1.
Insofar as Ved Mehta’s latest memoir has been noticed
at all, it has been as an insider’s story of the most tumultuous
period in the history of The New Yorker —the magazine
that may well be the most important and influential venture in
the history of American periodical publishing. It has also been
recognized as a tribute to the editorial genius of William Shawn,
The New Yorker’s second editor, whose firing in
1987 seemed to many to mark the end of a brilliant era of American
writing. Indeed, Mehta’s detailed account of what it was
like to work with “Mr. Shawn”—which he did for
more than 30 years—seems more honestly loving than Lillian
Ross’s recent memoir of Shawn, Here but Not Here,
in which she announces that she conducted a decades-long affair
with him and claims to have provoked in this famously shy man
paroxysms of wildness and prodigies of animal sensuality. Ross’s
is a truly repellent book, in the worst tell-all style, self-dramatizing
and self-congratulatory: “The True Story of Tristan and
Isolde, Told by Herself,” one is tempted to call it.
Mehta’s less florid and more informative chronicle is,
to my taste, far more interesting than Ross’s. But I am
clearly in the minority on this point: unlike most Americans,
I have always found chronicles of illicit sexual escapades less
enticing than descriptions of people doing work that they love.
Lillian Ross has her finger on the people’s pulse: though
she worked as a writer and editor on The New Yorker for
many years, she can scarcely be bothered to note that in her eagerness
to describe yet another moment of ecstasy she and Shawn experienced:
the work that Shawn did so well appears only as a torment from
which Ross’s love alone could rescue him. Mehta, on the
other hand, retains some sense of dignity, and of the difference
between the public and private realms.
But the story of William Shawn’s New Yorker is
neither the only not the most important story here. Though far
too few people know it, Ved Mehta has been engaged since the early
seventies on an immense and fascinating project: a multivolume
autobiography under the general title Continents of Exile. The
real importance of Remembering
Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker lies not in its appreciative
but excessively reverent portrait of that great editor, but rather
in its place as the eighth volume in Mehta’s series, one
of the truly remarkable literary enterprises of our time. (Though
Mehta clearly explains that the book is the latest installment
in his autobiographical series, some reviewers seem not to have
noticed this, and at least one of them has chastised Mr. Mehta
for “talking too much about himself”!) By one of those
happy accidents of timing in the publishing world, Yale University
Press has just released A
Ved Mehta Reader, offering selections both from his
autobiographical writings and from other books. With the Yale
volume and this latest memoir in hand, readers who are new to
Mehta will possess a splendid introduction to his work.
2.
Ved Mehta came to write for The New Yorker in 1959,
some seven years after William Shawn assumed the duties of editing
the magazine, which he had done up until the death of its founder,
that capricious and imaginative figure Harold Ross. Mehta continued
to work for The New Yorker as a staff writer even after
Shawn was dismissed, producing a handful of pieces for Shawn’s
successor, Robert Gottlieb (though Gottlieb rejected more of Mehta’s
work than he accepted). But soon after Tina Brown of Vanity
Fair replaced Gottlieb in 1992, she officially terminated
several of the long-time staff writers, including Mehta.
Mehta, like many others, clearly thinks of Shawn’s departure
as the end of The New Yorker he had known. And after all, Shawn
had worked for the magazine for 54 years: it is no wonder that
his firing seemed so momentous. But for Mehta the departure of
Shawn also marked the loss of his own literary “home”—a
loss very important, as we shall see, for this exile from his
native India.
Mehta was an integral part of The New Yorker during the most
eventful years of its history—and by that I mean not just
the end of the Shawn era, but also the sixties and seventies,
when Shawn changed the magazine, or allowed it to change, in crucial
ways. The most significant alterations involved the magazine’s
attitude towards politics. As Mehta points out (and as Thurber,
Brendan Gill, and others had pointed out before him), Harold Ross
had a terrific aversion to politics and refused to allow his magazine
to be contaminated by the stuff: Ross’s New Yorker
was a magazine of wit and culture, and that was enough for him.
