Life, death, and the gastronomic exploration of Ulysses

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” That’s how James Joyce introduced his protagonist for Ulysses in the second chapter of the novel. A novel where you have a prospective prediction and the retrospective view meeting: T.S. Eliot famously told Virginia Woolf sometime in the 1920s that with the 1922 publication of Ulysses Joyce destroyed the whole of the 20th Century. It’s widely regarded as the number one novel of the 20th Century.

The Modern Library put it at number 1 in the list of 100 top novels decided by a Board. Anthony Burgess of The Clockwork Orange fame said in the Observer, “Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the Century.” Ulysses like life is about everything and nothing. Put simply it is the story of a day. That simple reduction aside, it is an odyssey with chapter-to-chapter parallels to Homer’s The Odyssey, it is an epic about two races (Jews and Irish), it is about the cycles of a body, it is a cornucopia of personalities, it is exploration and inventiveness of language, and above all, it is an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies.

It holds up a mirror to the colonial capital that was Dublin on June 16, 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world that might be made over in terms of those utopian moments. The action unfolds in the early morning of June 16, 1904, and ends deep into the night (say 16 hours, 8 am to 2 pm). Joyce had met his future wife Nora Barnacle on that day and that was his way of dedicating something to her and June 16 is celebrated every year as Bloomsday. Every possible angle of Ulysses has been explored over the decades, especially the chapter-wise waltz with The Odyssey. Vladimir Nabokov mapped out the route that Stephen Dedalus, the hero from the previous novel The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Leopold Bloom take on that day while missing each other till the evening on the streets of Dublin. The pubs in Dublin are aplenty. It doesn’t then come as a surprise that a gastronomic tour of Ulysses was always there and a death might have informed many people about it. 

Scott Byrne wrote last Friday in The Guardian: “My father, David Byrne, who has died aged 78, was a restaurateur and hotelier who pioneered Bloomsday – the annual celebration of the life of James Joyce – as an epicurean festival. David was a man ahead of his time. In his approach to food, as to so much else in life, he followed the mantra to ‘keep it simple’. Whether his recipes were for lobster or offal, or a fresh green salad, they were always demonstrations of simple food, perfectly executed.”

David Byrne trained at the Shannon School of Hotel Management, a first-of-its-kind school in Ireland that also had a formative period of study in Zurich, Switzerland. His son remembers him as a natural and gifted host.

Ulysses has 18 chapters (episodes) and they are in accordance with the ones in Homer’s Odyssey. Starting with Telemachus and ending with Penelope.

The fourth chapter of Ulysses begins with Leopold Bloom making breakfast in the kitchen of the Blooms’ home at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom feeds the cat some milk, walks to Dlugacz’s butcher shop to buy a kidney for his breakfast. He returns home to Molly, who is still in bed; he eats his breakfast, then brings Molly’s breakfast to her (she is still in bed). The motif of food in the episode suggests a strong parallel between Bloom of “Calypso” and Stephen of “Telemachus,” the two episodes taking place at the same time.

 “In the 70s David married Deirdre Igoe, a tourist guide. After a brief stint in Hastings, East Sussex, they returned to Ireland with their young family and ran an outdoor catering business. Then in 1988, in the basement of our family home at 1 Martello Terrace in Sandycove, Co Dublin, they founded the South Bank restaurant. The restaurant commands a panoramic view of the Martello tower in which Joyce stayed for a few days in 1904 with his friend Oliver St John Gogarty. It is this Martello tower, now home to a James Joyce museum, that is immortalised as the early morning starting point for Leopold Bloom’s celebrated perambulation of Dublin in Joyce’s novel Ulysses.”

David and Deirdre saw a chance for the South Bank to be turned into a gastronomic event around Bloomsday. David got down to collating culinary references in Ulysses and came up with a Joycean breakfast menu of “nutty gizzards, urine-soaked kidneys and snot-green soup” to be relished as an alternative to sausage, bacon and eggs “by guests who were sewn up in Joycean costume and treated to readings from the novel, with Molly Bloom’s erotic soliloquy a memorable standout”.

Joyce once said that with me the thought is always simple but sometimes to get to the thought can be quite a journey. In Chapter 12, the action moves to a tavern where a new narrator appears talking about a man referred to as The Citizen. Anti-semitism comes out in the open and it is a very political chapter. However: the whole thing is told in the voice of someone else – saying to his friends at the pub later that night: “So let me told you what I saw today!!” He has a very distinctive voice, too – one of his phrases is “says I” – whenever he has spoken. Because he was part of the conversation with The Citizen and Bloom, he uses “says I” in almost every line of his story.

The writing of this episode is actually totally clear – it’s in a slang vernacular, Irish, but also very everyday language – not “literary”. What is Joyce up to? That’s not clear. Unless someone is handholding you, or you see. Little vertical slash marks all across the pages … I I I I I I I I I (eye eye eye eye eye eye eye eye) Cyclops’ eye is built into the text itself. You know it’s a new section because of how the text breaks up, and the change in style … but you have to figure out where you are in Homer’s epic. The episode is the parallel to the monstrous Cyclops episode. And so – the episode in Joyce’s book is filled with ‘I’. Also: that’s the reason it’s written in the first-person. In The Odyssey – Odysseus and the men escape. Odysseus got the Cyclops drunk – and then blinded him by shoving a hot stake through the Cyclops’ one eye. 

Simplicity and complexity: going hand in hand.

The Shiela Variations, an excellent blog with a robust Joyce section, does a Bloomsday post every June 16 and this is the back story.

On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, who was a waitress at Finn’s Hotel. Barnacle was from Galway and had moved to Dublin. The two had had a chance encounter on the street, where she had wondered aloud if he was Swedish, because of his blue eyes. When she told him her name, he said something about Ibsen (his inspiration and guiding star as an artist). Nora did not know who Ibsen was but she knew she liked this Jimmy with the blue eyes. He had asked her “out” – which, in Dublin, in those days, meant going for a walk. But on the appointed day, she didn’t show up. So on June 15, 1904, he sent her this note:

“60 Shelbourne Road

I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me — if you have not forgotten me!

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904”

The next day they met. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Joyce opens the novel in that tower with these words: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

–Introibo ad altare Dei.”

It ends with a 60-odd page—in the Penguin Modern Classics Edition—run-on sentence of Molly Bloom lying in bed. “…and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andulasian used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

This piece was first published for a dot-com that has, after my departure in a strange mix of thuggery and incompetence [Hard to call it plagiarism], removed my byline and given it to someone else. There are many such pieces [Mostly Spot Enterprise Stories] in the same boat, and I am going to preserve them in my own blog over the next few days.

Francis Bacon’s never exhibited first Screaming Pope on show at London’s Gagosian gallery

“Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist’s mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.“
Bacon, Francis.

British painter Francis Bacon’s first image of a screaming Pope—never been exhibited publicly—is due to go on show next week at Gagosian gallery in London. The papal image, known as Landscape with Pope/Dictator, will be displayed at Davies Street gallery in Mayfair from 15 March to 23 April.

The work, made in Monaco in 1946, depicts a figure in a traditional Catholic clergy cap and a shirt and tie, combining religious elements and sinister aspects from the artist’s fascination with Fascist dictators.

Francis Bacon’s Landscape with Pope/Dictator (around 1946)

On 19 October 1946, Bacon wrote to Duncan MacDonald, a director of the Lefevre Gallery in London: “I am working on three studies of Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent II [sic]. I have almost finished one. I find them exciting to do.” Bacon was fascinated by Velázquez, the leading 17th-century artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain.

According to the Sunday Times, the work was discovered by Martin Harrison as he compiled Bacon’s catalogue raisonné in 2016. Gagosian gallery says that Landscape with Pope/Dictator is not for sale.

Bacon’s inspirations and discoveries

The best commentaries on Bacon’s work are by Bacon himself in two series of interviews: with David Sylvester between 1962 and published in the later year, and with Archimbaud between October 1991 and April 1992. In both he speaks admiringly of Picasso, especially of the 1926-1932 period, the only one to which he feels truly close; he saw “an area there… which in a way has been unexplored, of organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it.” With this very precise remark, he defines the realm whose exploration is actually his alone.

Bacon never worked with the subject of the portrait sitting in his studio and he rarely painted strangers. He was fascinated by photography and by X-rays. “I’ve had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models… I couldn’t attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn’t know…” What is Bacon trying to tell us, what is he doing, and how is he able to achieve that. He gives another clue, “If my people look as if they’re in a dreadful fix, it’s because I can’t get them out of a technical dilemma.” He can’t paint strangers, he can do self-portraits and portraits of his friends or those he regularly drinks with. In the broader sense he says about his art, “I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail leaving its trail of the human presence… as a snail leaves its slime.” He paints people he knows as he understands them as human beings, so even if the brutal hand of the painter botches up the face the diamond lying underneath is still recognisable, the precious nugget, the self of the subject.

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera said while talking about Bacon’s portraits: “Looking at Bacon’s portraits, I am amazed that, despite their ‘distortion’, they all look like their subject. But how can an image look like a subject of which it is consciously, programmatically, a distortion? And yet it does look like the subject; photos of the persons portrayed bear that out; and even if I did not know those photos, it is clear that in all the triptychs, the various deformations of the face resemble one another, so that one recognises in them the same person. However ‘distorted’, these portraits are faithful. That is what I find miraculous.”

The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.” But Bacon maintained that he was simply a realist and did not aim to shock. “You can’t be more horrific than life itself,” he was fond of saying.

“In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough…’ . Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, fill up, elaboration considered to be technical necessity. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with ‘filler’, do away with whatever comes from habit, from technical routine, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say).”

So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are super-simple, flat colour; but: in the foreground, the bodies are treated with the richness of colours and form that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearean) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat colour background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if ‘put on a diet’, as if diminished, and for Bacon the issue always and above all is beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems nowadays to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.

And that is why he is irritated by the word ‘horror’ that is persistently applied to his painting. Tolstoy said to Leonid Andreyev and of his tales of terror: ‘He is trying to frighten me, but I’m not scared’. Nowadays there are too many paintings trying to frighten us, and they annoy us instead. Terror is not an aesthetic sensation, and the horror found in Tolstoy’s novels is never there to frighten us; the harrowing scene in which they operate on the mortally wounded Andrei Bolkonsky without anaesthesia is not lacking in beauty; as no scene in Shakespeare lacks it; as no picture by Bacon lacks it. Butcher shops are horrible, but speaking of them, Bacon does not neglect to remark that, “for a painter, there is this great beauty of the colour of meat.”

When Archimbaud asks Bacon which contemporary artists are important to him, he says: “After Picasso I don’t really know. There’s an exhibition of pop art at the Royal academy at the moment… [But] when you see all those pictures collected together, you do not see anything. To me there is nothing in it, it’s empty, completely empty’. And Warhol. He isn’t important to me.’ And abstract art? Oh no, he doesn’t like it.

Three Studies of Lucian Freud

Bacon commands a very high price. His Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold at Christie’s New York in 2013 for $142.4 million—the highest auction prize of a work of art at that time. Bacon, a devout atheist, made more than 40 portraits of popes over a 20-year period.

That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which in past times concentrated within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a mere physiological scandal. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death…’

To link Jesus nailed to the cross with slaughterhouses and an animal’s fear might seem sacrilegious. But Bacon is a non-believer, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, “Man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.” Seen from the angle, Jesus is that accident who, without reason, played out the game. The cross: the final point of the game played out to the end without reason.

No, not sacrilege; rather a clearsighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze that tries to penetrate to the essential. And what essential thing is revealed when all the social dreams have evaporated and man sees “religious possibilities… completely cancelled out for him”? The body. Only ecce homo, visible, touching, concrete. For “Certainly we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”

This is neither pessimism nor despair, it is only obvious fact, but a fact that is veiled by our membership in a collectivity that blinds us with its dreams, its excitements, its projects, its illusions, its struggles, its causes, its religions, its ideologies, its passions. And then one day the veil falls and we are left stranded with the body, at the mercy of the body.

