Picked-Up Pieces (75 page)

Whence the underlying force? Why the attentive “provision for the advantage of the organism”? What do mindless mitochondria care about the “longest possible run”? How the “somehow”? Not that Dr. Thomas is obliged to solve all biological riddles, or that the teleological fallacy (as, say, Jacques Monod would view it) can be easily erased from language attempting to describe intricate phenomena. But Dr. Thomas’ celebration of symbiotic relationships does seem tinged by the antique notion of Providence, rechristened “luck”: “There may have been elements of luck in the emergence of chloroplasts.” “It is another illustration of our fantastic luck that oxygen filters out the very bands of
ultraviolet light that are most devastating for nucleic acids and proteins.” Without exactly stating that this is the best of all possible worlds, Dr. Thomas approaches a kind of biochemical Leibnizism. His willingness to see possibility where others see only doom is, like McLuhan’s, tonic and welcome. Yet his announcement that the adversary system is obsolete in nature feels premature. Every day, my well-fed cat brings as tribute to my back porch the mauled body of a field mouse or baby rabbit; one wonders how complacently the little corpses submitted to their part in our triune symbiosis. One does not have to live very close to nature to cringe at all the carnage and waste it contains. That our cells harbor useful aliens, that ants perform miracles of coöperation, that we are all more sensitive and permeable than we know—this is sheer observed fact, and provocative as such. On the other hand, Dr. Thomas’ shimmering vision of a “fusion around the earth” that will spring from “more crowding, more unrestrained and obsessive communication” seems less a prognosis than a hope defiant of much we
can
observe about our increasingly crowded, irritable, depleted, de-institutionalized, and cannibalistic world.

M
Y
D
AYS
, by R. K. Narayan. 186 pp. Viking, 1974.

The autobiography of a writer of fiction is generally superfluous, since he has already, in rearrangement and disguise, written out the material of his life many times. A novel like
The Man-Eater of Malgudi
, though its hero, Nataraj, and its author, Narayan, are not to be confused, tells us more about the India that R. K. Narayan inhabits, and more explicitly animates his opinion of what he sees, than his recent brief memoir,
My Days
. Not that Mr. Narayan’s mischievous modesty does not lend an agreeable tone to this account of his rather uneventful life. Nor are his delightful gifts of caricature entirely inhibited by factuality. In
My Days
, as in his novels, one meets men so absorbed in self-interest that they become grotesque and emblematic: the young Narayan, seeking employment, grooms himself smartly to meet a prospective employer, who comes onto his veranda “bare-bodied and glisten[ing] with an oil-coating, as he prepared himself for a massage; he blinked several times
to make me out, as oil had dripped over his eyes and blurred his vision.… All my best efforts at grooming were wasted, for I must have looked to him like a photograph taken with a shivering hand.” The man barks a rebuff of the boy, and then paces “like a greasy bear in its cage.” This sense of imprisonment within character, of each person energetically if ruinously fulfilling his dharma—his vocation, a Christian might say—reached its peak in English fiction with Dickens, and perhaps requires a religious basis. In the liberal view, character is significantly malleable, whereas the traditional character-creators fatalistically look into men for a fixed posture, an irrevocable passion. Narayan tells us that another uncle served as “an inescapable model for me—his approach to other human beings, his aggressive talk wherever he went, his dash and recklessness … his abandon to alcohol in every form all through the day. (I portrayed him as Kailas, in
The Bachelor of Arts
, and he provided all the substance whenever I had to portray a drunken character.)” Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of colorful teeming that Narayan’s fictional city of Malgudi conveys; its population is as sharply chiselled as a temple frieze, and as endless, with always, one feels, more characters around the corner.

Yet the creator’s life, as described in
My Days
, begins in loneliness. A little boy, living with his grandmother and uncle, has only pets for company, and the pets all die. He goes to school, and hates it. “On the first day I wept in fear. The sight of my classmates shook my nerves.” He cannot shape clay, and his slate is always smudged. Throughout his schooling, though he toughens into an athletic child of the streets, he remains difficult, intractable, uninspired. “I was opposed to the system of being prescribed a set of books by an anonymous soulless body of textbook-prescribers, and of being stamped good or bad as a result of such studies.… I liked to be free to read what I pleased and not be examined at all.” Taking his university entrance examinations, he flunks English—his best subject. And in the idle year this gives him, he begins to discover his own dharma—the vocation of a writer.