Little had changed when Mehta arrived on the scene, but then,
in 1959 there were no American troops in Vietnam. It was Shawn’s
resolute disapproval of America’s involvement in the war,
more than any other single factor, that led to the change, and
therefore it should not be surprising that one of the key articles
marking the magazine’s metamorphosis was a sympathetic account
of support for the Viet Cong in a Vietnamese village. It appeared
in 1967 under the title “The Village of Ben Suc,”
and, as Mehta says, “it created a sensation.”
The author of the piece was a recent Harvard graduate named Jonathan
Schell, who, as a close friend and prep-school and college roommate
of Shawn’s son Wallace (himself now well-known as an actor),
had enjoyed an “in” at The New Yorker since childhood.
It appears that Shawn thought of Schell almost as another son:
he sponsored Schell’s career from “The Village of
Ben Suc” on, and when it became clear a decade later that
he had to begin thinking of a successor, it was Schell whom he
designated as heir apparent.
That particular plan didn’t work out—it soon became
obvious that the young man wasn’t cut out to be an editor,
or the editor of The New Yorker anyway—but nevertheless,
Schell did more than anyone else to establish the political tone
that the magazine would achieve in the seventies: earnestly and
immovably liberal, occasionally satirical toward the Right but
never toward the Left, and fond of publishing long and sometimes
excruciatingly boring articles in support of its political views.
Schell’s book on the imminent danger of nuclear holocaust,
The Fate of the Earth, remains the best example
of these tendencies, though to be sure it was considerably more
lively than his subsequent work for the magazine and elsewhere.
There are many who feel that Shawn’s inability to see that
the magazine as it grew more political was also growing dull made
it inevitable that, at some point, he be replaced.
Mehta notes some of these changes, but he clearly finds them
unimportant in comparison with what remained constant, which,
in his view, was the magazine’s commitment to literary excellence,
whatever the subject of a given piece happened to be. Early in
his career with the magazine, after he discovered that Shawn and
his staff were carefully comparing a new autobiographical essay
of his with an earlier one to see if there were any inconsistencies
between them, Mehta thought, “To lavish such attention on
ephemera—and that in a magazine that most people browsed
for its cartoons and advertisements—seemed like a kind of
fanaticism.” But it was a fanaticism that he soon came to
love, for he learned that the magazine would spare no expense
to ensure that any given article or story or poem in its pages
was as perfect as it could possibly be—and would do anything
in its power to encourage and support a writer who thought the
same way.
This was for Mehta the real legacy of “Mr. Shawn’s”:
an unswerving commitment to literary quality, to standards that
served as their own reward, whatever American society beyond the
magazine’s Forty-third Street offices might think: in that
one place at least, “nothing was done for any reason other
than that of striving for excellence.”
In Mehta’s view, this commitment evaporated almost instantaneously
after the firing of Mr. Shawn. Of a brief and hurried note that
Gottlieb sent his staff at the outset of his tenure as an editor,
Mehta (speaking for unnamed others) writes, “As we saw it,
Gottlieb’s note, lacking the elegance of feeling and language
which was the mark of even the most fugitive sentence from Mr.
Shawn’s hand, was a harbinger of the new New Yorker.”
After this great book came others almost equally fascinating.
Sound-Shadows of the
New World describes Mehta’s high-school years
in Arkansas, where as a dark-skinned but Aryan person in the Deep
South in the period just preceding the civil-rights movement he
found himself in another historically complex and potentially
explosive environment. That the key issue was skin color, while
Ved and all his (white) classmates were blind, adds a piercing
irony to the situation. Then the years at Pomona (The
Stolen Light) and the time Up
at Oxford—in the land that ruled India for
three centuries and whose abrupt departure from the subcontinent
precipitated Partition—before this new book about Shawn
and The New Yorker.
I said earlier that Mehta abandoned graduate study in history
at Harvard in order to write for William Shawn’s magazine,
but I did not say that he abandoned the study of history itself.
