"Brahms Comes to Dinner": Interview with Author Boman Desai

This transcript is linked to the podcast and video versions of this interview with Boman Desai, including full show notes.

Boman Desai:

Clara, at this point, she was learning his music at the same time while he was staying there. And he played them a number of pieces that he had composed. And at one point he went back to Joachim and he was with him again in Göttingen when they received a letter from Schumann, a list of all the pieces he thought Brahms should get published. Brahms was very taken aback because he thought, no, I don't even like all these pieces. And I thought I'd get one of my pieces published too at the most. And Joachim said, no, you're much too shy. You have to put yourself forward. You have to show what you can do. And at that point, Brahms said, okay. And he just wiped out a number of those pieces. And God knows what they were that he had apparently written a violin sonata, a quartet. All of these were simply wiped out. We'll never get to hear them now, of course. But that was how it got started.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. I was honored to record this interview with Boman Desai, whose wonderful recent novel "Brahms Comes to Dinner" I highly recommend. You'll hear how this work came out of Boman's larger novel, "Trio", and he shared stories about several of his other acclaimed novels, including "The Memory of Elephants", "Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love", and his book about the Lennon-McCartney Beatles' songs, "Dancing About Architecture". Some of Boman's writing comes from his Parsi family history and the life of his grandmother. And you'll hear about several life-changing moments, including with a legendary editor and writer, Diana Athill. You can watch the video on my YouTube or listen to the podcast, and I've also linked the transcript. Have a look at the show notes of this episode on my website where you'll find all the links.

Hi, Boman. Thanks so much for joining me here today.

Boman Desai:

Hello. Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Leah Roseman:

I definitely want to start with your newly published novel. I enjoyed so much, "Brahms Comes to Dinner".

Boman Desai:

Thank you.

Leah Roseman:

I also lent it to a friend of mine who's an amateur violinist, and he loved it so much. He said, "Everyone should read this book, who loves Brahms."

Boman Desai:

Thank you. I've been trying to get everyone to read it.

Leah Roseman:

Well, as we're recording this, it's recently published, so hopefully this will help. Now, this unusual award, the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music and Literature, and I was kind of curious to know other. I see with that award they're not always novels, but it actually is a genre I wasn't aware of. Novels about composers and musicians.

Boman Desai:

Oh, I wasn't aware of it either. I just write the books I want to write Then see wherever they fit. I'm happy to put them in there. Actually, I was in touch with Tim Schaffner, who's Nicholas Schaffner's brother. He's the publisher of the publication. And by an unusual coincidence, his parents were social and business friends with my first editor in London. So it was just a nice mix. He didn't publish my first novels that I sent him. And this one won the prize, and he made quite sure I knew that he had nothing to do with its award with the award, but that was how it came about. Nicholas Schaffner is his brother and he passed away, so this is in his honor.

Leah Roseman:

So this book comes from a much larger project, "Trio", which we'll get into. But I think we should start with the book, this particular book. And I think maybe I'll just get you. I loved it. I was rereading bits of it today just to reacquaint myself because I read it a few weeks ago. I have the author here, so I'm going to get you to tell people about it in your own words.

Boman Desai:

Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Well, as you said, it started out as a much larger book. The original, which was called "Trio", was. Well, the very first draft was 1800 pages, and I had about 80 floppy discs keeping all the information together. And when I tried marketing it to various publishers, agents, editors in the US, I was told there's no market for so very large a book about classical music in the US. Now, they're wrong about this. I'm quite convinced about that. But they suggested I bring it down to 300 pages or so before they would even take a look at it. And I didn't want to do that. And so I published the original myself, and then it started getting good feedback. It got good responses. And at that point I though, well, now I'm comfortable enough to publish a smaller version if I can use that as a stepping stone to the larger version again.

And so I published the "Brahms Comes to Dinner". Initially too, I wasn't entirely sure how I would go about it because you can't compress 1800 pages into 300 pages. And the 1800-page book obviously has a number of other novels in there as well. And I chose just to focus on Brahms' relationship with Clara and put that into this smaller book. And once I hit upon the notion of using that dinner as a thread, the scene, as a thread through the entire book, I couldn't resist writing it. And that was how it came about. I used that particular scene, which goes all the way to the end. And it is all pretty much factual, except I encompassed a number of his, Brahms' into a single scene. Things he had said in different times, different places. I put them into that one dinner scene because, well, there was one dinner at which he was, oh, very obnoxious.

In fact, the biographers that I had read, they all said, no, he said something so terrible we can't even write about it. So I made it up as you probably guessed what part I'm talking. See, the trouble with being a novelist is you can't say we don't know what happened. You have to put it in there. You have to imagine it. And I made up for that with the afterword in which I mentioned what I had fabricated and what was real. And I hoped that would take care of that problem.

Leah Roseman:

Now, Boman, most people who are tuning in, I assume they know who Brahms was and who Clara Schumann was, but it's possible some people listening won't know. So if you could just briefly.

Boman Desai:

Clara Schumann, easiest way is to say she was the greatest woman pianist of the 19th century. And she married Robert Schumann, who at that time was the greatest living composer. And they seemed to have a perfect union because he would compose and she would popularize his works by performing them. And in fact, the first 20 or so opuses by Schumann were all works for solo piano. That was all he wrote at that point before he got into larger chamber pieces and symphonic pieces also, of course. And Brahms was 20 years old when he came knocking on their door.

Well, he always wanted to compose. He'd been composing since he was - He actually started, he made up a form of music, writing music, his own notes and his own way to write it out at a very young age. And when his father, who was a hornist and a bassist, saw this, he decided to get him lessons, but Brahms wanted lessons on the piano. He didn't want to learn the horn or the bass, although he did take violin lessons and cello lessons too at one point. And Brahms, of course, he took lessons with a guy named Otto Cosell to begin. And then with Eduard Marxsen to whom he dedicated his second piano concerto. And at that point, he also met this gentleman named Josef Joachim, who was the greatest violinist of the 19th century, certainly of the late 19th century. And there was a guy named Eduard Reményi who was a violinist himself.

He was a Hungarian refugee in 1848. He had all these revolutions all over Europe. And he was a violinist refugee. He was making his way around Europe, making his living as a violinist giving recitals. And when he was in Hamburg, he needed an accompanist and somebody just got Brahms for him. And he was very impressed with Brahms, his musicianship at least. And he also wanted. I'm trying to say six things at the same time. But Brahms was given an introduction to Joachim through Reményi. And Reményi wanted an introduction to Liszt through Joachim who knew Liszt. And so Brahms and Joachim got to see Liszt. But Liszt's home, he lived in a huge, almost a mansion. And he had paintings on the wall and he had these sabers, Turkish sabers and gifts from all kinds of royalty. He had Beethoven's piano, he had Mozart spinet.

And he had all these people who kowtowed to him like you would not believe. He was like a god as far as they were concerned. And Brahms, on the one hand, he didn't go with all this hero worshiping. And on the other hand, he was very intimidated by this atmosphere. He really wasn't comfortable with it. And there were all these people who gathered for this afternoon's performance. And a performance, meaning Liszt would come out, he would talk to them, he would play some of their music, and they would play if he actually saw Brahms' music on the piano and he asked Brahms if he would like to come up and play. Brahms didn't even talk. He just sort of shook his head and sat there because he just wanted out of this at that point. So Liszt, to his credit, said, "Well, I will play this myself." And he played two pieces.

He played the Scherzo, the Opus Four, which I think it's an E-flat or E minor, I forget. It's the Opus four and the very first movement of his first piano sonata. And he did this through Brahms' handwriting. His music writing was atrocious. It was impossible to read. But Liszt not only was able to read it, he performed it flawlessly, even making comments while he was doing this. And Brahms was very impressed with all this. But then everyone started saying, "Now let's hear something of your own." And Liszt performed his sonata in B Minor. And this story might be apocryphal, but it did create Brahms apparently fell asleep while Liszt was performing the B minor sonata. And Liszt completed the sonata. He got up and he just left the room. And Reményi, at this point, he was outraged. How could you go to sleep while Liszt was performing?

