Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (22 page)

Absurd, of course, that designer accessories should be marketed in the name of a man who was famously unfussy about clothes, drink, appearance or cleanliness. “Ernest,” his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, once said, “was extremely dirty, one of the most unfastidious men I've ever known.” (She affectionately — and sometimes not so affectionately — called her husband “The Pig.”) In Cuba he kept a pack of smelly tomcats who were allowed to march all over his furniture (but then he did not possess a $3,499 “Kilimanjaro king bed”). Though he once informed the world that Gordon's Gin had kept him alive after a plane crash — “this beverage is one of the sovereign antiseptics of our time,” he wrote cheerfully; “[it] can be counted on to fortify, mollify and cauterize practically all internal or external injuries” — Hemingway was not a likely subject for the attentions of marketing men. The story is told of how a minor whisky
manufacturer invited Hemingway to endorse his product, Lord Calvert whisky, by appearing in a “Men of Distinction” advertising campaign for a fee of $4,000. His retort was blunt: “I wouldn't drink the stuff for $4,000!”

So why is Ernest Hemingway now being used to sell overpriced king beds and fancy pens? The answer is simple: Hemingway the writer is no more, but Hemingway the image lives on. A larger-than-life literary giant is, in the eyes of product pitchmen, larger-after-life. People who can't be bothered to appreciate the prose but who wish to be associated with the aura of its creator can now buy into the image. Good-bye Hemingway the novelist, hello Hemingway the brand.

What are the chances that this American trend might also, as so often happens in our globalized world, make its way into our country? Indian writers are lately beginning to receive almost as much attention as their Western counterparts. Even if literary product licensing is still an unknown art in India, it is surely not too early to consider the possibilities of paying commercial homage to our literary venerables. A Mulk Raj Anand coolie badge, for instance, might be just the thing to accessorize the latest Bina Ramani blouse. Or perhaps the Cottage Industries Emporium might honor Kamala Markandeya by actually selling nectar in a sieve? Equally up their street could be the Raja Rao serpent and rope set, in leather and coir, perhaps, or an Anita Desai crying peacock, tastefully done in brass. The possibilities are limitless:
ganga-jal
in a U-shaped urn could be sold as the Manohar Malgaonkar Bend in the Ganges, and any number of post-Kargil mementoes could be recycled as Bhabani
Bhattacharya's Shadows from Ladakh. More practical shoppers could take home Raj Kamal Jha's slightly soiled Blue Bedspread. For the better-heeled buyer with a taste for objets d'art, a fragment of rubble and a bulb could constitute an Attia Hosain Sunlight on a Broken Column. And I haven't even begun to mention the potential of an entire Malgudi Collection honoring R. K. Narayan's fictional small town (a slightly sagging string charpoy could, for instance, rival the attractions of Hemingway's Kilimanjaro king bed).

But something tells me India is not quite ready for all this yet. The director of Kerala tourism told me how he had made plans for an Arundhati Roy tour of the Vembanad backwaters, to rake dollars off the foreign tourists clamoring for a glimpse of Ayemenem and associated locales in
The God of Small Things.
The idea was brilliant, but it was promptly vetoed by the state government as unseemly. Writers have their place in literate India, it seems, but only on the bookshelves. Hemingway, now spinning in his grave, would no doubt have approved.

D
URING A 1989 VISIT TO INDIA
in the aftermath of the publication of
The Great Indian Novel,
someone who claimed to be a regular reader of one of my columns (always a dangerous species, the regular reader) offered me a challenge: to reconcile, in my next column, my interests in literature and international affairs. I told him it couldn't be done, except in jest — imagining which works of literature would be most appropriate for which then-prevalent international situation (
The Winter of Our Discontent
for Romania that year, perhaps, though
The Grapes of Wrath
would do just as well;
One Hundred Years of Solitude
for Albania's isolation-ist Politburo;
Joy in the Morning
for the release of Nelson Mandela, and so on.) He seemed to accept the answer, but my conscience wasn't so obliging. Regular readers, it inconveniently insisted, must be obliged.

Then the elevation of Václav Havel to the presidency of Czechoslovakia gave me a better answer. For here was the perfect marriage of the worlds of literature and international
affairs — a playwright ascending to political power. Havel, a longtime dissident who had spent many years imprisoned and silenced by his own government because they feared his words, had become a symbol and a spokesman for the forces of democratic reform in his country. Words, he once declared, “have the power to change history.” By his own triumphal ascent to power he demonstrated that the writer of words can also change history, indeed can make as well as reflect it.

Not every writer becomes, or even tries to become, a president, but half a world away in Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa, the eminent novelist, tried and failed, after handily leading in the public opinion polls, for the same post in his country. Vargas Llosa had not suffered the physical incarceration that Havel endured, but he became impatient with the mere function of observing and writing about the problems of his nation. As an author, he felt, he “had a unique understanding of the people, their needs, their concerns, their spirit.” He therefore entered the fray at what most analysts considered a desperate time for Peru, a country racked by hyperinflation, drugs, social problems, and the crippling terrorism of the Sendoro Luminoso or Shining Path movement. Perhaps to the surprise only of non-Latin Americans, he was promptly adopted by a conservative party as its official candidate. Though he lost, his profession was not discredited; a notch lower in the pecking order, Nicaraguan novelist Sergio Ramirez sought reelection the same month as his country's vice president.

The closest equivalent in India might be the electoral success of Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi,
though as a screenwriter his words reach the public only indirectly, through the lips of actors. Former prime minister P. V. Narasimha Rao is a rare example of a politician who became a novelist; his
Insider
was too thinly veiled an account of his own career to qualify convincingly as fiction. If true novelists, playwrights, and poets have been less successful in influencing India's political destiny, journalists have demonstrated the power of words to shake governments (and indeed, as the victories of several journalists seeking seats in Parliament suggests, to win votes for themselves).

