The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  Subir Sonalkar, journalist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Gokul Permit Room, Colaba, Bombay, July 1998

  He was a master of manipulation. He understood the necessity of style. Nothing else matters in our line of work. Style is all there is, the image, you get me? He worked at being obscure the way other people work at being rich or disciplined. He fucking worked it, mainly because he was a manipulator but also because he did not want to be found. No, wait. First he wanted to be found. When he was doing those jagged geometric hallucinations that were like no landscapes anyone had seen? At that time he wanted to be known. He wanted to be a name and a face. Then he tried something ambitious, what they came to call his Chocolate Jesus Period, and the moment he became a face and a name he didn’t want it any more. He was like that. If he knew you admired him and liked his work he treated you badly. If you cared nothing for him he would turn on the charm. The show that followed the Chocolate Jesus pictures was the biggest thing he had ever attempted. The Forest of Knowledge, do you remember? No, nobody does, except those of us who were there. A forest of trees infested with termites or poison and primed to disintegrate over a period of one or two years. It was his comment on the annihilation of the planet and it was long before everybody began to talk of climate change. The critics crushed it, all of them panned it, they didn’t get it and they flattened him and in my opinion that was when he decided he would give them substandard work, give them shit and see what happens. We know what happened. They liked it. They fucking loved it. That was the impetus behind the Any Colour You Like show, the work painted in whichever colour his buyers wanted, whichever disgusting colour matched their disgusting living rooms. They loved it and he hasn’t looked back since. That, in my opinion, is the single event that determined all that was to follow, the nihilism, the world-weary world wandering, the reclusiveness and contempt for critics and the general public. This is my take on the matter, of course. You don’t have to agree.

  The day Frank invited me over to meet his son I walked in the room and found a copy of Les Chants de Maldoror on the bar. I held up the book and I asked Frank what was going on. I was going to offer my condolences, right? Oh poetry is quite beyond me, said Frank. That’s Newton. He’s a bit of a genius. When the genius arrived in his pressed white shirt, I said something flippant. I said a boy of fourteen should not be allowed to read the good goddamn Count of Lautréamont-Ducasse. He smiled at this sad witticism, smiled sadly as if he were humouring me. Much later in the evening he told me he had translated some of the French poets as a way of learning French. I asked if I could hear one of his translations. At this point, Frank, discreetly I thought, vanished into the kitchen to confer with the cook. The boy said nothing for a long time. Oh the quality of that oppression, the steamy depths of that silence. How it weighed upon one’s head and how it leaked malaise into the room. A long silence and then he recited from memory a poem that sounded familiar to me. I pretended to know who it was because I did not want to expose my ignorance to the kid, but in my head I made some educated guesses. I knew it was a sonnet so I thought there was a good chance it might be Baudelaire. But it didn’t sound like him. I thought of Verlaine or even Apollinaire, though I should have known that it could not be goddamn Apollinaire. Not Apollinaire and certainly not Victor fucking Hugo! I gave up trying to guess who it was but I liked the translation and I asked for a copy. At home I looked up my French poets. It was Rimbaud of course. I noticed that he had mistaken right for left in the last line and I called and pointed it out with some pleasure. The following week I sent the poem to Nissim Ezekiel who published it in Quest and became a friend and role model to Newton. (Isn’t it strangely fucking interesting that both of Newton’s early mentors were poets who edited magazines funded by the CIA? I mean, his first publishers were Stephen Spender’s Encounter and Nissim Ezekiel’s Quest, serious literary journals, and also, as we now know, secret ‘cultural freedom’ weapons of the cold war.) Ezekiel’s mentoring technique in those days was to take you out for a cup of coffee where he looked at your poems and then he would take you for a walk on Apollo Bunder or Marine Drive or some other sea-struck cityscape and he would be extremely critical about said poems. Then, seeing the look of defeat on your face, he would drop two or three well-chosen words of hope into your misery. “Work harder.” Or, “We must labour to be beautiful.” In any case it was young Xavier’s first poetry publication in a national magazine. I have a copy if you’re interested:

  Lush green hollow and crackling river

  Where the mountain sun, brighter than our sun,

  Throws to the grass crazy rags of silver:

  The little valley brims with light and sound.

  A young soldier, head bare and mouth open,

  Neck bathed in watercress of latest blue,

  Lies asleep, stretched out under the heavens,

  Pale in his bed of green; the light eddies true.

  His feet in swordgrass, he sleeps. The smile

  Of a sick child on his lips, he rests a while.

  Mother, lull him warm – he is very cold.

  No plant makes his nostrils quiver, no scent.

  He sleeps in the sun, hand upon his silent

  Chest. In his right side are two red holes.

  Glory Pande, former live model, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Bangalore Club, Bangalore, March 2005

  I try to remember those days and it isn’t easy, let me tell you. It’s like the seventies. If you remember, you were not there, or you were in the wrong place. I mean, it’s true too that my memory falls short in general. What happened yesterday? For the life of me I cannot remember. I want to say nothing happened but this can’t be true. Then let it be said like this, yesterday nothing happened that was worth recording. I remember the old days better, when we were young and the world was beautiful.

