Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (16 page)

It's worrying to realize how many Americans are handicapped in their ability to participate in this complex modern society. The young man at that Detroit street corner will always have to rely on others for vital information to lead his life; he will always be vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by those who can wield that one vital skill he doesn't have — the ability to make sense out of the shapes on a printed page, or on a street sign. And this in the world's oldest and most powerful democracy, whose citizenry make (or acquiesce in) decisions that affect the rest of the world.

I ran after the young man and caught up with him at the light. “Here, let me help,” I said, taking the paper from him and reading the address aloud. “That should be that building over there,” I said, pointing at a building half a block away, its name visible in large lettering above the entrance. He looked at me in gratitude, but I just felt helpless. I wished I had a leaflet on me for an adult remedial education program — but he wouldn't be able to read that either.

“Thanks, man,” he said, a delighted look in his eyes. He headed off — this time, at least, in the right direction.

H
AVE YOU HEARD
?” chortled my friend the literary agent. “Apparently, eighty-one percent of Americans feel they should write a book.”

She wasn't kidding. Eighty-one percent of the citizenry of the land of the free and the home of the brave think they have a book in them. That's according to a survey of 1,006 adult Americans commissioned by the Jenkins Group, a Michigan publishing services firm. Having just established, in the course of researching the article preceding this one, that a staggering percentage of Americans are in fact functionally illiterate, I was astonished to discover the even more staggering percentage that saw themselves as pregnant with best-sellers just waiting to be born.

This should not in fact have surprised me, because I've met Carlos the doorman. Carlos presides, in green uniform and peaked cap, over the reception desk at one of New York City's tonier addresses, the kind where all visitors have to be announced but there is no sign crassly telling them so.
One day the friend I was visiting happened to mention to Carlos that I was an author. “Really?” he beamed, his smile equal parts admiration and complicity. “I'm by way of being an author myself.” It turned out he'd been working sporadically on a tell-all, spare-no-one, bodice-ripping yarn about the inhabitants of a tony apartment building on the West Side. “When I'm sitting here, helping the residents with their problems, I'm not just no doorman,” he confessed. “I'm doing me research.”

Good luck to him, of course. And it's probably just what the market needs, so I thought better of giving him a quick primer on the libel laws. After all, this is the year that two New York nannies turned their thinly disguised experiences mentoring the mewling offspring of Park Avenue parents into the best-selling, soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture book
The Nanny Diaries.
If two nannies can mine their months of child-minding to such runaway success, who's to say Carlos can't find gold amid the packages he signs for, the visitors he announces, and the food deliveries he sends up every day?

In fact Jenkins estimates that six million Americans have actually written a manuscript. The number sounds grim enough, but it's grimmer still when you realize that only some 80,000 books get published each year. So the manuscript-writing multitudes are being met by the implacable resistance of a tiny minority of publishers churning out rejection slips. No wonder there's a boom in independent publishing and self-publication, two practices that have helped increase the number of books annually making it into print. Ironically, book publishing may be the only growth industry left in the current economy.

But if Carlos has a lot of competition, as a budding novelist he's better off than most. Jenkins noted that only about a quarter of Americans say they would, given the opportunity, write a work of fiction. The overwhelming majority of prospective authors responding to the poll see themselves writing nonfiction. Most spoke, with commendable altruism and complete lack of imagination, of writing books that would help other people: inspirational self-help volumes, do-it-yourself guides, or that hardy perennial, cookbooks. Those are, of course, the categories that sustain most American best-seller lists.

What explains this general enthusiasm, not just for the printed word, but for actually producing it? America, the land of 113 cable TV channels and three telephones per inhabitant, hardly strikes the average foreign visitor as a haven for the Book. It may be counterintuitive, but one explanation could well lie in the computer revolution. Now people who can't spell have begun to write. The ether overflows with personal Web sites and weblogs, not to mention e-mails, whose number doubles every three months. It's not such a great leap from writing and sending an e-mail to developing a Web site or a “blog” and then persuading yourself that the next step is a book. After all, some e-mails have a larger readership than the average first novel.

Another reason, though, is as American as cheese-burger. It's the nature of American democracy, that great leveler. This is a country whose people really believe that anyone can be president; what's so different about the proposition that anyone can write a book? (Not to mention that it's a lot cheaper than running for president.) “I've read a
lotta books, sittin’ here,” Carlos told me. “And I said to myself, heck, I can do better'n that.”

He may be right: there's an awful lot of awful books being published these days, some of which end up on the best-seller lists. The question that is not asked by all these prospective authors is whether the book would be worth reading, whether it would add in some way to the sum total of humanity's cultural heritage. The only question they believe they need to ask is that other great American question: Will it sell?

“How's the book going?” I asked Carlos the other day as I caught him at his desk in a reverie, tapping his chin with a pencil, a faraway look in his eyes. “Oh, not bad so far, Mr. T,” he replied hastily. And then, as if to explain his abstraction, he added: “I was just thinking about the sequel.”

Maybe 81 percent is an undercount.

T
RUST THE FRENCH
. Who else would have put so much energy and resources into bringing twenty Indian writers to their country for a series of “rencontres” with the public of this highly literate land? At a time when readership for literary novels is dropping everywhere like the stock market index, France remains devoutly wedded to the promotion and propagation of culture. And not just its own. Every year the French equivalent of the Sahitya Akademi — the Centre National du Livre — picks one or two countries and brings a selection of its writers to the Continent for a two-week program known as the “Belles Etrangères.” The year 2002 marked India's turn.

