Special Report

14th February 1999

The old man and the typewriter

By : Mervyn Silva

"But that was another time. Almost another country."

- Mervyn de Silva (1973)

The French windows of the rented flat on Ward Place were open usually on weekends only. On weekdays my father was never home early enough. But on weekends he would indulge in what he termed were the four basic needs of the Sinhala male: bath, 'buth', beer and bed.

The 'buth' had crab curry to go with it. But my father was far from the average Sinhala male - or even the well above average one. So on weekends sounds would pour off the turntable of the PYE radiogram out of the open windows.

Gene Krupa and Rachmaninoff, Benny Goodman and Shostakovich, Louis Armstrong and Lizst, the Beyond the Fringe comedy team (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore et al), Mort Sahl performing at the Hungry Eye. The session would always close out though, with Dylan Thomas.

It was a .45 rpm - and Dylan Thomas was very drunk. It was not one of his poetry readings which are now tastefully turned out CDs I recently saw at a feminist friend's home in Delhi. No, this was Thomas in a BBC studio prior to one of his poetry readings, smoke from a cigarette curling over his tousled head, introducing his work and himself. "A Few Words of a Kind" was the record's title - Thomas's own phrase. 'Words' is the caption that Sartre gave his autobiography, a slim volume that really only dealt with his childhood.

On this record, Dylan Thomas wearily sums up his own work and its worth, his Welsh diction thickened by Scotch whisky : "words.. words.. words". He refuses to explain his poems: "let them stand on their own, the little literary cripples".

Words have been Mervyn de Silva's vocation- the selection and the ordering of words on a page so as to give a particular meaning or sense. Words have been an older, stronger, more consistent attraction than even women, liquor and a deck of cards. And the practice of words has been more compelling a loyalty than any idea, cause or philosophy. "How do I know what I have to say until I've read what I've written?" was a favourite line.

De Silva was a deviant product of the three most powerful ideological apparatuses of modern Sri Lanka: Royal College, Peradeniya University and Lake House. A brilliant but prodigal son, displaying a developing sensibility that was distinctively modern.

Already, the Royal College magazine of 1949, edited by him (and gifted to Lakshmi who he had just met) contained an article, not on Chaucer or Dryden or even on that hardy perennial Will Shakespeare, but a long review of John Huston's 'The Treasure of Sierra Madre' for which Bogart won an Academy Award. The review that was shamelessly exhibitionistic in the scintillating stylishness of its prose.

Literature and life

The Second World War and the beginnings of decolonization had fissured the ideological functioning of college and campus, coinciding with and reinforcing de Silva's own rebellion against the life-style and mores of his strongwilled, unbending, conservative father; a Southern migrant and successful petty-bourgeois patriarch who never left home without wearing his double-breasted suit. It is a tribute to that father that a successful resistance involved nothing less than the crystallisation in the son, of an individuality that resisted total remoulding by the Peradeniya of Jennings and Ludowyk and the Lake House of the Wijewardanes. It was an individuality however, that more often than not lapsed into individualism.

When I got to Peradeniya almost a quarter century later (rejecting my father's offer of Harvard made during a visit there), they were still talking of Mervyn de Silva. It was part reminiscence - affectionate, amused, awed - and part morality tale; a negative fable. As a fresher, the word had preceded him: a certain 'First', perhaps the most gifted student of English ever. Coming in with a scholarship, his freshman year bore it out. But the problem, as they told me warningly 25 years afterwards, was temperament. For a whole two years de Silva cut lectures, finally collecting a third class, which he protested was an impossibility, a device to save the face of the English Department and Ludowyk. He had not answered the requisite number of questions to have passed, he said.

Ashley Halpe taught us Shakespearean drama quite well, with a few tricks he learnt from David Craig I suspect. Halpe would huskily whisper in his introductory lecture, with an almost reverential caress in his voice: "literature is life". De Silva, regarded as a far more natural student of literature and literary criticism, knew better. Literature was not life. And life - varieties of experience, of emotional states (each one more removed from his father's universe) was drawing de Silva out of the classroom. The compulsive risk of the card table was more exciting than what Ludowyk had to say. But not quite. It is not that Mervyn de Silva traded in literature for life, but that he seemed to intuitively understand that this was the sort of life that literature was about; not the life of the lecture theatre and the Dram Soc. It is as if he wanted to experience life - not in the sense of the great outdoors or a return to 'rural idiocy'- but in the sense of human encounters, states of mind, of mood, feeling and emotional experience less mediated by academics and academia. "If I had got a first" he said "I would have wound up like Halpe - on the staff. Instead I became the editor of the Daily News". And the last foreign journalist to interview DN Aidit (the leader of the doomed Indonesian CP) and the first one to interview Abu Nidal.

De Silva was non- con formist in his non- conformism, opting neither for the LSSP-CP ( he would satirise the pretentious posturings of the former) nor for a faddish bohemianism which went tandem with Eurocentrism in literature. He had bypassed the curriculum and found his own way in the Peradeniya library to 20th Century American writing - Hemingway, Dos Passos and above all F. Scott Fitzgerald. His final turning away from Peradeniya's English Department was when it proved impervious to his passionate argumentation for modern American fiction to be given critical consideration.

He had no place for a department that had no place for Jay Gatsby and he knew that such a department had no real place for him.

Ludowyk was never to forgive him for his defection, accompanied as it was by a trail of rascally anti-paternal deception. Sir Ivor Jennings did though, hosting my parents to tea on the lawn at Cambridge (and proposing to enter their son's name in the enrolment register) on De Silva's first visit to Britain in 1964 on the way back from the Cairo Non Aligned Summit.

