Fritillary in Falicon
O Fritillary, you coquette!
For unlike others, once you’ve set
upon your bloom, you piroette
with wings upright, aflutter. “Let
the camera wait!” you seem to say.
We have no choice, of course. You play
around your petals, cloaked gold-brown.
Then suddenly, your wings fall down!
Exquisite orange! Hold still! But then
you quickly hoist your dress again
to cover what we seek to capture.
So quick your pose, but in it, rapture.
Is there a living writer whose achievements are so much taken for granted as John Updike’s? History is fertilized with unknown masters; but what about recognized masters who are under-appreciated? What happens to such fruit? How can any literary award’s committee sit down to discuss the world’s best – Lessing, Pamuk, Pinter – without someone muttering a single spondee — “Updike” — to quickly settle the matter?
There’s a terrible imbalance here: On its “Also by John Updike” page, Due Considerations lists 21 novels, 15 short story collections, eight collections of essays and criticism, seven books of poems, five children’s books, a play and a memoir; and Due Considerations itself contains no less than 146 articles of considerable stylistic, metaphorical, critical and intellectual weight. One’s reminded of Alexandre Dumas, a factory of a writer, a brand name, but Updike has chosen every word himself, written it all, while averaging an astonishing five beautiful sentences out of every six, with an equally impressive batting average of perfect words (whereas most popular writers these days hit no more than one sentence out of ten; and some no more than one per book).
Now compare this profound and prolific oeuvre, compare Updike’s scintillating talent, his steadfast devotion to testing “the limits of what I know and what I feel,” his implacable “homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness” and most amazingly, the fact that he’s still among us, still writing, still knocking sentence after sentence out of the park, compare this unrivalled writer to all the recognition he’s received so far — including Two Pulitzer prizes, the National Medal of Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, even a reference to Updike on the Simpsons – and you begin to understand exactly how much merit is lacking. It’s just not enough. Can it ever be enough?
In his review of William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life, Updike inadvertently stumbles upon a possible explanation: “It all came down to one book,” he writes of Proust’s A la Recherche due Temps Perdue. “No wonder it had to be vast. Posterity tends to give novelists a longer ride on one or two big books than on a raft of smaller ones.” And there’s the rub for someone like Updike. Perhaps he’s written too much.
The bigger problem, of course, is us. We’re easily distracted. We’re quick to watch the caped daredevil parachute off a skyscraper while neglecting the urbane-looking chap who always, for some reason, floats beside us, inexplicably, an inch above the ground. Updike makes a daily habit of his American genius; it follows readers around, especially men: to poker games, movie theatres, baseball diamonds and YMCA swimming pools and the everyday wooing of dollars and cars. “Small wonder,” he wrote in a short story inspired by his love for a ‘55 four-door Waterfall Blue Ford sedan, “the [American] landscape is sacrificed to these dreaming vehicles of our ideal and onrushing manhood.”Onrushing manhood. The suburban bedroom. The desperate housewife’s predecessor – desperate husbands. Sex has bedevilled Updike throughout his life. Like few other American writers, he’s proven to be endlessly fascinated by America’s (and therefore his own) fascination with sexual liberty, forever comparing one decade’s behaviour with another’s, as a museum curator might compare different schools of art (The inclusion in Due Considerations of his frivolous essay “Ten Epochal Moments in the American Libido” is a case in point).
This obsession of Updike’s, I speculate, may cause readers to dismiss an Updike novel as passé while ignoring the deeper beauty of its craftsmanship; and perhaps the sex-obsession itself is an Americanism many Americans, at least the more international-minded, are outgrowing these days. He seems to recognize the broader truth in old age, noting somewhere in Due Considerations – can’t find the exact quote – that sex in the late, pre-liberated 1940s had its own special codes and secret charms, and these were just as thrilling to the libidos of onrushing manhood as any activity in less prudish times to come.
Updike’s lush style of writing is deceptively well-trimmed, impeccably-dressed. He’s as prudent and delicate with his details with he is dismissive of dogma. Notice his recollections of childhood summers: “I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, and I liked the way I looked in the mirror, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.” Now notice the “perhaps” in the sentence that follows these details: “We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves.”
And we love such observations, perhaps, not just for the mirrors they present us, or even for the clarity of their reflection, but for the fact they’re conjured by a 73-year-old master of his art with the ability to astound us all the more – by travelling still farther through memory and time – the older he gets.
