Gurus, artists and exiles
Lee Langley
MY NINE LIVES by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala John Murray, £16.99, pp. 277, ISBN 0719561825 The introductory Apologia sets the scene: 'These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn't actually happen to me, it might have done ... The central character — the -I" of each chapter — is myself.'
My Nine Lives is subtitled 'Chapters of a Possible Past' and that is what we are given: variations on a theme of displacement, the search for love, and the often painful gaining of knowledge. The possible lives are turbulent, though the narrator, a trusting girl who gives more than she gets, is invariably passive, and willingly exploited. Wide-eyed, she moves through a world peopled by egotistical monsters, flighty, flirty mothers, gruff fathers who can be kindly, and lovers who bestow sexual favours before drifting on, either to oblivion or fame. There are divorces; an occasional ménage a trois or a quatre.
The parents in the stories are Jewish exiles from Nazi Europe, wealthy, or at least well off, the fathers concerned with security, the mothers reaching out for intellectual stimulus, fun or emotional fulfilment, openly disappointed in their less than beautiful offspring. The girl herself often feels an obscure sense of guilt for causing this disappointment. There is a sense of looking back at the elegance and golden days of the Thirties while trying to come to terms with a less satisfactory new life.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a dozen novels and six volumes of short stories. She is best known for her screenplays for Merchant Ivory; Heat and Dust, based on her own Booker-winning novel, won her an Academy Award. She has adapted Forster and Henry James and, like James, she explores the conflicting attractions of the Old and New Worlds. Her Polish/German/Jewish background and marriage to an Indian architect have provided the groundwork for her fiction: the Indian experience has always been the linking thread between London, New York and the subcontinent.
My Nine Lives returns to themes she has examined in earlier novels: the ambiguous nature of gurus, the selfishness of artists and the loneliness of exile. 'We were adrift from the solid land of our own background and social assumptions, and our language,' comments the narrator. The shade of Chekhov hovers, sometimes manifestly present: 'When we decided to sell the house, my brother George kept saying, "It's The Cherry Orchard, American style." And so it is, a grand, decaying estate, a brother and sister, both dreamers, weighed down by inertia, the threat from a changing outside world. Except that it ends, not with the thud of axe on cherry tree but the sound of music drifting across the gardens at sunset and the promise of hope.
The narrator falls quietly, hopelessly in love with the unlikeliest people — a preponderance of bulky, domineering men with heavy thighs, large heads and egos to match. In one story she is in thrall to a 'solid Prussian professor 30 years older than I, who after making love at once turned over on his side and went to sleep, snoring tremendously'.
Prawer Jhabvala has an even, unemotional tone of voice that conceals irony, lethal observation and sly humour. She can be caustic without being cruel, indulgent towards her slinky, sexy ladies and domineering geniuses. We can only guess at how autobiographical the material is, but some of the life has certainly been quarried for use here.
There are moments when one longs for the narrator to snap out of her passivity, shake off her low self-esteem and strike a blow for herself. But the stories are subtly tuned to the psychological make-up of her characters. They remind me of the paper flowers that used to be sold in Indian bazaars: a small wad of folded grey tissue paper, dropped into a glass of water, unfolded into richly coloured flowers that swirled and danced in the water, as these stories do in the mind.
Detoxing Dante
He knew the azure sky was Heaven-dressed Like Tuscan cruelty and the Tuscan tongue, A language for all Italy and soon A text for scholar-dogs to roll upon.
Perhaps he envied each unhappy wraith Rising from the turbulence of Hell, Since in his hands not even rhyme was safe, For they're immortalised by what they tell And we who read may guess they're pleased to be In pain if there's no other place to dwell.
Alas, it comes down to publicity, Poets harangue and bully and confess And feign to publish through eternity.
The Dictionary folds them to its breast.
Peter Porter
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