Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  Her life did become doubly blank. How painful it is to hear (from her affectionate brother William) of her ‘oppressive gratitude’ for insignificant favours, of her ‘almost stereotyped smile’; how terrible the testimony of her last illness when, far from turning easily to long-desired death, she fell into mental as well as physical agony and, when left alone, screamed so loudly that her neighbour felt obliged to write a letter of protest to William. This is the girl with the scissors again. She was a magnificent poet; why is there no complete edition of her poems in print?

  Sunday Times, 1981

  Darkness at Dawn

  Vedi by Ved Mehta

  In 1919, the year that General Dyer massacred hundreds of unarmed Indians in a park in Amritsar – the scene so carefully reconstructed in the film Gandhi – Ved Mehta’s father, Amolak Ram Mehta, was completing his studies at the King Edward Medical College, Lahore. Mehta jeopardized his whole future by helping to organize protest strikes; but he was an excellent student and in the event was able to take his finals. He set off for London to pursue further studies, and later won a Rockefeller fellowship to America. In India he became a public health official. His prosperity pleased but did not surprise his family, for his birth horoscope had predicted that he would ride upon an elephant, as only maharajas did, and sail the seas.

  Amolak Ram Mehta was a remarkable man by any standards. His son Ved’s achievements mirror his energy and success. One example: as a small boy Ved acquired a broken bicycle and set about mending it with the help of a servant. Then, secretly and with many tumbles, he taught himself to ride until one morning he was able to follow his three big sisters to school as they cycled through the early morning streets. The point about this story is that he was blind.

  Ved went on, with his parents’ support and his own unswerving determination, to wrest an education and career from the world. At fifteen he travelled alone to a blind school in Arkansas, and from then on America gave him most of his chances, including the funding of two years at Oxford. The New Yorker has published his writing regularly, and in 1975 he became an American citizen.

  At the same time he has grown increasingly fascinated by his background and forebears. And the information he has collected patiently and tenderly through family documents and recollections is of interest as a microcosm of the colossal changes that have taken place in India during the past century.

  Daddyji (1977) and Mamaji (1979) gave detailed accounts of the lives of his parents, up to the time when he was blinded by meningitis at the age of three. This new book describes Ved’s own experience when he was sent away to a boarding school-cum-orphanage for blind children in the hope that it would make him independent. ‘You are a man now’ are the first words he remembers hearing, spoken by his father at the railway station where he saw him off for the 900-mile journey to school in Bombay, where no one spoke Vedi’s native language. He was four.

  The experience, which might have been fatal, proved useful. Vedi, cursed by blindness, was blessed with hugely compensating gifts: he was lovable, sociable and brilliantly quick and clever. ‘A very jolly child’ is how he was remembered by other pupils, though it’s hard to imagine a four-year-old being jolly under the circumstances.

  The Dadar School, founded by American missionaries to teach blind orphans a trade – mostly chair caning, which was thought an improvement on begging, and massage for the more adept – was run by an enthusiastic Bengali Christian, Ras Mohun, who had studied in America. Mr and Mrs Ras Mohun made much of the child of good family, but still he had to live amongst the rough big boys. In the dormitory Vedi was the only one to have a sprung bed and mosquito net, just as he was the only one with shoes, soft clothes of his own and special food. Surprisingly this did not make the others hate him; instead they admired his chubby cheeks and soft skin, and he became their pet.

  By an outstanding feat of memory Mr Mehta has travelled back into the soul of the child he was, the child for whom time is unquantifiable, and each experience total. The Dadar School engulfs the reader as it did Vedi, with its boys’ talk of ghosts, rats and snakes, not always imaginary; the horrible slippery floor of the bathroom and the great drain under the building; thrilling races and tugs of war devised by Ras Mohun, outings to the zoo and the sea. The partially sighted children described what they could to the blind. Braille reading and writing were quickly learnt by Vedi. Miss Mary, the fourteen-year-old pupil teacher, gave arithmetic lessons with a system of rotating pegs; the Cardswallah and the Chesswallah enthralled; but the ‘Sighted Master’ who slept in the dormitory seemed to all the boys part of a hostile and powerful world of the sighted. One night Vedi hid under his covers while the Sighted Master did something to two boys who were brain damaged as well as blind. They were never heard of again.