“Foreswearing certain easy rituals, such as earning a living and running the world’s errands” — this, according to E.B. White in a letter written in 1937 to his wife, Katherine, is what’s required for anyone searching for “intellectual and spiritual privacy” and “afflicted with poetic longings of one sort or another.”
White composed his collection of 55 essays, which was published as One Man’s Meat in 1942, after an abrupt decision to uproot from life in New York City — a steamy Upper East Side apartment, weekly deadlines at the New Yorker, writing his commentary in what he considered the corporate, “weasel word” of “we” instead of the straightforward “I” — and relocate with his wife and young son to a remote saltwater farm in Maine.
In a matter of days, the once metropolitan Whites were living amidst spruce and elm and lilac, among barnyards and hen-coops, woodsheds and cellars, farmers and fishermen. Their son was attending a two-room schoolhouse; Katherine was working as a stay-at-home editor and housewife, while preparing her home grown jams and jellies, maple syrups and stewed rhubarb; and White himself, attending country fairs and town hall meetings, caring for his pullets and geese, sheep and roosters, hogs and dogs, reading his favourite farm papers (like The Countryman and The Rural New Yorker), pitching hay, husking corn, midwifing for the births of his lambs, catching lobster and mackerel, tending the crops, selling eggs at the local market, fending off foxes and rats, keeping meticulous accounts and engaging in all sorts of domestic handyman tasks and mechanical tinkerings with tools such as crowbars, jacks, clawbars, axes, wrenches, chains, tinner’s snips, saw-rakes, hammers, and the ubiquitous plankwood and nails. Oh yes, and he started writing his monthly essays for Harper’s magazine.
Simple living this wasn’t. And though White no doubt harboured “poetic longings,” his new circumstances saw him running more errands than ever before. Nor can it be said there was much privacy in his intellectual musings, considering White was essentially a blogger, one of the most well-known of his day (in the way Montaigne was a sort of celebrated blogger in his day, or Rousseau in his). As it turns out, it wasn’t a poetic longing White pursued at all, but rather — with the same web-spinning instinct his beloved fictional character would experience in his Charlotte’s Web — a poetic calling in pursuit of its bard.
In this way, One Man’s Meat presents us with a unique quest. “It’s not so much that I acquire dogs,” writes White in his essay “Dog Training,” “as it is that dogs acquire me. Maybe they even shop for me, I don’t know.” That “maybe” and “I don’t know” are vintage White, so observant yet so unknowing (a Narayan-type narrator in rural New England); and, well, if it turns out dogs rule the world, he wouldn’t be surprised.
Not just dogs, but White’s entire art would find and take possession of its artist during the period of these 55 essays written on his saltwater farm. The mice beneath the floorboards don’t tell White that one of them will appear someday in his book, Stuart Little, but we see their talents. In his deeply affectionate essay, “Spring,” he describes seven newborn pigs that were “blithe and bonny and good and gay except the runt – who was merely blithe and good and gay,” with no idea this runt was auditioning for a starring role in what would become one of America’s most popular children’s books.
The spiders, the Ferris Wheels, the agricultural fairs and even the whole genre of children’s books themselves – “Among the goat feathers that stick to us this season of the year are some two hundred children’s books…review copies, sent to my wife by the publishers” – these things fluttered out of destiny’s darkness, attracted to the newfound White who beamed so brightly in his country habitat.
He was already an accomplished writer, highly regarded, a natural wit and New Yorker icon, but he didn’t imagine his most important calling even with its representative “camels, pandas, and cocker spaniels” strewn all over his house. “I gazed hatefully at their jackets,” he says about those children’s books. Yet White couldn’t ignore their distinctive allure, for here was a man with the windows of perception swung wide open, who was, by his own analysis, “suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens.”
One thinks of Edward Wilson and his ants, of Thoreau and his ants (White even includes an essay about his visit to “Walden”), of sensitive, intelligent men who seek the pleasures of boyhood, of afternoons observing the epic lives of insects. But what seems the simplest of journeys can astounds us with its costs. Dante, the character, has only a rope; Frodo a measly backpack; a light-sabre all that Luke requires. But in real life, it takes a village, as Ms. Clinton says…to support the old hermit on a mountaintop. How much stuff Mr. Neale, our New Zealand’s Crusoe, required to survive on his desert island! What would Thoreau have written without his wife and mother to cook for him and clean his cabin? Joseph Banks, the great naturalist, embarking on a severe scientific life at sea, required his own servants and extra cabin space in Cook’s already tightly packed Whitby collier.
