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In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked
for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens;
we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart
‘will come to such sights colder/By and by’. The child
will one day find better reasons for her tears, including the
fate of humankind, falling and falling again since its first lapse
in Eden: ‘You will weep and know why.’ And
in any case there will always have been a secret reason for her
grief. Early and late she will have been crying for herself: ‘It
is Margaret you mourn for.’
I have always thought of the conclusion of this poem as remarkably
unkind and accusatory. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s
self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the
way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the
stress differently. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for
herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else
she may be mourning for as well, and however deep or shallow that
mourning may be. We are always the subject of our own tears, but
not the only subject; and knowing the many other reasons why we
weep is a complicated affair, often a matter of stealthy Freudian
displacement rather than anything resembling immediate cause and
effect. ‘Sorrow’s springs are the same,’ Hopkins
says. That’s why tears are transferable from one grief to
another, and may be genuine even when they pick the wrong occasion.
This perception is precisely where Ved Mehta’s memoir
The Red Letters
ends, and with it his extraordinary 11-volume autobiography, Continents
of Exile, begun in 1972. Mehta is remembering his father’s
tears at a particular, unlikely moment, and has been talking with
a New York psychoanalyst about his inability to weep at his father’s
death in 1986. The analyst, Kurt Eissler, a man closely identified
with Freud, shrewdly says that one can grieve without weeping.
‘What is there in crying? Crying in and of itself is not
a sign of emotional health. Many people can cry on demand.’
He quotes Hamlet’s speech to the players: ‘What’s
Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba/That he should weep for her?’
But then Mehta suddenly thinks he understands his father’s
tears – they are the language of one form of guilt covering
for another – and begins to sob uncontrollably himself.
Reversing his position with analytic ease, Eissler now says: ‘When
you cry is not as important as that you are able to cry.’
Mehta doesn’t comment on this change, but clearly thinks
his tears are inseparable from his new perception about the springs
of sorrow: ‘As I left Eissler’s office, I felt united
with my father, through our longest-delayed tears. Although shed
for reasons of our own, which even we might not have known for
certain, they provided us with a connective release from guilty
burdens.’
I’ll return to the detail of this story, not least because
Mehta’s writing so often reaches large questions through
small local instances. He says in an afterword to the whole series
that it is ‘predicated on the notion that the more particular
a story, the more universal it is’. This is an old piety
and entirely untrue. Think of all the stories that bored you stiff
with their unending particularity. What is true is that well-chosen
details represent more than themselves, and we don’t have
to go all the way to the universal. A modest generality will do,
a sense that pieces of this experience might have been ours, if
only by analogy. The trick is to choose the details, which Mehta
does with consummate, sly skill. If his stories, as he says, ‘grew
as if by their own momentum’, their development was nevertheless
‘contrary to the spirit of free association’, and
the books – individually and collectively – do have,
precisely, ‘a distinct design and architecture’.
Mehta was a staff writer at the New Yorker from 1961
to 1994, and has written many books apart from those in this series,
notably Fly and Fly-Bottle
(1963), The New Theologian
(1966), Portrait of India
(1970) and Mahatma Gandhi
and His Apostles (1977). Most of the work in the series
was published in the New Yorker before it reached book
form, and only the later volumes had to do without a first home
in the magazine. The story of this variety of exile is fully told
in one of the books. The titles in the complete series are as
follows: Daddyji
(1972); Mamaji
(1979); Vedi (1982);
The Ledge between the Streams
(1984); Sound-Shadows of
the New World (1986); The
Stolen Light (1989); Up
at Oxford (1993); Remembering
Mr Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’ (1998); All
for Love (2001); Dark
Harbour (2003); The
Red Letters (2004).
Many long-term writing projects are unfinished, of course. The
author gives up or steps away into death. Other long projects,
like Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time,
are finished to the slight surprise of their author, who perhaps
never entirely believed he would get there and have some life
to spare. Even completed works of this scope carry a suggestion
of fragility within their sturdy achievement, and Mehta tells
us that although he had been thinking of the whole sequence for
a long time, it was ‘mostly a private vision’: ‘I
wasn’t sure that I would have the physical and emotional
stamina – or indeed the means – to keep on with the
project.’ It was only with volume six, The Stolen Light,
that he became confident of his ‘architecture’ and
gave the set the general title he had ‘carried so long in
my head’. Mehta’s afterword doesn’t touch on
this doubt, and indeed ends with the words ‘full circle’.
But he knows better than most people that any full circle could
well have been a broken one.
