An unusual play written by Sue MacLaine celebrates the life of society beauty and model Henrietta Moraes, first wife of Indian poet and writer Dom Moraes. He was a poet in exile - an English poet in India and an Indian poet in England. Here's a closer look at the relationship between the much celebrated Dom and the Bohemian Henrietta
An unusual play written by Sue MacLaine celebrates the life of society beauty and model Henrietta Moraes, first wife of Indian poet and writer Dom Moraes. He was a poet in exile - an English poet in India and an Indian poet in England. Here's a closer look at the relationship between the much celebrated Dom and the Bohemian Henrietta
If Dom Moraes had been alive, I think he would have asked me to drive him down to the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton to see an unusual play called 'Still Life: An Audience with Henrietta Moraes' in which the audience are invited to "bring a sketchbook and drawing materials of your choice (not charcoal)" and draw the main character on stage.
The play scheduled throughout the month of May (during the weekends) is a one-woman show, where Henrietta is portrayed by Sue MacLaine, who has also written the play. You see there is a history to all this.
Dom, a brilliant poet, journalist and author, was married for five years in the sixties to Henrietta, who was a society beauty, artists' muse and part of a Bohemian set in Soho, London's fabled district.
As for Dom, he was the son of a distinguished Indian journalist, Frank Moraes, who edited The Times of India and campaigned for the Dalai Lama to be given sanctuary in India when the Tibetan spiritual leader was forced by the Chinese to flee his native land in 1959.
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Love
Dom was an 18-year-old undergraduate at Oxford showing promise as a poet when he met Henrietta in a Soho pub in 1956. She was 25 and been married twice but she thought Dom was a pretty boy and took him to bed. Henrietta was born Audrey Wendy Abbott in Simla, where her father was stationed in the Indian Air Force but in England, her first husband, filmmaker Michael Law, renamed her Henrietta.
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She posed for two famous artists, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, with whom she had affairs. She had two children by her second husband, actor Norman Bowler, though a DNA test later confirmed the biological father of one son was an English aristocrat, Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, a close friend of Princess Margaret.
Erratic
Dom and Henrietta were married in 1961.u00a0 But five years into their marriage, one day Dom said, "Darling, I'm going out for some cigarettes." He kept going all the way from London to Bombay to a new life and new loves (the actress Leela Naidu and later the writer Sarayu Srivatsa). Despite her erratic life, or possibly because of it, Henrietta was loved by her friends. She died in 1999, with one paper noting that said, "hers was an itinerant and rackety life, sustained by the tolerance of friends, oiled by alcohol and fuelled by an astonishing variety of drugs".
Death
On one of the radio stations, last week, artist Maggi Hambling, who drew her friend Henrietta after she had died, said, "She had ten times more life than anybody else a force of nature. They don't make them like that any more." Maggi wrote a mini-obit, entitled, 'My spirited model'.
"Henrietta's eyes looked into one's soul, at the same time exposing her own," Maggi began. "She posed for me most Mondays for the last seven months until two days before she died," said Maggi, who also recorded the moment of Henrietta's passing, "she died in an instant, joking to her doctor on the telephone. She was the most glamorous corpse I've ever seen. I miss her profoundly."
Poetry
My first encounter with Dom occurred when I came across his poetry in my first week at university.u00a0 "I am dying, you know," he announced much later, on one of his trips to London. He refused to undergo treatment for cancer. I went with him to Somerset when he was researching a book, The Long Strider, about an Englishman, Thomas Coryate, who actually walked all the way to India in 1613.u00a0 After watching his ex-wife being depicted on stage, I think Dom would have ordered dinner, eaten very little but got through several bottles of red wine.
Game
It's tempting to say that perhaps he and Henrietta were alike but An Audience with Dom Moraes could be an equally entertaining play.
He would often pretend he did not recognise some of the marvellous poems he had written when they were read out to him. I used to recite one about Bombay, "My native city". "That's very good," Dom would say. "But Dom, you wrote that," I would say. "Really?" he would say, his voice full of admiration. It's a game he played.
Tribute
Dom is gone but not entirely forgotten. A couple of years ago, it was engrossing listening to one poet pay eloquent tribute to another on a BBC Radio 4 series called Lost Voices.
The Liverpool-bred poet, Brian Patten, recalled his encounters with Moraes, "the double exile".
"In Britain, at least, his star has somewhat faded and his voice been lost it wasn't always like this," Patten said by way of introducing Dom, who was born on July 19, 1938, in Bombay, where he died at the age of 66 on June 2, 2004.
Recognition
Dom precociously made a name for himself by winning a prestigious literary prize, the Hawthornden, for his first book of poems, when still a second year undergraduate, studying English at Jesus College, Oxford. "In 1968 what happened to Dom was that he went to India and married a famous film star (Leela Naidu)," revealed Patten. "Yet in India, Dom was still an outsider. Remarkable as it seems because of his background and education Dom could only speak English. For me this explained his alienation. In England he was an Indian poet in exile. In India he seemed to be an English poet in exile."
Discover
I got to know Dom, with his companion, Sarayu Srivatsa (Ahuja), during the final phase of his life when he probably realised that contemporary England was not the country of his gilded youth when he had known literary giants, such as Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden and was determined to become a poet just like them.
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Patten reminded listeners of Dom's words, "From an early age I was aware of a kind of soundless dance going on inside my head demanding to be fitted out with words." Perhaps now is the time for a new generation of Indians to discover Dom's poetry, just as Patten did when he was 15.