  This is before he became a citizen of everywhere, before London and New York and Paris, before alcohol claimed him like an only child. He was fifteen or so, awkward around people. The only time he seemed confident was when he was working. Getting a word out of him was like squeezing blood from a stone. Impossible. He would just look at you with those big eyes and if he was moved for some reason or trying to communicate without words, which I often felt he was trying to do, then he’d vibrate. I’d feel him vibrating.

  He was called the Genius of Saint Mary’s. That was the first thing I heard about him. He wrote poems, I wrote poems. He painted, I modelled nude. It was only natural we would be drawn to one another. I was older and wiser in the way girls are wiser and he liked to follow me around. I suspect he was a bit star-struck. I think he liked it that my family was famous for its poets and writers.

  One day he asked me out. He said, would you care to join me for luncheon tomorrow at the Taj? And I realised two things. One, it was the first complete sentence I had heard him utter. Two, he had an English accent though he had not been to England. But how could I have refused, a boy with perfect manners asking me out? I said yes, yes, of course. By luncheon he meant dinner. He arrived on the dot of six in a taxi and held the door for me. We drove from Walkeshwar all the way down Marine Drive to the Gateway of India. He didn’t say a thing. At the restaurant we ate and drank in complete silence. But I felt it throughout, the vibrations that came off him like waves of static. He spoke with his hands and he smoked continually.

  He wanted to marry me. Perhaps if he’d stayed I would have said yes. It couldn’t have been more of a disaster than his other marriages, though it surely would have been more of a disaster than my one and only marriage. The following year he was gone to Jesus College and then came fame. I didn’t see him again until twenty years later, after his first and second marriages had ended and he returned briefly to India. And then I met him again last year in Bangalore at a wedding reception for the son of a dear friend. He was with his lovely partner, I forget her name, and he was wearing a black straw hat. It was the first time I had seen him in a hat and all of a sudden I realised he was old. And then something fa
r worse occurred to me. I was old too. I mean, it stands to reason. I met him when he was a boy and now here he was in his sixties. It was a shock, I’ll tell you that. We didn’t have much to say to each other. When I looked at him it was like looking into a mirror that had cracked. I’m sure he felt the same way.

  Miss Henry, author, actress, and artist’s model, telephone interview by Dismas Bambai, January 2005

  I saw the whole bloody thing, didn’t I? The first thing I noticed? I’ll tell you, darling. It was his way of smoking. So thoroughly affected, do you know what I mean? So affected, but affecting as well. Look at the photos from that period. Look at the cigarette held at the very tip of index and middle fingers, hand up near his face as if he was trying to decipher something written on his palm, some lost or forgotten language, Classical Aramaic or Phrygian or Sumerian or Linear A. That was the first thing I observed, the beautiful hands and doe eyes and total silence at all times.

  Most people dream visually, in a stream of pictures. I don’t. I dream in text. Print scrolls in my nightmares and sometimes in my dreams. Words seduce me first, not looks or money, though those qualities certainly help. Oh, my dear! Words are my erogenous trigger, in which case how did this silent boy manage to win me over? Easily explained. I’d seen some of his poems, hadn’t I? Poor Ralph showed me some crumpled pages while I was holding the fort at the bookshop one day. The first thing I noticed was how beautifully the text was shaped, perfect rectangles. The language too was beautiful. I told him so, which pleased him because he wanted to publish a selection in his Archer Press Poets series. That was the point about Ralph. He had no patience for the second bloody rate. I asked him once how he chose the poets he published. I realised I had never seen him reading anything other than newspapers and magazines. Do you know what he told me? He tapped his nose. I can smell them, he said. Not that they smell bad, which some of them do of course, dear me, they haven’t the most scrupulous hygiene. It’s the nose, Miss Henry, never lets me down.

  Well, then. I read the poems aloud and to my ears they sounded like the Old Testament, the Song of bloody Solomon transplanted to England’s green and pleasant land. And when Newton came in one day his silence did not unnerve me as it did most people. I heard him in my inner ear and what I heard most clearly was a sort of mute entreaty and immediately I understood. He didn’t so much as say hello. He might have swayed in my general direction and I was ready to go home with him. I was. Of course he was too shy to suggest any such thing. His way was to simply position himself in my general orbit. That was the entirety of his seduction technique in those days. I noticed that he began to spend a lot of time at the bookshop. He would come in early and help me set up for the day and then we’d have lunch and sometimes dinner as well. It was extraordinary. A courtship conducted entirely in silence.

