Running a struggling newspaper was another matter. Crawford was the first to acknowledge he had no business skills. ‘I was my own news collector, managing editor and editorial writer. I wrote a leading article and several editorial paragraphs every day, collected and wrote all the local news, edited the correspondence from all over India, some of it written in the worst English that I have ever encountered.’2
Crawford also had to manage the staff. ‘My first experience was on arriving in the office to find a subeditor—a vile half-caste—lying dead drunk across the office table,’ he wrote to his aunt. ‘It was only ten in the morning but others in the office were in a suspiciously hilarious frame of mind. Well, I bundled out the sub-editor and some of the worst of the others and the “reign of law” began.’3
Crawford found the work challenging. The newspaper staff, he wrote, consisted of ‘a baronet, a disqualified jockey, a drunken parson, a countess, a bank director, several struggling young barristers and a host of others it would make you laugh to hear of’.4 Crawford proved adept at picking up the local dialect and within months had become so proficient that he could excoriate ‘a lazy compositor’ for fifteen minutes straight without a single grammatical error.
The heat during the summer was so oppressive that Crawford had to employ no fewer than six punkahwallahs to work the fans in the office and at his bungalow. But at 400 rupees a month, the pay was excellent and he revelled in the fact that he had ‘sovereign control’ over what he believed was a nascent media empire. He also found the people of Allahabad ‘extremely civil, and I have quite a flood of invitations’.5
In August 1879, midway through his first Indian monsoon, Crawford packed his trunks and, accompanied by a small retinue of servants, boarded a train for Ambala. The last station on the broad gauge line, it was the starting point for an arduous climb by foot, horseback or carriage up the foothills of the Himalayas to Simla. The reason for Crawford’s journey was not only to escape the heat and humidity of the plains. For the aspiring newspaper editor, it was also an opportunity ‘to pick up the news that oozes through the penthouse of Government secrecy and, failing such scant drops of information, to manufacture as much as is necessary to fill the columns of their dailies’.
Depositing his servants and his baggage at Lawries Hotel, Crawford joined the throng milling around Scandal Point and took in the scenery and the crowds—a motley collection of spiritualists, wealthy American tourists, the occasional English peer and a botanist from Berlin. After returning to his hotel, he updated his diary, and went down to the hotel dining room where he was directed to an empty chair on one side of a long table. The seat opposite was vacant but Crawford couldn’t avoid noticing that ‘two remarkably well-dressed servants, in turbans of white and gold, stood with folded arms behind it, apparently awaiting their master’.6 He wasn’t long in coming.
No sooner had the man sat down than one of his two servants left and came back, ‘bearing a priceless goblet and a flask of the purest old Venetian mould’. Filling the goblet, he presented the man with a brimming beaker of cold water. ‘A water-drinker in India is always a phenomenon, but a water-drinker who did the thing so artistically was such a manifestation as I had never seen,’ Crawford recalled.
Unlike the other guests who ‘seemed to be vying, like the captives of Circe, to ascertain by trial who could swallow the most beef and mountain mutton, and who could absorb the most “pegs”,’ the man dining opposite him ate little. At first, Crawford thought he might be from Italy, though he was unable to discern his accent as he spoke to his servants in Hindustani.
Unable to contain his curiosity any longer, Crawford began to address his fellow diner in Italian, only to be answered in Greek with the phrase ‘den enoesa’ (I do not understand). Crawford switched to English to find that his companion not only spoke ‘like a fellow of Balliol’, but was ‘pungent, ready, impressive, and most entertaining, thoroughly acquainted with Anglo-Indian and English topics, and apparently well read’.7
Having spent many hours in conversation over a slow dinner, the still-unnamed dining companion invited Crawford to his room to share a narghile. Crawford enthusiastically agreed, welcoming any excuse to indulge in the aromatic enjoyment of the water pipe which he preferred to the Burmese cheroots, Egyptian cigarettes and Havana cigars favoured by the British.
What he saw when he passed through the glass door of his new acquaintance’s abode left him not only speechless but breathless as well. ‘It seemed to me that I was suddenly transported into the subterranean chambers whither the wicked magician sent Aladdin in quest of the lamp. A soft but strong light filled the room, though I did not immediately comprehend whence it came, nor did I think to look, so amazed was I by the extraordinary splendour of the objects that met my eyes.
