June 22nd - 6th death anniversary :

Universality, culture and language: an appreciation of Mervyn de Silva

by Godfrey Gunatilleke

Dayan Jayatilleka's reference to the Regi Siriwardene - Mervyn de Silva debate on Ezra Pound (Daily News, Nov 7-23, 1972) in his recent article on 'The Crisis of Modernity' in the issue of the Sunday Island of 29.05.05 recalled for me Mervyn in all his rich versatility and intellectual reach.

Mervyn brought an unusual combination of skills to his professional life. He was literary critic, intellectual, political analyst and media communicator all in one and he could move with remarkable sureness and ease from one role to another.

He unfailingly captured our attention and sharpened our perception of what was happening with a blend of seriousness, sarcasm and wit which was uniquely his. His writing ranged from the informed and scholarly analysis of international affairs to the biting satire with which he would portray individuals and expose the pretentiousness, double standards and the failures in political management which he observed in our society. He was inimitable in the way he could entertain his readers and at the same time make them think.

A generation's dilemma

When I used the term 'irreplaceable' I used it without any hint of exaggeration. Mervyn was the special product of his time and both the time and the man are irrecoverable. Mervyn belonged to the generation which was witnessing the transition that was displacing the English educated elite and producing what Mervyn himself calls the "anti- Western backlash of nationalism".

These comments which Dayan quotes provide us with some insights into the cultural phenomenon which nurtured sensibilities such as that of Mervyn's and formed their values. Mervyn captures the dilemma of his generation in the two terms he uses in his debate with Regi - "cosmopolitan hothouse" for the artificial cultural mix of this intelligentsia and "universal" for what he describes as the "finest things they assimilated from another culture."

I would say that Mervyn stands apart from most of the journalists of his generation in his evaluation of this multi-cultural minority. He responds to both the weakness and the intrinsic worth of that minority. It was a minority which flourished for a bright fleeting moment when the English educated intelligentsia had a self image of being Ceylonese within a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society.

In reaching out through "the cosmopolitan hothouse" of the English educated elite to what was "universal" in it, Mervyn was drawing on his own personal experience. He was not satisfied with stereotyping the Western educated products as another outstanding journalist Tarzie Vittachi had done for the entertainment of his audience.

He saw what was tragic in the incapacity of that elite to relate to the larger society in which they lived, their failure to mediate between what was "finest in what they assimilated from another culture" and the cultural resurgence that was taking place around them.

Mervyn as mediator

I think the word "mediate" has special relevance when writing about Mervyn. In his own profession, he was a mediator in the deeper meaning that the word carries - a media person who intervened between opposing points of view, gave space to dissent and guided debate and controversy. In this task he was constantly drawing on the values he had imbibed from what he learnt in his youth.

I met Mervyn when he was preparing to enter the university. He was introduced to me and a few friends of mine by his teacher Dick Attygalle. He had decided to follow a course in English and was already immersed in the most recent creative writing of that time - Eliot, Auden, Arthur Koestler, Camus, Grahame Greene.

What struck me and my friends who met Mervyn at that time was his deep personal involvement in what he read. He would often engage in serious and intense discussions of a novel or poem he had read or a film he had seen and display a surprising maturity of judgement for his age.

He was one of the rare few for whom literature was more than a subject of study for an examination or career. For him it was an enriching exploration of human experience. What literature meant to him is best expressed in his own words taken from his reply to Regi in the debate on Ezra Pound:

"All literature is a statement on life. I judge an individual work on how deeply it moves me, on how well the writer has used his skills to do so and how much it enriches my own experience and understanding of the human situation.

I am interested in a writer's ideas qua ideas and I am interested in how these influence his creative work but those ideas and views are not the basis of my literary critical judgement... Whatever the character of the writer's society and whatever his own politics, his imaginative work has a substratum of common basic emotions which makes the inspired utterance of one man meaningful to his fellows in other times and places.

The humanist's article of faith embraces a human heritage ... All literature is part of that..." ('Pound, Poetry and Politics', CDN, Friday Nov 17, 1972, p.4)

Universality and culture

This was the way Mervyn articulated his own rejection of relativist nihilism and defined the "universality" to which all societies and their cultures need to be linked. It is in this sense that Mervyn pointed to what was finest in other cultures which the English educated elite had tried to assimilate to some degree.

The sureness and clarity with which Mervyn focuses on the intrinsic value of a creative work comes out of the literary critical tradition in which he had grown, the tradition of F.R Leavis which his pupil E.F.C Ludowyk imparted to his students. Both Regi and Mervyn were agreed on what I would call the literary critical fundamentals. But it is Mervyn who comes out more convincingly on the issue of literature and ideology.

And Mervyn's definition of the issues and the answers he gives go beyond the boundaries of literary criticism.

This capacity to separate the ideology of a writer from his creative communication is not merely a capacity that is confined to the reading of literature. It is an attribute which has significance for all of communication and human relationships.

It is an essential attribute for the growth of a culture. It is a capacity which seeks to reach out to what is of worth in the other person's communication separating it from what is not valuable, from the ideas with which one does not agree.

It thereby creates the framework for the tolerance of dissent that I referred to earlier, the foundation on which people communicate with mutual respect even in the heat of vehement debate and controversy. Mervyn would probably say that the growth of our own culture depends on this capacity - a capacity to relate to what is finest in other cultures separating what is "universally" humanist from what is not.

Order in language

The literary critical pieces Mervyn produced and which I had the opportunity to read - among them the essay on Shaw in the Ceylon University Magazine of 1951, the writings on Hemingway and the Mervyn - Regi debate on Pound, his radio talks on literary subjects all show this sensibility - a sensibility that distinguishes the authentic experience, the lived reality from what is an abstract ideological message or a pseudo- philosophical statement.

We did in fact lose a very sensitive and insightful literary critic in Mervyn when he became more involved in his journalistic writing. But why I have discussed his literary critical writing is to make the point that this part of him and his affirmative humanism that grew from it enriched the world of journalism in Sri Lanka as no one else has done.

Speaking of Pound, Mervyn says, "Order in language meant disciplined thought and that had much to do with order in society, sound government, the quality of life and culture and civilization itself." The principle which is implicit in this statement, he applied to his own professional work.

This was best exemplified in the way he conducted a widely representative public discourse and debate on the ethnic issue in the Lanka Guardian, opening it to a lively exchange of diverse and opposite views and yet anchoring it all on a firm core of democratic, humanist and multi-ethnic values.

In the tolerance of dissent he promoted , in the space for reasoned controversy that he created and in the "order in language" he maintained , he set intellectual standards and norms of integrity in journalism which need to be upheld and carried forward.

In our commemoration of Mervyn we need to identify and undertake a program dedicated to that purpose.