John Masters - Personality

Personality

John Masters: a regimented life by John Clay was published by Michael Joseph in 1992. Now out of print, it is a sympathetic but not uncritical biography. According to Clay, Masters possessed a strong and sometimes domineering personality, and could be impatient with weakness or incompetence. He could also be extremely warmhearted and generous. His outgoing and boisterous personality flourished during his long residence in the United States. Masters was impatient with the literary establishment, which faulted his Indian novels as unsympathetic to Indians, and he was impatient with editors who wanted to remove the rough edges from his characters. Masters strove for accuracy and realism, resenting it when people mistook his characters' views as his own. He was extremely hard-working and meticulously well-organized, both as a soldier and a novelist. Clay speculates that Masters may have been driven to achieve by rumours that his family was not pure English, but Anglo-Indian or Eurasian. In 1962 Masters learned what he had apparently long suspected, that he did indeed have a distant Indian ancestor.

Clay's biography provides details that Masters omitted from the three volumes of autobiography he wrote: Bugles and a Tiger (1956); Road Past Mandalay (1961); and Pilgrim Son (1971). They are nevertheless extremely revealing. Bugles and a Tiger, which details Masters's time at Sandhurst and service on India's northwest frontier on the eve of World War II, is among the finest portraits of the profession of arms ever written. Road Past Mandalay deals mostly with the Burma campaign in World War II, while Pilgrim Son chronicles his career as a writer.