Rhyme and Reason : Vikram Seth Had the Audacity to Write His First Novel, About Young Bay Area Singles, in Metered Verse. To Considerable Surprise, the Critics Love It.

That customarily curmudgeonly man of letters, Gore Vidal, asserts on the dust jacket of Vikram Seth’s “The Golden Gate” that the book is “the Great California Novel.” A New York Times review called the book “a splendid achievement,” describing it as “a thoroughly Californian novel, peopled by unmistakably Californian characters.” One reviewer, X. J. Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times, called “The Golden Gate” “a splendid tour de force”; John Hollander, in the New Republic, topped that by saying the book is “a tour de force of the transcendence of the mere tour de force.”

Oddly, perhaps, the recipient of all this praise is not a Californian, nor even an American, and his path to literary celebrity has been anything but conventional. His curriculum vitae contains several surprises.

Seth (rhymes with “fate”) is a graduate student at Stanford University, not in literature but economics; he is a year from completing his doctoral thesis on the demographics of seven villages in China, where he lived for two years.

Explaining why he chose not to study literature, Seth says: “I decided that I’d probably lose my interest in literature if I were to study it. I like putting books down when they bore me. I think that’s a fundamental right that a reader has, and of course readers’ rights aren’t the same as students’ rights. Alas, students have to write a paper on something or read every book of Dickens or something like that. That’s a great pity, I feel, because it could easily turn off something that’s very interesting, because they’ve been forced to read it at the wrong time or the wrong pace.”

Seth, 33, was born in Calcutta, lived in India for all but a year and a half of his first 17 years, and didn’t set foot in the United States until he was 23. He doesn’t even drive, which makes him not exactly un-American but certainly un-Californian. Nevertheless, his novel suggests an intimate knowledge of California mores, from its billboards and bumper stickers to personal ads and pet psychiatrists.

“The Golden Gate” is filled with details about California that natives sometimes overlook because of excessive familiarity. Yet Seth emphasizes that it was not his detachment but rather his love of California that was most valuable to him in writing the book: “One can’t come with a cold and objective eye from outside and then write with affection about a place. One must have lived years in that place and not just observed for years.”

Seth’s first language was Hindi, though he believes that English is now his strongest. He speaks in a mellifluous tenor, with a British accent that he absorbed as a student, first at prep schools in India and then at Oxford University. It was only after his Oxford experience that he decided to continue his studies in the United States. Given a choice among Harvard, Yale and Stanford, he chose Stanford, “basically on the basis of sunshine, which was quite a powerful inducement, considering that England doesn’t have very much of it.”

Despite living in California for all but two years since 1975, Seth didn’t use American spelling until recently. He says he wrote the first draft of “The Golden Gate” with British usage: “I was inside the language but not inside the orthography.”

“The Golden Gate,” published in April, is Seth’s first novel. He has written two other books: a travel book about hitchhiking through western China, called “From Heaven Lake,” and a collection of poems, “The Humble Administrator’s Garden.”

“The people who published my travel book rejected my book of poems,” he says. “Both the people who published my travel book and the people who eventually published ‘The Humble Administrator’s Garden’ rejected ‘The Golden Gate.’ It’s because each of them wanted me to write another book like the previous one. Well, that wouldn’t have interested me. I know some people get into a particular genre and enjoy it, doing the same thing in a different place or about a different time, but I would have been bored stiff and the reader would have known it.”

Having won a Guggenheim Fellowship in April, Seth plans to return soon to India for a year or more. He intends to take up the study of Indian classical music, one of his passions.

The praise that “The Golden Gate” has won is all the more remarkable considering that it is that rare and arguably anachronistic commodity, a novel in verse. The book consists of 593 sonnets, including the acknowledgments, table of contents and author’s autobiographical note. All are written in iambic tetrameter, a meter that has not been fashionable for more than a century. Seth was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 masterpiece, “Eugene Onegin,” which uses that poetic form.