The first three books form a clearly linked group: a portrait
of the father, a portrait of the mother, a portrait of the artist
as a blind boy. The father, Amolak Ram Mehta, a Punjabi Hindu,
was a doctor under the Raj, a health inspector in many places,
although the family base was always Lahore. He had studied in
England and America, and was a great admirer of English manners
though not necessarily of England’s Indian politics (as
a student he was a leader of a strike protesting against the massacre
at Amritsar). The mother, Shanti Devi Mehra, came from a well-to-do
family in Lahore but remained connected throughout her life to
a more superstitious, less formally educated India. Mehta regularly
pictures his parents, and indeed the Mehtas and the Mehras, as
representatives of contrasting cultures: ‘The Mehtas . .
. were always trying something new and outlandish, as if to proclaim
to the world their individuality . . . while the Mehras . . .
held to the old and ordinary ways, as if to announce to the world
their inbred indifference to it.’ As children, Mehta says,
he and his six siblings thought of their father ‘as educated,
reasonable and compliant, and of Mamaji as uneducated, capricious
and stubborn’. On the way to a holiday in Kashmir the family
pauses at a spot where two rivers almost meet, remaining separated
only by a small ledge, which provides the title for Mehta’s
fourth volume. One river is fast and glacial and clear, the other
slow and tepid and muddy. ‘I remember thinking,’ Mehta
comments, ‘that, in their way, the two streams were as different
as Daddyji and Mamaji.’ The thought is more than a little
unjust to the mother, and this injustice is one of the deep themes
of the later volumes of the series.
A little later, Mehta writes of Lahore as consisting of two
cities, a ‘clearly demarcated British city’ which
the children associate with their father, and ‘the old,
unplanned, chaotic Indian city’ they associate with their
mother. But then he goes on to say that ‘in actuality, the
two cities had long overlapped’, much as many of the Mehtas’
and the Mehras’ ways of living had criss-crossed over time;
and when Mehta writes of the ‘almost Proustian scale’
of his literary undertaking, he may be thinking not only of the
scope of the thing but also of Proust’s two ways, the walk
towards Swann’s house and that towards the château
of Guermantes, which structure and segregate the writer’s
world and which, he ultimately discovers, are not opposing walks,
just different ones and not at all remote from each other: you
could switch or combine walks at almost any time. Mehta’s
father is not less Indian than his mother, only differently Indian;
and both parents are persons of extraordinary courage and resilience
and style, however dissimilar their forms of expression.
The third volume, Vedi, recounts Mehta’s time
at the Dadar School for the Blind in Bombay, which he attended,
with interruptions, from 1939 to 1943. He became blind, as a result
of meningitis, in 1938, just before he turned four. The father
was determined the boy should be educated but knew very little
about the school, and had not visited it himself. The headmaster,
a kindly, well-intentioned man, later told Mehta that
he could not quite believe that people of class and position,
like my parents, would send a totally blind child of scarcely
five to a school in a city 1300 miles away – with a strange
language, a strange climate, strange food – on the basis
of a perfunctory correspondence, in which the question of how
a well-to-do Punjabi child would survive in a Marathi-speaking
orphanage . . . was barely touched upon.
The school was as grim as an institution out of Oliver Twist,
but Mehta made friends there, and learned Braille, and how to
play chess. He was active and cheerful, and, striking a note of
physical risk-taking that characterises much of his life, tells
us that he ‘never walked anywhere but always ran, not caring
what was in the way. Sometimes I would forget where a wall or
a post was, and would crash into it . . . There was hardly a day
when I did not get a cut or a bump.’ It’s tempting
to think of the child as stoic and of the adult writer as uncomplaining,
but the effect is both subtler and eerier than that, and is well
caught in a phrase in a later volume: ‘Awful things happened
in India, but people picked themselves up and went on.’
Mehta’s method, throughout the series, is to show the awful
things, usually without comment, and leave us to think about the
rest. And in such a context picking oneself up and going on is
not a moral stance, however heroic it may seem. It is a survival
tactic, the only alternative to lying down and death. There are
plenty of people who don’t manage to pick themselves up.
In the desolate last scene of Vedi, Mehta returns to
the orphanage in Bombay as an adult to discover that most of his
schoolmates are dead of consumption and that the school’s
success story, a blind girl who later married the headmaster,
is living in a suffocating tenement and has virtually no memories
of the school. She asks Mehta to give her a Braille watch, and
‘starts whining like a street beggar’ – the
harsh language a sign of the nightmare triggered in the writer.
For him and his father, being blind and being a beggar are synonymous
in India; that’s why he had to get away.
