by Jeet Thayil
One never quite believed they had nothing in common, you know. They were born in the thirties and started to publish at around the same time. Both converted to Englishness as if to a new faith and both felt they were outsiders in a house of privilege. Both arrived in Oxford in their late teens. They thought and spoke and wrote in English and did so better than some Englishmen but they were treated like immigrants. Perhaps most tellingly both were cruel to the women in their lives. It makes one wonder if spousal abuse is an Oriental attribute.
The greatest point of convergence is one that is rarely mentioned in literary society, which is nothing if not polite, alas! Newton and Vidia were superb incarnations of the true Wog, a tribe that is vanishing from the multicultural world we have created. They arrived in London from the former Empire at around the same age, seventeen or eighteen, young writers who wished to locate themselves at the centre of English life, and they acquired, almost before they arrived, the properly fruity accent of their new environs. Remarkably, we tend to forget that neither had set foot upon these isles until their late teens. Audio, Video, Disco. Or rather, Audio, Vidia, Disco, and the learning, the soaking up is extant. All quite laughable, what? Except one must not laugh, not if one cares about one’s career and reputation. As you can see, I do not. Indeed, I am become exempt, am soon to become extinct. I have had my career. I may speak freely.
Rama Raoer, former professor of English Literature, Bombay University, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Dolly Mansions, near Dadar Station, May 2005
If this is a story about art then it is a story about God and the gifts he gives us. Also the gifts he takes away. God has it in for poets, that’s obvious, but the Bombaywallahs hold a special place in his dispensation. Or so I believe, with good reason. Much has been taken from the poets of Bombay. Bhagwan kuch deyta hai toh wapas bhi leyta hai.
What a time it was for poetry and poets, Xavier and Doss and so many others. In my mind those two are inextricably twinned, Doss and Xavier, Xavier and Doss, and your call brought it all back. But first let me apologise for my rudeness on the phone. I wasn’t raised to be a barbarian. When you said you were a journalist I went into automatic attack mode. I don’t trust journalists as a rule. I learned the hard way. They ask you an innocuous question, you make an innocuous reply, and the next thing you know there’s a screaming headline. GAY PROFESSOR DEFENDS UNDERAGE SEX. Or something of that nature, something vile, something so embarrassing you will wish you had never opened your mouth.
Let me ask you a question. Why has no one written about the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, poets who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two and vanished without a trace? It had never happened before, poets writing Marathi, Hindi, English, and combinations thereof, writing to and against each other, such ferment and not a word of documentation. Why not?
The fiction has been done to death, features and interviews and critical studies and textbooks, and not one of the novelists is worth a little finger of the poets. They were the great ones and they died. All of them died. If you want a moral, here it is: what God giveth, he taketh away. In this story art is god. And if god is art, then what is the devil? Bad art of course. But we’ll talk about that in a minute or we won’t. Kuch bhi ho, yaar.
I’ll tell you something no one knows. It was Narayan Doss who came up with the infamous name, the Hung Realists, as opposed to the famous name, the Hungryalists. It was Doss. Not the Bengali poets but a Marathi poet, a lower-caste or casteless Marathi poet. Of course the Bengalis took credit for it, as they do, but the truth is more and less clear-cut. The name did not come from Chaucer as some have claimed. It arose out of a misunderstanding. Someone misheard a joke made by that infernal joker Allen Ginsberg and a historical witticism was born.
When Doss arrived in Bombay in 1977 he knew nobody. He was nobody. But in a month or two he was at the heart of the scene, if scene is what it was. This was why he left his small town and came here, or one of the reasons he came, to be part of the milieu of Bombay in the seventies, which, as you know, was nothing if not glamorous, a saturnalia, a phantasmic playground for the rich and famished. Doss knew it would be closed to him because of who he was, his brilliant and terrible personal history. So he came up with an audacious scheme. He told everyone he was engaged in a revolutionary remapping of the continent of poetry to be published by the much-imitated never-equalled poetry collective Clearing House, a definitive anthology, inclusive rather than exclusive, with a hundred and fifty poets in all and a wide representative sample of each one’s work, a door-stopper of a book weighing in at about a thousand pages. This got him invited to the homes of the poets and they hosted him and paid his bills and no one ever thought of checking with Clearing House whether the anthology had been commissioned. Doss was a poetry hustler. We knew it and still we fell for it. We fell for him.
