From today's online edition of the Calcutta Telegraph.
THE DIGNITY OF THE SMALL PERSON IS IMPORTANT
W.H. Auden and R.K. Narayan have steered Alexander McCall Smith in the direction that his writing has followed
Returning, then, to the question which sparked these observations on influence: what has influenced me? The answer that I usually give is a brief one — my principal literary influences are that great poet, W.H. Auden, and that great novelist, R.K. Narayan. These are the two writers who, I think, steered me more than anybody else in the direction that my writing has followed. To this list I might add a stylistic, linguistic influence which I think was extremely important for me — the Book of Common Prayer, that great liturgical masterpiece that was used in the Anglican Church, including the Anglican churches in India, and indeed the Episcopal Church of Scotland, until it was largely replaced by the arid forms of modern liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer, alongside the Authorized Version of King James VI of Scotland and James I of England, gave great linguistic richness to the English language. The powerful Cranmerian prose of the Book of Common Prayer must have formed the deep linguistic patterns of many writers raised in observant households.
How did I get to R.K. Narayan? Well, I think that I can detect the outlines of the path that led me to that happy meeting. As a boy, I obviously had no experience of India. I was, however, born and spent my childhood in one of the last corners of the Empire, and so it is not surprising that I was exposed to Kipling. Now I know that there are many who have a low opinion of Kipling, and I do not wish to enter into the debate, but the fact of the matter is that some of my earliest reading was of The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories. Mowgli and Kim were very real to me, and I also remember being utterly entranced by Kipling’s story, “Rikki Tiki Tavi”, which I read so often that I could virtually recite it word for word. How painful it is to think back to those lost days, when one remembered the exact words of what one read — it is hardly possible to do that later in life.
But there I was reading Kipling’s Indian tales and being drawn subconsciously into a relationship with a country that I had never seen. India was to me a great, infinitely exciting place — I knew the names of the cities and could point to then on a map, and I had, no doubt, all sorts of exotic ideas about this country. That, I think, was the germ of my literary engagement with this country, even if it was planted by a writer now regarded as very old-fashioned. Of course, this was nothing unusual — there must have been vast numbers of people who were attracted to India in this way, just as today there are so many people who find themselves drawn to America through the powerful influence of their films. We feel that we can know a country although we do not know it, or only see it on the printed page or in the flickering images of the screen.
As a young man, my engagement with literary India continued to be somewhat unusual, mediated as it was through the work of a writer of the Indian diaspora, who rarely wrote about India itself, and by a writer who, having married into the country, came to it from outside. These authors were the Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, who wrote about India in the Caribbean, and the remarkable Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who lived in India for many years after her marriage. Then, fortunately, my reading took a more authentically Indian turn and I discovered the works of R.K. Narayan. I think, in fact, that I had read one of his books before the principal discovery — The Man-Eater of Malgudi was my first exposure to his writing, and although this book made an impression, it was not until a bit later that I found myself engrossed in the rest of his books. The effect, though, was profound, akin to my later discovery of the work of that sadly neglected English writer, Barbara Pym.
Now if I developed a taste for reading about India through the work of R.K. Narayan, what were his early influences? Narayan has left us a fascinating autobiography, My Days, which gives us an insight into his boyhood. He was, as you know, the son of a headmaster, and obviously in such a household he came into contact with a wide range of reading matter that arrived on his father’s desk for the school library. “My father,” he wrote, “ did not mind our taking away whatever we wanted to read — provided we put them back on his desk without spoiling them, as they had to be placed on the school’s reading room table on Monday morning. So our weekend reading was full and varied. We could dream over the advertisement pages in the Boy’s Own Paper or the Strand Magazine. Through the Strand, we made the acquaintance of all English writers: Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W.W. Jacobs, Arnold Bennett, and every English fiction writer worth the name. ... Through Harper’s and the Atlantic we attained glimpses of the New World and its writers.”
From this it is clear that the influences which were playing a part in his literary development were many and varied — something which I think in due course showed up very clearly in the nature of his writing. R.K. Narayan enjoyed the great gift of being able to see the universal in one small slice of humanity — the occupants of a single town. How much of that gift came from his boyhood reading — from his voracious consumption of the literature of cultures in which he was at the same time both insider and outsider. The world of Wodehouse’s extraordinary country houses was very far from the world of his father’s school in Mysore, but it is this dissonance, surely, which gives the writer the insight he needs to describe the universal. For wherever we are, the small things of life are the same: the jealousies, the ambitions, the frustrations, the human striving.
And it is Narayan’s ability to capture human striving so perfectly and poignantly that I think has most deeply influenced me in my own novels. As a young writer, he of course knew what it was to strive after something and to find it seemingly unattainable. It was while he was still a student that Narayan purchased a copy of a book entitled How To Sell Your Manuscripts. He was not a particularly good student, possibly because he was too busy writing, but inspired by this book he sent his manuscripts off to London publishers, only to experience that rejection that almost all writers must face: the letters back saying that the publisher regrets that he cannot in the current climate, etc etc.