He doesn’t get away yet, and his fourth volume, The
Ledge between the Streams, recounts his last years in India,
including a blow by blow account of Partition as experienced by
a Hindu family surrounded by the rising violence in Lahore. Mobs
howl, friends are killed, and the father finally sends most of
the family to relatives in Bombay. Later, when Lahore becomes
part of Pakistan, they lose everything. At one point the father
says the Punjab has been turned over ‘to the rule of fanatics.
The music that we hear from this time on out will be the sad music
of Partition.’ It is characteristic of the father that he
should find music even in distress; and characteristic of the
son that he should report this untimely eloquence without remark.
At the end of the book Mehta is 15 and all set to go to school
in America, but not before we have heard of some extraordinary
exacerbations of the idea of running rather than walking. In Lahore
the boys chase kites from house to house, leaping along the rooftops.
The blind Mehta joins in, employing what he later learns is called
‘facial vision’ – ‘an ability that the
blind develop to sense objects and terrain by the feel of the
air and by differences in sound’. An amazing ability but
scarcely a licence for running along a roof, and Mehta is always
falling.
I leaped over the parapet, but I missed my foothold on the eaves
. . . I frantically reached for something that would break my
fall. I hit my chin on the edge of the eaves, caught hold of it
. . . and pulled myself up with such force that it seemed that
I hit my knees on the bottom of the eaves and my forehead on the
top at the same time.
Another adventure: ‘I missed the parapet and started hurtling
through the air. But, as I had on so many other occasions, I saved
myself from a fall – this time by catching hold of a brick
projection.’ In Bombay, Mehta and a cousin are in the habit
of climbing on top of a moving lift cage or hanging from the lift
floor, and for once the writer does have something to say. ‘I
don’t know how we escaped with our lives, but one thing
I do know – though only in retrospect – is that in
Lahore we had got so used to living with a sense of danger that
in Bombay we couldn’t bear to live without it.’ Among
these exploits, Mehta’s learning to ride a bike and following
his sisters to school (and, much later, cycling around an island
in Maine), which otherwise might seem both miraculous and frightening,
becomes one of his safer and more modest accomplishments.
The next volume, Sound-Shadows of the New World, re-creates
Mehta’s years at the Arkansas School of the Blind in Little
Rock, which he attended from 1949 to 1952. If Vedi is
the most closely focused and harrowing of the books in the series,
Sound-Shadows is in many ways the most haunting, because
it shows us most clearly how the author learned to manage both
the fact and the idea of his blindness. There are verbatim quotations
from old diaries, in which Mehta, shut away in a broom closet
in the school with his typewriter and a radio, dreams of becoming
the Ed Murrow of his day, and the mixture of innocence and intelligence
is often heart-rending. ‘We went to the circus . . . with
a group called the Shriners . . . I wish I could say that I enjoyed
it, but it was mostly a lot of noise.’ ‘The United
States is developing a hydrogen bomb . . . It has been said by
the greatest scientists that a mere eight hydrogen bombs could
finish off Russia. Just imagine!’ ‘I cannot figure
out what I can do for my summer vacation. Whenever I think of
the summer, I have a sinking feeling.’ He learns to take
a bus into downtown Little Rock and to get around without a cane.
He manages so well that a woman who gives him a lift actually
thinks he can see. ‘You partially sighted people are the
link between the world of the seeing and the world of the blind,’
she says. Mehta adds: ‘It was the first time “partially
sighted” had sounded pleasant to me.’ And then the
conversation gets even more interesting. The woman says: ‘The
totally blind must have a world all their own, don’t you
think?’ Mehta says: ‘It’s just a world minus
eyes.’ Surely, she says, blind people ‘have so many
extra senses’, and Mehta replies: ‘They don’t
have any extra senses. They live in a world of four senses but
just use those senses better.’
This virtual overcoming of blindness is a fabulous achievement
– and also, Mehta later comes to believe, rests on a form
of craziness. His analyst keeps telling him that he both undervalues
and overvalues sight. He undervalues it because he keeps thinking
that its absence can be ignored, that he ‘can do everything
that anyone else can do’. He overvalues it because he thinks
he is an outcast without it, ‘like a beggar asking for the
hand of a princess’. Taught by this analyst, Mehta repeatedly
uses the phrase ‘unconscious fantasy’, which is baffling
to me, since the fantasy seems fully conscious and in so many
ways enabling. What is unconscious is the grounding of the fantasy
and the complex of reasons why this particular fantasy –
the fantasy of being able to see without seeing – should
be the one at work. Unconscious too is the instinct for self-preservation
that saves the subject from the more extreme dangers of the fantasy.