With the notable exception of Seth’s friend and writing mentor Timothy Steele, who is a poet and teacher at UC Santa Barbara, everyone who read early chapters of the book advised him not to finish it. An aside in “The Golden Gate” describes how people typically reacted after learning that he was writing a novel in verse:

A week ago, when I had finished

Writing the chapter you’ve just read

And with avidity undiminished

Was charting out the course ahead,

An editor--at a plush party

(Well-wined, - provisioned, speechy, hearty)

Hosted by (long live!) Thomas Cook

Where my Tibetan travel book

Was honored--seized my arm: “Dear fellow,

What’s your next work?” “A novel . . .” “Great!

We hope that you, dear Mr. Seth--”

”. . . In verse,” I added. He turned yellow.

“How marvelously quaint,” he said,

And subsequently cut me dead.

That Seth didn’t give up reflects his independence of spirit. Says UCLA rare-books librarian Victoria Steele, who is married to Timothy Steele and knows Seth well, “He doesn’t really live by other people’s rules in a sense, but it’s not that he’s pushy or obnoxious or anything like that--his heart is completely in the right place. He’s an incredibly smart person, but he does not take no for answer.”

Now that Seth’s book has won acclaim, he has no interest in parlaying its success by writing another novel in verse. Instead, he says, “I’m thinking of perhaps writing a novel in prose.”

Judging by appearance alone, one might easily overlook Seth, for he is only 5 feet 3 inches tall, with unremarkable features, a dark complexion and often-tousled black hair. Nevertheless, he projects radiance. Says Grant Barnes, director of the Stanford University Press, for whom Seth worked as an editor for a little more than a year: “He’s an exceptionally warm and loving person who seems to transform any group or any group situation just by the force of his charm. His face is an interesting study in itself. His smile is broad and so engaging, and yet he’s not the sort of guy who goes around grinning from ear to ear all the time. He’s really quite a serious person, but he will break into a smile at the moment when the subject goes from the serious to the light.”

He is, in fact, a polymath, a man of great learning in varied fields. He is able to function with sensitivity and skill in four vastly different cultures--Indian, English, Chinese and American. “He is more interested in the world outside of himself than he is in himself,” says Timothy Steele. “He has a healthy un-self-concern.”

Although Seth denies that he is a voracious reader, his knowledge of literature is profound. Victoria Steele says Seth and her husband have both “committed a tremendous amount of poetry to memory. When one falters the other can supply the missing word and so forth. I think they can talk to each other in a way they can’t talk to anyone else, because no one else is as learned, frankly.”

The collaboration between the two men began in 1975, when Seth, prevented from taking a creative-writing course at Stanford because of a scheduling conflict, sought an informal mentor. He was referred to a teacher who shared an office with Steele, but when Seth paid a visit, Steele happened to be closer to the door, so Seth introduced himself. Steele, who is unusual among contemporary poets in that he favors traditional meter and rhyme over free verse, agreed to offer Seth guidance in writing.

Steele’s wife, who calls Seth “an extraordinarily lucky person,” says this chance encounter is typical. “The fact that he was interested in poetry and wandered into the office of the one person in the world who could teach him to write metrically--it’s extraordinary.”

The two men grew so close that Seth’s book is dedicated to Steele, and a book of Steele’s poems, soon to be published by Random House (as “The Golden Gate” was), is dedicated to Seth. Steele’s dedication pays homage to Seth by using the stanzaic form that appears throughout “The Golden Gate.”

Both men believe that modern poetry has foundered because it is no longer accessible to the common reader: It has become, they say, too arcane, too remote from everyday experience. Steele, in fact, is writing a history that tries to account for modern poetry’s abandonment of conventional meter and rhyme in favor of free verse. And now that “The Golden Gate” has been published, some reviewers seem to have assigned Seth the role of single-handedly reviving American verse. When asked about this, Seth gasps slightly at the thought, then concedes that he does not enjoy most modern poetry.

“I often don’t understand what’s being said, and when I understand it, I sometimes wonder why it’s being said at all,” Seth says. “There is so much poetry that one reads which really doesn’t move or enlighten one at all. I’m not surprised that people are turning away from poetry. It wasn’t like this in the last century, when poetry was much more accessible. So much poetry refers to things which are not within the reach of the common, intelligent, literate reader.”