‘In the first glance, it appeared as if the walls and the ceiling were lined with gold and precious stones; and in reality it was almost literally the truth. The apartment, I soon saw, was small—for India at least—and every available space, nook and cranny was filled with gold and jewelled ornaments, shining weapons, or uncouth but resplendent idols.
‘There were sabres in scabbards set from end to end with diamonds and sapphires, with cross hilts of rubies in massive gold mounting, the spoil of some worsted Raja or Nawab of the Mutiny. There were narghiles four feet high, crusted with gems and curiously wrought work from Baghdad or Herat; water flasks of gold and drinking cups of jade; yataghans from Roum and idols from the Far East. Gorgeous lamps in the octagonal Oriental shape hung from the ceiling, and, fed by aromatic oils, shed their soothing light all around. The floor was covered with a rich soft pile, and low divans were heaped with cushions.
‘On the floor, in a corner which seemed the favourite resting-place of my host, lay open two or three superbly illuminated Arabic manuscripts, and from a chafing dish of silver nearby, a thin thread of snow-white smoke sent up its faint perfume through the still air. To find myself transported from the conventionalities of a stiff and starched Anglo-Indian hotel to such a scene was something novel and delicious in the extreme. No wonder I stood speechless and amazed.’8
The room belonged to Alexander Jacob, and Crawford’s chance encounter with Simla’s most famous jeweller would change the life of both men forever. Two years later, Jacob’s liveried servants, the tales he told about his exotic antecedents and his curio-filled room in Lawries Hotel would be the setting for Mr Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India—the first American novel to be set on the subcontinent and the first of dozens of books that Crawford was to churn out over the next three decades in a remarkable literary career that was once on par with Mark Twain’s.
Sprinkled with tiger hunts, Arabian love songs, black magic, mind readings, astral travel, Afghan revolutionaries, scheming Maharajas and an East-meets-West love story, it became an instant best-seller. ‘If it had not been for him (Jacob) I might (still) be a professor of Sanskrit in some American college,’ Crawford later told his aunt.9
The publication of Mr Isaacs also turned Jacob into an internationally recognized celebrity. His knowledge of precious stones and fabulous wealth, his magical powers, ability to communicate with the spirit world and his skills in the art of spy craft struck an instant chord. It was a story that milked the fascination of the West with the occult, the romance of the Arabian Nights and its preoccupation with the Great Game. But the novel’s fantastical plot and the fact that it was never in Jacob’s interest to set the record straight, meant that the lines between his real and romanticized life remained blurred forever.
In physical appearance, Jacob matched his fictional avatar. He had rooms in Lawries, kept a small retinue of servants and always insisted on drinking Apollinaris water imported from Germany. Like Jacob, the fictional Isaacs described himself as ‘a dealer in precious stones and similar objects of value’, whose main preoccupation in life was ‘amassing wealth’. Crawford said many years later that the story of his first meeting with Jacob formed the basis for his protagonist’s encounte
r with Isaacs at Lawries. He also said that many of the events in the novel were Jacob’s ‘actual experiences’.10
The story of Mr Isaacs is told in the first person by Paul Griggs. Like Crawford, Griggs is a tall, athletic, Italian-born American. He is the editor of an Allahabad newspaper, with the somewhat unfortunate name of the Daily Howler, and has come to Simla to present his credentials to the Viceroy’s press officer. Griggs knows Sanskrit, has a keen grasp of Hindu philosophy and has trained himself in the powers of mesmerism. He is also a staunch believer in the supernatural. ‘I am the real Paul Griggs of the story,’ Crawford later wrote, ‘and the occasional allusions to my own history are for the most part true’.11
How far the allusions to Jacob’s life are true is less clear. Isaacs tells Griggs he has changed his name from Abdul Hafizben-Isak as it is more in keeping with his profession, easier to write and has ‘an attractive Semitic twang’. He describes himself as ‘a pure Iranian, a degenerate descendant of Zoroaster, as you call him, though by religion I follow the Prophet, whose name be blessed’.12
Once Crawford moves the plot to Simla, the lines between fact and fiction disappear in a blizzard of bizarre storylines. Griggs joins Isaacs on a series of adventures that include a tiger-shooting expedition to the Terai involving no fewer than thirty-six elephants, and rescuing an Afghan warlord from the dungeons of an evil Indian Prince by spiriting him away to Tibet. All these enterprises are aided and abetted by the mysterious Ram Lal.