And what are we doing here? I'm going to. He decided he didn't want to have anything to do with Brahms anymore. And Brahms said, "I didn't like the music. I can't help it." And he said, "You didn't like Liszt's music?" So anyway, there was a big rift. There was always a rift between Brahms and Liszt all the way to the end. But Liszt did come back on stage, not that time, but at a later date in Leipzig actually, when Brahms was doing his first recitals in Leipzig. And he congratulated him and he welcomed him into the new German group of musicians. Brahms wasn't that interested, but Liszt was very much the gentleman at this point. But Brahms left the Liszt, the Alta. I forget exactly what it was called, the Altenburg House, which was Liszt's home. But he didn't want to go back home to Hamburg, to his parents with nothing to show, and certainly not after leaving Liszt.

So he went back to Joachim and Joachim, who was in Göttingen at that time, said, "Well, you must go and see Schumanns. Schumann will want to see you. He doesn't know your work, but he will be willing to listen." And so Brahms went to Schumann with something of a heavy heart, but also not with great hopes. And when he knocked on the door initially, this was the 30th of September 1853, it was around 11 o'clock and the Schumanns, they had seven children at this point and Clara was pregnant with their eighth. Marie, the oldest of the children, said Schumann had just left for his daily walk. And why would he come back tomorrow the same time an hour later? So Brahms left and he came back on the next day on the 1st of October, that would be. And Schumann opened the door and Brams introduced himself and he says, "Oh yes, Joachim has told me about you and come in." So he came in and he says, "So you can sit down and play for us." So Brahms got down and he started performing.

And almost at once, Schumann said, "No, hold on a moment." And he called Clara. And Clara came running down and she was a little shocked. She was also a little scared because Robert was bipolar and was beginning to show symptoms. He had already shown symptoms. And when he shouted for Clara, he shouted so loudly that she was afraid he was going into a manic stage at that point also. And she came down and she saw Brahms and Schumann just said, "You have to listen to this." And Brahms started playing. And they were both so entranced with what he was doing that they invite him to stay with them. And he stayed for a whole month at that point and was able to get his first six opuses published within six weeks of their meeting. Clara, at this point, she was learning his music at the same time while he was staying there.

And he played them a number of pieces that he had composed. And at one point he went back to Joachim and he was with him again in Göttingen when they received a letter from Schumann saying he actually had a list of all the pieces that he thought Brahms should get. A list of all the pieces he thought Brahms should get published. And Brahms was very taken aback because he thought, "No, I don't even like all these pieces. And I though I'd get one of my pieces published too at the most." And Joachim said, "No, you're much too shy. You have to put yourself forward. You have to show what you can do." And at that point, Brahms said, "Okay." And he just wiped out a number of those pieces. And God knows what they were that he had apparently written a violin, Sonata, a quartet.

All of these were simply wiped out. We'll never get to hear them now, of course. But that was how it got started. But then Brahms stayed with them and Robert went into the asylum because of his problem. And Clara was not allowed to visit him in the asylum. And Brahms became a kind of a go-between. He would take messages from Robert, bring them to Clara and back and forth. And so at this point also, Clara was incredibly depressed and there was nothing that could really bring her out of her depression, except she would play Schumann's music. And she wasn't even performing at this time because the bills were mounting. Robert's, his asylum bills were adding to the regular bills. And she needed to get out there and perform again, but she just wasn't in the right state. And at that point, Brahms was writing his first piano trio, the Opus eight, which he later revised into when he was doing his opuses in the '90s.

And we have both versions, so it's interesting to compare them also. But this was the piece that sort of brought Clara back a little bit to normalcy. It was the first new piece that she was practicing learning that made her interested in performing again. And so after that, she premiered many of Brahms' works with Joachim, many of them too. And of course she continued performing Schumann's works. So Clara was really responsible for making the Europeans aware of both Robert and Brahms at that point. Without her, I don't know how either of them would have really progressed much farther, but that's why I got the three of them into "Trio". They wouldn't have survived without one another. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So Bowman, now might be a lovely time to read an excerpt.

Boman Desai:

Oh, yes. This is actually at the very end of the book. The very last performance that Brahms attended of his own work, the fourth symphony was being performed. And this was on the 7th of March in 1897. He died on April the 3rd, not even a month later. And here he is.

"On March 7th, 1897, a shrunken Johannes Brahms suffering from cancer of the liver attended a performance in Vienna of his fourth symphony. The symphony glides so smoothly into its first theme that the listener finds himself deep in its wake before he realizes it has even begun. The second movement showcases a plaintive melody hovering around a single note like a hopeless lover. A friend had said that only Brahms could have written that symphony. And even Brahms had had access to certain locked chambers of his soul for the first time. But he had finally run out of locked chambers.

At the end of each movement, the conductor turned to Brahms's box to acknowledge the composer. The audience stood and the composer stood to acknowledge the downpour of applause, knowing the symphony would not otherwise recommence. With the conclusion of the symphony, the downpour swelled to a monsoon. All eyes turned to the tiny man, hollows in the back of his neck, skin discolored to bronze, trembling with tears. The auditorium awash with light and color in his blurry eyes. 20 minutes later, the emaciated old composer still stood. The audience still applauded. He was tired, but remained standing, clinging to the rail, buoyed by the love in the hall, wishing no more to sit or to leave than they, his lovely Viennese, wished to let him go. Their eyes no less damp than his own. Cheeks, no less bright, manly beards, a glitter with tears like diamonds, all of them knowing it was the last time they would be seeing one another.

He died less than a month later, but what remained the residue, the essence, distillate of his life, gold from straw, remains impervious to fang and claw at once the heart of the riddle of life and medicine for the heart."

Now I have condensed that a little bit in order to fit our colloquy here, but it's expanded into a chapter, four pages in the book itself, but we don't have time to read the whole thing right now. So yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Thank you so much for that. That was so beautiful.

Boman Desai:

Oh, you're welcome. Thank you.

Leah Roseman:

I understand, of course, you read all many biographies of these composers. I was curious if you went to source material at all in terms of letters.

Boman Desai:

Oh, yes. Brahms and Clara, the correspondence is almost a thousand pages. Yeah. So in those days before telephones and telegraphs and emails and all the rest of it, everything went into their letters. So the correspondence, I mean, the material was phenomenal. The difficulty, if anything, was making sense out of the whole thing, putting them all together chronologically. And also her diaries. Her father, Friedrich, Friedrich Wieck, W-I-E-C-K, Wieck he initially started her diary, writing in her diary himself for her at the age of four, because he thought she wasn't a very bright child. She didn't learn to speak very quickly, but she learned how to play the piano before she learned how to speak. And then he realized he had a prodigy on his hands. And that was when everything changed. She became his primary child. She had brothers, two younger brothers, but they unfortunately did not come to very good ends in large part because the father concentrated all his energies on Clara.

And the diaries that he started way back in 1824 or whatever went on until Clara died. She continued the diary on her own in 1896. So those were another set of thousand pages that I went through. And also Robert and Clara, when they were living together, they used to write in a common diary. Robert would write and then Clara would write. It wasn't a daily thing, but every now and then whoever's turn it was would fill in. And Robert didn't write as much as Clara did. But when they were in Moscow, when they were touring Moscow, he actually did a drawing of the onion domes. And it's kind of fun to look at those too. But what's even more interesting is they were so open. Well, it was their private diary, of course, but he used to put an F in the margin for the nights on which they had sexual relations.

So all of this was in the diaries as well. And there really wasn't anything held back. The stories are all there. In fact, I usually mention when I'm doing a reading from the book that I didn't want to write something like Amadeus because the way that guy, I think Peter Shaffer treated Salieri was just shameful because Salieri was respected, admired by Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Liszt, all of these people. But Shaffer wanted an antagonist to Mozart and Salieri became his victim essentially. I didn't want to do that and I didn't need to do that. So I had all this information. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I understand also Robert Schumann's medical records were released in the not too distant past.