  Vedi came to love his friends, Christian Deodi, Muslim Abdul, Paran from the girls’ dormitory, and to feel his allegiance lay more strongly to the Dadar School than to his distant home. Even so, he was often ill, and often felt he was living in a dream; and when he did return, he quickly readjusted again. His fear, and his father’s, that he might become that tragic figure of the Indian scene, a blind beggar, had begun to be allayed.

  A sad epilogue in which Mr Mehta revisits the school in search of old friends underlines how just that fear had been. Yet instead he is now the most illustrious member of the Mehta family, and has added this small classic of childhood to his other achievements. It is worth any number of nostalgic evocations of the Raj, and provides a touching epitaph for Abdul, Paran and the others to whom the gods gave no compensatory blessings.

  Sunday Times, 1981

  PART THREE

  WRITER

  I left the Sunday Times rather suddenly in 1986, when it was moved to Wapping. I didn’t care for the way things were done. No doubt the print unions had to be brought under control, but the humiliation of the journalists by proprietor and editor made me unwilling to go on serving such masters. I was lucky enough to be in a position to walk out. That was the end of my brilliant career.

  I became a writer. Slowly I adapted to the change: silence, hard slog, loneliness, old clothes. ‘You’ve gone very quiet,’ said Victoria Glendinning to me after I’d been out of journalism for a year. I still miss it sometimes, the feeling of perpetually renewed excitement, of belonging to a band of brothers and sisters who care passionately about the same things – books, reviews, journals, who’s said what, who’s writing where. Writing books is another life, mostly sweat and pain and panic, redeemed by moments of excitement during the research process, and a few of pure joy, when a paragraph or a sentence seems at last to express what you are trying to say.

  In due course I married a writer, Michael Frayn. He is the hardest worker I know, and he tells me that writers don’t retire, so perhaps I’ll be able to make up for all the time I spent doing other things when I was young. Biography has become my province, and I have never attempted fiction, although I have come to think the gap between biography and fiction is not so great. Novelists and biographers are both excited and inspired by the patterns of human activity. They are both story-tellers. Both use the basic raw materials of life, birth and childhood, work and love, family structures, betrayal, woe and death. You need imagination even if you don’t invent, and writers who invent very often depend on research too, their own or someone else’s.

  I am driven by curiosity, about the past and about human behaviour, and I enjoy all forms of research, from deciphering old papers to tramping in the footsteps of long-dead subjects. And I’m perpetually surprised by the oddity of what I stumble on, the weird and unpredictable histories that emerge when you turn back the covers over the past. Sometimes too the telling of one particular story, when a life has been carefully examined, will resonate in a larger area. When I explored the relationship between Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens, it seemed to me I had stumbled on a story, fascinating in itself, that also illuminated a whole era and the assumptions made about relations between men and women of that era.


  Writers are particularly prone to object to biography, seeing the biographer as a mere blunderer, piling up ‘documented deeds and days and disappointments’. The phrase is John Updike’s, and he also describes biography as trespassing on what he calls ‘the human innocence that attends, in the perpetual present tense of living, the self that seems the real one’. Most of us cherish the idea of our essential innocence, though we should not be surprised if we appear less innocent to outside observers. It could be that writers are especially upset by the idea of biography because they know the power of the written word. But while some biographers wear hobnailed boots, biography is no more homogeneous as a form than fiction. I say more about this in my review of Janet Malcolm’s book on p. 203.

