Ved Mehta and his wife, Linn Cary,
on the deck of the house designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes.
It's a fusion of modernism and regionalism. |
In a play of geometric shapes, a
doorway leads from deck to stark white interior. |
The distinguished author Ved Mehta, 69, looks uncomfortably out
of place in his summer home on the Maine island of Islesboro.
A consummate urbanite, he is dressed in light-blue blazer, gray
slacks, and gray shirt. His only concessions to country life are
removing his tie and replacing his black leather shoes with blue
canvas ones. He walks slowly, cautiously from the kitchen table
to the coffeepot, feeling his way. His hands tremble as he pours
a fresh cup for himself and returns to the table.
The kitchen of Mehta's summer home has a spectacular prospect
of East Penobscot Bay and the litter of islands from Deer Isle
to Isle au Haut, but Mehta can't see the million-dollar view,
because, as anyone who has ever read one of his books or his New
Yorker pieces knows, Ved Mehta is blind - the result of contracting
spinal meningitis as a boy of almost 4 in his native India. Still,
there are folks on Islesboro who do not believe that Mehta is
really blind, because they remember seeing him ride a bicycle
along the island's crowned, narrow, shoulderless roads 20 years
ago. But then Ved Mehta is a writer famous for refusing to accommodate
his blindness, either in print or in the conduct of his life.
As he explains in Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on
an Enchanted Island (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books,
2003), the 10th and latest volume in his autobiographical Continents
of Exile series, Mehta rode a bicycle back then in order to impress
Linn Cary, the woman he was courting and would marry in 1983.
"I wanted to prove to her that I was able to do things a
seeing person could do, and so was worthy of her," he writes.
As a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961 until 1994, Ved
Mehta became famous for seeking universal truths through the close
examination of the particulars of his own life, being one of the
chief practitioners of the New Yorker form of personal history.
In Dark Harbor, Mehta explains how he set about to build a house
and ended up building a family as well.
"The house was the perfect metaphor for getting married
and having children," says Mehta. "In a way, marriage
is a dark harbor itself, with all of its joys and disappointments."
Mehta first came to Dark Harbor, as the exclusive Islesboro
summer colony is known, in 1968 as the houseguest of Annette Engelhard
Reed, daughter of Charles William Engelhard, the gold baron said
to be the model for Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. Typically unsparing
of himself, Mehta relates in his book how, on a seaside picnic,
he stepped on a nest of yellow jackets, the insects' fiery stings
persuading him that he had stepped in a campfire:
The interior of the Islesboro house
is flooded with light and appointed with rugs, drapes, and
furniture of muted tones. |
Mehta and Cary on the granite steps
leading to the house. The precipitous site makes no concessions
to Mehta's blindness. |
The view from the deck to the water. |
"The sea was somewhere behind me, crashing and churning.
"Water, I thought, and made a dash for it, almost somersaulting
into the sea. Even though I was practically up to my neck in icy
Maine water, the burning on my leg did not seem to abate."
In 1981, 13 years after his inauspicious introduction to Dark
Harbor society, Mehta returned to Islesboro for another visit
and the following year purchased a parcel of land in partnership
with Annette Reed, who eventually divorced and became Mrs. Oscar
de la Renta.
The house that Mehta built on his 15 waterfront acres was a
distinct departure from the Shingle Style arks of old-money Dark
Harbor. Designed by noted architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, the
Mehta house is a fusion of modernism and regionalism, a tall,
shingled structure that resembles a boathouse marooned high and
dry on the wooded shore. A geometry of rectangular, square, triangular,
and semicircular windows admits volumes of light and air to a
stark white interior appointed with rugs, drapes, and furniture
of muted tones. The house does not reflect Ved Mehta's life or
personality at all, nor, in its precipitous site and frequent
level changes, does it make any concessions to his blindness.
And that is the way Mehta wanted it.
"It was as if I'd created the house, the swimming pool— indeed,
the whole private campus, as it were—for others to see and
enjoy," he writes in Dark Harbor, "as a monument to
my ability to visualize, to be as good as Everyman."
Mehta spends his days in Dark Harbor as he does in Manhattan,
writing from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., dictating to an assistant,
listening while she reads back what he has written, then revising
endlessly. And that's pretty much how he edited Barnes's design.
"For me, the house was like a book. I can't be defeated
by a book. It had to get done," Mehta explains. "I thought
of Ed as an author. Just as I don't want an editor to tell me
what kind of a piece to write, I didn't want to tell Ed what kind
of a house to design."
Thus, for many of its 272 pages, Dark Harbor becomes an earnest
chronicle of the vicissitudes of design and construction—replacing
the original Maine architect with Barnes, relocating the site,
repairing the leaky foundation, eventually building a major addition
to make the whole house more livable for a family.
For as its subtitle suggests, Dark Harbor is as much about how
a middle-aged bachelor came to marry a woman 22 years his junior
and become a family man as it is an exercise in design review.
The Mehtas share their home with daughters Sage, 18, and Natasha,
16, and ultimately, Mehta came to realize, the Maine house was
more for them than it was for him.
"From my point of view, it's not been worth it at all,"
he says frankly. "When I come here, I write from 9:30 to
5:30. No tennis, no golf, no sailing, the water is too cold for
swimming, and I can't go around openly all by myself. What I like
here is the air. But for my children, I don't think I could have
given them a greater gift than Maine and the island. Here, every
morning they get up and go. They go to sailing class. They go
to play tennis. They love it. That's why I kept this house."
Ved Mehta will appear tomorrow at a 7 p.m. reading and book
signing for Dark Harbor at WordsWorth in Cambridge. Call 617-354-5201
for more information.
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