Sources: Encounter by Milan Kundera and Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester

Journalism’s Ethical Paradox: The Canker at the Heart of the Rose

 “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer.

The long shadow looming over The Journalist and the Murderer was from Malcolm’s previous work ‘In the Freud Archives’ for which she was sued by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson—the defamation suit dragged on for years before a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. Malcolm’s pieces were first published as two-part essays in The New Yorker and later as non-fiction books by Knopf. The reportage is classic Malcolm, facts and characteristically rich observations, a classic yet unique style where reportage of the subject-matter is also rooted in the specificity of the clock, dates, and the atmosphere—Malcolm makes it a point to describe whether an interview, a double check, or a chance encounter leading to a new discovery takes place in a dimly lit, dingy basement office or in a snowed under New York park.

The press response to The Journalist and the Murderer was split between puzzled indignation and defensive fury. The indignation was encapsulated by John Taylor in a New York magazine broadside headlined ‘Houlier Than Thou’. The defensive fury was completely off-centre as in dozens of pieces for various publications writers enumerated names of journalists they knew who had excellent ethics and a New York Times editorial writer took umbrage at Malcolm’s “sweeping indictment of all journalists.” Fred Friendly, the renowned broadcaster, took up this theme the next year [1990] in his review of the book. Convinced that Malcolm was trying to put her finger on “what ails journalism,” he complained that her conclusion that “all journalists are guilty” was “distorted by a crabbed vision of the profession and her own place in it.” Of course not. The Journalist and the Murderer is not an attack on the ethics of journalists it engages with the central problem of the profession—the fraught relationship between the subject and the journalist. The journalist-subject relationship, like the analyst-patient relationship, is fraught with “abnormality, contradictoriness, and strain,” but—in a further paradox—these disquieting qualities are what give it its value. Just as therapeutic progress is predicated on the mutual miseries of the transference, “the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism” is what, in Malcolm’s view, “gives journalism its authenticity and vitality.” And she capped her argument with a zinger: “Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

“Malcolm is hard on her subjects. Why is she so hard on these people? I think it has something to do with a blurring of the line between reportage and criticism… Malcolm loves purists. Her heroes, Freud not least among them, rigidly refuse compromise, sometimes badly to their own detriment. She nods approvingly, in a review of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” at Milan Kundera’s observation that “none among us is superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” Yet she has remorseless radar for the kitsch in her subjects’ lives, and she uses it against them.“

The elusiveness of truth, the paucity of the means [therapeutic, journalistic, biographical] we pursue it with, and the unreliability of narrative—the stories we tell to pin it down, which are always incomplete and [consciously or otherwise] self-serving—underlie nearly all of Malcolm’s writing. The psychoanalytic books pose the narrativising consciousness against the Aleph of the unconscious; “The Journalist and the Murderer” and “The Silent Woman” are about conflicting narratives. Having explored the therapeutic, journalistic and biographical avenues by which we try, however futilely, to make our muddled way to truth, with the 1999 published “The Crime of Sheila McGough” she took up the even more inadequate legal one.

But Sheila is a recalcitrant heroine. Unlike Jeffrey Masson, a fountain of eloquence before whom all a journalist needed to do was park herself and turn on the tape, Sheila spoke in the “guileless and incontinent” drone of the bore who has to recount every last detail of an excruciatingly tangled story:

“I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more irritating subject. I know I have never before behaved so badly to a subject. I have never before interrupted, lost patience with, spoken so unpleasantly to a subject as I have to Sheila–to my shame and vexation afterward. I have never before dreaded calling a subject on the telephone as I have dreaded calling Sheila. To my simplest question she would give an answer of such relentless length and tediousness and uncomprehending irrelevance that I could almost have wept with impatience. I took notes of these phone calls, and among them I have found little cries of despair. One of them was: “Help, help! I’m trapped talking to Sheila. She won’t stop. Save me.”

What she sees when she looks at her heroine is “the impossible purity of her position,” and it makes Sheila “rather magnificent.” At last — an honest woman! A lunatic, granted, but a truthful one.

And not only that. I don’t think there can be any doubt that Malcolm’s affection for Sheila owes a great deal to her identification with a fellow purist who bollixed her career while acting under the delusion that she was sticking to the straight and narrow. Of Sheila’s trial she writes, “It was like one of those nightmares of guilt, where everyone you have ever known has gathered to accuse you of wrongdoing.” Notice the universalizing second person; she might as well have used the first, having suffered this nightmare herself, not just in her humiliating trial but, more bewilderingly, in the press crusade against her that left her in the minds of many, as she wryly phrased it, “a kind of fallen woman of journalism.” This been-there empathy lies behind her bitter observation, in “Sheila McGough,” that

in a sense, everyone who is brought to trial, criminal or civil, is framed. For while the law speaks of a presumption of innocence, it knows full well that the accused is weighed down under a burden extremely difficult to get out from under. The deck is stacked against the accused. An accusation has enormous psychological clout. Once someone is accused of a crime or misdeed, he begins to burn with a kind of radioactivity. The story of wrongdoing that the prosecutor or the plaintiff’s lawyer tells the jury is a fleshing out of the jury’s preconception. The task of the defense is not to clear the accused [that is impossible; it is too late for that] but to attack the accusers — to show that the plaintiff or the government’s witnesses are even worse than the accused.

“Judging from the outcome of the libel trial and from their later careers, it seems safe to say [but “safe” is dicey — you have to take account of my own bias, which should be clear by now] that the plaintiff in Masson v. Malcolm came out looking worse than the defendant,” writer Craig Seligman wrote in a long piece covering Malcolm’s work and the conflicts she got embroiled in till end-February 2000.

Decades later, all that has changed and The Journalist and the Murderer is for many years now in a standard reading list if not in the course for American journalism students. Her 10-plus provocative books, including The Journalist and the Murderer, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, In the Freud Archives, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, are ­simultaneously beloved, demanding, scholarly, flashy, careful, bold, high­brow, and controversial. Many people have pointed out that her writing, which is often called journalism, is in fact some other wholly original form of art, some singular admixture of reporting, biography, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century novel—English and Russian both. 

Malcolm was born in prewar Prague in 1934 and the family of secular Jews got out of Europe just in time in 1939. Her father was, not surprisingly, a psychiatrist. She met her first husband Donald Malcolm in the University of Michigan. He contributed to The New Yorker on theater and book criticisms–with whom she eventually separated–from the late 1950s to his early death in 1975. In the 1960s she began writing for The New Yorker on interior decoration, Christmas shopping, and what was then considered to be ‘the woman’s space’. In the mid-1970s, she married her editor at the magazine Gardner Botsford—a legend in his own right at The New Yorker and belonging to a wealthy family that had funded Harold Ross’ original New Yorker. By then she had found her mature voice and was writing about photography. She devoted two of the 12 articles collected in her first book, “Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography” (1980), to the portrait master Richard Avedon. “Avedon does not try to make people look bad,” she writes; “he simply doesn’t do anything to make them look good … Avedon’s pictures of men without props present an unpalatable truth. They show us that we are ugly creatures.” If that passage weren’t dated 1975–several years before Malcolm began her own series of great, cruel portraits–she might have been writing about herself.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills came out on April 26, 2011 in The New Yorker with the small strap saying Anatomy of a Murder Trial. The stellar work of Malcolm began when she is in her late forties and she would have been 76 or 77 when Iphigenia in Forest Hills was published. Unlike the book on Shiela where the narrative falters as the ins and outs of the case are impossible to capture by someone who relates too much, this one is a taut exceptional account of a trial where a woman is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her husband—a long ongoing divorce was the backdrop and the custody of a baby girl Michelle was a thorny subject with charged in-laws from both sides. Malcolm pursued even after the case and did two pieces for the New York Review of Books on Michelle [The child was removed from the grandparents’ house and sent to foster care] in November and December of 2012—What happened to Michelle in Forest Hills? and Michelle: Surviving in a Fixed World.

The start, like all good writers, is what Malcolm has expressed is the most important and difficult part. “If you don’t have a start, you don’t have anything.” Once that is there, everything falls in place. Alluding to Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Aleph,” in which the storyteller goes down into a cellar where he experiences a vision of everything in the world, Malcolm comments, “Writer’s block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is ‘running through his mind,’ and to accept that it may not—cannot—be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood.” The problem, she goes on, is narrative itself, for narrative, in being of necessity selective, is always incomplete and thus never wholly true.

She starts the complicated murder trial in the most simple manner: “At around three in the afternoon on March 3, 2009, in the fifth week of the trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova—a thirty-five-year-old physician accused of murdering her husband—the judge turned to Borukhova’s attorney, Stephen Scaring, and asked a pro-forma question. “Do you have anything else, Mr. Scaring?” The trial was winding down. Two defense witnesses had just testified to Borukhova’s good character, and Scaring was expected to rest his case with their modest, believable testimony. Scaring replied, without any special emphasis, “Yes, Your Honor. I think Dr. Borukhova will testify in her own defense.

There was no immediate reaction in the half-filled courtroom on the third floor of Queens Supreme Court, in Kew Gardens. Only after Borukhova had walked to the witness stand and taken the oath did the shock of Scaring’s announcement register. The mouth of one of the spectators—that of the victim’s younger brother—fell open, as if to mime the astonishment that ran through the room.”

There is such brilliance in Malcolm’s writing and reportage that part of a paragraph, a metaphor, an observation or some essence stays with the reader even years after reading any of her works. I was searching for an essence that had stayed with me some eight years after reading the long-form piece but I remembered no special word or phrase to search for it in the document before I stumbled upon it. It was at the end of a conversation and I intend to give the details that Malcolm recorded before coming to it.

“As time went on, though, when lunchtime came I found myself gravitating toward a bench in a corridor off the courthouse lobby, where I waited for a woman named Alla Lupyan-Grafman. She was the Russian-speaker who sat at the defense table throughout the trial as a court-appointed interpreter for the defendants. Both defendants spoke English—Borukhova in particular had no need of an interpreter—but the court had made the appointment to be on the safe side, to insure that no issue of language interfered with the smooth whirring of the wheels of justice. Alla was a slender, stylishly dressed, exceptionally friendly woman in her late forties, with a mane of curly platinum-blond hair, with whom, by the end of the trial, every lawyer, court officer, journalist, and even some spectators were on ecstatic hugging terms. She, too, was an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, but not a Bukharan; she was an Ashkenazi Jew from Minsk.

…….Alla had a complaint of her own about the Bukharans—a linguistic one. She said that the older generation had never learned proper Russian, even though it was an official language under the Soviets. When Khaika Malakov testified—with an interpreter simultaneously translating—she was highly critical of his Russian. She was uncritical of Borukhova’s Russian—and she was sympathetic to Borukhova herself. She and I offered each other tastes of the sandwiches and fruit we had brought from home, and struggled with the enigma of the case: she couldn’t have done it and she must have done it.

Katie Roiphe in her interview of Malcolm for The Paris Review, perhaps the only journalist to be interviewed by the nonpareil literary quarterly, says: “No living writer has narrated the drama of turning the messy and meaningless world into words as brilliantly, precisely, and analytically as Janet Malcolm. Whether she is writing about biography or a trial or psychoanalysis or Gertrude Stein, her story is the construction of the story, and her ­influence is so vast that much of the writing world has begun to think in the charged, analytic terms of a Janet Malcolm passage. She takes apart the official line, the accepted story, the court transcript like a mechanic takes apart a car engine, and shows us how it works; she narrates how the stories we tell ourselves are made from the vanities and jealousies and weaknesses of their players. This is her obsession, and no one can do it on her level. Personally, though, she exhibits none of the flamboyance of her prose.”

Someone who likes to stay in the background would hardly write an autobiography although Malcolm gave it a wonderful try with a small piece called Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography. I quote the last paragraph of the four-paragraph piece:

Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which journalists habitually, almost mechanically, fall when they write. The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendent. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.

