Portland State University Alumni News Winter 1985 On the inside letter from Denmark I 2 American family encounters differences in a dark land Up in the sky I 5 Roosevelt Carter (,74) has top job at Portland Airport and isn't coming down soon A college in the making I 6 It rook only nine years for an extension center /0 become a full-fledged college Korean friends I 9 Portland man starts endowment and PSU adopts a sister in Korea AlumNot.. I 4 Foundation News I 8 Campus News I 10 Calendar I 11 On the cover: Portland State College students strolled through the Park Blocks in 1958, when the first quadrant of Cramer Hall was still the only new building on campus. Portland State Univer<ity celebrates its 39th, 30th and 16th birthdays this month. See pp.6-7. tivc shelley reece a11d the rai: PSU professor believes the four little-known nQvels of an even less-known British author are "classics" of modern literature. by Cynthia D. Stowell "Free Concert: The Raj Quartet of Paul Scott performs in NH 462." So said the campus calendar item. We'll never know how many music lovers squeezed into the crowded lecture hall, only to find PSU English professor Shelley Reece holding forth on one of his favorite works of modern literature. One thing is certain: the calendar entry would have created a lot more confusion just a year ago, before Paul Scott's four·volume opus on the British rule in India became a media event. The Masterpiece Theatre series, "The Jewel in the Crown," based on The Raj Quartet and airing on public television through mid·March, is not only bringing to light a work of fiction much-neglected in America. It is introducing PSU's Shelley Reece, at least in the Portland area, as a leading authority on the even less known British author whose passion for India inspired the 1,926 pages of The Raj Quartet. It was just a few months before Paul Scott died of cancer in 1978 that Reece read Staying On, a kind of coda to the Quartet, and became instantly fascinated with Scott's work and the world view it reflected_ ''I'm really hooked on it," said Reece. " It catches me in an important place." Reece never met nor spoke with Scott, but he has spent the last five years getting to know the writer intimately - through his letters, his unpublished essays, and his thirteen novels. Talking to Shelley Reece is eerily like talking to Paul Scott himself. Scott's three Indias Reece has inevitably been caught up in the recent flurry of artistic interest in India and the anachronism "The Jewel in the Crown" is a fictional painting that figures into the 14-part Masterpiece Theatre production by the same name, tn the painting, Que~n Victoria is gelling a royal reception in India, the jewel in the British Empire, Actually the Queen never visited tndia_ of British culture transplanted to the subcontinent. First it was Richard Attenborough's film "Gandhi," then HBG's "The Far Pavilions," and now Granada Television's "The ~aj Quartet" and David lean's film adaptation of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India." Even before that, when Reece was on sabbatical in England in 1975-76, the British were watching BBC productions about India and the Raj (British rule). "There was an interest in denying any value to colonialism," said Reece. While he doesn't claim to be an expert on Indian culture and history, Reece has come to see India through the eyes and heart of Scott. For Scott, who served in the military in India during World War II and returned twice in the '60s and 705, there were three popular views of India - all of which he rejected. There was the Continued on p. 3 1
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