Secret Cousins in Literature

by Mandira Pattnaik

Tolga Ulkan

I assume many of us writers are accepting rejections this week, and my last column about narrative and structure might be stalking you (?) like intimate ghosts that whisper where you might’ve gone wrong. Doubt is undeniably a hated companion of writer life. Such pairings as narrative-and-structure and doubt-and-writer life, whether coupled beautifully or fraught with differences, are not one-of-a-kind. There exists more fraternal pairs in literature. For the sake of comic relief, let’s explore some very likely but secret cousins of the writing world.

Poetry and Novel

Did you know sometimes the shortest and longest versions of literature feed off each other? Yes, the love is mutual. Poetry and novel-length works influence and inspire the other.

The image of the tormented isolated man adrift in a hostile and dangerous natural world must have been made a lasting impression on your young mind. Remember Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

With sloping masts and dipping prow,

As who pursued with yell and blow

Still treads the shadow of his foe,

And forward bends his head,

The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

And southward aye we fled.

It did leave an indelible mark on young Mary Shelley’s imagination too. Like a haunted apparition, it returned to her so much that she used a strong influence of it in Frankenstein.

So poetry does have a secret relationship with novels. Writers whose poetic impulses drive their prose aren’t uncommon either. Fanny Howe is one of America’s most widely read poets, although, curiously, her writing career began during the 1960s with a series of novels she published under the pseudonym Della Field.

Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lanka-born Canadian writer, began his career with poetry in 1967 with the book The Dainty Monsters, but is better known as the author of the acclaimed novel The English Patient (1992)

Novel and Place

Place is where your heart is, and therefore, your writing is.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines blends personal lives and the history of places, particularly Calcutta, in the same way James Joyce records his stories upon the scaffolding of the city of Dublin. It is in the appreciation of this that the generosity of praise for these masters’ work needs to be seen through the prism of the cities themselves. As a student of literature and short-story writer, I’m drawn to a comprehensive study of both, and mesmerized by the way these two cities become the fabric on which character nuances are weaved in. Like rich tapestry, the dramatic changes the two cities have seen historically become wefts and warps, are looped into their writing, and lend themselves to superlative imagery and metaphors.

In Westmoreland Street the footpaths were crowded with young men and women returning from business, and ragged urchins ran here and there yelling out the names of the evening editions. The man passed through the crowds, looking on the spectacle generally with proud satisfaction and staring masterfully at the office-girls. His head was full of the noises of tram gongs and swishing trolleys and his nose already sniffed the curling fumes of punch. — James Joyce in Counterpart

Consider the accurate validation of the urban middle class in this extract. A group that is hardworking, often for a pittance, usually on the throes of change, and offering themselves to what the political and social circumstances lead them to. Find the drama is in a state of flux, the stage is the city’s pavements.

Contrast the above with the following passage from Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines:

But if I happened to hear that Tridib was around I would double back through the park and the back lanes. Someone would always be able to tell me where he was: he was a familiar figure within the floating, talkative population of students and would-be footballers and bank clerks and small-time politicos and all the rest who gravitated towards that conversation-loving stretch of road between Gariahat and Gole Park.

Again, Ghosh’s novel is like a blood cousin of the city of Kolkata, almost an admirer, and the place and the work are wonderfully connected.

Writer and Fashion Flair

Style is not what you’d associate with writers, because aren’t writers aka thinkers? Authors cloak worlds with words, how would they care about appearances you may ask. Turns out they do. Sharp dressing, white suits, floral summer dresses, black gowns, writers are some of the most fashionably dressed.

“I never saw him in any dress which was not fashionably neat with some approximation to elegance.” — thus spoke Lambert Wilmer (Our Press Gang, 1860) about Edgar Allan Poe.

Tom Wolfe said: “You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”

You build a style, you stick to it. It’s part of who you are, your identity and that carefully crafted image is an extension of the work that you share with the world. It’s a secret but then it’s no secret at all!

Writer and Controversy

Finally, what’s to that life left which is held out to examination in the prose and poetry open to all and out in the world? Well, there’s public controversies! A writer and controversy are like cousins that grow up together. There are really too many to keep track of, and at least some appear to have been intentional.

Skirting away from personal controversies, let’s list the more public debates around writers. Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was banned in 13 countries, including Sudan, India and Pakistan for its supposedly blasphemous references. According to the American Library Association (Report of Sept., 2021), Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling remained the ninth most “challenged” book of the year 2019, 20 years after its original publication; the main criticism of it stems from religious groups, who have accused the books of promoting occultism and witchcraft.

Sensitivity and Writing

There’s more to existence than the nomenclature of pain. Ditto for writing life. How we are always folding grief and pain, happiness and surprises, into origami shapes, releasing them into the chaos of a field where butterflies wing their way, and exulting when others find them. Many writers have reflected on how their life, as-is, is regular and monotonous. But they have shaped their writing life around it so. You’ll find the drab banker’s bored emotions as cause for the poet’s lyrics, or the seafarer’s adventures being the root reason why his novel was even born. Then there are writers turned activists, novelists turning recluse. What we hold inside, burns outside. It is important to keep the senses open to what’s happening around us, and let that sensitivity breathe freely. Hope you’re not hiding it; in fact, you’re displaying your sensitive heart with pomp and show, because these secret cousins must exist hand-in-hand.