A Writer's Progress

A WRITER’S PROGRESS

By ANNADA SANKAR RAY
(Translated from ‘Binur Boi’ in Bengali by Lila Ray)

(Continued from the previous issue)

XXI. DUTY

By nature Binu was indolent. He was averse to effort of any kind. He liked to stroll and did his thinking as he paced up and down. He liked to stretch out at full length and dreamt or read as he reclined. He did not like to sit in one place and therefore he did not eat well, converse well or correspond well. What could force such a person to sit down to the creation of literature? If there had been no urge, no insistent need, he could not have done so; he would have jumped up and run away.

If anyone had asked the twenty-year-old Binu why he wrote they would have been answered by the word ‘Duty’. To say that he did not hanker after fame at all would be an exaggeration. But to exert himself for it? That was another thing. The ‘duty’ he spoke of was of course social and humanitarian. He understood very well that his efforts would not produce literature, but he was more bent upon breaking down prejudices and reforming society than upon art for art’s sake. He had set himself to prove the worthlessness of the customs, inherited beliefs and conventions that have been so highly prized so long and to smash current pre-conceived notions. If for this he had to write a novel he would. He put himself to the trouble of sitting down and holding a pen in order to carry on his work of demolition. This demolition was not to be pure destruction however. Reformers destroy but, like a river, they break down one bank only to build the other higher. They also know how to construct. To dream of a newsociety was second nature to Binu. Like Omar Khayam he used to exclaim to the companion of his choice:

“Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits–and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!”

By degrees, quite unnoticed, the bonds which bound Binu to tradition loosened. He hesitated to describe himself as a Hindu and became diffident about calling himself even an Indian. What then was he? That which bears no label, a man without a brand.

XXII. STYLE

The answer to the question why he should write was duty. But there is another question. How was he to write? The answer to that was, not just anyhow. Binu was always very fastidious about the way he wrote, his style. Others could specify the subject: examiners pleased themselves. Binu could, however, dispose of the subject in his own way. As the proverb says: Eat to please yourself but dress to please others.

Binu, ease-loving as he was, took the greatest pains with his style, developing it sometimes conversationally, sometimes on paper, sometimes mentally. Correspondence is also writing of a kind. There is a saying that God must be remembered in the forest, in the heart, and in corners. Writing is similar. Binu did not relax his efforts for a single day nor did he compromise. He displayed his style even in his examination papers, and was penalised for it. He was also rewarded. He refused to write just anyhow even for newspapers and, though he wrote about social reforms, his manner was distinctive. Whether it was good or bad did not concern him; it was enough that it was his own.

For this he had to apprentice himself to many, in the first instance to ‘Birbal’, then to Rabindranath and lastly to Gandhiji. The style is the man. To separate a style from the stylist in order to learn it is like trying to separate moonlight from the moon. It is neither possible nor desirable. Binu did not content himself with an analysis of the style of those he chose as teachers; he sought the reality behind the appearance. A person is open to the influence of another as long as his own character is vague. The influence passes away upon self-discovery. To attempt to free oneself from an influence before then is like trying to jump out of a boat before it reaches the landing place.

The sole object of apprenticeship is self-discovery. When self-discovery comes imitation ceases. From then on one gives oneself, makes oneself known. Until that time imitation is not something to be ashamed of, and he who is ashamed to follow in others’ footsteps is not a true sadhaka.

XXIII. FOR WHAT GOD?

How should he write? The answer was, in his own way. There was another question. For whom was he to write? A study of ‘Birbal’s’ writings revealed that he wrote for men of feeling. He was unwilling to proffer his emotional experiences to those who lack feeling. How few men of feeling there are in the world! Even when education is universal it will not be possible to count them by the dozen! The inevitable conclusion is that ‘Birbal’ did not write for the general reader. And Rabindranath? Of his works some are for men of feeling, some for men of imagination, and some for sadhakas. Not all of his work, but a great deal, is for the general reader.

