I have been buying some novels lately and am not too happy. Which made me think, isn’t it better to go in for a poetry volume or even a volume of short stories? If you don’t like the poetry, you can chuck it after 20 pages. It costs you just two hours. A short story book will probably give you one or two that you like.
The trouble with a novel is you spend a week wading through it and, at the end, feel robbed. I just bought Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase . A sheep gets into guys and possesses them. In desperation, he hangs himself to get rid of the sheep. A week after his death, the dead guy tells all this to the narrator. I wasn’t about to waste another hour trying to fish out a metaphor from this miasma.
Shell-shocked, I lunged for a Sidney Sheldon — had never read the blighter earlier. You won’t believe this, his murderous heroine was possessed by not one sheep but two females! One of the possessors was Tony, who was knifing and castrating all and sundry. The ‘heroine’ was, of course, bechari innocent. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. The theme of the crappy novel was ‘multiple personality disorder’. Today, I am reading an arty Art Gallery novel. Hope the heroine is not possessed by sheep, goat or Tony. Prabhu, daya karna! My advice, buy poetry.
Talking of poetry, I notice that Ranjit Hoskote and Arundhathi Subramaniam (both fine poets) have now become professional blurb writers for Poetry India. I’ll shortly be going to one of them for a blurb myself. But they couldn’t have written for the French poet I intend discussing, Robert Desnos (1900-1945), who was taken to Auschwitz by the Nazis with a truckload of other Frenchmen for execution, which they all escaped because Desnos startled the guards by reading their palms and foretelling their splendid future. Desnos soon died of typhus.
He started with Andre Breton, as a surrealist (remember the Surrealist Manifesto, 1924?) but broke away. Breton was a great one for quotes. Sample this: “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” “It is living and learning to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.” (Did the existentialists, Sartre and Camus, take off from this quote two decades later?)
Surrealism is a tough nut to crack. Sample this quote: “The man who cannot visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.” (In that case, buddy, I sure am one.) However difficult or inaccessible the surrealists may have been, they came out with beautiful images.
Sequential logic and grammar were put in their place. Take his poem, ‘Freedom of Love’:
My wife with the hair of wood fire
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger…
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically.
My wife with the lips of a cockade and a bunch of stars…
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child’s writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow’s nest…
We in our films who only liken eyebrows to black clouds can’t even dream of comparing them to a swallow’s nest. Breton was fiercely antifascist, but we’ll not get into that. Fascism is a loaded word today.
For Desnos, freedom was artistic, personal and political. His optimism at the worst of times was infectious, and he never lost his love and appetite for “the intense beauty of the life of the senses,” as William Kulik, whose book I have, puts it.
In ‘Grape Harvest’ he tells us: Obeying the harvester, the wild animals are gone./ Meanwhile in the amphitheatre of the city/ built to flute music, the laurels of war fade/ And the names of heroes vanish from the wall of honour.” The earth is ‘drunk with blood’. “Wine, only you in your barrels are the same .
He wrote against the Nazis for half a decade. He spoke on radio during the Vichy regime. I presume he is addressing the Nazis when he writes: You are nothing but scum, nothing but foam./ I would like to be born each day under a new sky . Yet he never lost his optimism. In ‘The Voice’ a voice comes to him from afar:
Do you hear it?
It says “The pain will soon be over”
It says “The happy season is near.”
His last poem ‘Epitaph’ has become legendary. He doesn’t lose his pride.
I lived, not fallen but hunted./ With all human nobility imprisoned./ I was free among the masked slaves.”
He goes on to say that he watched over river, earth and sky. And then the admonition.
You who are living, what have you done with these treasures?
Do you regret the time of my struggle?
Have you raised your crops for a common harvest?
To be colonised is awful. Yet, don’t you think it might have been better to have been colonised by the French rather than the English? We would have had good wine instead of being addicted to whisky. And we would have had a different kind of poetry.
Keki N. Daruwalla is a poet and short story writer.
