Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (9 page)

Ever since
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
nearly three decades ago, I had thought of John Le Carré as the author who had deromanticized the spy novel. He had created a grim and gray world of petty routine and grand betrayal, a world so gloomy its chief protagonist preferred to die on the Berlin Wall than to continue its amoral battles. With
Our Game,
a title deliberately reminiscent of the “Great Game” that the British imperialists of a century ago thought they were playing against czarist Russia, it is clear that Le Carré has made of disillusionment merely another kind of romanticism.

And sure enough, Cranmer says of Larry, “What
powered him… was his romanticism, his love of the underdog, his gut contempt for the British Establishment and its crawling adherence to America. Larry's hatreds didn't change when Communism collapsed. Neither did his loves. His dreams of a better, fairer world didn't change — his love of the individuality over the collective…. After the Cold War it got worse. On both sides of the Atlantic. More corrupt, inward, conformist, intolerant, isolationist, smug…. Why shouldn't Larry continue to betray us?”

Le Carré’s own hatreds and loves haven't changed either. In an excoriating account of an encounter with the former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, he has written, “To listen to him you could be forgiven for assuming that we had been on the same side all along.” Le Carré has no doubt which side he remains on. He is contemptuous of today's Russo-American entente, whereby (in words from the novel that echo those of his op-ed) “whatever Moscow does is O.K. by Washington, provided nobody frightens the horses. End of policy.” It is symbolic of this not-so-brave new world that Cranmer discovers that “the Office,” as he calls it, has been relocated after his retirement in “a sullen multistory blockhouse, rooted amid tearing traffic, all-night cafes, and down-at-heel clothing shops.” A far cry from the days when spies were spies and God was a Russian-hating Englishman.

The irony is that Le Carré the author is guilty of the very sin he also ascribes to Western policy makers, that of “hunt[ing] wistfully for a new means of dividing the world for our greater comfort and safety, now that the Communist thing, rather regrettably, had gone away.” In conjuring up a world where a postimperial monster state is bent on subju-gating
fiercely individualist little republics as the West stands cynically (or cravenly) by, he has perpetuated an old division, one based on the continuing demonization of the old enemy, Russia. And so the Ingush are romanticized: “We're a bunch of unruly mountaineers who love God, drink, fight, boast, steal, forge a little money, push a little gold, wage blood feuds, and can't be organized into groups of more than one.”

In this post–Cold War world, to paraphrase an old joke from the novel, there will be no big war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing. Spy novelists may well need to encourage passionate insurrections to give themselves, and their characters, new moral causes to struggle for. But for the rest of us, wary of the endless multiplication of sovereignties, hesitant before the clamor for self-determination echoing in a hundred different dialects, anxious about murderous new fundamentalisms, and unconvinced that any part of the old Soviet Union really needs another Englishman “to take the Caucasus into [his] protection,” perhaps it would be better if those stones were left standing after all. In which case Le Carré’s indignation seems overblown and the political message of his fiction, for all the elegance of its writing and the smooth flow of its prose, a somewhat disingenuous and self-defeating exercise.

Having failed to revive the Cold War, Le Carré turned his attentions to the developing world, with a similarly dystopic vision. His next novel,
The Tailor of Panama,
the story of an unfortunate seamster who is blackmailed into becoming a British agent, soon had all of Panama up in arms — though, fortunately for the author, not literally.

Le Carré, apparently requiring more than just a spy story in these days when the life and death of a secret agent has few earthshaking consequences, produced a particularly nasty portrait of the Central American country, one describing it entirely as a land of corruption and betrayal. “There's no hope for us,” one of his Panamanian characters says. “What do we do? Cheat. Conspire. Lie. Pretend. Steal. Starve each other…. We're so stupid and corrupt and blind I don't know why the earth doesn't swallow us up right now.”

It gets worse. Those on both sides of Panama's more famous earth opening, the canal, reacted with fury to this “national insult.” For it seems that most of the book's characters, from the president on down, are so thinly disguised as to be instantly recognizable as real Panamanians, including many who offered Le Carré a hospitable welcome on his research visit. “Ugly, unreal and unjust” is one alliterative condemnation; another compared Le Carré’s book to a portrait of America based purely on the deeds of Al Capone.

This is, no doubt, all good fun, if you don't happen to be Panamanian. It is even possible that Le Carré’s research was more accurate than, say, that of Paul Mann, who has built a formidable award-winning reputation in the Western world for thrillers set in an India so grotesque, so revolting, and so replete with howlers that only a non-Indian could read them without his blood boiling over. What bothers me about the likes of Mann is that, to sell their tawdry tales of fetid exotica, they pretend to be portraying an entire society, peddling their hollow knowingness as if it were insight. I do not know enough about Panama to judge whether Le Carré is guilty of the same sin, but the problem is a familiar one.

In Le Carré’s case the dilemma is existential. In our post–Cold War world, his Great Cause has disappeared. So Le Carré dressed up a petty cause as a great one, buttressing his feeble fictions with op-ed assaults on the post–Cold War peace between the superpowers. His novels, he admitted, served to abet his assault on the West's new entente with Russia; he is the spy who never came in from the cold. Maybe, just maybe, Le Carré should stick to writing about the gray and gloomy England he knows best, rather than trying to set to rights a world that has moved beyond the sterile divisions of a global antagonism that threatened us all.

I
T IS A MEASURE OF THE EXTENT
to which colonialism has shaped our perception of the world that Indians know so little of the work of the greatest Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin, the two-hundredth anniversary of whose birth was celebrated as the last millennium was ending.

