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Ved Mehta and family in 2001. |
Now in his seventies and living in New York, Ved Mehta has devoted
half a lifetime to a remarkable multivolume autobiography entitled
Continents of Exile, which was "predicated on the notion
that the more particular a story, the more universal it is".
Few other full-time writers have laboured under such an overwhelming
disadvantage, or described their experiences with such scrupulous
precision; and his plain, uncluttered prose, narrative gift and
sympathetic authorial presence make an apparently daunting undertaking
both pleasurable and illuminating.
Mehta's father was a doctor who had studied in England before
returning to Lahore: he became the subject of the first volume
in the series, Daddyji,
which was published in 1972 and was followed in due course by
Mamaji, devoted to the author's
mother. At the age of three, Ved contracted meningitis, as a result
of which he became totally blind; years later, on a visit to New
York, his father tearfully confessed he had always blamed himself
for not getting his son to hospital in time. In subsequent volumes.
Mehta described his experiences at schools for the blind in Bombay
and Arkansas, his education at Oxford and Harvard, his time as
a staff writer on The New Yorker, and the travails and triumphs
of authorial life. He published his first book, Face to Face,
when he was 20, and its successors include Delinquent
Chacha, John is Easy to Please,
a biography of Gandhi, and
the masterly Fly and the Fly Bottle.
All the books reviewed here form part of Continents of Exile.
The Red Letters, the
11th and final volume, takes us back to the beginning, when Mehta
discovers how, in the 1930s, his father had had a passionate love
affair with a close family friend.
Ever since he left India at the age of 15, Mehta has been haunted
by the fear that "if I failed to live up to the standards
of the sighted—indeed to surpass them—I would be condemned
to live, grow old and die unmarried and child-less", like
the children he left behind in Bombay; and although he has always
resented being categorised as an Indian writer and a blind writer,
part of the fascination of his books lies in seeing how he puts
into effect "my determination to write as if I could see".
Blindness has made his other senses especially acute, and he is
not too proud to be helped by those who can see: researching Walking
the Indian Streets, he travelled his native country with a
girl who described what people and places looked like; at home
in New York, he reads and writes via an amanuensis, while friends
describe the colour of clothing or hair, or the cartoons in The
New Yorker.
Mehta started writing for The New Yorker while he was at Harvard,
and before long it had become a second home, and its editor a
much-loved (and lovable) father figure. Accounts of life on the
old New Yorker in the days of Harold Ross and his mole-like, self-effacing
successor, William Shawn, tend to be smug and over-reverential,
and Remembering Mr Shawn's New Yorker is not immune; when Mehta's
father suggested that he might "stop in and say hello"
to the great editor, his son reminded him that "Mr Shawn
is busy day and night putting out the most deeply respected magazine
in the world". He persuades us, however, that Shawn was indeed
a remarkable literary mentor, as well as providing a fascinating
insight into how the magazine was put together. "I felt that
he was sensitising me to the force and importance of each word—to
its weight, tone and texture—and was teaching me new ways
not only of writing but also of thinking, feeling and speaking."
Mehta tells us of "Mr Shawn's invisible hand", adding
that "his editing had laid the groundwork for a permanent
dependence on him". He reveals how Shawn's father, "Jack-
knife Ben", worked in the Chicago stockyards, and how Shawn
himself started his journalistic career on the Las Vegas Daily
Optic—a far cry from the austere, almost monastic offices
of The New Yorker, where articles accepted by the magazine were
submitted to endless editorial scrutiny, and commercial considerations
played no part in the proceedings.
Everything changed when the magazine was sold to S I Newhouse,
the owner of Conde Nast: Shawn, then in his late seventies, was
finally removed from office, and corporate culture seemed to prevail.
Happier times are evoked in Dark
Harbor, in which Mehta builds a house on an island off Maine,
marries and has children; and the magnificent series concludes
with a haunting and poignant account of how his father, a staunch
defender of arranged marriages, found romantic love in the foothills
of the Himalayas.
Buy
The Red Letters
Buy
Dark Harbor
Buy
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
The Red Letters
book preview
Dark Harbor book
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Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker book preview
Read other reviews of
The Red Letters
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