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These three books belong to a series of eleven, Continents
of Exile, in which Ved Mehta gives an account of his life
and times. The eleven volumes are “personal history”:
an austere classification which has long been employed by the
New Yorker, famous over the years for its fiction and
for its concern with fact. Remembering
Mr Shawn’s New Yorker, first published in America in
1998, salutes the magazine. Each of the three books gets off to
a memorable start.
Mehta, who has been blind since a meningitis attack in childhood,
has chosen to write as if he could see. “I had to see it
for myself”, he writes of some real estate in Dark
Harbor, where he also inspects an architect’s plans.
He can even see his Editor William Shawn’s gaze: “so steady
and penetrating that I felt he was looking straight into my soul”.
Ved the Impostor—Norman Mailer used the word in accusing
him of pretending to be blind, while others accused him of pretending
to see. There were at the New Yorker many varieties and
echelons of editor and checker to assist him, but his difficulties
made a special case of his conversance with fact. His blindness
is that of a necessarily vulnerable man, who frets and is often “stunned”, but who is also tenacious and headstrong,
reluctant to be thought brave, or to be pitied, fluently and interestingly
himself for a run of eleven volumes. He took up in adult life
with “prominent” people, and with wealthy women—“the
likes of Annette”, as he refers to them. When he came from
India, via Oxford and Harvard, to New York, he had not read the
New Yorker, nor heard of the hotel with which it came
to be associated, the Algonquin. But William Shawn, who edited
the magazine from 1952 to 1987, soon became his friend and second
father. Shawn hired him as a staff writer and would field his
entreaties and anxieties with what seems, in the telling, an eerie
courtesy.
The New Yorker’s editorial fussing and “fixing”
were preternatural too. This struck Mehta at first as “a
kind of fanaticism”, in a paper that “people perhaps
mostly browsed for its cartoons and advertisements”, but
was nonetheless “the most deeply respected magazine in the
world”. His description of A. J. Ayer as “a left-wing
intellectual” was withdrawn as possibly incorrect after the
magazine had gone to press. Terry Kilmartin of the Observer
would never have done that, apparently. Terry Kilmartin would
have been right, you might feel. Aver himself seems not to have
been entirely certain about this matter: “people sometimes
connect me with the so-called Left Wing Establishment”. Articles
were forever being fixed in a struggle for “perfection”.
At the start of the book comes an extraordinary session with
“Mr Shawn”, invariably so called by Mehta, in which
a piece about Mehta’s travels with the poet Dom Moraes is
minutely examined, not to say rewritten. The editor worries away
at the word “bummy”. Mehta demurs: “‘By
my count, that makes no less than—I broke off, realizing
that I should have said ‘no fewer than’, and quickly
corrected myself. ‘That makes no fewer than four “bummy”
words in a paragraph of about thirty lines”’. A fair
point. Shawn explains: “The repetition would set the tone
of your high-spirited Oxford holiday in India.” The word
was meant to mean roaming about and sponging; no further possible
meaning appears to have been considered.
Shawn was puritanical and prudish, capable of obscuring the
sense of a Mehta passage by substituting “thigh” for “testicles”, and of refusing ads for lingerie and female
hygiene aids. Homosexuality, Zionism and cancer were unheard of
in the New Yorker, Mehta recalls. Late in his career, the Editor
claimed that he had never imposed a text on any of his writers,
quite a few of whom were surely eager to be published and resigned
to being imposed upon. Shawn’s friend the staff writer Lillian
Ross remembered him “composing a passage to be incorporated
into a writer’s story”.
For Shawn, the magazine stood for love and freedom—freedom
from advertisers and conglomerate owners, and from trade union
organization. This was said at the time when finance in the shape
of S. I. Newhouse acquired the paper, and retired him. Freedom
and Shawn’s law were a contradiction, and there was another contradiction
in the way in which this magazine of sky-high circulation would
boast of appealing, not to “the laity”, but to the happy
few. Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” was read
at his cremation:
’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Ved Mehta is an accomplished gossip, who tells the story of
how he became a Weidenfeld author. He had gone to a Christmas
party in New York, hoping to meet Greta Garbo. George Weidenfeld “sidled up” to him, requesting “a word entre
nous”, offering a far better deal than Faber for his
new book, and expecting him for lunch at the Algonquin, where,
just as he was about to leave the restaurant, “Weidenfeld
arrived, saying he had been tied up on the telephone to London
to find out about his mother, who was in a hospital”. A deal
was nevertheless done, with Mehta receiving seven times the previous
offer.
Mehta’s account of the Editor and his magazine is too long and
too loving. For one contributor, it was as if Shawn were “beyond
our human conception”, Mehta relates, and when he wished
to dedicate a book to him with the words, “One day in thy
courts is better than a thousand”, Shawn feared that this
might seem to be comparing him with God. Could the dedication
be carried in Sanskrit? Mehta suggested. It was carried in English.