Before entering college Binu had discovered Tolstoy, the Tolstoy who, like Dhumra Lachan, criticised his own work, composed fairy tales for peasants and repented of having written; War and Peace, Anna Karenina, all, in fact, of his masterpieces. There is nothing in the history of literature like it. Ordinarily we lose ourselves in rapt admiration of even our most faulty creations, we take a blind parental pride in our offspring, not to speak of repentance. Tolstoy showed no mercy to his finest work because it was beyond the intelligence and learning of peasants and primitives, because a twelve-year-old boy would not be moved by it as deeply as an old man of seventy-two, because neither would be prompted by it to embrace his fellow-men as brothers and to forgive them their misdeeds, because it was written for a handful of wealthy, educated, civilised and leisured parasites. Tolstoy of course overdid it. He went to extremes in everything he did. He had enjoyed his youth like a Bhartrihari, and in his later days his sense of guilt was acute. He cursed his pen when it occurred to him that he was writing for sinners. He did not care to see a printed copy of his books.

Be that as it may, Binu came gradually to agree with him. The most successful creation is for the general reader or the people, the peasant and the savage, the boatman and the disposer of the dead. If these happen to be educated and cultured, well and good. If they are not, it does not matter, for words spoken with a home thrust, in tears and blood, touch the hearts of all men, no matter how insensitive and illiterate they may be. That does not mean that no other writing is worth while or is not art.

XXIV. TOLSTOY

Binu’s apprenticeship to Tolstoy had for its object not the acquisition of style but the outgrowing of it. He does not remember when his apprenticeship began and it is still incomplete. A time comes in the life of a writer when he wants to identify himself with his reader, when he does not want anything to stand between them. The thinnest partition pains him. For the literary initiate, as for the religious acolyte, the last word is sarvat tanmayo bhavet, complete union. Style is a help up to the point of union but at that point it becomes an obstacle. If the faithful friend does not take leave at the entrance to the arbour of love, she ceases to be a friend and becomes a co-wife.

In Tolstoy nothing at all is kept . He gives his reader all he has at the moment to give, life, youth, sin, virtue, wisdom, folly. He wanted to be one with the reader and he seems to have succeeded. The enemy of the writer, as of the acolyte, is his self-esteem, the tinkle of his jewelry, the clang of his pride. Has she, who comes to her Divine Lover tricked out in all her frippery, left any of herself free for an embrace? Silks and gems cover her entire person. The best heroine, the greatest initiate, is she who removes these trinkets, she who has overcome their fascination. So it is with the best writer. His ultimate reader is the inner soul of all men. “In this person is That Person,” as the bauls say. To win the love of That Person everything must be surrendered.

This is so not only in the case of style. Tolstoy abandoned his home a few days before his death. It was necessary for him to bring himself to that point in order to keep faith with life. ‘What magic is powerful enough to make the writing of a person true whose life is not true? A time came when Binu’s thoughts turned from society to life itself. In this too Tol~toy was his guru. His analysis of the essential and unessential bore a resemblance to Tolstoy’s, the young Tolstoy’s, With the elder Tolstoy he had greater differences of opinion but he also recognised that freedom, moksha, lies in complete union, in identification. For the writer mokshalies in identity with the reader. The reader is the ‘people’ made visible and he is also, off-stage, the pre-eminent Reader ofall times and all countries, That Person.

XXV THE LIVING OF LIFE

For whom should one write? The question is answered in various ways by various people and each prepares to live his life according to the answer he gives. If a person says he must write or peasants he prepares to live like a peasant himself for, unless he does so, the authentic note of peasant life will be absent from his work. And if a person says he must write for industrial workers he must live the life of an industrial worker, if the authentic note of industrial life is to be present in his work.

Upon how the writer lives ultimately depends who his readers will be, peasants or industrial workers. It may be that with education peasants will lose their rusticity and workers their drunkenness. They will present a different appearance when the State is at last theirs. But as long as peasants till the land and workers labour with their bodies, it will be necessary to tune one’s life to theirs. Not for a long time to come will the life of all classes in society be the same, even in Soviet Russia. Writers also should vary their modes of life; they should not all live alike. They should harmonise their lives with the lives of those for whom they write.

