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When Ved Mehta arrived in Manhattan for his first meeting with
the editor of the New Yorker he must have seemed an unlikely candidate
for literary success. A blind young Indian of slender means nervously
flourishing Oxford and Harvard credentials, he had published one
book—in Braille. The meeting, as he puts it in Remembering
Mr Shawn's New Yorker, 'transfigured my life'. He submitted
an article; Shawn liked it, and everything flowed from there,
Under Shawn's paternal wing Mehta flourished and in time became
internationally celebrated. As much personal memoir as portrait
of the great editor, this book tells how it happened.
For over three decades Ved Mehta was a star writer on the New
Yorker. He anatomised philosophers, historians and world figures.
His journalistic pieces were templates for two dozen books, 11.
of them autobiographical—a sort of memoir-fleuve with the
overall title Continents of Exile, He has measured out his life
with printed words, the paperchase crisscrossing India, America,
England and an inner landscape, as he explores his childhood,
writing career and personal life.
The life began unpromisingly when, at the age of four, an attack
of meningitis left him blind. His doctor father despatched him
1,000 miles across India to a school for the blind little better
than an orphanage, where Ved was one of the few to possess a pair
of shoes. Here, and at a more benign establishment in America,
the child learned to step out fearlessly into the darkness without
a cane. His intellectual sharpness and charts carved him a place
in the unseen world.
Detailing his joys and sorrows, Mehta compartmentalises his personal
world. Often covering the same time frame, these books describe
parallel lives. In the New Yorker memoir he leads an ascetic existence
dominated by work (the women who come and go are allocated another
volume). Strapped for cash, he won a $236,000 MacArthur Foundation
award in 1982 and fell into a brief, giddy flirtation with antique
furniture and Georgian silver: delusions of grandeur, but never
self-deception. When in the 1970s Mehta followed the zeitgeist
and placed himself on the couch, his analyst asked him to consider
why he always had to have the best—'the best university
... the best magazine to write for, even the best tailor'—Mehta
believes be needs to appear successful to fend off pity, but fears
that straying into hubris could call down the wrath of the sighted.
The blind man walks a tightrope.
The Red Letters
is ostensibly the story of Mehta's discovery of a passionate affair
his father had as a young man and what it did to his parents'
marriage. In hints and shadows other guilts surface: both parents
blamed themselves for his blindness; Mehta blamed himself for
not being with his father when he died. The narrative weaves between
past and present, with glimpses of the British Raj, and the dazzling
femme fatale who rose from abused peasant child to society hostess.
Leafing through faded love letters to uncover old hurts and lies,
with slowly emerging tenderness Mehta begins to understand, through
learning of his father's 'enchanted period', that his parents
were not at all as he had always seen them, and the discovery
changes him. This is the most personal of the three books.
Remembering Mr Shawn's New Yorker is Mehta's picture
of a literary institution and an editor he worshipped. It is the
Gospel according to Ved, beginning with Shawn's baptism by Ross,
the New Yorker's founder and first great editor, ending with his
journalistic crucifixion, brutally and shabbily ousted by the
New Men on the block in 1987.
There were many stories about 'Mr Shawn', as he was known, and
how Mehta reverentially refers to him throughout the book: the
eccentricities and phobias—fear of water, heights, crowds,
being trapped in an elevator... He was a self-effacing editorial
genius, courteous and delicate, and under his stewardship the
magazine became more serious, without sacrificing the cosmopolitan
elegance that had distinguished its pages in Ross's day. Few knew
that Shawn, who went to Harvard, was the son of Jackknife Bon,
a Jewish street-trader in the Chicago meat market selling knives
and gewgaws to the workers.
New Yorker writers could he tricky to handle, including as they
did alcoholics, flamboyantly damaged people, prickly stars. Shawn
nurtured them, employing 'invisible editing', spending days, weeks
even, consulting, agonising over a nuance, cleaving always to
respect for the text. On Mehta's side it was certainly an emotional
relationship: 'I began sitting anxiously by the phone waiting
for Mr Shawn's call, as if I were in love.'
The subtitle to this book is 'The Invisible Art of Editing',
and the invisibility sometimes extends to the editor's life; Shawn
had a 40-year affair with the writer Lillian Ross which lasted
until his death. They had a child, and Ross herself wrote an account
of it later, but from Mehta's book one might remain in ignorance
of the liaison, which gets one oblique reference.
He follows the magazine's changing fortunes: new management,
new editors (Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown . . .) and points out
with grim satisfaction that only when the New Yorker was dragged
into 'modernisation' and mass consumer marketing did it begin
to lose money. Interesting, but—like some New Yorker articles—the
book can dwell too lovingly on detail.
From the pages of these three books a vivid picture of Mehta
emerges: vulnerable, brave, brilliant, at times gloriously pompous;
ignoring his own blindness, crossing continents by plane, rowboat,
train, the back of an elephant; exposing himself to possible disaster
on the New York subway, using his literary achievements to fight
off fears of a solitary future. Moving from Boston to Manhattan,
it dawned on him that having lived an institutionalised life—schools,
universities—he had never so much as toasted a slice of
bread; he was alone in an empty room in a big city. Attempting
a TV dinner, he popped a boil-in-the-bag boeuf bourguignon into
a bubbling kettle. There was a loud explosion: beef stew splattered
the ceiling and rained down on his head.
He has always used what he calls facial vision, 'sound shadows',
to navigate the treacherous, invisible world. He also employed
a combination of techniques to enable him to write as though sighted—teams
of readers, amanuenses—and succeeded almost too well: Norman
Mailer, convinced Mehta was faking, threatened to punch him in
the face at a cocktail party to test his blindness.
Only Mehta would have considered a remote island off the coast
of Maine as a possible place for a man in his position to make
a home. Dazzled by the lifestyle of an old-money wealthy woman
friend, he decided, with almost suicidal perversity, to build
a house out 'her' island, and found himself physically and metaphorically
lost. Dark Harbor
describes the calamities that resulted when Mehta was drawn into
this empty, perilous landscape, employing an eminent architect
who had studied with Walter Gropius.
This real-estate and architect-led imbroglio makes for some appalling
black comedy until the ruinous extended nightmare segues into
the unlikeliest of dreams: love, marriage and parenthood, the
triple prize Mehta had always yearned for.
Buy
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
Buy
The Red Letters
Buy
Dark Harbor
Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker book preview
The Red Letters
book preview
Dark Harbor
book preview
Read other reviews of
Dark Harbor
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