OLD ‘TRIVENI’ DAYS ¹

By M. CHALAPATHI RAU

(Editor, National Herald, Lucknow)

Those days seem distant, but they were days of hope and vaulting conceit and they remain in the timelessness of the mind. The salt Satyagraha had passed into history. To me, who was thinking only of an inner disturbance, the Armenian Street was the street of adventure, giving to that part of Madras City the look of a cathedral town. The cathedrals passed by, and then the merchant houses. The taxidermist’s shop spran to life on this day with dead animals glaring limply. I went up the steps of the Young Men’s Indian Association, stood outside a room, and scrawled my name on a scrap of paper. I went in, with trepidation but with an air of assurance, and on light feet.

I had seen Ramakoti somewhere in Mount Road, with some detachment. A friend pointed him out to me as the Editor of ‘Triveni’. So unlike John Morley or W. E. Henley, I thought, and so unobtrusive. I had seen ‘Triveni’ but today I was meeting its Editor, and it seemed a moment on which somebody’s destiny depended. He would be kind, but would he have the pleasure of discovering me, I who was so well-known to myself?

He was considerate. Inside me the small ego was struggling, like that of Frank Harris hawking his early stuff in Fleet Street; outwardly I was shy and wide-eyed. He said kind things, something about the reciness of the writing. But first I had to get the article typed out. I ran to the nearest typist, passing the taxidermist’s animals, dictated the article word by word, and delivered it on tiptoe next day. It was only when the article was published that I realised that the writing had been too racy, a tumble of similes and metaphors, racing beyond the point of no return. In writing about Masefield, I had been affected by his ‘Reynard the Fox’. With twenty-five neatly printed reprints, in red cover, I felt I was a writer. First article, first impression, twenty-five copies.

I did not know how to reappear before Ramakoti now. He might ask me to write on another poet–not Drinkwater! I wanted to be the Macaulay of his ‘Edinburgh Review’, writing long, spacious articles, with Macaulay’s swaggering sententiousness, with history as the background. One day, I met Ramakoti in a tram. He called me to his bench. He spoke like a friend and said what has remained memorable to me and what I tell young men, with variations. “It is good to write with imagination, even excessive imagination, when one is young,” he observed. “That means there is something there. If there is no ferment at this age, nothing will emerge later.” Casually, he asked me if I had read ‘Yenki Patalu’.¹ I had; it had been exciting; but I remembered none of the songs. Could I translate them? I could, I said; only, I wanted the book. He sent me the book next day.

I read the songs, hummed them to myself, and felt they could not be translated. But I had said I would translate them, and I must. That night, the humming went into my head. One song was translated, then another; they tumbled into rhyme and shape, the rhythm corresponding nearly to the original rhythm. Exhaustion overtook me. I left the manuscript next day at ‘Triveni’ office, not daring to know the Editor’s opinion of a night’s exhilaration. I forgot the article and was spending delightful days, chasing dreams in Cubbon Park, in Bangalore. A letter came from Ramakoti saying that the article was ‘exceedingly well written’ and that he was happy and proud he had discovered me. Restrained commendation, but as good as a Nobel Prize for me then. The letter was affectionate and consoling. “Life is greater than service,” it said, referring to my rejection by the Medical Board for a highly important competitive examination. That saying has been a prize; life is above all service, even the highest.

One marginal comment on the manuscript, I have not forgotten–“Too much antithesis.” There could have been no viler antithesis. The exuberance remained, in spite of the editing. Today the commentary part is not acceptable to me. I could improve the translation, but I would not be able to do it, given another chance.

It was something to a student of law, which was an ass and not yet the engaging perplexity it was later to become. I lived in the Y. M. I. A., I was a ‘Triveni’ young man and in 1931-32 it seemed eternity lay before me. There’s was no urge to write, except for poetry which was reserved for English publishers. Reading and study were exciting. Ramakoti encouraged me to be an Edward Fitzgerald. I translated several Telugu poems but would not produce them.

There was early in 1932 a literary controversy, typical of Madras intellectualism of those days, which had a start from me. Two well known professors of English opposed in the Academic Council Satyamurthi’s proposal for the selection of Venkataramani’s ‘Murugan’ as a text-book for the B. A. classes. There was derision for Indian writing in English. What had it produced except rhetoric-mongering? I wrote a long letter in irritation on ‘Indo-Anglicans and Rhetoric-Mongering’, which was published in ‘The Hindu’. I made it rhetorical and derided the pedantic negativism of professors, and what had they been teaching? Sparks flew for some weeks. The controversy was interesting for me, for nobody questioned the standard of my rhetoric, and Saranathan, one of the two professors, praised it. On my way back from Bangalore, Ramakoti gave me Venkataramani’s new novel ‘Kandan’ for review, making it plain that he had declined to give the book to others and the honour of reviewing it belonged to me. I had read Venkataramani’s ‘Paper Boats’ and liked it. But a novel? Throughout the night, I had not a wink of sleep in the railway compartment. I was too eager to read the book I was to review. When I returned after the summer vacation, I was greeted enthusiastically for the review, which had yet to be published. It was dazing, when Venkataramani, meeting me for the first time, recalled Coleridge and praised the review also. He must have been a conceited young man in his time, I thought. The review was more a review of the English novel as it was at the time, and ‘Kandan’ to me was a medium of what seemed the strange, simile-studded English of Venkataramani.

