Odysseus Abroad (8 page)

Mr. Davidson too, surely, had unwittingly persuaded him against going back. He'd calmed him, praised the essays—not polite praise, but kindly recognition—making Ananda think he could maybe persevere.

Down the industrial path Ananda went, past the barrier regulating traffic, feeling as foreign and out of place as he had on the first day, then turned into the dark archway to the English faculty building. He went up the stairs—everything was lighted up but silent. If ever there came a time in the future—say, fifty years from now—when English departments fell out of use, and no one had a clue what to do with them, so that the hallways remained illuminated but unoccupied, then
this
was what the building would look like: quiet and purposeless. First floor; second floor. The departmental office, with its door closed. On the left, opposite the common room which students darted out of and into during term, was the steady line of offices of the Renaissance scholars, Romanticists, Victorianists, and the “twentieth century” teachers.

“
Come
in.”

Into the narrow but sunlit room, made somehow larger rather than smaller by the range of books crammed neatly and stood on shelves, from works first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a slight offering of stories that had come out a few months ago. He slipped into the armchair.

“Thank you for these,” Mr. Davidson said. He was in a jacket, despite the warmth.

In his hand, a sheaf of papers—Ananda's poems. His latest ones. He'd given Mr. Davidson an assortment previously, after having probed him shyly with the question, to which Mr. Davidson had replied without equivocation that he'd be “happy to see them.” Here, already, were further offspring, which he'd shared with him last week.

“I enjoyed them.”

Not so good. The term “enjoy” was imprecise, worrying, insincerely mollifying, vaguely insulting. So it was with the last set of poems too. But Ananda had almost forgotten Mr. Davidson's earlier lukewarm encouragement. Three weeks is a long time for a young poet. Memory is short; the young man is trying out various voices and registers at different moments—even different times of the day. Feeling self-importantly out of sorts in the morning, he might well write a deprecating poem in the tone of Larkin; in the afternoon, rereading one of Eliot's Sweeney poems, he could, by evening—already having forgotten Eliot, but unable to shake off that mood—produce ironic verses on sexual malaise. The twentieth century and its literature, from its birth in around 1910 to the present moment, is passing through him, unbelievably compressed, in less than a year—in spasms and transitions. So the young poet is in
a state of constant inspiration. Partly this has to do with being in a condition of strange incompleteness, the twenty-two-year-old mind, acute and wide-ranging, unable to come to terms with the body's ever-returning sexual desire. Partly it has to do with the excitement of being in the midst of modernity, and of paying homage—to Larkin, to Edward Thomas and Dylan Thomas, to Eliot, to Baudelaire, to Pound, even to the poets he feels remote from, like Robert Lowell. Paying homage—that is, writing other people's poems as if they were his own—makes him, on certain days, jubilant, and gives him immense power: he is, as it were, re-creating these poets at will, through his spasmodic enthusiasms; remaking what he knows as literature. In some not-irrelevant context, Hilary Burton had said to him, laughing, “Words, Mr. Sen! ‘
Words
, Degas—poetry is made out of words, not ideas,' ” quoting Mallarme to him in a way he didn't understand, and yet digested. But it was words—their sounds, their unpredictable moods—that made him write the poems.

“I must say you're
virry
prolific!”

A wry holding-back, almost a caution. Nestor Davidson had a way of emphasising words to assert admiration, or cast doubt. For instance, “very,” which he uttered musically, cramping the vowel in a way that could be, depending on context, troubling or reassuring. Pointing to a paragraph that Ananda had written in an essay, or responding to something he'd said, Mr. Davidson would observe: “That's
very
acute.” A throwaway remark, but the sort that had moored Ananda, making him experience the beginnings of a pride in himself—something quite different from the natural, stubborn egotism that made him write in the first place. But “very prolific”? He couldn't be sure if it was a compliment—or if a percentage of a remark could be complimentary, and a percentage derogatory. He
could only guess at its composition. Fifty-fifty; or sixty-forty? Surely the model of productivity in 1985 was Larkin's. He knew Mr. Davidson admired him. One envied Larkin his failure to be prolific. In his demonstration of emotion and range of subject-matter, Larkin followed the standard set by his productivity, of a low-key parsimoniousness. The guarded, disbelieving tone of the poems seemed connected to the personality that brought them to the world with such reluctance. Three morose, wafer-thin volumes in as many decades! Yet there was something wonderful about their antithetical efflorescence, their muted hostility to their own existence. And Ananda often wanted to write Larkin's poems—far more often than Larkin evidently did. It was possible that Mr. Davidson sensed this: the convergence, in Ananda, of the instinct to recoil, to hide himself away, with a soul in spate, leaking, spilling over, overflowing eagerly in poems he wrote every week with such facility. How could he not be “prolific”?

