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Vikram Seth

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Vikram Seth (pronounced sayt), born June 20, 1952 is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist. An unusually forthcoming writer whose published material is replete with thinly disguised details as to the personal lives of himself and his intimates, Vikram Seth complains that his readers presume to a degree of familiarity with him that they have not earned. It is doubtless a credit to Seth that — however unwelcome to him — his readers do feel this.

Background

Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata); his family lived in a number of cities including Simla and Patna as well as Kolkata and London during his childhood, he himself spending extended periods away at boarding school from the age of five. His father, Prem, was an executive of the Bata India Limited shoe company who migrated to post-Partition India from West Punjab in Pakistan. His mother, Leila, was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court as well as the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court, at Simla. She had studied law in London while pregnant with Seth's younger brother, and came first in her Bar examinations conducted only weeks after she delivered her second child. That child, Vikram Seth's younger brother, Shantum, leads Buddhist meditational tours; his younger sister, Aradhana, is a film-maker married to an Austrian diplomat, who worked on Deepa Mehta's Earth and Fire. (Compare the characters Haresh and Savita and two of the Chatterjee siblings in A Suitable Boy: Seth has been unusually candid in acknowledging that many of his fictional personnel are drawn from life; he has said that only the dog Cuddles in A Suitable Boy has his real name — "Because he can't sue.")

Education

He attended The Doon School, often called the "Eton of India," in Dehradun, and told a Doon Founder's Day gathering in 1992 of his "terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation" while studying at the prestigious institution. Seth said, "Sometimes, at lights out, I wished I would never wake up to hear the chhota hazri bell. For days after I left I thought of school as a kind of jungle, and looked back on it with a shudder. I was teased and bullied by my classmates and my seniors because of my interest in studies and reading, because of my lack of interest in games, because of my unwillingness to join gangs and groups." The experience is given to Tapan, the younger brother of Amit Chatterjee — the character bearing numerous similarities to Seth himself in A Suitable Boy (Amit takes charge of withdrawing the boy from the school and enrolling him in a day school).

The widely-quoted comments themselves, however, and the fact that he made them, perhaps should not be relied upon entirely to characterise either his schooldays or Seth the man; in his speech to the Doon students he also spoke of the advantages the school conferred on him and offered words of encouragement and inspiration. And in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Margaret Throsby, his slightly younger contemporary at Doon, the anthropologist and novelist Amitav Ghosh, expressed surprise at the report of how Seth had characterised his school days: in his own recollection Seth had been deservedly lionised by both students and staff, his winning personality and brilliant intellect having been well in evidence even then.

He completed his "A" levels at Tonbridge School in Kent, and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He undertook doctoral studies at Stanford University where he has stated that he spent "11 years (from 1975 to 1986) not getting an economics Ph.D."

While formally engaged in postgraduate economics courses at Stanford he also undertook poetics studies — he was Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing in 1977-1978 -- with the poet Timothy Steele [1], whose traditionally structured verse with formal rhyme and metre (together with that of Robert Frost and Philip Larkin) inspired Seth to adopt a similar formal discipline in his own poetry. "I wanted to have some contact with the writing program," Seth recalled in 2003 interview. "So I went to this office and asked if there was anyone who could help with poetry. There were two poets there and the one nearest the door was Timothy Steele, who writes with rhyme and metre. If the other fellow had been closer, I'd probably have turned out a poet of free verse."

In 1980-82 Seth did extensive field work in China gathering data for his intended doctoral dissertation on Chinese population planning; he was attached to Nanjing University while in China and became fluent in Mandarin within six months, later translating Chinese as well as Hindi poetry into English. He took advantage of his Chinese language fluency to return home to Delhi overland via Sinkiang and Tibet, resulting in From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983), his first book, a combination travel narrative and personal memoir written at the suggestion of his father.

Personal Life

Avocations

A famous polymath, Seth detailed in an interview (in the year 2005) in the Australian magazine Good Weekend that he has studied several languages, including Welsh, German and, later, French in addition to the oft-noted Mandarin , English (which he describes as "my instrument" in answer to Indians who query his not writing in his native Hindi), Urdu (so useful to him during the travels in Sinkiang and Tibet detailed in From Heaven Lake), which he reads and writes in Nasta’liq script, and Hindi, which he of course reads and writes in the Devanāgarī script.

He plays the Indian flute and the cello and sings German lieder, especially Schubert. He credits his partner, the French violinist Philippe Honoré, as inspiring him with the idea for his classical music novel An Equal Music.