It was much the same trajectory at the Law College : a brilliant first year, the Gold Medal for Oratory - beating KN Choksy into second place, and final examination fees solicited twice over (once from his father, and once from his fiancee, my mother) disappearing on an unlucky afternoon at the card table.

Journalism

Hartal 1953. A snapshot taken I believe by Lake House ace Harvey Campbell shows a skinny de Silva in a white suit, note pad and pen in hand looking to dodge the tear gas. He was freelancing for Lake House. In '55, the year of his marriage, he signed up full time at Esmond Wickramasinghe's suggestion. At the interview he'd been shown a front page of the Daily News which carried a photograph of him atop Sir Ivor Jenning's bungalow burning a copy of the Daily News after some peremptory denunciation .

Mervyn de Silva was now a professional journalist. Twenty one years later he would be sacked from the institution by the widow of one of his heroes and mentors, herself a patroness (of sorts) of his.

But it was not an extended replay of his Peradeniya and Law College days. In those two decades he would vindicate himself in a sustained, almost torrential, display of exceptional journalistic prowess and editorial distinction. Validating the judgement of his teachers at Royal College and Peradeniya about the brilliance of his talent, at Lake House ability finally became manifest achievement. Where his teachers and well wishers were wrong was when they insisted that curbing his temperament was a precondition for achievement.

It was in journalism and journalism alone that his talent and temperament came together almost as accompaniment (he would think that the latter was corollary of the former ). It was only in journalism that they could. When he walked up the steps of the Lake House, de Silva came home.

The institution was the first liberal patriarch he'd ever had; one who permitted the working out of a story line or immersion in one's sources to be played by him like Stephen Daedalus peregrinating through Dublin. As dusk fell and the bars opened de Silva could be anyone he liked - Dylan Thomas in his alcoholic eloquence, Jay Gatsby in his romances, James Mason in Odd Man Out (until '65 he did look a bit like him), Richard Burton (as he ascended the editorial ladder and became jowlier). Burton and Taylor in 'Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?' - minus the predatory sexuality - were also the roles in his reckoning, of the intense, ceaseless domestic warfare when he did get home (usually around 3 am every other school day).

But unlike many others (the brilliant sub editor Kanakaratnam for instance) he didn't burn out or destroy himself. The copy was on the editorial desk next morning. Half a bottle of Scotch - once one and a half, shared with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto - a heavy hangover and a mess in the wash basin later, the typewriter keys would start to click, turning into a clatter as the words flowed and the first of the days sixty cigarettes were lit.

The man was salvaged short of the brink by the only discipline he recognised - that of the deadline, inextricable from his dedication to his craft, the only one that enabled him to be himself - and by his wife, his "anchor" as he would say throughout.

Herself a rebel, converting to Christianity against the violent opposition of a beloved father (a minor public official, brilliant Buddhist polemicist and fanatical proselytiser from Panadura) Lakshmi Sylvia taught memorably and lodged at St Bridget's Convent, drove a car, played competitive tennis, swam, boated,danced, was one of the first to cut her hair short, read Camus, gifted Mervyn books by Edmund Wilson, had Pieter Keuneman's poster on her wall and was a subscriber to the Left Book Club.

But as it became more and more evident that Mervyn's waywardness was structural, she left her left-ish liberalism somewhere between HD Sugathapala's drawing room and the Navamaga editorial collective, turning into the perfect psychological and behavioural synthesis of where she was coming from and where she had gone - Panadura Buddhism and convent Catholicism - an exact antipode of her husband. Perhaps a necessary and functional transformation indispensable to his salvation. I think it was when old Perimpanayagam, then at St Thomas' Colpetty, laconically pronounced after the briefest exchange that I was "a chip off the old block" that she ignored the legendary Royal college principal and educationist HD Sugathapala's entreaties and decided that I should be schooled instead at the more disciplinarian St Joseph's.

A succession of Olivetti typewriters were repaired and replaced as the pre-dawn atmosphere in the Ward Place flat began to give a whole new meaning to the term 'nuclear family'. But the words that came off the typewriter! De Silva's journalistic achievement is striking not only in its quality and sustained character but in its multifariousness. Several of the 'greats' did double up as satirists (Tarzie Vittachi) or literary critics (Jayanta Padmanabha).

Mervyn however operated in three roles: critic, satirist and political commentator. Each of these practices could easily fill an anthology and constitute an enviable lifetime achievement. Each in his hands bore its own marks of distinction in style, temper and substance. He was the complete critic: film, theatre, prose, poetry, art.

Three characteristics stand out - the celebration of the moderns, the discovery of what I could call Twentieth Century American existentialism (specially Scott Fitzgerald), the grasp and celebration of Malraux (one would have expected Regi Siriwardena to have been his main Lankan champion) and, most distinctive, the treatment of Leonard Woolf- involving an implicit yet unerring and original critical judgement that the sparer, tauter 'Village in the Jungle' was superior to Foster's 'A Passage to India'.

As satirist (from 'Daedalus' to 'Outsider') his scope ranged far beyond Tarzie's brilliant lampoonings of brown sahibs and other figures in a Lankan landscape. From a Swiftian savaging of the elite boarding school system of his boyhood to the iconoclastic mimicry of his legendary teachers and lecturers, satire in de Silva's columns was a weapon of emancipation, both in the individual-psychological and social senses. The extensive range of subjects encompassed by his satire isÆ best exemplified by one on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which a Red Guard accuses his lover of giving him "the Cold War shoulder"!

(More next week)

Editorial/Opinion Contents