Seligman was, as it has proved subsequently, on the mark when he wrote that: “As much as Malcolm may think she hates the spotlight—she almost never gives interviews [The rare exceptions are rare]—on the page she is helplessly forthcoming, a peculiarity that goes some way toward explaining why the issue of privacy [“life’s most precious possession,” she calls it in her New Yorker essay on Chekhov] runs through her work like a nerve.”  

It was a different time, a different game, and a different manner of upholding journalistic ethics. These days the time in front of the camera and causing a flutter on Twitter everyday seems more important for journalism’s ‘big guns‘ than their hopelessly non-forthcoming work on the page.

[Based largely on a 2000 essay on Janet Malcolm by Craig Seligman and the Spring 2011 issue of The Paris Review plus my inputs from having been her reader for over over a decade]

Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom

One of the freedom that comes with a free blog is to post articles by other people that are illuminating and entertaining. This is one such piece on the 19th Century master Fyodor Dostoevsky. While working on Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky said: “I’m convinced that not one of our writers, past or living, wrote under the conditions in which I constantly write. Turgenev would die from the very thought. But if you only knew how distressing it is to spoil an idea that has been born in you, made you enthusiastic, of which you know that it’s good–and to be forced to spoil it consciously!”—–[Letters II, pp. 200-1]

In his Introduction for Wordsworth Classics Keith Carbine said: “Dostoevsky’s boastful lament in June 1866 as he struggled to keep up with the serialisation of Crime and Punishment in the Russian Herald, is, I think, both understated and inaccurate: no writer in the history of literature composed such a great book under such appalling ‘conditions’. That summer, as he explains in the same letter, he was in a terrible state because the previous year, desperate for ready cash in order to ward off the ever-present threat of debtor’s prison, he had accepted three thousand roubles from an unscrupulous publisher, Stellovsky, on conditions that he wrote ‘a novel of no fewer than than twelve signatures to be published by him, and if I don’t deliver it by November 1, 1866 [the last deadline] he, Stellovsky, is allowed to publish, free, as he pleases, anything I write, without any remuneration for me at all’ [Letters II, p 200]. He escaped this ugly deal by a hair’s breadth because of a wonderful stroke of luck–on October 4 he hired a 17-year-old stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna, to whom he dictated The Gambler [for Stellovsky] and the last episodes of Crime and Punishment and who soon became his loyal and devoted wife.

Gary Saul Morson

On the political and moral lessons of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.

Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment.

The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison—thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)—changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed.

At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up.

People do not live by bread—or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”—alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. “It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,” he wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “that evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been . . . and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges” except God Himself.

Dostoevsky’s characters astonish by their complexity. Their unpredictable but believable behaviour reminds us of experiences beyond the reach of “scientific” theories. We appreciate that people, far from maximizing their own advantage, sometimes deliberately make victims of themselves in order, for example, to feel morally superior. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Father Zosima observes that it can be very pleasant to take offense, and Fyodor Pavlovich replies that it can even be positively distinguished.

People are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.

In fact, people harm themselves for many reasons. They tear at their own wounds and derive a peculiar pleasure from doing so. They deliberately humiliate themselves. To their own surprise, they experience impulses stemming from resentments long suppressed and, as a result, create scandalous scenes or commit horrible crimes. Freud particularly appreciated Dostoevsky’s exploration of the dynamics of guilt. But neither Freud nor most Western readers have grasped that Dostoevsky intended his descriptions of human complexity to convey political lessons. If people are so surprising, so “undefined and mysterious,” then social engineers are bound to cause more harm than good.

The narrator of The House of the Dead describes how prisoners sometimes, for no apparent reason, suddenly do something highly self-destructive. They may attack a guard, even though the punishment—running a gauntlet of thousands of blows—usually proves fatal. Why? The answer is that the essence of humanness lies in the possibility of surprise. The behavior of material objects can be fully explained by natural laws, and for materialists the same is true of people, if not yet, then in the near future. But people are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.

The whole point of prison, as Dostoevsky experienced it, is to restrict people’s ability to make their own choices. But choice is what makes us human. Those prisoners lash out because of their ineradicable craving to have a will of their own, and that craving is ultimately more important than their own well-being and, indeed, than life itself.

The nameless narrator of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground [usually called “the underground man”] insists that the aspiration of social sciences to discover the iron laws of human behaviour threatens to reduce people to “piano keys or organ stops.” If such laws exist, if “some day they truly discover a formula for all our desires and caprices,” he reasons, then each person will realize that “everything is done by itself according to the laws of nature.” As soon as those laws are discovered, people will no longer be responsible for their actions. What’s more,

All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000. . . . there would be published certain edifying works like the present encyclopedia lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and designated that there will be no more . . . adventures in the world. . . . Then the crystal palace [utopia] will be built.

There will be no more adventures because adventures involve suspense, and suspense entails moments that are truly momentous: depending on what one does, more than one outcome is possible. But for a determinist, the laws of nature ensure that at any given moment only one thing can happen. Suspense is just an illusion resulting from ignorance of what must be.

If so, then all agonies of choice are pointless. So are guilt and regret, since both emotions depend on the possibility that we could have done something else. We experience what we must, but we accomplish nothing. As Tolstoy expressed the point in War and Peace, “If we concede that human life can be [exhaustively] governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed.”

“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense.”

The supposedly “scientific” view of humanity turns people into objects—literally dehumanizes them—and there can be no greater insult. “All my life I have been offended by the laws of nature,” the underground man wryly observes, and concludes that people will rebel against any denial of their humanness. They will engage in what he calls “spite,” action undertaken “just because,” for no reason except to show they can act against their own advantage and contrary to whatever so-called laws of human psychology predict.

“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense, that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.” Dostoevsky denied being a psychologist because he, unlike practitioners of this science, acknowledged that people are truly agents, who make real choices for which they can properly be held responsible. No matter how thoroughly one describes the psychological or sociological forces that act on a person, there is always something left over—some “surplus of humanness,” as the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin paraphrased Dostoevsky’s idea. We cherish that surplus, “the man in man” as Dostoevsky called it, and will defend it at all costs.

A passage in Notes from Underground looks forward to modern dystopian novels, works like Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920–21) or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where heroes rebel against guaranteed happiness. They want their lives to be their own. Put man in utopia, the underground man observes, and he will devise “destruction and chaos,” do something perverse, and, if given the chance, return to the world of suffering. In short, “the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it.”

In an essay ostensibly devoted to the Russian craze for séances and communication with demons, Dostoevsky addresses the skeptical objection that since these devils could easily prove their existence by giving us some fabulous inventions, they couldn’t exist. They are just a fraud perpetrated on the gullible. With tongue in cheek, Dostoevsky replies that this argument fails because devils (that is, if there are devils) would foresee the hatred people would eventually feel towards the resulting utopia and the devils who enabled it.

To be sure, people would at first be ecstatic that, “as our socialists dream,” all needs were satisfied, the “corrupting [social] environment, once the source of all flaws,” had vanished, and there was nothing more to wish for. But within a generation,

People would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality. . . . they would see that their human image had disappeared . . . that their lives had been taken away for the sake of bread, for “stones turned into bread.” People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that the mind which does not labor will wither, that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one’s labor . . . and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it.

Or as the underground man observes, social engineers imagine a world that is “completed,” a perfect finished product. In fact, “an amazing edifice of that type” already exists: “the anthill.” The anthill became Dostoevsky’s favorite image of socialism.

Humanness, as opposed to formicness, requires not just product but process. Effort has value only when it can fail, while choices matter only if the world is vulnerable and depends in part on our doing one thing rather than another. Ants do not make choices. “With the anthill, the respectable race of ants began and with the anthill they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance and staidness. But man is a frivolous creature, and perhaps, like a chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end itself.”

When you multiply two by two the result is always the same: there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no surprise. 

Perhaps, the underground man reasons, “the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in the incessant process of attaining, or in other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which, of course, must always be ‘twice two makes four,’ that is, a formula, and after all, twice two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.” When you multiply two by two the result is always the same: there is no suspense, no uncertainty, no surprise. You don’t have to wait and see what those multiplying digits will come up with this time. If life is like that, it is senseless. In a paroxysm of angry wit, the underground man famously concludes:

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a fop standing with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.

In the same spirit, a character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1869) remarks: “Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was not happy when he had discovered America, but while he was discovering it. It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, and not the discovery itself.”

People are always in the making or, as Bakhtin expressed the point, they are “unfinalizable.” They retain the capacity “to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word.”

Ethics demands that we treat people as people, not as objects, and that means we must treat them as endowed with “surprisingness.” One must never be too certain about others, collectively or individually. In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha explains to Lise that the impoverished and humiliated Captain Snegiryov, who in his pride has refused a large sum of money offered him, will certainly take it if offered again. Having saved his human dignity, he will surely accept the gift he so badly needs. Lise replies:

Listen, Alexey Fyodorovich. Isn’t there in all our analysis . . . aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In being so certain that he will take the money?

Dostoevsky understood not only our need for freedom but also our desire to rid ourselves of it. Freedom comes with a terrible cost, and social movements that promise to relieve us of it will always command a following. That is the theme of the most famous pages Dostoevsky ever wrote, “The Grand Inquisitor,” a chapter in Karamazov. The intellectual Ivan narrates his unwritten “poem” in prose to his saintly brother Alyosha to explain his deepest anxieties.

Set in Spain during the Inquisition, the story opens with the Grand Inquisitor burning heretics in an auto-da-fé. As the flames scent air already rich with laurel and lemon, the people, like sheep, witness the terrifying spectacle with cowed reverence. It has been fifteen centuries since Jesus promised to return quickly, and they yearn for some sign from Him. With His infinite pity, He decides to show Himself to them. Softly, silently, He moves among them, and they recognize Him at once. “That might be one of the best passages in the poem, I mean, how they recognized Him,” Ivan remarks with wry self-deprecation. How do they know he is not an imposter? The answer is that when you see divine goodness, it is so beautiful that one cannot doubt.

The Inquisitor also knows who the stranger is—and promptly orders his arrest! Christ’s vicar arrests Him! Why? And why do the guards obey and the people not resist? We learn the answer to these questions when the Inquisitor visits the Prisoner in His cell and unburdens his heart to him.

Dmitri remarks: “Man is broad, too broad; I’d have him narrower!”

Throughout human history, the Inquisitor explains, two views of life and human nature have contended with each other. Each changes its name and specific dogmas to suit time and place, but remains the same in essence. One view, which the Inquisitor rejects, is Jesus’s: human beings are free and goodness has meaning only when freely chosen. The other view, maintained by the Inquisitor, is that freedom is an insufferable burden because it leads to endless guilt, regret, anxiety, and unresolvable doubts. The goal of life is not freedom, but happiness, and to be happy people must rid themselves of freedom and adopt some philosophy claiming to have all the answers. The third Karamazov brother, Dmitri, has remarked: “Man is broad, too broad; I’d have him narrower!,” and the Inquisitor would ensure human happiness by “narrowing” human nature.

Medieval Catholicism speaks in the name of Christ, but in fact it represents the Inquisitor’s philosophy. That is why the Inquisitor has arrested Jesus and intends to burn him as the greatest of heretics. In our time, Dostoevsky makes clear, the Inquisitor’s view of life takes the form of socialism. As with medieval Catholicism, people surrender freedom for security and trade the agonies of choice for the contentment of certainty. In so doing, they give up their humanness, but the bargain is well worth it.

To explain his position, the Inquisitor retells the Biblical story of Jesus’s three temptations, a story that, in his view, expresses the essential problems of human existence as only a divine intelligence could. Could you imagine, he asks rhetorically, that if those questions had been lost, any group of sages could have re-created them?

In the Inquisitor’s paraphrase, the devil first demands:

Thou wouldst go into the world . . . with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity . . . cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing has even been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep.