  I tell myself that older writers make better biographers because they have made a long journey themselves. Yet in attempting this condensed account of my own working life, I have not found it at all easy to understand what went on inside the head of the young woman I was. If she is a stranger to me now, what claims can I make for biography? This may be precisely the point, that we can’t observe ourselves accurately – that it takes an outside observer to see what is going on in any life. I turn with some relief away from myself to other projects.

  * * *

  All the remaining reviews come from the years I have been working on my own. I particularly enjoyed writing for the newly founded Independent, where Sebastian Faulks was the first literary editor; and for Blake Morrison at the Observer and then the Independent on Sunday, and for his successor there, Jan Dalley. I have also appreciated being able to write longer reviews for the TLS under its editor Ferdinand Mount.

  Two Men and a Mask

  Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann

  Oscar Wilde lived his life as though planning to be the ideal subject for a biographer: the richly eccentric parents, the Oxford poses, the swift capture of social and literary success, the fatal passion, the trial scenes, the years in prison, the final degradation; and thrown over it all, the perpetually sparkling veil of wit.

  He was always seeing and presenting himself. On his honeymoon, he begins an account of his first marital bedding to a male friend in the street. A visit from his beloved Bosie has to be described, even as it is in progress, in a letter to another friend. Mirrors enthralled Wilde, and any departure from style dismayed him: in De Profundis he complained of the prison style, and of how ‘everything about my tragedy… is lacking in style’. Ellmann speculates that syphilis may have killed him; it seems quite as likely that it was the impossibility of keeping up his style that did it.

  Richard Ellmann is deeply sympathetic to Wilde and pays him the tribute of a near-perfect biography. The witty subject has found a witty biographer who is also distinguished for his erudition and humanity. We may know, or think we know, all about Wilde already, but nothing in this long book seems superfluous. How good he is on Speranza (Lady Wilde) and the dreadful Willie, Oscar’s brother, one of whose projects was to write ‘improved’ endings to Chopin’s Preludes. How wonderful on Oxford, where, funny, absurd and triumphant, Wilde worked as a labourer for Ruskin’s roadbuilding project, intoxicated himself on Pater’s prose, flirted with Catholicism and Freemasonry, was rusticated for absenting himself in Greece and Rome (‘I was sent down from Oxford for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia’), and won the Newdigate and a Double First.

  He shows Wilde becoming a star (a media star, as we say now) before he had written any notable work, made famous by Gilbert’s satirical portrait of him in Patience, and on the strength of that fixed up by D’Oyly Carte with an American lecture tour on ‘The Beautiful’. Wilde prepared carefully, packing a very fancy wardrobe but also letters of introduction to respectable and influential people. The American press adored the whole charade, which lasted for a year; Wilde also revelled in it, and the amazing thing is that he was then able to proceed to make himself into a good writer.

  Ellmann is alert to the telling detail as well as the good anecdote both on the American tour and in Wilde’s encounters with French culture. He recognized Verlaine’s genius and was good to him in his disgrace, which preceded his own; he sought out Edmond de Goncourt, who labelled him ‘au sexe douteux’; the young Gide felt he had been spiritually seduced by Wilde.

  Salome was written in French, and praised by Mallarmé and Maeterlinck (it was banned in England). Wilde took his English bride to Paris for the honeymoon; Ellmann thinks he was in love with Constance for a while, but she also brought some money. He edited a woman’s magazine until he grew bored, and published Dorian Gray to scandalous success. He was happy, and began to write the plays that are his greatest achievement. He fathered his two sons and drifted towards danger.

  Ellmann quotes Robert Ross’s claim that he first introduced Wilde to homosexual acts, when Ross was an undergraduate at King’s and Wilde was thirty-two. Ross was such an honest and honourable man that there seems no reason to doubt his word; but it is surprising.

  Perhaps sex was not very important to Wilde. When he fell in love with the appalling Lord Alfred Douglas, their pleasure seems to have lain partly in tormenting one another and partly in hunting for boys together. Ellmann says Wilde began to think of himself as a criminal then, despite his belief in self-realization and his professed scorn for both moderation and hypocrisy.