Boman Desai:

Yes. To the end, when he was in the asylum, many. Actually, there was no cure for Robert. All they did was pacify him on occasion with drugs. That was what they did. And apparently a lot of inmates of insane asylums in those days died of starvation or dehydration because they simply refused to eat. That was the only way that they had any kind of control over their lives. And Robert had stopped eating. Toward the end, he was almost literally a skeleton. Clara had not seen him in two and a half years because they said she would excite him too much for his own good. And finally they said, "Well, he's dying. You better come now." And when she saw him, I mean, she was bereft, of course, but she didn't recognize him at first. And then when she came up to him, closer to him, and she actually fed him some jelly.

She had jelly on her fingers and he ate it. And he tried to smile. It was a grimace, of course, but she knew that he knew who she was. And so there was that last bit of recognition, which meant a great deal to her. And it meant a great deal to Brahms and Joachim wasn't there. He came later. But Brahms said later that image of her holding him, he likened it to a Pieta by Michelangelo. And he said that was the most sublime image he had ever envisioned. So there was a great deal of love between the three of them. It was just they were regular people. And so they were never entirely sure what he died of. I mean, there are theories that say he was syphilitic, but none of their children were syphilitic. Clara was never syphilitic. And their relationships, I mean, they had sex about two or three times a week, if not more.

And they have all these children. They had eight children of their own, and there were two miscarriages as well. And the last child, Felix, was born after Robert had incarcerated himself, essentially. And one of Clara's grandchildren, who was very upset because he wasn't included in the will, actually came out with a pamphlet in which he accused Brahms of being the father of their last child. And I actually sat down and tabulated the times and it's simply not possible. I mean, that's eight months and something from the time Clara and they met on the 1st of October and Felix was born in June of next year, just a day before Robert's birthday, thereabouts. So that would've been about eight months. But it's just the kind of people they were, the characters they had. No way that would've happened. That simply would not have happened. And afterwards, when it was possible for the two of them finally to be together, everything changed.

It was Robert's incarceration in a sense that made it possible for their friendship to flourish as it did. And even their romance, because in those days, they actually did write love letters to each other. They never consummated the romance, but it was there very much so. And it's available in the letters. And these are the letters that survive. To the end, Brahms wanted to destroy his letters. And Clara was actually throwing his letters into the fire when Marie, the oldest daughter, came around and said, "No, no, no, no. We have to save these if we can." So the ones that are saved tell us without any doubt that there was a great affection between them, if not an actual romance. And in Eugenie's diary, Eugenie was the youngest of Clara's children to survive. Felix was younger than her, but he died before Clara died. And in her diary, in her memoirs, Eugenie even says that Clara had told her if he had proposed, I would have said yes, but he never proposed.

So she said she never understood Brahms. She had known him all her life. Well, since he was 20, and he was such a different person from the time he was 20 to the time he was 62, which was when she died. She died less than a year before he died. And actually her death was almost the key that set his death in motion because first of all, he was on holiday in Switzerland when he learned about her death and it was sent to him. The letter was sent to him, a letter from Marie, the daughter to Brahms in Vienna saying our mother passed or closed her eyes for the last time. And Brahms dashed to Frankfurt, which is where he though she was living at the time. He missed the stop and the conductor failed to wake him up at the right time. So he had to take the train back.

And then he found out there had just been a memorial in Frankfurt and she was to be buried in Bonn. So then he took the train to Bonn and he arrived just in time to throw a few clods of earth onto her casket and he was exhausted. And then on the way out, he lost his way. He walked eight miles in this tired state and that was the beginning of his end. He was never well again after that. So yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Was there an excerpt from Trio that you wanted to share with us?

Boman Desai:

This is a very short episode. And I should mention that Robert and Clara were very much in love, but Clara's father did not want. He did not want Robert marrying Clara because he felt he had groomed Clara to marry an Earl or a Lord or a very rich man at the very least, certainly not an impoverished composer who had in effect also damaged his fourth finger so he couldn't even play the piano anymore. And he didn't think his daughter's business was publicizing Robert's work, even though Robert was a student of his for a while and lived with them in the same apartment as well. So there was a huge conflict between Clara's father and Robert for the longest time. And Clara's father spat on him on occasion. He threatened to kill him with a gun. And nevertheless, they did get married. But this passage I'm going to read was Robert has just been visited by Clara's father who has told him in no uncertain terms that he is never going to marry Clara.

No matter what he does, he will use every way he can to get him out of the picture. And so he is very depressed and he's wondering how to. But Robert, at the same time, he was having other affairs too. He was having an affair with an English pianist who was touring at that point. He had an affair with one of Clara's servants who became an inspiration for one of the parts of his Carnaval. Christine. Chris-something was her name anyway. But at this point, he's very depressed because he's just been blown down by Clara's father. And this is how it came about.

"Robert sighed sitting again at the piano. Willy, who was his roommate at that time, wouldn't be back until late in the evening. And he was faced with the prospect of the long day ahead."

Additionally, it's raining outside to thunder and lightning and whatnot. Very dramatic actually.

"He had work to do on the Zeitschrift, which was a music paper that he also published. And the Fantasiestücke he was writing for Robena."

Robena was the English touring pianist with whom he was having the affair. And he was writing the Fantasiestücke , which I think was his Opus 12 for her, for Robena.

"but he sat at the piano instead doing nothing or so it appeared, but something was spinning in his head that he needed to let out and he could let it out only on the piano. He couldn't explain how it worked. Had he not pined for Clara, there would've been nothing to release. Had he not sat motionless at the piano, there would've been no conduit for release. He couldn't have said how long he sat, but something congealed in the time. The red blood, the hard bone of the new composition, a strident melody, roiling harmony, interspersed with tender interludes pulled from the collision of the thunder outside, the purr of the rain and the noise in his head.

He held his hands over the keys and under them the landscape of his nerves, blood and bones sprang to life. Little kingdoms growing under his fingers." This was his Opus 11, which he dedicated to Clara finally. His first piano sonata. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Such powerful writing and it's great to hear you read your work.

I was curious in terms of your own. When you grew up, Boman, your mother was a pianist?

Boman Desai:

My mother was a piano teacher actually. So we did have a piano in the house. Ironically, I was born in Mumbai and I came to Chicago when I was 19. And that piano was made in Chicago and it was brought to Mumbai. So we used to joke about they exchanged me for the piano essentially. But yes, my mother was a piano teacher. My father was a civil engineer. And I grew up in. And when I was about four or five, I was playing with soldiers like Brahms used to play with soldiers actually. Under the bed, the covers. It was small enclosed space. When my mother came and he asked me if I would like to learn how to play the piano. And I said, "Yeah, sure." I though I would be playing Mozart in a couple of weeks. But I was too short even to reach the pedals, so I had a box for my feet.

We were going through those John Thompson books at the time. And I got very impatient. I said, "No, I just want to play what I hear. I don't want to. I don't need to learn how to read in order to play what I hear." And this amazed me. My mother who'd been performing, playing since she was a teenager, even before that, I don't know exactly when, had never composed in her life, never though of it even. And I said, "How could this be?" And she said, "Well, some people perform, some people compose. And thank God we've got both of them." But she got me another teacher. He used to play nightclubs and he used to play a lot of jazz. And he taught me basic chords, but I'm no pianist by any stretch of the imagination. But it was good enough for me to get my ideas, my composing ideas onto the paper.

And then I learned the guitar. My brother actually got onto the guitar before I did, but it was a revelation that, oh, C major on the piano is C major on the guitar. And just to see how the music coalesced. And my brother also did a. He's a songwriter more than anything. And he did produce a couple of cassettes of his own work at one time. So he was fairly well known in Mumbai, and he still is well known in Mumbai, but he's not performing anymore. We're both old now. So yeah. My parents listened to a lot. Mozart was my mother's favorite. Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, the usual. And my father was very fond of Johann Strauss also. Even if he had the same, he would buy the Blue Danube by God knows how many different orchestras. He just loved that piece. And I used to listen too.