White never once pretends that simple living is simple, that having nothing makes you happy – and he marvels at the movie starlet who says, “why clutter up one’s life…here I have nothing and I am happy,” while she stands in her lavish kitchen with her housekeeper, a cook and two English setters. In “Memorandum,” White admits to daydreams of starting life afresh — “no equipment, no stock, no pets, no family responsibilities, no program” — but then acknowledges a deeper understanding of himself and his much stronger, overpowering “taste for domesticity.”
What other specimens of interest are attracted from the dim distance into White’s blazing cabin? An oddity from World War II: A friend of White’s reports the Germans were polite and taking lots of pictures in France. White recognizes the style of Walt Whitman in a radio announcer’s voice (and informs us, remarkably, that all America was talking like Whitman at the time!). Remote country air raid drills, a Japanese uncle-in-law, and somewhere in all the deliberate observation of One’s Man Meat – the five years of being “fully awake” as White describes it – lurks one of literature’s greatest opening lines just waiting for White to find it: ‘“Where’s papa going with that axe,’ said Fern.”
Part III
Mind you, ELECTRA (not to be confused with Freud’s misinterpretation of the goddess), although lacking in most Indian customs, is not a bad place to live. Joyce, Proust, Melville – the world’s finest writers have vacation homes there. But these writers, writers who really have composed enormous tracts of their native landscapes, do not take well to a poorly sketched character “feeling a glow of happiness” or faces that work like emoto-meters, as in the case of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s howler, “On the faces of Mr and Mrs Kairon could be discerned a daze, an initial shock, and an inchoate ethnic guilt.” Therefore many of the writers whose subject matter doesn’t appeal to the Indian audience would be as quickly turned away from ELECTRA and humiliatingly redirected to collegiate writing programs in middle America.
Categorising by readership or amorphous ideas of nationhood, of course, is as absurd as categorising by surname. One should question this need to drape nationalistic sashes over the shoulders of writers and turn their fiction into pageantry. I cannot help but attribute the impulse to the fundamental disappointment many of the ELECTRA-type Indian-English writers must feel, when, after having their personal visions of India so warmly embraced by western editors, they come home to relatives who know nothing of their art, family members who – as you read them a page or two of your latest novel, editing out the sex bits and translating the difficult words as best you can – interrupt to ask, so how much money are you making? Isn’t it time you got married? Or worse, the book is set afire by angry Indian mobs and banned by the Indian courts.
Your natural reaction is to raise your awkward oriflamme of Indian ancestry and proclaim that your art and your self are inseparable, that because your self is as Indian as any Allahabadian Sandman or Delhian Sylvie, your art must be Indian too (never mind that it speaks a language the majority of Indians don’t understand). And look, just look at the growing number of other Indian-English writers — a whole collection of them! — who are carving out a similar territory, graphically describing all sorts of previously unspoken material (most of it pulled, coincidentally, out of a very British-American sexual closet), making an impact on the English literary scene, winning international awards, creating, as Rushdie puts it, “the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.”
But what a tremendous contribution India would make to the world of cooking if Indian mothers would just start serving their pappadams with ketchup and cheese dip.
You might even say India has made a valuable contribution to the world of beauty since its string of successes in the Miss World and Miss Universe contests – never mind that the traditional Indian concept of beauty would easily fit two modern beauty queens into the same traditional dress, or that the average Indian female wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a swimsuit. When the German-Indian rap star Apache Indian sang his hit song, “I am an Indian” (the video of which, interestingly, became a kind of national anthem on Indian television because of its “unity-through-diversity” theme – hey, everyone’s an Indian!), he was not singing about the Indian identity, or even the German identity, because he was performing like a young American.
And thus the Indian-English author, in trying at once to serve the recipe of India in the dining room of English literature faces a conundrum, the most common solution to which is the Indianization of the performance — the tuxedoed waiters serve fried samosas and chutney-covered canapés, the punch bowls are filled with mango lassi and todi juice, the candelabras fitted with bright Divali sparklers, and all the while the writer entertains the company with clever conversation, an endless stream of cross-cultural teasing and wordplay. But the general shape of the literature, the reason, form and purpose behind the entertainment – the aforementioned celebration of self — remains fixed; in fact it becomes more entrenched, more exclusive, because now it is suddenly rejuvenated with a new and exotic party game. Like Karoke. Or Bangra music.