You must understand that he was a beautiful young man. Not handsome or good-looking. Beautiful! Dark skin, swollen lips, Neanderthal eyebrows, wild black hair, a bit like a promiscuous Russian ballet star, Nureyev rather than Baryshnikov. In short he looked the part of the poet. And the Untouchability? In the mid-seventies it was a badge of honour. It only added to his allure. We thought it was simply a part of his rebel genius and Luciferian ambition to appear out of thin air and make those authoritative pronouncements about the strongest among us, the blanket condemnation and praise and weird insights into our work and into our heads. It was as if a fully formed baby poet had appeared in our midst to hold us to the light and destroy us – or make us better.
We were entranced and we let him get the better of us. That’s the truth of it and by now it’s well known. People talk, word gets around. Everybody knows what became of that anthology, kuch nahin, one big anda, zero se zero tak. The true anthology was something nobody expected. It burned the old maps and all those who expected to be in it were excluded. It was something he and Xavier dreamed up. All of that is known. But here’s something else nobody knows. He brought a book of poems with him when he arrived in Bombay. Did you know that? A genuine book, poems he’d been working on since he was a teenager growing up on the wrong side of the river in that heartless Indian village he was in such a hurry to escape. Not a slim book – God save us from slim books of verse – no, no, it was a hundred and thirty pages, a substantial selection, and the poems were like nothing we had seen, loose-limbed, improvised, shaggy laughing monsters of violence and pity, also sweetness, also rage.
The question I will leave you with is this, what happened to the book? Why did it appear in Marathi and disappear immediately thereafter? Why was it never translated into Hindi or English when lesser poets were being translated left, right and centre? And what was the nature of the encounter between Doss and Xavier? Enough, I’ve talked enough for today. I’m an old man and I need my rest. We’ll pick it up again tomorrow.
I’ll leave you with a last thought. What I’m telling you is a story with no end and no beginning. From those to whom much is given, much will be taken away.
Peter Priestley, former Oxford Professor of Poetry, email interview by Dismas Bambai, Cornwall, October 2005
It’s rather heartening that you should contact me now. There was a time journalists wrote to me every other day, around the time he became the first non-white winner of the most prestigious poetry prize in the land. They said it was because he was the youngest recipient but what they really meant was something quite different. He was the first winner of the prize who was not to the manor born. You must keep in mind how racist England was in those days, not that it isn’t so now. It’s just that we do a better job of hiding it.
One afternoon, it was one of those afternoons of our lives when all was ahead of us still, summer, the brilliant water, the lovely weeping trees, a hump-backed bridge and a trio of friends, and I said, New, in twenty years we’re going to want to remember this. He was silent for a long time. His eyes were closed in the sun
and I thought he had not heard me or he had heard me as one hears the sound of water, and just as I was beginning to sink into my own silence, he said, in twenty years, Peter, we shall still be friends. He was right. I look upon that unlikely testament as one of the achievements of my youth.
Last year a small poetry press in London acquired the rights to Ralph Godwin’s Archer Press publications. The idea was to bring out a collected edition of the various volumes in a single box. On the spine would be the logo, the yellow archer and his arrow poised for flight, with the titles and authors’ names, lovely idea, really, and they wanted a quote from me for Newton’s poems. Do you want to know what I said? “Learn these poems by heart. Newton Xavier was a guardian spirit of a shamanic age.” I meant every word. In a time of performance poets and spoken word poets and jazz poets and poz poets and beat poets and street poets and stand-up poets and sit-down poets, and the poet-next-door and the poet-as-professor, the conversational poets and confessional poets, the poets of the quotidian and the poets of crisis, and the poet as activist and poet as arriviste, and Martian poets and Movement Poets and identity poets and queer poets, it helps to remember that once poetry was prophecy. Ted Hughes’s first volume, The Hawk in the Rain, appeared the same year as Newton’s Songs for the Tin-Eared, in 1957. And Geoffrey Hill’s first, For the Unfallen, appeared soon after. Hughes, Hill, Xavier, a trinity of shamans. Not Larkin, for God’s sake, none of those well-crafted limericks. Not Heaney by any yardstick. Hughes was Heaney’s daddy and daddy did it first and best. And not Peter Porter or Kingsley Amis or Newton’s mentor Stephen Spender. God no. In that context one must mention that the songs in Songs for the Tin-Eared traded in certain secrets: the meaning of rivers (they are never silent), of trees (upside-down sense spirits), of predatory creatures from the animal kingdom (blood spirits of violence and life-in-death). And then came the second volume, Saint Me, published in 1967, which I can tell you was originally and provisionally titled Kingdom of the Leashed, Republic of the Lash, a related suite of poems that presents the intellect as an adequate reflection of the finite and points in the last section to the future, poems that seem uncanny when you look at them today because they predict a world in which suicidal rage and the climate would combine to create the end of days. One marvels at the fact that New’s entire reputation rests on two slim books of verse. But what books they were! You will not see the like again. I believe this was the true reason for his inability to continue after the second volume. He wrote as if each poem was his last. I believe he used it all up and he had to switch tracks to his other, lesser gift, the gift that added fortune to his fame.