Rossini was another big favorite also. The overtures, of course. My father was also very interested in tape recording music. So we had a lot of music in the house. And when there were concerts in Mumbai, my parents would take me too. And when I was younger, the Moonlight Sonata, the Beethoven Pastoral, these are very attractive pieces for a child. And then for a long while, I simply got out of it. I got more interested. I mean, most of my peers were not interested in classical music and I wanted to keep up with them. So Elvis and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones all came in. I was going out with a friend of mine and I was waiting for her in her living room before we left, and she was getting ready in the bedroom. And she had a cat who was rather spastic under the dining table and kept sort of jerking.

And I though, "What is wrong with this cat?" And I got down under the table with the cat to see what he was doing down there. And he was playing with a dead cockroach actually. But while I was under the table, the Mozart piano sonata in A, the 10th Sonata came on. And it took me back to the time when I was under my bed with the covers and my mother used to play. So I thought, oh, let me get. So I bought that piano sonata initially. And at first I just bought the pieces that my parents used to listen to. There wasn't very much Brahms there at all, really. They weren't very fond of Brahms. They liked, as I mentioned, the regulars. And initially I just purchased pieces that they listened to that I was familiar with. The Hungarian Rhapsodies were another big favorite.

And then the Jewel, the grocery store, every week they would have a new Funk & Wagnall's album, a record classical music album with a booklet. And if you collected all 16 booklets or all 16 albums, you would have a complete encyclopedia of music and all these albums. And number 16 was Brahms's fourth symphony. And when I first listened to it, it was by Hans Von Isserstedt. He was a Swiss conductor. And I was just blown away. I used to listen to music before I went to work every day. I would get up early and listen to the music with headphones, nothing to interfere with that. And it was a form of meditation as well. And when I first heard that fourth symphony, which I was just talking about, I was just entranced. I thought it was just beautiful. And that was the beginning of my interest in Brahms.

Then I started getting his other symphonies and reading about them. And you might be familiar with a reviewer critic by the name of Tovey, Donald Francis Tovey. Well, he wrote a number of critiques. He was a contemporary of Brahms too, though he was much younger, so he lived much longer. But I got collections of all his works. And for the Brahms Piano Concerto number two, he had a description in there of the sense was mighty wings flapping. And I thought, oh, that's an interesting analogy. But I hadn't heard those wings flapping when I listened. But then after I had read that, I went back to the symphony. This was during the Scherzo, the second movement. And I thought, oh, that's what he was talking about. Those are the wings he was talking about. And he actually said, there are three ways to talk about music.

First, you can just talk about the number of movements, the length of each movement, things like that. In the second, you can talk about where the modulations come in, where the repetitions come in, how they are changed, where they are varied. And the third is this visual effect that music has. So I tried to get some of that into my writing when I was talking about Brahms' works as well. These are, of course, my own visualizations, but it came from reading Tovey. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I was actually curious, growing up in India, that you weren't listening to more classical Indian music as opposed to Western European music.

Boman Desai:

No, I'm afraid. See, I'm a Parsi, which is a very small group of. It's a minuscule part of the Indian population. It's like 0.006%. And it's a dying race simply because religion disallows them to mingle with foreigners. And they don't allow converts. You have to have a Parsi father and a Parsi mother in order to have a Parsi son. And people keep marrying out of the religion. And so it is becoming. So the Parsis, they came to India in the seventh century. They were running from the Arab explosion. The Arabs were conquering everything in those days. And if you wanted to maintain your religion and if you wanted to maintain your life, you had to leave the country essentially. And they left. They followed the old trading routes. They landed on the West Coast of India. And many of them are now still. The largest concentration of Parsis in the world is in Bombay.

But there's also a large group of them now in Chicago, in Toronto near where you are and Houston. The largest group of Parsis outside of Bombay is in Toronto, interestingly enough. And so what they did to survive in part initially, they acclematized themselves to the Hindus who were the dominant religion at that time. Then when the Moguls came in, the Muslims, they acclimatized themselves to the Moguls. This was their mode of survival. And then when the British came, they were, of course, very British. And the British, of course, brought Western classical music with them. And in order for the Parsis to maintain this, they aped the British in many ways because they wanted to be. And they're also lighter skinned because they were from Iran originally. So they didn't really pay much attention to Indian classical music at all. If anything, they denigrated it to their discredit, as far as I'm concerned, because there is a great deal. I did learn about Indian classical music through Yehudi Menuhin of all people. So anyway, there was no Indian classical music in my growth when I was growing up. I learned about that as an adult. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Interesting. I'd like to ask you about Diana Attill. I was fascinated to learn about her. And she published your first novel. Well, the first published novel was "The Memory of Elephants?"

Boman Desai:

Yes. Yes. You want me to mention how that came about? Yes,

Leah Roseman:

Please do.

Boman Desai:

Oh.

Leah Roseman:

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. Please note, I’ve linked a few suggested episodes in the show notes for you: with Martha Anne Toll, Heather Taves, Michael Stephen Brown, Thomas Cabaniss, Yale Strom, Gabriel Kahane, Scott Nygaard among so many episodes since 2021. Sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, consider buying me a coffee on my Ko-fi page, or buying some unique podcast merch. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Boman.

Boman Desai:

I was working full-time at Sears Roebuck as a market analyst trainee, meaning I was waiting for an analyst to die so I could take their place. Pretty much like Brahms's father was waiting for a bass player to die so he could take his place. I had written a 200-page novel at that point and it had been declined by five publishers, just five, that's nothing. But I saw friends of mine shooting ahead with their lives, married and children and so on and so forth. And I figured I better get on the stick and do something for myself. So I went back to my office manager. I was working part-time while I was writing this book, and I said, "I want to go back to working full-time." And she said, "Okay, but you have to dress the part." In those days, I was wearing headbands to work, sandals, which was absolutely a no-no.

She said, "Dress the part. And when there is room, we know your work, we know you. So when there is room, when we need somebody, you would be the first person that we would come across." So I was going through the paces at that point. But what happened was, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first gentleman to climb Mount Everest, had an office in the Sears Tower. I was on the 35th floor, he was on the 37th floor. And Sears had hired him to lead an expedition of a boat that they were selling from the mouth of the River Ganges in the Bay of Bengal to its mouth, to its source in the Himalayas. He headed this expedition of four boats. They made a movie of it, calling it "From the Ocean to the Sky". And they showed it on. Well, they showed it on PBS in 1978 or so, but they had a preview in the tower.

And I saw the preview. And on the way down from the 37th to the 35th floor, I was in the elevator with just one other, he was a senior market analyst. And these are huge floors and we hardly know one another, but we know one another by our faces, by the nameplates. And he looked very thoughtful. And just curiosity, I said, "Something on your mind?" And he said, "No, but just that I saw this, we've seen this movie, and I can't help comparing myself with Sir Edmund. For him, every day is an adventure, and he's 10 years older than I am. Whereas for me, it's the same routine every day." And I was just sort of laughing and I said, "Well, what did you want to do? Did you want to climb mountains?" And he said, "No, I'm not that adventurous, but I do wish I had written one good book." And by that time we reached our floor.

And I said, "Well, when you retire," and he said, "Of course, everyone writes books when they retire." And then six months later, he died of a heart attack. And my first thought, he was only his mid-fifties at that point. And my first thought was he's never going to write his book. My second thought was, "I'm never going to write my book if I stay with this job, this position." And I went back to the office manager and I said, "I'm sorry, I would like a part-time job again, and I have to write my book." And she said, "Well, you're going to be demoted, which means lower pay. You're going to be part-time again, which again means lesser pay." And as a part-timer, I would lose my benefits, which again was something to think about, but I told myself it was only going to get more difficult as I went on.

