`Writing for me is a very difficult business'

Published : Nov 04, 2005 00:00 IST

Vikram Seth at a reading of Two Lives in Chennai on October 13. - SHAJU JOHN

Vikram Seth at a reading of Two Lives in Chennai on October 13. - SHAJU JOHN

Interview with Vikram Seth.

"Vikram Seth is great to teach. No taxing thought, absolute clarity in style and language," said the college professor. What a surprise, therefore, when Vikram Seth tells you, "I'm much more inarticulate on tape than I realise. May I request you to brush up my grammar and make me sound coherent". He pulls out a newspaper carrying an earlier interview. "I must have said all this I suppose, but these questions and answers... raw.... Can't you put things in your own words?"

Your brief is to produce an interview, not a thesis, but you promise to process the talk, trim the phrases, and not to bore the reader. Seth is not wholly convinced (nor are you), but he does pull up a chair in front of the window in his seventh floor hotel suite, framing rain-washed Chennai in sunlit romance.

But look, he is up again, turning the waste bin upside down, pulling out a bench stool, trying to find a pew for the cassette player in your hand. You chuckle. What a contrast to your last encounter with the same man at a literary seminar, where, choosing to perch on a ledge at the head of a noisy staircase, he breathed staccato impatience. Now, on a promotional tour of his new book, you behold the genial persona.

Much has been said about Two Lives, a biography with a memoir thrown in. From hometown Biswan (United Provinces) Seth's great-uncle Shanti Behari Seth was sent to Europe in 1931, to become a dentist. He knew no German, but managed to learn enough to join the university in Berlin, and make friends, including Henny, the landlady's daughter. She had protested against taking the `black man' as tenant, little knowing that he was to become her husband, but not before the Second World War forced her to flee her fatherland, lose her Jewish family in concentration camps, settle in alien Britain, and see her fiance Hans married to another woman. Shanti became her staunchest link from that old world.

He too had his crosses to bear, losing an arm in the war, and learning to work with a single arm. Henny married him though not perfectly sure it was the best thing to do. She was to find solace and protection in his loyal soul. That is how her mother's long-ago prediction came true: "As long as Shanti is around, you won't starve."

Strung across continents, the World War and the Holocaust, this touching story is unfolded by grand-nephew Vikram, who had been an inmate of their home as a student (Tonbridge and Oxford), a regular correspondent and visitor thereafter. The narrative is based on interviews with an ailing widower uncle, and his aunt's letters. Seth brings research and imagination to spin the yarn, filling gaps and incertitude with intuition. His personal bond with the protagonists charges him with strength, confidence.

Two Lives admits a third, or a "quarter" as Seth puts it. No other Seth book has the author so dominantly present on the pages, as kathakar (narrator), sutradhar (stage manager) patra (character) and sahrdaya (respondent). More, Seth talks exhaustively about the genesis and process of writing the book, his concerns with form and truth.

Seth owes Two Lives to his parents. His mother Leila suggested interviewing Shanti. The old man's grief over wife Henny's death had made him destroy her papers. But he was eager to recall the past, though not without digressions. Seth's father Prem found Henny's old letters in the forgotten attic.

We learn of Shanti's undergraduate struggles with German, which made him bond with Henny, his love for Goethe and Heine, his burrowing into the correspondence of Henny and her German friends. We also see how his knee begins to tremble and anger flares up as he reads the Gestapo transport lists and the official note confiscating the property of decimated Jews. His pleasure in the German language becomes a casualty.

Though fed by polyglot streams, the book remains uneven. The five parts, each stylistically distinct, do not meld into an easy, unified whole. Too much is spilt on some pages, while some moments are left too bare. There are other imbalances too. Arresting images shape the bleakness of post-War Germany, while the privations in Britain are reduced to cryptic data. Shanti's Indian family background accents the factual. It does not blaze to life as Henny's pre-War circle of friends does.

Paradoxically, though Seth's analysis of the part played by Germany in the 20th century is an essay in itself, it does fit into the structure - if not the texture - of the book. This is no dry historical summing up, but the deeply felt conclusions of a creative mind. The fact that it is not as emotional as the spine-chilling reconstruction of a victim's last day in Auschwitz, does not decrease its potency.

Seth is often dismissed by critics as old-fashioned, or compared unfavourably with contemporaries spinning more complex arabesques. He strives for uncluttered clarity. But then he has also been called the Indian Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin or George Elliot. Adventures in different genres are his hallmark - a bravura novel-in-verse about California (The Golden Gate), epic prose romance in post-Partition India (A Suitable Boy), an elusive love story about a European musician going deaf (An Equal Music), besides travelogue (From Heaven Lake), collections of verse stubbornly wedded to rhyme and metre, a radiant translation of Three Chinese Poets, and now this biography-cum-memoir.

Two Lives bumps, gropes and soars across different kinds of time and space, ending on a note of unsentimental poignancy, close to prayer: "If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred. May we see that we could have been born as each other. May we, in short, believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, in love."

