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Imagine that in your twenties you meet a prominent journalist,
a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of some
half-dozen books. Your love affair ignites violently, but flames
out over months of tears, equivocation, and desperate telegrams.
Thirty-some-odd years later you find yourself featured as one
of four central figures in his detailed "Personal History
of Desire and Disappointment," a lover's memoir assembled
with an archivist's eye. It's all there, everything you've forgotten
or suppressed in the intervening years: the flirtations, the pillowtalk,
the love letters and transatlantic cables, the sexual letdowns,
the neurotic scenes in taxis and restaurants, breakup's dead dial
tone. Your private experiences have not only become public, but
they've done so as part of someone else's story, a story in which
your affair was just one in a series of romantic wrong turns,
cul-de-sacs on a royal road that led, finally, to some other destination.
At least Mehta's exes must have seen this book coming. All
for Love is, after all, the ninth installment in the author's
Proust-inspired Continents of Exile series, which has been appearing
steadily since 1972's Daddyji. The early volumes tell the story
of Mehta's birth in 1934 to a well-off Hindu family in Lahore,
the attack of cerebrospinal meningitis that left him blind at
the age of four, his years in and out of abusive missionary schools
for the disabled, his family's hardships in the wake of the partition
of India and Pakistan and 1947, and his time at the Arkansas School
for the Blind. 1989's The Stolen Light recounts Mehta's four years
(1952-56) at Pomona, where he was the first Indian student. All
for Love is set in the years from 1962 to 1974, and picks
up after Mehta had abandoned graduate work at Harvard to pursue
freelance writing as a protegee of New Yorker editor William Shawn.
It is a meditation on the natural result of a workaholic's first
professional successes: romantic catastrophe.
The first lover commemorated here is Gigi, a dancer with the
Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Mehta recounts his first impressions
of her: "She was about an inch shorter than I was, with a
dancer's body and a serious but expressive mouth. She had long,
thick, intensely red hair, but it was done up in a discreet chignon."
The intensely visual character of the description is typical of
the book's early chapters: though Mehta tells us of his blindness
in the prologue, the social and logistical mechanics of his daily
life as a blind person are largely absent from the bulk of the
memoir. What we get, instead, are the impressions of a writer
who compensates silently for his blindness with his powers of
inference and curiosity, deducing and synthesizing the visual
from other data and sources. Thus when he remembers attending
a rehearsal for a production of Fandango that Gigi is in, he tells
us the colors of the dancers' tutus and leotards, the Spanish
look of the stage set. And when Gigi abruptly informs him that
she can't marry him because he's not Jewish, and adds that she's
leaving him to marry someone else, we encounter the sort of excruciatingly
oblique reference to Mehta's blindness that occasionally haunts
the memoir: after receiving Gigi's news by telephone at work in
The New Yorker's offices, he locks himself in a bathroom stall
to spare his amanuensis the spectacle of his grief.
As Mehta remembers his four love affairs, a second pattern begins
to emerge alongside his habit of downplaying his blindness toward
the point of its erasure. This pattern is the psychological arc
shared by one affair after another: intense flirtation lands the
couple very quickly in bed; Mehta begins soon after to urge long-term
commitment while using his literary work more and more as a refuge
from the relationship's volatility; his lover meets someone else,
or reconnects with a former swain on the pretext of needing to
get the ex-lover out of her system, and ends up leaving Mehta
for the other man. Vanessa, the second love, is a Brit with a
perfect Oxbridge accent. When Ved goes off on an extended research
trip to England, she leaves him for a Bronx waiter. Lola, her
successor, and the memoir's most vivid and vital figure, is a
highly intelligent woman who starts out as Mehta's secretary while
he is traveling in India, becomes his lover, and eventually joins
him in New York. Bored and alienated by her life there, she eventually
runs back to the less distinguished Gus, whom Mehta jealously
dismisses as a "wretched fellow who emerged from the swirling
heat and dust of Delhi like Caliban." By the time we have
watched the third affair go predictably sour, our interest in
Mehta's story has become less voyeuristic than diagnostic: not
least because, in his 1960s Manhattan intellectual caste, "Freud
is in the air." What occulted trauma, we wonder in cocktail
Freudspeak, is driving his compulsive repetition of neurotic love-object
choices? The thrice-jilted Mehta shares our sense that he is going
in circles: "The whole point of living was to learn from
experience, and I seemed to have gone from one intense experience
to another and come out as dense as I had gone in. It was a little
like diving into a swimming pool and coming out dry."
If Mehta fails to learn from each relationship in its immediate
aftermath, he does at least recognize his need to learn, tormenting
himself with guilt and regret. He walks out of the pool, not dry,
but bloodied by self-flagellation. The problem is that his willingness
to blame himself fails to prevent the next disastrous plunge into
love. What finally breaks the cycle of breakup and fruitless self-recrimination
is the fallout from Mehta's fourth romance, with Kilty. This affair
follows the familiar script with the difference that Kilty ends
up on an analyst's couch instead of in another lover's bed. Three
years later, her psychoanalyst pronounces her a psychotic and
therefore "unanalyzable," but in the interim, Mehta
himself has entered psychoanalysis. With this Freudian swerve,
both Mehta and All for Love jump dramatically out of their
deepening ruts. Pathological romance narrative gives way to the
story of its analysis, with condensed transcripts of Mehta's sessions
at Dr. Bak's taking the place of lovers' quarrels and telegrams.
