SETH, Vikram

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Nationality: Indian. Born: Calcutta, 20 June 1952. Education: Corpus Christi College, Oxford, B.A. (honors) 1975, and M.A. (honors) 1978, in philosophy, politics, and economics; Stanford University, California, M.A. in economics 1979; Nanjing University, China, 1980–82, university diploma. Career: Senior editor, Stanford University Press, 1985–86. Awards: Thomas Cook Travel Book award, 1983; Ingram Merrill fellowship, 1985–86; Guggenheim fellowship, 1986–87; Commonwealth poetry prize, 1986; Sahitya Academy award, 1988; W.H. Smith award, 1994, for A Suitable Boy. Agent: Giles Gordon, Anthony Sheil Associates, 43 Doughty Street, London WClN 2LF, England; or Irene Skolnick Agency, 121 West 27th Street, Suite 601, New York, New York 10001, U.S.A. Address: c/o HarperCollins, 10 East 53^rd Street, New York, New York 10022–5244, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Mappings. Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1981.

The Humble Administrator's Garden. Manchester, Carcanet, 1985.

All You Who Sleep Tonight. New Delhi, Penguin, New York, Knopf, and London, Faber, 1990.

Beastly Tales from Here and There, illustrated by Ravi Shankar. New Delhi and New York, Viking, 1992.

The Poems, 1981–1994. New York, Penguin, 1995.

Novels

The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse. New York, Random House, and London, Faber, 1986.

A Suitable Boy. New York, HarperCollins, and London, Phoenix, 1993.

Other

From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet. London, Chatto and Windus, 1983; New York, Vintage, 1987.

Arion and the Dolphin: A Libretto. New Delhi and New York, Penguin Books, 1994.

Arion and the Dolphin (for children), illustrated by Jane Ray. London, Orion Children's Books, 1994; New York, Dutton Children's Books, 1995.

An Equal Music. New Delhi, Viking, and London, Phoenix, 1999.

Translator, Three Chinese Poets: Translations of Poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu. New Delhi, Viking, and New York, HarperPerennial, 1992.

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Critical Studies: "Vikram Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Rowena Hill, in Literary Criterion (Bangalore, India), 21 (4), 1986; "'Homeward Ho!' Silicon Valley Pushkin" by Marjorie Perloff, in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), 15 (6), November-December 1986; "'The Golden Gate' and the Quest for Self-Realization" by Makarand R. Paranjape, in ACLALS Bulletin, 8 (1), 1989; "'The Golden Gate': The First Indian Novel in Verse" by Santosh Gupta, in The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s, edited by Viney Kirpal, New Delhi, Allied Publishers, 1990; "Recycling the Genre: The Russian and American Novel in Verse: The Case of Pushkin's 'Evgenii Onegin' and Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Roumiana Deltcheva, in Rosyjska Ruletka, 2, 1995; "Trunks of the Banyan Tree: History, Politics & Fiction" by J.H. Walker, in Island Magazine, 63, winter 1995; "'The World Goes On': Narrative Structure and the Sonnet in Vikram Seth's 'The Golden Gate'" by Jay Curlin, in Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association (Conway, Arkansas), 22 (2), fall 1996.

Vikram Seth comments:

I write in different genres so as not to bore myself—and the reader. And I like writing that is clear, even deceptively clear.

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Vikram Seth is another poet of exile in the postcolonial world, in which writers seemingly switch societies, cultures, and even languages with ease, yet under the poised surface are the anxieties of those without the security of home and place. Mappings records Seth's feelings of nostalgia for India after studying abroad for many years and his continuing attraction to the "notes of other birds, / The nightingale, the wren." For Seth the poetic traditions, other than those of India, at the time were British and, later, American and Chinese. Many of the poems are of youthful restlessness and ambivalent feelings toward family. They are also antiromantic and express a rational hedonism; life is to be enjoyed while it lasts. A game of Scrabble, travel, or an evening of sex seem equally pleasurable. The comic rhymes and conscious superficialities, pastiche, and parody deflate seriousness, mock high culture, and add up to an alternative vision.

