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If my experience is a guide, even veteran writers have no more
idea about what kind of books they might end up writing than would-be
parents have about what kind of children they might end up producing.
Yet one book seems inevitably to lead to another, or writers would
not have a corpus to their names. Somehow, the invisible friend
of creativity keeps the process flowing, like a life stream.
In the spring of 1970, when I was 37, I had published half a
dozen books, one of them a big one entitled Portrait of India,
which I, together with some of its kind reviewers, imagined would
outlast me - give me a touch of the immortality that those of
us caught up in a creative endeavour secretly crave. At that moment,
I certainly thought my best work was behind me. That April, after
publishing the book, I felt empty and depressed, and also frantic
for an idea for a new book. The frightening thing was that I'd
been earning my living by my pen since my 20s, without a cushion
of private means or university appointment, or indeed a job of
any kind. (I had an association with the New Yorker, but it did
not commission pieces and paid only for those it accepted and
published.)
I think I was bedevilled by more than my share of writers' insecurities.
English was my fourth language and it was the only language I
could write in, and The Oxford Book of English Prose, which I
relied on to improve my writing, filled me with despair and inadequacies.
It could not be otherwise: my chosen method for improvement was
to constantly read and reread the selections from the masters—Shakespeare,
Milton, Swift, Samuel Johnson, Melville—and try to imitate
their style.
Just then, my father happened to be on a temporary medical assignment
in New York, where I had settled some nine years earlier to write.
I was having morning coffee with him in a little café around
the corner from my flat when he remarked that once he had lost
so much money in a poker game that my mother was sure they would
have to sell our house and her jewellery to pay off his debts.
"Just imagine, son, someone like me, born in a mud hut, playing
cards for such high stakes, as if I were a maharajah," my father
said. I asked him how he had managed to save himself from bankruptcy.
He said that within a few weeks he'd won back all the money and
more, and added that it was self-confidence born at the card table
that had sustained him after partition, too, when we had all come
out to independent India as virtual paupers. He said he ascribed
his general optimism to the fact that he was breast-fed until
he was three years old.
I now wanted to know how the father we'd always imagined to be
as predictable as the tides could have been such a reckless gambler.
He retorted that, far from being reckless, he always played his
hand with the deliberation of a mathematician and a psychologist.
I listened to my father talk almost as if he were a stranger.
I'd left home at 15 to pursue an education in America and England;
since then, I'd been studying mostly on scholarships and grants
or writing in straitened circumstances and had not had the wherewithal
to go home for more than one short visit. In any case, I had not
seen much of my father—indeed, of my mother or my siblings.
I remembered, with a pang, that when we were growing up his stories
had transported us children, eventually perhaps influencing even
my choice of a vocation. What are writers if not storytellers?
Yet as a child I had listened to his stories with half an ear,
feeling sure the next day he would repeat them, like the refrain
of a familiar song.
After leaving him that morning, I began to recall his stories,
and to set them down in a sort of free association. The narrative
grew as if by its own momentum. Following my father's return to
India, I continued our conversation through letters, asking him
to explain this point and amplify that description. Along the
way, I started writing down his stories about the mud village
he'd been born into; his boyhood escapades at school; his becoming
the second university graduate in the history of his family; his
becoming a doctor; his going to London and America for postgraduate
work; his landing a job in the Public Health Department and so
becoming part of the official establishment in the Punjab; his
taking up arms against the epidemics of the plague and cholera,
a little like the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith;
his siring seven of us children, and at the same time educating
his brothers and nephews, bringing them all out of the ancestral
village and helping to launch them in Lahore, the Paris of India.
My being cut off from the family lore in America gave the developing
narrative a certain objectivity and cohesion—put emotional
distance between the material and me. It was as if I were writing
about someone else's father and describing events and episodes
long gone and done with. Soon a book started taking shape in my
head. I realised at the outset, however, that since my father
was a private citizen, with no public importance, the book would
have to have a story with literary quality to have any value at
all. That is, people would have to be able to read it for the
pleasure of reading it, rather than for information or knowledge.
As it turned out, the idea for my next book had been as close
to me as my own nose. I wondered why had I ever fretted about
lack of material. Then again, without my father's presence in
New York and without his remark about his colossal gambling losses—both
completely fortuitous—I never perhaps would have stumbled
on to the idea. Before I knew it, I had a small book; it was published
in 1972 as Daddyji .
