It was a dark and stormy night

A year-end musing on masala-fry taste


It was a dark and stormy night

The obscure 19th century writer, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, has left behind at least two lines that have notched him a couple of cuts on the scratching post of posterity. They are both acute masala-fry lines with instant appeal to people such as ourselves who can’t, or more correctly won’t, make up their minds whether their films are thrillers or dramas or musicals or comedies or tragedies or all of the above and then some.

The first Bulwer-Lytton line is lampooned by fashionable creative writing courses on both sides of the Atlantic. It is the tagline of the annual Bad Writing Awards handed out in the UK and named after the poor man, no less. It is this innocent little phrase: It was a dark and stormy night.

Personally, my Indian heart can’t see what’s wrong with it. It may indeed be a little opaque but conveys the moot point perfectly well. It has also turned into a fashionable cliché or was it already one when Bulwer-Lytton inked it in at the start of his novel Paul Clifford in 1830?

In point of fact, the phrase was actually the start of a reasonably long compound sentence; one that ran to the size of a short paragraph. But, if the objection is to the turgidity of long compound sentences and their stretch-limo style construction, then why not say so instead of picking on the opening line?

But, like Charles M Schulz’s star Beagle Snoopy, who loved and made this melodramatic opening line famous, yes, in all of Schulz’s syndicated glory, I like it too.

The world’s most famous Beagle used it whenever he worked his iconic Olympia Traveller, pounding on it, Schroeder-like, playing the novelist, atop his dog-house, starting, but alas, never finishing, a series of books with it.

For Snoopy’s ever attendant friend, Woodstock the bird, even this act of borrowing Bulwer-Lytton’s resounding line was an act of considerable genius, worthy of fulsome applause.

But the modern day Western literary critic is a bird of a more dyspeptic hue. For him, repository of smart 20th century literary opinion, English-speaking, white, upper class, understated, tweedy, Baron Bulwer-Lytton can’t write.

Ours may truly be a different sensibility,Hindu,having been reared on 40,000 Gods, the Ramayana and Mahabharata rather than The Bible, The Illiad and The Odyssey; at least in terms of one’s diet of myths of childhood; but one feels oppressed, stripped, as if, of aesthetic sense. One feels like calendar art, lurid, or a two dimensional cartoon character, unable to discern a bad line from a good one.

But to be fair, the trans-Atlantic pundits weren’t thinking of us, our temperamental differences, our polytheism and so on, when they set out to mock their own dark and stormy to a man, inclusive of those long, run-on Bulwer-Lytton sentences aforementioned.


Perhaps it has something to do with the Western urge towards order and homogeneity, the unitary, that One God principle, but if these litpundits had their way, they’d have every writer and aspirant turn into the literary equivalent of late method actor Marlon Brando - and the more contending incoherence the better; particularly when filled out by the beauty and length of eyelash on Marlon!

Or, if writers must be compared to writers; like apples to apples: to Ernest Hemingway; never mind that he spent most of his sentient years battling erectile dysfunction and outright impotence. What counts is that he did it with macho hunting escapades and yards of drink! So what if all this heroic effort caused no more than desultory twitches in his urge to penetrate. What matters to the litpundit in his lair is Hemingway’s spare, whittled down, implication-laden short sentences! The suffering, the big man’s-man impotence, is so much grist to the mill, but Papa never let it lead to over-writing like dear old Bulwer-Lytton, did he? So fecundity be damned and do not mention the millions of Victorian London whores. Creativity must, if it is to be applauded, run along neat pathways of well crafted words and well bred emanations of emotion.

Still, persuasive as this sounds, I’m not ready to buy this line.I’ll take my emerging Asian market chances; possessed as I am of the effrontery to find dark and stormy still fresh and evocative! To me, it has a pregnant and suspenseful Mary Shelley style Prometheus or Frankenstein about it. It raises expectations. It makes you look forward to what comes next in a lip-smacking ketchup and Tarantino sort of way. Honestly, it is a classic- a Shammi Kapoor “yahoo” of a ham-fisted offering, an ingredient for a hit, redoubtable and reassuringly familiar, dear old masala –fry bubbling on the kadhai.

The other line, used so often that you’d think it came from folklore or the editor of the newspaper with the weakest circulation in the land, is this: The pen is mightier than the sword. There it is, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote that one too!

This sentence, sometimes turned caption to a cartoon on a self-important scribe, is not otherwise derided at all. It might remind an idle mind of the Fall of the Roman Empire, complete with campy centurions in skirts brandishing short and shiny jabbing-swords; but it too succeeds in running to just as much of a cliché!

