—
“And I’m sure you’re not as bloodthirsty as this poem makes you seem,” smiled Mr. Davidson affably, clearly secure in the knowledge that Ananda wasn’t capable of murder; now he was quoting Ananda’s own lines back to him: “ ‘and if she’d died by me, in such a way / my soul might have been satisfied.’ ”
Affably? But wasn’t he making fun of two of Ananda’s most beautiful lines? Not cruelly, maybe; but not affably surely? This poem, along with “Across the River,” he’d produced in a stupor of emotion and attentiveness to the sound of words. Could Mr. Davidson, who’d been so receptive to the essays, really miss the poems’ special quality? Was it because he was a fiction-writer, a different sort of beast to a poet? A novelist was about normalcy, wasn’t he — and, despite his susceptibility to the reverberations of Wordsworth, Eliot, and Larkin, Mr. Davidson presented the face of normalcy, of sanity, did he not? He was one who’d outlasted the first terrible pangs of love. Ananda was not only always in their throes — he couldn’t seriously believe that, one day, he wouldn’t be. Only two weeks ago he’d reread Auden’s introduction to Shakespeare’s sonnets, smiling inwardly at Auden’s tentativeness, as he asserted something in a qualified manner because he knew it was the truth: “Perhaps poets are more likely to experience it”—meaning “true love”—“than others, or become poets because they have.” That was getting it from the horse’s mouth. Mr. Davidson was among those that Auden had discreetly categorised as the “others”; the non-poets. In the quote that Auden had then offered from Hannah Arendt (once more, the apologetic air: “Perhaps Hannah Arendt is right”), Ananda had been startled to notice his own blurred but unmistakable likeness: “Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.” Wryly, he saw the pattern he was following, in committing a similar error with his tutor: it was no surprise, actually, that Mr. Davidson hadn’t grasped what the poem was doing, since, of course, he was no devotee of that “indispensable experience.”
The poem Nestor Davidson had been gently ridiculing was a meditation on dawn (which Ananda was never up to see: all the better for his imagination and his faint memory, from childhood, of dawn’s radiance); the poet is thinking of his imminent departure from his lover, while she sleeps. He’d like to hold on to that fleeting moment, as the light begins to enter the window, keep it as it is, impossibly unchanging; and this is what leads him to lyrically speculate on whether the death of his sleeping lover — because death and sleep are one — wouldn’t arrest time and the day’s progress; wouldn’t cheat the inevitability of waking and parting. Mr. Davidson’s response to Ananda’s tranquil, sweetly tragic mood was a blunt instrument in that stillness.
“It’s a difficult art,” said Mr. Davidson — now he was softly addressing himself rather than admonishing Ananda, the prose writer recalling (perhaps from experience) the mysterious pitfalls of poetry-writing. “But what you do have is a grasp of rhythm,” he said — not grudging, but fair. “It was never something I could master!” So he had had the experience then! — he’d given verse a go. How little Ananda knew of him — yet had reached out to him as at a straw. In a jacket photo from one of the early books, he’d been surprised to find Mr. Davidson — younger, with an unbelievable moustache — smoking, the careless spume drifting away from the face. Ananda wished he hadn’t seen the picture, for its strangeness but also for its supercilious but fragile optimism. He’d never caught Mr. Davidson smoking. He must have given it up, as he had the “difficult art”—or had he? Ananda decided to slip in a compliment — to prove he was superior to the little well-meaning jibes that Mr. Davidson had aimed at his poems, but also to get out of his system something he’d wanted to say.
“Thank you. By the way, I liked the stories in No Place in the Sun very much — they’re very elegantly written.” There. It was done. Something was proved.
Mr. Davidson’s expression changed in the summer-shadow that had alighted on the face: for less than a second, he looked haunted.
“That’s very kind of you.” What did this smile, this expression mean? It was genuine happiness — held in check. “Your opinion means a lot to me.” Ananda had had no idea. “I’m glad.”
Ananda was glad too — a glow of satisfaction: to be regarded as an equal. Means a lot to me. He’d had no idea.
—
He hadn’t been wholly truthful. Something was missing in the stories. What, it wasn’t easy to put your finger on. Maybe it was their very craftedness that went against them, giving them the slightest hint of artificiality. But if that were really the case, the hint of the artificial was counter to the free-flowing, light style. Before he’d read the stories, it hadn’t occurred to Ananda that South Africa could be written of like this — without overt politics and hand-wringing, as a landscape of sunlight, comedy, provincial drabness, and small existential dramas. Was this lack of politics a limitation: was it what made Mr. Davidson a relatively minor player? Ananda could not decide. Or was it what gave to the writing its freshness and agility? Clearly, Nestor Davidson was talented. Why wasn’t he better known? Ananda seemed to have a knack for becoming friendly and populating his life with people who were gifted but hadn’t had proper recognition. Take his music teacher in Bombay, a remarkable singer ignored by the cognoscenti. Or his own mother, with her unique singing voice and style, of whom hardly anyone was aware. Or his mad uncle in Belsize Park, whom he called Rangamama—“colourful maternal uncle”—who shone so brightly in his youth and who Ananda’s father said — quizzically, as if describing a condition — was a “genius,” but who’d imploded, arresting his own advancement. Was it something about the world, that promoted the second-rate and left the genuinely talented unrewarded; or was it something about Ananda, that he found success second-rate and spotted a gift in failures? Or — more disturbingly — was it that Ananda was gravitating towards these people; in doing so maybe even attempting to create a mirror-image; to, in some way, find himself? As for success…he must probe Mr. Davidson about his chances for the finals. For there was no guarantee he’d get a First.