A Odd, Cold Fish

Footprints on Water

by Bernd Pflug

Colombo, 2024, Perera Hussein Publishing House

The Ceylon Civil Service, long sadly defunct, was lucky in its chroniclers. Among the many who left us with outstanding memoirs of their years in the service were at least two unusually gifted and insightful authors. In his Vignettes of the Ceylon Civil Service[1], the younger of these, M. Chandrasoma, MBE, gave us a first-hand account of a civil servant’s life at every level from junior assistant to ministry secretary, told with evident patriotic spirit and genuine affection for the public he served during a career that spanned the last decade of the colonial era and the first nine years of independence. Chandrasoma’s prose is plain, cool and considered, but the effect of his memoir is uplifting and inspiring in no ordinary way.
      Chandrasoma is overshadowed only by Ceylon’s most famous literary civil servant – a man who was, as a writer, absolutely world-class. I speak, of course, of Leonard Woolf, whose Hambantota diaries, covering the two and a half years he spent as assistant government agent for the district, are admired by historians and general readers alike[2]. Woolf’s experiences in Hambantota also provided grist to his famous novel of Sinhalese peasant life, The Village in the Jungle. These books are impressive enough in themselves, but my own favourite among Woolf’s Ceylon works is the second volume of his epic autobiography, titled Growing[3]. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read, and there is much to be learned among its pages.
      Between Chandrasoma and Woolf, we are already sumptuously served; add to these the doorstop works of Sir James Emerson Tennent, the urbane reminiscences of Sir Arthur Ranasinha, the anti-imperialist, occasionally irate field reports of Herbert Wace and C.J.R. le Mesurier (preserved for us in the writings of the left-wing academic and former Prime Ministerial secretary S.A. Meegama)[4], and what do we have but a veritable feast – very nearly a surfeit – of first-class writing on the Ceylon Civil Service. How does Footprints on Water fare by comparison? Does it merit a place on the menu, even as an amuse-bouche? Have we – to put it crudely – any room left for it?

 

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It is best to make clear, before we go any further, that Footprints on Water isn’t officially by W.T. Stace. That honour must go to a gentleman named Bernd Pflug, by whom Stace’s hitherto unpublished work was, as it says on the cover, ‘edited and critiqued’. I suspect the title, with its strained (though perhaps unconscious) allusions to the Gospel of Matthew and Keats’s tombstone, is his also. Despite my earnest efforts to track him down on the internet, Dr Pflug remains (to me, at least) a somewhat elusive and mysterious figure. We shall return to him later, but for the time being let us stick to what Bertie Wooster was taught by his man Jeeves to call the res. What of Stace, and the 160-or-so pages of autobiography that make up the bulk of Footprints on Water?
      By his own account herein, Walter Terence Stace, born 1886, seems to have been an odd, cold fish. Apparently encased in a cocoon of oblivious self-regard from early childhood until his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1908, he considered first the Church of England as a career, then poetry and later philosophy before practical considerations thrust him, greatly against his will, into the line his brother and father had followed before him: the colonial civil service. In the meantime, he contrived to fall in love with and marry, without the knowledge of his family, a woman old enough to be his mother. Despite this romantic distraction he did well enough on his second shy at the civil-service exams to qualify for the British or the equally prestigious Indian Civil Service, but picked Ceylon instead because he thought he and his wife would be able to live more comfortably on a junior officer’s salary in that post. 
      All this he recounts with a blandness that, unleavened by any saving touch of humour, makes him seem chilly indeed. Pflug claims to discern in Stace ‘a kind of life with a twinkle in his eye,’ but if so, it must be a twinkle discernible only to one blessed with that famous German sense of humour.
      Stace admits in his autobiography that his work developed in him a practical side that his character had previously lacked; it does not seem, however, to have done much to cure his self-centredness. Woolf, Chandrasoma and the other writers earlier mentioned were eager to talk about Ceylon, about the people they dealt with, their work and its effects, and what they thought about it all; there’s a bit of this in Stace, too, but far too much about himself and the development of his own character as he made what shifts he could to meet the demands of his job. Sadly, none of it shows any real self-comprehension at all.
      Yet he was a perceptive man for all his evident lack of psychological insight, and clearly a great intellectual. His observations concerning his work, the Lankan character, British racism, the merits and demerits of colonialism and imperial administrative policy (or the lack of it, as far as he, at least, was able to make out) are somewhat unoriginal but they are succinctly put and not without interest. His later career was as a professor of philosophy – at no less an institution than Princeton University in the USA, where he started work directly upon leaving the Ceylon Civil Service – and this is very much the kind of memoir one would expect a professor of philosophy to write.
      The chapters of Footprints on Water I found most interesting were those dealing with Stace’s time as Police Magistrate in Gampola and his appointment as Governor Chalmers’s private secretary, which followed on from it. In the course of the first of these positions, he – by his own report – was left to deal with the outbreak of the 1915 ethnic riots without any executive support from his superiors. The reader may decide for themselves whether or not to believe this; there are certainly a few instances in the book where Stace seems, in the words of his editor, to have ‘slightly confused historical fact with telling a good story.’ Fortunately, there is no need for us to be suspicious of the reason he gives for being made private secretary to Chalmers, which is that the latter, a scholar of Pali and Buddhism and an intellectual in his own right, wanted someone better read than the average career civil servant to talk to in private. It sounds perfectly likely, and one only hopes the governor was not disappointed in his man.
      Chalmers, of course, had to bear responsibility for the spectacular way in which the government mishandled the 1915 violence, though most of the key decisions were in fact made by his deputy, R.E. Stubbs, and the military commander of the island, Brig-Gen H.H.L. Malcolm. His term was thus cut short and he returned to England the same year, but he was not otherwise penalized. Stace’s career seems to have suffered rather more than his patron’s did, but since he was not ambitious, this did not really trouble him. After being shuffled from one mid-level posting to another for some fifteen years, he was finally kicked sideways, out of the civil-service ‘line’ altogether, by being made Mayor of Colombo and Chairman of the CMC (these were not elected positions in his time but gubernatorial appointments). After this, he took the hint and left Ceylon with the Burgher wife he had married after tiring and getting rid of the first one some time during the 1920s. His legacy in modern-day Sri Lanka is a road named after him in Grandpass, and precious little else.
 

