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Ved Mehta sizzled across the Oxford sky of the Fifties like a
meteor. He was rational, talkative, friendly, confident and blind.
In fact he was so clever that the blindness seemed to be the merest
eccentricity. Everybody was impressed, everybody was fond of him.
Ved was then, and is now, unique. His observations are peculiarly
piquant and his conversation is penetrating even at its most oblique.
He has spent much of his time, for 30 years, writing numerous
volumes of autobiography. He had already written the first of
these when he reached Oxford to do his second undergraduate degree.
His first degree was from an unlikely college in provincial
America called Pomona, and that is the setting of this present
volume. In away it is the most exciting of his books, and surely
the hardest to write, because it deals with adolescence, with
first encounters with girls, with social anguish about religious
faith, and with his attempts to con people into believing he was
not quite as blind as he looked. Blindness turns ordinary risks
and adventures into something hair-raising. He has total recall
of every subject and every incident, or is it possible that his
narrative skill is ever so slightly a magician’s and a myth
maker’s? I believed every word of his account, but at times
I forgot I was not reading fiction. This remarkable man is at
present a Fellow of Balliol where he sits smiling, taking notes
for a volume on the Oxford of the Fifties, so I ask myself the
question anxiously.
The best course of action is to abandon oneself to delight.
Never was there a better remembered account of the horseplay of
a Fifties American campus, but the edge that blindness adds makes
it eery. There are no colleges like Pomona in the Fifties any
more: even at the time it was something of a rare and delicate
growth, the flower of lower middle class America, rather like
a very small Catholic college of the same period. Many of the
students there had never read a newspaper. The college inhibitions,
his inhibitions, and the inhibitions of the girls, add up to some
agonizing pages.
Courage is common sense, and Ved Mehta had plenty of that; he
had the stoicism of the old Raj many times multiplied. By the
time Pomona had finished with him he felt a certain nostalgia
for British India as being a less provincial place. Places like
Harvard handled his applications with long tongs, because they
feared to contribute to his cultural disorientation, so he went
to Oxford instead and ended up on The New Yorker.
The strangest thing about this entangled series of stories,
self-portraits and portraits of others, stranger even than its
brilliance as horrific entertainment, is the fact that it is perfectly
true. He even drives a car (in the book I mean, not thank God
in Oxford). He conveys with amazing accuracy the process of his
education, the appalling verses of his father’s patroness,
bits of Urdu verse that he treasured, and suddenly, near the end,
a few lines of "Love’s Labour Lost." One October,
his course reading, which is to read to him, is Moliere, Goethe,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Marx and Engels, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Shelley, Wordsworth, Henry
Adams, Spengler and Toynbee. Do I detect a touch of irony in this
list?
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