If it does. In one hair-raising incident, reported both in Mamaji
and in All for Love, Mehta finds himself ‘gripped
momentarily by a fantasy that I could see’, and drives a
car along a stretch of freeway in Southern California. The girl
who is with him thinks this is fun and then is suddenly terrified,
and takes over the wheel. There is of course a strong element
of pride as well as craziness in this behaviour, and the poignancy
of this complicated condition is beautifully caught in a key moment
in Arkansas, affording a clear perception of what Mehta calls
‘the dream of dreams, the prayer of prayers, the gift of
gifts for a blind man’. What is it? It is ‘the knack’
of getting people to help you without any compromise of your ‘essentially
self-reliant, independent nature’. The knack of allowing
people to love you as well as help you, which is the theme of
Mehta’s later volumes, is even more difficult to acquire.
The Stolen Light and Up at Oxford recount
the completion of Mehta’s formal education. He takes two
BA degrees, one at Pomona College in California and one at Balliol
College, Oxford. He starts on and quickly abandons a PhD programme
in history at Harvard. These volumes are full of vivid evocations
of people and places. The Master of Balliol asks Mehta what his
plans are ‘for afterlife’, as if Oxford were the world
and the world a kind of limbo, and there are some thoughtful pages
about what happens to the golden children of England when they
reach that afterlife: often suicide. ‘The casualties, no
less than the victors, of the complex system of British education
were witnesses to its enigma.’ In their upper-class fashion
these stories are just as desolate at those of the Dadar School
for the Blind in Bombay. But these volumes contain fewer surprises
and incidents than the earlier ones, and are a little low on energy.
Too perfectly achieved as New Yorker pieces, perhaps, and that
is what the next volume suggests too.
Remembering Mr Shawn is an account of Mehta’s
long association with the magazine and a loving tribute to its
elusive editor. Giving up Harvard, Mehta was offered a writing
contract and an office at the New Yorker. There is a
lot of fun in this book, especially in the circuitous and patronising
letter from Isaiah Berlin huffing and puffing about Mehta’s
article about Oxford philosophers: ‘The New Yorker
is a satirical magazine, and I assume from the start that a satire
was intended and not an accurate representation of the truth.’
The comic problem here is that Berlin had written a complimentary
letter to Mehta (‘I congratulate you on your long and splendid
piece’) and then realised how little his friends in Oxford
liked the stuff. Always good to know your own mind. But Remembering
Mr Shawn becomes melancholy as it chronicles what Mehta sees
as the demise of the New Yorker. Shawn is fired in 1987;
Robert Gottlieb becomes editor; then Tina Brown. David Remnick’s
tenure is beyond the frame of this book. Mehta understands that
times change and that the New Yorker had become more than a little
unworldly. ‘We were courting disaster,’ he says of
himself and his colleagues and their refusal to think of their
magazine as in any way connected with making money. ‘It
has been brought to their attention,’ a commentator unkindly
but shrewdly said, ‘that they work for somebody.’
But there is very little understanding of this disaster, and the
book, in this sense quite uncharacteristic of the series, exudes
helplessness and regret.
The last three volumes of the series, like the first three,
make a group, although I doubt whether any reader could have foreseen
how the grouping would happen. All for Love is about
the adult Mehta’s quest for (and in some respects intricate
refusal of) an enduring relationship with a woman. The time is
that of the earlier part of the previous book, 1962 to 1974, from
the start of Mehta’s first major New York affair to the
death of his first analyst, the Hungarian Robert Bak. He recounts
four romances, two of them in great detail, and as in the earlier
volumes, offers only enough commentary to invite us to make more.
Does he understand why these affairs go wrong, why the women end
up with someone else? Is he as much at fault as he thinks? Can
one understand such things – as distinct from finding a
coherent story that one can bring oneself to believe? This seems
to be what happens to Mehta in analysis, the last romance, so
to speak, in this volume. ‘I came away from my sessions
. . . feeling that my analysis was akin to the nightmares of Faust,
the trials of Ulysses, and the Stations of the Cross. Throughout,
I felt that when it worked, it had more to do with art, myth,
faith and, above all, Bak’s personality than with science.
No doubt, Bak would have said that my scepticism itself needed
to be analysed.’