Which is why the indigenous Indian-English metaphor, a more Tagorian creature in which an image matures entirely outside the English literary imagination – the base of a banyan tree spread like the sari of a seated women, a river rising to embrace a village with the passion of a young wife returning for the first time to her parent’s home — is such a rare and endangered species.
Apart from some whispers sounding like “neem leaves brushing the sandstone ceiling” (Parera’s second indigenous Indian-English metaphor, a record-setting two in five pages), I didn’t find another specimen in the entire Rushdie-West collection. I admit to having skimmed much of Firdauz Kanga’s most exasperating “Trying to Grow,” (Up?) which, reading like an Internet chat session, is as misplaced in Indian Writing as Nehru’s spoken piece of non-writing. Amitav Ghosh’s reflections on his anthropological study of a village in Egypt squirms uncomfortably in this Rushdiesque reserve and betrays the false nativity of the collected subject matter. The sample could as easily fit into a collection of Egyptian-English Writing, or Bangladeshi-English Writing, and Ghosh – usually quite suspicious of border-defined states – would have been wise to follow V.S.Naipaul’s example and disallow the patriotic representation of his craft by forbidding Rushdie and West to capture his work altogether.
The chapter excerpted from Arundhuti Roy’s Booker Prize winning The God of Small Things could be said to contain an indigenous Indian-English metaphorical conceit – the comparison of human sperm to those syrupy soft drinks sold in Indian movie theatres and carnivals. But here we have a case of an Indian packaging of a foreign commodity. While sperm may tropologically inhabit British and American phraseology, one doesn’t often hear it mentioned in public Indian-English discourse – although perhaps I mix with the wrong crowd. To her credit, of all the demonstrations of, as Devani puts it, “fascination of the male anatomy” (no less than five of the stories include descriptions of penile emissions), Roy’s may be the most artful.
Since publication of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-1997, another decade of novels and poetry written by Indian nationals has emerged in numerous languages and styles, and I expect I’ll comment on some of these eventually, but my initial impression is thus: India’s trade liberalization policies since the Indian Writing’s appearance, the huge increase of London- and New York-based literary agents representing India-based authors, the mass influx of foreign tourists and businesses into India over the last decade, the availability of the Internet and cell phones across the country, satellite television, foreign ownership of Indian media, the explosion of young Indians wanting to be writers, filmmakers, artists, entrepreneurs and so forth (rather than the civil servants of old), the Indian-English accent on the telephone support call, the newfound sense of career ambition and the whole amusing illusion that our fast-expanding world is somehow shrinking – all of this will likely transform India, in Rushdie’s mind, into an even larger presence, a greater contributor to the world of books; but it’s unlikely to help infuse English literature with anywhere near the richness, the beauty, the immensity of life which India, the country, is capable of. For every Indian author who navigates the treacherous migration to an American or British readership, an unknown number of beauties will fly into windscreens or find themselves left with nowhere to feed.
Part II
By contrast, for a writer like G.V. Desani, whose excerpt from “All About H. Hatterr” is more healthily represented (twenty-eight pages) as entry number four in Indian Writing, the English literary cathedral cannot be ignored. It is an overwhelming feature of his imagination, his task being to redecorate it with personal artefacts. The issue at hand is the “dhobin; viz., my Indian washerwomen,” who H. Hatterr believes has “a crush” on him, and his friend Bannerji is now responding to the revelation:
“Good luck to her. Whereas, I deplore and deprecate sensual love, I am wholeheartedly for romance. Is her name Priscilla, or is it Daphne?…I am anxious to know if you could concur with the bard Walt Whitman, and sing to her, As I lay my head in your lap, camerado?…it might be a genuine Darby and Joan feeling. If so, Mr. Robert Bridges rightly protests, Quit in a single kiss?…Does she suffer from a morbid fascination of the male anatomy? Is she an Elephant?”
Like his dialogue, Desani’s prose leaps and dances – an almost spontaneous exuberance which was cloyingly repeated by such Indian writers as Rushdie, I Alan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Kiran Desai and many others not included in this collection. Here, the affections of an Indian dhobin are cast into a flashy mosaic of Greek Mythology, 18th century love ballads, the quotations of 19th and early 20th century American and English poets.