It was very quiet. Ordinarily, Ananda didn't like silence. But the unusual quiet just after midday allowed him to hear what was happening beyond, and around, the English faculty; London was busy, in a sort of counterpoint to the first floor's inactivity. What was the road behind the buildings and alleys outside Mr. Davidson's window? Malet Street? Ananda had a limited confidence in his knowledge of the immediate environs.

“I
did
like these,” Mr. Davidson said, nodding charitably at the typed pages he'd placed back on the table, “but I couldn't quite bring myself to believe”—he smiled a little wickedly, but affectionately, as if assessing Ananda retrospectively from a vantage point in the future—“in their sense of pain.”

Ananda nodded, but not because he was in agreement with Mr.
Davidson. He was used to having his pain mocked, or overlooked. He knew how it felt to have his poems ignored or rejected (thus the polite note from
Encounter
, which he treasured, and the irritating lack of acknowledgement from the National Poetry Competition), but not slighted. Partly he stayed sanguine because Mr. Davidson had been so upbeat about his tutorial essays; this somewhat (but not wholly) compensated for his inability (what else could you call it?) to recognise the uniqueness of the tranquil, frozen records of loss that Ananda had given him. “Across the River” had come to Ananda strangely, and it owed nothing to Larkin or Eliot. He'd written it in a dream; the poem itself was dream-like. It described a boy—the narrator—trying desperately to swim across a river, possessed by some fierce but doomed urge to reach the other side. Having failed to do so (either the current's too strong, or the boy isn't an adept enough swimmer), he runs up and down the bank till, exhausted, he lies on the sand, staring at the stars. Ananda had eschewed all punctuation but the comma—twice, he'd left a blank space between one part of a line and another, to indicate a pause and a fresh beginning. Also, he'd dispensed with capital letters at the start of each line, and everywhere else for that matter. He believed he'd been able to pull this off without seeming childishly avant-garde; that he'd succeeded in turning this and the other poems he'd shown Nestor Davidson into frozen pieces of music. It was
viraha
—separation from the beloved, an idea important to Kalidas and later to the
bhakti
poets (for whom it resurfaced as Radha's perennial but unrequited longing for Krishna)—that he must have been trying to invoke. It was a concept unbeknownst to Ananda till he was seventeen; but, once he'd discovered it,
viraha
defined with more and more exactness the yearning he'd been carrying with him for years. The object of his desire was mostly an emanation rather than a specific person with a face and name (despite the fact that
he'd fallen in love with his cousin two years ago)—ah, it could even be a succession of names and faces, among whom, why not, even God could be included.

“And I'm sure you're not as
bloodthirsty
as this poem makes you seem,” smiled Mr. Davidson affably, clearly secure in the knowledge that Ananda wasn't capable of murder; now he was quoting Ananda's own lines back to him:
“ ‘and if she'd died by me, in such a way / my soul might have been satisfied.' ”

Affably? But wasn't he making fun of two of Ananda's most beautiful lines? Not cruelly, maybe; but not affably surely? This poem, along with “Across the River,” he'd produced in a stupor of emotion and attentiveness to the sound of words. Could Mr. Davidson, who'd been so receptive to the essays, really miss the poems' special quality? Was it because he was a fiction-writer, a different sort of beast to a poet? A novelist was about normalcy, wasn't he—and, despite his susceptibility to the reverberations of Wordsworth, Eliot, and Larkin, Mr. Davidson presented the face of normalcy, of sanity, did he not? He was one who'd outlasted the first terrible pangs of love. Ananda was not only always in their throes—he couldn't seriously believe that, one day, he wouldn't be. Only two weeks ago he'd reread Auden's introduction to Shakespeare's sonnets, smiling inwardly at Auden's tentativeness, as he asserted something in a qualified manner because he
knew
it was the truth: “Perhaps poets are more likely to experience it”—meaning “true love”—“than others, or become poets because they have.”
That
was getting it from the horse's mouth. Mr. Davidson was among those that Auden had discreetly categorised as the “others”; the non-poets. In the quote that Auden had then offered from Hannah Arendt (once more, the apologetic air: “Perhaps Hannah Arendt is right”), Ananda had
been startled to notice his own blurred but unmistakable likeness: “Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.” Wryly, he saw the pattern he was following, in committing a similar error with his tutor: it was no surprise, actually, that Mr. Davidson hadn't grasped what the poem was doing, since, of course, he was no devotee of that “indispensable experience.”

