Dom Moraes: My Son's Father and Never at Home
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Chapter Four Dom Moraes: My Son's Father and Never At Home • Chapter IV Dom Moraes: My Son's Father and Never At Home Dom Moraes was a man of chequered career, a poet, journalist, biographer, autobiographer, translator, and writer of travelogues. He is one of the significant Indian English writers of the first generation of post- independent India. Dom was born in a wealthy Goan Catholic Christian family in 1938, with a high educational background. He was the only son of Dr. Beryl and Frank Moraes. His father was a London returned barrister, a student of Oxford and the first non-British editor of the Times of India; and his mother was a pathologist. As a child of seven years, he suffered from the trauma of his mother's nervous breakdown and eventual descent into clinical insanity. He accompanied his father on his travels through South-East Asia, the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, the places he had to visit once again as a journalist. At the age of 16 he went to London and lived there for more than 20 years. From his adolescence Dom made himself controversial by trying to assert his identity as an Englishman. He even became an English Citizen in 1961. In 1956, aged 18, he was courted by Henrietta Moraes. They married in 1961. He left her, but did not divorce her. He married Judith and had a son, Heff Moraes. However, this marriage could not last long. He later married celebrated Indian actress and beauty Leela Naidu and they were a star couple, known across several continents, for over two decades. Their marriage, too, ended in separation. A Beginning (1958), was his first book of poems which made him, at twenty, the youngest-ever winner of the Hawthornden Prize. Poems (1960), was his second book of poems, 148 John Nobody (1965), his third, and they all belonged to the English phase. Also, around this time, Poems 1955-65, was published by Macmillan in the USA. Dom started to earn his living as a journalist and a television producer. He returned to India in 1968 and began his Indian phase soon. Pritish Nandy, the then editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, began to publish Moraes' poetry; there were several interviews and features on him. Prior to coming back to poetry after a considerable gap of about sixteen to seventeen years, he was fighting alcoholism and failed marriages, and steadily writing prose - memoirs, travelogues, tourist literature for the Department of Tourism, Government of Madhya Pradesh, and others. He had brought out in 1967, Beldam Etcetera, a pamphlet of verse. It was more than sixteen years later, in 1983, that he published another book of poems. Absences. In 1987, his Collected Poems came out. Serendip (1990), his collection with many poems on Sri Lanka, won him the Sahltya Akademi Award in 1994. The next poetry collection was. In Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems, (Carcanet, 2001). Finally, Yeti Books, Calicut, published his last collection. Typed with One Finger (2003). This volume contains the entire text of Cinnamon Shade: New and Selected Poems, as well as several new poems. His Collected Poems, 1954-2004 came out next. Moraes conducted one of the first interviews of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader in 1959. The Dalai Lama was then 23 and Moraes, 20. He was a correspondent in various wars in Algeria, Israel and Vietnam. In Hong Kong he became the editor of The Asia Magazine in 1971. He also edited magazines in London, and New York. He became an official of a UN agency in 1976. He wrote 23 prose books, two autobiographies and scripted and partially 149 directed over 20 television documentaries from England, India, Cuba, and Israel for the BBC and ITV. Besides writing prose and poetry, the young Dom Moraes travelled much as a journalist. He became a globe trotter visiting many far flung countries such as Israel, Bhutan, Chile, West Irion, Vietnam, Zaire, etc. But he never lived at one place. This perhaps set the tone for his future career as a wandering reporter. It also must have unsettled him; his works reflect a migrant's compulsive desire to witness and report and not to get involved. In 1961-62 he was one of the very few public Indian figures to strongly criticize the Indian Army takeover of Goa, land of his forefathers, and Daman and Diu from Portuguese India. Pandit Nehru, the then Prime Minister, was extremely dissatisfied and the Government of India refused to issue passport to Dom. For the rest of life he lived in Mumbai on the British passport. When the Gujarat riots erupted in 2002, with their heavy toll of Muslim dead, Moraes left for Ahmedabad the minute the news came through, claiming that since he was a Catholic, Muslims would not see him as an enemy. Moraes spent the last 14 years of his life with Sarayu Srivatsa who was more than a friend to him. He suffered from cancer, but refused treatment and died from a heart attack in Bandra, Mumbai on 2 June, 2004. He was buried in the city's Sewri Cemetery and as per his last wishes Sarayu Srivatsa buried the soil from his grave in Odcombe, Somerset, on 19 July 2004 (his birthdate). Many of Dom's old friends and publishers attended the memorial service in Odcombe. This chapter will attempt a critical analysis of his two autobiographies. My Son's Father and Never At Home and point out the people, places and events which influenced him, as well as his development into what he became- a poet of considerable merit and a well- known journalist. 150 In the Foreword written for the second edition of the first autobiography, My Son's Father he wrote, 'Part of the reason for writing my autobiography was that I wanted my son to know what I had been like around the time he was bom. ... The other reason for this book was that my childhood and adolescence had been very traumatic for me. I seldom spoke of them with anybody. I therefore found it cathartic to write about them. It is probable that writing this book changed my life.' (Moraes,1991: Foreword) He published his first autobiography in 1968, when he was thirty. However, it covers only first twenty two years of his life. In the preface he says that he has tried to write this book by 'editing' the episodes that made his life. Its grace lies in the freshness of sensibility which is one gift of youth. Dom Moraes asserts that the book 'truthfully presents a person in the process of growth, development and change, the progress of 'a child towards being a man'. (Moraes, 1991: Preface) This autobiography consists of thirteen chapters divided in two parts. Chapters 1 to 6 - A Piece of Childhood, Chapter 7 to 12 - After so Many Deaths and Chapter 13 - Epilogue. Each chapter begins with a stanza from different poems of well-knovra poets as well as his own poems. It is very poetic and apt to his young age. For instance, he begins the very first chapter with lines from "A Letter" from Poems: Almost I can recall where I was born, The hot veranda where the chauffeurs drowse, Backyard dominion of the ragged thorn And nameless servants in my father's house.... (Moraes, 1991:3) When the influences on Dom's early years are considered, they are gloomy, of a lonely child in a sick house. In his childhood, what Dom was always aware of was the absence of his 151 father. As Frank Moraes was a senior journalist, he was always on tours of different countries on business, and mother, a doctor, working in a hospital in Mumbai. Before the symptoms of insanity were seen in his mother, Dom's life was happy like any child in a household. When Frank Moraes was in Bombay, he had many visitors in the evening. Dom remembers him sitting in the veranda with his friends talking and drinking, till late night. His father was one of those promoted by the British and a friend of many of the nationalist leaders. He has written most comprehensively about himself, his parents and the position which resolute his future as a man of letters. The following extracts from the prefatory note to his travel book Gone Away underscores his ancestral back ground in all its peculiarities. ....My family came from a part of India that had been colonized by the Portuguese, which explains the family name, also the family religion, which was Roman Catholicism. (1983: 19) He points to something more enlightening about his parents in his autobiography. My mother and my father had nothing to do with India: they were simply themselves, as I was myself, and our relationship had to be worked out independent of what we were. (1991:163-64) This restricted concern of parents for their own comforts and well-being at the end of the growing son's emotional ambition thoroughly injured the sensitive boy to develop warm ties with his roots. Stephen Spender, a significant formative influence on Moraes, refers to the poet's development from 'a traumatic childhood and adolescence to manhood' and perceives the emotional strain on such poets, 152 " ...caught between their Indian birth and their extreme sensitivity to EngUsh language and culture."(Spender, 1969: 4) His father had a good library at home and he also took Dom to the Royal Asiatic library when he was in Mumbai. These libraries helped Dom to become a voracious reader.