10/29/2023 0 Comments Dom writers book summaryThat impromptu inscription in the book began to seem very clever, combining sympathy with a sore throat with a gracious regard for another writer's productivity, and - I thought - a melancholy hint that the writer himself had all but lost his own voice as a poet. Perhaps I seemed like a visitor embarrassingly zealous about reconnecting Dom with a world he had left behind. Only when I spoke of the poet George Barker did he show more interest, declaring that they had quarrelled and he never wanted to see him again. He turned monosyllabic the dog barked, crows squawked on the balcony. Conversation slowed as I whispered hoarse responses about the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, whom Dom had known through David Archer, and Geoffrey Hill, who had succumbed to peritonitis in Bombay after a tour like mine. He kept up with the loyal Peter Levi, but I had to answer questions about others: John Heath-Stubbs, David Gascoyne, Thomas Blackburn - and Eric White, amazing bohemian bureaucrat of the Arts Council.ĭom responded only briefly to my information there was no flow of reminiscence. He was sent out again, Adil translating Dom's instructions for him.ĭom's contacts with English friends were, it seemed, few. English was his only language, so he had no connections with other linguistic communities, not even that of his servant, the gentle old man who now suddenly entered, not with the prescribed throat syrup but with a bottle of orange pills, presenting one to me on a plate. For television, he scripted - and sometimes directed - more than 20 documentaries.ĭom's conversation that November day in 1988 suggested a feeling that his literary career had not worked out well, that it was somehow not suited to the times. He co-edited The Penguin Book Of Indian Journeys (2001), and last year published The Long Strider. He also contributed to Voices Of The Crossing (2000), edited by Naseem Khan and Ferdinand Dennis, on the impact of England on writers from the subcontinent and the Caribbean. In 1988, he published his Collected Poems, and two years after we met came more poems in Serendip.Ī third volume of autobiography, Never At Home (1994), was followed in 2001 by another poetry collection, In Cinnamon Shade. In 1968, Dom settled back in India for good, only resuming the writing of verse in the late 1970s. A compelling study of Himachal Pradesh, a region of his own country he had never visited before writing about it, had kept me reading into the small hours a week before I visited him. He travelled - he was to say he had visited every country in the world - and wrote journalism, travel books and a biography of Mrs Gandhi (1980). Two years later, settled in Islington, he published more autobiography, My Son's Father.īut then the muse left him. ![]() All were received well, Dom becoming a familiar and well-liked figure at poetry readings and in poets' pubs. The Brass Serpent - translations from Hebrew poetry - followed in 1964, and John Nobody the year after that. In 1960, he published Poems, and the autobiographical Gone Away, about his travels in India. Dom, the first non-English person to win the prize, was also the youngest. The following year, his first book of poems, A Beginning, was published by David Archer's Parton Press (which had published Dylan Thomas's first) and, in 1958, it won the Hawthornden Prize for "the best work of imagination". In 1956, he began reading English at Jesus College, Oxford. Three years later, WH Auden read and liked his work, and, indeed, Stephen Spender - who first met him in Bombay - was publishing him in Encounter magazine.Īfter two years in Sri Lanka, at the age of 16 Dom arrived in England. By the age of 12, he was writing poetry, and a book on cricket. ![]() He received a Jesuit education, but as a child, Frank had taken him to Australasia and south-east Asia. My diary records an impression that Dom, then around 50, was not happy with what life had delivered him.ĭom had been born in Bombay the background was Goan, he was the son of the author Frank Moraes - sometime editor of the Times of India - and his mother was a disturbed Catholic. He welcomed me warmly at his door, but with a kind of abstracted courtesy pleased to be visited, but also shy, with an air of entrenched sadness.
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