Suddenly, a quartrain tossed off years ago by the same writer breezes into your mind.

God loves us all, I'm pleased to say - Or those who love him anyway - Or those who love him and are good. Or so they say. Or so he should.

It is a love story, but Two Lives is also an assertion of the writer's right to raise his voice against evil, peddled senselessly, foolhardily, by a race bent on self-destruction in its continual attempts to annihilate others.

Excerpts from an interview Vikram Seth gave to Gowri Ramnarayan:

The book peaks in an unusual segment, which is not emotional but analytical, when you make socio-historical comments on the impact of Germany on the present-day world, including the Muslim world. Why do you begin with a bland account of how you met Uncle Shanti and Aunt Henny at age 17?

I didn't want to label the parts. I didn't want to go in with my guns blazing - Henny's tragedy, the Holocaust, battle smoke, Shanti's arm blown off. I wanted to lead the reader into the book, the way I was led into their lives, with emotional highs coming when I discovered the events myself. I push some material back and forth to explore their love and marriage. It's interesting for me that although it was not a process of heightened emotion, for you the peak was the historical summation of Germany's impact on today's world. I didn't want it to stick out like a sore thumb.

It is valuable because it is not a clinical assessment, but what you discovered in the process of writing as personal experience. Yes, it sticks out, as do some other things.

Yes, the book is not smooth, it's rather like a hedgehog. But a hedgehog is a single entity with a few quills coming out here and there. I thought a long time before I put the historical analysis in and also while I reduced it to its present concentrated form. Many think it doesn't belong in this sort of book. It just goes to show that you can't please everyone. You shouldn't try. Write as you see fit.

Despite his warmth and love for the family, Uncle Shanti is often censorious and critical of young Vikram's dilettantishness. But despite her coldness towards Indian relatives, and mania for orderliness, Aunt Henny understands the lad and is confident he will do well. Why?

That's right. She was deeply sympathetic, a great giver of courage. She claimed to have optimismus, this belief that if you put your mind to it you could do things. She valued independence. Shanti had displayed independence. I think he was timorous with regard to me because he took his responsibility of being in loco parentis seriously. Thank God for Aunt Henny. Otherwise I'd have become a complete chooha [mouse].

I felt you loved her more.

Not true. Certainly I loved her more after the book than in her lifetime. I discovered her sensitivity, courage, generosity, forthrightness. It wasn't endless kindness - she was a strong woman who made distinctions between persons who stood by their values and those who did not. Though the War had destroyed her family, she didn't just write off all Germans, but embraced those who came off well.

Maybe Uncle's injustice towards his own family at the end of his life coloured my feelings. But I don't have any regrets, I always told him how much I loved him. With Aunt Henny, I regret not having expressed what I felt for her, fully, in her lifetime.

Were you inspired by any other biography?

No. When I wrote a travel book (From Heaven Lake) I didn't go out and read a whole lot of travel books, I wanted to tell my story in my own way.

You were young then, the time of confidence.

[With an am-I-so-old look] Don't you think one should strive to preserve that originality? If you're tackling a new genre, the first thing to do is not to go and see how everyone else did it. I don't want to arrive at the average of what everyone else has done. That would be rather boring.

You can be cowed down by your own reputation now.

Well, a bit. But it would frighten me more if I bored myself. I wouldn't want something to go out in my name that I didn't think was worthwhile, integral, whole. I have written some things that I don't think stand muster. I haven't published them.

Not easy to be self-critical.

I'm self-critical not only with regard to the book as a whole, not just in the process of revision, but in the process of the original writing. I don't just write very easily. Indeed writing for me is a very difficult business.

Really? You're so lucid that it's difficult to put your book down even if I don't like it.

Thank you. I strive for lucidity. I don't try to be facile.

I enjoy the way you casually throw in an abstruse word now and then. It belongs there, irreplaceably.

Maybe because the word may not have been abstruse for me. If I felt a word was inaccessible I'd have probably removed it if I could have done so without doing injustice to the clarity of thought.

In Two Lives you are onlooker, reconstructionist, commentator and character. Why? To create levels and layers in the narrative?

[In an Oxbridge accent] Hmm.... Interesting analysis, not an inaccurate one. In fact, it's actually quite perceptive. Yes, it leads to different textures in the writing. Not deliberate, it was inevitable.

Did you feel you'd muddle the reader, coming into the story at different times as you do, from China, England, India, the United States, Israel, Berlin?

Were you muddled by it, a little bit? Yeah?Should I read it again?

Certainly a book should admit to being read again, but not because it was confusing.

(Disarmed) It could be my fault.

It could indeed be your fault, but, on the other hand, it could be mine.

Actually, readers tend to read too much into details. I begin to see inner meanings right from the start, in the postbox, the gnarled apple trees with their tart fruit. This book overflows with details. Did you have to let go and sort much?

