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Journalism of Courage
In the summer of 8217;69, Vikram Seth, then 17, turned up at the home of his mother8217;s uncle, in northwest London, seeking room and guardianship. He had just been awarded a scholarship to study for his A-levels. As he settled himself into a guest room in the attic, he got immersed in the lives of Shanti Uncle and Aunt Henny.
In Seth8217;s attentive prose, their story gathers all the threads of migration of the century just past. It catches the ambitions and atrocities that carried men and women far from the places of their birth and demanded no more and no less of them than to arrange a sense of belonging in a scaffolding of relationships salvaged from a terrible past.
So Shanti set off for Berlin in 1931. After a series of temporary accommodations, he found boarding in Henny8217;s home. Decades later, he remembered her telling her mother, 8220;Don8217;t take the black man.8221; That warning aside, Shanti was soon drawn into the family8217;s social life and was not treated as a mere lodger.
Shanti acquired his degree but found he could not practise, what with the Nazi injunctions against foreigners. He relocated to Edinburgh, hopeful of qualifying to practice in Britain. Henny8217;s family was Jewish and was soon scattered in a rush of emigrations and deportations.
Henny found refuge in London; her mother and sister were not so fortunate. For Henny, in London during the war years, correspondence with Shanti became almost the sole link to her past life. By then, he had enlisted in Britain8217;s war effort, serving in Sudan, Egypt, Syria and Italy, where he lost his right arm he would return to dentistry as a left-hander.
In the 8217;90s, soon after Henny8217;s death, Seth decided to write a book on this remarkable couple. He conducted a series of interviews with Shanti.
But what of Henny? How was he going to project her inner life? Upon her death Shanti, in a fit of heartbreak, had destroyed all her photographs and letters. A fortuitous discovery of a trunk in the attic gave him an account of Henny. She had spoken little to Shanti about this correspondence, perhaps to insulate their relationship as a link to happier times.
These letters trace Henny8217;s efforts to know of her mother and sister8217;s fate; her exertions to get compensation from the German government; her revived links with old friends from Berlin and what must have been a difficult task of separating friendships worth preserving from those with men and women who8217;d made expedient compromises during the Nazi years.
To the narrative of these two lives, Seth brings his foremost skill as a writer8212;his ability to convey the circumstances of relationships. And in this non-fictional narrative, after two very different novels A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music, Seth8217;s respect for the dignity of his characters keeps Two Lives from being intrusive.
In his novels, this respect sometimes limited his characters8217; emotional profiles; here it gives them ownership of their own stories. It also lattices their partnership with the movements and histories of the 20th century.