The Humble Administrator's Garden also reports on surfaces and the trivia of life while using such forms as the sonnet, quatrain, and epigrammatic couplet. Although some poems are in free verse, Seth usually writes a regularly stressed line. A refusal to look inward, a celebration of simple pleasures and of survival, and a half-serious resort to platitude and pastiche for amusement and as defense make Seth a poet of our time, of eclecticism and self-aware artifice. The Humble Administrator's Garden is divided into poems about China, where Seth studied for two years, India, where he was born and raised, and California, where he then lived. China is a place to discover universal brotherhood despite cultural differences, India is a land of memories and lost relations, but America, for all its comforts and pleasures, is lonely and dangerous. The China poems are imagistic and atmospheric, but tendencies towards chinoiserie are held in check by Western stanzaic forms. Often the poems offer analogies to the poetics of their creation. In the title poem, a sonnet, unscrupulous means and administrative practicality create the satisfying art of the garden. Mr. Wang "may have got / The means by somewhat dubious means, but now / This is the loveliest of gardens. What / Do scruples know of beauty anyhow?"

The California poems refer to loneliness, former loves, and nostalgia for a foreign, European past, presumably Seth's period as a student at Oxford. Emotions are mocked by expressing them platitudinously: "The fact is, this work is as dreary as shit. / I do not like it a bit." "There is so much to do / There isn't any time for feeling blue." The language is varied to invigorate an otherwise unreverberant diction. Although some of the poems appear so offhand in subject and manner as to be close to triviality, there is often a sense of a threat to survival. "Ceasing upon the Midnight" begins with absurdity ("He stacks the dishes on the table. / He wants to die, but is unable"), moves through memories of other countries and cultures, and returns to an unromantic, nonsuicidal, alcoholic present: "The bottle lies on the ground. / He sleeps. His sleep is sound." Deftly, ironically maneuvering its way through obvious echoes, the poem imitates the structure, movement, and psychology of the typical romantic ode, but it is undermined by bland irony, part of a highly unromantic poetic: "the rules / of metre, shield him from / Himself"; consequently, "to cease upon / / The midnight under the live-oak / Seems too derisory a joke." "Unclaimed" epigrammatically comments upon a passing sexual encounter: "To make love with a stranger is the best. / There is no riddle and there is no test." The throwaway manner is like the theme. Claiming "that this is all there is," Seth deflates romantic urges. To celebrate the pleasures of the passing moment and of ordinary life is to argue for a poetic of what is as opposed to the ideal.

The Golden Gate is a 307-page verse novel written in nearly six hundred fourteen-line, sonnetlike stanzas and loosely modeled upon Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. It is also an amused love song to San Francisco for its beauty and as symbol of the contemporary good life. Italian coffee houses, Japanese and Chinese restaurants, all-night bookshops, ice cream parlors (with Bubble Gum and Pumpkin Pie flavors), Berkeley, Silicon Valley, Telegraph Hill, and the Oakland hills provide settings for conversations and actions by characters who are representative of the various subcultures of the San Francisco area: John, a self-controlled WASP yuppie computer designer; Phil, a warm Jewish pacifist dropout; Janet, a Japanese feminist rock musician and sculptor; Liz, a career-minded Italian corporate lawyer; and her pious brother Ed, a troubled Roman Catholic homosexual. John's conservative inhibitions, his obsession with proper forms of behavior, his homophobia, and his intolerance and rages at deviance eventually cause him to lose Liz and reject Phil, his closest male friend. Loneliness and the need for others, central themes of The Golden Gate, are not resolved through romantic love. Phil says, "Passion's a prelude to disaster," and Liz does not "feel sure / I can trust passion any more." When Liz breaks with John and announces her forthcoming marriage, her father asks, "You do love Phil?" She replies, "Not on your life," and she thinks, "I couldn't / Hope for a better better half: / A good kind man who makes me laugh." By contrast John lives alone in a wretched state of anger, guilt, and desire.

