|
'A blind man will not thank you for a looking glass,' runs an
old English proverb. Nothing could be further from the truth when
it comes to Ved Mehta. The latest three books by this veteran
New Yorker writer have now been published in Britain for the first
time, and with each one he holds a mirror to his life.
The Red Letters:
My Father's Enchanted Period (Sinclair-Stevenson
£15.99, pp200) is the most recent. It tells of his father's
illicit romance with a shepherdess turned socialite, providing
an insight into the India in which Mehta spent his childhood.
Dark Harbor
(Sinclair-Stevenson £17.99, pp374) explores his life as
a middle-aged family man building a home in America. And Remembering
Mr Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing
(Sinclair-Stevenson £19.99, pp428) is a homage to the editor
who steered him through his writing career and whose 'clean and
concise style' is clearly evident in the poise of Mehta's understated
prose.
For all his influence over Mehta, Shawn is not the real subject
of the book that bears his name. His main purpose is to bring
the narrator into focus. Much the same is true in Red Letter,
which is less about Mehta Senior's affair than about how Mehta
Junior learnt of and wrote about it. 'Perhaps I had no right to
the story,' he admits, 'but I felt that it also belonged to me.'
This self-centredness is more than simple egotism. Blind since
the age of three, he creates a backdrop of personality where shape
and colour would ordinarily set the scene. From time to time,
he circumvents his disability by depicting things seen by his
many amanuenses. He writes of the shade of grey that he paints
his apartment or the delicate colouring of a Nepalese beauty.
Such images, however, tend to be peripheral. If Mehta's work
transcends his blindness, it is not through the use of borrowed
eyes, but because it is utterly captivating in its own right.
His elegant and thoughtful books are as relevant to the world
of five senses as they sure are to the world of four.
The vibrant 'inner world' that he creates also serves a private
purpose. It makes for him the personal context that he craves.
Mehta has an understandably precarious sense of identity, not
only because of his blindness, but because of his complicated
upbringing. Born in India. he spent several years in an orphanage,
before being educated in Arkansas and California, then Oxford
and Harvard, before settling in New York. He is not quite at one
with the New York literati, yet neither can he recognise the India
he has left behind.
In Red Letter, as in his earlier Indian nooks, he lives
and breathes his birthplace, yet in much of his other writing,
he is resolutely Western, the question of nationality rarely breaking
the skin of the narrative. Mehta's alienation gives his work the
distinctive perspective of the outsider. He is like the eccentrics
at the New Yorker, who 'didn't quite fit into the world outside
and therefore observed it and wrote about it with a certain detachment
and irony'.
Words are where Mehta feels most at home; his writing is often
a collage of the fragments of language that have accompanied his
life. Dark Harbor is punctuated by diary entries: great
swaths of dialogue are layered through the text of Mr Shawn;
Red Letter is interspersed with the broken poetry of
a series of love letters. 'I became hypersensitive to language
under Mr Shawn's editing,' Mehta declares and this is no exaggeration.
His books are the compositions of an accomplished wordsmith and
an extraordinary man.
Buy
The Red Letters
Buy
Dark Harbor
Buy
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
The Red Letters
book preview
Dark Harbor
book preview
Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker book preview
Read other reviews of
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
Ved Mehta takes
no responsibility for and makes no claim of accuracy for any information
on this Web site that is not directly written by him. |