He does so in an acrostic sonnet on Honoré's name in An Equal Music:

Perhaps this could have stayed unstated.
Had our words turned to other things
In the grey park, the rain abated,
Life would have quickened other strings.
I list your gifts in this creation:
Pen, paper, ink and inspiration,
Peace to the heart with touch or word,
Ease to the soul with note and chord.
How did that walk, those winter hours,
Occasion this? No lightning came;
Nor did I sense, when touched by flame,
Our story lit with borrowed powers -
Rather, by what our spirits burned,
Embered in words, to us returned.

Business acumen

Seth is famously astute as a businessman. His late literary agent Giles Gordon recalled being interviewed by Seth for the position: "Vikram sat at one end of a long table and he began to grill us. It was absolutely incredible. He wanted to know our literary tastes, our views on poetry, our views on plays, which novelists we liked. There really was a lot of Eng Lit in it. Then he asked our views on agenting and how we would go about selling his books. The three of us were very self-conscious and rather resentful of doing this in front of each other. Agents never get interviewed by authors." But notwithstanding the acute commercial savvy Seth has become renowned for, he later explained to Gordon that he had passed the interview not because of commercial considerations, but because unlike the others he was the only agent who seemed as interested in his poetry as in his other writing. That being said, Seth followed what he has described as "the ludicrous advance for that book" (£200,000 for A Suitable Boy) with £500,000 for An Equal Music and £1.4 million for Two Lives.

He prepared another acrostic poem for his address at Gordon's 2005 memorial service:

Gone though you have, I heard your voice today.
I tried to make out what the words might mean,
Like something seen half-clearly on a screen:
Each savoured reference, each laughing bark,
Sage comment, bad pun, indiscreet remark.
Gone since you have, grief too in time will go,
Or share space with old joy; it must be so.
Rest then in peace, but spare us some elation.
Death cannot put down every conversation.
Over and out, as you once used to say?
Not on your life. You're on this line to stay.

Having lived in London for many years he now maintains residences in Salisbury, England, where he is a notable participant in local literary and cultural events, and Delhi, where he lives close to his parents and keeps his extensive library and papers.

Gay themes in Seth's work

In each of Seth’s novels and in much of his poetry thus far there have been gay themes and characters of greater or lesser centrality. Seth has been discreet but not secretive about his personal life, occasionally referring the idly curious without further comment to an early poem, “Dubious”:

Some men like Jack and some like Jill
I'm glad I like them both but still
I wonder if this freewheeling
Really is an enlightened thing,
Or is its greater scope a sign
Of deviance from some party line?
In the strict ranks of Gay and Straight
What is my status: Stray? Or Great?

Seth has said that "the 'I' in my poems is almost always me," so one may conclude from his use of this poem to answer questions from time to time that he identifies as bisexual. Moreover, Mappings and Seth's other books of poetry contain love poems addressed to both male and female objects.

Beyond the dedication in An Equal Music, Seth has expressly acknowledged his relationship with his longtime partner, Philippe Honoré, and in her own memoir A Life on Balance, Justice Leila Seth (with her son's permission) mentions his “gay choices.” The Indian journalist Sandip Roy reports that Seth discussed the issue of his sexuality candidly in a television program with his sister Aradhana and that in a book tour interview Roy had probed further: Seth said that this was not something he'd ever hidden; he just didn't wish to be defined by it. On the other hand, he was conscious of the fact that his being moderately open about his sexuality might help other people in similar situations and that was one of the reasons he had given leave to his mother to write about it.

Writing

Poetry

Seth is now best known for his novels, though he has characterised himself as a poet first and novelist second. His first book of poetry, Mappings, was originally privately published; it attracted little attention and indeed Philip Larkin, to whom he sent it for comment, referred to it rather scornfully among his intimates, though he offered Seth encouragement. Whether or not Seth's poetry is expressly influenced by Larkin, it contains similar elements: a highly colloquial vocabulary and syntax with enjambement and rhyme; closely structured form but without rigidity.

Travel writing

His travel book From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) was his first popular success -- even here he makes frequent asides in verse -- and won the Thomas Cook award for travel writing. Among its considerable charms for Seth's admirers is the extensive insight it affords as to Seth as a person, who is for once candid about the reality and effect of living abroad -- though not in particular of being in Diaspora -- a theme which arises in his poetry but nowhere in his fiction:

Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate dalmoth and dreamed of Delhi. What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

Hybrid: The "novel in verse"

The first of his novels, The Golden Gate (1986), is indeed a novel in verse about the lives of a number of young professionals in San Francisco. The novel is written entirely in rhyming tetrameter sonnets after the style established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, which he encountered in English translation in a Stanford second-hand bookstore and which changed the direction of his career, shifting his focus from academic to literary work. The likelihood of commercial success seemed highly doubtful -- and the scepticism of friends as to the novel's viability is facetiously quoted within the novel; but the verse novel received wide acclaim (Gore Vidal dubbed it "The Great California Novel") and achieved healthy sales. The novel contains a strong element of affectionate satire, something occasionally missed by Seth's more earnest critics, as with his subsequent novel, A Suitable Boy.

