by Jeet Thayil
He didn’t know.
Ralph’s Archer Press published Songs for the Tin-Eared when he was nineteen. The next year the book won the biggest poetry prize in England, a prize they hadn’t awarded in fourteen years and certainly not to a non-Englishman, and some time after that we were married. By then I was an old woman of thirty-something, or let’s say twenty-nine, yes, twenty-nine’s better, and he was famous, details of his life, of our life, splashed across the newspapers, and always the same word in the headline, Poet, and none of them knew poor Newton’s secret. The poems were few and far between. I hardly ever saw him working. He tried to write but it was a hard slog and very little came of it and he blamed me. Who knows, maybe it was my fault. I’m the first to admit it. I’m a handful, I am.
One morning I went out to buy some Player’s and a pimply-faced git waylaid me, my first paparazzo, clicking away, and there I am unwashed in me pyjamas and he says, Miss Henry, Miss Henry, what’s it like, life with the poet? Is it all it’s cracked up to be, then? I drew myself up to my full height. It might have been my finest moment.
I said: Piss off, darling!
Reggie Ashton, former English tutor, Jesus College, Oxford, telephone interview by Dismas Bambai, February 2005
It was one of those moments, extreme flux in the air, the sixties not quite upon us. One had to keep a wary eye out for the rabid socialist, as you know, who was absolutely everywhere one looked. And the socialists hadn’t yet become Utopians. This may be the main reason one looked the other way at the outré behaviour, because of his background, as it were. The exotic Oriental! The beautiful brown boy fresh off a boat from the tropics! The baby poet! One saw a letter of introduction from Stephen Spender, no less, and Auden had read him and liked him, and Barker and Bacon were his friends, and the Archer Press was about to publish him. It did strike one that he seemed to have no interest whatsoever in the study of English Literature. I’ve seen a number of essays in my years at this hallowed institution, as you may well imagine, and still I recall the first he submitted. Even now, after all these years, when one cannot remember if one has taken one’s morning medication. The wild horses of the mind, what? We are but riders holding on for our lives, if you see what I mean. Let me try to explain about the essays. They were full of the most marvellous and convoluted images, upside-down girl-trees, cadaverous monster-writers feasting on bowls of blood, and so on, but there was no content whatsoever. It was plain to see that he had dashed them off in ten minutes. The first essay he gave me began with this statement, and I am not paraphrasing, “Byron was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Pope was born with a wooden spoon. And Keats was born with no spoon at all.” The essay then went on to discuss in extraordinary detail the comparable tactile qualities of silver versus wood, and it ended with an anthropological interpretation of the use of cutlery and the societal meaning of eating together in a group. There was no further mention of Byron, Pope, or even poor Keats. Still and all, it was apparent to most of us that his only interest was poetry. Fun for him, what? One realised eventually that one had to surrender to the inevitable. From the day that realisation dawned things improved considerably. When Mr Xavier arrived at my rooms I would make myself comfortable in my armchair. I would put my feet up and light a cigarette and rest my eyes upon the green field of the quadrangle. The poet would read aloud from his essays, or he would read his poems, of which one remembers certain phrases even now, much as one recalls a melody one has heard in one’s youth. After some weeks of this I must say I began to enjoy the sessions in the way one enjoys certain types of fiction, or the sound of birdsong in the streets of London. One enjoyed listening to the words as a purely experiential sensation in which one is liberated from the tyranny of meaning. Once I reached this somewhat mystic, not to say profound appreciation of Mr Xavier’s talents, I was able to relax. Thereafter we got along rather famously. I understood him and he understood that I understood. Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit.
He and his friends, the poet Peter and the filmmaker Julian, threw rather interesting luncheon parties. More often than not they were liquid luncheons. But Newton would always cook some one thing, a one-pot meal, coq au vin or pork stew or goulash. His idea of a meal was rather avant-garde to say the least. Bacon and wine in everything. Bacon-wrapped chicken, bacon-wrapped fish, bacon-wrapped bacon. Rashers in the pudding! I jest, but the fact is he could not get enough of the pig. And his future wife was there of course, whose main interest was the rolling and smoking of cannabis cigarettes, who was rather visibly pregnant, who announced one day that she had stopped drinking whisky and switched to vodka and orange juice, for the vitamin C, don’t you know? She was quite the hit. One noticed she was most comfortable when she was the centre of attention and surrounded by a crowd of admiring male faces. That was when she came, so to speak, into her own. She was a one, really. Poor Newton suffered terribly.