Jesus answers: “man does not live by bread alone.” Just so, the Inquisitor replies, but that is why Jesus should have accepted the devil’s temptation. People do indeed crave the meaningful, but they can never be sure they distinguish the truly meaningful from its counterfeits. That is why they persecute nonbelievers and try to convert or conquer nations of a different faith, as if universal agreement were itself a proof. There is only one thing that no one can doubt: material power. When we suffer great pain, that, at least, is indubitable. In other words, the appeal of materialism is spiritual! People accept it because it is certain.

“Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”

Instead of making people happy by taking away the burden of freedom, the Inquisitor reproaches Jesus, You increased it! “Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” People want to call themselves free, not to be free, and so, the Inquisitor reasons, the right course is to call unfreedom freedom of a higher kind, as socialists, of course, usually do.

To make people happy, one must banish all doubt. People do not want to be presented with information that, as we would say today, contradicts their “narrative.” They will do anything to preclude unwanted facts from coming to their attention. The plot of Karamazov, in fact, turns on Ivan’s desire not to admit to himself that he desires his father’s death. Without allowing himself to realize it, he makes the wished-for murder possible. One cannot begin to understand either individual people or society unless one grasps the many forms of what might be called preventive epistemology.

The devil next tempts Jesus to prove His divinity by casting Himself down from a high place so God will save him by a miracle, but Jesus refuses. The reason, according to the Inquisitor, is to show that faith must not be based on miracles. Once one witnesses a miracle, one is so overawed that doubt is impossible, and that means faith is impossible. Properly understood, faith does not resemble scientific knowledge or mathematical proof, and it is nothing like accepting Newton’s laws or the Pythagorean theorem. It is possible only in a world of uncertainty, because only then can it be freely chosen.

For the same reason, one should behave morally not to be rewarded, whether in this world or the next, but simply because it is the right thing to do. Behaving morally to earn a heavenly reward transforms goodness into prudence, like saving for retirement. To be sure, Jesus performed miracles, but if you believe because of them, then—despite what many churches say—you are not a Christian.

Finally the devil offers Jesus the empire of the world, which He rejects, but, according to the Inquisitor, should have accepted. The only way to keep people from doubt, he tells Jesus, is by miracle, mystery (just believe us, we know), and authority, which universal empire would ensure. Only a few strong people are capable of freedom, the Inquisitor explains, so your philosophy condemns the overwhelming portion of humanity to misery. And so, the Inquisitor chillingly concludes, we “have corrected Thy work.”

In The Possessed (1871), Dostoevsky predicts with astonishing accuracy what totalitarianism would be in practice. In Karamazov he asks whether the socialist idea is good even in theory. The revolutionaries in The Possessed are despicable, but the Inquisitor, on the contrary, is entirely selfless. He knows that he will go to hell for corrupting Jesus’s teaching, but he is willing to do so out of love for humanity. In short, he betrays Christ for Christian reasons! Indeed, he outdoes Christ, who gave his earthly life, by sacrificing his eternal life. Dostoevsky sharpens these paradoxes as much as possible. With his unmatched intellectual integrity, he portrays the best possible socialist while elucidating arguments for socialism more profoundly than real socialists ever did.

Would you choose to surrender all choice in exchange for a guarantee of happiness?

Alyosha at last exclaims: “your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of him, as you meant it to be!” Since all the arguments have come from the Inquisitor, and Jesus has uttered not a word in response, how can that be? Ask yourself: having heard the Inquisitor’s arguments, would you choose to surrender all choice in exchange for a guarantee of happiness? Would you have everything decided for you by some wise substitute for parents and remain a perpetual child? Or is there something higher than mere contentment? I have asked my students this question for years, and none has agreed to accept the Inquisitor’s bargain.

We live in a world where the Inquisitor’s way of thinking grows increasingly attractive. Social scientists and philosophers assume that people are simply complicated material objects, no more capable of genuine surprise than the laws of nature are capable of suspending themselves. Intellectuals, ever more certain that they know how to achieve justice and make people happy, find the freedom of others an obstacle to human well-being. For Dostoevsky, by contrast, freedom, responsibility, and the potential for surprise define the human essence. That essence makes possible everything of value. The human soul is “so little known, so obscure to science, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges,” only unfinalizable people under the God who made them free.

[Link to the original piece in The New Criterion]

Roland Vernon on Krishnamurti at Brockwood Park

It was Roland Vernon’s biography that was the backbone for my two-part essay on Jiddu Krishnamurti for The Times of India. Star in the East was Vernon’s first non-fiction biography for adults and it is an amazing achievement keeping in mind that there were several biographies on Krishnamurti before his came out. His three subsequent novels are A Dark Enchantment, The Maestro’s Voice, and The Good Wife’s Castle and the plots are fascinating. This talk at the Krishnamurti Centre in Brockwood Park was sent just for my interest recently by Vernon and I thought it would be great to have it online for people who have a more than passing interest in the life of Krishnamurti.

Brockwood Park School

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Founded by educator philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, in 1969, Brockwood Park School is an international boarding school for 14-19 year olds, in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. It provides an holistic education for around 75 students and is the only school of its kind in Europe.

Brockwood Park talk for 2^nd June 2019

I’m here today to talk about Krishnamurti in a historical context, because it was the story above anything else that attracted me to the subject. When I decided to write my book, I had no intention of offering a commentary on his teachings, because a book like that would be a pale shadow beside the teachings themselves; but the story – its huge timespan, its canvas of characters and territories, its bridging of a sepia-tinted old world with the modern, computer-driven age, its scent of mystery, its leaps of faith, its whispered hints of supernatural entities at work, its saints and occasional villains; and its narrative pull, centred on a man who dedicated his long life, without respite, to what was a consistently articulated mission to bring about radical change in the world and save mankind – this was romance, I thought, of a breath-taking nature.

And I had to do something different to what had been done before. Previous biographers (with one notable exception) had been personal friends or sworn devotees, and it became clear that in order to contribute something original and impartial I might have to risk stepping on a few toes. There were certain individuals, including some of my sources, whose blinkered defence of Krishnamurti’s memory bordered on the kind of discipleship that he spent his life rejecting. Not that I had any intention of doing a hatchet job, but I sought to allow clear daylight and fresh air into some rooms that had been boarded up too long. Most particularly, I wanted to do justice to the remarkable events and machinations that underpinned his early years, which, I believed, most certainly did affect the rest of his life, even though he later claimed to have forgotten them and that they were an irrelevance. He had good reason to do this because that early life was so dazzling and sensational, it would inevitably interfere with a modern audience’s ability to focus on the important things he had to say, here and now. Yet, a detached and historical perspective of the story showed that, despite the passage of time, the changes in the cast of characters and the transformation of the world in which he lived, Krishnamurti departed the public stage in 1986, not so very different in message or profile to the man he had been sixty years earlier – as a teacher of the world, or, dare I use the term, the World Teacher, one who, to quote words of those who first presented him to the public, when just a boy, would ‘be able to work for the good of humanity, and to pour out at these levels influence which otherwise could not descend thereto.’ What attracted me to Krishnamurti’s story was not the saintly end product, but the tenacity and consistency that he displayed over such an extraordinarily long period of time. And I maintain that this single mission, to which he dedicated his entire life, evolved out of, through, and beyond the circumstances of his early life. None of it would have been achieved without the exposure established for him in his early years and which remained intact to the end. I am talking principally about the platform, the mechanics of distributing the teachings, which was created by certain individuals who in turn were propelled by a number of converging circumstantial, historical, and cultural influences. I feel that an understanding of these influences, including the religious and philosophical currents that gave rise to the messianic adventure of his early life, is not irrelevant but throws light on and enriches the story of the man he would later become.

Roland’s three novels are A Dark Enchantment, The Maestro’s Voice, and The Good Wife’s Castle and the plots are fascinating and dark.

In support of this approach, let me offer a musical analogy. Anyone like me, who is enthralled by the music of Mozart, will feel something unique when they hear his work. Nothing else has the same magic, nothing quite raises the goose bumps in the same way. But, leaving aside his inspiration, Mozart was very much the product of his past and his times. He composed within a very particular set of constraints: he inherited a prescribed system of notation, he used a small range of musical instruments, which were built to conventional specifications, and he could not venture beyond a musical vocabulary that was palatable to his patrons, his audiences, the period and the culture in which he operated. And of course, we do not neglect his early work just because his later was richer and more sophisticated. Had he lived a couple of centuries earlier or later, or on the other side of the world, his music would have sounded wholly different, or may not even have sounded at all. See how important the historical context and circumstantial platform were in his case. Why then should we ignore those of Krishnamurti?

I first came across Krishnamurti in early adulthood when some slightly alternative friends of my parents lent me a copy of his book, The Flight of the Eagle. The text rather baffled me, but I was intrigued with its plain-speaking logic, its authority, absence of literary ornamentation or pretence. I was also captivated by the photograph on the cover, which showed the author in profile, after he had begun to lose his hair but before he attempted to conceal it with that sweep-over. It was a noble, erudite face, with a neat beak of a nose and an intensity of concentration in its features. Not unlike – in fact incredibly similar to – a bust of Julius Caesar, I thought. After that, I barely thought about Krishnamurti again for a decade, until I stumbled across the story of Annie Besant, the grande dame of nineteenth century secularism, socialism, and women’s rights. I was seriously thinking about writing a book on her, and read that in later life she moved to India, championed the cause of Indian nationalism, became head of pseudo-religious organisation called the Theosophical Society, and dedicated herself to promoting a Brahmin boy called Jiddu Krishnamurti as nothing less than the new messiah. I read of the so-called discovery of this boy on a beach at Adyar, near Madras in 1909; how a group of cavorting English Theosophist gentleman were bathing in the sea late one afternoon, when one of their number, a former Anglican clergyman called Charles Leadbeater, now a self-professed clairvoyant spiritual authority, was entranced by the sight the boy, captivated by what he described as an etheric substance of gorgeous luminescence surrounding him. The body of this child, he claimed, housed an ancient soul, the result of multiple reincarnations, one for whom human desires and feelings were but petty abstractions in comparison to the great spiritual work he was destined to undertake. Leaving off for a moment these extraordinary claims, I turned a page and saw that famous 1910 photograph of the boy, long-haired, beautiful beyond words, with a fathomless ocean calm in his eyes, and after a moment or two I realized that, yes, this was the very same person who would later turn into the Julius Caesar on the cover of my now tatty Flight of the Eagle. From that moment I was swept away by the tale.

As everyone familiar with Krishnamurti knows, Besant, Leadbeater, and the Theosophical Society provided the immediate catalyst that served to propel him, as a young man, into public life. But they were pawns carried on a tide of several coexistent historical trends, such as the rise of orientalism in the west, the birth of the Bohemian movement, popularist challenges to the Established Church, extraordinarily rapid advances of science, a revolution in printing and publishing, the rise of political radicalism, the birth of an avante garde in the arts, and the diplomatic mess that ultimately led to the First World War. All these interlinking historical circumstances prepared the soil for Theosophy’s increasingly outrageous claims to take root. Central to these claims was a proposition that the Lord Maitreya, a divine avatar, was soon to become incarnate within a human vehicle, as he had been in the person of Jesus, and that mankind would behold a new saviour. Excitement bordering on hysteria was rife in certain Theosophical circles, and had been, even before the discovery of Krishnamurti; but once the leaders had settled on a candidate (and it should be said that Krishnamurti was not actually the first) it became known as the World Teacher project. And a public stage was born.

So what was this Theosophical Society that whipped up such fervour in the early years of the twentieth century, and where did it spring from?

Theosophy literally means divine wisdom, and although the term is nowadays associated with the organisation founded in 1875, it has been connected to philosophical schools dating back to antiquity. At the root of it lies the conviction that everything, manifested and unmanifested, created and uncreated, divine or material, emanates from a state of unity, immeasurable, incomprehensible to the intellect, yet all pervasive. This transcendent reality, or godhead, can be accessed by man through a process of mystical realisation or union; furthermore, it is only within the experience of this unity that true wisdom is to be found, primordial wisdom, the ground upon which all the religions of the world have been modelled, and in pursuit of this, Theosophists through the centuries were led into experimentating with the occult and supernatural.