And I took the part-time. I started working. I was a secretary for the chief economist at Sears at the time. We became good friends. He even came to Mumbai with me once, which I was very happy about too. But for 10 years, I wrote my book. It was 800. Well, it was 400 pages. But in those days with electric typewriters, I typed the whole thing from beginning to end twice to get a clean copy. And then it was declined by about 40 publishers in the space of four months. And this just knocked me out. I had a syncope. I just passed out at work. I was taken to the hospital and I was given two weeks off from work to recover. And I had read an article, I forget where, either the Wall Street Journal or Time Magazine or maybe the New York Times about this woman, Diana Athill, who had edited and published and discovered V.S. Naipaul, who went on to win the Nobel at a much later date.

But at that point, my thinking was she published one Indian, maybe she'll publish another. And also she was based in the UK, and I thought maybe the old colonial ties would stand me in better stead in the UK than in the US. So during these two weeks that I was on my back, essentially, I wrote to her and I sent her the prologue. And she wrote back almost immediately to say she'd like to read the rest of the manuscript. And I sent her the rest of the manuscript. And she again was very. And those days, those were letters. We weren't talking about emails in those days. And she wrote back to say they wanted to publish the manuscript and it was getting a second reading, but if she approved, that was all that was really necessary. And I would be hearing from the chairman of the firm sooner or later.

I thought he was going to call to talk about timelines and when it would be published and the cover and things like that. Instead, he offered me an advance, which was half a year's salary. And I was struck dumb. I couldn't speak literally. I was at my desk at work and he was calling from London. And I wrote the figure down on my calendar. I still have that page because I thought I'm not going to believe this later on. And he said, "Isn't that enough?" this very deep English voice, And I said, "Oh, yes, yes." I was about to say, I would've paid you to publish the book. I didn't say that. And I said, "Thank you." And he said, "No, thank you." And I said, "No, thank you." And this went back and forth for a while. And then things got a whole lot better.

I mean, it wasn't easy sailing by a long shot even after that. It was 13 years before the book was published finally in the US by the University of Chicago Press. But even so, things were never quite that bad again. And then the rest of the work came about too. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So that book is "The Memory of Elephants" that you're speaking about?

Boman Desai:

Yes. And the title is really a metaphor for the memory of the Parsis, the Zoroastrians, whom I just spoke about. That prologue is the story of how they fled Persia, which is Iran today, to come to India. And the rest of the book is three generations based on my family of the. My grandmother at one point, she was in her 90s at this point, had sent me a care package. This was in the 1970s. She sent me tins of Indian food because she thought I would miss it. Initially, there wasn't that much Indian food in Chicago, but gradually, I mean, now we have Indian food to match anything in Bombay or Mumbai as it's called now. And I told her, "You don't need to send this anymore. We can get this food here." And she said, "So what else should I send you?" And I said, "I'd like a new photograph of yourself." So my mother told me she got up at five in the morning and dolled herself up for this photograph.

And I still have the photograph, of course. And then she said, "Now what do you want?" And I remembered that when she was younger, she had written a number of plays in which she had acted herself. These were all in Gujarati, which is not a language I speak fluently or hardly at all anymore. But I asked her to write down the story of her life as much as she could remember. And she had also traveled to the UK, again, speaking no English and to the Far East. Her son, my father was in the UK at this point, so he was able to help her once she was there. And she traveled all over Europe with him too. But on the ship, there was nobody that she could really talk to. There might have some other Parsis, but that was about it. And the Far East, she had spent time, and she wrote about all of these things.

And they're still in the library of the town in which she grew up. And I asked her to write the story of her life. She was born in 1884, which was the year before Brahms wrote his fourth symphony, which is how I remember it. Brahms and my grandmother were on the same planet at the same time. But she was in her 90s. She died in 1984. And I visited in 1985 from Chicago. And my mother had translated all this Gujarati into English at this point. So I was praying that this was worth something that I could use it because she was in her 90s, but it was beautiful. It was perfect. And that really provided me with the first part of the book, "The Memory of Elephants". And then I thought, "Well, now I have to fill it out with the rest of the family." And I sat my mother down and I recorded everything she could remember of her childhood, her courtship with my father.

And that was how the book. But she said, "You can't say this because this really happened and we don't want people to..." So I said, "No, that's all right. I'll make it up." So I made up things to compensate for the. And then she said, "Now everybody will think this is true." So I said, "But you can't have it both ways. You can't tell me to make up stories and then tell me not to write the real story. It has to be one or the other." I mean, that was just a little fun along the way. But even my cousins, many people in the family didn't want to read the book because they thought. Well, they just don't understand why people write books or music. They attend the concerts and they'll read the bestsellers, but they're not readers or musicians in their own right, aside from my brother now.

And my cousin in London was very sympathetic nevertheless. So "The Memory of Elephants", it's a metaphor for the long-term memory of the narrator of this story. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So you've written quite a number of historical novels. Some are early 20th century, mid-20th century. There was one I was curious. Oh yeah, about a circus troop, "The Elephant Graveyard".

Boman Desai:

How did that come about? Oh, it was very. Actually, by this time, I had written two other novels that I was very happy with too, and I was wondering what to write next. I called this "The Elephant Graveyard". The elephant, he's always the. Well, not the real live animal, of course, but I had elephant bookends. I had elephant paper cutter, made of ivory, no less. It was my uncle. My uncle and aunt lived in Hong Kong and I visited them when I was five years old. And my uncle said apparently one evening, one afternoon, I had secreted myself again under the bed and drawn pictures of elephants one after the other. So elephants were sort of always part. And when I had my noujode, which is the equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a confirmation, I was asked by this friend of my parents what I wanted for a present.

And I said, "I'd like an elephant." She said, "We can't get you an elephant." I said, "No, a small elephant," meaning about that large. I had seen a jade elephant in her apartment. She said, "Oh, you can have these." My mother said, "No, no, no, you can't take other people's things." And so she got me a wooden elephant, which was pretty. We still have those actually. So elephants. And so when I was thinking about what shall I write about, I thought, "Well, let me write a book centered around the elephant." So as with Brahms, where I read everything written about Brahms, I read everything I could find out about elephants. I reread Moby Dick twice because I wanted to see how he used the whale and I was using the elephant in similar terms. Initially, I was going to set it in a zoo. And then I thought, no, a circus is far more interesting, far more exhilerating.

Then I started reading everything I could find about circuses. And my boss at that time, again, I was at Sears. I was working part-time again at Sears at this point. He used to holiday in Florida, and that's where the circuses used to have their bases when they weren't. And so he brought me a couple of books that were filled with circus lingo and circus stories and things. So I became something of an expert on circuses, but I wanted to have a one-on-one relationship, if not a relationship, an encounter, let's say, with an elephant. So I went to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and I went to the person who minded the elephants. Her name was Amy or Amy something. It's in the book anyway, in the afterword of the book. And I told her the whole story and I said, "I'd like to meet the elephant one-on-one." And she said, "Sure." The elephants were out on the paddock at this point.

And she said, "Why don't you go inside where the cages were for the night and wait for me there?" And there's the cage, the elephant's cage. Then there's a narrow, well, it's narrow, but it's large enough for an elephant to walk sideways. And beyond that was the door that led to the paddock. And she said, "Wait for me. I'll join you in a minute." So I went inside and I was waiting at the cage, not in the cage, right at the door of the cage for the elephant to come in. And he started coming. And I thought, where is the owner? I was getting a little scared because he was getting larger and larger as he came closer and closer. And finally he had reached the second door, so we were maybe about a couple of yards when she showed up. And I mean, it was fine.

