by Paul Theroux
Simpson's father was a poor workingman, but it was a stroke of luck that he toiled in a printing shop, because it meant that his son would do something similar, which led the boy into lithography. Young William had a glimpse of better things, and wanted them. He was apprenticed to a lithographer, and that highly specialized skill inspired his drawing and painting. From the age of fifteen or so he saved his dinner penny, and instead of buying bread rolls he bought tubes of watercolor paint. He sketched from nature and later drew pictures of all the old houses of Glasgow—that was the beginning of his lifelong interest in history and archaeology. After the houses were pulled down, only Simpson's pictures remained as a record, published in Stuart's Views of Glasgow (1848) and posthumously reprinted as Glasgow in the Forties. He read poetry and literary criticism, attended night classes somewhat fitfully, and became a devotee of Ruskin.
Simpson spent his days working as a lithographer and his time off hiking and sketching. In Meeting the Sun (1874), he wrote:
My first love in art was a Highland mountain, and I have been a mountain worshipper ever since. Fate has privileged me to visit many shrines of this faith,—the Alps, the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the mountains of Abyssinia; now I can add to this list Fujiyama in Japan, and the Sierra Nevadas of California, where I have seen Mount Shasta and the Yosemite Valley. I think that a valley, however beautiful it may be, never could have become a sacred object, such as mountains seem to have been all over the world. A great high peak, soaring up into Heaven, with its garment of snow, white and pure, often lost in the clouds, as if communing with those above, its icy barriers setting it apart like consecrated ground where the profane must not tread,—these are the features of the higher mountains, which may have impressed men and produced that religious veneration of which we have evidences from the most remote antiquity.
He sold his first watercolor, The Braes of Lochaber, in 1850.
Naturally ambitious and seeking a challenge, he set off for London in 1851, and in the metropolis found work in a large firm of lithographers. He was at pains to point out in his autobiography the importance of his craft, which was exclusively pictorial, concerned with people and events ("Now it is all done by photography," he said in 1893). Of lithography he wrote, "The startling thing is that it was a class of work which came into existence, lasted only a quarter of a century, and has entirely vanished." And he remarked on how lithographers frequently became artists, while engravers seldom did.
The Crimean War gave him his first big break. In London he had been sketching pictures of battles for readers, basing them on newspaper accounts. He read the papers, studied up on the topography, and tried to depict the action. He kept wishing he was there at the front. He said to his employers, "Here they are making gabions, fascines, and traverses. What are these? No one knows. If I were there I could send sketches of them, so that everyone would understand."
He was sent, and two days before his thirty-first birthday he was under fire at Balaklava. He sketched while being shelled. But he was not foolish, just rational and downright. "If a shell is coming towards you," he said, "it becomes instantly visible, as a black speck against the white smoke of the gun which fired it, and before it reaches you there is plenty of time to go under cover."
He earned the respect of Lord Raglan, who allowed Simpson to use the official letter bag for sending his pictures back to London. And he learned the paradoxes of war, discovering it was essential that he see battles for himself, because often two officers in a skirmish would disagree on the details and conduct of the action. At the battle of Tchernaya he noted that in spite of heavy shelling and numerous casualties there was no blood visible on the battleground—the uniforms and dust absorbed it. During the war, he was able to spend three weeks at Kertch, visiting and sketching mound tombs, one of his passions. He did not see Miss Nightingale, he said (she was at Scutari), but he did see the elderly mulatto Mrs. Seacole, and a crazed Irishman, one of the casualties of the Crimea. It is characteristic of Simpson's interest in the unusual and the out-of-the-way that he gives a brisk description of the British commanders yet offers a compelling portrait of this madman:
He had wrought himself into a state of madness. In the village he had picked up a long stick—a wooden hay-fork formed by the natural branch of the tree. With this clenched in both hands and his eyes staring wildly out of his head, he was rushing about, exclaiming, "I smashes whatever I sees;" and whatever could be smashed with the hay-fork was destroyed by this maniac. Glass windows were special attractions to him. I saw him chase a very small fowl, and each time he failed to catch it he became more excited. At last the miserable chicken, exhausted with the chase, fell into his hands, and when this took place the wild fool did not know what to do with it. In an incoherent way he expressed himself as wishing to know what could be done, and at last, grasping the bird by the neck and squeezing it with all his strength, he said, "Die! Die! Die!"