Crawford describes Ram Lal as a thin figure, not very tall, wearing a long grey caftan and a grey turban, with a pointed beard, a long moustache and heavy eyebrows, all of which are also in shades of grey. Ram Lal, we discover, is ‘so well versed in the mysteries of the fourth dimension that he can vanish into thin air at will and is able to conjure up a thick mist in the mountains on an unusually clear and moonlit night’.13
Ram Lal was not entirely a figment of Crawford’s imagination. Jacob was a firm believer in such cosmic beings who, he said, appeared mysteriously in critical situations to offer advice or to use their divine intervention to ward off evil. Though Crawford said later that the character was based on a ‘mysterious Buddhist’ he had once met in India, Ram Lal was clearly a mix of the two.
‘He is a very wise man, but he is not from Iran,’ Isaacs tells Griggs. ‘No. He is a brahmin by birth, a Buddhist by adopted religion, and he calls himself an ‘adept’ by profession, I suppose, if he can be said to have any. He comes and goes unexpectedly, with amazing rapidity. His visits are brief, but he always seems to be perfectly conversant with the matter in hand, whatever it maybe.’14
Ram Lal clashes with Isaacs when the latter falls for a certain Miss Westonhaugh, ‘a fair English girl’15 of pure mind and morals. He disapproves of romantic pursuits as they distract Isaacs from the higher calling. Griggs also looks down on the romance and tries to dissuade him from getting too involved with Westonhaugh, pointing out that, while she might be ‘charming and fair now, she will be fat at thirty-five, and will probably paint at forty’.16 Later on, he disparagingly remarks that Westonhaugh ‘was of the type of brilliant, healthy, northern girls, who depend more on their animal spirits and enjoyment of living for their happiness than upon any natural or acquired mental powers.’17
Crawford later admitted that he added Westonhaugh as an afterthought because he was amused by the process of writing and ‘wanted to see what would happen’. At the end of the book, she succumbs to jungle fever and dies while a dumbstruck Griggs watches Isaacs and Ram Lal walk off into the darkness, hand in hand, never to be seen again.
Crawford spent only a few days in Simla before returning to Allahabad. Though he still found the city agreeable, he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with working for an opposition newspaper which had little effect on politics. The paper alienated English readers because of its mildly pro-Home Rule stance and was unpopular with Indian readers because it didn’t go hard enough. As both sides withdrew their support, the ‘owner found himself a poor man, and the editor a much wiser one’, Crawford recalled. The last straw was a quarrel with Kunzru over editorial control. Crawford rebelled against the proprietor’s attempts to influence the paper’s coverage and ‘retired in disgust’.18
Crawford left Allahabad for Bombay in July 1890. From there, he travelled to Rome where he toyed with the idea of becoming an opera singer, failed his audition, flirted with the concept of rewriting some Vedic hymns but couldn’t find a publisher. In February 1881, he boarded a tramp steamer bound for New York, where his uncle Sam Ward had married into the Astor family and built a massive real estate empire. Ward was a poet, philosopher, lobbyist and bon vivant. With his vast range of influential friends, he turned out to be the perfect mentor for his ‘unsystematic, lazy and loungy’ nephew.
After dinner one night, as the two men were sitting in the smoking room of the New York Club overlooking Madison Square Garden, Crawford began telling his uncle stories of India. ‘I told him with a great deal of detail, my recollections of an interesting man whom I had met in Simla’.19 When I finished, he said to me: ‘That is a good two-part magazine story, and you must write it out immediately.’ Ward took him to his apartment at Brevoot House, ‘got him a room, locked him in and started him working on the tale.’20
Crawford took to writing with great zeal, keeping his uncle updated on his progress. ‘I kept at it day to day, getting more interested in the work as I proceeded.’21 For a first-time novelist, Crawford was fortunate to have a protagonist with such an exotic background. Crawford’s biographer John Pilkington writes that Crawford began with the intention of featuring his first encounter with Mr Isaacs—including an account of his career up to the time he met him—but, as the possibilities of exploiting Isaacs’ adventures became evident, he continued to write.