Miss Henry, author, actress, and artist’s model, telephone interview by Dismas Bambai, January 2005
A detail. I was pregnant when I first met Newton, and I disappeared for a time. I went to the baby’s father and tried to make a go of it, as one does. Not that it worked. Or it worked for some time and then it did not. I was lucky in that I had an easy time of the delivery, possibly because I was in the Colony Room when my waters broke and Muriel took me upstairs. There was no time to drive to a hospital and she said she had some midwifing experience. Come along, cuntie, she said. Exactly the kind of invitation I could not resist in those days. She put me in the bathtub and she perched on the toilet. And the baby’s father, a man whose name no longer passes my lips, he was on the floor. When it was time I told Muriel, it’s coming, I do believe it’s coming, and she said, well, I better get my suitcase. Back in a moment, cunties, she said, and went downstairs. The baby’s father was of no help whatever. I realised it was all up to me. Isn’t it bloody always, though? I told myself a few things.
The same energy that puts the baby in will bring the baby out. Harness the womanly energy.
Breathe: one breath, two breaths, three, four. Relax and count.
It is like dying, trust and let go.
It is not enough to experience the door. You must open.
Travel down into consciousness. All is written inside. The knowing. The future.
I would have liked to stay in the water but the bathtub was too small. At which Muriel said one can rent a birthing pool and put it in the living room. It’s a bit late, isn’t it, darling? I said. My daughter was born at that very spot, in the bathroom where I knelt. Muriel told me to reach down and pull her out with my hands and I did just that. I reached down and pulled. It was so easy. I knew as I pulled out my baby that Newton would find me and we would live together in a house, though I never would have guessed Islington, and I knew too he would leave me, as he did, twice.
The first time he disappeared Nannie and I went to find him. But where do you find someone in London if he does not wish to be found? We tried the obvious places, the Colony Room, the French, the Coach and Horses, Bacon’s studio, a barge on the Thames on which an acquaintance used to live. I thought he might be holed up in somebody’s rooms in Oxford and I resolved to go there. And then we had a bit of luck. I ran into a friend, a cat burglar if you must know, someone who had helped me out on occasion, and she gave me an address in Pimlico. Nannie and I went there and we found a flat without heat or running water. But my cat burglar had come through, for there was Newton in an armchair, nervously smoking a cigarette. He was Nannie’s favourite. She used to call him Newski because he’d read all the Russians. He was pale and unwashed and trembling in a fisherman’s sweater. Newski, said Nannie, what have you done? And we carried him home and fed him and put him to bed and I saw something on the pillow. It looked like a moving spot of blood. Lice. His head was full of lice. Nannie had to get a special shampoo and wash his hair, at which point he mumbled something about how Verlaine’s wife had found lice on a pillow used by Rimbaud. And off he went, a story about Rimbaud and
Verlaine in Brussels. How had he landed in that hovel in bloody Pimlico? He never said. Or he had a different story each time I asked. I think that was the thing that drove us finally, finally apart. Newton had a shifting relationship with the truth. He liked to keep a respectful distance. When hemmed in he told the most fantastic lies.
A week later, after he’d recovered, after he’d been fully deloused, he said he was off to the shops to buy cigarettes. Back in ten minutes, darling, is what he said. For a month, for two months, I heard his footsteps on the stairs. I imagined he was lying beside me. I saw him at the newsagents or on the tube. I imagined the worst. Dear, dear dotty me, I thought, I must be losing my tiny mind. Of course I never saw him again.
Gill Temple, sound engineer, telephone interview by Dismas Bambai, January 2005
I know that story. “See you in ten minutes.” It became a kind of catchphrase in their circle. My mother had heard all the stories, true and false, and she had no illusions. She married him and had a baby with him and tried to make a go of it. I take some comfort in the fact that my mother is the only one he did not leave. He didn’t have the chance, really. She left him first.
This was in 1975 when I was about five. Newton had been commissioned to paint the Prime Minister of India and we three went to Delhi. The portrait was never completed. It was the time of the Emergency and Mrs Gandhi was sensitive about her image and I think she had reason to be. Also, the government had just blacklisted Newton’s father, my grandfather, the journalist Frank Xavier, and I think Mrs Gandhi must have been asking herself why she had commissioned the portrait in the first place.