Narayan sent the manuscript of his first novel, Swami and Friends, to a series of London publishers, but to no avail. Then his first publication came — in the pages of the humorous magazine, Punch, no less — and it brought him the then handsome fee of six guineas. He now became a journalist but continued to send out manuscripts without success. The manuscript of Swami was still doing the rounds in London — still unsuccessfully — and Narayan wrote to a friend in London who was sending it out for him. If it came back again, he said, his friend should tie a heavy stone to it and throw it in the Thames. Fortunately, the friend did not take this advice, but continued to show it, eventually to Graham Greene. It sat on Greene’s desk for a while and then he read it and passed it on to a publisher with the recommendation that it should be published. That happened in 1935 and it was the launch of Narayan’s distinguished career as a novelist. In all he wrote fourteen books, each, in its way, a little gem.
The central themes that you find in a Narayan novel — the portrayal of the hero or heroine who strives to be something, perhaps unrealistically — is for me an immensely powerful theme, and one that is full of comic possibilities as well as great human grandeur. Life in this world is, for many, not easy: the barricades are not always in the right place, people do not always understand what it is that we really want, our abilities are not always as readily recognized as we would like them to be. But in spite of all the limitations that we have, we still have our dignity, which is so important to us. That is what Narayan teaches us — that the dignity of the small person, the apparently insignificant onlooker on the great dramas, is important. He helps us to sympathize and to understand. And he shows us, too, that in these small strivings of everyday life, there is the larger story of humanity’s potential for both kindness and unkindness.
One does not need a large canvas to portray all this. Remember Jane Austen, who famously said that she painted miniature pictures on tiny squares of ivory. She did. Nothing much happened to her characters — they led restricted lives in which the major question was often whether they would meet and marry a particular man. Yet these tiny squares of ivory are really great canvases that say a lot about what it is to be human. Similarly with Narayan’s novels, in the small events of their lives we see the big issues written large. And these issues are revealed in a clear narrative, in limpid prose — something that is not always evident today in contemporary novels. Narayan can ramble a bit, but he rambles clearly — if that is not a contradiction — and of course real life rarely goes from A to B without digression and excursus. In that respect, rambling may be considered a virtue from the social realism point of view.
When I wrote the first novel in my Botswana series of novels — The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency — although I may not have realized it then, I now acknowledge that I was heavily influenced by Narayan’s example. I proposed to write about a woman in a smallish town; I chose for her a friend and assistant who had strived very hard to get where she got in life; I chose to make Mma Makutsi inordinately proud of her performance in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College, where she achieved the hitherto-unheard-of mark of 97 per cent; I chose to make the society in which they lived an intimate one, in which reputation and status was important — all of these being typical features of the Narayan novels. Was I consciously imitating? No, I don’t think I was. The influence was, I think, more of that subconscious nature that I have alluded to earlier on. And so when a journalist interviewing me some years ago said, “Your novels remind me rather of the work of R.K. Narayan”, I felt a momentary surprise and asked, “But how do you know that?” — not realizing, perhaps, that this was not just a random, co-incidental insight on the journalist’s part, but something which was fairly obvious to anybody who knew both bodies of work.
What of Narayan’s reputation today? There are, of course, fads in the growth and decline of literary reputation; authors can be in favour one moment and then in the next, people may be heard saying, “Why on earth did anybody bother to read him or her?” Such is the fickleness of the public taste. I am not sure how extensively Narayan is read these days in the UK, for example, but I can say that when I mention him to even quite well-read friends, many of them confess that they have not read him. This upsets me every bit as much as when I hear that friends have not read Auden. The remedy, of course, is always at hand — an appropriate edition thrust into their hands with an earnest imprecation to read it as soon as possible. I hope, though, that there will be a revival of interest in Narayan’s novels in the United States. A couple of years ago, I was privileged to be invited to write an introduction to two new re-issues of omnibus editions of his novels, published in New York by Everyman’s Library. I was delighted to do this, and I have hopes that the inclusion of these books in a large and widely-circulated list in the US will introduce new readers to this very great writer.
If there has been a central theme to this lecture, it is this: that India has, through a number of writers writing in English since the late 1930s and up to the present, made an inordinately vital and significant contribution to the body of world literature written in English. I have tried to show, through an examination of my own experience and through an instance of literary influence, one writer upon another writer, how this affected my own work in a major way. In making this contribution to world literature, we outside India have been immensely enriched by the subtle, gorgeously human, and beautifully written prose which your writers have given us. Long may this process continue, and if Indian writers continue to win all the Booker prizes ad infinitum, then that will surely be richly deserved.
