The clumsiness of a great writer
Francis King
THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL by V.S. Naipaul
Viking, f10.95
Although the blurb describes this work as a novel, mountainous waves of fact constantly burst into the still lake of its fiction; so that it is difficult to differentiate the one from the other. The narrator, in all four of its sections, is clearly Naipaul himself, a man of Indian stock born in Trinidad, who wins a scholarship to Ox- ford, settles after graduation in London, and eventually becomes a world-famous novelist. There are numerous references, although never by title, to Naipaul's books (particularly to In a Free State, which , somewhat surprisingly, since it is a collec- tion of novellae not a novel, won the Booker Prize in 1971), to his travels about the world, and to the family left behind him in the Caribbean. The whole of the second section, entitled 'The Journey' the least satisfactory of the four although full of fascinating passages — consists of some 70 pages describing how, having experienced the life of a larger world entirely through the reading of often out- dated and second-rate books, the young Naipaul embarked for Europe, to submit to the rites of passage, some demeaning and humiliating, some exciting and exhilar- ating, and some merely puzzling and deadening, that preceded his eventual acceptance into the alien and often hostile tribe with which he had decided to throw in his lot.
The wounds inflicted by these rites of passage are evident throughout — a phrase constantly, even obsessively, used is 'raw- ness of nerves', as though the physical jolts and jars of that journey from one culture to another had been accompanied by psychic ones. But so too is the lonely strength achieved through such wounds. The detachment -- wise, shrewd, perceptive, unjudging — brought by the'narrator to his observations of the little community among which he finds himself in the Wiltshire countryside, is akin to that brought by Somerset Maugham to the expatriate little communities of Malaya. Typical of this detachment is an incident described at the end of 'The Journey'. A woman with whom the youthful Naipaul carried on a flirtation in an Earls Court lodging-house writes to him, after many years of silence, to pour out her desolation. He feels that desolation, bordering on madness. Briefly, he makes it his own, with the empathy essential to a novelist. But he confesses: 'I didn't go to see her. It would have been physically hard for me to go where she was. And her disturbance, her instability. . . was too unsettling to me.' There is always something shocking in the self-protectiveness of writers. To write about a former friend's unhappiness is not `too unsettling', but to try to alleviate it is.
Even at its most fictional, in its superb descriptions of a rural community in a state of violent flux — the narrator is living in a cottage on a once extensive and well- tended but now diminished and run-down estate, industralisation is destroying all the ties that once linked the country-folk and the land that they farmed — one is always conscious in this book of a subsoil of fact. The narrator's landlord, never spoken to and glimpsed only twice, is a man who, after a pampered and protected childhood and 'a young manhood of artistic talent and promise and social frivolity', succumbs to a kind of accidie which confines him to his manor house. When one reads of his poetry and drawings and of his high- spirited, heartless short-story in verse, published in the 1920s, about a woman missionary in Africa who ends up in a cooking-pot, one at once wonders whether there is not more fact than fiction in the character. One wonders the same about this recluse's friend, a bookman (in the old-fashioned sense of the term) rather than a writer, who sucks up to the socially prominent and rich, earns a reputation for brilliance through occasional reviews and broadcasts, and eventually kills himself by swallowing too many sleeping pills after a bout of hard drinking. One wonders the same about the narrator's novelist friend `Tony'.
Naipaul is at his masterly best when he deals with the fates of a small group of people living either in or around the manor. A man shows a jaunty courage by driving up and down a perilous cart-track in order to visit the local to say his last goodbyes to his cronies two days before the death which he knows to be imminent. Another man murders his wife, after she has first eloped with the local central- heating engineer to Italy and then, no longer wanted, has returned home de- feated and disconsolate. These deaths and others similar to them, punctuating the book, suggest the mutable sweep of hu- man existence, like clouds perpetually forming, disintegrating and reforming over a landscape immutable in its bare essen- tials.
The book is an odd one. There is wearisomeness both in its repetitions of scraps of information already given to the reader and in the painstaking manner in which Naipaul describes every geographic- al detail of the area immediately around the manor. Often one has the sense that, so far from having grown organically, the whole work has been stitched together from isolated stories, fragments of stories, articles and passages of autobiography. Early on, Naipaul writes of some local cattle, malformed as the result of 'the mistakes of an industrial process'. 'Curious additional lumps had grown. . . as though these animals had been cast in a mould, a mould divided into two sections, and as though, at the joining of the moulds, the cattle-material, the mixture out of which the cattle were being cast, had leaked. . Similarly, in Naipaul's book, the materials from the two separate moulds of reality and imagination have not properly fused, and something has leaked away.
But, as even on the clumsiest and dullest of pages of another expatriate novelist, Conrad, so even on the clumsiest and dullest of the pages here, one is conscious of the spirit-imprint not merely of a good writer but of a great one.
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