Another memorable portrait (and of course Simpson sketched these people as well as wrote about them) was that of the Kurd he met near Batoum (now the Soviet city of Batumi), on the Black Sea. This Kurd had a face that was "vile, wicked and cruel," and when asked what he was doing there, he said simply, "killing people."
"Who do you kill?"
"Travelers."
"How do you kill them?"
"I watch the road, and when I see travelers coming I hide behind a rock and shoot them as they pass."
"How many have you killed?"
"Thirteen, and five Russians."
He did not explain the reason why he made a distinction in the case of Russians. It may have been perhaps some patriotic sentiment. He was then asked what he was doing in Batoum. To which he replied, "Some business."
"Where are you going when you leave this place?"
"Back to the mountains, where, please God, I hope to shoot some more travelers."
Simpson had amassed an enormous number of pictures, including rarities, for he had recorded the fall of Sebastopol and had traveled in unknown Circassia. He was able to publish a pictorial history of the war (two folio volumes, eighty plates), and his reputation as a war artist was made.
He was something of a novelty, too, though in a different respect: he had grown a beard. When people saw him, they bleated like goats or called out "Doormats!" because "anyone with a beard was looked on as a Jew or a foreigner."
After the Crimea, whenever there was a great event to be depicted in a lithograph for the London weekly papers, Simpson was sent. He made pictures of everything that came his way: the opening of a canal, a tunnel, or a bridge; wars and uprisings; weddings, coronations, funerals, state visits, or following a royal progress. Simpson faithfully recorded them all, but he did much else besides—sketching ruins and back streets or simply picturesque views. In Japan, later in his life, he tramped around drawing views of Fuji.
When Simpson was sent to India to record the aftermath of the Mutiny, he had in mind a large-scale project, so that he might do for India what his fellow countryman David Roberts had done for the Holy Land. He had a grand scheme and envisioned four large volumes with something like 250 plates.
He was at it seven years—nearly three years in India and four years working his sketches into finished pieces. He had traveled all over India—to Lahore and Peshawar and up the Khyber Pass; to Simla and sixteen marches beyond it, to Sutlej. He sketched thugs in Jubblepore and then set off in a dooley (a sort of light palanquin) for the wild in-between places ("It is in these spaces that the real India exists"). He traveled to Bhilsa, to find Buddhist architecture, and to the source of the Ganges in the Himalayas, and to faraway Chittore, before the railway. All the while he was sketching. He estimated that in his Indian journey he covered 22,570 miles.
The project was an almost total disaster, and its failure is probably one of the reasons that Simpson is so obscure a figure today. It was Simpson's awful fate that his Indian pictures remained unpublished. His putative publisher, Day's, had gone bust, but the firm regarde
d Simpson's pictures as their property, and they were simply sold off, flogged as bankrupt stock. In spite of this reversal, Simpson kept on.
If the Crimea had made him a war artist, the India trip of 1857–59 made him an artist-traveler, in the manner of the Daniells, George Chinnery, Edward Lear, Zoffany, William Purser, Henry Salt, and so many others who made their name bringing pictures of India and the Far East back to England. Some of these were greater artists than Simpson, but no other traveler had more stamina, and none were so fastidiously truthful. Simpson's counterpart today is the inspired photographer who roams widely and reports on places that are little known and dangerous.