Throughout his H. Hatterr, Desani refers to an array of Indian settings, characters, fashions and foods, but describes them in foreign terms — opera, bull-fighting, African music, beer, champagne, European literature and sport. I did encounter two possible indigenous Indian metaphors in these twenty-eight pages of play: 1) a man approaching the narrator like a “wild elephant’s trunk with the intent to pounce,” and 2) a swarm of mosquitoes making an “Indian pipe-like sound.” I left them alone, however, because the first, apart from being mixed (half elephant, half cat), was unnaturally glossy, stolen perhaps from a travel brochure; while the second was not at all native. An Indian pipe in India would not possibly be called “Indian” – it would be called a sannai, or a nadaswaram, or an instrument certain barbers in certain villages will play at weddings.
Born, raised, fed on India, you spend all day cooking a traditional Indian meal for some foreign guests, diligently mixing spices so that the butter chicken, the menthi dal, the Hyderabadi rice taste exactly as they did when the Moghul Emperor Akbar ate them in the 17th century. You are showered with compliments, of course, but dipping your pappadams (which you bought at a store) into the dal, like nachos into a dip, your guests — attempting only to flatter – say you could make a lot of money if you marketed them as a kind of potato chip.
Rushdie’s argument – common amongst many expatriate Indian authors – that his writing is Indian because he is Indian steps in perfect time with much of the popular English literary parade, a gaudy collection of forced individuality in which one’s writing should express one’s self, the uniform one wears should provide insight into the character underneath it. (I see Narayan sitting worn out on a bench, having marched that street in a different era, wearing a suit and tie because the local tailor from his village insisted the great writer look impeccable for such an important “English” occasion).
Rushdie also knows that once you accept his premise, as most modern critics do, his argument settles well with the climate of his mother-country. India is a plurality, after all, a unidiverse, a kind of protean battlefield strewn with the remains of one invading culture after another; and the passports of the naked sadhu who buries his head in the sand of Kanyakumari and the wealthy transvestite hairstylist in Delhi named Sylvie will bear the same three-headed lion embossed on the covers. Indeed, how can we possibly define, question or refute one’s Indianness?
But what if we define Indian writing another way – not by the people who write it, but by the people who read it? I suddenly see most of the writers in this volume haggling with visa officials at the Indian Writing High Commission, growing irate and finally being tossed out by dutiful guards. Only six writers out of the thirty-two in the Rushdie-West collection would be granted permanent citizenship — Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Kamala Markandaya, Saadat Hasan Manto (who has written one of the best “Partition” pieces I’ve read), Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Satyajit Ray.
A few writers, such as Vikram Seth and Anjana Appachana, are offered the option of dual citizenship, a remarkable compliment, really, to their story-telling ability. But the rest — Rushdie included — are hastily told to apply for nationality at, well, let’s call it something like the English Literary Establishment of Cultural Transience, Rebellion and Alienation (ELECTRA), down the road, where their themes of intellectual angst, so-called self-discovery, religious disillusionment, familial breakdown, bodily liberation, alcohol and sexual abuse will be met with greater appreciation. (…to be continued)
Part I
Let us now commemorate, or at least acknowledge the 10th anniversary of this 50th anniversary collection of Indian English writing first with a review of the book itself, and then, later perhaps, with a comparative look at whether Indian English prose continues its loud and triumphant parade toward early extermination.
I want you to imagine Jim Corbett, India’s legendary tiger hunter and conservationist, returning from the dead to visit the few remaining hectares of India’s jungle a century after spotting his first big cat as a small boy. Like the ghosts of rural England, India’s tigers are so rare and endangered that their fiery eyes and fearful symmetry, once roaming as poetically in Rajput kingdoms as in art, now exist only, albeit quite dramatically, in the story-filled tea-stall chats of India’s remotest villages.
Welcome to the The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-1997, where “fifty years of Indian Writing” – what should be the literary equivalent of 50,000 Bengal tigers inhabiting a wilderness as large and unconquerable as Moby Dick’s (a billion people, 16 official languages, a few of which, excluding English, offer some of the most remarkable writing on the planet) — is like a tattered signpost pointing the way to “Tiger Reserve.”