Seth’s views about prose fiction are similar. “I don’t much care for great experimentation and knotted language and stuff that the reader has to wrestle with--as if the writer is in some kind of tangled spasm of inspiration. I feel like saying, ‘Cut it out.’ The great writers of the past, whether Tolstoy or George Eliot or Jane Austen, were great, clear, fine writers. I don’t get turned on by ‘Finnegans Wake,’ for instance.”

Seth has been confounding convention for a long time, chiefly by allowing his passions, not other people’s taste or expectations, to guide him. His interest in China, for example, blossomed when he read translations of Wang Wei, the 8th-Century Chinese poet; he was so moved that he was determined to read Wang Wei in the original. Despite the considerable difficulties of mastering the classical form of Chinese that Wang Wei used, Seth studied the language and eventually was able to read him. Chuang Yin, Seth’s Chinese-language professor at Stanford, says Seth was a “fantastic” student. “He has the ability to grasp not only the structure of this particular language but the sense,” Chuang says. “He has almost the same sense of it that a native has.”

Seth’s travel book, “From Heaven Lake,” is an account of an even more audacious project: He hitchhiked through Sinkiang and Tibet in 1981, even though restrictions on the movement of foreigners in China seemed to rule out such journeys. In one exploit recounted in the book, Seth, tired of being under the watchful eye of a Chinese guide, was being shown an underground irrigation tunnel called a karez . Seth suddenly yelled to him, “See you at the mouth of the karez! “ jumped in and waded in the darkness until he found a place to exit, 50 yards down the channel. Seth only hints that such behavior is unorthodox; the guide, he wrote, was “a little peeved with his ill-disciplined charge.”

Seth’s passion was once more engaged in an unlikely way when he happened upon two translations of “Eugene Onegin” in a bookstore. “I took them off the shelf because I thought this was odd--that the same bookstore would stock two different translations. I thought I would at some stage compare them . . . on a purely theoretical basis, no particular poetic interest. It was just (that) I didn’t speak Russian and I wanted to see how the two things would stand up against each other, whether you could really tell visibly that this was the same poet or not. I began reading them, comparing them stanza by stanza, and suddenly I realized I wasn’t comparing them at all. One of the translations (by Charles Johnston) I was just reading--I was reading page after page of it, and I couldn’t put it down. I read it about five times that month, and before I realized it, I thought, ‘Let me try using this stanzaic form.’ ”

In Seth’s hands the use of meter and rhyme is not merely a gimmick; what he strives for is a fusion of tone and substance. In particular, the frequent use of feminine rhymes, which stress any but the last syllable of each rhyming word, gives the poetry a more delicate and playful tone than it would have if the rhymes were strictly masculine, with stresses on each rhyming word’s final syllable. The sympathetic, yet mischievous, slightly mocking tone that the feminine rhymes provide seems apt for a novel about life among the young and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Not all of Seth’s reviewers have appreciated the significance of meter in his verse. One recent review, in the New York Times Book Review, sought to imitate “The Golden Gate” by using its stanzaic form, but entirely neglected its meter: The omission made the review read like doggerel. That error probably reflects the disrepute into which metered poetry has fallen, and the lack of familiarity most modern readers bring to it.

The book’s plot is set in motion when a friend of John, a young Silicon Valley executive, places a personal ad in a newspaper on John’s behalf. Seth says the device occurred to him after he and a friend had a conversation about the advisability of using such ads to find romantic partners. “We were both going through a fairly rough patch, not with each other but with other people, and we just decided that this might be a good idea.” Seth won’t say whether he placed an ad himself.

The book depicts a succession of romantic relationships, including a homosexual one, while examining such topics as wine making, cats, the eating habits of pet iguanas, an anti-war demonstration and babies.

Many reviews of the book have cited its focus on yuppies, implying by their use of the word that such subject matter is unworthy of the grand poetic form in which it appears. Seth argues that of the book’s five main characters, only two are yuppies, and he says reviewers do him a disservice by over-emphasizing their significance. Moreover, part of the pleasure the book yields extends from the way it manages to treat contemporary subjects poetically. Even a personal ad is far from mundane when rendered in rhyming iambic tetrameter.

Seth says that when he started the book, he did not know how it would end and could not see more than two or three chapters ahead. As he neared completion, he envisioned the sad end that some of his characters would meet and empathized with them to such an extent that he hoped by the time he reached the end, “something else might have intervened.”

