The Winds of Wonder

Paul Richard about Rabindranath Tagore

It came about in a curious way. Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet who had been knighted by the British crown, came to Japan for a visit and was staying in Yokohama. He was accompanied by two Englishmen, a Mr. Pierson and Mr. Andrews, who had been missionaries and who were now teachers in his school at Shantiniketan. We had not met each other in India, but we had heard about each other, and in Yokohama we became friends. At that time he was preparing for a lecture tour in America, so I gave him the twelve articles to forward to my friend Hollenberg in Denmark, since there was no censorship of mail in America. But instead of sending the articles to Denmark, Tagore gave them to James Pond, his manager in New York. Pond liked the series, and told Tagore that he would publish them in book form if Tagore would write the introduction. Tagore kindly agreed, and the book was published under the title To The Nations.

All this took place without my knowledge, and I was quite surprised when Rabindranath came back to Tokyo and handed me a copy of the book. When Samuel Fleisher saw it, he was somewhat upset and angry with himself for being so hesitant, and then he went ahead with the whole series in his own newspaper as originally planned. If an American book publisher could risk it, so could he.

If I owe to Mira the stimulation for my books, it is Tagore whom I must thank for my epigrammatic style. Tagore was of course a master of this paradoxical form, and he called these thoughts “stray birds.” But in spite of the respect, affection, and gratitude that I felt towards him, I was often exasperated by his indifference to everything which did not gratify his need for beauty. The message of his sumptuous surroundings was “do not disturb the landscape,” but one day I could no longer bear it and I blew up. “How can you enjoy all this peaceful finery in a world at war and in agony?” I demanded. A week later, when he came to supper with us, I got my answer. “I have given a great deal of thought to what you told me and I concede the truth in it. But I cannot do otherwise; although I am not very old, I am very tired.” …

His [Tagore’s] candor took me by surprise and I felt somewhat guilty about lashing out at him, but some of his Indian colleagues were less charitable in their assessment. Sarodini Naju, for example, described the poet as a “professional beauty.” He was, in fact, one of those rarefied creatures whose entire lives have to be protected. When, as a young man, his family wanted to send him to England for his studies, he got no further than the port of embarkation. There the inconvenience of it all was simply too much for him, and he hastily returned home. He would never walk in the streets for fear of seeing some ugly sight, and he travelled in a private Pullman car in order to avoid having to sit with disagreeable people. On one occasion Mira and I shared his private coach to Nara, the ancient Japanese capital. Arriving there in the evening, we were surrounded by men bearing lanterns who seemed to be accompanying us from the station to the center of the city. Tagore was delighted, exclaiming: “How nice of them to have prepared such a welcome for me.” And we too might have been taken in, but for the fact that our young companion on the trip, an artist named Tetsuo Harasawa, whispered in my ear, “There was a famous Japanese comedian on the same train, and it is the custom to light the way for famous actors to the theatre.”

We then had dinner at the hotel and I was surprised to see Tagore order for himself a brochette of little birds. “How can you, a great poet, devour a plate of little birds?” I asked, but he made no attempt to explain.

There was indeed something “precious” about Tagore, in every sense of the term. He was not of this world, he was poetry in motion, and despite my disapproval he was to me an inspiration. “Gurudev,” the divine teacher, is what those closest to him called him. But to me he was Rupadeva, the god of forms around whom nature seemed to sing and dance. Great men must not be measured by their shortcomings, and Tagore’s greatness towered above his eccentricities.