Theosophical thought blossomed and declined throughout the course of western history, according to the level of threat it posed to the ecclesiastical establishment, but by the 18^th century we begin to see a cultural climate within which it could flourish, usually at the expense of Christian orthodoxy. Corruption within the monstrously powerful Roman Catholic Church became a target of particular derision, and there began a movement to seek spiritual truths in cultures beyond the reach of Christianity, both historically and geographically. At the same time, the rise of Freemasonary around Europe encouraged a pursuit of esoteric philosophy, unfettered by loyalty to any organised religion.

Meanwhile, esoteric traditions, incorporating the recognizably Theosophical ideas of Pythagoras, Plato, Jakob Boehme, Immanuel Swedenborg and the Austrian physician Anton Mesmer, were practised within secret societies, such as the Rosicrucians. They caught the British public’s imagination through the occult fiction of statesman and hugely popular mid-century novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who became one of the key forerunners of modern Theosophy, and whose direct descendants – Emily Lutyens, née Lytton, and her daughter, Mary, were to have such important roles in the life of Krishnamurti.

Breakthroughs in science and technology were beginning to light up some of the dimmer recesses of cultural mythology, particularly with regard to the creation story. Darwin and the geologist Charles Lyell undermined the literal interpretations of Genesis and belief in an anthropomorphic God who was directing the affairs of the world for the benefit of mankind. Mounting nonconformism, together with this new tide of scientific scepticism, was paving the way for a secularist revival. Atheist organisations were formed, some of them like parodies of the contemporary chapel movements, with fund-raising fetes and banners, with zealous members assembling in halls on Sundays, singing secular hymns, and listening to heretical sermons denying the existence of God.

The fall of Napoleon marked a return to more conservative values, but the unstopped bottle of political reform and popular unrest now led to the birth of alternative, experimental denominations, often nominally within the embrace of the mother church, but occasionally so far removed as to be labelled blasphemous. A broader range of religious choice became available. Established seats of theological authority, which in Britain resided at the universities, were challenged to defend the supremacy of the single, older church, while rapidly changing social conditions undermined their credibility. Nonconformism was in the air, and excitable congregations were easily led by tub-thumping tirades from the pulpit. The age of religious opportunists was commencing.

But it was the work of one individual in particular that put modern Theosophy firmly on the map, a woman whose magnetic personality, exoticism and learning made her one of the most controversial spiritual adventurers to have challenged the authority of mainstream religion: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Foul-mouthed, volatile, grotesquely fat and reeking of the cigarettes she smoked incessantly, Madame Blavatsky was seminal to the development of New Age thinking, and her influence runs deep. Her claim, in the 1870s was that she had rediscovered a primordial wisdom, the key to life and divinity, which predated and superseded all religions. Her revelation of what she called this ‘secret doctrine’ (which was also the title of her most famous book) she maintained would transform religious consciousness in the west and signal a new era in the history of humanity. But it was her breathtaking demonstrations of spiritualist phenomena that gave spice to her public appearances. She was the archetypal occultist, swathed in black shawls, bulbous-eyed, gravel-voiced, sporting a thick eastern-European accent, part witch, part priestess, with a dash of the eccentric academic, a woman who combined showmanship with scholarship, and although swamped by scandal and accusations of fraudulence, possessed the force of personality to silence would-be critics face-to-face. No stranger to coarse manners, she enjoyed the challenge of confrontation, obliterating her opponents, lashing them with her intellect, which, unlike the virtually immobile hulk of her body, was agile and lucid.

In September 1875, Blavatsky, along with her American collaborator, Henry Steel Olcott, officially founded the Theosophical Society, tapping the nineteenth century spirit of adventurism while bringing together several strands of religious and intellectual enquiry, much of it rooted in ancient philosophy and modern advances in science. The Society was a melting pot and its catchment was wide, encompassing spiritualists, dissenting Christians, atheists, agnostics, political liberals, freemasons and occultists. Their common ground was millenarian, a shared belief that the old order was passing and that human consciousness was on the cusp of a golden new age, whose principal concern would be to create a universal brotherhood of mankind. Although four decades were to pass before the rise of the World Teacher Movement, which propelled the young Krishnamurti to fame, it was these tenets, upheld by Blavatsky and rooted in earlier movements, that underpinned it. More esoteric, was her belief in a semi-metaphysical occult brotherhood of ‘Masters’, ancient spiritual adepts, who resided in the Himalayas and appeared astrally to her and an increasing number of disciples. A defining point in the Theosophical movement, and one which was to create divisions in the Society, came with Blavatsky’s insistence that her Masters’ philosophy was fundamentally that of the east, and that members who sought true wisdom should turn their attention to the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. To this end, in 1882, Blavatsky and Olcott moved the international headquarters of their Society to an estate that they acquired at Adyar, a suburb of Madras. This was later to become Krishnamurti’s home and where he was schooled in Theosophy, complete with its bedrock dogma of the Masters. Throughout his life he would mention the sense of encountering metaphysical entities – whom he early-on called Masters, because that was the terminology he inherited, but would later be less distinct about identifying.

Blavatsky’s heirs, Krishnamurti’s direct sponsors, were to develop her tenets into a new, more complex, in some ways more rigid and narrow system of belief, but the core ambition to achieve universal brotherhood through spreading the word of an enlightening wisdom, based on eastern philosophy, and spear-headed by a god-incarnate figure, personally chosen by the Masters, would remain central to everything.

And then spiritualism burst onto the scene, first in America, and then quickly taking root in Britain. The public, members of the aristocracy and even royalty, were intoxicated with the prospect of communicating with dead spirits, not least because it might provide the answer to one of the oldest curiosities at the core of religious enquiry: is there life after death? A fuse had been lit, leading people to question how humankind, the natural world and all material creation might be interwoven with a spiritually, perhaps scientifically, accessible, previously hidden super-power. It would not have been inconceivable in those heady times to have speculated about the day when newspapers might even pronounce a plausible theory for the universe, one that proclaimed empirical proof for the existence of angels, spirits, the afterlife and even God; and this would not necessarily conflict with Christianity but might remodel humanity’s approach to it for the long term good of all. This spirit of scientific confidence, occult curiosity, political choice and challenging of the establishment, opened the gates for exciting new religious and philosophical alternatives and directly contributed to the rise of Theosophy.

The intent may have been beneficent, even noble, but unfortunately, one of the principal individuals who set himself up to achieve it was less so. And so we come to the person of Charles Webster Leadbeater.

When I wrote my book, I tried to give both sides of the Charles Leadbeater debate. I probably painted a picture of him as a slippery manipulator and spinner of tall tales, as well as being someone who got up to some questionable things with young boys, and who possessed a number of other unattractive personality traits, such as being dismissive of women in general, but particularly unkind to the many elderly ladies who travelled to India to join his organisation with the best intentions. But at the same time, in a spirit of fairness, I gave mention of the high regard in which he was held by many of his colleagues, not least the magnificent Annie Besant, and he has supporters to this day who keep his work in print and defend his reputation. My book, however, was written at a time when the benefit of the doubt was too often given to predators of this sort, many of whom have fallen from grace with a force that has left us all rather more hardened and with a readjusted perspective on such matters. Since the revelations about Jimmy Saville, Michael Jackson, a whole string of senior clergymen and others, and seeing how they managed to cover their tracks for so long, dupe even the people closest to them and die with their reputations still more or less intact, I have reevaluated the level of tolerance that should be allowed Charles Leadbeater. We do not have evidence of the very worst that we can imagine – how could we, because whatever happened took place a century ago and behind closed bedroom doors, and, when given the opportunity to testify against him to the police, Krishnamurti denied any impropriety. He was certainly under pressure from his mentors to quell the scandal, and a denunciation of Leadbeater would have spelt the end of the World Teacher movement and disillusionment for hundreds of thousands of devotees. But we should not necessarily doubt the truth of his testimony. However, in the case of several other Leadbeater boys we read of investigations, first-hand reports and confessions enough to be confident that he was a serial paedophile of the most heinous kind, a self-obsessed monster who used spiritual teaching as a means of gaining access to and sharing beds with children for decades, who never acknowledged the harm he was causing, and who in today’s climate would never be allowed close to minors, let alone set himself up as their religious, intellectual and physical mentor. He would in all likelihood be behind bars. He was lucky to have escaped major prosecutions, first in England, then India and ultimately Australia. This was the man to whom the boy Krishnamurti was entrusted at the age of fourteen and who would be his guiding influence for much of the next twenty years. Can it be any wonder that Krishnamurti wanted to jettison his past?

Charles Webster Leadbeater was born in 1854, the son of a railway bookkeeper in Stockport, though he later fabricated a far more romantic childhood, claiming to have been born in 1847 – so as to make him equal in age to Annie Besant – to have been brought up in South America and to have been involved in all sorts of swashbuckling adventures, which included being held captive by Indians in the jungle, being roasted over a fire, watching his brother being executed, diving under water to a stockpile of hidden Inca treasure, stabbing a werewolf, etc etc. All lies. He later claimed to have attended Queens College Cambridge but in fact never went to any university. He became a curate in the small village of Bramshott (close to here, actually) in 1878, and it was here that he first began to organize clubs and holidays with young boys. It only took 5 years for him to start doubting traditional Anglicanism and in 1883 he joined the Theosophical Society, falling under Madame Blavatsky’s spell. He travelled to India and Ceylon as a footsoldier for the Society and lived there for 4 years, consolidating his belief in the Masters, his own clairvoyant abilities and sharpening what he considered his unique astral consciousness. He then returned to Britain with the first of many young boys who were to become his inseparable proteges, and there became a close collaborator with Annie Besant, the well-known social reformer, once religious fundamentalist now turned secularist, and hero of workers’ and women’s rights. After Blavatsky’s death, Besant became her successor as leader of the Theosophical Society and was fired by the idea of bringing about universal brotherhood. While Leadbeater provided the supernatural speculations and spiritual authority, Besant possessed the confidence, passion, social connections and oratorical skills to turn their joint concept into a serious mission with concrete international goals. She had found a new purpose and grew determined to change the world in her own lifetime, by whatever means. As her close friend Bernard Shaw said of her, ‘She was a born actress. She was successively a Puseyite Evangelical, an Atheist bible-smasher, a Darwinian secularist, a Fabian socialist, a Strike leader and finally a Theosophist, exactly as Mrs Siddons was a Lady Macbeth, Lady Randolph, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Volumnia. She saw herself as a priestess above all. That was how Theosophy held her to the end.’

In retrospect, it is astonishing how so tremendous a force for social good as Annie Besant could have been so taken in by Charles Leadbeater and the system he proposed; and she never wavered in her defence of him personally, despite the far-fetched nature of the visions that only he experienced, together with the multiple scandals and recurrent evidence of paedophilia. Yet join forces she did, and in the closing years of the nineteenth century they forged together the structural matrix of a new religion that claimed knowledge of the solar system, the subatomic and chemical make-up of creation,  the spirit world, the far reaches of history and the unveiled mysteries of the future. They created and preached a dogma that proposed the evolution of a new, superior and enlightened master race, the emergence of great land masses from out of the sea, which would be colonized by the new race, and above everything else, the realisation that eastern philosophy and India were the cradle of the new world religion, to be led, as I’ve mentioned, by a new saviour. An affiliated organisation was formed around the person of Krishnamurti to spread the word: the Order of the Star in the East, later abbreviated to just Order of the Star. This was too much for many Theosophists, including Rudolf Steiner and those who adhered to a more conservative interpretation of Blavatsky, and many of them resigned or formed other societies. But for tens of thousands of others it was thrilling, and a fitting culmination to many years of cultural readjustment in the west. They signed up in their legions. A footnote illustration of this came home to me recently when I was writing a history of my own family. My great great grandfather, Sir William Vernon, an industrialist in Liverpool, who was the son of Primitive Methodist preachers and a devout Christian, wrote in his diaries of travelling large distances to see Annie Besant giving lectures, and in 1895 coincidentally shared a journey with her, by land and sea all the way from Charing Cross to Bombay, and got to know her quite well. Indefatigable, she gave several lectures at sea, which he of course attended, and was so taken that he arranged his travelling schedule in India so as to go to her talks there, once or twice sitting beside her on the speaker’s platform.