Travel also vindicated Simpson's fair-mindedness. He believed he held "exceptional" views on the subject of national character—in a word, he was not a racist, and he felt strongly that it was politicians who whipped up feelings of nationalism and xenophobia. He said that as a child he had always been told of the "superiority of the Scotch." But it was all prejudice and political humbug. He was not taken in: "I saw that each country remembered only its own virtues, and saw mainly the voices of its neighbors and, by contrasting the good features of its own character with the bad of the others, reached what was to it a satisfactory conclusion." His humanity made him clear-sighted, and this shows in his pictures. His 1876 album Picturesque People depicts individuals, not stereotypes. It was one of his great virtues that he traveled around the world without any preconceived notions of who or what he would find, and this absence of cant and bigotry in his nature made him a brilliant observer.
I long ago came to the conclusion that there is more resemblance than difference among the various people of the world, and here is what I take to be a characteristic example. In passing through the palace [of the Maharajah Runbir Singh]... I had to cross an open court. On the first day I saw a boy mending a defect in the pavement with a chunam or kunkur of some kind. The hole was only about six inches or a foot in size, and the boy sat there pounding the chunam slowly into it. I think I spoke to him in passing. Next day I again found him slowly beating away at the same hole.
I said something about such a small hole not being yet finished, and his reply was, "Ha Sahib, Sircar ke-kam hai"—"It is Government work, sir."
It struck me on hearing those words that it was not the first time I had met that boy.
Simpson made two more visits to India, but by this time he was a "special artist" on retainer from the Illustrated London News, and under its auspices Simpson went as far afield as Afghanistan (he covered the First Afghan War and later the Afghan Boundary Commission) and China. In 1873 he went completely around the world, the journey he recorded in Meeting the Sun, a delightful travel book full of adventures, off the beaten track (up the Yangtze River, among the Modoc Indians in northern California) and on the beaten track (the marriage of the emperor of China and Niagara Falls).
Simpson was happier among outlaws than he was among royalty. As a guest of the prince of Wales in a royal residence, he worried that the servant assigned to him (because he hadn't his own) would take a dim view of his darned socks and his plain old hair brushes, and he cringed at the thought of "a gorgeous creature in blue plush breeches" unpacking his portmanteau. He preferred the dervish in the caravansary or the floor mender in Kashmir. This is the reason his pictures are full of telling detail, and it also accounts for the fact that Simpson, not a natural writer, produced good travel books. Simply, he talked to everyone and reported accurately what they said.
That Modoc business turned him into a listener. It was a bitter war, and especially bloody for its being so far from any large settlement. Simpson was not put off by the remoteness of this bloodbath. When the railway ran out, he took a stagecoach, stopping at settlers' log houses on the way. He met all the usual pioneer belligerence, but typically he reported it with irony:
In one place, an old settler expressed the usual warm desire to see the Modocs exterminated, and included the whole race of Indians in the same merciful sentiment. When he came to the place first there were lots of Indians about—they were as plentiful as ground-squirrels, and every fall white men used to go out and shoot a hundred or two of them. At the present moment he was sorry he could not get away.... I reported this valiant warrior's wish at the camp, and there was a great regret that such valuable services were not to be had.
That twinkle and tone of voice and light touch, and even some of the expressions, are Kiplingesque. Though their paths did not cross, Kipling and Simpson traveled many of the same routes in the world, and their enthusiasms, their pawky humor, and the colors they favored are very similar. Both shared an interest in biblical history and classical scholarship, and they were machine-mad, too, loving the mechanisms of locomotives and tunneling equipment.
Although Simpson was born almost forty years before Kipling, their experiences of India overlapped, and their sympathies were much the same—not the pink, princely India, but India outdoors, its streets, hills, and bazaars. Kipling's father illustrated some of his son's work, but how much more appropriate Simpson's pictures would have been. In his passions and sympathies as well as his limitations and quirks, William Simpson is the Kipling of watercolorists.
