As I attempt to record my impressions of Amitava Kumar's newest book, there's a palpable sense of trepidation. Wouldn't it be imprudent, and downright stupid, for a lay reader like me to try reviewing a book written by a famous Professor of English at an American college and who's author of several critically acclaimed books?, I ask myself. But then, perhaps, my false sense of vanity ( 'if I read it, I'll write about it' ) triumphs over the initial misgivings and here I'm striving to get the essence of the book.
Taking the title of the book 'Writing Badly is Easy' at face value, I probably erred at the outset in estimating its ambit. The author begins aptly, finding faults with the obtuse and ornate Babu English. He takes a dig at the bewildering pomposity of the language used in courts in India. The opening paragraphs of the sessions court judgment delivered in the Arushi Talwar murder has been randomly quoted to prove the point (seeing the 'monstrous prose' of the judgment I was taken aback too). Amitava then refers to George Orwell's advice in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language: 'A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions,: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?'
Amitava Kumar's piece on oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee's writing, I'm afraid, somehow fails the above mentioned Orwell test. Mukherjee is the Pulitzer prize winning author of the bestselling book 'The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer'. Amitava's piece, captioned 'The Emperor of Writing Maladies', gives enough hint to the reader who goes through it looking for Mukherjee's 'writing maladies'. But, alas, except for pointing, albeit obliquely, Mukherjee's failure in choosing the appropriate word in a specific context, he talks about the overwhelming influence of Anton Chekhov on Mukherjee's writing. In his 2017 keynote address to the recipients of the Whiting Awards for emerging writers Siddhartha Mukherjee seems to have profusely quoted from Chekhov's writings and Amitava quotes them too. He concludes the piece, the way Mukherjee had concluded his speech, by quoting Chekhov's six rules of writing. Reading, and re-reading, the piece I couldn't quite understand whether the writer admonishes Mukherjee's writing or heaps praise onto it. Or, the good Professor is so gently chiding the good Doctor that the reader is hard put to differentiate between condemnation and commendation.
As the book progresses, the reader becomes aware that it's not merely about writing badly. The writer proceeds to talk about the credos, forms and style of writing but the context in which it's said is predominantly American. The books and authors, that have been referred to, may not appear familiar to the lay readers in India. Yet in chapter IV (Reading comes before Writing) Amitava suddenly invokes the relatively known setting of Hindi cinema, vernacular books and authors. Songs of Gulzar, poetry of Arun Kolatkar and Daya Pawar, partition stories of Manto and Amrit Rai, and the works of Perumal Murugan have all been touched upon with great empathy.
The later part of the book is chock-a-block with pieces that would appeal more to budding writers and to students pursuing English literature courses. That said, the author's erudite description of various aspects of writing, coupled with gems of literary anecdotes, kept me hooked to the book till the end. In creative writing, there's always a great emphasis on rewriting and revising. Virginia Woolf is said to have revised even her suicide note! The legend has it that British poet Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's work, probably to serve as an inspiration for her macabre writing! And, what say of this advice by Pulitzer prize winning playwright Edward Albee?
''If you only read the great writers, you'll be in trouble. Read junk. It's enormously encouraging to tell yourself, 'I can do better than that'."
For someone like me who often falters writing 'a clean English sentence' and whose lines are mostly 'laboured constructions', the book has proved to be quite revealing. So here I'm, still hearing the echo of Umberto Eco's words: 'Do not write long sentences. You are not Proust'. I also see myself staring probingly at my own sentences after coming to know of Henry James's 'masturbation of commas'.
The two Appendices to the book further enhances its readability. Appendix-A carries an essay from the author's book 'Lunch with a Bigot'(2015). VS Naipaul's Rules of writing for Beginners, as enunciated during his stint as a Trustee of Tarun Tejpal's Tehelka, is most vividly described here. Amitava Kumar thereupon draws his own 10 Rules of Writing, all pure gold ( e.g.#5 Walk for ten minutes. Or better yet, go running #6 A bookshelf of your own). Appendix-B is a reproduction of the writer's 2014 PEN Ten interview and it's as delightful as it can get.
One last point. Amitava Kumar is sensitive to the title of books, yet he seems to have chosen a misleading one for his own. Given a chance, I would have named this book 'The Tao of Writing'. For, Ray Bradbury had appropriated the book's most suitable title 'Zen in the Art of Writing' way back in 1990!
(The review has been done by Ajay K Singh, who is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading.)