Books
Jordan, Patrick
l l l l l l Books: ANTI-IMPERIALISM & ASCETICISM A CCORDING to Raghavan Iyer (The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi), more books and essays have been written about Gandhi...
...I had the most curious feeling they w e r e . . , against Gandhi...
...Gandhi quoted Tolstoy's parables and metaphors so freely he was unconscious of borrowing them...
...Gandhi's influence was muted, India partitioned into separate Hindu and Muslim states wracked with religious civil war...
...Gandhi's autobiography or "experiments with truth," has been reissued to capitalize on recent interest...
...Not only do we now have a monumental corpus of writing by and about Gandhi, we have a major film and the criti4 May 1984:281 each other's works, and briefly corresponded...
...Their mode of dealing with reality i s essentially kenotic, premised on self-emptying...
...There are other publisher's as well...
...And he brings to bear a knowledge of the Russian language and Indian and Russian literature as well as his own extensive literary background...
...What is evident is that despite Ben Kingsley's gifted portrayal in the film, he is clearly not the real Gandhi...
...The work hums with an inner motivation and consistency...
...Green is a master of design...
...movie is "a fraud of the most egregious By thus stating the question, Green adkind," "straight pacifist disinforma- dresses each of his readers...
...But nier's The Gandhi Nobody Knows first Green's apostrophes are strictly inappeared in Commentary as a review of tended, directed solely to situate...
...He employs this mechanism on a broader scale with Gandhi and Tolstoy...
...Yet when Gandhi went to Bengal in 1947 to attempt reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims, one of his last great acts, he pointedly said, "I have come not to give consolation but to bring courage...
...He utilizes similar skills in his own writing...
...He named his communal farm in South Africa Tolstoy Farm, and said that days there were the deepest days of faith in his life...
...Tolstoy called himself a yurodivi, one of God's fools...
...Grenier's opin- never dally, but rather add concreteness ions of Gandhi are neither revelatory nor to the vital issues with which Green ino clarifying--Gandhi mentions them all tends to wrestle...
...Such men will inspire antipathy...
...But it was always to be felt in him, and as a quite unashamed presence...
...As a literary critic, he has a genius for picking subject matter, and a special nose for whatever framework supports a literary work...
...Lord Mountbatten said that Gandhi's allies stalked Gandhi...
...A more satisfying pictorial biography, and perhaps the best introduction to Gandhi to boot, is Eknath Easwaran's Gandhi the Man...
...Gandhi admits he nearly slipped...
...He seems to be that rarest of contemporaries: one who not only Calls attention to but understands paradox...
...Green calls his Tolstoy and Gandhi a "biography...
...Both viewed political societies sub specie aeternitatis...
...One of the last entries in ~ Tolstoy's diary was in praise of Gandhi...
...In the end, Tolstoy fled a domestic hell, hated by his own family...
...He directed that force primarily against his own appetites, against his body, and to some degree against aggression itself...
...The most recent significant contribution to Gandhian studies is the writings of Martin Green...
...Written twenty eventful years before his death, this is essential Gandhi...
...Martin Green's trilogy is a marvelous concurrence...
...Nor was Gandhi's own writing hand still...
...Thus, writes Green, "The Russian revolutionaries looked to Tolstoy as their major opponent on the left...
...They deserve scrutiny precisely because they performed the paradox of turning power" against itself, against all the truly sinister manifestaafterword for Gerald Gold's pictorial tions of that lust...
...Not only do Gandhi and Tolstoy keep our minds alight, as Green writes, "even if or as we go down to disaster," but in his own way Green performs a similar service...
...A person is known by the number and qualities of his enemies...
...Green notes that in 1920 when Gandhi was acquiring national leadership, he became erotically drawn to Saraladevi Chaudhrani, the wife of a nationalist leader...
...Nehru's difficulties typify our own...
...its experiments come off as real works-in-progress recounted...
...He so entwines their lives and thought that he needs but the singular...
...biography...
...Before there was a term for nonviolence, for example, Gandhi was forced to run a contest in his paper Indian Opinion to invent one...
...A PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY Gerald Gold...
...He approaches his material with precision...
...Gandhi and Tolstoy are the greatest antiimperialists not because of their intellectual magnitude but because they attack the very logic of such power...
...Gandhi himself noted he was "a back number...
...AN AUTOBINRAPHY THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH Mohandas K. Gandhi Beacon Press, $8.95 paper, $28 pp...
...erword by Pdchard Attenborough Newmarket Press, $9.95 peper, 192 pp...
...Concomitantly, Gandhi and Tolstoy questioned the revolutionists and deplored industrialism as inherently explorative...
...Gandhi concerned with the lust for power built is "more complex.., more interesting into our i m a g i n a t i o n . . , into our than the character on the screen...
...Green makes no claim fiom the film...
...The winner was satyagraha or "firmness in truth," "nonviolence...
...Their ethics and their politics are rooted in sacrifice...
...He begins with their similarities, for, he says, contrasts only make sense within a context of similarity...
...His early study on Yeats and yon Hiigel noted that von Hiigel's reconciliation of humanism and Catholicism was responsible for Green's own conversion...
