Sunrise with Seamonsters (17 page)

His contempt is severe; he mocks humbug and is impatient with the ignorant and the inept. He can manage his impatience tactfully. "Is this your poem?" he asked an African student who had submitted a handwritten piece of verse ("A New Nation Reborn") to him for comment. "Yes? Well, I've read it and I want you to promise me to give up poetry immediately. Don't be depressed. Look at me, I've never written a poem in my life! I'm sure your gifts lie in quite another direction. But you have beautiful handwriting."

But in Dar es Salaam he lost his temper and identifying an African who attempted to needle him as "our friend from the Gold Coast" created a very anxious moment. He is skillful at depicting rage in his books. For example, Singh's "blind, damaging anger" at the house-warming party in
The Mimic Men,
when the Roman-style house is wrecked; Mr Stone and Mr Biswas, whose tempers isolate them; and in one of the autobiographical parts of
In A Free State
he describes his confrontation with the rowdy bullying Italian tourists at Luxor (he defies the tourists and disarms the Arab). He loses his temper in India and analyzes the quality of the rage: "It was brutal; it was ludicrous; it was pointless and infantile. But the moment of anger is a moment of exalted, shrinking lucidity, from which recovery is slow and shattering."

Normally, Naipaul is a gentle and affectionate man, with a brilliant intellect, a remarkably decisive mind and a genius for inspiring friendship. His marriage is a confident, supportive influence, and intensely private, based on the respect which comes out of deep love. Pat Naipaul is devoted to her husband and awake to his moods; she has traveled great distances with him, knows his work better than any critic, and with some of
The Loss of Eldorado
acted as a patient and scholarly collaborator.
Though she is never mentioned in his books (in
An Area of Darkness
she is referred to once, with what seems calculated vagueness, as "my companion"), she is behind every word he writes.

If Naipaul had a country he would have made a useful diplomat for difficult postings. He has traveled to the interiors of India and Africa and South America, and crossed North America; he has reported on them. He speaks French well and Spanish with a Castillian accent (his Hindi is said to be shaky). He can move quickly and set himself up comfortably. He has had more home addresses than any man I know, but these addresses are impermanent: his household effects are nearly always in a warehouse.

Other people's stairs are steep, other people's bread is salty, said Dante of exile. For a writer there is a special curse in having to work among unfamiliar books and surroundings, on someone else's table, staring at another man's taste in wallpaper ("I see you put my wallpaper in
The Mimic Men,
" a Kenyan hotel-owner wrote to Naipaul). Once, Naipaul had a house in Stockwell. It was in poor condition when he bought it, but (Georgian, detached, in a quiet crescent) it had possibilities. He redecorated it, furnished it, put in double-glazing, central heating—and went to Africa. Less than two years after returning from Africa he sold the house, moved into a hotel, then into a. friend's house, and finally went to California. It makes moving for him something like the colonial ideal on a small scale, setting a place on its feet and then withdrawing from it. The Srinagar "Hotel Liward," where Naipaul was a guest (he gives it a chapter of
An Area of Darkness),
actually improves with his residence, as he puts idling employees to work, reminding them of their duties, encouraging them in their skills.

Both in his writing and in his daily life he is a perfectionist. Never late himself, he punishes the unpunctual. If you are late for dinner he might start without you; then you arrive when other guests are eating, beginning your first course when others are halfway through their second: the embarrassment is all yours, and you're left holding the grapefruit, as it were. I stayed with Naipaul in London. We were invited out to dinner; the host's car was to be sent to collect us, and Naipaul had autographed one of his novels as a present. But the car was an hour late, and the signed novel was left behind. An African had an appointment with him in Nairobi. The African was very late; he had, he said, run out of petrol. "He was lying," said Naipaul afterwards. "Everyone's late here—what else could he say?" In East Africa, a place noted for its unpunctuality, Naipaul insisted things should start on time, and eventually, where he was concerned, they did.

"I still have a great instinct towards great happiness and delight and pleasure," Naipaul says. He will share his enthusiasms (on which he has read all the literature) with any friend who shows an interest. He is
knowledgeable about cricket, movies of the 'forties, snuff, architecture, fine wine, Indian art and politics, exploration, military strategy and topography, and printing (once on the Oxford train he breathed on the window and sketched half a dozen styles of typeface for me); and he is an astute graphologist as well.

"He's a tormented man," Naipaul said of a man who appeared to me rather unflappable.

I doubted this. How did he know?

"His handwriting." Naipaul winced. "Tormented."

Mention someone's name and Naipaul's first reaction might be, "An interesting hand. Even upside down it's still revealing."

His wit makes him a delight to know. When two Chinese, both named Wong, were deported from East Africa at a time when Europeans were getting preferential treatment, Naipaul commented, "Well, two Wongs don't make a white." Everyone he has met remembers something of him. The West Indian lady says, "Man, I'll never forgive him for saying, 'A banana a day keeps the Jamaican away'"
^*
; a lady he stayed with in the States remembers, "He said he would never live in a place where he couldn't get Gloucester cheese"; the host in Africa respects him for insisting on Schweppes soda, the hotel-owner in Kenya says, "When Naipaul stayed here I had to buy a new cookbook, a vegetarian one." "A very curious man," says a doubtful English lady. "He said he'd given up sex." A literary person recalls him saying that
Mr Stone,
the story of an English clerk on the verge of retirement, is "my most autobiographical book." In a Soho
trattoria
he leaned across the table and said to me, "Don't you think the British government should sell knighthoods at the post office?"