Shawn was a fine Editor, with a feeling for literature, for
Salinger and Musil, for Duke Ellington and jazz and for Mike Leigh
and film, and his was a fine magazine, which was given to saying
so. It was much more than a shrine to ritual, punctilio, pedantry
and hyperbole. But its practice of editorial interference did
harm by lending its authority to an intensification of such interference
in Anglo-America. Edmund Wilson is reputed to have asked the New
Yorker perfectionists: “Why did you hire me if you don’t
want to print what I wrote?”. He might also have asked if
they thought that sub-editors were likely to know more than their
author about the subject in hand. None of this is to deny that
it is good to get things right, or that Hannah Arendt may have
been wrong to savage Shawn when he tried to edit her.
The primal scene, as it were, of Dark Harbor occurs
at another of the abrasive New York parties of the time. Mehta
attends a grand eightieth birthday celebration for the Jesuit
Fr Martin D’Arcy, of the spartan bedroom and lucullan feasts.
Edmund Wilson enquires of Mehta, seated to his right: “What
are you and I doing here in this ageing café society?”.
“Father D’Arcy says he has set his heart on converting me”,
replies Mehta—“you know he converted Evelyn Waugh”.
In response to this lead balloon, “Wilson abruptly turned
to his left”. Mehta sits to the left of Annette, who invites
him to her house on an island, Islesboro, off the coast of Maine,
and helps to pay for the construction of a dream house on the
island.
The book is a comedy of errors which recites the hesitations,
dismissals and disbursements that ensued. “I had decided
to perhaps abandon building a house there”, he says in the
midst of it. But a house did in the end get built. It is the work
of “the last of the gentleman architects”, Edward Larrabee
Barnes, and is beautiful. A shingled white New England dream,
completed in 1985. Eleven years later, Mehta was at it again,
with an extension. “Like Father D’Arcy, I certainly enjoyed
hobnobbing with the rich”, he writes, and the house helped
him to do this. It also looks like an aspect of his marriage:
his wife, “to the manor born”, bore him two daughters
as his own manor came about.
Dark Harbor has a story to tell, and it gets the better
of the vexatious it describes and transmits to the reader. As
at other points in this serial autobiography, blindness can seem
a metaphor for human limitation, whereby what you see is accompanied
by what you can’t help missing. Mehta’s Maine sets you down within
the confines of his world, which he keeps appearing to transcend,
and it also sets you down within the confines of your own. His
experience of Islesboro is a literal sounding of the island’s
noises, and spaces; there are reminders of the spatial exactitudes
of the former French Nouveau Roman.
In the opening scene of The
Red Letters, he has his parents to dinner with Mr Shawn.
Mehta is tense. His first father says he likes the “jokes”
in the magazine: he should have said “cartoons”. Worse
follows. His father retires to the next room in tears. There are
feelings to be spared here; Shawn moves to leave. The tears are
of remorse. His father grieves that, by delaying for a day in
order to confer with important British medical colleagues, he
may have added to the damage done by meningitis to his son’s optic
nerve.
The father is an anglophile Punjabi from the last days of the
Raj, who is said to want to “shake the fellow” when
someone offends him. Amolak Ram Mehta shows his son, needing his
collaboration, the draft of a story in which a medical student
meets a hill girl who is presently abducted and abused. This leads
to the revelation that Mehta’s father had once, for an “enchanted
period” of two years. conducted a “dalliance”
with a woman known to the lad as Auntie Rasil, his mother’s
friend. Ved remembers her voice as witch-like. Amolak remembers:
“She had a mountain complexion and European looks and had
already put her tribal ways behind her”. A “socially
prominent person” in Lahore and Simla, Rasil was, with Mehta’s
father, submissive and devout. In her letters, pored over by father
and son, Amolak is addressed as “lord of my life”.
Amolak speaks of his membership of a society in which the possession
of more than one wife is common, and he speaks approvingly of
arranged marriages such as his own. Of his wife he says: “She
knew from the day of our marriage that I was a straight shooter”.
Romantic love was, for him, part of the romance of England. Ved
Mehta is severe at times with the father he clearly cares about
profoundly, and towards the end of this sensitive and mindful
book, he interviews his mother, who talks, to tremendous effect,
about the drawbacks of her earlier life with her husband, “the
Long-Lived One”, who “only had to walk into a room
for all the butterflies to flock to him like milkmaids to Lord
Krishna”. The hill girl, long ago, had been found to have
the name Meera, that of the Hindu god Krishna’s wife, tattooed
on her upper arm. His mother cries: “I ask God, what misdeeds
had I committed in my previous incarnations to put the trial of
Rasil in my path?”. Dr Sahib, her husband, “would
be the first one to admit that your Auntie Rasil was better as
a dalliance than a homemaker”.
Mehta has already published, in his series of memoirs, a book
about his father, in which the affair is not discussed. Something
of the same kind happens in the life he has written of his second
father, William Shawn, where Lillian Ross is barely mentioned.
Meanwhile, from Ross’s book about her life—no “dalliance”,
as she points out —with “the man I loved”, and
revered, a book which appeared in the same year, and in which
Shawn is portrayed as melancholy, stoical, as feeling himself
confined, “there but not there”, “more ghost
than man”, worrying that he may have made a mistake in editing
the New Yorker for thirty-five years—from this
book Mehta is altogether missing. These mutual omissions, which
could well have escaped the attention of the books’ fact-checkers,
shed light on the fetish of fact.
Buy
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
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Dark Harbor
Buy
The Red Letters
Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker book preview
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The Red Letters
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