“Tell me an interesting Indian story.” These words were uttered many years ago by the American novelist and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, and he was addressing the writer U R Ananthamurthy at the Chicago residence of the poet A K Ramanujan. Such moments have a sparse occurrence in the oral history of literary gossip. It’s one of those convergences of great rarity – like certain planetary alignments – that forces us to ascribe to it a deeper meaning.
There’s clearly more going on here, we tell ourselves, than a get together arranged by a few Chicago University boffins. When Ananthamurthy relates to Bellow one of Vaikom Muhammad Bashir’s tales – “an interesting Indian story” – we view this less as an instance of one writer humouring the other than as a meeting of minds and not least a lucky confluence of cultures.
Over the years, Bellow may have fallen out of favour with the average Indian reader, but his own interest in Indian history, philosophy and culture did in fact run deep. Behind it lay his admiration for Ramanujan, a feeling that later matured into friendship.
“I am the hyphen in Indo-American”: with this self-definition, Ramanujan seemed to have bridged the divide between the two cultures he identified as his own. But his expert grasp of the western canon – of Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats and Eliot – was what at first drew Bellow towards him. Bellow by his own admission was “astonished” at Ramanujan’s understanding of the British and American poets. “He really,” Bellow said of his Indian friend, “gets inside these poets.”
I sometimes think that there are sentences in Ramanujan’s poems that won’t seem out of place in a Bellow novel. The following sounds like Bellow but is actually from Ramanujan’s poem, “Anxiety”: “The earth has bone for muscle. And the air is a flock of invisible pigeons.” And whereas this poetic image reminds one of Ramanujan, it comes from Bellow’s great novel Seize the Day: “Everyone was like the faces on a playing card, upside down either way.”
The rhythmic similarities of their language aside – they strove in their writings to echo closely the melodious cadences of speech – the two sensibilities at play here were very much alike. Both the writers were nakedly autobiographical and both enjoyed mixing a certain grandiloquence of style – words like ‘human’, ‘self’, ‘species’, ‘heart’ – with downright mundane concerns. I am reminded of Ramanujan calling a light bulb in Chicago “a cousin of the Vedic sun”; and of Bellow’s Artur Sammler, the one-eyed protagonist of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, comparing the moon – “A white corroded pearl” – to his eyeball.
The literary link between Bellow and Ramanujan was actually established by another Indian poet, Adil Jussawalla, who believed that the one Indian character in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, named Dr V Govinda Lal, “is based at least a little on” Ramanujan.
Back in the day, it was a consensus view that only the star-crossed and the damned ended up as Bellow characters. The novelist became notorious for settling scores through his fictional portrayals – of ex-wives, of former friends. Socially-minded critics attacked him throughout his life, and have done so posthumously, for his less-than-generous depictions of females or black Americans (a verdict that, informed readers will tell you, is utterly unfounded).
Yet in Mr.Sammler’s Planet, Dr Lal emerges as a character on an equal footing with the novel’s Bellowian, dreamy and intelligent protagonist. Artur Sammler is a Polish Jew, a holocaust survivor, living in the New York of the ’70s. He is also a man composed of Old World prejudices and a self-avowed ‘Orientalist’. But after meeting Dr Lal, and reading his manuscript on colonising the moon, called The Future of the Moon, Sammler is all but smitten with admiration for the “Hindu scientist”. “Lal was the real thing,” Bellow writes. “This was no charlatan, only an oddity. He was excellent, solid.”
Here’s a rough blueprint of every Bellow novel ever written: you take an oddity (usually a wise intellectual, a variant of the author’s autobiographical portrait), and placing him at the centre, you surround him with charlatans (those money-minded, streetwise, manipulative others). To label Dr Lal as an oddity – and if the link is authentic, to see Ramanujan as one – was an act of writerly generosity on Bellow’s part. He saw something of himself in his Indian friend, and gave something of himself to this composite Indian character he so sympathetically painted in his novel.
Bellow, to be sure, was a product of his time. In the post-war era, the world hadn’t quite opened up. The major cultural transaction was between Europe and America. And Bellow combined in his novels the high seriousness of European thought with the joie de vivre that was typical of the American experience back then. But now, in this day and age, the question of relevance arises for the contemporary reader. To what extent is Saul Bellow still relevant to our experience?
Perhaps it is the wrong question to ask. Literature is not a hostage to topicality. (As Ezra Pound said, “Literature is news that stays news”.) But still let us attempt to answer it. Bellow’s relevance, at least for this reader, lies in the writer’s voice, in the contemporariness of his language. It’s a voice that makes you sit up, leave whatever you were doing, and listen. He spoke not to a generation or a country when he wrote in Herzog, “I go after reality with language. Perhaps I’d like to change it all into language...”
Bellow’s reality – foolish intellectuals, urban conmen, adultery, disease, breakdown and death – is all around us, and it travels across generational and geographical bounds. The celebrations of the Bellow centennial this year have been disappointingly low-key, and there’s barely been a mention here in India.
But perhaps the occasion will allow some of us to revisit the universal reality Bellow tried to weave through his language – a reality he imparted to us through some of the most interesting American stories, which of course were his stories, but also ours.
Vineet Gill is a journalist with The Sunday Guardian