To my mind, a crucial milestone in the creation of the platform which Krishnamurti climbed as a young man and never lost, was the 1914 court decision to make him and his brother Nitya the legal wards of Annie Besant. Their father – fearing the worst about Leadbeater – had fought tooth and nail to have the boys separated from the Theosophists. Besant reveals a degree of duplicity in assuring him that the boys would be kept apart from Leadbeater and persuading him to sign a document giving his permission for them to go to England purely for their education. Once out of India, however, she gave orders for the father to be banished from the Theosophical estate at Adyar and made immediate arrangements for the boys to be reunited with Leadbeater in Sicily. A huge and widely publicized legal battle for custody now erupted, which the father won at every stage, even after appeal, until Besant, who would never accept defeat, took the case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, the most powerful legal body in the British Empire. Some of the senior Law Lords present at the hearing, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, were old personal friends from her political days, and the informal proceedings at Downing Street were over almost before they began. Custody of the boys was given to Annie.

Again, by today’s standards we may think that justice was not served, especially given Leadbeater’s record of child abuse and the history of falsehoods fed to the boys’ father. Nevertheless, had Krishnamurti been returned to his family at this stage, aged 19, he would probably have disappeared into obscurity. Instead, he was educated, cultivated, allowed to tap whatever extraordinary resource he was beginning to discover within himself (albeit shrouded, at this stage, in Theosophical terminology), and presented to audiences around the world, both on the speaker’s platform and through a huge number of published magazines, pamphlets and books produced and distributed by the Society. The decidedly dodgy custody settlement made all this possible. There were ups and downs in his later relationship with Leadbeater, who was to emigrate to Australia, find new favourites, and to some extent lose interest in the increasingly rebellious Krishnamurti, but Annie Besant was a genuinely loving adoptive mother, and his bond with her remained strong until the end.

As the 1920s progressed, something very interesting happened. True, his platform had been established by the Theosophical Society – their organisation, their funding, their publishing house. And their public relations machinery had established his audience on three continents, Europe, America, and India. But the more entrenched and exclusive the Societies and organisations around him became, the more they seemed alien both to Krishnamurti and to the young, idealistic post-World War 1 crowds that were beginning to flock to him. Other movements and cultural influences were now coalescing which did not necessarily concur with Theosophy’s complex pantheons of astral masters, its racist pedagogy, esoteric rituals, exclusive secret societies, and its reliance on the occult testimony of an old spiritual martinet well past his prime, with a shady reputation.

Krishnamurti’s public platform therefore underwent a metamorphosis and his profile shifted away from traditional Theosophy and more towards what could be described as an alternative, philosophically liberal culture which in some ways foreshadowed the hippy movement of the 1960s. There were summer camp meetings with gatherings around great campfires, there were sandal-wearing men with long hair, trousered women with short, there were vegetarians, pacifists, nature lovers, young intellectuals, artists. A romantic scent of optimism was in the air, of rebirth after the horror of the war, and following the disillusionment with the ruling establishment that had led the world into that catastrophe. Krishnamurti was a young man of this generation and he answered its call. Already famous as a potential saviour of mankind, whose appearances as a young adult had never been short of theatricals, and imbued with the fashionable mystery of the orient, he was now feted by the young and by a sophisticated, experimental avante garde, who were feeling their way into a new system of values. They included inheritors of the Bohemian and ‘Back to Nature’ movements of northern Europe, which had been a reaction against the devastation of industrialisation and urban living. Baden-Powell’s Scout Movement was part of this new interest in retrieving a lost closeness to nature. A sense of practical teamwork and recreational pioneering infused Krishnamurti’s camp gatherings. Then, there was the spirit of humanitarian compassion, epitomised at that time by the birth of the League of Nations and the liberal diplomacy of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Fridtjof Nansen. This was the World Teacher’s message of Universal Brotherhood being put into practice, and the new generation wanted more. Political reformers joined the movement. The future Labour Party Leader and campaigner for disarmament, George Lansbury, a spokesman for new liberal values, became a prominent member of the Order of the Star, sitting with Krishnamurti on the speaker’s platform; and other distinguished advocates of democratic values and international cooperation joined his circle, like the philosopher, Hermann Keyserling.

Krishnamurti was, of course going through a remarkable awakening of his own, instigated by, what has become known as, his mysterious spiritual ‘process’ of 1922, which increasingly breathed something new, original and authoritative into his public statements. Although he did not formerly abandon Theosophy and dissolve the Order of the Star until 1929, I believe he achieved maturity in his teaching and formed the message which was to be at the core of his teachings for the remainder of his life as early as 1926 or 1927. So that, crucially, when he did declare his independence of the Society that had nurtured him, he took his audience and his platform with him. The sixteen thousand people who went to hear him at the Hollywood Bowl in 1927 were fully aware of his status as Theosophy’s messiah for the new age, but they were not going to abandon him two years later just because he distanced himself from an anachronistic organisation. ‘If the water tastes good,’ he would say, ‘drink it.’ They drank their fill, but found it difficult to abandon the personality cult that was already in place. Quite aside from his message, of course, the young teacher was by now extremely handsome, especially with his Savile Row clothes and Rudolf Valentino haircut. He himself recognised that the glamour of his profile was a distraction, and spent the remainder of his life trying to deflect an audience’s worship away from ‘the speaker’, but in the 1930s it was part of the package.

The style of delivery and a lot of the terminology were to change over the next six decades, but the core of the message was the same, because he had realized something pure and immutable, and that was that. There were, of course, practical considerations to be faced after his dissolution of the Order of the Star, and a constant flow of talks and publications was needed to ensure a continuance of the stage so well-established by 1929. This was largely handled by Krishnamurti’s associate – another former Leadbeater boy – Rajagopal. The future relationship between these two men opens up another whole story that we cannot enter into today, but suffice to say that Rajagopal possessed the practical know-how and business acumen to ensure the continued distribution of Krishnamurti’s work and the generation of funds to support his and his immediate circle’s lifestyle. The gatherings in Europe, California and India went on as before, the publications flourished, and the teachings, if anything, began to reach an even wider audience than they had in the days when they were restricted to members of the Order of the Star.

The World Teacher project certainly did not disappear after 1929, and although the term was tactfully withdrawn, much messianic speculation continued to be centred on the figure of Krishnamurti well beyond the 1930s. The Great Depression and the dark political times that followed, fuelled people’s hopes for a saviour. At the same time, in the cultural climate of the 30s, with the rise of Abstract and Expressionist art, when previously revered laws of form and harmony were tossed aside in the name of experimentalism, Krishnamurti’s nihilistic stance and his denials of authority were fashionably modern. And so his stage continued to prosper until the Second World War, when travel became impossible, communication restricted, and he spent these years holed up in California.

He burst back on to the scene in 1947 with a long trip to India, where he was received as if he had never been away, the reputation of his remarkable Theosophical past and connections with the now legendary Annie Besant still intact, ensuring that people flocked to his talks and revered him as a spiritual master. For some, it was not the words he spoke that were as important as the invigoration that came from beholding and sharing the presence of the master, which is the Indian concept of darshan.

His reemergence as an eminent speaker in the west had less to do with his Theosophical past, but was very much connected to cultural circumstances of the 1950s and 60s, many of which were a recapitulation and thus an inheritance of what had occurred in the 20s and 30s. A younger generation was attracted to non-conformism and religious alternatives, it was fashionable to deny authority, to doubt received opinion and to question orthodoxy. Patriotism and war had been stripped of glamour and it seemed more urgent to debate issues of racial equality and the brotherhood of man. Secularisation and social emancipation were in the air. The stage was set, once again for a world teacher with a message that would liberate mankind. Krishnamurti was again the man of the moment and became a key player in the 1960s spiritual upheaval. Nothing had changed in what he had to say, except the occasional term and a slight difference in delivery style.

Astonishingly, the remainder of Krishnamurt’s life saw him fulfil his role as a world teacher – not, perhaps, in the way his Theosophical sponsors had prophesied, but in effect, not so very different. Did this come about because Leadbeater’s visions and speculative ramblings were right all along? Or was it a role he achieved through the acquisition of skills learnt early in life and riding a wave of cultural circumstances that continually propelled him into the spotlight? Without wanting to evade the question, I believe there that both may be true. Which brings us to the most intriguing question: what was the source of Krishnamurti’s inspiration, who or what was the entity or entities to which he alluded repeatedly, as being ‘present,’ sometimes purging him in the so-called ‘processes’, at others just there, immanent, like a scent in the room, an immeasurable sacredness that imbues everything it touches with benediction? He refused to label it because he knew that people would leap on the concept of a spiritual agency and enslave themselves to it. He naturally also rejected Theosophy’s system of Masters, but did say in later life that, ‘there is a force which the Theosophists touched but then tried to translate into their own symbols and vocabulary and so lost it.’ So, again, a hint of a mysterious ‘force’ operating in some manner upon the material world. Shortly before his death he said that while his body was alive he was still the World Teacher. That term. He also recorded his famous statement about the immense energy, the intelligence that had been using his body for 70 years and which would not return to another body for many hundreds of years. This notion of a human being touching the source of enlightenment and thus embodying something which some would label divine, is close to Steiner’s principle of the Second Coming, which was not a physical reincarnation of Christ, but the potential in any one of us for mystical union with the Christ-principle. This is what orthodox Theosophy had been proposing for centuries. I do not wish to dwell on all this more than to say that the mystery of Krishnamurti’s source, in a historical sense, over a period of more than 60 years, was something others continually  longed to put a contextual label on, and wanted to attach themselves to – Besant and Leadbeater as much as their successors in Ojai, Ommen and perhaps even here, too. His Theosophical sponsors cannot be blamed for interpreting his gift in the light of their own immediate history and the context of their intellectual speculations. Had he lived on a mountain in some remote corner of India, who knows, he may never have travelled west, but might have become one in a long line of Eastern holy men, the inheritor of an age-old wisdom tradition. As it was, and despite some negative influences and coercive treatment, he was given a voice, presented with a public and educated in such a way as to articulate himself to them with concision and eloquence. Which he continued to do with extraordinary consistency and passion for a lifetime.

Facebook’s wild and severe side effects

Book Review: Facebook is undermining democracies and leading to shallow and degraded public discourse

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In some ways, Facebook is like Mary Shelley’s fictional character Frankenstein’s monster in the author’s 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein. It is an experiment of chemistry and alchemy where the creature takes a life of its own and turns against the creator Victor Frankenstein. That is where the similarities end as Victor and the world hate the hideously ugly but sensitive and emotional “monster”. Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defends his platform like a stoic even when there is evidence to show how easily the connector of over 2 billion people can and has been manipulated for vested interests far from sinister than the use of personal data to gather insights for the company’s profitability.

Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Antisocial Media charts the journey of Facebook from an innocent social site built by Harvard students into a force that, “while it may make personal life just a little more pleasurable, makes democracy a lot more challenging. It’s an account of the hubris of good intentions, a missionary spirit and an ideology that sees computer code as the universal solvent for all human problems”.

Facebook is magnificent when you get in touch with long-lost friends from the past, or when you can share family photographs with people who matter. Almost everything else is a problem on Facebook. It certainly qualifies for the as-yet-unsettled dilemma over whether any system that is “too big to fail” is robust and good for the planet. As Nassim Taleb, the author of the vastly popular The Black Swan and of recent titles Antifragile and Skin in the Game says, “The internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely. I can’t imagine situations in which social networks could be useful except to arrange to have dinner with someone, and they clearly can be very destructive.”