I had no idea that Daddyji would become the first of a cycle
of books, which would eventually consist of 11 volumes, totalling
3,800 pages. In fact, I spent the following five years on a biography
of Mahatma Gandhi and a political book about India. But it was
only a matter of time before I realised that my mother, too, deserved
a book of her own and I was soon plunged into a literary experiment
of stepping into a woman's point of view, to write her biographical
portrait. It was published as Mamaji
(1979), and the two books about my parents became the cornerstones
of the family saga with the omnibus title Continents
of Exile.
Between publishing the succeeding books, I wrote other books,
but all told in 32 years Continents has been my main preoccupation,
for, without knowing it, I had embarked on a long literary journey.
Although I had read Trollope, Proust and Powell obsessively, I
never thought I would end up writing a cycle of my own.
The stations of the journey arrived one by one, unbidden, unplanned,
and mysteriously. The writing forced itself on me as a world of
characters, who had taken me over and so enslaved me that I scarcely
had a will of my own. Yet the odd fact is that people who have
read the series as a whole have told me that the books read as
if they had been carefully planned. This confirms what I've often
felt in nearly 50 years of writing and publishing—that the
design of a good book, fiction or non-fiction, is decided in the
unconscious, and that a writer is merely its agent.
In the 19th century, every writer belonged to a national tradition—can
one imagine Dickens, Thackeray or George Eliot not being English,
or Tolstoy, Pushkin or Dostoevsky not being Russian?—but
in the 20th century some of the great masters, such as Conrad,
Nabokov and Beckett, were exiles.
Insofar as Continents belongs to any genre, it belongs to the
literature of exile, for in it I try to touch the limits of time
and memory across lost space, and inhabit the persona of narrator
as a means of studying a variety of relationships. It is an intellectual
pilgrimage, exploring themes of family and love, journalism and
psychoanalysis, among others.
The story itself spans the 20th century, with parts of it reaching
back to the 19th. Continents is constructed from memory but is
buttressed by interviews, letters, diaries, wills, land deeds,
books, and newspaper articles. In other words, I have relied on
an armature of fact, much as many modern writers have availed
themselves of myth. I was trained as a historian, but ended up
as a writer—one discipline reinforcing the other.
In Continents I employ such fictional devices as flashback and
flash-forward, description and narration, together with such nonfictional
techniques as interviewing the cast of characters whenever I can.
In this way, I check my recollection against the recollections
of others and, when necessary, assimilate their memories into
mine and into the text itself. Thus, I have aimed to make my account
accurate—faithful to the spirit of what actually happened.
This method of extensively mining the memories of others is,
I believe, unique to this autobiography. Each book in the series
is organised around a central metaphor, so that while each has
a basis in chronological reality and re-creates the story from
the narrator's perspective during a particular period, the import
of the book is also symbolic.
Thus Vedi (1982) is the story of my stay,
far from home, from ages five to eight, at a Christian missionary
orphanage for the blind in Bombay. Not only does the book recount
my early experiences, but it also, by analogy, tells of the world
of childhood. The Ledge Between the Streams
(1984) is, at one level, a story of the convergent influences
of a Hindu orthodox mother and a western-trained doctor on one
of their children. At another, it tells the story of the bloody
partition of India—an event that laid waste to the innocence
of childhood itself for a generation.
Sound-Shadows of the New World (1986)
is an exploration not only of my adolescence at a state residential
school in Arkansas but also of my discovery of education and liberation
in the new country as a mid-century immigrant. The
Stolen Light (1989), an account of my gaining academic and
sexual knowledge in California, is also a social history of 50s
America.
Up at Oxford (1993) is about the fulfilment
of a dream—of acquiring intellectual prowess and winning
acceptance in an ancient seat of learning. Remembering
Mr. Shawn's New Yorker (1998), a portrait of my relationship
with my mentor, is a story of that great literary and journalistic
institution under Shawn's leadership; at the same time, it deals
with the drastic consolidation in the American publishing industry
and its inimical effect on the freedoms of expression and of exchange
of ideas.
Dark Harbor (2003), a comedy of
social and architectural imbroglios, is about creating a home
and family late in life. The Red Letters
(2004) casts a backward glance on the whole series, putting Daddyji
in a new light and thereby, even as it shifts perspective on everything
that has gone before, bringing the Continents story full circle.
Continents is predicated on the notion that the more particular
a story, the more universal it is; and thus although the work
is ostensibly autobiographical, it tells a cross-cultural story,
of India, England and America.
The Red Letters, Dark
Harbor and Remembering Mr Shawn's
New Yorker by Ved Mehta are published by Sinclair-Stevenson,
price £15.99, £17.99 and £19.99 respectively.
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. |