Binu felt like taking to the road in order to be everything with everybody, a peasant with peasants, a boatman with boatmen, a woodcutter with woodcutters, a baul with bauls. The influence of Tolstoy made him partial to peasants. A peasant is like an undying banyan; he puts out roots that strike down into the earth. All others may be uprooted but he will not be. By being a peasant among peasants and marrying a peasant girl, Binu could learn the mysteries of the elemental life of nature. If it is at all possible to feel things that are primeval and fundamental, it is possible in the life of the peasant. Though he thought of the peasant in particular, the idea of the people in general had attracted him ever since Gandhiji started his mass movements. Fresh moods and a fresh speech float on the current of the people. He could not approach them without jumping into the stream. For the language of books and moods derived from books he had acquired a distaste.

XXVI. SAVING GRACE

Now and then Binu grew impatient to change his mode of life. As long as he had been alone it was more or less possible; now his life was not his alone. In the last reckoning he would be called to account for his life alone and the future would judge him as though he were single; yet, if he lived the life of his choice, other lives would be disarranged. Exactly how much this opposition implied, the future would not be able to understand. It would know only as much as could be understood from inference.

Half of Tolstoy’s life was passed in an inferno because his life-purpose did not agree with the life-purposes of others. When he felt death near he threw off his hesitation and struck out into the life that was his alone. Before he died he won through. If he had not done it he would have been defeated for all time. In Gandhiji there is no hesitation, Not only does he face suffering himself for what is dear to him, he makes others suffer also. The number of his close relatives has grown by degrees from five to five or ten lakhs, and in course of time may number four hundred millions. Gandhiji has the strength of soul to drag them along with him but Binu had not enough strength of mind to put to the test what he thought true with only five others.

The fact that saved him is that the peasant is not only a peasant, he is also a human being. The Ramayana and Mahabharata give him pleasure even though the writers were not peasants among peasants; they neither heard nor sang the song of peasant life. The coal-miner is not a cowherd; yet the dalliance of Radha and Krishna, through the chemistry of love and emotion, makes him one with the Gopis of Brindaban. The composers of Vaishnava lyrics were not cowherds among cowherds. They identified themselves with them through the chemistry of feeling. So it is always been. To change one’s way of life, though not impossible, is difficult. Those who have been able to do so deserve our respect, but the lives of those who have not been able to do so need not be failures. There are precedents. The appeal of Binu’s writing, if he could not change his mode of living, need not be restricted to the middle class. It could give pleasure to proletarians as well. The saving grace is that they are human beings like Binu.

XXVII. CLASS LITERATURE

Binu had always wanted human life in its entirety, in all its guises, to find a place in literature. Let its full and complete music be heard! Of the lives of kings and royalty in general there has been enough, too much, and enough also of aristocratic life. There has also been a great deal of what is spoken of as middle class life or its lack of life. Other people exist who have a beauty of their own, a special melody, a delicious flavour. They may not be the losers if their acquaintance is not made and they are not introduced into literature, for they are not over-anxious to read. But we will lose, we who have learnt to read and read to learn. Why should our writers deprive us of them? Why should they not taste life as a whole and give us a taste of it? When the Ramayana and Mahabharata were written there was an excuse; the reading public of the day was not large. Can there be any excuse today?

There is none. Yet enquiry will reveal that the lives our poets lead are confined and arid. Many of them, like Binu, have the urge without the strength. Tolstoy is the representative writer of the present day. And the fact that he found the strength to make the plunge in the end is significant.

Then what is the answer? The answer is the birth of hundreds of writers like Gorky. Until their advent the lives of peasants and workers will remain outside literature. They cannot enter in. Through the window of folk literature the breeze may waft a rustic strain now and then or some sweet pastoral melody. Through the door will be heard the sound of revolutionary singing, a song of destruction. This is not different from journalism, for there is something of propaganda in it. The window of folk literature and the door of journalism are not the front doors of literature. Among the famous who have come in this way is Gorky. There are several others among the less famous.