She'd brought some baguettes with her and rolls and I fed the elephant and I touched his tongue or his trunk. And that was my encounter with the elephant. I didn't really find a place in the novel, but that was as much as I wanted to do. There's also an encounter with a cobra in the same novel. And I went to another one of our zoos and cobras are really slimy. And the owner even told me, she said, "Don't be careful because it can be poison." I said, "But the skin can..." She said, "Yes, the slime can be..." I said, "Well, why didn't you tell me before?" And she gave me some kind of special soap to wash my hands with. So that took care of that. But I'm not really an animal person and I just did it for the books essentially.

Leah Roseman:

Is it the most rewarding thing when you finally start to write when you've been doing so much research?

Boman Desai:

No, finishing the book. And then it's never really finished. I keep going back to it. But that first complete draft is when I can breathe a sigh of relief finally. Yeah. While I'm writing it though, there are passages which I'm very excited about, and I will read those passages over and. I mean, even now I will read passages over and over again. So I do go back to them and it does a great. I don't know how to put this, but I really write in many ways for myself. I mean, I'm very glad to have people read them and enjoy them, but it's really a question of, I think each of us needs to find something in our lives that gives us faith in ourselves, boosts our own egos in a sense. Now, if all my books had never been published, it would make no difference to the world, but it would make a difference to me as a person.

I wouldn't be the person I am if I hadn't written the books. I would be in many ways, I think, a lesser person. So in that respect, I did it for myself more than anyone else. Now I'm talking about.

Well, even someone like Tolstoy, Tolstoy is my favorite novelist, I have to say. Although I don't have favorite novelists as much as favorite books. And there are many books I like, but not necessarily all the books by that author.

Leah Roseman:

I believe that your book Trio we were speaking of earlier was compared to Tolstoy.

Boman Desai:

Yes. I don't know how much I told you about that, but there was a philosopher professor at Harvard who emailed me to say, well, he'd enjoyed the book. And he was actually a singer in his own right as well. But he said this was the book Tolstoy would have written had he chosen my subject. And of course I was thrilled. But even, I don't know if I told you about. In order to use that. At that point, "Trio" had been published in two separate volumes because they couldn't publish it in a single volume. And when I went ahead, when they were able to publish it in a single volume, I wanted permission to use that quote. But he had died in 2011, and this was 2015. So I got in touch with his publishers and they said, "Well, he never married. He didn't have any descendants, so very sorry, but we can't help you with that." I got in touch with the Harvard faculty and they pretty much had the same story.

And then somehow I got in touch with the hospital in Canada where he had died and the nurse who had taken care of him when he died. All of this was done with my computer on the telephone. This was in armchair detective work, if you wish. I said, "Would you please ask her to give me her information?" She said, "No." Well, no, what she said was there were two names in the register from people who had visited him. Their information was in there. So I said, "Would you please give it to me?" And she said, "No, I can't do that. That's personal, private." And I said, "Please get in touch with them and tell them the story and see if they would get in touch with me." And I had sort of given up hope at this point. But then I got an email from someone who called herself Star Nacht, Starry Night in German.

And I learned this is some scam or spam or whatever. And I was about to delete it when I saw in the subject matter Trio. And it turns out to be his executrix who was a friend of his. And she said, "Yes, I know he was very fond of classical music. And he had told me about your book. And yes, I'm sure he would be happy if you were to use it." So that was how that came about. I'm so thrilled with that. I mean, I literally got up and started dancing around the apartment. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

I really, I'm so curious to read so many of your novels, and I thought it would also be interesting for people to talk about a couple of the other ones. So "A Googly in the Compound" set in the early 20th century.

Boman Desai:

Yes. How did that come about? Okay. To set the scene, the family, the Sanjana family is a Parsi family living on the outskirts of Nausari, which is where many Parsis wound up after coming to India, have a tiger cub. In those days, well, a friend of theirs was a tiger hunter and he had killed a man eater and brought the cubs back with him. And the family decides they'd like to keep the cubs until they grow to adulthood, and then they would give them to a zoo. But they were fine enough to keep as cubs, but they grew even in a year and a half to two years. A tiger can get pretty dangerous without even knowing how dangerous he is. And the Sanjanas lived in Mumbai, but they visited Nausari, which is where these cubs were being kept by the person who look after their things, their housekeeper.

And when they showed up this time, they were at a breakfast and they were letting the cub loose. And by the time he's growling and he has his own intentions of what he wants to do with his life. And there's a great deal more involved, but each of the characters in this story, there is Dali who was based on my grandmother again, her husband who was the brother of her first husband. So she married two husbands in turn. She married the second after the first one died. And she had two sons. And these two sons are also with her in this compound. There are five of them. And the oldest son is married to an English woman. And she has been stranded. She was stranded in India by the Second World War. She had come looking for a lost lover to Mumbai, and she found that her lover had already married somebody else.

And she was left in Mumbai without any means because the war had closed the seaways behind her. And this guy, Surab, the son of Dali Sanjana, sees her and he wants to marry her. He has this, the thing I was mentioning earlier about the British and the Parsis, and one way of being British as well, marrying a British woman. And she was in a difficult enough state being stranded in India without any means. And so that was how the marriage came about. There's a whole other story involved where she had an affair with the steward onboard the ship when she was coming. And she was pregnant with him with this second child of her first child when she married. And her husband doesn't know about this, but this is a different story. It came about because I can't find this photograph anymore. With my grandmother and my father, they had a picture of themselves taken with two tiger cubs in their hands.

And I thought, well, what happened to those tiger cubs? And where was this picture taken? And where is this picture now? And that was sort of what got me thinking about this particular story. And each of my characters has a story to tell. So again, as in "Brahms Comes to Dinner", in "Brahms Comes to Dinner", it's the dinner scene that threads the entire novel. And in this novel, which is called "A Googly in the Compound", this breakfast scene threads the whole novel. And in between are the flashbacks which tell you about how each of those individual five individual characters got to that particular place at that particular time. So the structure is similar. And the scene progresses initially that Tiger is just being a pet, but something happens to inflame him in a very difficult and different direction. And I won't tell you more about that.

In fact, one of my favorite readings from that is to read everything until the tiger gets enraged and then to stop at that point. Oh, and I should mention a googly. Do you know what a googly is?

Leah Roseman:

I looked it up.

Boman Desai:

Okay. Well, I use it as an epigraph in the book itself, but of course Americans aren't familiar with it either. And a googly is a cricket term. It does for the ball when it's been balled, pretty much what a spinball does for a ball in baseball. And so you expect the ball to go in a certain direction and then it turns in the other direction. And a googly in the compound here, of course, is the metaphor for the tiger whom you expect to go one way and then he goes the other way. So that was how that came about.

Leah Roseman:

I'm curious, do these big structures, are they in your mind before you start to write these books?

Boman Desai:

An overall structure is, but the individual. In fact, each of these novels, it's currently the revised edition that's been published. "The Memory of Elephants" I mentioned was republished 13 years later by the University of Chicago. And it's a revised version of the original. And similarly, these two, not "The Elephant Graveyard", that's the only publication. But "Trio" was initially published as two volumes. And then when I did the single volume, again, I revised a great deal. And so I'm very happy with the final single volume. And two other novels, this one are "The Googly in the Compound", and another one called "Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love". I published initially for the release only in India. And these were never published at that point in the US. And when I finally tried to publish them in the US, they said, "Well, these are old novels. We can't publish them anymore because everybody already knows them." And I said, "No, they're only available in India." But they said, "Well, now with Google, et cetera, they're available everywhere." And I said, "Yeah, but nobody thinks about it even.

It's a brand new publication." But anyway, I didn't get any further with that. And I published them myself at that point. And fortunately now with Amazon, whom I don't like on many accounts, but the publication is so easy. It's pretty straightforward and it's inexpensive. But the problem again is publicizing the work. Publicizing a work is very expensive and something like what you're doing is invaluable as far as I'm concerned. So thank you for that. But these two novels, I republished in the States. And when I republished them, I revised them quite a bit, especially "A Googly in the Compound". I added a whole scene there. And I added a whole scene in Portrait as well, but a smaller scene. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

So a "Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love" is based on this high school teacher? I was just reading up a little bit about these books.

