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Authors: Amit Chaudhuri
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returning; poor Tagore had had no rescuing angel, no mother-love to protect and entertain him. Nor, for that matter, had he had Ananda’s uncle. Though his uncle couldn’t be trusted. Not only was he seldom sympathetic towards Ananda’s outpourings of homesickness, he claimed he never felt homesick himself. He was lying.
Mr. Davidson too, surely, had unwittingly persuaded him against going back. He’d calmed him, praised the essays—not polite praise, but kindly recognition—making Ananda think he could maybe persevere.
Down the industrial path Ananda went, past the barrier regulating traffic, feeling as foreign and out of place as he had on the first day, then turned into the dark archway to the English faculty building. He went up the stairs—everything was lighted up but silent. If ever there came a time in the future—say, fifty years from now—when English departments fell out of use, and no one had a clue what to do with them, so that the hallways remained illuminated but unoccupied, then
this
was what the building would look like: quiet and purposeless. First floor; second floor. The departmental office, with its door closed. On the left, opposite the common room which students darted out of and into during term, was the steady line of offices of the Renaissance scholars, Romanticists, Victorianists, and the “twentieth century” teachers.
—
“
Come
in.”
Into the narrow but sunlit room, made somehow larger rather than smaller by the range of books crammed neatly and stood on shelves, from works first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a slight offering of stories that had come out a few months ago. He slipped into the armchair.
“Thank you for these,” Mr. Davidson said. He was in a jacket, despite the warmth.
In his hand, a sheaf of papers—Ananda’s poems. His latest ones. He’d given Mr. Davidson an assortment previously, after having probed him shyly with the question, to which Mr. Davidson had replied without equivocation that he’d be “happy to see them.” Here, already, were further offspring, which he’d shared with him last week.
“I enjoyed them.”
Not so good. The term “enjoy” was imprecise, worrying, insincerely mollifying, vaguely insulting. So it was with the last set of poems too. But Ananda had almost forgotten Mr. Davidson’s earlier lukewarm encouragement. Three weeks is a long time for a young poet. Memory is short; the young man is trying out various voices and registers at different moments—even different times of the day. Feeling self-importantly out of sorts in the morning, he might well write a deprecating poem in the tone of Larkin; in the afternoon, rereading one of Eliot’s Sweeney poems, he could, by evening—already having forgotten Eliot, but unable to shake off that mood—produce ironic verses on sexual malaise. The twentieth century and its literature, from its birth in around 1910 to the present moment, is passing through him, unbelievably compressed, in less than a year—in spasms and transitions. So the young poet is ina state of constant inspiration. Partly this has to do with being in a condition of strange incompleteness, the twenty-two-year-old mind, acute and wide-ranging, unable to come to terms with the body’s ever-returning sexual desire. Partly it has to do with the excitement of being in the midst of modernity, and of paying homage—to Larkin, to Edward Thomas and Dylan Thomas, to Eliot, to Baudelaire, to Pound, even to the poets he feels remote from, like Robert Lowell. Paying homage—that is, writing other people’s poems as if they were his own—makes him, on certain days, jubilant, and gives him immense power: he is, as it were, re-creating these poets at will, through his spasmodic enthusiasms; remaking what he knows as literature. In some not-irrelevant context, Hilary Burton had said to him, laughing, “Words, Mr. Sen! ‘
Words
, Degas—poetry is made out of words, not ideas,’ ” quoting
Mr. Davidson too, surely, had unwittingly persuaded him against going back. He’d calmed him, praised the essays—not polite praise, but kindly recognition—making Ananda think he could maybe persevere.
Down the industrial path Ananda went, past the barrier regulating traffic, feeling as foreign and out of place as he had on the first day, then turned into the dark archway to the English faculty building. He went up the stairs—everything was lighted up but silent. If ever there came a time in the future—say, fifty years from now—when English departments fell out of use, and no one had a clue what to do with them, so that the hallways remained illuminated but unoccupied, then
this
was what the building would look like: quiet and purposeless. First floor; second floor. The departmental office, with its door closed. On the left, opposite the common room which students darted out of and into during term, was the steady line of offices of the Renaissance scholars, Romanticists, Victorianists, and the “twentieth century” teachers.
—
“
Come
in.”
Into the narrow but sunlit room, made somehow larger rather than smaller by the range of books crammed neatly and stood on shelves, from works first published at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a slight offering of stories that had come out a few months ago. He slipped into the armchair.
“Thank you for these,” Mr. Davidson said. He was in a jacket, despite the warmth.
In his hand, a sheaf of papers—Ananda’s poems. His latest ones. He’d given Mr. Davidson an assortment previously, after having probed him shyly with the question, to which Mr. Davidson had replied without equivocation that he’d be “happy to see them.” Here, already, were further offspring, which he’d shared with him last week.
“I enjoyed them.”
Not so good. The term “enjoy” was imprecise, worrying, insincerely mollifying, vaguely insulting. So it was with the last set of poems too. But Ananda had almost forgotten Mr. Davidson’s earlier lukewarm encouragement. Three weeks is a long time for a young poet. Memory is short; the young man is trying out various voices and registers at different moments—even different times of the day. Feeling self-importantly out of sorts in the morning, he might well write a deprecating poem in the tone of Larkin; in the afternoon, rereading one of Eliot’s Sweeney poems, he could, by evening—already having forgotten Eliot, but unable to shake off that mood—produce ironic verses on sexual malaise. The twentieth century and its literature, from its birth in around 1910 to the present moment, is passing through him, unbelievably compressed, in less than a year—in spasms and transitions. So the young poet is ina state of constant inspiration. Partly this has to do with being in a condition of strange incompleteness, the twenty-two-year-old mind, acute and wide-ranging, unable to come to terms with the body’s ever-returning sexual desire. Partly it has to do with the excitement of being in the midst of modernity, and of paying homage—to Larkin, to Edward Thomas and Dylan Thomas, to Eliot, to Baudelaire, to Pound, even to the poets he feels remote from, like Robert Lowell. Paying homage—that is, writing other people’s poems as if they were his own—makes him, on certain days, jubilant, and gives him immense power: he is, as it were, re-creating these poets at will, through his spasmodic enthusiasms; remaking what he knows as literature. In some not-irrelevant context, Hilary Burton had said to him, laughing, “Words, Mr. Sen! ‘
Words
, Degas—poetry is made out of words, not ideas,’ ” quoting
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