...Tolstoy and Gandhi is the final installment of a trilogy entitled The Lust for Power...
...I was s a v e d . . , but I don't know how...
...Commonweal: 282...
...His literary works consist of eighty volumes and better than ten million words...
...Tolstoy and Gandhi admired the revolutionaries of their time but stood in steadfast opposition to their goals and means...
...I did not prove an ideal father," he writes...
...Green seems to agree with Gandhi and Tolstoy that "the only root of effective anti-imperialism is ascetism...
...Gandhi views himself in these pages with science-like detachment and selfhumor, with a readiness to acknowledge incompleteness...
...IRE 6ANDHI NOBODY KNOWS Richard Grenier Thomas Nelson, $3.95 Paper, 120 pp...
...Gandhi's vow (1906)of brahmacharya, renunciation of sexual activity and even sexual desire, is akin to Tolstoy's teaching on sexuality in The Kreutzer Sonata...
...As the vehition...
...We can hope that as his writings seek to clarify his own struggles, they will continue to help us bear our own...
...His blows are falling too fast...
...Gandhi's nature," he writes, "was full of aggression...
...There is a note of "How tO novelty on this account...
...Martin Green has praised Gandhi's literary, style for its "range of tones, of humor, reasonableness, solemnity, and tenderness, all coaxed out of a surprisingly limited instrument...
...And thus, Green says, they are "essentially anti-humanist," a startling puzzlement for his readers for whom the principle of expansion and exfoliation are normative...
...The first volume, The Challenge of the Mahatmas (1978) was inspired in part by Green's visit to India in 1975...
...Gandhi paid dearly, and in full...
...In Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979) the second volume of the trilogy, he makes a telling comparison of Tolstoy and James Fenimore Cooper...
...Gold's rendering is strictly Most readers, of course, will already elementary...
...Richard Greered quickly, hemorrhage completely judge...
...It is replete with his remarkable candor, imagination, openness, and resolve...
...Green's study is of imperialist cultures...
...It should be noted, Green's works all have an autobiographical reference...
...The photographs doprovoke know there exists a significant relation interest...
...Rather his purpose is to make a In Green's trilogy the issue is: "I am bilious attack on Attenborough...
...So Green analyzes the enemies...
...Gandhi's religious politics were as radical and unintelligible to most as Tolstoy's...
...They encouraged me to challenge him...
...Whatever merit there might be to cle for examining power, he chooses Grenier's view, he never allows the Tolstoy and Gandhi because, he says, reader the moral distance necessary to they were both hugely powerful, in psyche as well as in objective accomplishment...
...ANDHI...
...But Gandhi can write: "'She recovTOLSTOY AND GANDHI, MEN OF PEACE A BIOGRAPHY Martin Green Basic Books, $23.50, 315 pp...
...Newmarket Press islife-threatening episodes, and one is re- sued three "tie-in" books with his film minded of Bernanos's statement that "I Gandhi...
...He was ever realistic, ever erect to the demands of the hour...
...Kasturba recovered...
...Gandhi as well as Tolstoy eventually forsook all positions of power...
...His early hesitancies about nonviolence had been overcome by reading Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You...
...He responded to much in Gandhi but was unwilling to respond to more...
...himself...
...Iyer, the political scientist, has written of Gandhi, but it could be said of Tolstoy as well, "While the best may often be the enemy of the good, an appeal to the best may be the only way, in certain circumstances, of arresting a rapid moral decline or even securing some good...
...Here Attenborough writes the well are we doing...
...He knows the dimensions of subtlety, can be swift and surgical, aquiline, and brilliant...
...Green is fully aware of their odd glamour, their overawing features and moral fissures...
...Attenborough compares photo- between Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Gangraphs of the real Gandhi with still shots dhi (1869-1948...
...Again we are addressed...
...They the Attenborough movie...
...His autobiography merits the term classic...
...Gandhi promoted detailed schemes of self-help...
...Gandhi looked on himself as Tolstoy's spiritual son...
...The radicalism as well as our conservatism...
...I saw there at once that nations, like individuals, could only be made through t h e agony of the Cross, and in no other way...
...She was beautiful, a woman of broad cultural education...
...Green is also a highly skilled writer...
...Green tells of Gandhi's reaction to a crucifix he viewed in the Vatican in 1931 while returning from the Round Table Conference in London...
...l l l l l l Books: ANTI-IMPERIALISM & ASCETICISM A CCORDING to Raghavan Iyer (The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi), more books and essays have been written about Gandhi than any figure in history, excepting the founders Of the great religions...
...Patrick Jordan cism it has engendered...
...Green writes that as Gandhi found himself an embodiment of power,"eroticism and a general expansion of the self was an inevitable temptation...
...Nehru, abandoning him, took India down the route of modem development...
...When he objects, on religious grounds, to medical treatment being given Kasturba, his wife, who is hemorrhaging, she agrees to forego the treatment and settles for Gandhi's naturopathic nostrums...
...Both read believe only where I pay dearly...
...stopped, and I added somewhat to my Attenborough has had his day at the reputation as a quack...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 9
