by John Updike
Alive and Free from Employment
MY DAYS, by R. K. Narayan. 186 pp. Viking, 1974.
The autobiography of a writer of fiction is generally superfluous, since he has already, in rearrangement and disguise, written out the material of his life many times. A novel like The Man-Eater of Malgudi, though its hero, Nataraj, and its author, Narayan, are not to be confused, tells us more about the India that R. K. Narayan inhabits, and more explicitly animates his opinion of what he sees, than his recent brief memoir, My Days. Not that Mr. Narayan’s mischievous modesty does not lend an agreeable tone to this account of his rather uneventful life. Nor are his delightful gifts of caricature entirely inhibited by factuality. In My Days, as in his novels, one meets men so absorbed in self-interest that they become grotesque and emblematic: the young Narayan, seeking employment, grooms himself smartly to meet a prospective employer, who comes onto his veranda “bare-bodied and glisten[ing] with an oil-coating, as he prepared himself for a massage; he blinked several times to make me out, as oil had dripped over his eyes and blurred his vision.… All my best efforts at grooming were wasted, for I must have looked to him like a photograph taken with a shivering hand.” The man barks a rebuff of the boy, and then paces “like a greasy bear in its cage.” This sense of imprisonment within character, of each person energetically if ruinously fulfilling his dharma—his vocation, a Christian might say—reached its peak in English fiction with Dickens, and perhaps requires a religious basis. In the liberal view, character is significantly malleable, whereas the traditional character-creators fatalistically look into men for a fixed posture, an irrevocable passion. Narayan tells us that another uncle served as “an inescapable model for me—his approach to other human beings, his aggressive talk wherever he went, his dash and recklessness … his abandon to alcohol in every form all through the day. (I portrayed him as Kailas, in The Bachelor of Arts, and he provided all the substance whenever I had to portray a drunken character.)” Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of colorful teeming that Narayan’s fictional city of Malgudi conveys; its population is as sharply chiselled as a temple frieze, and as endless, with always, one feels, more characters around the corner.
Yet the creator’s life, as described in My Days, begins in loneliness. A little boy, living with his grandmother and uncle, has only pets for company, and the pets all die. He goes to school, and hates it. “On the first day I wept in fear. The sight of my classmates shook my nerves.” He cannot shape clay, and his slate is always smudged. Throughout his schooling, though he toughens into an athletic child of the streets, he remains difficult, intractable, uninspired. “I was opposed to the system of being prescribed a set of books by an anonymous soulless body of textbook-prescribers, and of being stamped good or bad as a result of such studies.… I liked to be free to read what I pleased and not be examined at all.” Taking his university entrance examinations, he flunks English—his best subject. And in the idle year this gives him, he begins to discover his own dharma—the vocation of a writer.
An aspect of this vocation, one feels after reading Mr. Narayan’s fascinating middle chapters, is to have no other. His interviews for employment in business are humorous disasters; his enrollment as a teacher in the school where his father had been headmaster, a plausible route to respectability, is sabotaged by Narayan himself with the manic pugnacity of one of his own characters. His chapter describing the regimented foolishness of schoolteaching and his repeated escape from it approaches vehemence; the chapters following drop in emotional temperature, and trace a slow climb to success, contentment already achieved.
That settled it. After the final and irrevocable stand I took [not to be a teacher], I felt lighter and happier. I did not encourage anyone to comment on my deed or involve myself in any discussion. I sensed that I was respected for it. At least there was an appreciation of the fact that I knew my mind. I went through my day in a businesslike manner, with a serious face. Soon after my morning coffee and bath I took my umbrella and started out for a walk. I needed the umbrella to protect my head from the sun. Sometimes I carried a pen and pad and sat down under the shade of a tree at the foot of Chamundi Hill and wrote. Some days I took out a cycle and rode ten miles along the Karapur Forest Road, sat on a wayside culvert, and wrote or brooded over life and literature, watching some peasant ploughing his field, with a canal flowing glitteringly in the sun. My needs were nil, I did not have plans, there was a delight in being just alive and free from employment.
It speaks well, I think, of the Indian society of the early Thirties that it allowed, after due resistance, this prospectless young man’s rebellion against gainful employment; a contemporaneous American family might have driven such a child to France, or into bohemia—altogether out, in any case, of the home environment that has continuously nurtured Narayan’s creativity. Madras, where he was raised, and Mysore, where he came to live, spontaneously fostered a fictional city: “On a certain day in September, selected by my grandmother for its auspiciousness, I bought an exercise book and wrote the first line of a novel; as I sat in a room nibbling my pen and wondering what to write, Malgudi with its little railway station swam into view, all ready-made.…” This novel, under the title of Swami and Friends, was finally published in England.