Boman Desai:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

So writing from the point of view of a woman as a man yourself, how did that work for you?

Boman Desai:

I don't have any idea what happened between the two of them. Absolutely no idea. But I had seen them once. I was 17. He was 17, a classmate of mine. I saw them walking side by side and they weren't holding hands. They weren't looking at each other. And I remember being very impressed with his savoir-faire at that point, because I felt if I had been walking next to her, I would've been fidgety. I would've been bouncing on my feet. I would've been looking constantly to make sure she was still there, that sort of a thing. So I was very impressed with that. And much later, after I had published "The Memory of Elephants", and after my second book had been declined, I was thinking of more novels to write. And I remembered that one scene. And as I said, I knew nothing about what happened between them, but I undertook to make everything up.

And when I undertook to make everything up, I went into my own life, which is how, in a sense, this is my most autobiographical woman. Although I'm not gay, I'm not transsexual. I never even thought of it in those terms, but she has a marriage and an affair before she winds up with a good happy ending, let's say. And I had a marriage and an affair, and I haven't wound up with a happy ending yet, but that was the state of things. And unconsciously, I suppose, I was transmuting my life into hers. I didn't really think of it as my life while I was writing it, but it was after it was done that I recognized all these things. And even so, in the first book, which was published only in India, was called "A Woman Madly in Love". When I republished it, I called it "Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love".

And I republished it because there was a woman on the fifth floor of the building in which I lived. I was on the third floor. She was in her 90s, and I was writing "Trio" at that time. And I would bump into her in the elevator every now and then. And we got talking and she invited me to. I was in the house. I wasn't going anywhere. For those three years that I wrote the first 1800 page draft, I lived entirely off my savings. I was saving money on food, so I lost 20 pounds. I was saving money on haircuts, which is how my ponytail got started. And so I saw quite a bit of her. And she said at one point, she asked me what I was doing, and I told her I was a writer. And she invited me to her place. And she was a lovely old woman.

She was, like I said, in her 90s. And she had eloped when she was 18 years old. She had an encounter with, of all people, Al Capone, way back when. So she was telling me all these stories, which I've used in a "Portrait of a Woman" now because she became part of my story later. And what happened was she started having heart attacks and she'd been to the doctor and the doctor had said, "You have only about three weeks to live if you don't have surgery right away." And she, like I said, she was 93, 94 at that time. And she said, "I've lived long enough. I've lived a good life. Three weeks is fine." But she said she had trouble. I mean, she had trouble just even taking the elevator to the ground floor to pick up her newspaper from the lobby and her mail.

And I said, "No worries. I can do that for you." And her groceries, I got groceries. She'd make a list and I would go and get them for her. And I did this. I thought three weeks? No big deal. But she lived for more than a year after that. And she was writing in her diaries at that point. She said, "If you want, you can use these diaries, use them any way you want." And after she finally did pass away, I had all her diaries and whatnot. And I remember thinking my character in the novel, she was still a little too full of herself. And I think I was a little too full of myself in some ways too at that point. And this episode, I was with Wilma, which was her name. In the book, it's Alma, but in real life it was Wilma.

And I was with Wilma once, well, through many of her heart attacks. And I would give her and ampoules of morphine, which she would syringe into her mouth. And there was one point she was suffering a heart attack for four hours. She just laid her couch on her sofa on her back and she said, "Please let it stop. Let it stop." And all I could do was hold her hand, give her the ampoules. There was nothing I could do really to help. And I saw her, in a sense, so close to death often enough. And this had an effect on the way I saw death as well and in the way Farida, my character. So I added this section in different parts along the novel of a "Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love". So that was a benefit as far as I'm concerned in revising the story, the novel at that point.

And with "A Googly in the Compound", there was one character who really didn't have much of a story. And I thought I need to get more of a story for this guy, but I was just out of ideas. And I told myself, maybe he's just too apathetic, too effete to have much of a life. But then when I was in Mumbai at one point, I was visiting a friend of my mother's who had been in Burma during the Second World War, just before the Japanese came across the country. She was 13 years old at the time. And her family, they were fairly well to do. And they took a boat from Rangoon, which is where they were living, to Chittagong, hugging the coastline of Burma until they got to Chittagong. And from there, a train to Calcutta and then into India. But they kept her father back because he was a doctor and the British needed doctors for outbreaks of malaria or whatever.

And then it just became impossible. The Japanese just broke through and everybody had to leave on their own account. And her father got into his Jeep and he was finding his way as best he could. But four British Tommies held him up at gunpoint and got him out of the Jeep, got into the Jeep themselves and drove off. And he was left to his own devices at that point. It's an amazing story, but somehow he made his way back to Calcutta. And on the way, he came across his Jeep with each of the four British Tommies with their throats cut in the car itself. And I thought this is my character's story. He somehow finds himself in Burma. And then I found out there was a division of a platoon of Indian soldiers who started in Pune, which is very close to Mumbai, which is where my character lived.

Bombay at the time. It wasn't Mumbai then. And so I read, there was an Ohian missionary, a missionary doctor in Burma at the time, and his name was Seagrave. And I got ahold of his memoirs. So I learned a little bit about how that took place. And there was an American general Stillwell, General Joe Stilwell. They called him vinegar Joe because of his tartery mouth, I guess. But he led an expedition of Burmese, Indians, Chinese, British, and Americans safely to life in Calcutta all the way from Burma. And I read his diaries, his stories, and I realized my character had to somehow join his troop. Because out of all the people, out of all these refugees, only about 10% survived. Only about 10% made the way. Otherwise, they died of starvation or killed by the Japanese along the way. But every single one of General Stilwell's contingent survived, including a dog by the name of James.

They brought him along too. And the Chinese were very upset about this because they ate dogs and they were getting hungry, but they saved James as well at that point. So that was how "Googly "got revised.

Leah Roseman:

Boman, was that your grandfather, the doctor?

Boman Desai:

No, this was my mother's friend's father who was the doctor. Yeah. Okay. And she's still alive. I still see her in Mumbai when she's in her 90s now too, of course. But I gave her a copy of "A Googly in the Compound". So she was quite thrilled with that too. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

Speaking of older women, we went very quickly past Diana Athill, your first publisher, first editor. But she was an incredible woman. Do you want to say a couple of words about her for people who don't know who she was?

Boman Desai:

After she retired, she was knighted by. Well, he's King Charles now. Anyway, she wasn't just my editor. She was an editor to people like John Updike, Norman Mailer. And she had stories about all these people too, which were quite amazing. And Mailer in particular, she said at one point they were going to a reading somewhere. They needed two cabs for all the people they had. And Mailer was in the cab in front and she was in the cab behind. And halfway there, the cab in front stopped and they stopped to get out. And it seemed Mailer had challenged the cab driver to a fight. And she thought it was the most ridiculous thing she ever heard. I don't think they actually got into the fight, but they got into an argument for sure. And things like this. And VS Naipaul, she used to iron his shirts.

Well, I mean, she got him his start. The first three novels he published through her firm didn't go anywhere. And she said, "We published novels that we thought were good, even though we knew they wouldn't sell because we knew that further down the line they would sell." And surely enough, his fourth book, "A House for Mr. Biswas", won the Booker Prize. And after that, he won the Nobel. But until that point, and she said, "You don't have the same luxury," she told me. She says, "If this book doesn't make it, you have to start thinking again." And my second novel was declined, as I said. And that was a difficult time too, but I had one novel under my belt. So I had some kind of cachet, if you wish. And I mean, it never went quite that badly again. But then when she was in her 90s, I still feel very indebted to her, without her, if I hadn't had that book, "The Memory of Elephants" published when I did, I really don't know how I would've carried on at that point. And I visited her three times in her 90s. This would be during the 2000s. And I visited her because I was afraid that every time would be the last. And she kept on living until she was 101. I think the last time I saw her was in 2012 or 2013. And she died maybe two, three years after that. But she also told me, and I have copies, she has eight books published altogether. One of them is a book of short stories. One is a novel, and the others are all memoirs. And interestingly, she said she made more money in her 90s through her memoirs than she had ever made in her whole life as an editor. And she was quite proud of that.

