It’s no wonder that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was superb at adapting the work of other writers for the screen. She was an exemplary writer herself, and she had the wisdom to see what was most brilliant in the work of other writers and to help it to shine. Her scripts for Merchant Ivory films of works by E. M. Forster and Henry James, and several of her own novels, step away from the written word to illuminate the author’s characters, settings, and mostly thorny plots.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was Jewish and born in Cologne, Germany. She escaped to England with her family in 1939. She wrote, “Attending school and university in London, I received an English education that has remained as the backbone to support me throughout all subsequent encounters in very varied circumstances.” She married C. S. H. Jhabvala in 1951, and they lived in India for twenty-five years. Collaborating for forty years with filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory meant living part of the year in New York, then mostly settling there.
Jhabvala wasn’t a cozy writer, though she was funny. Whatever she had experienced in her life, whatever feelings she harbored about her characters or the real human beings who might have inspired them, she kept herself in the background, and perhaps for this reason her readers were free to laugh, smile, or cry, or to put the book or story aside for a moment to feel the heat and the dust of India, or shiver from the damp chill of a London winter.
Central to her work, as to the work of Anton Chekhov, V. S. Pritchett, and William Trevor, was Jhabvala’s indifference to whether or not the reader might find her characters appealing. Many of her characters are frustrating, even distasteful, and those who shamelessly make use of others most often triumph in worldly terms. Meanwhile, the weak and the passive exhibit real tenacity, trapped though they are by their loyalty and love for the rotten ones; they are determined to persevere in their quiet lunacy. The weak don’t care for the world or its opinion. They are free in a way that the triumphant narcissists can never be.
Jhabvala won two O. Henry Prizes, the first in 2005 for “Refuge in London,” set in an English boardinghouse filled with European refugees. The narrator says that she’s in many ways the same as the other girls at her boarding school: “But I wasn’t, ever, quite like them, having grown up in this house of European émigrés, all of them so different from the parents of my schoolfellows and carrying a past, a country or countries—a continent—distinct from the one in which they now found themselves.” Jhabvala was both like and not like her narrator and the refugees who fascinated her.
Jhabvala’s second O. Henry, in 2013, was for “Aphrodisiac,” set in India and about the downfall of a rather silly, lazy man who develops a passion for his sister-in-law. Jhabvala wrote about “Aphrodisiac”: “The origin of this story was not an incident or a character but a situation—and one that has often fascinated me: someone’s desire for another turning into an obsession that destroys all of his nobler qualities and higher striving.” Her statement sums up a characteristic of her work, that behind the story is a human situation and her observation about it. Her fiction is based on the notice her keen mind took without judgment of the way some people live, even though her characters themselves are often quite concerned with morals and ethics and are quick to judge others. After describing the characters and conflicts in “Aphrodisiac,” Jhabvala wrote: “I have to admit that none of this came to me consciously but evolved within the situation itself: so by the time I had finished writing (as often happens to me at the end of a story) I looked at it and wondered: ‘So that’s what it was all about.’ ” Her fiction was driven by her intellect and instinct, and her curiosity about her characters, who often seem doomed, not by fate, but by themselves as they give in time and again to their obsessions and illusions.
Toward the end of her life, Jhabvala wrote about her love of the short story form: “And after all that writing, I now write only short stories, which I love for their potential of compressing and containing whatsoever I have learnt about writing, and about everything else.”
—Laura Furman
Austin, Texas