John is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word [Hardcover]

Ved Mehta (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 241 pages
• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd (October 18, 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0436552809
• ISBN-13: 978-0436552809
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,256,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pleasures of Literacy, January 17, 2000

By 

Ramnath Subbaraman (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word (Hardcover)

John is Easy to Please is a collection of six pieces written over a period of nine years for the New Yorker, where Mr Ved Mehta was a staff writer. These essays - the longest running to 58 pages, and the shortest to 10 pages, focussing on a variety of people, are unified by what Mr Mehta calls in his foreword 'the ancient theme of the tongue and the pen'. The brief foreword again suggests that these are accounts of his encounters with literate personages - George Sherry, UN interpreter; Sir William Haley, English editor and broadcaster; Sir Basil Blackwell, Oxford bookseller; Ram Babu Saksena, Urdu translator and critic, R K Narayan, Indian novelist and Noam Chomsky, American linguist. But it is more than that.

For it seems to be Mr Mehta's style to create the context - intellectual as well as physical - and draw you gradually and almost imperceptibly into his world, till you see and feel what he does. Thus in 'Quiet Beneficent Things' you are served with a good measure of the British book-selling business before you meet Sir Basil. In 'The Train had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station' the context creation and conversation with Narayan progress simultaneously. In what is certainly one of the best pieces on the legendary Indian novelist, Mr Mehta must have added his affection to the ink - we grow to love Narayan by the minute.

Mr Mehta's focus is not always on personalities. 'The Third' is more on BBC's high brow radio programme than on any individual. But Mr Mehta's descriptive power is so good that you feel a personal loss when you learn, in a post script, that "Alas, your description of the Third Programme has become a historical record of a cultural phenomenon that could not survive the dawn of the nineteen seventies". 'John is Easy to Please', the piece that gave its title to the book, again is more an exposition of transactional grammar, than of Noam Chomsky, its proponent or even of his espousal of radical politics, for which he was becoming increasingly popular at that time.

In the foreword, Mr Mehta writes that these people "might well be surprised to find themselves in the same room.....The gathering would indeed be a bizarre one - at once flamboyant, Promethean, ironic, romantic, tender and intellectual - but for me it would be Heaven". In the room that Mr Mehta - with his feel for information, and mastery of English prose - has created, for me too it was Heaven.