The literary London of Shaw and Wells, Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, the Strand and the Mercury had been brought, via magazines subscribed to by his father’s school, into the center of Narayan’s boyhood, and colonial India abounded in English-language journalism, though of a threadbare sort. (This reviewer once had the opportunity to ask Mr. Narayan if present, nationalist India, which has discouraged the teaching of English, would produce any more masters of the language like himself; his answer was affable but not affirmative.) In his first year of free-lance writing, Narayan earned nine rupees and twelve annas (about a dollar and a quarter); the second year, a short story sold for eighteen rupees; in the third, a children’s tale brought thirty. He labored as the Mysore correspondent for the Madras Justice; Graham Greene became his champion in England, and found a fresh publisher for each of his earlier novels, which were critical successes merely. The author married, and his beloved wife’s sudden death from typhoid, and his own slow recovery from sorrow via psychic communication with her, form the only significantly adverse incident in his gradual progress from journalistic piecework to international distinction, movie deals, and—crown of crowns—a travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In prosperity and fame, his imagination seems to work as fluently as when Malgudi with its railway station swam into view: “During my travels in America, the idea [of The Guide] crystallized in my mind. I stopped in Berkeley for three months, took a hotel room, and wrote my novel.”
Narayan’s few revelations about his practice of writing heighten the value of this memoir. His desire to write in English was born of an early infatuation with English novels, beginning with Scott and Dickens (“I … loved his London and the queer personalities therein”) and going on to the romanticism of Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli and Mrs. Henry Wood (“I looked for books that would leave me crushed at the end”). When he turned from mystical poems to his first novel, he let the incidents invent themselves: “Each day as I sat down to write, I had no notion of what would be coming. All that I could be certain of was the central character.” The tale-teller, that is, is nearer the tale-hearer, in his openness to surprise, than college instructors of plot mechanics may know. “The pure delight of watching a novel grow can never be duplicated by any other experience.” But Narayan’s fertility would be tedious without his control and economy; he goes on to describe how his days of pure delight were followed by nights of “corrections, revisions, and tightening up of sentences” so that a “real, final version could emerge … between the original lines and then again in what developed in the jumble of rewritten lines.” His one confessed doctrinal resolve, as he set out, was “to see if other subjects than love … could be written about. I wished to attack the tyranny of Love a
nd see if Life could offer other values than the inevitable Man-Woman relationship to a writer.” The predominantly masculine interplay of his novels develops, one feels, from street life, from the skein of casual and passing conversation that he alludes to lovingly more than once. His days of journalistic news-gathering no doubt reinforced his habit of sociable curiosity, but the impulse perhaps dates back to the time when, an only child in his grandmother’s house, he found it “exciting, one day, to be asked to go with my uncle to the street of shops.” His days as a writer customarily began with a walk:
All morning I wandered. At every turn I found a character fit to go into a story. While walking, ideas were conceived and developed, or sometimes lost through the interludes on the way. One could not traverse the main artery of Mysore, Sayyaji Rao Road, without stopping every few steps to talk to a friend. Mysore is not only reminiscent of an old Greek city in its physical features, but the habits of its citizens are also very Hellenic. Vital issues, including philosophical and political analyses, were examined and settled by people (at least in those days) on the promenades of Mysore.
Narayan is one of a vanishing breed—the writer as citizen. His citizenship extends to calling up municipal officials about inadequate street lighting, to “dashing off virulent letters to newspapers about corruption and inefficiency.” Such protests do not feel, as with so much American social consciousness, forced—a covert bid for power and self-justification. “If I have to worry, it’s about things outside me, mostly not concerning me.” What a wealth of material becomes accessible to a writer who can so simply proclaim a sense of community! We have writers willing to be mayor but not many excited to be citizens. We have writers as confessors, shackled to their personal lives, and writers as researchers, hanging their sheets of information from a bloodless story line. But of writers immersed in their material, and enabled to draw tales from a community of neighbors, Faulkner was our last great example. An instinctive, respectful identification with the people of one’s locale comes hard now, in the menacing cities or disposable suburbs, yet without it a genuine belief in the significance of humanity, in humane significances, comes not at all.
* Or as indubitably fictitious, several correspondents have assured me.
APPENDIX
One Big Interview
The interviewers are as follows:
SAMUELS: Charles Thomas Samuels, who taped our conversations for several days in August 1968 on Martha’s Vineyard, and permitted me to revise the transcript for publication in the Paris Review the following winter as “The Art of Fiction XLIII.”
RHODE: Eric Rhode, whose radio dialogue with me for the BBC Third Programme was published in The Listener on June 19, 1969.
GADO: Frank Gado, professor of English at Union, Schenectady, New York; for simplicity’s sake I have identified with his name not only his own questions but a few from his students, whose taped session with me in the winter of 1971 was printed as a special issue of The Idol, that spring.
BUCKINGHAM: Hugh Buckingham, a poet and critic then teaching at Harvard, who came and talked to me about Bech: A Book; the transcribed interview appeared in the Sunday Herald-Traveler (Boston) Books Guide supplement for January 19, 1971. His machine failed to record our first take; the second lacked much of the sparkle of the irrecoverable first.
SRAGOW: Michael Sragow, an undergraduate reporter for the Harvard Crimson, where this interview appeared on February 2, 1972, having been taped in Cambridge the preceding December.