He wrote much of the book in bed, using “whatever weapon was at hand,” pen or pencil. “Sometimes I would sit in bed with my various papers and notes around me and just write from morning till night and maybe write as many as . . . 12 stanzas a day. At other times I wouldn’t be able to get to more than two lines in two or three days and just then tell myself I really needed a break.” Seth wrote the book in 13 months.

His bedroom at the Stanford Graduate School dormitory reflects his creative dishevelment, with clothes and books spread about. His disorderliness is legendary: Muriel Bell, who inherited Seth’s office at the Stanford University Press, says that while Seth occupied it, it was “a rat’s nest. There were file cabinets and stacks of manuscripts and books on every available subject. It was very hard to get from the door to the desk. He’s very tiny, so there would be this tiny person behind these great stacks of papers.”

Bell says that when Seth’s father, a businessman whom she describes as “very dapper,” once visited his son at the press, he said “how relieved he was to find that Vikram had at last gotten a job that required a coat and tie.” Bell adds that Seth “probably hasn’t had one on since he left (the press).”

Barnes, the press’s director, says Seth’s slovenliness is “part of his tolerance of ambiguity. He’s able to move among several cultures and glean the best from them and make use of them and to deal with the ambiguities of situations and thrive on them. I think there might be some truth to the old saw about a clean desk being a sign of a second-rate mind.” Seth’s “tolerance of ambiguity” is probably also reflected in his embrace of poetry, at once the most disciplined and the most spontaneous of writing forms.

Seth says he actually prefers order. “It’s just that things become confusing. I have elaborate filing systems, but somehow none of them work out.”

Seth is also something of a legend at the Stanford University Press for the quality of his work there. Barnes says almost all its top editors have had many years of publishing experience before being hired. The selection process includes a test so difficult that “very few people survive” it, Barnes says.

Seth did not have to take the test to obtain the second-tier position he was originally hired for, but he did so anyway and passed easily. Says Barnes: “That was very unusual, because many people with editorial experience can’t pass that test.”

After a few months on the job, a senior editor whose responsibilities included the press’s prestigious Asian studies list left, and Seth was promoted several grades to oversee it. “His work as a senior editor was brilliant, it was technically competent, and his authors loved him,” Barnes says.

Seth resigned the post earlier this spring to give himself more time to write and reflect. He has spent recent weeks on a five-city tour promoting the book, a process he finds exhausting and apparently unsettling. “The nice thing about this sudden celebrity is that you know that in about three weeks you’ll be a nonentity again, so that’s at least reassuring,” he says.

Seth says one benefit of his success is that his parents are “delighted. They’ve always wondered why I don’t produce (A) a Ph.D. and (B) produce grandchildren, and I think they’ve always been dubious about these other activities that have taken me off track. I think they’re happy that at last what always seemed a somewhat self-indulgent activity is being recognized and paying off.” He is looking forward to being reunited with his family in New Delhi, where his mother is a judge.

Random House’s hopes for “The Golden Gate” are reflected in its first printing of 20,000 copies, which company publicist Suzanne Wickham describes as “a tremendous amount for either poetry or a first novel.” In mid-May, it reached No. 3 on the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of best-selling novels in the Bay Area but had not made any other best-seller lists.

Meanwhile, Seth’s Ph.D. dissertation languishes. Asked if he plans to finish it, he sounds uncertain: “It would be a real pity if that useful and interesting research were to go to waste, but the trouble is that if I was seized by the scruff, by a novel or something, I wouldn’t be able to tell the Muses, ‘Go away and come back later.’ I don’t think that kind of inspiration is recallable.”

“The Golden Gate” seems to cast a slightly harsher light on Seth’s attitude toward the dissertation, for he has whimsically inserted into the book a minor character named Kim Tarvesh, which happens to be an anagram of the author’s name. Tarvesh appears at a housewarming party:

. . . bowed down with the gray futility

Of his dank thesis, Kim Tarvesh

Ogles convexities of flesh

And maximizes his utility

By drowning in his chilled Chablis

His economics Ph.D.

“The Golden Gate” by Vikram Seth was published in April by Random House, New York.