The Hindu : Karnataka News : Reading as therapy words and ideas

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 09, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Karnataka

Karnataka

Reading as therapy words and ideas

In the aphoristic words of Bristles, physical cowardice always triumphs over moral verity

What does one do when one is consumed by blind hope and dark despair, tossed between the placid waters of the Sargasso Sea and the rapids of the Zambezi, with no exit?

Being recently consumed by ancestral blues of an extreme kind that was not of my making, and having none to help or even talk to, I found the situation provided all the necessary rationale, not to speak of the wherewithal, to resort to desperate remed ies. However, in the aphoristic words of Bristles, the headmaster of Coram’s, the school from where the immortal Arthur Abdel Simpson created by Eric Ambler failed to matriculate, physical cowardice always triumphs over moral verity. In fact, more than physical cowardice, books helped. It is of these two books, utterly different from each other, which sustained me over ten hours of loneliness and degrading self-pity while waiting for a bureaucratic Godot that never turned up on two successive days, that I will speak.

Surprisingly, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) with its relentless gloom and the inevitable denouement of a bullet in the back of the protagonist’s head foreshadowed in the very opening pages, helped on the first day. Having read the book over fifty years ago, I had nearly forgotten the power and the internal logic of what Koestler calls the ‘grammatical fiction’ of the life and death of Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, an old Bolshevik, as he awaits interrogation, trial and execution. Rubashov is a synthesis of several old Bolsheviks brought to trial in the 1930s, following the assassination of Sergi Kirov, a protégé of Stalin, in Leningrad on December 1, 1934. At the end of these trials, some of the most famous leaders of the Bolshevik revolution were shot.

The remarkable aspect of the Moscow trials was that these veteran revolutionaries admitted to having been counterrevolutionaries plotting to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, of being in league with Trotsky and so on, collaborating, as it were, in their condemnation. Koestler tries to explain this paradox by bringing together three characters, Rubashov, the accused, Ivanov, his first interrogator and an old Bolshevik and friend executed in the middle of his interrogation of Rubashov, and Gletkin, the ‘new Soviet man’ who, in Koestler’s vision, symbolises all that is evil in the Soviet system. An ex-Communist, Koestler was among those that complained that ‘god’, meaning Communism, had failed them, without realising that ‘god’ had never promised them anything. Despite his anti-communism, Koestler manages to present a convincing explanation of this paradox, the ‘grammatical fiction’, though this is given a vulgarised interpretation by Gletkin who makes sympathetic noises about ‘history’ absolving persons like Rubashov even while ‘historical necessity’ required them to be shot. The book made compelling reading in that depressing office, reviving memories of other times and other places, of other ideological and literary disputes.

On the second day sustenance was provided by that perennial favourite, P. G. Wodehouse – and shame on the inbuilt dictionary of my laptop that does not recognise the name. The book however was not any Jeeves or Blandings castle novels; it was The Luck of the Bodkins, a magnificent narration published in 1935. Though Monty’s first appearance was a Blandings Castle novel (Heavy Weather, 1933), the author saw that the character should flourish on his own, not as an appendage to doddering aristocracy.

Wodehouse was a master of plot construction and narration. This book excels the highest standards by scrupulously observing all the three Aristotelian principles of ‘unity’ — of time, place and action. The action takes place during a transatlantic voyage; the ocean liner is the scene of virtually all the action; and the time taken for the action corresponds to the time taken for the voyage to be completed. The narrative is incredibly complicated, with plots and counter-plots, of hearts broken and mended, of broad farce masquerading as low villainy, of journeys ending in lovers’ meetings.

Above all, there is Albert Peasemarch, the steward assigned to Monty’s stateroom, one of Wodehouse’s immortals. Monty, tested to the extreme in his efforts to reconcile with Gertrude Butterwick, his estranged fiancée, emerges triumphant.

Gertrude, a muscular young lady and fanatical hockey player, is however quite unsuited to a lightweight like Monty. As in most Wodehouse novels, the boy or girl is in love with or even engaged to at the beginning to an entirely unsuitable person. Nice girls like Maud in A Damsel in Distress (1919) are in love with cads; light hearted young men like Monty are engaged to hockey players who are keen to improve the minds of their fiancés. Bertie Wooster, nature’s bachelor, routinely gets entangled with earnest young women who want to improve his soul. But all’s well that ends well. The Monty matter is set right in Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin (1972), written 37 years later to celebrate the author’s 91st birthday. Amazing, ageless Wodehouse!

M.S. PRABHAKARA kamaroopi@gmail.com

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Karnataka