Is Gorky’s work class literature? Will what those-who-are-to-come write be class literature? No, literature is always just literature, painting is always painting, music is always music, and art is always art. The lapidaries of literature will acclaim as pure gold whatever they find to have the properties of gold. All other things are imitations. Gold has no class.

XXVIII. ALTERNATIVES

Binu was one of those too impatient to wait for the birth of Gorkys. He consistently sought another way out. It seemed to him there must be one. If the windows of folk literature are made into doors, light and air flood into the house of literature. With slight modifications folk literature can become literature. Many precedents are to be found in the history of letters. Faust was at folk tale. Goethe made it into literature, and before Goethe, Marlowe. Baul songs are not exactly folk songs but Rabindranath made literature out of them. The bauls could not do it themselves. An inquiry into the origins of the Vaishnava lyrics will uncover ancient shepherd songs. These lost gems would have been lost utterly if they had not become a part of the Vaishnava liturgy and become kirtans. If the bhatiali songs of boatmen had been part of the Sakta liturgy, we would have had more beautiful gems in our collection, not gems of folk literature but of real literature.

Binu himself tried to do this sort of thing in his later life. He has not been able to accomplish much yet. If he ever finds the time he will try, to show how it is done. Binu wonders why our modern poets do not turn their attention in this direction. The greatest literature is based not in the individual mind but in the group or racial consciousness. Though the individual has been given freedom in creation, the towers of buildings whose foundations are not set in the earth are destined to topple, however high into heaven they may aspire. Why have the Vaishnava lyrics survived so long when many other creations of those same Vaishnavas lie in the dust? The answer is that the padavalitakes into consideration the general consciousness of the common people of the time and builds upon it. The other poetry is not so written. If our modern poetry were to relate itself to folk poetry it would have a future. And folk literature also would gain permanence. Literature would be suffused with the mysterious vitality of folk literature.

XXIX. THE GOSPEL OF LIFE

Binu had loved the Ramayana and Mahabharata from infancy. Why are no epics written nowadays? The question occurred to him now and then. Vyas may not be alive today, nor Valmiki, but we have Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo. Since when has India been in want of Rishis? How many we have had within the last hundred years! Rajarshi, Maharshi, Brahmarshi, Maha-yogi, Paramhansa, Anshavatar, Purnavatar, and Mahatma have all been born. All but Devarshi are still with us. Devarshi is also with us in another guise. Otherwise how could riots break out at a word? Who starts them?

To go to our question. The answer is that an epic is not the creation of any single person. Before Valmiki gave the Ramayana a permanent form, many others had given it a transient one. Some of them were charansor bards, some panegyrists or bhats, some professional story-tellers or kathaks, some grandmothers or aunts putting children to sleep with bedtime stories. The Ramayana is, so to speak, the creation of a whole nation. So is the Mahabharata. To say so is not to belittle the genius of Vyas or of Valmiki. Not to say so is to leave unsolved the riddle of the creation of an epic. There are no epics today because modern nations, do not do things in an epic way. No tale nor collection of tales comparable to the Ramayana and Mahabharata has wide currency. There is only the dalliance of Krishna. It is not fit material for an epic, being of a lyrical naturc. Thousands and thousands of lyrics have been made out of it.

Then shall we give up all hope of an epic? No, the individual must do what he can. Tolstoy gave an epic to Russia, his War and Peace. Romain Rolland gave to Western Europe his Jean Christophe. It too partakes of the nature of an epic, the composer Beethoven being the model for its hero. The reading of Jean Christophe was a memorable experience in Binu’s life. It is idle to debate whether it fulfils the purpose of an epic; it is the gospel of modern European life, West European. The hero is not the hero of bloody battles but the hero of a way of life. Beethoven’s life is the silent answer to the question of how to live, how life should be lived. Binu was in search of ways to live. This way inspired him. For some time the book became his gospel of life. If only he could write one like it!