Writer Offers Revelatory Account of His Missteps in Love

Blinded at the age of 4 as a result of meningitis, at a time when the sightless in his native India were generally considered uneducable, Ved Mehta not only managed to receive an education but also developed a remarkably visual style of writing that led many readers to assume he was one of the sighted. As Mehta explains in the prologue to “All for Love,” the latest addition to “Continents of Exile,” the series of autobiographical works he has written over the last three decades, “[u]nconsciously, I assumed that I could do everything anyone else could do .... As a four-year-old child, I imagined that my world was everybody’s world. If I had been older, I may have experienced my blindness differently--hesitating, perhaps, to put one foot in front of the other .... As it was, I laughed and played, jumped around, ran about, hopped and skipped, climbed up and fell down--much as I had done when I could see.”

Mehta has told the story of his Westernized father in his memoir “Daddyji” and that of his old-fashioned, devoutly Hindu mother in “Mamaji,” and recounted his own experiences as a student in “Up at Oxford.” (He also attended college in California and graduate school at Harvard.) As a young writer, he attracted the attention of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who helped guide his career. Primarily a nonfiction writer, Mehta proved an adroit practitioner of the kind of evocative, thoughtful, in-depth journalism that distinguished the magazine under Shawn’s tenure. (Mehta recently commemorated that relationship in his rather worshipful memoir “Remembering Mr. Shawn’s ‘New Yorker.”’) Whether recounting childhood memories, describing the richly varied world of modern India, or tracking theories of modern European theologians like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mehta’s grasp of detail was impressive.

How did Mehta manage to write journalism that incorporated so many visual details? At one point in the narrative of “All for Love,” we hear him explain his methods to the psychoanalyst who is treating him in the wake of a disastrous love affair: “ ... I once described someone this way in the ‘New Yorker’: ‘A Player’s cigarette hung from his lower lip and threatened to fall off at any moment.’ I knew the brand of his cigarette from his chance remark. The hanging bit I picked up from the way he spoke.”

These sessions on the couch make up the ninth and final section of this writer’s surprisingly revelatory, sometimes painful account of four ill-fated love affairs, the last of which drove him, despite his distrust of the Freudian method, to seek therapeutic help. Disclosing--indeed, broadcasting--the intimate details of one’s personal life has become a staple of contemporary culture, and it has become almost as fashionable for critics to deplore--or at least question the value of--this trend. I suspect that the process of writing about these love affairs may perhaps have had greater value to Mehta in helping him understand himself than the finished book will have for many who read it.

This said, I must admit that I read “All for Love” with considerable interest, fascination and even a kind of admiration. For Mehta has not used this book as an opportunity to take revenge on his ex-girlfriends, even though it seems that he was spurned by all of them. Indeed, the first three women--Gigi, a sweet-natured Jewish American dancer; Vanessa, a charming if rather flaky Englishwoman; and Lola, a lively, quick-witted, impulsive Eurasian (half-German, half-Indian) who is of enormous help to him when he goes to India to gather material for a book--all come across as sympathetic and likable. In his own account, it is Mehta who often seems to have been foolish, self-centered, emotionally blind and very probably, in Vanessa’s and Lola’s cases, responsible for sending them the signals that led them to choose other men over him. His goal in this book is not self-justification, but self-understanding.

When he plunges into his fourth and most disastrous love affair with a fey, girlish literature student named Kilty (clearly the least suitable candidate thus far), the would-be romantic hero of his own life tells himself he has learned from his experiences and has finally found the ideal mate. Even when Kilty tells him about the “demons” that sometimes “roam most freely” about her poor little brain, he’s bending every effort to make her his wife.

Mehta tells us he obtained permission from all four women to quote from their love letters. Well and good. Still, the question arises: Mightn’t it have been less exploitative--and more artistically rewarding--to have transformed life’s raw material into an accomplished, aesthetically satisfying novel? Quite possibly.

But in taking the “other road” of nonfiction, Mehta is able to present, without apology, some of the things that a novelist might have edited out: the foolishness, the clumsiness, the repetitiveness of mortal experience and the ways in which the most cliched Freudian pronouncements may suddenly seem not quite so risible when they shed unexpected light on the life that you’ve been leading.