And only when we enter this domesticated literary parkland does our talented tour guide, Salman Rushdie, inform us that herein lies the “best possible selection from what is presently available [in India] in the English language.” In other words, a safely-enclosed, second-rate safari where the tired animals can be fed through car windows. For as much as Rushdie’s literary agent might wish otherwise, Indian English writing does not, nor will it ever, represent Indian writing (an argument I will wrestle with later);
My own search for the indigenous Indian metaphor, specimens of which I’ve been collecting for years now, took me 186 pages, about one-third of the book to a sentence by Padma Parera, in her finely observed story, “Dr. Salaam”:
The only sound then was of the wind lifting the branches of the neem trees – gently, as a woman will lift her hair with her hand to cool the nape of her neck.
To reach this sentence – admittedly a poor specimen given that I’ve seen a similar gesture animate sunburnt, bikini-clad blondes on Californian beaches, but indigenous in its adorning all females with lengthy tresses — I had to trudge through a dry, empty, desolate terrain.
The tour began with a misplaced piece of political rhetoric, Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous “Tryst With Destiny,” the speech immortalized not for being a piece of Indian writing at all, but quite the opposite — a spontaneous, heart-felt example of brilliant oration. As if to emphasise the mood, Nehru’s historic speech is immediately followed by Nayantara Sahgal’s nepotistic, hagiographic memoir about India and its founding fathers (her uncle Nehru and his close friend Mahatma Gandhi). Their inclusion here as a thematic trailhead helps clarify the misbegotten purpose behind Rushdie’s and Elizabeth West’s collection — not so much Indian writing as fifty years of a place called India. Thus triply confined – 1) written in English, 2) conceived by people with Indian surnames 3) heeding Nehru’s call “to work hard…to build a noble mansion of free India” – the ensuing samples of prose seem pitiably unnatural in this artificial landscape, what could also be called Rushdie’s Theme Park.
After the patriotic intro, my pursuit of the indigenous Indian metaphor took me through eleven more entries, including the masterful works of such legendary writers as Nirad C. Chowdhury, Mulk Raj Anand and Satyajit Ray – but oh how defeated they looked! Their tender, careful renditions of deified rivers, rhapsodical servants, the Jurassic adventures of a simple pair of Calcuttan Babus (Ray, as with his extra-terrestrial story “The Little Martian,” once again scooping Spielberg) seem covered with a kind of mange, forced as they are to coexist with the scabrous angst of comparatively minor specimens by such writers as Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Firdaus Kanga, Arundhatti Roy and Kiran Desai.
And how pale and emaciated dear R.K. Narayan! India’s greatest English author confined to seven pages. Had all 578 pages of the collection contained only Narayan’s work the cover might then have merited the hyperbole “Indian Writing,” for here is a writer who truly represents a place, a people, a culture (something, ironically, the country itself has trouble doing).
In the Rushdie-West selection, a sunny, refreshing meadow of a story entitled “Fellow Feeling,” Narayan’s gentle, god-fearing protagonist tells an irascible, bullying train passenger that if he doesn’t behave,
“I will slap your right cheek and at the same time tug your left ear, and your mouth which is now under your nose, will suddenly find itself under your left ear, and, what is more, stay there. I assure you, you won’t feel any pain.”
You can see Narayan’s familiar paw-print in the words, “your mouth, which is now under your nose,” because in Narayan’s world, where characters are so dependent on the people around them that if you separated them they would die within a week, some men need to be reminded where their mouths are. This kind of affectionate portrayal, where characters are composed of and celebrated for their deficiencies, runs counter to the general post-Joycean literary trend in which characters operate their bodies with the entire universe stuffed inside their bellies, their borborygmus playing the music of the cosmos, the act of going to the toilet or masturbating producing a wealth of philosophical compounds.
Nor does metaphorical fauna flourish in an environment where English is a language of class affirmation, bureaucratic negotiation, neighbours trying to act “uppity.” Too much art in the English medium would only ostracise a writer like Narayan (who, like a good author, suffered from every deficiency except the ability to record timeless stories) from the people he met and talked to during his ritualised morning walks in Madras. Too much stain and artistic design in the window, no matter how Indian the colours and patterns, would only draw our attention away from Narayan’s native pastoral view to what, for Narayan and the people he writes about, is an alien art form.