‘I am at work on the story—the character and personality of Jacob are a romance in themselves, s’il en fut. It is easy to make him fall in love with some fair English girl and to lead them through numberless adventures—weaving in stories of Nicoletts which I believe I told you—not to mention personal experiences in India.’22
After just six weeks of writing, Crawford put the final touches to the novel and on June 15, 1882, presented it to his uncle. Ward insisted it be published as a serial, but Crawford rejected the idea, telling his uncle that the novel was ‘the exposition of an idea—namely that the love of woman, to a man of fine sensibilities and true purpose, is a step on the road to the attainment of the ideal life, whatever the religion of the individual’.23
Mr Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India was published simultaneously in England and America on December 5, 1892. Critics were enthusiastic and sales boomed. The book sold out in the US within a few weeks of its publication, and the publishers couldn’t keep up with the demand. Macmillan reprinted the book nine times in the first year of publication.
In addition to his forty-four novels, Crawford wrote thirty-three articles, four plays, three volumes of Italian history and two travel books. Henry James described him as ‘meat and drink and lodging to publishers’.24 He was still churning out books at the rate of one a year when he died from exhaustion in 1909 at the age of 54.
Yet, today, not a single volume is in print, which probably has more to do with the quality of his writing rather than the quantity of the prose. He rarely spent more than two months on a book, locking himself away in such varied surroundings as a room above Macmillan’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue in New York or in subterranean caves that lay underneath an old castle in Sorrento that was the residence of the wife of a Russian Prince.
Crawford admitted that the success of Mr Isaacs had more to do with luck than literary merit. As his sister, Mary Hugh Fraser, later explained: ‘The fashionable world had gone off its head about Esoteric Buddhism; everybody was either a Mahatma or a Chela; and former gross-living people were giving their entertainers much inconvenience by refusing to eat beef and mutton, in public, at any rate. Mr Isaacs struck the note of the moment, and any o
ne who had not read the book was hopelessly out of the running.’25
Inadvertently, Crawford had made Jacob a poster-boy for nineteenth-century New Agers. Across Europe and America, people were flocking to new faiths of every kind, ranging from the occult to spiritual healing, and a host of secret doctrines that supposedly held the timeless wisdom of the East. As Isaacs’s avatar, Jacob was seen as the ultimate practitioner of these arts. It would not be long before the proponents of this spiritual counter-culture movement tried to claim him as one of their own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A CLEVER CONJUROR
WHEN the Meerut Express arrived at Ambala on September 6, 1880, the station master witnessed an extraordinary sight. Alighting from the cramped third-class cabin was a rather overweight, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed Russian woman with multiple chins and baggy eyes, dressed in voluminous clothes totally unsuited to the tropical heat. Accompanying her was a softly spoken, slightly built, middle-aged man with steel-rimmed spectacles and a flowing Santa Claus beard. The pair seemed to be in a hurry as they called a coolie to find them a dak-gharry—a wooden litter on wheels—to take them on the next stage of the journey. Like most European travellers disembarking at Ambala at this time of the year they were heading for Kalka, the departure point for the arduous climb to Simla.
Just as Francis Marion Crawford had done a year earlier, the pair hired a horse-drawn tonga for the slow and perilous ride to the summer capital of the British Raj. Villagers along the route stopped and stared as the woman yelled out an endless string of curses at the driver and his ear-splitting safety horn, while her companion calmly sat back and enjoyed the view. Simla in the hot season was no stranger to oddballs and eccentrics escaping the heat of the plains, but Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (HPB) and her companion Henry Steel Olcott were about to give the terms a new meaning. For Alexander Jacob, the arrival of the two travellers would be more of a burden than a blessing. The hill station was too small for more than one purveyor of mystical power.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 10