Seth offers the reader a 1980s version of Ariosto, Butler, or Byron in which the self-conscious act of writing narrative is made part of the fun through the author's comments upon himself and his techniques, long digressions, the interweaving of plots, deft shifts of scenes, suspended development, and unexpected events and coincidences. Outrageous rhymes ("iguana"/"sultana"; "inter alia"/"full regalia") add variety and delight to an absurd but functional stanza rhymed ababccddeffegg. While many stanzas have literary echoes and allusions or offer a variation in how the three quatrains and couplet are welded, the poem is equally rooted in present-day popular culture, and the contemporary idiom is beautifully employed. The wit often updates the past: "… Don't put things off till it's too late. / You are the DJ of your fate." Rhyming has become fun. While part of the effect of The Golden Gate is the brisk, clear movement of the story within its swift tetrameter lines and many feminine rhymes, the interruptions, contrasts, and unexpected twists are ingenious. When Phil attends a party to meet Sue, Liz's sister, he instead falls in love with her brother Ed. Phil confesses to Liz, who reveals that she had known since "Sunday before the equinox / You both wore the same mismatched socks." The Golden Gate acknowledges its origins in epic romance through witty imitations of such conventions as an invocation to the muse, allusions to its predecessors, and the use of pets as an American equivalent to epic machinery and gods. Besides Ed's five-foot green iguana named Arnold Schwarzenegger and Janet's two "Sweet Siamese of rare refulgence," there is Liz's "Magnificat" Charlemagne, who jealously urinates on John's clothes and eventually contributes to the breakdown of their engagement. Seth invests significance in ordinary life, and even his formalism has the seeming spontaneity, directness, and immediacy of free verse.

Seth's next book, All You Who Sleep Tonight, is a collection of poems on diverse subjects. The "sleep" of the title is a metaphor for death, loss, the evasion of feelings, including the feelings of love, and the historical past, particularly those parts of it that brought grievous suffering upon individuals or whole peoples. The poems in the book are divided into five sections. The first section, "Romantic Residues," focuses on the quality of love in today's world. Its central theme is the reluctance to make a commitment and to take the risks that come with it. Love comes to an end or is not allowed to grow from the beginning, as in "A Style of Loving": "Picnic, movie, icecream; / Talk; to clear my head / Hot-buttered rum-coffee for you; / And so not to bed." Evasion of involvement, however, brings with it its own pain, and a melancholy feeling overhangs these poems. The "lovers" in "The Room and the Street" say farewell to each other after being together for a short while: "You take my hand, / Then stand and frown awhile. / At my express demand / You undertake to smile." The poems in the second section, "In Other Voices," show high seriousness, an element new in Seth's poetry. "Work and Freedom" portrays the horrors of the Holocaust indirectly by imagining the unbearable effect on the commandant of Auschwitz as a human being who is relieved to gain his freedom from his work when offered another assignment. "A Doctor's Journal Entry for August 6, 1945" evokes vividly the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. "Ghalib, Two Years after the Mutiny" gives a poignant depiction of the suffering of the great Urdu poet in the days when India was in the last throes of its conquest by the British. "In Other Places," the third section of the book, is mainly a series of tender vignettes on different places, but it also includes a longer poem, "On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge." The next section, "Quatrains," reflects a further expansion of Seth's perspective on human experience. It consists of four-line poems on miscellaneous subjects that range from a flippant phone conversation with a woman who hangs up to the semiserious philosophical observation that "your eyes, my understanding, all will rot …" The perspective deepens in the last section, "Meditations of the Heart," where the themes of death and a feeling of oneness with others in a common human fate dominate: "All you who sleep tonight / … Know that you aren't alone. / The whole world shares your tears, / Some for two nights or one, / And some for all their years."

