Kidding around

“At last I am safe,
My creditors do not know me...”

From The Kadkanama of Bachchoo

In Ranikhet some years ago for Subhash Ghai’s shoot of Kisna, to which I was contracted as a co-writer, I was sitting around the dinner table with the director/producer, his assistants, stars and hangers-on. An Indian film shoot is quite a mela — as Shekhar Kapur is fond of saying, some final sense and order emerges from “existing in chaos”

The shoot in Ranikhet seemed to my inexperienced eye lively and busy but in no sense chaotic. As a writer, one is as welcome on the film set as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest. Nevertheless, Subhash made me very welcome indeed and no indulgence was spared, including a case of white and rose wines specially brought up from the plains to indulge my taste. (I am not going to waste type once again in plugging Sula’s Sauvignon Blanc as the most drinkable of Indian wines, because I’ve done it a few times in print before and haven’t even been presented a free half-bottle for my uninstigated and unstinting pains!... but yeah, one can hope...)
Around most Indian shoots there are plenty of young and some not so young assistant directors, some of them with the technical title of first assistant director (AD) and several, possibly even six or eight, second and third ADs. All of them do their allocated jobs but their dream is to jump into the director’s chair if not shoes. They work, they bide their time and good luck to them.
At this particular dinner I was sitting next to Subhash and someone — one of the stars — asked me if I had any ambitions to direct films. I could see that the ADs and others who harboured such ambitions were listening to see if I would be a future competitor.
“No, I’ll stick to writing”, I said.
Several people asked why.
“Because I think you have to suffer from severe personality defects to want to direct”, I said.
Subhash laughed and said he agreed. The others, reluctant to confess their ambition, silently wondered what I meant.
I wasn’t going to explain. Apart from the fact that it was said partially in mischief, or because of that, I was content to let it fester. Needless to say my unpopularity went up a notch or two.
I have no way of knowing whether it was in the same spirit of mischief that Martin Amis this week said, when asked if he had considered or would ever consider writing for children, that he would have to suffer severe brain damage to contemplate such a thing.
He went on to explain. His explanation contained the belief that people who wrote for children condescended to their readers, avoiding vocabulary and modes of expression that would as adults come naturally to them.
He found this act of condescension, or of holding back or shallowing one’s depth of engagement with the object of one’s prose, demeaning and the defeat of “writing”.
Good stuff.
The Indian reader probably knows Martin Amis from his several works of fiction and perhaps from the fact that he has appeared on one or more Indian literary festival platforms and was rude, outrageous or whatever it is that a 61-year-old enfant terrible can be.
I think Amis is wrong. The idea that people who write for children have to be brain-damaged is not objectionable because it is insulting to Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Enid Blyton (I’m not sure about this one), A.A. Milne, J.K. Rowling and a thousand more.
It is objectionable because it turns the act of writing into a form of confession, self-expression or mental — which includes intellect and emotion — self-discovery or even indulgence.
I should declare an interest. I have written books some of which are classified by publishers, booksellers and librarians as “for young adults”. I have also written one or two books which are very noticeably illustrated for and sold to younger children. I write other things too, but don’t disown these.
I might further declare that at the age of 19 in Pune I was riding a motorcycle, hit a very large pot hole and was hurled off the bike as was my pillion rider. She suffered no damage but I ended up in hospital and was ordered to lie still in it for several days. I don’t recall the doctors saying that I was brain-damaged, but then Indian doctors at the time were quite discreet.
I do plead that I am an exception to the rule.
I don’t know why Amis writes. Samuel Johnson said, “Only a blockhead writes, except for money”. I am sure William Shakespeare did, fulfilling commissions for the stage and defining and retaining relationships with his patrons by writing poems for them. I am sure Charles Dickens wrote for money and then brought to the task his critical and reforming social sensibility.
Rudyard Kipling didn’t write the Jungle Books for children. He did write the Just So stories for his son and daughter and addresses the stories to his “Best Beloved”.
The stories bear out part of Amis’ thesis, because when he comes to a word or an object which he thinks will be unfamiliar to his children he draws a picture of it or describes it. And still there isn’t any condescension in the explanations which are often ironic, twisted and amusing.
One mustn’t speak for J.K. Rowling (if one could, one would be rich), but my own experience of writing for “young adults” or younger children was that it wasn’t consciously done. I don’t know if I know more big words that Amis but have in my time wrestled with and understood all manner of complex prose, including that which strives to describe the mysteries of quantum physics. I feel I am capable of some profound thought, but when one writes a particular story, one enters into the universe of that story — the language, concepts, conceits and emotional tropes of that world.
It wouldn’t be right for Huckleberry Finn, Balu the Bear, Toad of Toad Hall or Harry Potter to escalate into Karamazovian angst.
My advice to Amis is to stick with adult prose and to stay away from motorbikes when in Pune.