Two Lives, Vikram Seth's latest book, is just out in England, and we're racing along the A36 somewhere near Frometo meet him for lunch at the Haunch of Venison. We're late and we're lost. I call to tell him that we're 20 miles away. My friend, Candace Bahouth, a mosaic artist from Pilton who's driving me to the interview, insists I clarify that we're 20 miles away and in a 1961 Morris Traveler. We arrive half an hourlater and we're still there before Seth. We're in the pub drinking half pints of Guinness when he arrives carrying an armful of newspapers, all with articles about him and Two Lives, which tells the story of his great-uncle Shanti, a successful one-armed London dentist (he lost his right arm at Monte Cassino in WWII) and Aunty Henny, Shanti's German-Jewish wife.
It's an unusual book, a commercially risky project. But that's nothing new for Seth, who has gotten rich and famous writing to his muse. He wrote his first novel, The Golden Gate, in verse. His second, A Suitable Boy, clocked in at almost 1,400 pages in hardcover and established him as an international literary celebrity when it was published in 1993. Though a third novel, An Equal Music, published in 1999, was quieter, Two Lives has him back at the top of the U.K. publishing world. "I'm so happy that people are enjoying it and responding to it, because it's not a very obvious book," says Seth; Two Lives will be published by HarperCollins in the U.S. in November.
Like his fiction—and his life—this new work of nonfiction centers on a devotion to family. "Family relationships are fraught," he says, "but they're wonderful. It's a piece of luck if you happen to choose a loving family to be born into."
Candace leaves and we go upstairs to the restaurant. Seth is a regular at the Haunch. The place is pretty fabulous; looks and personality to spare, but it's got nothing on Vikram Seth. The 53-year-old author has the charm market cornered. He's got a beautiful voice, a beautiful way of using language, and disarming self-possession. Judging by the service, our Bulgarian waitress, Liliana, agrees. I decide to leave the discussion of Seth's unprecedented advances for later. A Suitable Boy reaped a reported million dollars and the London Telegraph claims a £1.4 million advance for Two Lives(roughly $2.4 million). I'll need to bring up money eventually, but for now, we order tiger prawns, pork loin and a very good bottle of wine. Though Seth claims that he's "somewhat elusive," or to put it more poetically, "a gregarious recluse," he talks easily about his work, his writing life and his family.
Seth calls Two Lives "somewhat unclassifiable." While focusing on Shanti and Henny, and touching on Seth's own life, the 512 page book is also a chronicle of the history and intellectual movements of the 20th century.
Seth's literary reputation in the U.K. is unchallenged. A Suitable Boy, his sprawling novel set in the early 1950s in India, got generally positive but mixed reviews there and in the U.S. But the British press was beside itself, comparing him to Tolstoy, George Eliot and Goethe. "Already the best writer of his generation." gushed the Times of London. "Massive and magnificent," according to the Sunday Times. Heady stuff for a writer who had just spent most of his 30s living with his parents.
His family, Seth has said many times, is the biggest thing in his life. It was the impetus for his writing Two Lives, its size and breadth is reflected in A Suitable Boy, and it was the reason he returned to India after a decade in California. And while he owns a house in England, his heart is in India.
It was his mother's suggestion that he interview his uncle as a way to keep the old man, who was in his 80s, engaged in life. Henny had died five years before in 1989, and Shanti was lonely and depressed. Seth spoke with Shanti over a period of five months, at 18 Queens Road, in Hendon, London, the house where Seth had come to live with "Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny" in 1969, when he was 17 and preparing to study at Oxford. "It was pretty much out of filial loyalty to my mother and grand filial loyalty to my uncle. I felt it was important to do but I thought it would be an archival book mainly for the benefit of the family and for my own curiosity. I was at loose ends, so what was to be lost?"
Shanti arrived in Berlin in 1931 to study dentistry. He boarded with a Jewish family, the Caros, although when Frau Caro, Henny's mother, told her about their choice of lodgers, Henny's reply was, "Don't take the black man." But Frau Caro did, and Shanti soon became part of Henny's circle of Jewish, half-Jewish and Christian friends. But under the Nazis, Shanti, as a foreigner, could not study or practice in Berlin; Henny, as a Jew, lost her job. They both found refuge in England, but Henny's mother and sister, Lola, died in the camps.