Novels in prose

A Suitable Boy

After the success of The Golden Gate, Seth took up residence in his parents' house back in Delhi to work on his second novel, A Suitable Boy (1993). Though initially conceived as a short piece detailing the domestic drama of an Indian mother's search for an appropriate husband for her marriageable Indian daughter against the background of the formative years of India after Independence, the novel grew and Seth was to labour over it for almost a decade. The 1349-page novel is a four-family saga set in post-independence, post-Partition India, and alternatively satirically and earnestly examines issues of national politics in the period leading up to the first post-Independence national election of 1952, inter-sectarian animosity, land reform and the eclipse of the feudal princes and landlords, academic affairs, inter- and intra-family relations and a range of further issues of importance to the characters. The Indian journalist and novelist Kushwant Singh has said of the novel that, "I lived through that period and I couldn't find a flaw. It really is an authentic picture of Nehru's India." The novel was, despite its formidable length, a bestseller, propelled Seth into the public spotlight and assured his reputation, although it was somewhat controversially passed over for the Booker Prize shortlist. English critics greeted A Suitable Boy with almost universal enthusiasm (notwithstanding the passing-over for the Booker Prize shortlist); some American critics appeared oblivious to its considerable humour, possibly lacking the necessary cosmopolitan awareness to be attuned to its satire.

An Equal Music

Seth's third novel, An Equal Music (1999), set in contemporary Europe, focuses on the lives of classical musicians and their music: so integral to the novel is the discussion by the characters of their performance repertoire (some of it very slightly obscure) that Seth successfully marketed a companion double CD containing performances of all the music referred to. Readers and critics without musical knowledge occasionally complained that Michael, the protagonist, was simply not a likeable (or unlikeable) enough character to sustain interest throughout a substantial novel and that the focus on the music for its own sake can be trying for the uninitiated. Musically knowledgeable readers, especially those who perform, were with rare exceptions unstinting in their enthusiasm and praise. Paolo Isotta, one of Italy's most significant music critics, wrote in the influential newspaper Il Corriere della Sera of the Italian translation that no European writer had ever shown such a knowledge of European classical music, nor had any European novel before managed to convey the psychology, the technical abilities, even the human potentialities of those who practise music for a living (Silvia Albertazzi, 2005).

Biography

His most recent book, Two Lives, is a non-fiction family memoir written at the suggestion of his mother, and published in October, 2005. It focuses on the lives of his great uncle (Shanti Behari Seth) and German-Jewish great aunt (Henny Caro) who met in Berlin in the early 1930s while Shanti was a student there and with whom Seth stayed extensively on going to England at age 17 for school at Tonbridge and then to attend Oxford. As with From Heaven Lake, Two Lives contains much autobiography and this is a considerable part of its appeal.

Range

Seth's considerable range is demonstrated by the meticulous historical accuracy of A Suitable Boy with the finely nuanced cultivated-Indian English of the narrative voice and the entirely in-character voices of the principals of the story; the correspondingly accurate depiction of northern California yuppies of the 1980s in The Golden Gate and of the world of western classical musicians in An Equal Music. He has continued to produce volumes of poetry at intervals alongside his publications in a range of other forms, including translations from Chinese poets. Despite his formidable erudition in a wide range of disciplines, both his prose and poetry are strongly characterised by their accessibility and he has said that he labours considerably to ensure this.

In most of Seth's writing (apart from An Equal Music, narrated in the first person by its central character) there is a strong, and always engaging and attractive, narrative persona -- sometimes, as in From Heaven Lake, obviously Seth himself; at other times, in his novels and poems, intermittently so. He has complained about some of his readers assuming on book tours a degree of intimacy with him that they have not earned.

A film of A Suitable Boy is slated for release in 2006, an earlier attempt at a television serialisation having been abandoned.

Bibliography

Novels
Poetry
Children's book
Libretto
Non-Fiction

Prizes and Awards

  • 1983 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet
  • 1985 Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) The Humble Administrator's Garden
  • 1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) A Suitable Boy
  • 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) A Suitable Boy
  • 1994 WH Smith Literary Award A Suitable Boy
  • 2001 EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Award) for Best Book/Novel An Equal Music
  • 2006 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman

See also

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