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Ved Mehta tells a very funny story, though whether its humour
is intentional or not is unclear, about the time he was 25 years
old and trying to embark on a full-time writing career. Well-connected,
then as now, he rang up David Astor, editor of The Observer,
to see if he might be interested in a political article about
India. Asked how long it would be, he replied; "Oh, 13,000
words." "The most we could do would be 1,500,"
said Astor. "The American magazines like long, boring things.
You might try one of them."
Mehta not only tried the American magazines but managed, within
a couple of years, to land himself a job at perhaps the most prestigious
of them: The New Yorker. For the next 33 years, from
1961 to 1994, he wrote a steady stream of articles on the philosophic
revolution going on at English universities, emerging models of
historical scholarship, and changing and unchanging aspects of
Indian life. These intellectually shrewd but always personality-rich
analyses were often collected into book form and made a considerable
name for the author.
Journalistic fashions come and go, however. Reporting techniques,
and also writing styles, can come to seem old-fashioned. During
Tina Brown's editorship of The New Yorker in the early
1990s, a premium was placed on second-guessing what was culturally
"hot" or "buzzing"; Mehta, a bookish man who
wrote understated rather than shouty prose, had his contract terminated.
Still, as he spells out in Remembering
Mr Shawn's 'New Yorker',
his lengthy praise song to Wallace Shawn, editor-in-chief there
from 1952 to 1987, he had had a very good run. The magazine had
been the home that he had lacked in his personal life. Born in
Lahore to a family whose lives were later to be convulsed by Partition,
he became blind at a young age, and spent much of his childhood
in Arkansas, before going to Balliol, Oxford, for his undergraduate
degree.
This difficult upbringing was the subject of his first book,
Face to Face (1957).
It anticipates the contemporary fashion for autobiographies about
personal disabilities or illness. But neither there, nor in his
11-volume "Continents of Exile" series of memoirs, does
he ever lapse into mawkishness: "The fact that I was blind
might be relevant to the method of my research but not to its
results."
I wonder. His books are slow and carefully wrought, full of
checked and balanced sentences that never lurch or rear up at
the reader. They are dense with almost pointillist detail. Each
new encounter or experience is logged in smooth, almost macadamised
prose. The methodical, obsessively fact-checking regime at The
New Yorker suits him very much. In a not untypical, and rather
endearing, piece of idolatry, he tells a friend of his that Shawn
doesn't smoke or drink coffee "Blimey. He must be a bore."
"Quite the contrary. He is wonderful company and a genius."
Most of Remembering is written less fulsomely. Fans
of books about The New Yorker, a genre that seems to
get bigger with each passing year, will relish every obsessively
noted detail about the magazine's policy regarding contents pages
(a bad thing), whether or not to publish articles within a year
of their acceptance (touch and go), and the office attendance
levels of star writers such as EB White and Maeve Brennan. It
also divulges the extraordinary fact that in 1981 Congress passed
special legislation, applicable only to writers at the magazine,
allowing them preferential pension plans.
Dark Harbor
is a quite awesomely fact-packed account of the author's efforts
to build a new home off the coast of Maine. No conversation with
surveyors, architects or estate agents is too utilitarian for
Mehta to record. He also admits to always making a beeline for
moneyed people—"I certainly enjoyed hobnobbing with
the rich as if association with them in itself could be nourishing
and there were no price to pay for it"—a compulsion
he explains as stemming from the dispossessions that nearly ruined
his family.
The Red Letters
is far more compelling, and a fascinating conclusion to the "Continents
of Exile" series. It tells of the affair between his father
(about whom the first volume, Daddyji,
was written) and a Nepalese shepherdess-turned-socialite whose
life had been a traumatic journey involving abduction, rape and
spousal cruelty.
Welding together the personal and the political, it is at once
an affectionate deconstruction and reconstruction of his beloved
father, a studied meditation on a lifetime of writing, and an
artfully structured recapitulation of many of the key themes to
have emerged during the preceding volumes. Mehta may claim that,
"I had trained myself to be mimetic, thinking that civility
required looking to the comfort of others." But one finishes
the book—and the series—impressed, humbled even, by
this doggedly individual dance to the music of dislocation.
Buy
Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
Buy
Dark Harbor
Buy
The Red Letters
Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker book preview
Dark Harbor
book preview
The Red Letters
book preview
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Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker
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