But it did work, and Dark Harbour tells us, among other
things, of Mehta’s happy marriage to Linn Cary and their
life with their two daughters. It also tells us of – indeed
is centred on – another piece of craziness (Mehta’s
own word), but this time deeply satisfying. ‘Gripped momentarily’,
as he puts it on the other occasion, by the fantasy that a blind
man could enjoy the seascapes of Maine, he buys a piece of land
on a narrow island. As so often, he writes of seeing things. ‘I
decided that before I could make up my mind what to do about the
Reidy house, I had to see it for myself.’ This is an old
house he thinks of buying before he decides to get an architect
to design one. ‘See it for myself’ means walk around,
touch the building, feel the air, gather documents, talk to people
– in short do whatever it takes to construct a mental image
of the place. Reviewers have repeatedly been offended by Mehta’s
constant use not only of the vocabulary of seeing (‘even
today, the word “seeing” mesmerises me’), but
of visual descriptions in prose. Mehta’s answer is that
he is a blind man who writes, not a blind writer, and of course
it isn’t true that blind people can’t see. ‘She
wore her hair in one long braid which fell to her hips and that
day she was dressed in an elegant silk sari with tucked and gathered
pleats in front that cascaded down to her sandals. She came into
the room and greeted me, Indian fashion, by putting her palms
together in a namaste.’ I take it Mehta put some of this
together by asking, and got the rest by a mixture of listening
and guessing. But there is no doubt that he is seeing this woman
as he writes; and that we are seeing her because he does. In any
case, as one of his supposedly satirised Oxford philosophers might
put it, there is a fallacy in thinking perception of any kind
is inevitably reliable. The house is a fantasy, of course, but
one that gets built. It symbolises marriage and it houses an actual
couple; and soon houses their children too. Combining the optimism
and imagination of his father with the resilience and superstition
of his mother, with a little help from his analyst and the ready
affection of his wife, he puts an end to his exile through craziness
rather than in spite of it.
This is the end of the story, surely. Well, there are still
the connected tears of the father and son, and that is what the
last volume, The Red Letters, is about. Visiting New
York, meeting William Shawn and other friends of his son, Amolak
Ram Mehta has a little too much to drink and passes out. When
he comes round, his whole frame is shaken with sobs. He has told
a person he has just met that he feels he is to blame for his
son’s blindness because he delayed a day in taking him to
the hospital in 1938. He had decided not to cancel a tennis match
with an important ‘visiting English superior’. Actually,
both his parents blamed themselves. Mehta’s mother had taken
the boy for a long walk in the cold, ‘and she blamed herself
for that, much as my father blamed himself for his tennis party.’
What’s curious here, and very moving, is that Mehta is not
really interested in these questions of blame, writing of ‘the
irrelevance of the tantalising might-have-beens to the reality
of my blindness’. But he is haunted, from this year onwards,
from 1967, by the memory of his father sobbing on the bed. The
haunting ends only with the 1986 analytic session I have already
described.
The truth is, Mehta comes to believe, that his father was not
crying over his imagined part in his son’s blindness. He
was crying over an affair he had long ago, in Simla in 1932 and
1933, before his son was born. He describes this time, with only
half an attempt at irony, as his enchanted period, and gradually
reveals the affair to Mehta, first under the disguise of a fiction,
then as a confession, and finally hands over a bundle of letters.
This happens in 1976, when Mehta is writing his big book about
India. Mehta is shocked, but also fascinated and, overtly at least,
remarkably unjudgmental. But he thinks his father’s affair
is the probable cause of his mother’s asthma – his
mother knew the woman in question, indeed she was a close friend
of the family – and his feelings for his mother change.
There is not exactly a shift of allegiance, a passage from one
stream to the other – the father’s magnetic powers
are too strong for that. But Mehta is forced to accept what he
finds a ‘chilling’ interpretation of the man he has
so much loved and admired and imitated. Amolak Ram Mehta had not,
as his son had always fondly imagined, ‘been born without
the darkness that shadowed the lives of us lesser mortals’.
And we in turn go back to Mehta’s second volume, Mamaji,
and see his father’s lover, the woman he calls Rasil, in
an entirely different light. Her beauty, her charm, her seemingly
constant presence in certain years now become readable for what
they are: indications of a story that is just off the page. Mehta
knew about the affair when he was writing Mamaji; hadn’t
known when he was writing Daddyji.
But was the father weeping for his guilt over his affair, as
Mehta supposes in that tear-releasing insight of his own? ‘His
guilt over my blindness might be a cover for his guilt over his
Enchanted Period.’ It might have been and probably was.
But this explanation is far from excluding other grounds for tears,
including that very blindness. Amolak Ram Mehta could also have
been crying for his lost and ended romance itself, and for the
woman he loved as well as for the wife he hurt. And for himself,
of course.
Michael
Wood is head of the English department at Princeton and the
author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
All for Love
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