THE MAKING OF A BIGOT- ROSE MACAULAY

''The making of a bigot'' by Rose macaulay is a clever and deeply intelligent novel about a man's transformation from believing in the many sided nature of truth to a specifically narrowed down conception, impelled by necessity and worldliness. Eddy oliver, at the beginning of the novel , is an enthusiast, burbling with enthusiasm, seeing the merit and good in everything, albeit in an undiscriminating and indiscriminate manner. His friend Arnold is a cynic-witty , disparaging and with an undernote of disdain . His fiancee Molly is conservative, with a narrow set of homogeneous core beliefs. And the london eddy traverses, with the many societies he partakes of , reveal his core unstructured thought process. Alternately tory and liberal or even socialist, receptive to unbelievers while believing, a pacifist who can equally see the necessity of war his impressionability reacts to phenomena with a naive effervescence without examining their undersides. Over time the essential agreeableness between diverse aspects and the regrettable divisiveness that separates them becomes a creed in itself, an unconsidered creed propelled by effervescent sentimentality. It is this ingenuousness or willed ignorance that receives a shock.

The novel skilfully delivers its own compeuppance as Eddy discovers reality and human nature refusing to yield to his idealistic conception . All around him Eddy sees people choosing a path by negating other truths, forming a conception of life by excluding and by the novel's end, with a series of mishaps and botched adventures, be it an attempt to work at st gregory's parish, or a club for teaching aspects of socialist thought to young adults as a stand in for Datcherd ( which eddy messes up by having too many lectures on too many topics ) or his own journal unity which proves a calamitous failure , culminating in a bout of fisticuffs and violence at a protest by strikers . Yet the narrative also values the incipient romanticism of Eddy , his fellow feeling for Eileen de moines whose unconventional choices and pure love for Datcherd is deemed immoral by others. The fibre of sympathy that permits Eddy to see merit in seemingly disparate contradictions has a fundamental emollient decency but it needs must be battered by life and be moulded into a variation of bigotry , out of the varieties on offer in modernity .

But my one misgiving with the novel would be its schematic binary between the multifarious nature of simultaneal truths eddy feels affinity to and the ineluctability of bigotry that must perforce be its counterpart. Between these oscillations there is very little discrimination, sifting and sorting, distinguishing between varied viewpoints to make a choice. And this dichotomy renders the novel schematic and in a way fails to plumb into an exploration of the constituents of what entails truth. But in charting a trajectory of a particular sensibility from a somewhat ingenuous even if ill conceived many sidedness to capitulating to a single mindedness prompted by worldliness it succeeds powerfully. ''The making of a bigot'' is, in its tragicomic, satirical vein, as effective as turgenev's Rudin and Goncharov's oblomov - whose indolence and utter passivity/inactivity is contrasted by a core romantic idealism and authenticity marred by temperament and imperilled by the limitations of self, even if unextinguished. Rose macaulay's eddy partakes of that indolence although his indolence is more intellectual than physical. Driven by the force of a sensibility buffeted by a world uncongenial, unsympathetic, at best contemptuously indulgent, at worst blithely dismissive , Eddy is, by the story's conclusion, on the path to mediocrity and bigotry, in order to ensure worldly success. But then given the lack of foundations or a systematic, rigorous approach to exploring truth anyway Eddy's vacillations can only bring about a materialization and concretization of their antithesis . The tragicomic ending is a foregone conclusion.