My mother was present at their first meeting. Her job was to take notes while Newton interviewed the prime minister and made preliminary sketches in his notebook. She said it was a complete disaster. Newton would ask a long leading question and Mrs Gandhi would reply in monosyllables. Newton pointed out that India had arrested its intellectuals and politicians for speaking out against the government. Was this not an extreme response to a fairly common democratic tradition? No, said Mrs Gandhi. Newton asked if the Emergency would continue indefinitely despite the fierce criticism it had drawn in India and the world. Yes, said Mrs Gandhi. Did it not bother her that history might judge her as one of the most autocratic of Indian rulers, asked Newton. Mrs Gandhi paused for a moment and regarded the floor with disapproving eyes. She took her time to reply. No, she said. There was only one question to which she did not reply with a monosyllable. Newton asked if her father Jawaharlal had had a great influence on her policies. She looked at him for the first and only time in the interview, frightening him with her eyes, and said, why does everybody who interviews me have to ask the same questions? And that was how the meeting went, according to my mother. Mrs Gandhi never came around.
My mother said the preliminary interview was Newton’s technique. He asked questions, made sketches, and took detailed notes, meaning my mother took notes. Then he examined and dissected each reply and created a composite psychological portrait of the subject before going to the canvas. There were no sittings. He preferred not to have the living subject before him while making a picture. He preferred to let his imagination have the final say. I think it’s true to say that this remained the case throughout his life. For him nature was a springboard. He had no interest in mimesis. He was interested only in transcendence.
By then he was no longer writing. He announced that he had given up the word and taken up the line. According to my mother he was doing neither. She said his self-appointed role was to drink and because he was working for the prime minister everything was on the house, cases of liquor delivered to the door whenever required. There was an endless stream of visitors as well, journalists and poets, artists of all kinds, and the only thing they had in common, according to my mother, was the whisky and the rum. They drank like it was going out of style. She said he was drinking so much that he came to see the work as an interruption. He switched from oil to acrylics because acrylics dried faster. He was in a hurry to be done. No wonder Mrs Gandhi had her doubts about the portrait.
Unannounced she came to inspect the studio one morning. My mother and I were in the sitting room when the bodyguards arrived. Then she came in, so swiftly and noiselessly that I was scarcely aware a tall lady had sat down beside me on the couch. I was crying for some reason I don’t remember, and she took my hand and spoke in a very soft voice. I don’t remember what she said. You are a strong girl and you must always be strong, she might have said. Or she might have said, be brave and everything else will follow. Whatever it was it made me stop crying immediately. She was wearing a white sari and no jewellery and she had short hair and sat very straight. When she smiled I was surprised at how girlish she seemed, not at all like the Indian ladies who came to visit my parents. She was simple in her dress but still there was something queenly about her. I thought she was wonderful! I admired her as only a five-year-old can admire someone. She knew she had made a fan of me.
Newton was asleep or he was sleeping it off and my mother didn’t know what to say. How do you tell the prime minister to come back later? Besides, the portrait was highly visible, placed by the window in a corner of the room. Mrs G stood in front of it for no more than two or three minutes. The smile left her face and her whole manner changed. She became positively glacial. I don’t blame her, do you? He had made her a blob of black against a background of newspaper headlines about the Emergency. It was a special kind of black. Really, it was the absence of all colour. And all you saw in the elongated humanoid blackness were a pair of eyes and the famous streak of white in the hair. It was the first of the paintings he came to call ‘Alterations’, where he would use a magazine cover or a newspaper photo and paint over it. Mrs Gandhi gathered her white sari around her and turned her terrible gaze to my mother. She said, tell him I will not be demonised. Then she left and never returned. In the afternoon there was a phone call from her office informing Newton that the portrait had been decommissioned. It was as if he had been waiting for just such a setback. He started to drink in earnest. My mother decided she’d had enough. Early one morning we got into a taxi and went to the airport while Newton was still asleep. I remember it, empty bottles everywhere and full ashtrays and rubbish and my father passed out on the couch near his frightening portrait of Mrs Gandhi. My mother and I tiptoed around him so he wouldn’t wake up. It was the last time I saw him.
Years after my mother had left him a journalist asked her about their life together. Oh, Newton, she said, he was poet for a day. Of course they took the quote and made a news report out of it.