Though Mehta himself does not put it in these terms, it seems
clear to me that what Shawn gave him above all—granting
that he gave him much—was the ability to become a different
kind of historian. When Mehta began to write the autobiographical
essays which grew into books and then into the comprehensive architecture
of Continents of Exile, Shawn felt the need to find a rubric to
describe what Mehta was doing. Clearly, none of the old categories
that the magazine used to describe its pieces—Notes &
Comment, Talk of the Town, Profile—would do. So, Mr. Mehta
relates,
After he published the Profile of my mother, he’d O.K.’d
my writing a few pages about my experiences in an orphanage in
Bombay, where I had spent three years, between the ages of five
and eight. In the writing, the few pages grew into a whole book
[Vedi].
He liked it so much that he wanted it to have its debut in The
New Yorker, but there was no existing heading under which
it could be accommodated. I finally suggested Personal History,
and he inaugurated that as a new department and published my piece.
For years thereafter, Personal History was used only for my autobiographical
pieces, since he thought of personal history as an exception—not
something that The New Yorker should publish as a matter
of course.
Somewhat later the brilliant autobiographical essays of John
Updike, collected in book form as Self-Consciousness, would appear
under the same rubric.
Mehta’s suggestion was a brilliant stroke, as was Shawn’s
decision to accept it, for this is precisely what Mehta has been
accomplishing in Continents of Exile: the writing of history in
the genre of personal narrative. Having lived through an extraordinary
set of events, and having met an extraordinary number of fascinating
people—from Pandit Nehru to Karl Barth, and from Robert
Lowell to Bertrand Russell, though he just missed meeting Greta
Garbo—Mehta is in a peculiarly advantageous position to
present us with history as something that people live in, not
just live through.
But, of course, he has paid a price for the range of his experiences.
In addition to the partial isolation, the always being marked
as different that inevitably accompanies blindness, his peregrinations
have insured that he can never have a cultural home in any familiar
sense: neither the India that could find no place for him, nor
the England that he idealized despite its notorious insularity
and mistrust of outsiders, nor the America that strives so successfully
to ignore the history in which Mr. Mehta’s life has been
steeped, could be such a home.
Similarly, he has found no religion to ground him, neither the
vague and nominal Hinduism of his youth nor the Christianity in
which, later, he became professionally interested as a writer:
Mehta notes that he is a man simply without religious belief or
inclination, which means that the variety of habitation was unavailable
to him as well. That is why The New Yorker was so important to
him: as long as Shawn was there to support him—to provide
him with an office, with readers for the many books he needed
that were unavailable in Braille, with amanuenses, and with regular
words of encouragement—it was the closest thing to a home
that he was ever likely to find.
If a note of pity has been struck in the preceding paragraph,
let it be known that I struck it and not Mehta: never was there
a person less inclined to self-pity than he. But for us readers
pity may be appropriate, as well as admiration: certainly, admiration
for one who has never denied or hidden his blindness, but has
never leaned on either, who can narrate his development of “facial
vision” as lucidly as he can explain ordinary language philosophy
or describe the political heirs of Mohandas Gandhi. But also some
pity for one who will always be in exile, who can imagine no homecoming,
either in this world of the (to him unbelievable) next: all continents
for Mehta are continents of exile….
But this exiled condition is not peculiar to Mehta. Increasingly
the world is full of what, in the aftermath of World War II, were
called Displaced Persons: refugees, suspended among various cultures
and faiths, unable to return to their former worlds and uncomfortable
with any visible alternatives. The problem takes different forms
today, but has expanded its scope and receives its best description
in Walker Percy’s metaphor: displacement means being trapped
in a deteriorating orbit with no clear way of achieving reentry.
Ved Mehta is one of the most vibrant and comprehensive chroniclers
of this increasingly prevalent condition, which is why there are
few literary projects of our time more important and edifying
than Continents of Exile. The decline of The New Yorker, however
sad, is trivial in comparison.
Ved Mehta takes
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on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