He told me once that thoughts of the future made him envy the birds because they had no such worries. Well, we can’t be sure of that, can we, New? I said. You have a home to go to, he said. Where will I go? And then his English life fell to pieces and his marriages broke up and his father died. The poetry stopped. Eventually he returned to India. Return was not inevitable, not by any means. But he made it so.
BOOK TWO
Adventures in Alleged Bias
Saint Nicholas
or Sinte Klaas in the Dutch vernacular;
Americanised to Santa Claus by settlers;
born in Turkey, not the North Pole;
patron of brides & unmarried girls,
of travellers, sailors, children, & Russians;
washed white in representations;
life story lost, found as Christmas father;
of reindeer, the tetherer.
from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)
1.
It was the second Christmas of the new century, a dazed and joyless time in the life of the city. Everywhere we looked the storefronts were lit but the lighting was lurid and wrong. Late in the evening the odd lost Santa walked to the park, his bell silent. On the high branches of the trees plastic bags bloomed like flowers. Residual Fifth Avenue traffic sent up a tidal hiss. Above it all the small sky sat like a lid, a sky of ash and tower dust and who knew what powdered human remains. In the old apartment the old body sounds deepened. The conjectural wheeze of hot water pipes, the bone creak of floorboard, all those unknowable scrapes and knocks. And gust after gust against the window where Goody Lol watched the wintry shades darken from purple to slate and then to black.
Undisturbed on the workspace were the twenty-three pictures she had placed there that morning. Newton’s only task for the day had been to make a final selection for the Chelsea gallery where he would be exhibiting for the first time in many years. He wasn’t sure exactly how many years because he lost track of decades (and: wives, a war, three cities, one subcontinent). He lost track of simple tasks. It was all extremely annoying until you reminded yourself that he could not help it. He had lost track of himself.
The grandfather clock chimed the half-hour and at the same moment she heard the rotary phone with the big handset and overloud trilling. A moment later she heard him shout.
“Goody, the phone! The phone, Goody.”
But New yelled her name so often she’d stopped responding. In public he was unfailingly soft-spoken. Supplicants, civilians and patrons had to lean forward to hear him. His softness of speech had been remarked upon. An interviewer had even speculated that it was “a deliberate ploy to get one’s attention”.
Goody knew why he called for her. It gave him a sense of purchase in an otherwise unmanageable apartment. There was stuff everywhere. Even the master bedroom had been co-opted and the walls barricaded with wobbly stacks of books that had not been touched in a decade. The guest bath had been turned into a darkroom festooned with shiny blackout curtains and clotheslines strung with clips. The bathtub was booby-trapped with stop baths that were not for bathing and encircled by trays of malodorous fixative or curative. Stuff. There were LPs and stretched canvases stacked twenty deep in the hallways. Take-out cartons stood on the bookcase. The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position. You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far would I go for a cup?
The apartment was chaos made visible.
In the early days when she brought it up Newton would air his Theory of Creative Disorder with particular reference to the state of one’s living space. He said the attempt to impose order on chaos was the mark of a minor artist, particularly if said artist failed to recognise the world and its manifestations as meaningful; and the impulse to create tenderness or bliss in the midst of chaos was the project of the superior artist. Then he would bring out the Big Guns. Freud, Einstein, Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock. He would reluctantly mention Bacon against whom he had a long-standing grouse. Not a woman on the list anywhere, surprise, surprise. The Big Guns believed in product over process, in the end not the means, in tardiness not tidiness.
“Isolation, ecstasy, and vigil,” he said, “these are the things that count, not an orderly desk. Write that down.”
She had taken to renting a small apartment downtown that she kept obsessively tidy. But she spent several nights a week at Chaos Central. Tonight in a converted study off the living room where she had commandeered a small desk for herself, Goody was putting the first strokes to a photo of her own face, lining closed eyes with kajal, outlining cheekbones and smudging lips. She was obscuring, obscuring. She was working long hours on her own image but it was the opposite of vanity. It was selflessness. She was making in the name of, for the glory of the master.
