Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(15)

She wrote her first novel, Destination Chungking, during this period. It was widely praised and her talent was immediately evident. But only in London, where her husband had been sent as military attaché, was she finally able to break free. She refused to return to China with him in 1945. Did she not fear for her life then? “Ah, but this was in England,” she says with a lovely smile. She went back to school to complete her medical education, graduating with honors in 1948, by then a widow. She was thirty-one.

Because it was the doorstep to China, by now Communist, she settled in Hong Kong and began her practice. She fell in love with a married British correspondent, and the story of their affair, written at night on the kitchen table, became A Many-Splendored Thing. Her lover was killed in Korea. Han Suyin married Leonard Comber, another Englishman, on the rebound—and because she thought her daughter, then twelve, needed a father. She was living in Malaya, running two clinics and working from early morning until night, charging one dollar a visit while other doctors charged $15. After work, she wrote. “It amused me,” she explains. The reason is plainly deeper. “I do what I want. That’s the leitmotiv of my life.”

There is a long tradition in literature of doctors who have been writers, some good and some great. Rabelais and Chekhov, for example, Céline and Conan Doyle, A. J. Cronin and Somerset Maugham. “I don’t think of myself as a writer,” she protests, and the name she chose, Suyin, means simple sound. Nevertheless, she wrote four more novels between 1956 and 1963, none of them quite as successful as her bestseller, and then she turned to the autobiographies. Her marriage to Comber ended in amicable divorce. “He was a nice man,” she says. “He spoke five languages, but our relationship bored me to tears.”

She lives now in an apartment in Lausanne with her third husband, Vincent Ruthnaswamy, an ex-colonel in the Indian army, broad, deeply burnished, and a man of considerable tact. They met in Nepal where he was building roads. Medicine is behind her; she has not practiced since 1964. She and her husband travel, spending about four months a year in Lausanne. They have a house in India and a small apartment in Flims in the Swiss mountains. The apartments are rented. “I don’t believe in accumulating property after sixty,” she explains. She is rushing things a bit. Most women would be happy to look like her at forty.

Szechwan is her province; her father’s family is from there. An isolated region deep in the mountains, it has often during its history been independent, with close ties to Tibet. The Yangtze flows from there and many great legends of China come from there as well. The people are different. “We are the Italians of China,” she says. “We eat more red pepper than anyone else. Also, we are not afraid to die.” She turns to her husband. “Don’t you think it’s better than other places in China?” “Yes,” he says shrewdly. “It’s very Indian.”

Her day begins at seven. She wakes and has coffee. For an hour she does housework and then settles down to her correspondence, using the dining room table. “My husband has his typewriter on the desk,” she explains, “and since he is a man, he should have the place of honor.” Vincent doesn’t smile as she says this but on his face is a certain mixture of forbearance and disbelief. “Every twenty minutes or so I get up,” she says, “and do something else. I think it’s good for the figure.”

Vincent cooks the lunch, and from two o’clock on she works. There are no Saturdays or Sundays. It is always work; no matter where they are living. They see few movies or plays, go out rarely, seldom entertain. She has too much to do: the next volume of her autobiography and a novel about India. Who knows what the future will bring? As another famous doctor, this one fictional, wrote: “To live life to the end is not a childish task.” That was Zhivago.

People

November 8, 1976





D’Annunzio, the Immortal Who Died


He was born in a backward province, in a town of no consequence. His father was a politician and lecher, his mother one of those saintly women that Italy is famous for. He was one of five children. None of the others ever amounted to much. He had his first glimpse of glory at sixteen, the glory of Pushkin and Balzac that never tarnishes, and he was never to lose sight of it, even in the final years of his life when toothless and senile he died on a day he had predicted.

When I visited Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa which overlooks Lake Garda in northern Italy, it was November 1976. The big hotels along the lake were closed for the winter, the guides—the villa is now a national monument—stood around the cloakroom in their overcoats with newspapers stuffed in their pockets. D’Annunzio bought this villa just after the First World War when it was not much more than a small farmhouse. He named it the Vittoriale which meant roughly, “signifying victory,” and set about enlarging and rebuilding it to his taste. It is filled with books, sculpture, grand pianos, bas-reliefs, and all the memorabilia of his life, even the airplane in which he flew over Vienna.

On the days I was there, few other visitors appeared. The grounds were empty except for an occasional workman. In one of the outlying buildings a large exhibition of photographs of D’Annunzio’s life was in its final, unattended days. I had taken a tour of the main house the day before and now wanted to go through slowly with a notebook. The guide had wandered off and I was alone in a room when a man engaged in replacing a light bulb suddenly noticed me and, straightening up, demanded what was I doing? Photography or making notes was absolutely forbidden, he said. An argument began and finally the guide agreed we would have to obtain permission. We walked down to the administrative offices near the gate. The president of the Vittoriale was not in but an assistant, a woman in her fifties, came out to see us. I explained that I was a writer interested in D’Annunzio. I had taken the tour and was merely going through again and making notes. I showed her some pages.