Vaidhyanathan is more succinct with his first phrase of the book: “The problem with Facebook is Facebook.” In early 2017, Zuckerberg wrote a wide-ranging manifesto on his page that marked a shift for him and his firm. He was coming to terms with the fact that through 2016 Facebook had hosted and promoted propaganda that influenced the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Facebook also faced flak for its video streaming service after multiple people used it to publicise suicides and homicides they were committing. As criticisms mounted, Zuckerberg promised to do better, to explain the problems in the most general terms and, more pertinently, to shift blame where he could.

The central nerve of the book is how Facebook rather than connecting us creates bigger barriers and makes it impossible to have genuine debate. “Those who follow the rise of authoritarianism…would by 2017 list India, Indonesia, Kenya, Poland, Hungary, and the United States as sites of Facebook’s direct contribution to violent ethnic and religious nationalism, the rise of authoritarian leaders, and a sort of mediated cacophony that would hinder public deliberation about important issues, thus undermining trust in institutions and experts. Somehow, Zuckerberg missed all of that,” writes Vaidhyanathan. By November 2017, Zuckerberg was left with no defence but to investigate and reveal the extent of Russian interference with the US elections through advertisements purchased on Facebook and Instagram and targeted precisely to reach at least 126 million US citizens.

Vaidhyanathan informs that the culture of Silicon Valley is explicitly cosmopolitan and tolerant of difference and dissent. “So how did the greatest Silicon Valley success story end up hosting radical, nationalist, anti-Enlightenment movements that revolt against civic institutions and cosmopolitans? How did such an enlightened firm become complicit in the rise of nationalists such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, and ISIS? How did the mission go so wrong?” These are some of the complex questions Vaidhyanathan asks upfront, and tries to answer with simplicity subsequently.

The roping in and the role played by Alexander Nix, the CEO of a market research firm called Cambridge Analytica, came out of obscurity and explained both the Brexit and the Trump upsets. This part reads like a spy thriller that is gripping as well as deeply unsettling for anyone concerned with the extreme direction the world has taken and how Facebook facilitates it just by being itself. Investigative and fearless journalists and reputed newspapers find less space in this fast-paced world ruled by trolls.

The rise and consolidation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Modi has been given due importance. Facebook staff worked with BJP officials during the Modi campaign. India has more Facebook users than any other country, with more than 250 million in 2018, about 30 million more than the US. That 250 million is less than one-quarter of India’s population, while the 220 million Americans constitute more than 60 per cent of the US population. So not only is the future of Facebook in India, the present of Facebook is as well. “As the BJP solidifies its political standing the overall political culture of India has degraded through social media harassment and intimidation,” writes Vaidhyanathan.

The problems that come with new technologies replacing old ones and causing narrowness is not new, Robert M. Pirsig wrote about it in his eerie 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I quote at length. “What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua…like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America…an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks…‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?’ A question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream…Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.” Antisocial Media is an example of taking on a largely nonsensical behemoth and calling for some channel deepening.

(This article was first published in the 16-31st October issue of Down To Earth).

Doubts Punctuate The 1950 Milan Kundera Spy Case

“Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.” The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

As if taking a cue from one of his characters a dark secret from the past threatens to crash on the opening chapter of Milan Kundera’s life. In October 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt published a story that claimed Kundera informed on one of his countrymen in 1950, leading to the man’s imprisonment for 14 years in a hard labour camp.

The basis of the assertion was an old police report that fell into the hands of Adam Hradilek, a historian researching the bleak days of Czechoslovakia’s Communist past. The police document reopened the story of Miroslav Dvoracek and that of his childhood friend Iva Militka. The report also brought the past of arguably the most brilliant literary surgeon of communism in Eastern Europe to the forefront. It is a widely reported and misreported story in which the jury is still out on the truth and doubt remains the only certainty.

The 1950 Police Report
The police report dated March 14, 1950 says: “Today at around 1600 hours a student, Milan Kundera, born 1.4.1929 in Brno, resident at the student hall of residence on George VI Avenue in Prague VII, presented himself at this department and reported that a student, Iva Militka, resident at that residence, had told a student by the name of Dlask, also of that residence, that she had met a certain acquaintance of hers, Miroslav Dvoracek, at Klarov in Prague the same day. The said Dvoracek apparently left one case in her care, saying he would come to fetch it in the afternoon… Dvoracek had apparently deserted from military service and since the spring of the previous year had possibly been in Germany, where he had gone illegally.”

The most important thing is the veracity of the police report and from what has come out the document is being considered as genuine (though there is speculation on whether its contents are genuine). Jerome Depuis of the French magazine L’Express travelled to Prague and cited the historian Rudolf Vedova from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR), the same institute Hradilek works for: “We had the document analysed by the Czech Secret Forces archive. The paper, the names listed, the identity and the signature of the officer were all examined—and the document was found to be authentic.”

Around the same time Jiri Grusa, a Czech poet and in 2008 the president of the international writers association PEN, told a German radio station that he went to Prague to see the police document for himself. Grusa said that he now has no doubts that “the document is real. There’s no denying it. Only it is not Milan Kundera’s document, it is no denunciation, it’s a police annunciation. And if Kundera says, I didn’t do it, then I have to believe him.”

The Background
In 1948 a putsch in Czechoslovakia led to a communist takeover. This resulted in the armed forces being purged and veteran airmen who had flown with the RAF in the war (about 40 per cent of Czech Air Force) were demoted, kicked out or sent to labour camps due to their exposure to the West. Even students were not spared. Two boyhood friends, Miroslav Dvoracek and Miroslav Juppa, who had attended the same school in a small town in Eastern Bohemia were included on a list of expulsions in a memorandum from January 1949. When they were ordered a month later to join an infantry unit, Dvoracek and Juppa, aided by Juppa’s girlfriend Iva Militka and her relatives fled to West Germany.
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The Joke, Prague, and Milan Kundera

In October 1963 Jean Paul Sartre visited Prague as a guest of the Czechoslovak Writers Union and predicted that the great novel of the second half of the twentieth century would be produced by the search for truth about the experiment of communism.

Earlier that year, in July, when he was in Moscow for another one of his trips to promote the project of an East-West writers’ community, the Soviet leader Kruschev had initiated a clampdown. At a reception in his dacha in Georgia attended by Sartre, the Soviet leader denounced Western writers as the henchmen of capitalism, a theme reiterated at a conference in Leningrad which castigated Western art and culture for its decadence and corruption.

In his Prague visit Sartre confirmed that as a socialist he recognised that they were many unwholesome aspects of Western society but, to his credit, he refused to condone the attack on authors at the Leningrad conference. The writers dismissed as decadent at the Leningrad conference had names like Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud.

Jim Holt wrote in a 2003 piece for Slate.com: “In the early 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, he (Sartre) realized that he was ‘living a neurosis’; despite his philosophy of action, he had been a mere bourgeois writer, like Flaubert. His interest in Marxism awakened, he decided to align himself with the Communist Party—this at a time when the crimes of Stalin were being documented and other intellectuals were abandoning the party. The erstwhile philosopher of freedom morphed into Sartre totalitaire.

That is something of a caricature, but Sartre did have his shameful moments over the next two decades. He broke with Camus because the latter denounced totalitarianism. He was silent on the gulag (‘It was not our duty to write about the Soviet labor camps’), and he excused the purges of Stalin and later Mao.”

The Paris take on him goes: “Sartre brought us both the malady—totalitarianism—and the antidote: freedom.”

Nevertheless, a novel did come out of the communist experiment but Sartre at that time was awake only to the ‘unwholesome aspects of Western society’. The Joke by Milan Kundera is a profound novel with an intricate and beautifully worked out plot. The novel was first published in 1967 in Czech under the title Žert but the English language translations left the author bewildered. It is the loss of many readers that a novel of such brilliance came distorted to them for almost 25 years in four different translations before the author could finally call the fifth English language version as being faithful to his Czech original.

Milan Kundera is an intensely private person and he broke a 25-year media silence when in mid-October 2008 he denied an article published in a Czech weekly that on the basis of an old police report said that he turned over a Western intelligence agent to communist authorities in 1950, a move which saw the man narrowly escape the death sentence and led to his spending 14 years in prison. It is a sensitive incident that has been widely reported and misreported and I would need a few days of research before I can comment on it.

Milan Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and his first step in the arts began at an early age on the piano. His father, Ludvik Kundera, was a concert pianist and musicologist who had earned recognition for collaborating with the famed Czech composer Leoš Janáček. The influence and the understanding of music can be found throughout Kundera’s works.

Kundera was an important figure in the Prague Spring, the brief period of reformist activities crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21st August 1968. In 1970 he was expelled from the Communist Party for the second time after an earlier expulsion in 1950 had yielded to a readmission in 1956. The second time he was also expelled from the Writers Union and lost his job as a teacher of world literature on the film faculty at the Prague Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Access to his work was banned, and Kundera was reduced to making a living by writing an astrology column under a fictitious name. He described that experience in that unforgettable novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Some biographical material even says he worked as a labourer.

In an interview with Philip Roth, Kundera says, “Then they expelled me from University. I lived among workmen. At that time, I played the trumpet in a jazz band in small-town cabarets. I played the piano and the trumpet. Then I wrote poetry. I painted. It was all nonsense. My first work which is worth while mentioning is a short story, written when I was thirty, the first story in the book Laughable Loves.”

Jan Čulík, an independent journalist and a senior lecturer in Czech studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, says, “Most Western critics originally understood Žert as a political novel, a protest against Stalinist totalitarianism. Protest against Stalinism is however only one of many themes in the novel. Kundera rightly objected to such a simplified interpretation. He pointed out that the 1950s in Czechoslovakia attracted him as a scene for the novel only ‘because this was a time when History made as yet unheard of experiments with Man. Thus it deepened my doubts and enriched my understanding of man and his predicament.’ Czech critics of the 1960s correctly understood Žert as a work probing the deepest essence of human existence.”

In that interview to Roth, Kundera says: “Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise—the age old drama of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andrè Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets ever smaller and poorer.”

The Joke is a first person narrative by four characters-narrators and they appear reflectively in each other’s rendition. Armed with just a harmless little prank the novel exposes the brutal and bleak world of a totalitarian system and it does so with a deep understanding of the human condition. It is the power of the story coupled with Kundera’s genius to unearth every human emotion that makes The Joke such a complete delight.

In The Art of the Novel Kundera presents his conception of the European novel and also talks in detail about some of his books. It is a work of high erudition that grabs the essence of the novel as an art form and the novelist as an explorer of existence. “Well, I’ll never tire of repeating: The novel’s sole raison d’ etre is to say what only the novel can say.”

The novel shows the reader the world of possibilities. It is secondary whether the possibilities come into being or not. Asked that if you are trying to grasp a possibility rather than a reality, why take seriously the image you offer of Prague, for example, and of the events that occurred there; Kundera said: “If the writer considers a historical situation a fresh and revealing possibility of the human world, he will want to describe it as it is. Still, fidelity to historical reality is a secondary matter as regards the value of a novel. The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence.”

“A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being.”

At the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak writers in June 1967, Czech writers openly clashed with the Communist leadership for the first time. Kundera became a leading figure in the movement for freedom. He delivered a speech that became a milestone in the history of independent, self-critical Czech thought.

“Nations tend to think of their cultures and political systems, even their frontiers, as the work of Man, but they see their national existence as a transcendent fact, beyond all question. The some-what cheerless and intermittent history of the Czech nation, which has passed through the very antechamber of death, gives us the strength to resist any such illusion. For there has never been anything self-evident about the existence of the Czech nation and one of its most distinctive traits, in fact, has been the unobviousness of that existence. This emerged most clearly in the early nineteenth century when a handful of intellectuals tried to resurrect our half-forgotten language and then, a generation later, our half-moribund people too.

Kundera said that small nations always face the threat of extinction and there is no point in preserving a separate Czech identity in a quickly integrating world if this community is incapable of making its own, innovative and unique contribution to mankind, in particular in the field of the arts. For that to happen he argued Czech literature must develop in conditions of total freedom. “All suppression of opinions, including the forcible suppression of wrong opinions, is hostile to truth in its consequences. For the truth can only be reached by a dialogue of free opinions enjoying equal rights.”