Bulwer-Lytton’s body of work, prose, poetry and letters, is obscure but not negligible. He didn’t exactly lack readership or critical acclaim in his time. A time, let it be remembered, when pianos wore drawers and the prostitute population of London outnumbered other women four is to one! A time perhaps, when melodrama was not entirely disliked, particularly behind closed doors when the stays could come off and Victorian rectitude be rested on the brass bedpost for a spell.

To wit, Bulwer-Lytton’s letters to his son and others betray a certain self-satisfaction. But, all in all, it was just as well that he was a bona fide aristocrat, a Baron with an independent income, the sensibilities, friends and connections. This worked in an era when a pint or two of Anglo-Saxon/Norman blue blood, a family seat, and a genuine title affixed to your moniker ensured you were part of the flotilla that ruled those Britannic waves.

But as far as I’m concerned, it is just good to know that Bulwer-Lytton, rather like our less than “A list” Bollywood actors, felt no pain during his lifetime, notwithstanding the ridicule heaped on his literary name today.

And for us, for those of us who might want to take this linemeister to heart, there is an India connection too. It came via his child and grand-children and it is this: Bulwer-Lytton’s son, after turning down the proffered Governorship of Madras, became Viceroy to India.

Robert, Lord Lytton, Viceroy, 1876-1880, presided over a humdinger of a famine, the first Afghan War and the “Empress Durbar” in 1877 which proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India. He also designed various protocols and intricate gun salutes to calibrate the relative importance of each of the princely states, all 558 of them! Lytton enjoyed himself over this - some kings with kingdoms the size of football fields got no guns at all, several middling ones got 9, the biggest and the best got 21, and the Viceroy gave himself a chandelier rocking 31- so that no-one was left in any doubt as to which tribe, in effect, ruled India!

Drama, like mousiness, can, and does run, in one’s blood.

But all this high-dudgeon was not what Robert the Viceroy was all that keen on. What he wanted, was to be a writer, just like papa. His letters refer to it time and again, pining, and sentimental yearning that indicated that he wanted to match up to his father’s perceived literary stature. Robert did write furiously in his youth, stacks of poems of indifferent quality, using the foppish pen-name Owen Meredith, only to wilt gradually, damned by faint praise and stymied by neglect. His novel- in-verse Lucile was probably the high-water mark. It was made into a film too, in 1912, more than a decade after his death in 1891, but nothing much came of that either.

Fortunately, goaded by his father, who probably suffered the pitfalls and pangs of the literary life even if he didn’t plumb its depths; Robert did take up a parallel career in diplomacy. He began as the Ambassador’s dogsbody at the British Mission in Washington, working for his Minister uncle; served happy years in Italy and various spots in Europe; and reached the zenith of his career in India. And later, after some years in the wilderness, he was appointed Ambassador to France. Interestingly, Robert Lytton even died in the act of composing a poem.

His son, dark and stormy’s Simla-born grandson, was briefly Viceroy in the 1920s too. It was a short stint in between holding down the seat as Governor of Bengal between 1922-1927. The grandson, all Victor Alexander George Robert of him, ran into quite a few dark storms of his own trying to contain the burgeoning freedom movement- scrapping with Sir Ashutosh at Calcutta University one day and working out how to keep the non-violent Mohandas Karamchand at bay on another!

There is more. The first Lord Lytton’s daughter Emily married one Edwin Lutyens, the talented arch-imperialist who designed Rashtrapati Bhavan and a good deal of New Delhi besides. Lutyens laboured away, anchoring his thoughts on the belief that it would all endure. It was an Albert Speerish notion, as it turned out, because the Raj lasted just twenty years after Viceroy House was built.

Perhaps Edwin should have taken a cue from his wife Emily who became the most ardent follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti. She also befriended the young and promiscuous Annie Besant and the growing Indian Freedom Movement. Edwin didn’t pay any heed to Emily’s native infatuations, of course, and probably didn’t need to, because imperial and obtuse to the last as he was, cursing Indian architectural traditions even as he stole from them, it is Edwin Lutyens, and not India loving Emily, who is remembered today.

Going full circle to grandfather Bulwer-Lytton, it must be understood that there is something of the genesis about this pen and sword business, not to mention the dark and stormy sally. They both have oodles of a certain je ne sais quoi fanfare about them. Bulwer-Lytton probably wrote like that all the time, with a touch of Victorian drama verging on the mawkish.

It was probably in his blood because his son picked up on it, wielding both pen and sword, and so did the grandchildren, and who knows, perhaps the great-great and the great-great-greats - are still doing it!

But if Bulwer-Lytton were alive today, and if he cared to put his quill to it, he’d go down a Salim-Javed-treat in Bollywood. After all, as his progeny realised soon enough, when they were here, we take our melodrama very seriously and see absolutely no reason to laugh at it in the interests of taste.

(1,855 words)

By Gautam Mukherjee
Thursday 20th December 2007