OGLE: Jane Ogle, of Harper’s Bazaar, whose written questions about Buchanan Dying were answered by me, in exceptionally lavish detail, on December 18, 1972, on the typewriter, and were never published.
HOWARD: Jane Howard, who spent three days in Ipswich with the Updikes in September 1966, and whose sprightly and courteous account, under the somewhat discouraging title “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First?” appeared in the November 4, 1966, issue of Life.
ONE BIG INTERVIEW
SAMUELS: You’ve treated your early years fictionally and have discussed them in interviews, but you haven’t said much about your time at Harvard. I wonder what effect you think it had.
My time at Harvard, once I got by the compression bends of the freshman year, was idyllic enough, and as they say successful; but I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly. I remember the glow of the Fogg Museum windows, and my wife-to-be pushing her singing bicycle through the snowy Yard, and the smell of wet old magazines that arose from the cellar of the Lampoon and hit your nostrils when you entered the narthex, and numerous grateful revelations in classrooms—all of it haunted, though, by knowledge of the many others who had passed this way and felt the venerable glory of it all more warmly than I, and written sufficiently about it. All that I seem able to preserve of the Harvard experience is in one short story, “The Christian Roommates.” There was another, “Homage to Paul Klee,” that has been printed in The Liberal Context but not in a book. Foxy Whitman, in Couples, remembers some of the things I do. Like me, she feels obscurely hoodwinked, pacified, by the process of becoming nice. I distrust, perhaps, hallowed, very O.K. places. Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.
SAMUELS: After graduating from Harvard you served as a New Yorker staff writer for two years. What sort of work did you do?
I was a “Talk of the Town” writer, which means that I both did the legwork and the finished product. An exalted position! It was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make poems of the objects and overheard conversations.
SAMUELS: How do you feel about being associated with that magazine?
Very happy. From the age of twelve when my aunt gave us a subscription for Christmas, The New Yorker has seemed to me the best of possible magazines, and their acceptance of a poem and a story by me in June of 1954 remains the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life. Their editorial care, and their gratitude for a piece of work they like, are incomparable. And I love the format—the signature at the end, everybody the same size, and the battered title type, evocative of the Twenties and Persia and the future all at once.
SAMUELS: You seem to shun literary society. Why?
I don’t, do I? Here I am, talking to you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it non-participants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf. Anyway, in 1957, I was full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say, and Ipswich gave me the space in which to say it, and in which to live modestly, raise my children, and have friends on the basis of what I did in person rather than what I did in print.
RHODE: I don’t see any affiliation in your work to the French idea of experiment, or indeed to the kinds of experiment that go on in the States. It seems to me that you are much closer to the English novel: there is a very strong sense of the domestic in your work—of the world as it is. [A pause.]
I’m just trying to think of the word “domestic.” I suppose this is true. It may be less a matter of conscious choice than of the fact that I seem to be a domestic creature. My first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was, at least in my mind, something of a nouvelle vague book, particularly in the ending: that is, I tried to create a pattern of tension and then, instead of resolving it, dissolved it. It ended with a kind of brainless fair: people come to a fair and you hear their voices and it all dissolves. In my mind it was a somewhat experimental book, and my publishers then, Harper, seeme
d to think it was, because the ending puzzled them so much that I took it away from them and went to Knopf, where I’ve been happy ever since. In each of the books there has been, in my mind at least, a different experiment, an adventure: in Rabbit, Run the present tense may seem a mild adventure. It’s more and more used now, but at that time it wasn’t.
RHODE: Coming back to The Poorhouse Fair, the most striking thing there, I think, is the fact that you have so clearly kept yourself out of the book, that you have created these very old men and women. This is an act entirely of the imagination, or so it feels. In fact Mary McCarthy said that she finds it a rather spooky accomplishment—like those boy actors who play old men—that you have created these characters so credibly. How far was it based on actuality?
Not very. There was indeed a poorhouse a couple of blocks from where I grew up, but I very rarely went into it, and there was a fair that must have impressed me as a child. I had written prior to this, while living in New York City, a six-hundred-page novel, called Home and more or less about myself and my family up to the age of sixteen or so. It had been a good exercise to write it and I later used some of the material in short stories, but it really felt like a very heavy bundle of yellow paper, and I realized that this was not going to be my first novel—it had too many of the traits of a first novel. I did not publish it, but I thought it was time for me to write a novel. I was—what?—twenty-five, twenty-six. Getting to be an old man, as writers go in America. They were tearing the poorhouse down in Shillington, and I went over and looked at the shell. My grandfather, who is somewhat like John Hook in that book, was recently dead, and so the idea of some kind of memorial gesture, embodying what seems to have been on my part a very strong sense of national decay, crystallized in this novel. I wrote it in three months and then rewrote it in three months. It was my first real venture into what you might call novelistic space and it was very exciting. I haven’t read it since the last set of proofs, but I’d like to think that there was some love, and hence some life and blood, in these old people.