Shanti and Henny were close friends after the war, but did not marry until 1951. Shanti was unsure of Henny's affections and fearful of not being able to make a living after losing his arm. He eventually built an excellent dental practice (in the beginning he'd make sure his patient was securely in the chair before finding out he was missing an arm).
Early on in the project, Seth confronted the problem of having only one voice to tell the story. Henny couldn't speak for herself, and Shanti, in his grief, had destroyed every reminder of her. Then Seth found an extraordinary cache of Henny's letters in the attic.
"It suddenly became a book I could not not write," he says. Her letters were "a revelation both of her suffering and her undeniable character." After the war, Henny reached out with food and clothes and money not only to Jewish friends, but to Christian friends as well, yet "she still made a clear and moral distinction and would have nothing to do with those she believed made exceptions within their circle but basically embraced Hitler's view."
Two Lives is not a love letter. Seth shows Shanti becoming manipulative and vindictive as he grew more feeble. He ultimately cut his family out of his will, leaving everything to his English caretaker and one great nephew. "There is a warts and all aspect. I feel a great loyalty to the truth. I didn't want to shy away from it even though it made me uncomfortable and members of my family uncomfortable."
In Two Lives, Seth also documents his own transformation from economics student to writer. He was at Stanford working toward his doctorate for more than 10 years with a two-year interlude in China. (Seth is fluent in Chinese, but insists he has no gift for language. "Chinese was an obsession. I'm not very disciplined but I am obsessive.") One day, after an all nighter entering economic data into a computer, he discovered Eugene Onegin, Pushkin's novel in verse, in the Stanford Bookstore. "I was in the grip of an inspiration that would change my life," he writes. His dissertation was pushed aside, and he began his homage to San Francisco, The Golden Gate.
Rethinking his long tenure in California after a friend's comment that going to California was like entering a swimming pool ("You swam a few laps and before you knew it, you were 50 years old"), he realized in 1987 that he wanted to go home to India. "I'd been away from my family for a long time." He lived with his parents for the next six years, researching and writing A Suitable Boy.
Seth only writes if he's inspired, and he finds inspiration from many sources, which is why his work includes poetry, translation, a children's book, a libretto, three novels and now, Two Lives, the first personal nonfiction thing he's written.
David Davidar, the publisher of Penguin Canada, who counts Seth as his first major acquisition (Davidar lured Seth with an offer written in sonnet form) and his very good friend, considers him a genius. "I don't use the word lightly. He's worked in every form you can think of with equal facility. He's astonishingly good."
"I'm a little frightened when I try something new," Seth admits, "but I'm more frightened of dereliction to the muse and losing a chance because how often are you inspired to do something? That's considerably more bothersome than the fear of falling flat on your face, and that's the worst that can happen."
The wine bottle's almost empty. I think this might be the time to bring up the advance he got for Two Lives, reportedly on the basis of an eight-page proposal. He laughs. "My lips are sealed. You probably know better than I do."
But he does tell me the story: "My agent [the late Giles Gordon] created this marvelous magical proposal from a conversation we had, and when I read it, I said, 'My God, what an interesting book,' and on the back of this proposal and a few meetings, the most hard-bitten publishers surrendered all sorts of enthusiastic responses. It was rather like buying a pig in a poke. There wasn't even a little trotter they could see. The publisher proposal is the most underestimated genre in all literature."
While he wants his book to do well, he already considers himself blessed. "I'm obsessed with my work. And with a loving family, nice siblings and such... with love and work taken care of, everything else is fine."
I turn off the tape recorder. We talk about Hurricane Katrina and the Supreme Court nominations and what he would take to a desert island (music).
Candace is back and we finish the wine and order dessert, and Liliana brings us chocolate schnapps on the house. Seth tells us that when we called to say we'd be late, he phoned his brother Shantum in India to congratulate him on his daughter's birthday. Shantum has two little girls that Seth calls the joy of his life. Seth is unmarried and has said that he is on the verge of realizing that he will never have the kind of relationship he writes about in Two Lives.
But the mood brightens when, thinking of Shantum, Seth remembers our Morris Traveler. Shantum had a Morris Traveler when he was in England and Seth asks to see ours. This is no ordinary Morris Traveler. Candace is an artist, after all. There's a shrine on the dashboard with saints and a Buddha and plastic flowers. He is smitten with the car. And because he so clearly loves the car, and because he has the charm market cornered, we give him a ride home.
