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Literary Review
From another time
READING A Variety of Absences, the new Penguin collection of three of Dom Moraes's autobiographical books (Gone Away, My Son's Father, Never at Home) is a real chore.
You feel impatient and out of place — like Alice, a little into your reading, you find yourself in a place that has very little to do with the doings of this world.
Those familiar with Moraes's writing style, particularly of the early autobiographical and travel writings will understand just why this book is not a good idea — a good Moraes can keep you entertained for the length of a day or two and then you pass on the book; Moraes is also good train reading. However, with A Variety of Absences, you can't take it along on a journey because the thing is not only bulky but also weighs too much; besides, it's quite boring in large chunks or otherwise kind of dampening.
Through the book, Moraes is dropping names, albeit of some interesting and very famous people — the likes of Stephen Spender, Auden, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, a young Husain, a young Mulk Raj Anand are all there. And though sometimes it's nice to see what these chaps were like when young, it gets a bit much as one after another they appear to lead a privileged Dom Moraes through the corridors of life, opening doors, finding rooms, hotels, booking passage aboard ships to exotic places, publishing his poems and generally functioning as the more fizzy backdrop to Moraes's own rather mouse-like presence.
Whatever effect these books may have had on the reading public at the time of appearance, it's difficult to get that feeling now. The times, as they say, have indeed changed. No longer is youth a time of romantic abandon and self-discovery nor indeed are there even drunken poets or the intoxication of poetry. People now are not as people in the three books of A Variety of Absences.
Of the three books the easiest and perhaps most interesting read is My Son's Father, the story of Moraes's arrival at repose after a miserable childhood troubled by his deranged mother and the equally troubled years of youthful misery over several inabilities. This thread is interwoven with those that tell of friends and acquaintances who marked Moraes's voyage towards maturity as poet and writer, and towards fame and recognition.
My Son's Father is easier to read because of the presence of his frail but often demonic mother, with whom Moraes eventually learns to make peace. This story seems to humanise Moraes, coming as it does along with a relentless account of How Dom Moraes Met Famous People and the Recognition of Moraes's Talent.
The first book, Gone Away is almost impossible to read, it's an account of a very upper class and well connected Moraes as he goes, very often literally on taxi rides or trains discovering stuff which today is not just peculiar but laughable as something to be discovered. For instance the account early on about an evening spent visiting bootleggers in Bombay, (coming as it does when we have seen the likes of "Sathya" and "Company") is ludicrous and one simply just skips page upon page of Moraes's rambling.
What is of interest in this section are some accounts of meetings with the Dalai Lama, then a young man, (who as yet had no English and needed a translator) and the presence of Moraes's friend `Ved', with his rather overstated tongue-in-cheek humour.
Section three, Never at Home, runs more or less along the same lines and one gets a dead horse being flogged kind of feeling — more names, more accounts of slow going from here to there and there to here.
One feels as one reads these three autobiographical books that had Moraes not been such a privileged person — with a father who had connections to everybody and his secretary, the accounts may have been deeper. Though perhaps that is also a vastly unjust thought, but there seems in Moraes a certain lack of inner life, or rather his inner life reads far too much like a well worked out Programme for the Day!
Considering the raw material at hand it seems rather careless that Moraes does nothing much with it — Moraes's eye passes glibly over the landscape, in a lazy curve that includes human beast and land and all.
The almost total lack of humour, or where it does appear, it is so laboured as to be embarrassing, is another thing that makes these three books a burden.
Perhaps these books can only be enjoyed by those located in a particular milieu, by those whose lives go around a cog of Important Names, who inhabit a world with small attention spans that can accommodate neither a moral sense nor the kind of self awareness that the good writers — whether of autobiography or travelogues — of a later generation (and here I think of Amitav Ghosh who read here recently) do not do without.
A Variety Of Absences, The Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes, Penguin Books, p.627, Rs.599.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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