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Of Stace’s subsequent career, Footprints on Water has very little to tell us. From what I have been able to discover it was not brilliant, and his reputation as a philosopher is modest. However, it seems to have been this side of him, rather than his civil-service work, that first attracted Bernd Pflug to him. Neither Pflug’s preface nor his forty-page ‘critique’ of Stace, which follows the main body of the text, show any interest in the story being told, nor are they concerned with what the philosopher had to say about Ceylon or the folk he served. Dr Pflug, in fact, cares only about two things: Stace’s views on colonialism, which take up a scant four pages towards the end of his autobiography, and the short comparison he makes between his own views on the subject and those of Leonard Woolf. Even these, we find when we begin reading the ‘critique’, are presented only to disagree with them: a prelude to an airing of Pflug’s own ideas about British imperialism, which form almost the entire subject of an essay in which Stace is little more than a convenient imperialist straw man for Pflug to worry, terrier-like, to pieces.
      And Dr Pflug’s views are, frankly, not worth discussing. They reprise, in poorly written form, the negative if superficial and morally anachronistic judgements passed on the British Empire by today’s left-wing intelligentsia – views that are especially fashionable these days in India and Britain. Most well-read people are familiar with them from the works of far better writers, such as Shashi Tharoor and William Dalrymple. Unlike those authors, Bernd Pflug knows not whereof he speaks. Though he claims to have lived in Lanka for some time and quotes an impressive number of books on our history in his footnotes, one is moved to doubt whether he has actually read any of them, for his arguments are all based on the very different history of British India, and he expresses them with a degree of bias and lack of critical detachment that at times seems almost Hindutva. India, it seems, has been his home, or at least his principal base, since 1977. Yet however much he may know about that country, it it safe to say that Dr Pflug knows absolutely nothing about the character and impact of British colonialism in Lanka. His ‘critique’ is merely an airing of his own tiresome prejudices. As for his implicit judgement that Lanka is no different from India in its history and character, I find it, as a Lankan, thoroughly insulting.
      I have my biases too. I was born here; this is my beloved home. But I am also, inescapably, a genetic and cultural product of the British Empire, and I have never been able to bring myself to hate and condemn that which played so large a part in my own making. Unlike Herr Pflug, I am somewhat familiar with imperial history – not just British but also Portuguese, Dutch and South Indian – as it pertains to my own country, and in my reasonably well-informed opinion Bernd Pflug, when he talks about colonialism and its effects in Ceylon, is talking through his hat.
      That a reputed – and no, I don’t mean ‘reputable’ – academic should talk so freely about something he clearly knows so little is astonishing to me. I have great respect for academics, not being one myself, and am appalled to see one of that elect – if indeed he is – let the side down so badly. Curious to learn more about the man behind the doctoral credentials, I tried looking him up online. I found very little, and nothing to inspire confidence. I encourage interested readers to look him up too, and judge for themselves.
  

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We needn’t concern ourselves any further with Herr Doktor Pflug and his ‘critique’. It adds nothing to the book he has produced, the main interest and subject of which is, lest we forget, the story of Walter Terence Stace and his adventures in Ceylon. I found that story interesting and moderately enjoyable, and though it didn’t impress me as much as the works of the authors I mentioned at the beginning of this review, it was a pretty fair read – it qualifies as an after-dinner mint, perhaps, to follow the banquet of Lankan civil-service histories. I advise prospective readers to confine themselves to Stace, and leave Pflug well alone. 
      Before I close, a technical word or two. I do not doubt that it was Dr Pflug’s editorial decision to interpolate his own wordy footnotes with Stace’s own, to the confusion of unsuspecting readers. He has attempted to distinguish his own notes from Stace’s by putting them between ugly square brackets. A much better (and obvious) solution would have been to present them as notes to the text, placed at the end of the book, and leave Stace’s footnotes where they were. Why this was not done I cannot imagine.
      Sri Lankan publications in English tend to be full of typographical errors, in some cases so many and so atrocious as to make the book unreadable. Perera Hussein is one of those rare publishers of whom this is not true, and I am happy to say that, for the most part, Footprints on Water keeps up the house standards. There are, nonetheless, two all-too blatant proofing errors in the book, which the reader will surely find.
      This is bad luck, for which I sympathize with all concerned. My own experience as an author and editor has convinced me that the First Law of Proofreading is ‘there will always be typos.’ No doubt there are some in this very essay. Concerning which, all I have left to say is that I wish I could have been a bit kinder about Footprints on Water. Its worst faults are those of its editor, Pflug, rather than its author or its publishers. My advice to the latter, on this showing, is not to be so much in awe of people with Ph.Ds.

Notes

1. Chandrasoma, M., Vignettes of the Ceylon Civil Service 1938–1957. Colombo, Fonseka Publications, 1991.
2. Woolf, L., Diaries in Ceylon, 1908–1911. London, 1963, Hogarth Press.
3. Woolf, L., Growing. London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 (paperback edition).
4. Meegama, S.A., Guns, Taverns & Tea Shops. Nugegoda, 2019, Visidunu Press.