The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe

For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger than myself, had moved with his family to New Mexico. At his desk I managed to write three books, beneath shelves containing editions of his work. I can’t explain why it took me so long to reach up and open those books, but when I finally did, it was extraordinary to discover how similar were our trajectories: same prep school and university; two young sons; novels set in North Africa and Peru; a gap year working on an Argentine estancia.

Until that moment, I had cultivated a self-protective disconnect with my landlords, hardly unique, indeed part of a tradition — rather like V.S. Naipaul behaved towards Stephen Tennant when living in Wilsford. I now thirsted to know more. Almost as surprising to learn was that Henry Shukman had been meditating on a mountainside in Santa Fe during the years I sat working in what had been his former ‘refuge’, as Buddhism calls it. Not only that, he had since become a Zen master. While I was realising correspondences at his old desk, he was rapidly erasing them, as if engaged in brushing the path clear. How he discovered and followed his path is the subject of this memoir.

The author’s background is illuminating, not least since it’s the subject of a 3,000-page ‘family novel’ that he worked on for 30 years and then, like a Sisyphean burden, discarded in favour of writing One Blade of Grass. Henry, the younger brother of the BBC science editor David, is the ‘rationalist’ son of two Oxford academics who were trained as spies. His professor father, Harold, was from a family of East European Jewish tailors who arrived in England as penniless refugees.