An aspect of this vocation, one feels after reading Mr. Narayan’s fascinating middle chapters, is to have no other. His interviews for employment in business are humorous disasters; his enrollment as a teacher in the school where his father had been headmaster, a plausible route to respectability, is sabotaged by Narayan himself with the manic pugnacity of one of his own characters. His chapter describing the regimented
foolishness of schoolteaching and his repeated escape from it approaches vehemence; the chapters following drop in emotional temperature, and trace a slow climb to success, contentment already achieved.

It speaks well, I think, of the Indian society of the early Thirties that it allowed, after due resistance, this prospectless young man’s rebellion against gainful employment; a contemporaneous American family might have driven such a child to France, or into bohemia—altogether out, in any case, of the home environment that has continuously nurtured Narayan’s creativity. Madras, where he was raised, and Mysore, where he came to live, spontaneously fostered a fictional city: “On a certain day in September, selected by my grandmother for its auspiciousness, I bought an exercise book and wrote the first line of a novel; as I sat in a room nibbling my pen and wondering what to write, Malgudi with its little railway station swam into view, all ready-made.…” This novel, under the title of
Swami and Friends
, was finally published in England.

The literary London of Shaw and Wells, Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, the
Strand
and the
Mercury
had been brought, via magazines subscribed to by his father’s school, into the center of Narayan’s boyhood, and colonial India abounded in English-language journalism, though of a threadbare sort. (This reviewer once had the opportunity to ask Mr. Narayan if present, nationalist India, which has discouraged the teaching
of English, would produce any more masters of the language like himself; his answer was affable but not affirmative.) In his first year of free-lance writing, Narayan earned nine rupees and twelve annas (about a dollar and a quarter); the second year, a short story sold for eighteen rupees; in the third, a children’s tale brought thirty. He labored as the Mysore correspondent for the Madras
Justice;
Graham Greene became his champion in England, and found a fresh publisher for each of his earlier novels, which were critical successes merely. The author married, and his beloved wife’s sudden death from typhoid, and his own slow recovery from sorrow via psychic communication with her, form the only significantly adverse incident in his gradual progress from journalistic piecework to international distinction, movie deals, and—crown of crowns—a travel grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In prosperity and fame, his imagination seems to work as fluently as when Malgudi with its railway station swam into view: “During my travels in America, the idea [of
The Guide
] crystallized in my mind. I stopped in Berkeley for three months, took a hotel room, and wrote my novel.”

Narayan’s few revelations about his practice of writing heighten the value of this memoir. His desire to write in English was born of an early infatuation with English novels, beginning with Scott and Dickens (“I … loved his London and the queer personalities therein”) and going on to the romanticism of Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli and Mrs. Henry Wood (“I looked for books that would leave me crushed at the end”). When he turned from mystical poems to his first novel, he let the incidents invent themselves: “Each day as I sat down to write, I had no notion of what would be coming. All that I could be certain of was the central character.” The tale-teller, that is, is nearer the tale-hearer, in his openness to surprise, than college instructors of plot mechanics may know. “The pure delight of watching a novel grow can never be duplicated by any other experience.” But Narayan’s fertility would be tedious without his control and economy; he goes on to describe how his days of pure delight were followed by nights of “corrections, revisions, and tightening up of sentences” so that a “real, final version could emerge … between the original lines and then again in what developed in the jumble of rewritten lines.” His one confessed doctrinal resolve, as he set out, was “to see if other subjects than love … could be written about. I wished to attack the tyranny of Love and see if Life could offer other values than the inevitable Man-Woman relationship to a writer.”
The predominantly masculine interplay of his novels develops, one feels, from street life, from the skein of casual and passing conversation that he alludes to lovingly more than once. His days of journalistic news-gathering no doubt reinforced his habit of sociable curiosity, but the impulse perhaps dates back to the time when, an only child in his grandmother’s house, he found it “exciting, one day, to be asked to go with my uncle to the street of shops.” His days as a writer customarily began with a walk:

Narayan is one of a vanishing breed—the writer as citizen. His citizenship extends to calling up municipal officials about inadequate street lighting, to “dashing off virulent letters to newspapers about corruption and inefficiency.” Such protests do not feel, as with so much American social consciousness, forced—a covert bid for power and self-justification. “If I have to worry, it’s about things outside me, mostly not concerning me.” What a wealth of material becomes accessible to a writer who can so simply proclaim a sense of community! We have writers willing to be mayor but not many excited to be citizens. We have writers as confessors, shackled to their personal lives, and writers as researchers, hanging their sheets of information from a bloodless story line. But of writers immersed in their material, and enabled to draw tales from a community of neighbors, Faulkner was our last great example. An instinctive, respectful identification with the people of one’s locale comes hard now, in the menacing cities or disposable suburbs, yet without it a genuine belief in the significance of humanity, in humane significances, comes not at all.

APPENDIX
One Big Interview