  One night I asked him to take me to the cinema. We went to a Peter Sellers film. The Naked Truth or Naked Is the Night, something that had the word ‘naked’ in the title. I was hoping for a racy comedy but it wasn’t a comedy and it wasn’t racy and throughout Newton kept his hands to himself, so proper I realised I should have to make the first move. Afterwards we walked on the streets of the West End, past the tube station and the girls in the doorways, and we might have kept walking all bloody night if I hadn’t taken matters by the lapel, by the scruff of the bloody neck. I told him I’d the key to a friend’s flat. Would he like to go there with me? I thought his reply remarkable but only because it was a complete sentence and most of the time he was given to monosyllables. I couldn’t possibly, he said. And I thought, oh well, it’s only a matter of time.

  His father had put him up in an Asiatic boarding house somewhere in Shoreditch, of all places, or it might have been Hackney. Somewhere dire at any rate. Frank knew the owner of the boarding house. It was a way of keeping Newton safe before he went up to Oxford. But daddy couldn’t keep him safe enough, could he, from the likes of me?

  When I couldn’t bear it any longer I told him one night that I was going home with him, whatever his thoughts on the matter. We took a taxi to Shoreditch or Hackney or Hoxton, somewhere, and we stumbled up the stairs and he unlocked the door to a room lit by a naked hanging bulb. The bed and dresser were covered in drifts of debris. You see, he couldn’t pack, it was a sort of disability. He could not pack and it goes without saying that he could not unpack. Clothes and books and bottles everywhere and an ashtray on the floor and damp towels on the bed and a smell of old socks and damp. The toilet was not en suite, you’ll be surprised to hear: it was at the end of the filthy corridor. It struck me as appropriate lodgings for a foreign poet and I felt very much at home. My only complaint was that he was much too tender. I had to teach him how to be rough with a woman, how to use his open hand. Once he got over the shock he was a fast learner. I stayed a week and then came an unforeseen piece of luck. It turned out my former husband had left me a house. Newton and I moved in of course.

  Call me Miss Henry. I don’t have a second name. I might have had one once but it was so long ago I don’t recall it, really I don’t. For a time I called myself Henry Xavier. But I dropped that soon enough. Didn’t like the ring of it, did I? I mean, there’s nothing sadder than a divorcee using her married name, don’t you think? Although to tell you the truth, to drop a little truth bomb, we never did divorce. We split up, we separated, we became ghosts to each other but we never made it official. It was the sixties, darling, when Newton and I tied the knot, 1962, to be precise, and we didn’t believe in marriage. Nobody did. If you don’t believe in marriage how can you believe in divorce? The point is, his later marriages, the two I know of, they were illegal, weren’t they? Stands to reason. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a bigamist, a trigamist, a serial bloody matrimonialist.

  I saw the whole thing, I did. The transformation of the silent young poet to drunken raconteur, all in the space of a year or two. It began around the time he won the prize, in 1958, at the jaded age of twenty. When he first got to London before going up to Oxford he didn’t say a word. He was so bloody shy. But that lasted for as long as it takes to down a breakfast Bloody. He took to the life as if he’d been rehearsing for it from the age of ten. He was a natural. And do remember, darling, they used to call me the Queen of Soho. I should know.

  We needed so little then. Half a crown for a pack of Player’s and a drink and then the day would settle into itself. The days, the days, how I loved them because they were always the same. First thing in the morning, meaning second or third thing, we’d go to the Café Torino on Dean Street for a vol au vent and coffee, if we had the change to spare. Otherwise just the caffeine. It was across the street from the French, Gaston’s pub, which had another name of course, a name nobody bloody used. We called it the French because Gaston was French, just the loveliest man with the most elegant way of lending you money. You’d say, I’ll take a Pernod, please, Gaston, and do you think you might be able to lend me a fiver? And he’d bring you the drink and change from a fiver and you were set for the afternoon. We’d sit at the Torino and watch until the French had filled up and then we’d tumble across the street and fall in, always from the side entrance on the left and always we’d exit from the right. One must have one’s little rituals, must one not? At the French, then, the parade would begin, the endless talk and gossip and innuendo. In the afternoon we’d go to a drinking club and to another in the evening. How rude we all were! Hello cuntie, Muriel said to everyone at the Colony Room, man, woman, and child, meaning Newton, who was always the youngest person in the room, eighteen when we met. The first time someone was rude to him it was as if a cloud had descended. He was mortified. It didn’t last, needless to say. Soon he was ruder than any of us. He could aim an insult from ten paces that would leave you breathless.

  Bacon and he had a rivalry, didn’t they? Who could be more of a bastard? It was a rivalry based on the usual thing. First Newton painted me and then Bacon wanted to paint me. Newton didn’t like it but he couldn’t quite bring himself to f
orbid it, either. Besides, I wouldn’t have bloody obeyed. I was born in Simla but I wasn’t a quiet Indian housewife beholden to her husband. And how on earth could one refuse Bacon when he was always so generous with the champagne? He drank nothing else as we all know. The second time he painted me, and he always painted me nude and spread-eagled on an unmade bed, well, that afternoon we went back to the Colony Room and there was Newton. Bacon asked if he would like a glass of bubbles and Newton said, certainly fucking not! Do I look like a champagne drinker? I told him, darling, don’t be jealous. Bacon doesn’t like girls except as models, don’t you know?