The quintessential literary genius

On the narrow ramparts of Neemrana, while a literary festival swung through its various moods "" insularity, belligerence, camaraderie, jealousy "" you might have observed a quiet, white-haired figure who managed to stay in the background while being present at every key moment.

Dom Moraes, unlike other literary luminaries, enjoyed a position of relative ease on the fringes of the great game, and only his love of conversation and a certain humorous, observant, shrewd gleam in his eye marked him out.

If you happened to wonder what was going through his mind, he provided a partial answer years ago when he wrote Gone Away: "I have a little game I play with people, which in my nastier moments I am proud of: I take notes of their mannerisms, chuckling to myself. I was just starting the first invisible chuckle when I noticed Das chuckling too. His eyes rested on me, intelligent, sardonic and seeing, I stopped taking notes hastily."

Fortunately for readers who enjoy Dom's matchless prose just as much as the poetry on which his reputation rests, Dom Moraes encountered few subjects equipped with Das's ability to see what he was up to.

Over the three volumes that make up A Variety of Absences "" Gone Away, My Son's Father and Never at Home, he is relatively free to get on with his observations, chuckling invisibly all the while. And, spaced apart as they are, these three volumes offer a remarkable insight into the life and times of a singular figure. No novelist could have created a character like Dom Moraes, though most would have given their right arm to be able to do so.

Gone Away was first published in 1960. At the precocious age of 20, Dom had won the Hawthornden Prize for poetry, launching his career in somewhat premature fashion. Dom was not your average self-conscious 20-year-old; the son of a famous father (the legendary Frank Moraes), he summed up his curriculum vitae in 'Song'""" I sowed my wild oats/Before I was twenty/ Drunkards and turncoats/ I knew in plenty."

He had met Stephen Spender, who had praised his poems; been taught by W H Auden; met Cyril Connolly, who had criticised his suit; refused to respond to Raymond Chandler's gibes about Nehru; received a magisterial nod of approval from T S Eliot. He had travelled, far more than most young men of his generation, and grappled with the complex emotions his mother's progression into madness had evoked.

As the first volume of his memoirs, Gone Away works precisely because it was never meant to be a memoir; Dom had been commissioned by Heinemann to write a book about India. "The book was called a travelogue," observes Dom, "but it turned out to be a better picture of me as I was at twenty-one than any more orthodox autobiography."

Nevertheless, he managed to pack in some travel: inside Bombay, gloomily surveying the extremely strange phenomenon that was a cocktail party in a prohibition state (as it was at the time), Dom pushed off to scrutinise the infinitely more fascinating world of Bombay's bootleggers. In Delhi he noted an eternal truth about the capital: "All the gossip in New Delhi is political."

Ved Mehta "" who accompanied Dom on several other alcohol-fuelled trips with long-suffering phlegmaticism "" and he visited Nirad Chaudhuri and listened in some bewilderment to the Bengali author's extolling of the wonders of England, including Lyons' tea-rooms.

With Ved, too, he travelled to Nepal and met "the last feudal overlords that the world has seen, these Ranas", saw villages and monasteries, recited Edna St Vincent Millay's 'For Any Dying Poet' to the poet Devkota as he lay, dying of cancer, among the bodies of more dead and dying.

At thirty, he wrote an autobiography""My Son's Father "" more personal in tone, his eye for detail and his sense of humour more focused, his critical faculties more developed. He fell in love; he wrestled with his mother's nightmares; he became a poet. He was able to look back at the first stirrings of his talent with the clarity and humour that mark his best work:

I told myself stories, therefore, based on the characters I had just read about: Tarzan, Black Bartlemy, Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain, etc. At first I simply told myself these stories in bed: then I began to do it walking up and down my bedroom; finally I wandered through the flat, murmuring to myself, and gesturing fiercely with my hands as the tension of the plot mounted.

My father and his friends, sitting on the verandah, often watched astounded as I slowly paced the drawing-room, mouthing and flapping my hands. My father was already worried about my mother's mental health: he now began to worry about mine."

Never at Home is best read as the third volume of a trilogy "" it has a sense of closure about it, even though Dom's fans might well ask for a fourth volume. Of Eichmann sitting inside his glass box as the trial wound on and on, he writes: "I could not feel pity, because of the evidence, and because of his dehumanisation by the glass box; for the same reasons I could not feel anger or hatred. The evidence might have caused those; but the evidence had become unconnected with the man."

He covered Algiers during its war, and Vietnam during its struggle. "It had been a beautiful country, but it had also been depopulated and deforested; scabbed with napalm, stained with cordite, it lived on in a new incarnation, goddess of boredom and war." In between there was poetry; then there was writer's block. There were distractions "" affairs, other writers, the bizarre figure of Christine Keeler, sponging off journalists without any of the charm of Holly Golightly demanding change from her escorts for "the powder room".

In 1982, Dom wrote the first 'real' poem he had produced in seventeen years. It's called Absences, and the title of this edition of his collected memoirs is drawn from it: "No sound would be heard if/ So much silence was not heard./ Clouds scuff like sheep on the cliff./ The echoes of stones are restored./ No longer any foreshore/ Or any abyss, this/ World only held together/ By its variety of absences."

For the moment, he rests "" a travelogue through India with Sarayu Ahuja came out last year, and another book is in the pipeline. He doesn't so much fight his long-term illness as eye it sardonically in between more travels, more wine, more cigarettes. At the end of his memoirs, illuminated by his inimitable raconteur's voice, he leaves "a little tired, but in the end/ Not unhappy to have lived".

A VARIETY OF ABSENCES

The Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes

Dom Moraes

Penguin

Pages: 627

Price: Rs 599