulties. This division from his studies was mirrored through the rest of his life—the battle between the demands of practical needs versus the urge to create. Scott worked as an accounts clerk for C. T. Payne and took evening classes in book-keeping and wrote poetry in his spare time. He later noted that the rigid social hierarchies and codes of his suburban childhood he found echoed in British Indian society. ==Military service==

Scott was conscripted into the British Army as a private soldier early in 1940, He quickly came down with amoebic dysentery, not diagnosed until 1964. The disease may have had some effect on his character and writing. He joined the Indian Army Service Corps and became familiar with life at hill stations such as Abbottabad and Murree. He made many close friendships with Indian comrades, and literary portraits of his friends appear in his works from this point. He later helped to organise the logistic support for the Fourteenth Army's reconquest of Burma. After the fall of Rangoon in 1945 he spent time in Calcutta and Kashmir, later posted to Malaya to end the Japanese occupation; they had, however, already surrendered by the time Scott arrived. In his time away from India he missed the country deeply and longed to return. At the end of the year he rejoined his company at Bihar and sailed back to England, having spent three years in India. During his service, he continued to write poetry. ==Career==

In 1941, before his military posting, Scott had published a collection of three religious poems entitled I, Gerontius, as part of the Resurgam Series of pamphlets. He wrote for Country Life and The Times. His work was included in Poetry Quarterly and the poetry anthology Poems of this War (1942). In 1948 he published Pillars of Salt in a collection of Four Jewish Plays.One biographer notes that as an agent, Scott "sheltered nervous talents, supported frail ones, pruned back bogus growth, detected and cherished genuine achievement in the wildest and most undisciplined bolters." His long standing gastric illness was exacerbated by the visit to India, and on his return he had to undergo painful treatment, but afterwards felt better than he had for many years and began to write. In 1976 and 1977, the last two years of his life, Scott was invited to be a visiting professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. The financial offer was a great relief after his endless financial anxieties of his writing career. The University of Texas supported the author by offering to buy his manuscripts. His coda to The Raj Quartet, Staying On, was published in 1977, just before his second visit to Tulsa. Staying On won the Yorkshire Post Fiction Award and the Booker Prize in 1977. Scott was too unwell to attend the Booker ceremony in November 1977. ==Adaptations==

Granada Television showed Staying On, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson as Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy. The success of its first showing in Britain in December 1981 encouraged Granada to embark on the much greater project of making The Raj Quartet into a major 14-part television series known as The Jewel in the Crown, first broadcast in the United Kingdom in early 1984 and subsequently in the United States and many Commonwealth countries. It was rebroadcast in the UK in 1997 as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of Indian independence, and in 2001 the British Film Institute voted it 22nd in the all-time best British television programmes. It was also adapted as a nine-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation under its original title in 2005. ==Legacy==

While Scott was teaching creative writing at the University of Tulsa in 1976, he arranged to sell his private correspondence to that university's McFarlin Library, thus making available some 6,000 personal letters. The materials begin in 1940, when Scott was enlisted in the British Army, and end only a few days before his death on 1 March 1978. == Personal life ==

In Torquay in 1941 Scott met and married his wife Penny (born Nancy Edith Avery in 1914). At the time she was a nurse at the Rosehill Children's Hospital; she later wrote four novels as Elizabeth Avery between 1959 and 1963; she died in 2005. Towards the end of his life, Scott stated to his doctor that he was "eating little, sleeping less, and drinking a quart of vodka a day." Writer Peter Green wrote of his meeting with Scott: "In 1975, though still only in his mid-fifties, he was a dying man, and knew it. He was "an alcoholic wreck." Scott's wife Penny had supported him throughout the writing of The Raj Quartet, despite his heavy drinking and violent behaviour, but once it was complete she left him and filed for divorce. In 1977, while he was in Tulsa, Scott was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died at the Middlesex Hospital in London on 1 March 1978. ==References==