Some, of course, may argue that journalism is hardly literature, even if sometimes it has been indistinguishable from fiction. And at least the Indian journalist, like the Indian litterateur, is free to write what he wishes to. The greatest challenge for writers is when they have to function in societies that do not grant them this freedom. Then the function of literature becomes more than the creative rendering of social observations. In societies where truth is what the government says is true, literature must depict a deeper truth that the culture needs to grasp in order to survive. Kurt Vonnegut once compared the writer to the canary sent down a mine shaft to determine whether there is enough air for the miners to work: if the canary suffocates or comes up gasping for air, the miners know something has to be done. In many countries, it is the writers’ gasping cries at their own suffocation that has brought about the most fundamental changes. As the Nobel Prize–winning Italian novelist Italo Calvino put it, “The paradox of the power of literature [is] that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers.” President Havel expressed it with even greater
intensity. “I inhabit a system,” he said, “in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions…. The word Solidarity was capable of shaking an entire power bloc.”

It is probably no accident, therefore, that some of the world's greatest literature in recent years has been produced by writers who are either in exile from oppressive political systems (Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Breyten Breytenbach, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) or struggling to hold up a mirror to the oppressive structures within which they live (André Brink and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, Pablo Neruda in Chile, Boris Pasternak in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn before his exile, Havel himself). Literature has always had the potential to raise the awkward question, to probe the deeper reality, to awaken the dormant consciousness, and therefore to subvert the established order. Which may explain why good writers rarely have the opportunity to make effective presidents. They are better at revealing than at ruling.

W
HY HUESCA?”
our friends asked when my former wife and I told them where we wanted to go. It was 1980, and we were on our first visit to Spain, then newly emerged into democracy after four decades of Franco's fascism. But Huesca was no tourist spot: it was an obscure town on the way to nowhere. To get there, we would have to risk country roads of unpredictable quality. And then our homeward ascent through the Pyrenees, we were warned, would be unnecessarily arduous. “Forget it,” our friends said.

We couldn't. There was something we had to do in Huesca.

So we wound our way tortuously through the rugged hills of the Sierra de la Peña, till the road flattened out across deserted scrubland and a weather-beaten sign told us we had reached our destination.

Huesca was as nondescript a provincial town as our friends had said it would be. But we had a specific objective in mind. Not the cathedral, to which our Michelin guidebook
accorded one star. Not even the traditional bustling marketplace, which Hemingway might have immortalized in a couple of paragraphs. What we wanted, as we'd explained to our disbelieving friends, was something altogether simpler.

We had come to Huesca for a cup of coffee.

My wife scanned the storefronts as I turned in to unfamiliar streets. Twice I nearly stopped the car, but Minu's sense of occasion was not satisfied. “No, not here,” she said. “It's not quite right.” I drove on.

It was springtime, as it had been decades earlier, in 1937, when Huesca had acquired its brief spasm of importance as a military stronghold of Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War. The ragtag Republican forces, resisting him in their forlorn fight against fascism, had encircled the town. Their ranks included a motley collection of international volunteers — idealists and opportunists, anarchists, Communists, and passionate democrats. Among them was a gaunt, consumptive English writer who called himself George Orwell.

The Republicans, poorly armed, badly led, hopelessly organized, and racked by treachery and dissension, besieged Huesca for months. Amid the blood and grime of the grueling campaign, the inspiriting word was passed through the frontlines: “Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca.”

Orwell took heart from the prospect. “Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca”: it was the kind of false promise that sustains morale in every war, like “We'll be home for Christmas.” The siege of Huesca dragged on, and the slogan's optimism rang increasingly hollow. Attrition took its toll on lives, strategic objectives, hope. Huesca, impregnable in
fascist hands, seemed to represent the utter futility of the cause of freedom.

George Orwell, destined to become one of the world's great voices of freedom, was wounded in action on the outskirts of Huesca. He left for home on a stretcher, bitter in his disappointment. “If I ever go back to Spain,” he wrote in his searing
Homage to Catalonia,
“I shall make a point of having a cup of coffee in Huesca.”

But Huesca did not fall. Franco and fascism triumphed in Spain, and Orwell never saw Huesca again.

“Here,” Minu said abruptly. “This is it. Stop the car.” We were at a modest little café, as unremarkable as the ones she had earlier rejected. But across the road, its sign bright in the sun, stood an imposing building. For forty years under the Franco regime, the long arm of the law had ended in a clenched fist — that of the dreaded Guardia Civil. Minu had stopped me in front of its local headquarters.

“What will you have, señor, señora?” the waiter asked us as we sat down. “Lunch? Dessert?”

I looked over his shoulder, across the road, at two civil guards in the uniform of their newly restored democracy. They stood stiffly at attention, rifles in hand, guarding the gates of their establishment.

“No, thanks,” I replied at last. “All we need is a cup of coffee.”

A
FEW YEARS AGO
I received an interesting paper from a professor at my old college, St. Stephen's, an elegant oasis of red brick on the bustling outskirts of Delhi. The professor, Aditya Bhattacharjea, was an economist, but despite this disqualification his paper intrigued me. Remarking that a majority of the country's leading English-language writers — he named Rukun Advani, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Anurag Mathur, Allan Sealy, and myself — were all roughly contemporaries at St. Stephen's, Professor Bhattacharjea posited the existence of a new literary phenomenon, a “St. Stephen's School of Literature.”