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When Ved Mehta was four years old, he was struck blind. Both
his father and his mother believed they were responsible; his
mother because she had taken him for a long walk on a cold, damp
day, his father because he had delayed the diagnosis and treatment
of his meningitis to keep an appointment to play tennis with a
visiting dignitary. As far as Mehta himself is concerned, however,
it is all talk about “might-have-beens” and cannot alter
the fact that he has not been able to see for 66 years.
“That kind of parlour game, I’m sure, we can all play ad infinitum,”
he writes in The Red Letters,
the 11th and final part of Continents Of Exile. Critic John Grigg
has described this work as Mehta’s autobiographie fleuve, which
takes its author from post-partition India, via a school for the
blind in Little Rock, Arkansas, Balliol College, Oxford, and Harvard
to New York and, 33 years on, the New Yorker magazine and beyond.
Mehta’s ability to cope with his disability and produce such
an incredible body of work (the extended memoir apart, he has
written 14 other books, including a history of India and a life
of Gandhi) must amaze everyone but the writer himself. From the
outset, he was determined to make light of his blindness . He
refused to have a guide dog and would not a carry a white stick.
Except where necessary, no mention was made in his books of his
blindness. He wanted to be treated on equal terms.
His only concession to his disability is the use of an amanuensis
who reads back what he has “written” and helps make countless
revisions. It is a painstaking, time-consuming process which has
produced a prose style of informal elegance, diamond clarity and
hypnotic power. He is a rarity amongst writers: someone who reads
well because of the way he writes and for what he writes about.
As one of his publishers put it: “By diligent use of four senses,
Mr Mehta is able to piece together the world of five; and when
he describes what he ‘sees’ he is in fact describing what
he sees through the eyes of other people. In recreating the visual
world for himself in this fashion, he finds that he is helped
most by the chance and spontaneous remarks of friends and strangers.”
I met Mehta amid the faded grandeur of the Royal Overseas League
in St James’s when he was visiting London with his wife Linn to
promote his last three books in the Continents Of Exile series
to be published in the UK: Mr
Shawn’s New Yorker; Dark
Harbor; and The Red Letters, subtitled My Father’s Enchanted
Period.
Two men dominate the most recent books: William Shawn, the legendary
editor of the New Yorker, and Mehta’s father, Amolak. Shawn, who
died in 1992, was Mehta’s mentor, nursing him through his early
years as a writer, teaching him not only new ways of writing “but
also of thinking, feeling, and speaking”. He would sit by
his phone like a forlorn lover waiting for Shawn to call. He happily
acknowledges that he venerated him as a hero but, then, so too
did most of his colleagues. Over lunch at New York’s Algonquin
hotel, recalled Mehta, Shawn would restrict himself to toasted
pound cake without butter, and a glass of orange juice. He never
drank coffee or alcohol and never smoked. There was something
of the monk about him. An intensely shy and private man, Shawn,
Mehta acknowledged, would have been horrified at the prospect
of a book devoted to him. “Sometimes,” he writes, “I wonder
whether I knew him at all. He hardly ever talked about himself,
always turning the conversation to the interests and concerns
of the other person.”
The magazine over which he presided belonged to another age,
when every word was weighed by the carat and the debate on whether
to keep or kill a comma could continue long into the night. There
was a strict division between the editorial and advertising departments;
and writers were revered as saints and paid the going rate of
a dollar a word. At any given time, Shawn would be keeping track
of as many as 16 sets of proofs, as an article wound its way through
the New Yorker’s labyrinthine system towards publication. Amidst
the tumult, Shawn was the still centre. He was, says Mehta, “an
incredible man”.
“I would hand in a manuscript 60,000 words long on Friday evening,
and on Sunday afternoon he’d get back to me, saying he either
liked it or didn’t, what had to be revised, touched up, or not.
I don’t think he ever slept. And yet when you were with him he
seemed to be completely relaxed, as if he had no care in the world.”
Shawn’s New Yorker died in 1987, when its editor was unceremoniously
retired. A couple of years earlier, Shawn had crafted a moving
and defiant statement in which he articulated the New Yorker’s
values, which reads now like a prophet crying in the wilderness.
“In an age when television screens are too often bright with nothing,
we value substance,” he wrote. “Amid a chaos of images,
we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe
in clarity. And in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the
English language.”
To all of which, Mehta would also unhesitatingly subscribe. With
Shawn gone, it was only a matter of time before he went too. He
was finally “let go” in 1994, since when he has struggled
to find another home . Now, at the age of 70, his publisher tells
him that he is unknown in England, his name meaningless to a fresh
crop of journalists.
“I think the memory span is getting shorter and shorter,”
he says. “I think the culture has leaped out of our civilisation.”
When he tried to sell an idea to a friend in the BBC, he was told:
“You’re the kind of chap who writes cultural, literary stuff.
I’m not interested. Culture is finished. Literature is dead. Don’t
ever call me back again.”
Has pessimism set in? “Freud thinks one is optimistic or pessimistic
because of whether one is breastfed or not,” Mehta responds.
“I don’t think I was breastfed much. Father was breastfed until
he was three years old. He was very ebullient and very optimistic.
A bit like Micawber in David Copperfield.”
Mehta’s father died in 1986, aged 90. The overture to Continents
Of Exile was a biography of his father called Daddyji;
The Red Letters brings his story full-circle, beginning in the
1960s in New York at a dinner party attended by Mehta’s parents
and Shawn and his wife and children. It was there that Mehta first
began to unravel a family mystery, involving his father, who was
a doctor, and a beautiful young woman called Rasil, with whom
he had an affair in the 1930s. The pair first met in 1925, when
he was 31 and unmarried and she was 14 or 15 and a shepherdess.
When next their paths crossed, he was married and she’d been abducted
and raped by a policeman. Rescued by a Hindu philanthropist, she
was now married to a businessman whose son abused and beat her.
Mehta’s father became infatuated with her and she with him.
The Red Letters were kept from that time by Mehta’s father, red
being the colour of love. Though his family lost virtually everything
at partition in 1947, the letters survived because Mehta’s father
had given them to a nephew for safekeeping. In 1974, he entrusted
them to his son. Mehta’s imagination was “inflamed”. He
saw the letters as “a repository of clues to a lost history, not
only my father’s but also perhaps Simla’s” — the Himalayan
town favoured by colonialists and upper-caste Indians in search
of fun.
Over the course of many conversations, his father filled in the
details. Mehta told him that no matter which way he sliced it,
it was “a story of betrayal — the betrayal of my mother”
and that if he were ever to write it, it would reflect badly on
him. His father protested that it was the one blemish on his marriage.
Had he not been a good husband and a good father? In part he blamed
the prevailing, flirtatious atmosphere in Simla.
In the end the affair ran its course and Mehta’s father and mother
remained married for more than 60 years. Rasil meanwhile took
to religion. When her husband hanged himself, she set up home
with her stepson. What, one wondered, had Mehta’s relations made
of his book? They weren’t surprised, he says. Everyone knew about
the mistress. It was common knowledge. Mehta himself had not known
simply because it had all happened before he was born. Yet again,
it seems, he’d been kept in the dark.
Remembering Mr Shawn’s New Yorker, Dark Harbor and The
Red Letters are published by Sinclair-Stevenson at £19.99, £17.99
and £15.99 respectively.
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Dark Harbor
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The Red Letters
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Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
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