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In New York in the early 1960s, Ved Mehta, then just 30, was
already a star New Yorker writer and a familiar figure at literary
parties. Small, smiling, immaculately dressed in a grey suit,
he would move through a gathering with a natural ease, usually
heading for the most attractive girl in the room.
We knew that he was blind, but it was hard to believe; indeed,
even his friends, of whom I was one, would speculate about the
true extent of his blindness, for although his eyes were evidently
damaged, and he would sometimes have to feel his way, he always
behaved and wrote as if he could see. Taking our cue from him,
we never dared to raise the subject of his sight with him, or
to help him in any way, even when he would walk off into the traffic
in search of a taxi.
Since then, Mehta has built a considerable reputation as a chronicler
of his life and times in India, Europe and America, with some
23 books to his credit including the autobiographical series Continents
of Exile, of which this new book is the ninth volume. Although
his attitude to his blindness has gradually become more relaxed,
especially since his marriage in 1983, he has never addressed
the subject with anything like the frankness he shows here.
The main theme of the book appears to be Ved Mehta's romantic
odyssey, but it is really about his slow, painful coming to terms
with the deep connections between his career as a writer, his
emotional difficulties and his inability to see.
First he summarises much of the personal history he has told
elsewhere. After he contracted meningitis at the age of four he
was saved from the scrapheap by his mother's devotion and his
father's determination to give him the best education available.
This meant he had to leave India; at 15, he travelled alone to
a school for the blind in Arkansas; he went on to college in California
and then to Balliol College, Oxford, and postgraduate work at
Harvard. All the time, he tells us, he was "in the grip of
the fantasy that I could see". His ears became his eyes;
he refers to his "facial vision", a skill the blind
can develop which enables them to feel sounds like shadows on
their faces. He also developed an exceptional memory for what
was said around him, especially for visual details.
When he decided to try to make his way as a journalist, these
exceptional powers of observation, the intellectual self-confidence
gained at Oxford and Harvard, and his natural writing talent led
him to the New Yorker, where the editor at the time, always respectfully
referred to here as Mr Shawn, became his mentor and friend.
But for all his apparent social confidence and success, he was
desperately lonely and longing for love. The bulk of this book
consists of his account of four love affairs. It is as if the
old New Yorker reporter has pulled out his files on his own life
and turned them into four narratives.
Not many men would be prepared to expose, as Mehta does, their
youthful blunders and inadequacies. When he took up with Gigi,
a dancer, he found himself briefly impotent; the humiliation haunted
him. Gigi left him for a former boyfriend, which set a pattern;
there was always a rival lurking in the wings.
His next love was Vanessa, an English girl he had known in Oxford,
who would leave his bed in the small hours to walk her landlady's
dog. She took up with a waiter while Mehta was away working on
a book. Next came spirited, energetic Lola, half-Indian and half-German;
they travelled and worked together in India and he took her to
New York; they planned to marry, but in the end she, too, left
him for another man.
Although Mehta describes all these women with generosity, the
reader cannot help wondering whether he is, perhaps subconsciously,
taking belated revenge. Certainly his account of the ineffably
tiresome and affected Kilty, with her tiny childish voice, taste
for baby talk (she called him Vedkins and referred to her "breasties"),
is lethal. Gradually Mehta came to realise that his steady success
as a writer was in marked contrast to his failures in love. He
would sit in his office, keeping up his composed, dignified front;
then go home alone and weep.
After Kilty, Ved Mehta began a long period of analysis. The
last section of this book is an account of some of his exchanges
with his analyst, and it reads like a psychological thriller.
Whereas much of the story of his love affairs is predictable (and
the quotations from letters are too long), the process whereby
he is forced to relate it to his blindness is fascinating. Gradually
he learns that the techniques for overcoming his disability which
have served him so well professionally have crippled him emotionally:
if he cannot acknowledge the significance of his blindness to
himself he cannot hope to be truly intimate with anyone else.
Like all Ved Mehta's work, this book is written with a calm
lucidity. For those who have never read him it would be a good
place to start; this is more than the story of the sentimental
education of an exceptionally brave and gifted blind man. It is
a subtle examination of the relationship between thought and feeling,
the crucial links between the ability to love and the ability
to work.
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