This was a year of friendships and discoveries, and for me the golden age of ‘Triveni’. I was now informal and confiding with Ramakoti. He had been vague with his gestures of joy and despair; he emerged like a Boticelli portrait. Behind his softness, the dissolution of individuality, I saw the strength of steel, the core that would not dissolve. He had unchangeable ideas about the get-up of ‘Triveni’, the paper on which it was to be printed and the advertisements which must be accepted or rejected. Proof reading was a refined passion, like an engraver’s art, the test of perfection. This could be appreciated by me only slowly by the elaboration of experience. At that time I was incapable of such analysis, incapable of understanding the nature and extent of his sacrifice. I only felt the impact of sunniness, and the sunniness of one who knew good writing and to whom editing was an art. His excisions were delicate surgery. He was a pruner, a gardener with other men’s words, thinking more of the garden than his own chrysanthemums.

The Y. M. I. A. throbbed with life, and the reading-room characters were a study in South Indian sculpture, young men and old men, some Hogarthian. Mrs. Besant’s statue, the St. Paul’s like dome, the gallery of portraits of greatness, the book-shop where theosophy and palmistry jostled with Georgian poetry, the marathon ‘kalakshepams’ on Sundays, and the genial secretary, who seemed to be unaware of what was going on round him! The restaurant, dingy and noisy, broke up into literary round-tables with an occasional Johnsonian rumble. The coffee was famous for its freshness and kick, and sweets were served stingily like manna. Between ‘Triveni’ office and the restaurant, one might meet varying incarnations of belles-lettres, among lawyers with punctured gowns.

I could recognise Isvaran before we were introduced to each other, on Ramakoti’s return from his home-town. He thumped frequently the wooden verandah-passage before my room with a far-away look, an assistant editor of ‘Triveni’, with an outstanding story to his credit, which I had read. He seemed to stare, with time enough. When he spoke of his forthcoming collection of poems, I pitied the situation. By then, poetry meant melancholy to me; happiness lay with prose. But he looked dedicated, doomed, and was later to make me think of our generation as the doomed generation. His mind was fascinating like a fairy castle which had to be scaled. I reviewed his book. For me reviewing was a sibylline task, in which the reviewer had to weigh the chances of perfection and immortality. Isvaran’s friendship was useful for prosaic work too, when I was entangled in a private war of words on behalf of Madras reviewers against Masulipatam bards. It was my effort to drop gentleness and assume a Byronic ferocity befitting an ‘atheist, socialist and vegetarian’, as I described my convictions of the time. Isvaran was less contemporaneous, living within himself, in the drudgery of an inner devotion, and his daemon, as I called it in commemoration of Goethe and Faust, had to be roused. He too was to be a perfectionist in editing and later to edit the ‘Short Story’, a model of that art.

Venkatararnani dropped in occasionally, gnome-like, kindly-looking, wise with humour, his eyes glittering with fun, his solemnly delivered similes contrasting with his effortless quips. I was not sure, that a person with such orthodox looks should write good English prose. Writing to me was either good prose or good poetry–and prose was intolerable for whole seasons–and if any Indian attempted it, he must look like a Tagore or at least like the Chettur Brothers. Venkataramani broke down my resistance. He talked as he wrote, in cascades of similes. From him I learnt that creativeness is sympathy. He was the antithesis of his environment but the environment was essential for his integrity. I called him, in days when I did not comprehend the importance of environment, ‘a lily in the mud of Mylapore’. His heart, even when it bled, was lily-white.

It took me time to know and understand Chandrasekharan. He chattered endlessly, pontifically, but with humility. His book ‘Persons and Personalities’ was a surprise to me; his gaiety contrasted with the purposefulness of his writing and even the punctuation seemed to be affected by high seriousness. Except for classics, I assumed the authority of Coleridge towards books, though I cared as little for Coleridge as for Kubla Khan. It was some years later that Chandrasekharan was convinced that I liked his book, that in spite of my love of resonance. I demanded meaning.