Nineteen of us — we should have been twenty, but one Marathi writer, Kishor Shantabai Kale, was held up by the courts after his father-in-law, another writer, brought a case against him — spent the second half of November waxing literary under the gray skies of a drizzly Continent. It was an impressively motley group. Five septuagenarian
seniors — the legendary Mahasweta Devi, Jnanpith and Magsaysay Award–winning Bengali novelist and social activist; the distinguished U. R. Ananthamurthy, Kannada novelist and former president of the Sahitya Akademi; the Rajya Sabha MP and Telugu poet C. Narayana Reddy; and the eminent Hindi stylists Nirmal Verma and Krishna Baldev Vaid — were joined by a variety of younger writers in other languages. We spanned the range from the trilingual sixty-year-old M. Mukundan, a product of the former French territory of Mahé in Kerala who has published dozens of books in Malayalam, to the U.S.-based thirty-one-year-old Akhil Sharma, who is working on his second novel. In between were the Dalit writers Bama (Tamil) and Narendra Jadhav (Marathi), the Hindi poet Udayan Vajpeyi, the Gujarati Jewish memoirist and novelist Esther David, the youngest-ever Jnanpith winner (for her Hindi novel
Kali-katha via Bypass
), Alka Saraogi, and five more English-language novelists (in alphabetical order), Anita Rau Badami, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Mukul Kesavan, and myself. The list was completed by the author-illustrator pair of Anushka Ravishankar and Pulak Biswas, who found enthusiastic audiences of children throughout.

Some of us worried about the burden of being expected to “represent” Indian literature: there was nothing particularly democratic or incontestable about our selection and I, for one, lamented the absence of an Indian Muslim voice. (It turned out that Soraiya Bibi, the former Kamala Das, had dropped out at the last minute, the great Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder had been unable to travel, and a third Muslim invitee had been laid low by a stroke.) There
was also the question about what made us all “Indian”: five of the nineteen currently live abroad, and three (Badami, Baldwin, and Sharma) who have permanently made their homes elsewhere no longer carry Indian passports. Is Indianness, then, a state of mind, or a badge of ethnicity? Nine Indian languages (including English) were represented; what about the other nine that figure on our rupee notes? The impossibility of doing justice to the breadth of Indian writing within a logistically manageable number of writers pointed to the unfairness of the question. What we all had in common was that some of our work was available in French translation, that the event's literary adviser, the Paris-based Rajesh Sharma, had considered us worth inviting, and that we were all able to get away when the French wanted us. In the absence of other defensible criteria, that would have to do.

After a couple of joint events we scattered throughout France in smaller groups, and some us were even asked to make brief forays to Belgium and Holland. But the time we spent together was among the highlights of the trip — the opportunity for nineteen Indian writers to get to know each other better, to convert names we had heard into flesh-and-blood companions whose voices, tastes, and foibles added an invaluable dimension to their literary reputations. The literary encounters were fun, but nothing could match the joy of being embraced by the gentle affection of Mahasweta Devi, or making up for the inadequacies of French vegetarian fare by dipping into the bottles of
chilli-achaar
(hot pepper pickle) that Alka Saragi had so thoughtfully brought along. If in the process we could also encourage the French public to read more about India — and embolden French
publishers to go on to discover other Indian authors — so much the better.

The writers left France at the beginning of December full of tales of their experiences: of being received by the dynamically articulate French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin (a veteran of the French embassy in Delhi), whose discourse ranged from the importance of retaining a plurality of literary voices to the prospects of war over Iraq; of being startled when Narayana Reddy thereupon broke into a melodic Telugu chant, the likes of which had never been heard in the meeting rooms of the quai d'Orsay; of Bama being heckled by Tamil expatriates in Paris for drawing attention in France to the problems of untouchability, and of Esther David rising to her defense; of Shauna Singh Baldwin making side trips to assorted French cities where much of the action of her next novel is to take place; of an overflowing reception by the Indian ambassador, Savitri Kunadi, with writers, publishers, editors, and translators downing champagne and samosas; and for me, of having to juggle readings and responses in both English and French, as a packed audience at the city's Maison de l'Inde (House of India) included equal numbers of people who did not know one or the other of these languages.

But the defining moment of the trip came toward the end of the fortnight, when the group, returning from a reception at the majestic Hotel de Ville, found themselves accidental witnesses to the interment of the nineteenth-century novelist Alexandre Dumas, more than a century after his death, in the magnificently lit Pantheon. The Roman columns of this great Parisian monument were bathed in purple, red,
and blue light; a military band played outside, while an honor guard escorted the coffin of the author of
The Three Musketeers
to its final resting place. Ananthamurthy, the doyen of the group, put it simply to me. “The French,” he said, “really know how to honor their writers.”

And — in a smaller way — ours too.

Q
UIZ QUESTION FOR THE LITERARY-MINDED
: where in the world did many of the giants of Indian literature gather at the end of September 2003 for an
Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Sammelan
(All-India Literary Conference) inaugurated by Prime Minister Atal BihariVajpayee? New Delhi, the capital of India? Nope. Calcutta, the capital of everything cultural?
Nahin.
First prize for the smart kid in the back row who said “New York.”

Yes, it was in the unlikely setting of New York, in a building uncompromisingly called the Manhattan Center, that you could hear, over three days, Gulzar declaim his Urdu poetry, Sunil Gangopadhyay speak about the Bengali novel, and M. T. Vasudevan Nair explain the history of Malayalam fiction, as the head of the Sahitya Akademi, Dr. Gopichand Narang, presided. This extraordinary event, which drew crowds ranging from a hundred to five hundred expatriates on each of the three days, was an initiative of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, the unheralded institution devoted
to promoting Indian culture. And it proved a triumph for one man who, in the Big Apple, is synonymous with the institution — the indefatigable septuagenarian Dr. P. Jayaraman, a Madrasi who writes books in
shuddh
Hindi and who, in New York,
is
the Bhavan.