  The richness and thoroughness of the treatment of the terrible dénouement is such that one reads to the end and only then begins to question whether Wilde is quite deserving of the unqualified praise heaped upon him. The way in which he was treated by British law and society naturally disposes one in his favour; but there are some question marks over his character and his work, and the relation between the two.

  Ellmann claims that Wilde was conducting an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics. He knew all the secrets and could expose all the pretence. Along with Blake and Nietzsche, he was proposing that good and evil are not what they seem, that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of behaviour.

  But Blake was an innocent, and Wilde was an arch-sophisticate, delivering his wisdom in the guise of super-worldliness. His aphorisms, coming thick and fast, are one-liners that sometimes cancel one another out. And where Blake’s and Nietzsche’s attacks on received morality were wholehearted and passionate, Wilde’s were often frivolous. Neither buying boys nor destroying himself by going for Lord Queensberry was a way of showing up the values of a corrupt society. Wilde (like Orton) was too implicated in what he attacked to be able to manoeuvre effectively, despite the noble courtroom defence of homosexuality.

  Wilde is lovable, pitiable, brilliant and self-destructive, and there is a mystery about his self-destruction which Ellmann does not solve, or seek to solve. William Archer, who praised and defended Wilde, also made a telling attack (which Ellmann does not quote) when he suggested that there were two men behind the enigmatic mask presented to the public: Oscar, a cheap and facile mountebank, and Wilde, the true artist, whose work was to be esteemed and relished. This marvellous book tells you everything you need to know about Wilde, but perhaps a little less than the truth about Oscar.

  Independent, 1987

  Time and Distance

  The Progress of Love by Alice Munro

  In the first story in Alice Munro’s first collection – published in Canada nearly twenty years ago – a small girl goes out driving with her father, who has become a travelling salesman during the Depression. He takes her to an isolated farmhouse she has never visited before, where a good-looking woman living alone with her blind mother greets them warmly, teaches the little girl to dance and gives the father a whiskey. As they drive home, she realizes she will not talk about the visit to her mother, and feels her father’s life

  darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distance
s you cannot imagine.

  It’s a perfect story, and a good point of departure for all Alice Munro’s subsequent work, which has been an exploration of those weathers and distances, those landscapes that shift from the known to the almost unimaginable.

  As she has grown older, her power to unravel a whole tangle of family history has grown stronger and surer, and this latest collection is her best yet. Munro is as much a regional writer as Walter Scott or Mauriac, which is to say she broods closely over her chosen territory, discovering richness in what many would be tempted to dismiss as dull and barren.

  All her stories are set in Canada, and mostly in her native western Ontario, a wide landscape of farmlands and small lakeside towns where no great dramas have happened since the Indian wars, and where the people are traditionally narrow, conservative, religious and thrifty, many of them shaped in the mould of Scottish ancestors, although increasingly now feeling the breath of the affluent American culture to the south.

  She has a tenderness for the strong, seasoned Canadian women who preserve their houses and their way of life as best they can against the inroads of new fashions in belief and behaviour. Yet she is not lamenting the passing of the old, or peddling nostalgia or folk wisdom. Time itself fascinates her and she will take a family through three generations of its history to demonstrate how impossible it is to draw a final line under any action.

  In the title story, one woman’s histrionic gesture, aimed at the conscience of a too easy-going husband, reaches its mark in an impressionable daughter; years later, grown up and married, the daughter commits a quite different act of destruction, intended, perhaps, to atone for whatever she imagines her mother’s sufferings were. Another generation on, the effects are still reverberating, open to different interpretations. When critics call Munro Proustian (as they do) they may be pointing to this virtuoso grasp of a time-span as well as to her skill in deploying single physical details – a scrap of wallpaper, a blurred snapshot – as emblems of feeling.