I had expected A. D. Mani to be a frosty, old professor from the way he had reviewed Isvaran’s first book, on Venkataramani, and patronisingly asked people to watch ‘the coming man’. From the moment I saw him in the reading-room, elusively swimming in and out of sight, smiling to himself, I knew it must be Mani. His slippery walk and furtive, searching looks frightened me but there was no avoiding him. He was chummy from the first meeting. From then I have been ‘Philip’ to him and he ‘Jimmy’ to me, after two writers of the day. His world was the world of Wodehouse and Edgar Wallace. Throughout the years we have remained warm-hearted friends in the profession, except for a brief period on the Press Commission. We go about as old ‘Triveni’ boys, even claim that we started journalism from the gutters of the Armenian Street. We discussed, and mostly dismissed, the journalists of the day, competing vigorously in our conceit. It never occurred to us that we would after some years be presidents of the two all-India organisations of the profession.

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar must have been a French academician and an authority on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe, from the hefty manner in which he had written about Joan of Arc. His humility and his young looks, when I was introduced to him by Isvaran, over the noise of a ‘kalakshepam’ in the auditorium, were a surprise. He seemed too eclectic in his tastes, tolerant in his criticism. He was generous and reviewed my ‘Triveni’ article on ‘Modernists, Imagists and Futurists’, recalling the unusualness of expression, in-one of the many weeklies for which he wrote. I find that, after an enormous output, he is among the Mandarins.

There were several others who, dropped in occasionally bridging rumours of other literary worlds. From his tours, Ramakoti returned and talked of Phadke, Gokak and Masti, Madame Sophia Wadia and literary circles and reputations in Bombay which were dim to us. Now and then, we had Marco Polos like Nilkan Perumal, art-critics like G. Venkatachalam, whose suave personality I had to engage one day single-handed and with nervous enthusiasm, in the absence of Ramakoti. There were ‘kalakshepams’, Chidambara Bhagavathar completing the Ramayana twice, talks on culture, debates, oratory and nonsense, and all the while Isvaran, whom Venkataramani would rag for slavery to the printer’s devil, and Ramakoti, on the prowl for talent. I am not sure of the sequence, nor am I sure that it was all as solemn as it seems now. The days were hilarious, cold or sunny, troubled, crowded, but not dull. We were an elite, not a clique. It was a club without rules. One day Khasa dropped in, from a hospital, recovering from near-to-deathness after a lathi-charge, a martyr and a figure of interest.

Life seemed larger than any service and Ramakoti was the centre of the universe. I was in a world of books, and journalism was far below literature. The newspapers were within my daily study, feasts of jargon and lawless syntax. I wrote little, content to dream of writing classics. One day Ramakoti wrote in exhausted despair an article ‘Bring Me Thy Failure’. I called it a lyric in prose, though he would not concede it. It was the consummation of his sadhana, and it conveyed to me the essence of the Gita, though I have cared little for that classic of ambiguity, sought unsuccessfully to be annotated into faith. The article was a revelation to me of the essence of a good editor’s sacrifice, how a writer has to be ruthlessly subjected and reduced to ashes, so that an editor might rise from them. I have seen editors selfishly project themselves and make their journals advertisements of their self-esteem. I do not know if even Massingham of the ‘Nation’ cared to set himself aside so gallantly as Ramakoti did to make his journal express in its personality, which was his personality, the many-sided singleness that can come only from the significance of many writers. It was not safe for my conceit to live so close to a person of Ramakoti’s severities. I could see how decisive were his decisions, how imperious he could be in his tastes. He saved me from early cynicism and from much else. But I was afraid of taking advantage of his kindness, while loyalty, I thought, demanded that I should write for no other editor. It explains the meagreness of my published contributions in my most productive phase. The reading-room was my world; there I could laze for hours, making a discovery of Lucretius or carrying out, under Edith Sitwell’s influence, experiments with verse texture to see its influence on rhythm. On some nights, Ramakoti would call me to his room and ask me to talk. I had nothing to aid me but a gawk’s humour to decorate the trivial tales I could tell.

These are memories, without an effort at memorising. The years which followed had gaps. But I was again near ‘Triveni’ whenever possible, still writing as infrequently. The writing included two political articles which swung me into journalism. The bitterness of conviction was far away and dilettantism was an escape from life. After a long measure of the dissipation of daily journalism, the old contempt for it has returned. I might, it seems, be able to indulge in the ancient dream of writing the whole of ‘Triveni’, the notes, the stories, the poems, the translations, the book reviews. But Ramakoti is too good an editor to encourage such a parade of perversion. And besides, in those days the whole of eternity lay before me and there was the security of an unknown future. Now, it seems time is shrinking, with life’s daily battle for integrity.

¹ From the Silver Jubilee Number of Triveni (Feb. 1955)

² Songs in Telugu by Nanduri Subba Rao.

“Success consists in unceasing pursuit of the Path. The only failure an idealist recognizes is the failure to stand by Truth.”

From Bring Me Thy Failure (Triveni, July 1932)

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