Nine variations on a theme of exile
My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past
By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Shoemaker & Hoard, 277 pp., illustrated, $25
Autobiography and fiction are two sides of the same coin. Both depend upon the selection or omission of events, raise questions about the narrator's reliability, and propound value systems. In ''My Nine Lives," her 19th book, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Academy Award-winning screenwriter and Booker Prize novelist, flips this coin. More a collection of related short stories than a continuous novel, the book's subtitle says it all: These are the ''Chapters of a Possible Past."
Each of the nine lives is ''potentially autobiographical." The author says in her introductory ''Apologia" that ''even when something didn't actually happen to me, it might have done so." Every ''central character" is a version of Jhabvala herself.
As a result, the nine chapters are imprinted with a sameness of character and setting that reflects Jhabvala's experience in London, New York, and India. At 12, in 1939, Jhabvala moved from Cologne to London with her middle-class German-Jewish parents. She learned English, studied English literature at the University of London, and married an Indian architect and moved to New Delhi. These experiences recur in the stories; the personal details are tweaked so Jhabvala can explore her alternative destinies.
The choices also repeat because character is fate. In one story, the daughter of wealthy German immigrants travels between her divorced parents, her stepmother, and her ''Indian family," spending her time and money on the care of these manipulative others. In ''Mnage," two sisters and their niece, the narrator, all serve the refugee pianist Yakuv, whose talent demands their passion and their money. In ''Gopis," translated as milkmaids, a shopkeeper/politician/lover named Vijay enthralls 20-year-old Lucia, daughter of rich Connecticut parents. His former lover, the narrator, notes that Vijay has become groaningly obese. Vijay ends up in jail, as does another obese guru in the book's final life, titled ''Pilgrimage."
The reader might wonder why any woman would fixate on such a man, no matter what his artistic and persuasive powers. Sexual passion is rarely part of the attraction. The answer is more psychological. Jhabvala says in her ''Apologia" that these chapters illustrate a quest for a ''person I have looked up to, or been in love with, maybe even for some sort of guru or guide. Someone better, stronger, wiser, altogether other."
Jhabvala's book reflects her study of E. M. Forster and Henry James, not her screenwriting for Merchant Ivory. The stories are almost entirely told and not shown. Women spend amazing amounts of time waiting for their lovers to return from concerts, rallies, tea with richer women, or trysts with the waiting woman's sister or aunt or mother. Sometimes waiting is worth it. Yakuv, in ''Mnage," has ''plenty of energy left in his short and muscular body." But more often, such waiting disturbs the narrator and the reader. Better, says the narrator's aunt in ''Refuge in London," to marry a ''book-keeper or teacher" than to choose a relationship so ''unsettling." Most often, this opting out of action is frustrating and disappointing. Lucy, in ''Gopis," decries what she calls the concept of a ''love in spite of, love as absence -- all that Krishna and gopi stuff." Better to go back to Connecticut and tend her suicidal mother.
The most vivid parts of these chapters are their settings, their sense of place. The ''crammed flat in a crammed house in a maze of alleys leading off the bazaar" in ''Life" is wonderfully suggestive. This Delhi neighborhood is minimized into the maze of rooms in a London boardinghouse and then enlarged in the descriptions of West Side university apartments and East Side luxury buildings. The settings can be almost tactile, enhanced by C.S.H. Jhabvala's wonderful illustrations.
While the Central European background of many of the characters is never explicitly pictured in the novel, the inherited sense of exile is very powerful. The narrators are disconnected from their families. Their fathers did not father them, even though they do send money. The women bounce between India and the West, and between failed marriages and unfinished academic pursuits. Real and imagined loss, abortions, and unhappy children hover in the background of every story.
Autobiographers usually write to shape history's perception of them. Jhabvala appears more interested in defining the location of meaning and value in a life that might have taken many directions. Clearly, the solution is not in religion, since gurus tend to grow obese, and ascetics become money managers. Nor is value to be found in art, since these artists rival the gurus in their skillful manipulation and preening self-interest.
What's left is fiction. A disabled dancer tells one woman that life has many ''stages." People and things must be ''left behind" just as a dancer leaves behind each previous movement of the dance. In this book, Jhabvala suggests that we might use the intersection of memory and imagination to fix our moments of beauty and truth, to choose the moments of value in the stages of our lives.
Judy Budz is a professor of English at Fitchburg State College.