Whether Anne Salmond’s history can be turned into a screenplay directly, or whether it requires a fictional treatment first, the subject matter cries out for (or blows a Maori conch shell for) Peter Jackson’s talents. Mel Gibson, with his Apocalypto, gave us a mysterious jungle society — a new skin over familiar feelings – but could never shake free of the contemporary, or make us feel as though we’ve left a recognizable humanity behind, as does, say, the 1992 Mexican movie, Cabeza De Vaco, set in a similar time and place.
Jackson, however, could pull it off – not with 16th-century South America and the Conquistadores, but in the 18th-century conquests of the South Pacific with the peerless Captain Cook. The primordial island scenery, the volcanoes and breadfruit, the fleets of canoes, the war dances, shootings, spearings, lashings, kidnappings, beheadings, human sacrifices, half-eaten body parts, cannon balls that skip across the surface of the sea, fireworks and water-rockets, icebergs and storms and illnesses, “lusty” naked (and sometimes pugilistic) nymphs, the greed for the power of guns and red feathers and sex and nails and mana, the pull and anguish of discovery, the families and rivalries and aristocracies that energize cultures as far apart as Tonga and London – Jackson could capture it all without allowing us to ever feel quite comfortable amongst the tribes we meet and the discoveries we make. This, of course, is the thrill of all great adventures and all great art.
Salmond catalogues a tremendous amount of voyaging and I suspect she wearied at times of writing phrases like “shot a musket ball through the bow of the canoe” or “traded yams and a pig for a nail and a cloak.” But we grow used to it, like waves at sea, and the lull of repetition, of waiting, recording, measuring, sounding, charting, bartering, of anchoring in quiet harbours, of floating on pinnaces, canoes and tall ships and hardly ever standing on solid ground, makes the encounters with the abrupt, abrasive substance of people so much more fascinating. Like the sailors at sea, we grow to crave and relish the human touch.
Captain Cook himself stands as aloof, dogged and unintelligible as any of history’s greatest figures. An early ethnographer and man of many mistakes, he found three weeks of a secure, well-paid country life in England — after many years at sea — more than he could tolerate and quickly returned to his South Sea adventures, not for the laurels (which he’d already received), or the lithesome lasses (for whom Joseph Banks so yearned), but for the sweeter flesh of scientific pleasure. That such a man, the son of a farmer, was chosen by committee — as opposed to some freak of fate — to pilot the Endeavor and lay down his weapons, undress and bow before alien chiefs (or, contrarily, to plunder an entire Mo’orean village in revenge for a stolen goat), inspires us not just to appreciate Cook’s role in history, but to acknowledge the astonishing range of consideration of which a society is capable.
Salmond’s Cook is boyish, fastidious, passionate and detached, creative and sterile and reminds one of Abraham Lincoln in his inability to turn off the sub-woofer bass of his higher-calling which reverberates in his every word and action. In Tahiti a group of importuning beauties jeered at his refusal to sleep with them – impotent old man! – but their mistake was simple: Captain Cook was not a man. And he wasn’t really a captain, either; and when, while in New Zealand, he’s mistaken for a slave (taurekareka) – because he didn’t avenge the killing, and eating, of ten of his companions – the Maoris are perhaps more correct in their presumption than history credits them. Cook was slave to his convictions.
Salmond does as best she can to present both sides of these cultural encounters (though she generally rides, like most her sources, inside the officers’ cabins of Cook’s ship), and amongst the islanders we find, in a kind of looking glass world, the mirror images of Cook and Banks and Webber and many other of the European big-wigs. The islanders, too, have their own philosophers and philanders, their thieves and theists, crooks and kings, artists and adventurers – some of whose journeys, epics in themselves, Salmond allows us to closely follow; and their performance of taio, or name-exchanging, with Cook and his crew provides an apt anchorage that holds these repellent symmetries, however briefly, together.
O how great our enchantment when nothing is as it seems! What differentiates a boat from an island? On viewing Cook’s ship, the Hawai’ians gaily clambered aboard and started tearing off the iron bits, just as Cook’s men feasted on their island fruits and felled their trees. And some of the island men even mistook a few members of Cook’s crew for ladies and jauntily pursued them to a secret place for coupling only to emerge bewildered yet wiser and more careful in formulating assumptions next time – like all great scientists and historians, amongst whom Anne Salmond sails with the same sense of endeavour and endurance, skill and passion for knowledge as Cook himself.