He writes steadily, but slowly ("to achieve a writing which is perfectly
transparent"),
on unnumbered pages, using few notes, staying with a book without a break to the end. Though he does little revision in the conventional sense he might, as he did with
The Mimic Men,
throw away 20,000 words. After typing a book he often recopies it by hand
(Mr Stone
takes up the whole of a thick yellowing Indian ledger) and then types it again. Understandably, the writing of a book exhausts him like a sickness,
and after each book he has a period of recovery, a convalescence during which he reads, usually puffing a plump Amboseli meerschaum, in his pajamas and dressing gown. "I dress for dinner," he explained to me once, and he laughed. But of
Mr Biswas
he wrote, "... he was given strength to bear with the most difficult part of the day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times was for him almost like an act of sacrifice."

He has considerable courage, a refined sense of order and an unswerving literary and moral integrity; his eye, attentive for the smallest detail, can give an apparently common landscape or unremarkable physique many features. The decision to begin the long labor of writing a novel, with all the penalties of solitude, is an enormous one. "You do your work; you do it over long periods of total isolation," Naipaul says. "It's a rather horrible life ... You become crankish—I used to wonder why all the writers I got to know were all so crankish. I understand more and more; it's the sheer solitude and loneliness of the job!" While writing
Mr Biswas
Naipaul used to console himself with a fantasy: "I would imagine that a man would come to me and say, 'I'll give you a million pounds, if only you will stop writing; you must not finish this book.' But I knew I would have to say no." And he adds, "Well, today I wouldn't say no."

But he probably would. The designation
Writer
in his passport (a British passport but no more an indicator of his nationality than Conrad's was) describes him perfectly. He has never been anything but a writer; "I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved in people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one."

"And what's more," says Nikos Kazantzakis in his travel book,
England,
speaking of Englishmen traveling, "wherever they go, even the most backward, distant country, they are able to settle down comfortably, because everywhere, they carry England with them." But this is true, in varying degrees, of more people than the English. Consider the yams in Brixton market, the Bank of Baroda in Southall, or the exclusive American supermarket/PX at the US airbase in Ruislip. Like the
bidet
in the Congolese hotel, it indicates who is living—or who once lived—close at hand. All immigrants are colonists in the sense that they carry something of their national culture with them: ideas of comfort, religion, business and appetite are part of their luggage, you might say. The traveling Englishman's first act in the distant country was to give definition to the new landscape by naming—or re-naming. In Malaya he found an agreeable place and called it the Cameron Highlands; he remembered a king or an explorer or a trader on a road sign, and in front of his own veranda'd bungalow put up a board saying "Hillcrest" or "Cluny Lodge". It is an English trait—the colony, a blank landscape waiting to be dramatized with names, gave this passion full vent—and part of the comfort Kazantzakis speaks about derived from the familiar names. After the naming came the rituals and institutions, the club, the church, the school, the team, the drama group—English enthusiasms, enclosing and protecting the community. To seek admission to these was to seek to be English.

Kazantzakis was surprised and delighted by a great deal that he saw on his visit to England in 1939; much he found alien and strange: Sheffield (and the "appalling, depressing" "grime-stained" cities of Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester) "pained" him:

... faces smeared with smoke; smudges of coal on naked, girlish legs; factory after factory, all looking alike; horrid brick apartment houses; tormented expressions. The workers grave, severe, their eyes blue steel. This was the first and last time I would see them. But it was all I could do to stop looking at them.

He knew England through her literature, but he suggests that the literature had not prepared him for this horror (perhaps revealing a gap in his reading, an inexperience of the English novel). He read Shakespeare, "and this is the amazing thing—there is no human type so different from the Shakespearean hero as the contemporary Englishman". Kazantzakis repeated that he was from Greece, a hot indolent place, and though Greece's links with England have always been unique and strong, he thought of himself as an "Oriental":

I sometimes think that we of the Oriental, tormented, pain-steeped ports, where the air has been permeated with desires for thousands of years, are like crafty old men going to the innocent, barbarous, ephebic North, our eyes forever seeking, greedy, yet slightly tired and derisive, as though knowing everything. The races of the Orient are old ladies, heavy and primordial.

It is almost an English assessment of a particular kind of foreigner. And Greece is not far away. East Africa and Singapore are farther, but for a person like myself who has lived happily in these former English territories, England is not a strange place; it holds no terrors and few disappointments; a visit is like a return. Then, one must conclude that the English were more than successful in carrying their country abroad, for the England they carried was understandable to me, an outsider. If I had a surprise on arriving in England it was the unexpected confirmation of the accuracy of the literature and a convincing justification of reminiscences I heard in tropical bars. I had doubted certain things. I found descriptions of English sunlight and spring flowers hard to believe; I tended to think that a man's memory of a particular rural landscape exaggerated its color and emptiness, and could not help but feel that behind every English hill was an English factory belching smoke, and that the English people I knew overseas were escaping to a suitable climate, or else castaways from that rainy island who had chosen to live in a fantasy of Englishness that was permitted in a cut-price colony. And if the memory was not falsified, and the literature was accurate, why should the Englishman travel so far? Why not go home? The answer is in the small East African settlement, the club, the church, the school, moved intact from the mother country and offering protection. It is also something very different from this, a factor Mr Kazantzakis doesn't mention: the Englishman's appreciation of foreignness—he produced a whole library of the literature of expatriation. That appreciation is like another distinctly English trait, the pleasure in coping with adversity—hostility in awful climates—as real in the fenced-off compound in the tropics as in Britain during the winter power cuts when the householder's mood was curiously triumphant.

The English sense of order, the result of an habitual reflex rather than a systematic decree, gives the impression of a tremendous solidity and balance. It was carried abroad and it reassured those who could enter into it. English attitudes traveled without changing much, and to a large extent this accounts for some of the Englishman's isolation. The English overseas are accused of living a rather narrow existence, but the point is that they associate themselves deeply with a locality: in this sense all Englishmen are villagers. It shows in the special phrases they use when they are away, among "natives" or "locals."