Evergreen
It is remarkable the way Dom remains evergreen in the memories of his friends, among them the painter Jatin Das. Two years ago, Jatin was painting a mural the outside wall of the Chelsea Club where he was staying when he suddenly began talking about Dom.
Jatin was filled with fond memories of Dom carrying his actress daughter, Nandita, on his shoulders when she was a little girl. "Let's write a book about Dom," Jatin enthused.
He cast around and found someone who had known Henrietta. Dom, it was apparent, had lived in a bygone age in England when it was fashionable to marry young and generously share your bed with equally talented and bohemian folks.
I met Dom when his partner was the writer Sarayu Ahuja. But Jatin told me his (second) wife, Bidisha Roy Das, had "made a documentary on Leela Naidu". Suddenly hearing about Henrietta Moraes on radio reminded me that seven years have passed since Dom died.
MEMORIES
I have known Dom personally for so long that there are a lot of memories which come to my mind. I particularly remember the first time I met Dom in London in 1959.
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It was in a pub in Chelsea, on the embankment that faced the Thames. I had previously read his poetries in many literary journals in London and then his first published book of poetry
"A Beginning." Recognising him from the photographs I had seen, I picked up the courage and introduced myself to him.
He was whiling away his time and then he took me along with him to meet George Barker. Being a poet myself, it was a memorable meeting, since in a single day I met two poets and got acquainted with them too. I still treasure a copy of a collection of his poetries by Penguin.
Sadly, his work as a journalist has been neglected. His writing was appealing; something should be done to make a collection of all his articles as a journalist and a war correspondent as well. All his war stories along with the poetries would make a great collection.
Ranjit Hoskote
Poet, Cultural Theorist and Curator
Dom was a friend, a mentor and a very important figure in my life. As a young poet who began to publish in the late 1980s, I regarded him as a major point of reference, along with Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla and Keki Daruwalla.
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I met him in 1986 at the inaugural reading of the Poetry Circle. I have been an admirer of his poetry, his writing and his reporting as well. As a war correspondent in the 60s, his work is moving. He sided with the oppressed and did a lot of commendable work. What stands out is that he never spoke about the dangers of war reporting.
I am editing Dom Moraes: Selected Poems for Penguin Modern Classics that is due out this autumn. This volume will include a representative selection of Dom's poetry over a nearly 50-year period, with a substantial Introduction and Notes, and will stand as a critical edition.
(As told to Utkarsha Kotian)
Pearl Pastakia
Professor of English Literature, St. Xavier's College.
Moraes is not a part of the prescribed syllabus for the literature students but his work is a background study for Indian poets who write in English. His style of poetry is extremely beautiful, and he lets the reader interpret whatever he writes. I remember this poem of his on a Christmas Dinner, where a turkey is being eaten.
He uses the turkey as a symbol of Christ's sacrifice and very skillfully merges the two together. Slowly you realise that he talks about a person's cannibalistic side that merges with the idea that man was responsible for the pains of Christ.
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I particularly remember this poem since I have read it over and over again, finding it more engrossing each time. Sadly he has been overshadowed by other poets of his era who dominate the minds of all poetry lovers today. Now that I think of him, I realise that there is a side to him that is completely unknown.
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There is a lot that he should be credited for, since he is so well known as a journalist too. But sadly, most of his writing requires a lot of discipline and perseverance on part of the reader to appreciate his poetry.
Feroz Khan, Film and Theatre director
I am a great appreciator of his poetries. His work as a journalist has been outstanding. Whatever little I have read and known about him, he always came across as an extremely fine, sharp person and a man with an acute sense of politics.
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He carried on his father's legacy as a journalist quite well. Perhaps he is one of the most important people who nourished the emotional landscape of the city. When one has to study the future of the city, knowing the past is extremely important, and Dom has played a very important part in that.
Jerry Pinto
Poet and Author
I met him first through his poetry, which may have been the best way to meet him since he was not an easy man to know. The first time I met him was when I interviewed him for the Free Press Journal. He had broken poetic silence after 17 years, with Serendip.
This was a special numbered edition of a book of poems brought out by Penguin, who were to be his publishers for many years after that. I did not particularly like the man but I respected and admired much of his poetry, specially 'Vivisection', 'Gardener', 'Prophet' and the sequence 'Interludes'.
I found his early work a peculiar mixture of strong poems and poems written with an odd contempt for depth. It was as if in the process of negotiating with two nationalities remember he never surrendered his British passport he had not worked out exactly how to deal with the two different registers in which English is used by India and England. But with prose, he was almost never wrong and he has left us some of the finest autobiographical works an Indian has written.
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I have not read enough of his journalism to comment. I suspect he was a fine journalist but because India has a great contempt these days for those who live by the written word, he was reduced to grinding out column after column, sometimes on subjects he knew very little about.
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For instance, he started a profile on Vijaya Mehta by saying he did not know much about her work in theatre and had not seen her films but had been assured that it was important work. You could take this as a moment of extraordinary honesty most Indian journalists who talk to me about my books have not read them nor would they care to or you could say that he should not have chosen Mrs Mehta at all.
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I did not think of him as a friend but at one of our very last meetings, I remember seeing a suddenly human side to him. We were all at the Oxford Bookstore for a poetry reading and I asked him what he was going to do. He looked over his reading glasses, affecting the air of a self-deprecating grandfather, and smiled, "I suppose I shall do what I have always done.
I will read out some poems and no one will understand what I am saying." But when he read his poems, the ones that talked about his encounters with cancer and death, a peculiar hush fell upon all of us. Arundhathi Subramaniam had to read next and I didn't think it was going to be easy for her and it wasn't.
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