Rajat Neogy: An Indian in Uganda
WE MADE OUR introductions through our work, and met in person later, which is the right sequence for writers to get acquainted. Rajat's magazine, Transition, had recently begun in Uganda, and I was writing poetry and fiction in Malawi. Africa was a small place then—or so it seemed, because it was one place, where writers were eagerly signaling to each other: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and Ulli Beier from Nigeria; Cameron Duodu from Ghana; Dennis Brutus, Nadine Gordimer, and others from South Africa; Ezekiel Mphahlele and James Ngugi from Kenya; David Rubadiri and I from Malawi; and yet others in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania. Nearly all these signals were directed toward Uganda, where Rajat edited them for publication in Transition.
It is hard to imagine a little magazine becoming so influential on such a vast continent, but that is what happened with Transition. Rajat began his magazine at just the right time, and it became a rallying point throughout the 1960s. It helped that Rajat was a local boy, with Africa inside him as well as the experience of a British university. It all showed in the way he spoke, moving from Swahili to Hindi to English. Kampala in the mid-sixties was a small green city, and Uganda was prosperous and full of distinguished writers (Achebe, Mphahlele, V. S. Naipaul, Ali Mazrui), artists (Michael Adams, Jonathan Kingdon), and anthropologists (Raymond Apthorpe, Colin Turnbull) from Makerere University. Rajat had lived through Uganda's later colonial years and through its independence and hopeful years. He was also to experience its disintegration and terror.
He was brave, articulate and funny, and a tease. He had tremendous confidence, not the ranting and fearful bravado that was common among some Ugandans, but a stylish poise that was both intellectual and social. He was handsome, clever, and young. He used all his gifts. He traveled across Africa, and to London and New York. His magazine mattered. He liked me and published my writing—he was the first publisher of my work—and I felt lucky to know him.
One of his strangest requests to me—but typical Rajat—was that I agree to sign a paper saying that I had committed adultery with his Swedish wife, Lotte. This was 1965. Adultery was grounds for divorce in Uganda, and it had to be proven. "I wouldn't ask this of anyone else," he said. "I am asking you because you're my friend." Well, that was true, but Kampala was such a small place that I was afraid of the social consequences. I was not married, and I did not want to be known in town as a co-respondent, the legal term for the adulterous party. Rajat said he had a contact at the printer of the Uganda Argus — the firm also produced Transition — so he would see to it that my name would not appear in the court column, where divorces, criminal convictions, and bankruptcies were listed, once a week in small print.
Although I had never laid a hand on the woman, I agreed to be named as co-respondent and to admit to hav
ing slept with her on three occasions. Rajat's harassed attorney warned me that this admission was illegal—connivance, in fact. I was soon served with papers, and in court the magistrate said, "This Theroux chap—isn't he supposed to be a friend of yours?" Rajat admitted this was so. Magistrate: "Some friend!"
In spite of Rajat's promises, my name appeared in the Argus, and afterward, when I showed up at parties, people—expatriates or leathery ex-colonials—smiled at me knowingly. At the age of twenty-four, I had my first experience of celebrity. It was also one of the happiest periods of my life. I fell in love. Rajat approved of the woman, Anne Castle. He was a witness at our wedding—his elegant signature on our marriage certificate. Rajat married two more times and fathered six children, who are now scattered around the world.
During those years, because we were friends, because we were in Africa, I saw him every day. (I had started out as a lecturer at Makerere; a few years later, because of the rapid departures of expatriates, I became acting head of the Adult Studies Centre. "We have no one else in the pipeline," the chancellor, Y. K. Lule said.) Rajat was in his element at a large table—he could be found at the City Bar on Kampala Road, the Staff Bar at Makerere, or an austere vegetarian restaurant, Hindu Lodge. He sat, he talked, he teased, he encouraged; then he went back to his office and worked on his magazine. We all assumed that Uganda would just get better. Naipaul disagreed. The politicians were clearly opportunists and crooks, he said: "This country will turn back into jungle."
