Writers have been performers/ the close link between writing and performing is as old as the history of storytelling itself-Amitabh Ghosh/ The write

Are writers also performers? Amitav Ghosh doesn't agree. In a recent blog, he argues against this notion: "Writers and readers have not always stared each other in the face. Until quite recently most writers shrank from the notion of publicly embracing their readership."

He goes on to mention William Gaddis and Coetzee as examples of authors who refuse to read from their works, and suggests that doing readings is largely a twenty-first century phenomenon, "Through the last century the relationship between readers and writers was largely impersonal. The reader related in the first instance to a book, not to its writer; and writers, for their part, did not confront their audience directly in the manner of musicians, singers, actors and so on." Following Gaddis, he believes that by reading out aloud to audiences, by inserting themselves between the reader and the text, authors diminish the autonomy and integrity of their works.

Phenomenon

I disagree with Ghosh; let me begin with the twentieth century, and move back in time to the nineteenth and earlier, when, it seems to me, writers performed week after week, and enthusiastically so, across cities and continents, much like mega rock bands do now.

I don't feel that the autonomy of a book is affected by the act of the author reading from it. Books will make their own journey, and I agree with Ghosh that this is the primary journey. When I stumbled upon a Leonard Michaels collection in a Nanz supermarket at the turn of the century, I didn't know who he was. I found the book in a bin of remaindered titles. I bought it, forgot about it, read it years later, got hooked, then wanted to know more about the author. I bought his journals which gave me an insight into the kind of person he was. So books forge their own independent connections; I don't disagree with this.

Ghosh is a novelist, and like many novelists, he forgets poetry. Poets have always read from their work. Unlike novelists, poets are, almost always, excellent readers of their work. As a child I remember listening to tapes of Ezra Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes. I was mesmerised by their voices. As a student at Oxford, I remember going to packed readings by contemporary poets in beautiful medieval settings: Kathleen Jamie, Jo Shapcott and Tom Paulin. And recently I heard Eunice de Souza read her poems at the Mussoorie Literature Festival. As the sun set over the mountains, Eunice had the audience eating out of her hands, they were laughing one minute, thoughtful the next. They were in thrall to a higher god. I'm not even talking about performance poetry, a separate genre, here.

Coming to prose, David Sedaris is the best example of a contemporary writer whose writing flows on paper, as well as it does in live settings- he is often on America's National Public Radio; his readings attract large crowds. All these writers perform, they enjoy doing so, and it doesn't seem to affect a reader's individual appreciation of the writing.

Tradition

For often, when one is listening, one listens with one's eyes shut: the mind is free to make its own picture. Listening to an author read is not like watching a film where you are told how everyone and everything looks like.

The relationship between the book and the reader remains autonomous and creative; the act of reading out aloud doesn't interfere with this process.

The writer as performer is not a phenomenon of the crass new century. It was very much the done thing in the 1900s. Writers did it because they loved doing so, as also to make money. In fact, as the academic Robert Giddings has pointed out, the literary one-man show has a history going back to the bardic tradition. In later years, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Twain and Carlyle, all went on lecture tours. Commenting on Coleridge's remarkable stage presence, Hazlitt wrote, "His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought..."

As far back as 1881, Oscar Wilde was doing world tours, much like U2 or Lady Gaga do nowadays. In that year alone, he gave 140 lectures in 260 days. Mark Twain too was a consummate performer; William Dean Howells, writing about Twain, the performer, had this to say, "Twain was the most consummate performer I ever saw… on the platform he was the great and finished actor…" Lecturing for the author-half of Twain was perdition, wrote Howells, but for the actor-half, it was paradise.

Perhaps the greatest of the writer-performers was the man whose 200th birth anniversary was celebrated last week: Charles Dickens. Dickens wanted to entertain the masses and make money- he succeeded on both counts, making more than 45,000 pounds from his performances. Realising that reading to the public will cut out the publishing middleman, he began professional reading tours of his own. He paid close attention to the stage set-carpets, specially designed gas lighting, a sounding board; the props too were carefully chosen: a tumbler, a fancy decanter, a small bouquet of flowers. He enjoyed the power he had over audiences, once telling his wife, "If you had seen Macready last night - undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read - you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have power".

Dickens

The most remarkable thing about Dickens was that performance preceded his writing too. He performed in his room, then wrote, then performed again, this time on the stage. In a celebrated passage his daughter observes her father at his desk, "He suddenly jumped up from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung nearby, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making.

He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror.... the facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward, but evidently not seeing me, he began talking rapidly in a low voice... . he had not only lost sight of his surroundings, but had actually become in action, as in imagination, the creature of his pen."

Once on the stage, he would transform himself into his characters. An eyewitness account of one such performance, which appeared in a magazine of the time, gives us a sense of his skill, his commitment to acting out characters and situations, "Gradually warming with excitement he flung aside his book and acted the scene of the murder, shrieked the terrified pleadings of the girl, growled the brutal savagery of the murderer, brought looks, tones, gestures simultaneously into play to illustrate his meaning, and there was not one of those who had known him best or who believed in him most, but was astonished at the power and versatility of his genius..."

Is it any wonder then that at his final performance in 1870, 6,000 people were turned away at the door. When Dickens finished, he was crying.

On his 200th birthday, let's celebrate Dickens, the biggest writer-performer of them all, someone who showed that the two are closely entwined, not mutually exclusive, no matter what Amitav Ghosh says. Modern publishing and silly lit fests might have cast this relationship in a new mould, but the close link between writing and performing is as old as the history of storytelling itself.

- The writer's new book The Butterfly Generation was published recently