In his successive writings Seth has continued to reveal ever new dimensions of his versatility. Beastly Tales from Here and There is a retelling of fables, two each from India, China, Greece, and Ukraine, besides two fables of his own creation. At one level these are stories for children, combining simple moral instruction with entertainment. Their strength, however, lies in their ability to entertain. Seth has mastered the art of storytelling, and his verse flows fluently and with perfect resilience. The apt use of specific and sufficient detail and a sense of both the comic and the tragic bring the characters and the situations fully alive, thus carrying the listener or the reader into the imaginary worlds of the stories. Captivating as the stories are for younger readers, like most fables they also have a level of seriousness suited to adults. For one thing, as in real life, the moral lessons are not always clear and categorical; in fact, one is often left wondering if a story contains any lesson at all. For instance, in "The Hare and the Tortoise," although Ms. Hare loses the race to Teddy, she receives all of the attention from the admiring pressmen and becomes successful and rich. While she is "pampered rotten," the tortoise is "forgotten." Such a lifelike outcome may be beyond the comprehension of a child's innocent mind.

The story closest to life is "The Elephant and the Tragopan," one of the two original fables by Seth. Its theme is the protection of the natural environment, also a subject of major concern in The Golden Gate. Led by an elephant and a tragopan, the wild animals of Bingle Valley march in a rally to the human town to protest against the building of a dam that would destroy their habitat. The head of the Man-Council, Bigshot, who is responsible for the decision to build the dam in order to build his vote bank and fortune, tries to manipulate the leaders into withdrawing their agitation. Failing to persuade them, he decides to hold them as prisoners. In the ensuing scuffle and confusion, he wrings the tragopan's neck and kills him, but he is stopped from going any further by his own son, who rises against him in support of the animal cause and sanity. Seth ends the story on an ambiguous note, however, leaving it "for the world" to decide whether or not the dam will be built.

Yet another kind of book by Seth is Arion and the Dolphin, a libretto for an opera. The story is based on the legend of the poet Arion of the seventh century B.C., who was associated with the court of Periander of Corinth and is credited with the invention of the dithyramb. In Seth's treatment Arion is a musician who sings to the accompaniment of the lyre and who serves as court musician to Periander, the tyrant of Corinth. He goes to Sicily to compete in a music festival and receives a large amount of gold for winning the competition. On return voyage to Corinth the sailors on the ship decide to kill him in order to take his gold. They force the captain, who had become Arion's friend on the voyage out, to agree to support them. Arion leaps overboard and is saved by dolphins, who dance and feast and sing with him. One dolphin becomes Arion's close friend, and the two together reach Corinth. Periander does not believe Arion's story, however, and orders him put in a prison cell, and the dolphin is caught by fishermen and turned into a circus act. Tortured and suffering because of its separation from Arion, the dolphin dies. Periander now realizes how much Arion and the dolphin loved each other, and he repents having doubted Arion's story and having caused the dolphin's death.

Arion and the Dolphin is a story of innocence. At one level it also is a story for children, and it is not surprising that Seth has written a version for children. Both Arion and the dolphin personify pure innocence and goodness, but the story also provides a forgiving understanding of characters who commit evil deeds. The goodness of the captain is obvious, and it is clear that he is compelled to comply with the sailors in their decision to kill Arion. The evil of the sailors is explained by their poverty, and Periander's high-handedness and cruelty are explained as being the result of his position. There is an underlying dichotomy in the story between the world of the sea and sky on the one hand and the earth on the other, the former representing unadulterated nature and goodness and the latter the human world fraught with evil. Arion derives the inspiration for his music from the sea through the sounds in a conch shell given to him by the captain. The most beautiful passages in the book are lyrical descriptions of the sea. The story ends with Arion's prayer to his muse for unity between the natural and the human worlds: "May music bind the sky, the earth, the sea / In tune, in harmony."

—Bruce King and

Surjit Dulai