‘My novels came in a flood’

Kewal Anand reconstructs an interview from the letters of Mulk Raj Anand to Saros Cowasjee, Professor Emeritus at the University of Regina in Canada

YOU have written more novels than your two undisputed rivals, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao together. Which one do you consider to be you best work?

I have no right to say which my best work is. Some books come off, not because they are really good, but because they confirm the familiar feelings of the group of critics who are swayed by partisan emotions. Actually every book is a process, with much good and bad in it. The novel is a form too amorphous to be controlled precisely. The relative merits of a book, from the author’s point of view, may lie in his feeling of how much he was able to express of the soul drama, and at how many levels. Perhaps, from this standpoint, I would consider Untouchable to be a more intense work than the others.

I first met Gandhi in the Sabarmati Ashram in 1927 when I showed him the immature draft in Joycean English. I did not write the book in 1930 but began it in 1925, as part of the Confession. I went to see lrene in Dublin in summer/autumn of 1926, and met A.E. (George William Russell) and Yeats. I cannot vouch for the day and month in each case, but what I have put down there (in the Bubble) three or four times are factual references.

I learnt that the word and act must integrate if one is to be a writer of any significance. Never mind if Gorky had already done it for Russia, Zola in France and Dickens in England. In India it had not been done. If the seamy side of life had to be written about, then there it was and it must be exposed. And this is what I did in Untouchable and Coolie. Also, I wanted to create in Coolie a boy in all his humaneness, as against the fantastic Kim.

Only when an author fails as an artist does the question arise whether the work is documentary or propaganda. The novel form is fortunately loose enough to include both scandal like Anna Karenina and the echoes of the Napoleonic period as in War and Peace, provided the novelist talks in terms of human beings and not in terms of puppets.

It’s all mixed up, this question of the novel. Is it for burnings and melting? For the realisation of the character, to see the flow? Or is it for preaching sermons on the Vedanta, Communism or anti- Communism? I thought, always, that the novel is a new kind of poem, the 20^th century ballad, the folk epic of the new classes, rather formless, but immediate in recognition (when it is good) of the quick of life, in little chicks abandoned women, old soldiers and ardent young people.

Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction. In my opinion it is one of the finest books on the subject, better even than E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Both books influenced me a good deal in my writing, even though I could not approximate to the point of view of either as defined in their respective approaches.

The first draft of each novel came in a flood. Rewriting it, one felt the instinctive truth of the spontaneous utterance. I let everything go through. Of course, in trying to integrate one’s say, in human terms, with one’s ideals, there is always the risk of saying too much. I admit that good craftsmanship is important. I have told myself often, "cut, cut, cut!"

I don’t know if the first instinctive writing can be drastically revised. My novels come in a flood and, although I try to control the avalanche, I find that, apart from cutting down chunks, it is not possible to demolish the rhythmic flow of the ballad, rough though it be.

Would you say this is true of you life’s most ambitions undertaking, your autobiographies.

I am not writing autobiographies but autobiographical novels. It is necessary to make this distinction. I believe in the confessional novel. In the first person singular, one can be nearly honest, peel the onion layer by layer and get to one’s conscience.

Be honest. Don’t be afraid. Go your own way and don’t seek advice from old men like me. "Everything old keeps a hungry grip on life", John Cornford said. The young must break free.

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