Jhabvala: Searching for the Pure (like Water Drawn from a Well)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a German-born British and American Booker prize winning novelist, short story writer, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. The New York-Delhi Nexus. Jhabvala lived in India for 24 years (1951-1975). In 1975, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Heat and Dust, which was later adapted into a movie. She moved to New York the same year. She had "remained ill-at-ease with India and all that it brought into her life," and wrote in an autobiographical essay, "Myself in India," published in The London Magazine, that she found the "great animal of poverty and backwardness" made the idea and sensation of India intolerable to her, a "Central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis"–accompanied by a searing intelligence and astute insight. After moving to New York in 1975, she lived there until her death becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States. No Country was Truly Hers. Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany (her father had moved from Poland to escape the draft), from which her family fled to England in 1939. In 1948, her father committed suicide after discovering that 40 members of his family had died during the Holocaust. However, she would never become Anglo-Saxon. "No country was truly hers. She never took root anywhere, but kept her trunks ready and her ornaments few, ready to move on...Her fascination was that of the sharp-eyed outsider."   Escaping Repressed English Manners. Post-war England was a drab, rationed place. So in 1951, she was thrilled to be swept out of it by a Parsee Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, her husband until she died. Still, she could never be Indian. She tried to assimilate; but for all her attempts, she remained as  "awkwardly conspicuous as those pallid, withered Westerners who came to India to find spiritual peace and caught dysentery instead." Though she had cease to live there since 1976, India held sway in her work. In "My Nine Lives (2004)," she has fictionally left New York and returned to live in Delhi. She remained attracted to India's holy songs, "pure like water drawn from a well. There, at night, in a burial ground, she found herself in a group of people singing songs of 'unrequited longing.'  At last, shyness laid aside, she fitted in. But she was exiled still." Most of this material is from: Rugh Prarwer Jhavbala,  The Economist/April  13, 2013, p. 94. Writing stories about displacement and culture clash, she had a sharp eye for the nuances of class and ethnicity.

Manet: Father of Modern Art.  Thursday, April 11, I saw via cinema the exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, presented by the Royal Academy of Arts in London with host Tom Marlow. According to some art historians, Manet in his work accomplished the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to impressionism.  He was among the first to paint scenes of contemporary urban life, not previously considered worthy subjects of depiction. Part of but Aloof from the Crowd. His painting, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, composed in 1862 is an example. The band is playing (but unseen); and a fashionable crowd has gathered in a public park to listen to a concert. The composition represents Baudelaire's argument that modern life was heroic and as worthy a subject as any taken from the classical world. According to Baudelaire, the visual experience of the city, the spectacle of the city, conveyed the essence of modernity; and integral to this is the crowd. After all, people made the city and sets its pace; and with a population explosion unprecedented in history, life in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century had never been faster nor more crowded. An artist wishing to record the hustle and bustle of this new city life, according to Baudelaire, needed to be at least part of its crowds and possessed with the means, both intellectual and financial, to remain aloof from them. This artistic type he named the flâneur, meaning "stroller" or "loafer." By placing himself at the extreme left of the painting, critics suggest, Manet is deliberately identifying himself as a flâneur, the gentleman-dandy situated both within and removed from the crowd. Distancing. Also, Manet identifies himself with the artist, Velazquez, famous for bringing a greater psychological complexity to art and for scrutinizing in his paintings the relationship between the observer and the observed. Moreover, Manet, like Velazquez, surrounded himself with the great and the great personages of the contemporary art scene, including poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire. He also includes several family members. The loose brush stroke and quickly executed masses of color in Music in the Tuileries Gardens suggest the spontaneous energy of the moment, even while few members of the audience appear to be engaged with each other. Manet desired to make the estranging quality of self-awareness an essential part of the content of his work. "Manet is the first painter for whom consciousness itself is the great subject of his art. A tableau vivant constructed so as not to dramatize a particular event so much as the beholder's alienation [Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism (U. of Chicago Press, 1996)]."