One of the books I received for my birthday this year was the autobiography of W S Senior, whose collection of poetry, Vita Magistra, I had coincidentally read, having found it earlier in May on my shelves. In writing about that I mentioned how Senior, a shadowy figure before, had come alive for me a few years back when I found his granddaughter at the home in Oxford, where my Dean now lives.
She made it clear to me how devoted Senior had been to Ceylon, to the extent of having his ashes buried there, in Haputale, near the last home he had in the country with his family. His career here was indeed varied, for after a decade at Trinity he moved to a vicarage in Colombo, and then, when he was attached to the University College, he had a home near Haputale. He himself lived then in the Maligawa at Reid Avenue, courtesy of the Obeysekera family, which indeed ensured the publication of the autobiography a couple of years ago.
Senior himself regrets the fact that his writing did not succeed in England, as I noted in talking about his poems. This is understandable, for his poetry is not remarkable, though sometimes there are inspired lines, when he talks about Ceylon. And so too is it with his prose, because though he had a fascinating life, he only alludes to his inner life. He does dwell often on what seem to him intimations of immortality, and these usually arise in the midst of scenic beauty and the play of light and shade, vividly described. But the dilemmas he overcame are couched in vague terms, and though one can guess what he is dealing with, the lack of certainty clouds the situation.
Interestingly, I read this at the same time as I was reading Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and I was struck by the similarity between the strong emotions in boyhood that both the iconoclastic gay American writer and the very proper British clergyman describe. In Vidal’s case his fictional hero cannot escape his sense of the physical beauty of the ideal twin, a feeling that it would seem Vidal shared, with regard to a friend who was killed in the war. For Senior, the description of beauty recurs, but he avoids any sense of sexuality, and the impression he leaves is that he decided to give up any such contact – to the chagrin of at least one of the many he calls Erza, a collective for the ideal schoolboy chum.
But the sense of schoolboy romance Senior seems to have felt as strongly as Gore Vidal did, though he soon enough sublimates it. Indeed, his parallel ecstasy as to landscape had begun about the same time, and perhaps it was a prop to help him overcome a very different appreciation of beauty. For the book is full of depictions of landscape, in England, and then in Ceylon, with a healthy does in between of Switzerland which was the last place in which he served.
He weaves all this in with people, movingly, as when with regard to Switzerland he harks back to being taken there when a boy by his father, and notes that he was not as close to him as he would have liked to be. Then there are accounts of different reading parties, schoolboys he took from when he taught in England, and youngsters on treks from Trinity, along with students at Student Christian Movement Camps. One of these is ineffably sad, for it is about a boy dying of appendicitis, when the telegrams asking for help were delayed by inclement weather, and a doctor appeared too late.
That was one of the reasons that prompted Senior finally to take orders. He had been mulling this, but he enjoyed being a schoolmaster, and it was this tragic death that made him decide he had to move on. And never one to do things by halves, he decided to serve as a missionary, an ambition he had been drawn to in his years at university. Indeed, a striking feature of the book is its pen portraits, or perhaps one should say glimpses, of leaders in the field.
And so he came to Trinity, where he acted too as Principal for the redoubtable Fraser, whom he much admired. His accounts of the Kandyan boys he grew to love, and their aristocratic forebears, recreate vividly the emergence into the 20th century of a traditional society. But his recollections of holidays in plantation bungalows are also evocative of a different past, the transposition of English values to the Ceylon highlands.
He does not talk much of politics, but a brief account of the Sinhala Muslim riots of 1915 and a third-party account of his own heroic role suggest his involvement in the life of the country, recognizable too in his constant prayer for co-existence, which he sees as a prerequisite of the development he longs for. And while settled in his Christian faith, he recreates movingly the atmosphere of Buddhist shrines, and the tranquility of the statues he comes across in the historic cities.
His involvement in Ceylon meant long spells away from his family, the boys going to boarding school, and the girls having long breaks away from him. It is to finally reinforce relations with them that he retires, and that was obviously not too late for the book has vivid scenes of a close-knit family, and his descriptions of their evenings together are most moving.
I suppose in time his memory will fade altogether, but the book leaves one with the impression that he was an immeasurably good man, with a strong sense of beauty which led him to love beyond measure the country he made his second home.
by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha 
from The Island https://ift.tt/GtU5Ews
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