Having experienced democracy, Nazi subjugation, Stalinism and ‘socialism’, the Czechs are favourably placed to produce a unique testimony about man and his/her predicament, thus giving Czech culture meaning, maturity and greatness. The question remains, Kundera concluded, whether the Czech national community is aware of this opportunity and whether it will use it.

Kundera’s novels offer that unique and moving perspective on human existence. They tell a compelling human story with compassion and with rare insight of a world that is intoxicated with power and oblivious to individual sorrow. Describing irony he says, ‘the more attentively we read a novel, the more impossible the answer, because the novel is, by definition, the ironic art: its ‘truth’ is concealed, undeclared, undeclarable. Irony irritates. Not because it mocks or attacks but because it denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as an ambiguity. In other words, the art of the novel does not lie in the answer but in the beauty of the questions it raises.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being he writes: “A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.”

Sources: Sartre by David Drake; Slate.com, Interview with Philip Roth, writings of Jan Čulík, and the novels of Milan Kundera.

To Write Or Not To Write

Victor Hugo once said: “If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” Great novels are not dated in any essential sense as they capture the timeless human condition and longevity is the ultimate test for them. A vexing question for writers is as to why they write and what they seek to achieve via writing. In this post I’ll take some authors and present their views on the writing process and elaborate on how they look at what they do.

J.D. Salinger in a 1974 telephonic interview given to the New York Times from his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, said: “There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”

When he gave the interview it was about nine-and-a-half years since he had published his last novella ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’ in The New Yorker magazine in June 1965. The interview in 1974 was also his first since 1953, when he gave one to a 16-year-old girl of a high school newspaper in Cornish.

Salinger, who died aged 91 in January this year, blasted his way to literary fame and cult-like devotion with the 1951 publication of The Catcher in the Rye. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” That’s how the frenetic three-day account around Christmas of Holden Caulfield began in the modern epic that is the benchmark against which all coming-of-age novels are measured.

Salinger remained a unique celebrity after the novel in the sense that his absence from public life further fuelled the curiosity around his life and works. Salinger was an extremely private man and after Catcher he devoted himself to creating fiction that centred on religion and ‘exposed the spiritual hollowness’ in American society (from http://www.deadcaulfields.com/; a website dedicated to the life and works of Salinger). To this end he collected characters from his early stories and bound them together into a single family—the Glass family. He described the family of seven children and their parents Les and Bessie Glass as ‘settlers in twentieth century New York.’

Salinger said: “I think writing is a hard life. But it’s brought me enough happiness that I don’t think I’d ever deliberately dissuade anybody (if he had talent) from taking it up. The compensations are few, but when they come, if they come, they’re very beautiful.”

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera discusses graphomania (a mania for writing books). The author recounts his encounter with a garrulous taxi-driver in Paris. The driver has chronic insomnia (Has had it since the war when he was a sailor and his ship sank. He swam three days and three nights before being rescued). In his extra time he writes and is working on a book about his experiences.

‘“Are you writing it for your children? As a family chronicle?’

He chuckled bitterly: ‘For my children? They’re not interested in that. I’m writing a book. I think it could help a lot of people.’

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer’s occupation. We write books because our children aren’t interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

You might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about our concepts. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. She is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers).”

This is another quote by Kundera: “The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”

In the afterword of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a novel that unfolds on a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son and becomes ‘a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live’ author Robert M. Pirsig says: “Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last payment, I shouldn’t be discouraged. Money wasn’t the point with a book like this.

That was true. But then came publication day, astonishing reviews, best-seller status, magazine interviews, radio and TV interviews, movie offers, foreign publications, endless offers to speak, and fan mail… week after week, month after month. The letters have been full of questions: Why? How did this happen? What is missing here? What was your motive? There’s a sort of frustrated tone. They know there’s more to this book than meets the eye. They want to hear all.

There really hasn’t been any ‘all’ to tell. There were no deep manipulative ulterior motives. Writing it seemed to have higher quality than not writing it, that was all.”

The last author that I want to consider in order to approach the writing process is the 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. I discovered Pamuk late and was blown away by My Name is Red. The novel is set in Istanbul in the late 1590s. The Ottoman Sultan commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and his empire, to be illuminated by the best miniaturists of the day. The novel opens with the murder of one of the artists and the mystery behind it sustains the pace and some of the tension in the plot. However, the murder is the backdrop from where the author enters into a meditation on art, love, artistic devotion and the conflict between East and West.

My Name is Red is a first person narrative; the titles of the chapters tell you who is doing the talking. It works brilliantly as you get to see how the same event is perceived by different people. The novel surgically opens and reveals the entire panorama of human relationship and motive. For instance you get to see the novel’s love story from the perspective of Black as well as Shekure (the man and the woman).

My Name is Red was translated by Erdag M. Goknar. The recent works of Orhan Pamuk are translated by Maureen Freely, a US journalist, translator, author, and professor who grew up in Turkey and now lives in England. In a review for New Statesman Freely said of My Name is Red: “More than any other book I can think of, it captures not just Istanbul’s past and present contradictions, but also its terrible, timeless beauty. It’s almost perfect, in other words. All it needs is the Nobel Prize.”

Dick Davis in a review for the Times Literary Supplement wrote: “Heartbreakingly persuasive… This novel is then formally brilliant, witty and about serious matters. But even this inclusive description does not really capture what I feel is the book’s true greatness, which lies in its managing to do with apparent ease what novelists have always striven for but very few achieve. It conveys in a wholly convincing manner the emotional, cerebral and physical texture of daily life, and it does so with great compassion, generosity and humanity.”

Pamuk himself has given less weight to the murder mystery and the East-West question and has called the arduous work of the miniaturist, the artist’s suffering, and his dedication to his work as the central issues of My Name is Red. The stories within the narrative of the old masters of Herat and of the great Bihzad are fascinating. Even towards the end Pamuk makes the reader marvel when Master Osman gets completely lost in admiring the illuminated pages of yesteryears and when the other miniaturists lose themselves while remembering the long days of their apprenticeship in the Sultan’s workshop. Pamuk has the gift of offering the reader any number of diversions to savour even when the tension of the plot is approaching boiling point.

‘Sirin falling in love with Husrev by looking at his picture is the best-known and most frequently illustrated story in Islamic literature’ and Pamuk uses it as a model for many scenes, gatherings, and stances in the novel. In a similar manner Pamuk sketches the character of Shekure so brilliantly that it becomes possible to fall in love with her just by reading.

In Pamuk’s words: “My book really has only one center, one heart: the kitchen! It is the place where Hayriye seeks to influence Esther the clothier with gossip and food; Shekure, too, comes downstairs to the kitchen to advance her intrigues, send off letters and notes, scold her children, and supervise the cooking. The kitchen and all that it contains are the platform on which everything stands.”

Pamuk captures the essence of a writer’s occupation in his book Other Colours: “In order to be happy I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day. …To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true—nothing makes me happier, nothing more surely binds me to life. …If my daily dose of literature is something I myself am writing, it’s all very different. Because for those who share my affliction, the best cure of all, and the greatest source of happiness, is to write a good half page every day. For thirty years I’ve spent an average of 10 hours a day alone in a room, sitting at my desk. If you count only the work that is good enough to be published, my daily average is a good deal less than half a page.

…But please don’t misunderstand me: A writer who is as dependent on literature as I am can never be so superficial as to find happiness in the beauty of the books he has already written, nor can he congratulate himself on their number or what these books achieved. Literature does not allow such a writer to pretend to save the world; rather, it gives him a chance to save the day. And all days are difficult. Days are especially difficult when you don’t do any writing. When you cannot do any writing. The point is to find enough hope to get through the day, and, if the book or the page you are reading is good, to find joy in it, and happiness, if only for a day.”

Anton Chekhov: The Tsar of Russian Literature

During my school days in the eighties there was a lot of Russian literature that I had easy access to courtesy Progress Publishers and one of my uncles. My uncle is an avid reader and those days his library was flush with Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov and also innumerable folk tales from Russia. Some 5-odd first cousins and I grew up in a small hill town surrounded by Russian folk tales. Aldar Kose and Shigai-Bai were household names and we were all too familiar with the laziness and the charm of the youngest son Ivan.

The first time I read ‘Misery’ by Anton Chekhov it was a Hindi translation called Vyatha Ka Bhar. The story of Iona Potapov, a sledge-driver in Petersburg, takes just over 2000 words to capture crushing grief. Chekhov is brilliant in using the settings of Russian rural life; lived under the weight and silence of snow. The primary purpose of this post is just to provide a link to the story for an interested reader. In ‘Misery’ death ‘came for the father’ but took the son instead; and Chekhov, in the most beautiful manner, captured the stone deafness of the living.

Author J.D. Salinger referred to Chekhov in his book Franny and Zooey. ‘At ten-thirty on a Monday morning in November of 1955, Zooey Glass, a young man of twenty-five, was seated in a very full bath, reading a four-year-old letter. It was an almost endless-looking letter, typewritten on several pages of second-sheet yellow paper, and he was having some little trouble keeping it propped up against the two dry islands of his knees.’

The letter is addressed to Zooey and written by his eldest alive brother Buddy Glass and it deals with, among other things, the acting career of the recipient.

“And if you go into the theatre, will you have any illusions about that? Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of, say, The Cherry Orchard? Don’t say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen ‘inspired’ productions, ‘competent’ productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov’s talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul on-stage. You worry hell out of me, Zooey. Forgive the pessimism, if not the sonority. But I know how much you demand from a thing, you little bastard. And I’ve had the hellish experience of sitting next to you at the theatre. I can so clearly see you demanding something from the performing arts that just isn’t residual there. For heaven’s sake, be careful.”

Salinger gets it so right; it is near impossible to match Chekhov’s talent nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy. The Wordsworth Classics edition of selected stories of Anton Chekhov carries an introduction by Joe Andrew, Professor of Russian Literature, Keele University, and some information in this piece is distilled from it. From being a writer partly to earn money to train to be a doctor and partly to amuse himself Chekhov drifted into literature seriously in the mid-1880s when he moved to St. Petersburg and met a number of famous writers who praised the great talent they saw semi-submerged beneath the hackwork. In his work Chekhov combined the dispassionate attitude of a scientist and doctor with the sensitivity and psychological understanding of an artist.

One of the works, The Robbers, appeared in Suvorin’s New Times in 1890 and the publisher reproached Chekhov for his ‘objectivity’ (that is, lack of ‘message’), and Chekhov responded with a tired irony: ‘You tell me off for my objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil … When I depict horse thieves, you want me to say that stealing horses is wrong. But surely this has been long known without me saying so. Let the jury condemn them, but it is my job simply to show them as they are.’

Yet there was a shift in Chekhov’s own approach as shown in a few of his last works and just two years later he wrote to the same correspondent that the best writers ‘are realistic and describe life as it is, but because each line is saturated with consciousness of its goal, you feel life as it should be in addition to life as it is, and you are captivated by it.’

The twentieth-century Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg sums this up well: ‘Chekhov’s sympathies and antagonisms are clear, but he does not touch up the people he likes and he finds human traits in those he dislikes or even hates. As a result of these tendencies, it would be no exaggeration to say that Chekhov was perhaps the most human, liberal, and basically decent man in Russian literature.’

This understanding of what the artist needed to do at the end of the nineteenth century in Russia arose in part from his deepening consciousness as an artist, but also because, as a man who had risen from very humble origins, and who continued to work (for free) as a doctor well into the 1890s, Chekhov knew life ‘in the lower depths’ better than any of his predecessors. Perhaps that is the reason why this profound line came from him: “Any idiot can face a crisis — it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

Notes: Misery and Grief by Anton Chekhov; Wordsworth Classics, Selected Stories, Anton Chekhov, 1996. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger.