Books

It is sad to realize that Sri Lanka has lost her outstanding novelist in English and her outstanding love poet in English this year, within three months of each other. I refer to Nihal de Silva, who died in May, and to U. Karunatilake, who died in August.

Apart from being the best representatives of their respective genres, the two share a number of circumstantial resemblances. Both achieved their success late in life, de Silva in his early sixties, Karunatilake in his early seventies. They did so with their first published works, “The Road From Elephant Pass” and “The Kundasale Love Poems” (specifically the love poems therein), both of which won the State Literary Award. And despite subsequent publications, it is on these first works that their reputations rest.

But the most remarkable resemblance is their mutual contribution towards “Purifying the dialect of the tribe” of Sri Lanka’s creative writers in English. Notwithstanding the differences of temperament, style and genre, the maiden ventures of these two authors have had the welcome effect of purging our prose and our prosody of the excesses they had come to exhibit from a surfeit of self-consciousness and contrivance, there being so often, in the work of established and emerging writers alike, an over-straining of diction, style and effect-smacking of what Keats called “having a palpable design upon” the reader.

With de Silva and Karunatilake, though, one discovered a lucidity of sentence and line that was like a fresh wind blowing through our literary landscape. With it went a refreshing absence of affectation and of seeking after effect that enabled precise expression of thought and feeling. At the same time language was handled with a sensitivity that facilitated evocative power - the hallmark of creative writing. Some necessarily brief examples may serve, if not to substantiate, at least to clarify the rationale of, these claims and to encourage purposeful reading of the two works.

Taking U. Karunatilake first, since he was the first to appear, consider the effect, in “Gurudeniya”, of the opening lines:

“The boundaries vary between life and life
There is past life in all this landscape”
And of the closing lines: “But now where the car stalled
The impounded river flows
Over the terraced fields and the Pitiya Devale
And the old limestone bridge
All past life beneath its waters.”

The way the past leaps hopefully into the present at the beginning of the poem contrasts heart-rendingly with the way it is dispatched, at the end, back to its place in the past. This tragic effect is achieved with the utmost economy of line and a straight forward description of the scene before the poet’s eyes which, nevertheless, assumes a symbolic significance. Look, again, at these lines from “Worlds”:

“All those years
These pines had been growing quietly
Seedlings, perhaps, when our old Ford
Puffed cheerfully up the mountain.
But it’s only now they have sprung
Suddenly up the sheer slope
And that old glow is barred away
Up in the sky.”

The description is simple but deceptively so. Through judicious use of diction, line and syntax, there is conveyed the poignant truth that the fruit of deprivation had its seed down at the very time of love’s fulfillment.

Turning to Nihal de Silva, I turned a few pages of “Elephant Pass” and came to this passage:

“Some twist of fate had thrown me into the company of this strange, moody woman sitting on the far edge of the ground sheet. She was a trained militant and an enemy of my people. She had now chosen to betray her own leader. My job was to deliver her, and the information she was privy to, safely to my superiors in Colombo. Any involvement with her was an act of criminal folly that would have a disastrous impact on my career.

“Yet I had killed one man, and grievously injured two others, because they tried to molest her. I’d do it again too, gladly.”

The stark brevity of this self-analysis is in character with the hero. But how effectively it conveys the “fighting in his heart” and the struggle between self-awakening and self-preservation at the heart of the novel. Again, right at the end: “We had negotiated the minefield, overcome countless threats and hurdles, and emerged miraculously unharmed. Only we had come out on opposite sides of the minefield. Neither of us could find a way back.

“But she was safe.

“I had to be satisfied with that.”

This is almost too familiar an illustration and too laconic a summing-up for such a prodigious story. But the unexpected twist to the metaphor - the two surviving at opposite ends with no prospect of reunion - conveys the anguish far more effectively than anything more expansive could have accomplished. And the last two lines remind us of the moral victory achieved in the teeth of tragedy. It is the best of conclusions. These examples, inadequate as they are, provide some indication of how both writers achieve depth of thought and feeling through simplicity of means.

There are none of the “delirium tremendous” effects, (to borrow that nice coinage by Hopkins), that characterize so much Sri Lankan fiction and poetry and either negate the validity or betray the invalidity of the experience they seek to convey. These two writers can be seen, therefore, as being a cathartic influence on creative English writing in this country, and it is hoped that this influence will be felt in the future. Not that their styles should be imitated. “Le style-c’est I’homme meme”, and any original writer must necessarily have his or her individual style. What should be emulated is their simple yet dignified, economic yet productive, intense yet unselfconscious, use of language, which I have tried to illustrate above, and which seems to approach the ideal held out in the last of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”:

“(... where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,…
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)”

It was T.S. Eliot, too, who said that it takes an outstanding writer to alter creative expression for the better. In U. Karunatilake and Nihal de Silva we are privileged to have had two such writers, though all too briefly, in our midst at the same time. One may add that it takes creative acumen to be able to learn from such writers, recognizing in them, as Eliot himself recognized in Ezra Pound - (to whom he dedicated “The Wasteland”) -, “il miglior fabbro” or, in translation, “the better craftsman.”

NB: Of course, the creative achievement of Nihal de Silva and U. Karunatilake is not restricted to expression. It also relates to sensibility and the creation of value. This is yet another resemblance, but it would have to be the subject of another article.