He was on one of his trips to London when she fell ill and he was here when she died. Everybody called to say a few words, complete strangers called. He did not. That’s the kind of thing you remember all your life. She was so young, I was so young, but not a word from him. Then, weeks after Edna’s death, I saw an interview and I will always remember the headline. Nothing sadder in the world than the death of a young woman, says Newton Xavier. The interview was mostly black comedy. He was blackout drunk. He kept asking for an ashtray and when they got him one he kept missing it, he ashed the floor. He misheard questions. He insisted there was a third person in the room and when the interviewer said, no, it was just the two of them, Newton took a swing at him. Then he took a drink. He was of the opinion that there was no situation in the world, however unpleasant, that could not be improved with alcohol. Whisky was his stock response to life. Except not everything in the world can be solved by drink. “Nothing sadder in the world than the death of a young woman.” Words are cheap when you’re talking to the press.
Two years after she died the phone rang and it was a voice I did not know, a man who claimed to be my father. He wanted to meet me. I’d like to drop in, if I may, he said. But why now, I asked. He said, you were a child when I last saw you and I have no idea what kind of young woman you’ve become. I told him he needn’t trouble himself to be a father for a day. He asked if he could see me even if it was onl
y for a moment. I disconnected the phone. When it rang again I did not pick up.
I changed my surname and took my mother’s maiden name. I’m happy to say that I have taken after my mother in every possible way, from my colouring to my eyes to my general outlook, which is sunny. Of course I take after my mother. I work with music and everybody knows Newton is tone-deaf. The title of his first book is autobiographically accurate. I’m telling you this for the record. I have nothing more to add.
Reggie Ashton, former English tutor, Jesus College, Oxford, telephone interview by Dismas Bambai, February 2005
It occurred to me that one should bring together birds of an exotic feather. Newton was in the dailies. It was the first time the Hawthorn had been won by a Wog, by which I mean Westernised Oriental Gentleman. Mind you, one uses the word in its best sense, as a term of affection if not quite endearment. Also in the news for other reasons was young Vidia Naipaul, who too had been a student of mine. One hesitates to say one taught him everything he knows, but one must say so as he is not the sort to credit his masters. Vidia had published a brace of amusing novels set in the islands. The comic mode, as it were. And just that year he’d come out with a collection of short stories, also set in the islands, also amusing. In other words he received some attention in the better newspapers. I don’t know why, or perhaps I do, perhaps I was being devilish, and I set up a meeting between Newton and Vidia. Newton had gone down from Oxford and was living somewhere in London with the soon-to-be-infamous Miss Henry. He suggested the French Pub as a meeting place, which wasn’t its name, incidentally. One doesn’t wish to be thought of as a pedant, or perhaps one does. The point is the establishment’s name was the York Minster. Only its shaggier denizens called it the French. Newton was a regular for the simple reason that it was Miss Henry’s favourite pub in all of London and possibly the world. Vidia had never been there in his life. He was no bohemian and in any case he wasn’t one to go out to lunch unless someone was picking up the william. So there we are, Newton penniless, Vidia parsimonious, and luncheon at the York Minster. How one would have liked to be a fly on the wall during that meeting, you know, between the lauded young poet and the future Nobelist. One has no doubt it was a liquid affair on the Newtonian side of the table. Carpe Cerevisi! And it serves one well to remember that the two were of the same generation, separated by six years, Newton being the younger. I spoke to Vidia soon afterwards and asked him how things had gone. “He wasn’t interested in me,” said Vidia. “He was interested only in English writers.” One detected a curious note of hurt. And believe me, Vidia is not given to sentiment of any kind. Purely in the interests of research I asked Newton the same question. How had the meeting gone? He said, “Much as I thought it would. We had nothing to talk about and nothing in common, except that he is very shy and so am I.” Then, some years ago when Newton was on one of his forays to London, I persuaded him to stop by the college for a glass of sherry. I was nearing the end of my innings and had already begun to take my leave, intellectually, from my immediate surroundings. In the course of things he mentioned that he had met Naipaul at the Neemrana festival in India. This is decades after their first, rather disastrous meeting at the York Minster. How did Newton find the new laureate, I asked. “He can be witty and wise, when he allows himself the liberty,” he told me. “Alas, he prefers to be the great man of letters. There has been a change in the shy young writer I met in 1959 and change isn’t always for the better.”