[Laughing] This reading is not untrue, not so far-fetched as not to make sense. If any such thought went through my mind it must have been subconscious, not unconscious. [Ruminatively] Apple tree, museum, library, letter sent during the Quit India movement, taxi in Berlin - that's the texture of life. Life is sometimes clogged by a multiplicity of details. You need to sort things out even to make sense of your own life, let alone the life of others. Art mirrors, but it is also a sorting out of details. You have to prune them down to make sure you get a distillation, yet something that doesn't seem clogged. That's what I'd call the idea, the endeavour behind the plain style, that it can take in a multiplicity of experiences but also create richness without unbearably multiplying confusions.

You once wrote: "I seem to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias." Is it difficult to craft a language that is honest, to communicate this experience of a diasporic aawara, of living in many places in a state of not belonging, always yearning for the place inhabited before?

We're all historical accidents. The fact that you're holding up a recorder and we speak in English.... We can either be continuously thinking and worrying about it, or not think about it at all. Neither of them is how we operate. We worry about it a bit, we're also pleased to be moving in different cultures, we wonder how rooted we are. It's natural to ask all these questions. But if you become tongue-tied as a result, or stymied, then it becomes counterproductive.

My books are emanations of my personality to an extent. But they also come to me from the objective world outside... I... I don't feel one should aim for a consistency of style, prose or poetry, but for the truth of one's own sensibility. We must try not to engineer, or force it out of kilter, simply because the world we are writing about inhabits a different geography.

In my books I try to put my own concerns somewhat on the back burner, enter the lives of characters as fully as I can. If their lives contain an element of, say, very rich Indian experience, I put it in. I don't think it behoves me to inject my own concerns of the diaspora, or of being an Indian with experiences in China, America or England into every book I write.

You mean, they clearly enter into Two Lives, but not in An Equal Music. That is a mysterious book, so much withheld, probably the book where you are least required to be present.

Indeed not, especially in the first person narrative by someone who is not an Indian. He's a northerner, he goes first to Vienna, and finally finds himself in London. My experiences are quite different, also I suppose my rather late immersion in Western music. I had heard symphonies, operas, but I had no real personal experience of anything like how a string quartet makes music. That was so compelling for me, so fascinating, so tantalising. I put aside my doubts as to whether I could do it, whether one should even write about music, which is such an ineffable experience. Then I thought, `well, let's try it and see if it works'.

In Two Lives your picture of post-War Britain is skimpy and not emotionally charged as are your images of post-War Germany.

That's right. I touch upon miners' strikes and Uncle becoming increasingly conservative. The events were not so dramatic. I let them inveigle themselves in through a letter or two. Post-war Germany was in extremis. A great phenomenon of the last century was that post-War Germany, particularly Berlin, played so important a part in both halves of the last century, epitomising the division between the capitalist and communist worlds. Post-First World War Germany led to the events of the book.

Two Lives is about dispossessions. Shanti and Henny are distanced from their homeland, culture and language. What did they find in the midst of such alienations?

I was hoping you'd get to the finding part. Their grit lies more in finding and coming to terms with losses. Henny was not quite as passionate as Shanti, but she loved him in a very abiding way. He once said that he would give his life for her, but she did something more difficult, she tried to live on for him. I think they found something in each other, in their work, and in the country, which seemed to be rather cold but in fact very tolerant.

Is the book about Two Lives or about you?

In Hindi it would have been called Dhaayi Jivan (two and a half lives). Every book is eventually about yourself, I'd say this book more than most. Look at the choices people make and the huge moral and psychological pressures they face at different times. You're bound to wonder how you yourself would have behaved. I see someone in the last decade of his life, estranging himself from the family he loved, and I ask myself how am I going to be in my old age? Will I lose my faculties? The moment you write about people's lives, especially real people, you speculate about why they did what they did, and will something like that happen to you.

So self-reflection helped you overcome your bitterness and rancour towards your uncle.

I think so. The problems were partly with myself. I put him on too high a pedestal. That was unfair. He was a man of great courage, intelligence and family feeling. That should have been enough.

Out of the blue references to the holy Ganga, Benedict man of god, Kaddish, Turkish taxi driver... They flash through your final pilgrimage to Biswan, Monte Cassino, Berlin, Hendon.

Exactly. I asked myself whether it was right to end in that way. It seemed like a natural closure, a coda to the book.

The book ends under the shadow of hatred but, meditatively. Can peace prevail?

Sometimes it is as unrealistic to be pessimistic as to be overly optimistic. We've seen how, in certain circumstances where the realist expected a bloodbath, it did not happen. So one can hope.

Henny's mother believed that God never sends sufferings beyond bearing. She became a Holocaust victim. Do you believe in God?

The interview is over. [Smiling] I'm just kidding. What I mean by this is that had I chosen to talk about these things I would have done so in the book. It's a huge and imponderable subject. If I write about it, it won't be in the course of an interview.

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