Free Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri

Mallarme to him in a way he didn’t understand, and yet digested. But it was words—their sounds, their unpredictable moods—that made him write the poems.
    —
    “I must say you’re
virry
prolific!”
    A wry holding-back, almost a caution. Nestor Davidson had a way of emphasising words to assert admiration, or cast doubt. For instance, “very,” which he uttered musically, cramping the vowel in a way that could be, depending on context, troubling or reassuring. Pointing to a paragraph that Ananda had written in an essay, or responding to something he’d said, Mr. Davidson would observe: “That’s
very
acute.” A throwaway remark, but the sort that had moored Ananda, making him experience the beginnings of a pride in himself—something quite different from the natural, stubborn egotism that made him write in the first place. But “very prolific”? He couldn’t be sure if it was a compliment—or if a percentage of a remark could be complimentary, and a percentage derogatory. Hecould only guess at its composition. Fifty-fifty; or sixty-forty? Surely the model of productivity in 1985 was Larkin’s. He knew Mr. Davidson admired him. One envied Larkin his failure to be prolific. In his demonstration of emotion and range of subject-matter, Larkin followed the standard set by his productivity, of a low-key parsimoniousness. The guarded, disbelieving tone of the poems seemed connected to the personality that brought them to the world with such reluctance. Three morose, wafer-thin volumes in as many decades! Yet there was something wonderful about their antithetical efflorescence, their muted hostility to their own existence. And Ananda often wanted to write Larkin’s poems—far more often than Larkin evidently did. It was possible that Mr. Davidson sensed this: the convergence, in Ananda, of the instinct to recoil, to hide himself away, with a soul in spate, leaking, spilling over, overflowing eagerly in poems he wrote every week with such facility. How could he not be “prolific”?
    —
    It was very quiet. Ordinarily, Ananda didn’t like silence. But the unusual quiet just after midday allowed him to hear what was happening beyond, and around, the English faculty; London was busy, in a sort of counterpoint to the first floor’s inactivity. What was the road behind the buildings and alleys outside Mr. Davidson’s window? Malet Street? Ananda had a limited confidence in his knowledge of the immediate environs.
    “I
did
like these,” Mr. Davidson said, nodding charitably at the typed pages he’d placed back on the table, “but I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe”—he smiled a little wickedly, but affectionately, as if assessing Ananda retrospectively from a vantage point in the future—“in their sense of pain.”
    Ananda nodded, but not because he was in agreement with Mr.Davidson. He was used to having his pain mocked, or overlooked. He knew how it felt to have his poems ignored or rejected (thus the polite note from
Encounter
, which he treasured, and the irritating lack of acknowledgement from the National Poetry Competition), but not slighted. Partly he stayed sanguine because Mr. Davidson had been so upbeat about his tutorial essays; this somewhat (but not wholly) compensated for his inability (what else could you call it?) to recognise the uniqueness of the tranquil, frozen records of loss that Ananda had given him. “Across the River” had come to Ananda strangely, and it owed nothing to Larkin or Eliot. He’d written it in a dream; the poem itself was dream-like. It described a boy—the narrator—trying desperately to swim across a river, possessed by some fierce but doomed urge to reach the other side. Having failed to do so (either the current’s too strong, or the boy isn’t an adept enough swimmer), he runs up and down the bank till, exhausted, he lies on the sand, staring at the stars. Ananda had eschewed all punctuation but the comma—twice, he’d left a blank space between