Innumerable British poets of flimsy attainment have entered our imaginations and our schoolbooks, but Pushkin remains a closed book to us. Literate Indians can quote from “The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk” and turn misty-eyed at yet another recitation of “Casabianca,” with its boy standing on the burning deck, but ask us to name one of Pushkin's masterworks, and we are lost. All three poets flourished at roughly the same time — the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century — but neither Selkirk's creator, William Cowper, nor the very English Felicia Hemans, whose faithful boy went down on his ship the
Casabianca,
have any international literary stature today. Pushkin, on the other hand, is not just immortal: he is recognized as the
creator of modern Russian language and literature, no less, and as the writer who has captured the Russian soul as no other writer has before or since.

Yet — pick up the
Penguin Dictionary of Quotations,
that hallmark of British literary recognition, and you will find six pages devoted to Cowper: a staggering 147 quotations. Even the deservedly obscure Hemans gets seven listings. And Pushkin? Not even one. He doesn't appear at all. It's not just because he's “foreign,” since the
Penguin Dictionary,
with admirable eclecticism, has quotes from Goethe and Heine, Ibsen and Voltaire. It's just that the Anglocentric view of the world has never had much room for Pushkin.

But just listen to Russians about this man! Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, an exotic nobleman whose maternal great-grandfather, a black African, came to Russia in the days of Peter the Great, embodies the Russian spirit as no purely Caucasian writer ever has. He died in a futile duel at the tragically young age of thirty-eight and yet wrote lines that were memorized by czars and Communists alike. Listen to the woman in a Moscow bookstore who told a Western journalist, “Pushkin is my spirit, he is my soul.” Heed the twentieth-century Russian poet who declared that “Pushkin is our everything.”

Pushkin's was an extraordinary life by any measure. By twenty-one, he had published his first major poem, “Ruslan and Ludmila,” a courageous “Ode to Liberty,” and a clutch of satirical poems that so offended the czar that he was promptly exiled from Saint Petersburg to southern Russia. Banishment didn't cramp his literary style, and he produced the hugely popular epic poem “The Prisoner of the Caucasus.”
The court, mindful of his fame, ordered him back to his family's luxurious estate, Mikhailovskoye — a sort of genteel house arrest — and two years later pardoned him. Pushkin settled first in Moscow and then in Saint Petersburg, producing the book-length verse-novel
Yevgeny Onegin,
a masterpiece that is revered as one of the greatest works of Russian literature, was adapted as an opera by Tchaikovsky, and even inspired India's own Vikram Seth, in San Francisco, to write his novel in verse,
The Golden Gate.

There followed a flurry of other great works, including the novel
The Captain's Daughter
and most notably
Boris Godunov,
a verse drama that was the basis for Modest Mussorgsky's most famous opera and also for an award-winning Soviet film. Pushkin was working on a novel about his African ancestor — titled
The Negro of Peter the Great
— when a duel sparked by his unhappy marriage ended his short and brilliant life.

Pushkin revolutionized Russian literature, deriving images and themes from his country's history and folklore and using contemporary language shunned by traditional writers. His impact on his country's cultural self-perception simply cannot be overestimated: it is far greater than Goethe's in Germany, comparable only to Rabindranath Tagore's in Bengal. To be fair, Pushkin, rather like Tagore, has proved difficult to translate. The Russian scholar Valentin Nepomnyaschy explains it well: “Of the world's [literary] geniuses, he is least translated into other languages and the hardest to grasp in translation: in cultures with other languages, he seizes the soul only of those who know and love our language, our culture, those to whom Russia is not spiritually alien.”

Russia is indeed spiritually alien to the world outside Eastern Europe; still, our ignorance of Pushkin is shocking. But it is not entirely surprising. For all English speakers in India are products of a colonial education, the legacy of Thomas Babington Macaulay and his self-satisfied successors. We have internalized a literary value system that emerged from the British desire to teach their literature as an instrument of their imperial domination. Let the natives admire our great works, the assumption ran, and they will admire our rule as well; a babu shaken by Shakespeare will also be charmed by Churchill. What Indian would defy Dufferin who has been awed by Defoe?

To their credit, the British were right for a long time. But it took the supremely well-read and cultured Jawaharlal Nehru to see beyond the worldview the British offered their colonial subjects. Today, after five and a half decades of independence, a perusal of India's literary pages shows that his intellectual legatees have a wider literary horizon: Shakespeare and Eliot, certainly, but also Goethe and García Márquez, Kundera and Kenzaburo Oe. But though it is never too late to discover a great writer, it remains a standing reproach to India's proliferating publishers that there is practically no available translation of Pushkin.

T
HE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH
of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, on July 12, 2004, has passed, but how can any writer allow it to pass unremarked? It is not merely the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won in 1971 that marks Neruda as one of the greatest literary figures of the last century. It is surely the extent to which his life and his poetry lives on in the souls of readers everywhere — most particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, but also, thanks to some excellent translations, across the globe as well. Neruda's poetry illuminates the Spanish language, its lines cited, its sentiments absorbed, to a greater extent than, say, Eliot's in English. His passion, his rage, his tenderness, his wit, are as familiar and beloved to literate Hispanics as Rabindranath Tagore's to Bengalis. And unlike most poets, Neruda was a man of action, serving his country as a diplomat and politician, always willing to put his life and limb at the service of his convictions.

The combination gave him a following few writers
have ever known in their lifetimes. One of my favorite stories of Neruda is of the time in his early sixties when he was addressing an audience in a Latin American country and was asked by a fan to recite a particular poem. Neruda started doing so, and faltered; the poem had been written many years earlier, and his own memory was no longer so reliable. As the aging poet stood on the stage, stumbling for his half-forgotten words, a man rose from the audience and recited the next line. Then another got up to join him, and another; and soon the entire audience was on its feet, reciting the poem, as its author stood silent and humbled, listening to his poetry coming back to him through the voices — and the hearts — of his readers.