After probing Mehta's early childhood memories, Bak pieces together
his patient's Oedipal narrative: having accidentally seen his
mother naked shortly before contracting the illness that left
him blind, Mehta came unconsciously to regard his blindness as
the just punishment for his transgression, and sought only lovers
who would eventually leave him and thus confirm his sense of his
culpability, his unworthiness to be loved.
Bak's take on his patient's primal scene may shed as much darkness
as it does light, but other facts that surface in the analysis
have a genuinely revelatory force. These have to do with the day-to-day
ramifications of Mehta's blindness, and their articulation feels
like the lifting of a long censorship. Eavesdropping on the scene
of analysis, we discover that Mehta's love affairs had a semi-public
dimension even as they were occurring. We learn, for instance,
that he dictated his love letters—documents we read in earlier
chapters of the memoir—to amanuenses rather than writing
them out or typing them himself, partly because he was too embarrassed
to give his lovers evidence of his poor spelling abilities. We
learn that the privacy of his correspondence with Gigi, Vanessa,
Lola, and Kilty was further compromised by his needing to have
their letters read aloud to him by third parties. We learn that
among his amanuenses were several women whose intimate working
relationships with Mehta threatened his lovers. And for the first
time, Mehta explores his motivations for writing like a sighted
person, disclosing the perceptual gifts and compensations that
have made it possible for him to write the blindness out of his
books. The memoir's earlier silence about the texture and logistics
of Mehta's disability turns out to have mimicked its author's
neurotic relationship to his blindness. All for Love, in
other words, reveals itself to have been a symptomatic text, one
that has been made to exhibit the same denials and displacements
its writer once did in respect to his blindness, inflicting these
symptoms on its readers in order that we may experience, rather
than simply observe, their dispersal. But anyone looking for the
happily-ever-after of a terminable and successful therapy will
find All for Love frustrating. For starters, Bak suddenly
dies before the conclusion of Mehta's psychoanalysis, necessitating
a messy transition to another analyst. More importantly, Mehta
is wiser than to present his analysis as the infallible answer
key at the back of the textbook, solving all the problems set
out in the earlier pages. Instead, he asks on the memoir's final
page, "Could I have got over any of the four women without
analysis—did I get over them, for that matter? I was certainly
able to get over each of them sufficiently not to be stuck in
a state of mourning—bemoaning my losses and fate and then,
as Bak conjectured, reading their letters in later life as a solace
in my loneliness. I was also able to get over them sufficiently
to write about them here as honestly as I can, and without experiencing
crushing pain. But, in some sense, despite psychoanalysis and
the passage of time, I am still not able to get over any of them
completely. If I had been, I would not have felt the need to write
this book." Analysis can describe and even weaken the symptom,
but not annihilate it; and because writing, for Mehta, is unthinkable
without the symptom, all of his "Personal History of Desire
and Disappointment," and not just its early chapters, is
stricken, lovesick, and knowingly deluded. Despite the readerly
prurience its early pages seem to court, Mehta's love-memoir manages
not to come across as a tawdry tell-all or as a spurned lover's
public revenge. This is only a little due to Mehta's delicacy
in disguising his lovers' identities, and owes more to his apparent
lust for self-blame, a lust that seems to have survived even psychoanalysis.
But what most exonerates All for Love of kiss-and-tell exhibitionism
is the fact that its candor serves an end remote from titillation,
setting down Mehta's baffled present-tense experiences of love
in order to record a later sea-change in his understanding, a
sweeping if imperfect transformation that makes the "personal
history" seem a legitimate, and even indispensable, genre.
Like the best memoirs, Mehta's is more than the life story of
a person who later happened to write it down. Instead, it understands
its own being as entangled in the life it tells, comprehending
that life and life-writing must endorse and justify one another
with the reciprocity of lovers. It is the prehistory of itself,
the story of how it came, through the very events it retells,
to be, first, thinkable, then necessary, and finally written.
Curiously, All for Love ends not with Mehta's refreshingly
unfussy prose, but with a single image: a photograph of Gigi,
his first great love, appearing in the title role of Stravinsky's
Persephone shortly before her affair with Mehta. Persephone, remember,
was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld, where she ate
four pomegranate seeds. When her mother, Demeter, begged for the
girl's release, Zeus decreed that every year Persephone must remain
in the underworld one month for each seed she had eaten; thus
winter was born. Whatever the photo may say about Gigi, it works
as a strange twin to the frontispiece photo of Mehta in 1960—as
a second, more encrypted portrait of the author, a Persephone
only partially rescued from the past by psychoanalytic fiat. With
a tact and economy like Mehta's own, the photo sums up the lessons
of All for Love: that some consummations, like the eating
of four gorgeous seeds in hell, cannot be undone; that no mourning
is ever fully terminable, however skillful the neighborhood Freudian
might be; that our past lovers remain connected to us by thin
but unbreakable filaments of desire and rage and regret; that
they are also our emissaries in the world, sent out from a past
moment of convergence into the bewildering distances of the present,
across which they nonetheless send us news about ourselves; that
they are, finally, repositories of parts of our selves and our
pasts, and therefore to be marked and kept and even claimed, but
never discharged, never erased. The photo testifies, too, to a
settled man's admission, even as he nears the porch of the underworld,
that he still longs for a lover of his youth. His longing makes
him look back, and even though the look will banish its object,
it will also join him publicly and eternally to his longing. All
for Love is encapsulated in this final tableau: the backward look
of Orpheus at Eurydice.
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