And I was very happy for her because of that too. And the last time I saw her, I do remember I didn't want to leave, but of course I had to leave. And I gave her a great big kiss just before. And I think she looked at me like, "What was that all about?" And I'm sure she knew how I felt. But yeah, I surprised myself also, but that's how it came about. Yeah. And she was 95, 96 at that point too, if not older. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And over your writing life, you've also worked as a creative writing teacher.

Boman Desai:

Yes. Yes. Once I had published the book and I got my undergrad in writing, in creative writing, in English with an emphasis on creative writing, you can get an education teaching English or creative writing, and I chose creative writing. And once you have a master's in English and you've published a novel, you're eligible to teach, which is rubbish, which is absolute rubbish, but that's how it's done. But at that point, I was working part-time and I never wanted to work full-time again because I wanted the time for the novels. And I used to sign up for these different temp agencies. There were six or seven temp agencies. And I would call them every Friday to ask if they had any work. Often enough, there wasn't any work. But even when there was, it was the lowest pay at that point. And I was really depressed because I just got back from India at this point, and I was at a dinner with a friend.

And she told me that I should get into what they called a low residence university. Are you familiar with low residence universities? They're for people who are interested only in writing. And we get together twice in the year at the university. I joined the University of Southern Maine, and I would go to Maine in January and in July for either five or 10 days each time we had a break in between. And the people who came would be there for two years and I would be going back. And during the time in between, we would be communicating through email. They would be sending me stories and I would be writing back to them with my critiques and how to carry on. And it was lovely because I could pay my bills. I had time to write. And I had students reading my work and telling me what a wonderful man.

They would look at, I mean, I was a secretary before that, and I'd had even worse jobs. And they would be looking at me and calling me professor. And I would be looking behind me like, who are they talking about? But I just loved that job. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And I did want to ask you about your Beatles book.

Boman Desai:

Oh my goodness. Thank you. That got me started with that song of theirs called All My Loving. There's a rhythm guitar that John Lennon uses. And I liked that particular rhythm a lot. And I actually aped it on the piano. I play All My Loving with that particular rhythm. And there was a neighbor of mine who used to come knocking And my door, "I heard you playing that again." And I said, "Yeah." He says, "Can I come inside?" "Yeah, sit down. "And so anyway, it was something I really liked, but I realized that he never played that particular rhythm again in any of their songs, although he very well could have. And then I realized also that many of the other rhythms that he had used, they never used again. And I started reading a lot about the Beatles biographies and things as well. And he mentioned at one point, he said, yes, I made it a point since I was just playing a rhythm to try a different rhythm each time.

I didn't want to duplicate myself. And it wasn't just the rhythm. I started thinking not only in terms of what did they do in this particular song that they have never done before, that they never did again? And in that song, I Feel Fine, they start out with that reverb, which was actually a mistake. And George Martin was going to cut it down and Lennon said, no, leave it. I like it. And even the backward tapes that they did for a while, those were all mistakes that they held onto because they liked them. So that made me go from the very first Lennon-McCartney song, Love Me Do, to The Long and Winding Road. There's 162 of them. I only focused on the Lennon-McCartney songs, none of the Harrison songs, and none of the songs that they performed by other people. And I talked about what. I went through every single measure of every single song to make my point. And there's only about six or seven songs in which they repeat out of all of those. And that is quite astonishing in itself. Yeah. And so that was how the book came about. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

And the title of the book.

Boman Desai:

The title of the book, "Dancing About Architecture", came from Elvis Costello, whom I admire immensely. In fact, I would say today he and Paul McCartney are the primary songwriters of the day, although I'm not up to date on much of the recent, not since the '90s anyway. And he once said that writing about music is the stupidest thing you can do. It's like dancing about architecture. And of course, he writes about music himself, his own notes. He writes his own notes and they're quite lengthy too. So I know he was speaking tongue in cheek, but I started thinking, yes, but you can also dance about architecture because you would dance very differently about the Sears Tower than you would dance about Falling Water or about the Taj Majal. It would be a different dance. And in fact, even writing about it, I did conduct, this was a talk I gave on writing about music.

And often enough, when people write about music or talk about music, they say, "Oh, it was wonderful. It was beautiful. I loved it." But all that does, it tell you what the person thinks of the music. It doesn't tell you anything about the music itself, which takes me back to Tovey when he was talking about those giant arms flapping. Said, yes, that is writing about music. And that was a point I was trying to make to this particular class. And what I did was I recorded the first Brahms Scherzo. I recorded the love death from Tristan, just the orchestral part toward the end. And there was one, oh, Schuman'ns Papillon, his Opus two. And I played it for them. Most of them, if not all of them, didn't really know the composers. And I played it for them and I had written descriptions of these three pieces.

And I said, "I want you to put the description to the piece itself." And they were able to do it. Not only were they able to do it, but they began to understand how to write about music and not just to talk about, oh, this is beautiful. And even now I will read reviews and people say, "Wow, wow, wow, this is wonderful." It's so pointless. It just tells you what this person feels about the music, dancing about architecture. Yeah. So each of those, I was writing about the music as well as just talking about what they did differently in each. And also interestingly, Lennon, he did different rhythms, different time signatures from the very beginning. Whereas McCartney's first triple signature was She's Leaving Home, which was their eighth album. Everything else was two, four or four, four times before that, but not for Lennon. And so you begin to see.

They also, they sang, many of the songs they worked together, but there were many songs they wrote individually. And whoever wrote the major part of the song took the lead vocal on that particular song. And then you begin to see their individual fingerprints in each of the songs also. And Lennon did more of these triple numbered songs. He also did songs with mixed time signatures. You take a song like Good Morning, Good Morning, try following the beat sometimes. It just goes in and out and in and out. There's nine crotchets to a measure, seven crotchets, five crotchets. And yet it all seems to fit together. Even all you need is love. It's three, four, three, four, three, four. And it's beautifully done. And McCartney didn't do this really until almost the very end, Two of Us. That's a song that goes into about three or four time signatures. And again, it's beautiful. It just swims together. You don't feel, oh, he's changed the time signature here. And I got into other things too.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So after having lived just about your whole adult life in Chicago, I believe?

Boman Desai:

Pretty much. I was in Pennsylvania for one year when I majored in philosophy for a change. I came here to study architecture, but I realized it wasn't for me and got into different things at that point. Yeah.

Leah Roseman:

But you are planning to move back to India?

Boman Desai:

I am this November and primarily, well, my brother and I are both old and I think we need to be together at this point. And I left Mumbai when I was 19. I'm 76 now, so there's a lot I'm going to have to get reaccustomed to. And I've been visiting every year, nevertheless. I've been visiting during the winter months in Mumbai, February, which is the worst month in Chicago. Now it's going to be the heat and the monsoon. And I can't say I'm looking forward to that, but I am looking forward to staying with my brother again. Yeah. I mean, I have many friends here too, but I have to be with him toward the end.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. But that's wonderful that you can do that. But I'm sure you'll be writing.

Boman Desai:

Oh, yes. Well, two unpublished novels I will try to get published. And there's a new novel and I'm also working on a cello concerto. I was going through a stress test this morning and you're lying on your back and the melody was going through my head over and over. But I won't get started on that either until I'm settled in Mumbai. And I'm not sure in what order I'll be doing things. But yeah, there's no end of work in my retirement, no less.

Leah Roseman:

Well, it's been such an honour to meet you and to talk about your writing. So I want to thank you very much for this.

Boman Desai:

Oh, thank you, Leah, especially for asking about all these other books too. So many thanks for that.

Leah Roseman:

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.