The poem Nestor Davidson had been gently ridiculing was a meditation on dawn (which Ananda was never up to see: all the better for his imagination and his faint memory, from childhood, of dawn's radiance); the poet is thinking of his imminent departure from his lover, while she sleeps. He'd like to hold on to that fleeting moment, as the light begins to enter the window, keep it as it is, impossibly unchanging; and this is what leads him to lyrically speculate on whether the death of his sleeping lover—because death and sleep are one—wouldn't arrest time and the day's progress; wouldn't cheat the inevitability of waking and parting. Mr. Davidson's response to Ananda's tranquil, sweetly tragic mood was a blunt instrument in that stillness.

“It's a difficult art,” said Mr. Davidson—now he was softly addressing himself rather than admonishing Ananda, the prose writer recalling (perhaps from experience) the mysterious pitfalls of poetry-writing. “But what you do have is a grasp of rhythm,” he said—not grudging, but fair. “It was
never
something I could master!” So he
had
had the experience then!—he'd given verse a go. How little Ananda knew of him—yet had reached out to him as at a straw. In a jacket photo from one of the early books, he'd been surprised to find Mr. Davidson—younger, with an unbelievable moustache—smoking, the careless spume drifting away from the face. Ananda wished he hadn't seen the picture, for its strangeness but also for its supercilious but fragile optimism. He'd never
caught Mr. Davidson smoking. He must have given it up, as he had the “difficult art”—or had he? Ananda decided to slip in a compliment—to prove he was superior to the little well-meaning jibes that Mr. Davidson had aimed at his poems, but also to get out of his system something he'd wanted to say.

“Thank you. By the way, I liked the stories in
No Place in the Sun
very much—they're very elegantly written.” There. It was done. Something was proved.

Mr. Davidson's expression changed in the summer-shadow that had alighted on the face: for less than a second, he looked haunted.

“That's
very
kind of you.” What did
this
smile, this expression mean? It was genuine happiness—held in check. “Your opinion means a lot to me.” Ananda had had no idea. “I'm glad.”

Ananda was glad too—a glow of satisfaction: to be regarded as an equal.
Means a lot to me
. He'd had no idea.

He hadn't been wholly truthful. Something was missing in the stories. What, it wasn't easy to put your finger on. Maybe it was their very craftedness that went against them, giving them the slightest hint of artificiality. But if that were really the case, the hint of the artificial was counter to the free-flowing, light style. Before he'd read the stories, it hadn't occurred to Ananda that South Africa could be written of like this—without overt politics and hand-wringing, as a landscape of sunlight, comedy, provincial drabness, and small existential dramas. Was this lack of politics a limitation: was it what made Mr. Davidson a relatively minor player? Ananda could not decide. Or was it what gave to the writing its freshness and agility? Clearly, Nestor Davidson was talented. Why wasn't he better known? Ananda seemed to have a knack for becoming friendly and populating his life with people who were gifted but hadn't had
proper recognition. Take his music teacher in Bombay, a remarkable singer ignored by the cognoscenti. Or his own mother, with her unique singing voice and style, of whom hardly anyone was aware. Or his mad uncle in Belsize Park, whom he called Rangamama—“colourful maternal uncle”—who shone so brightly in his youth and who Ananda's father said—quizzically, as if describing a condition—was a “genius,” but who'd imploded, arresting his own advancement. Was it something about the world, that promoted the second-rate and left the genuinely talented unrewarded; or was it something about Ananda, that he found success second-rate and spotted a gift in failures? Or—more disturbingly—was it that Ananda was gravitating towards these people; in doing so maybe even attempting to create a mirror-image; to, in some way, find himself? As for success…he must probe Mr. Davidson about his chances for the finals. For there was no guarantee he'd get a First.