I rise well before dawn to get an early plane back to Hyderabad. My class isn’t until 2 o’clock but I’ve promised to give a public lecture on Joyce at 11. I say it’s a public lecture but it many ways it is the continuation of a private conversation. When I first arrived in August I had talked with Varvara Rao. Vavara Rao is a great Telagu poet, but he has also been one of the most important public faces of the Naxalites for the past four decades, a role that has seen him spend many years in prison. I had talked with him about Leninism in a discussion that had plunged me back into arguments I had not revisited for more than thirty years. It had also reminded me of Portugal in 1975 where all the best people espoused all the wrong causes. I had promised Vavara Rao that I would talk to him about Joyce and then time had simply evaporated. I had asked Satya to inform Comrade Rao about the talk but I knew that he had been at the forefront of the protests at the ‘encounter’ killing of the Naxalite leader Kisenji five days before in West Bengal and I did not know whether he would be there. I was delighted to see him arrive in the audience but it was a delight mixed with apprehension. I would have to get the argument right.
My lecture took the well known texts of Joyce and placed them in the political context of turn of the century Dublin where he could observe at first hand the nationalist identifications which would lead Europe ineluctably to commit suicide. Ulysses is Joyce’s response to the First World War, Finnegans Wake his contribution to the efforts to avoid a Second. In place of monoglot racially homogenous masculine identities, polyglot mongrel female pluralities.
I know I am going to end the lecture with a reading from the final passage of Finnegans Wake as Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is both river and mother, goes down to meet the sea of death. I know from much experience that there is a 50% change of me bursting into tears before the end of any reading of this most moving passage in the English language. As I start the lecture I hope that I will remain dry-eyed. My argument is finished and I start the reading the words so familiar and so foreign: “Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I goes all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?” Suddenly I know, as I am assailed by memories both of my mother and my own children, that tears are inevitable. It may be that the birth of my grandchild due tomorrow or the end of my teaching life in India due today add their force to the endless cycle of ends and beginnings. What is certain is that I end the lecture, like an old ham, with tears pouring down my cheeks.
One lecture ends, another begins. My last Eastwood class specially lengthened to 6 hours so we can see both Letters from Iwo Jimo and Gran Torino. I have never taught a class which caused me more anxiety. Normally it only takes two or three weeks to get a class going but it took about six – a record for me. Indeed shortly after Flavia arrived I experienced real depression at the thought that I would be teaching a recalcitrant class for the first time in my life. One problem I had foreseen was anti-Americanism. Anti- Americanism, very prevalent in the third world and Europe, has the same political structure as anti-semitism – it solves all problems. You never have to have another political thought – “It’s all the fault of” and from a logical point of view it doesn’t matter whether you put in Jews or Americans – the world is always explained. Of course anti-Americanism, unlike anti-semitism has a real basis in the political actions of the American state but the confusion of specific political actions with a whole country and its traditions is simple idiocy. I had hoped to counter this through readings of the classics of American Studies from Frederick Turner to Leo Marx but ,when I had prepared the class, these classics seemed so idiosyncratic and so internal to America that I had dropped them in favour of my own explanations, which six weeks in were not working. The bigger problem, however, was that they hated the early Clint Eastwood films – a couple of Rawhide episodes, the Sergio Leone films, Kelly’s Heroes – all my favourities were regarded as old fashioned shit. I had forgotten how old Clint and I were. For my students their idea of a Hollywood star was Tom Hanks ( may God forgive them). And then I showed them Clint’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me – a film ostensibly about a mad female stalker but just as much about a predatory male very like Clint Eastwood himself. Then they were hooked, they began to see the complexity of Clint’s movies (complexities which Clint studiously ignores in his own comments). And my arguments about the stupidity of knee jerk anti-Americanism began to bite The class became pure pleasure. Three weeks before I had set them an exam on A Perfect World ( arguably Clint’s greatest film) and their answers, digging deep both into genre and the development of Clint’s own image, were a joy to read. Now we watch and discuss Clint shooting the most famous battle of the Second World War, from the Japanese side, and then staging the death of his own screen persona in Gran Torino. I have rarely enjoyed a class more.
The university has been pleased with my visit and as a rare privilege they have allowed me to hold my farewell party in the Vice Chancellor’s gardens. One of the elements of elite education that I try to reproduce with any class is that intellectual discussion is inseparable from eating and drinking. The trusty Baidurya has been charged with summoning up the finest food and drink that Hyderabad can provide. I want to give my students a great party and I spare no expense. However, I add the explicit instruction that the alchohol must be mainly wine and beer – I fear that spirits might lead to scenes of shame and degradation. I reach the gardens to find biryanis and curries steaming in abundance – about two bottles of wine, four cans of beer and more bottles of hard liquor than I have seen in my life. A good time is had by all.
Almost all my Hyderabadi friends are there and I reflect, as I will often in my final days, how lucky I was to come to the English and Foreign Languages University at Hyderabad. Early in my stay Bobby Roth had suggested that he and Filipa Cesar come and film my last class. The thought of a repeat of the shoot at Quincy did not appeal. However, I do ask Baidurya if he can arrange a crew. There is no crew and I think no more of it but the next day Baidurya produces his film of the event:
