No home for Mr Biswas

Ferdinand Mount

Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (Andre Deutsch £7.95)

V. S. Naipaul

Does man qualify as a migratory species? Or are human migrations too random, violent and erratic? Seen from some more placid planet which counts in centuries, Earth must look like one long rush hour: empires waxing and waning, Goths and Vandals sweeping across the steppes, Vikings and Normans across the seas, pioneers, pilgrims, settlers, convicts, slaves and indentured labourers all moving vast distances under varying compulsions. 'et in literature, migration does not crop up all that often. There are plenty of books euc'llt strangers arriving and unsettling ,stablished communities; there are also books set in imperial or colonial worlds, about the struggle to convert or dominate alien lands and alien peoples. But there is rather less writing of quality about the ex- Perience of being unsettled. Even writers ;:bo use a foreigner to represent The Out- siclier tend to use him mainly for un-local ,,31°11r; Joyce chooses Bloom for Ulysses, ',.43t because he is interested about what it '07s like to be Jewish in Dublin at the turn r. the century but because he is interested in klublin and in being Irish at the turn of the century. ii And perhaps this is not so odd: writers The to write about substance not absence. de,e, gaPs in the substance are to be te""2"3red, not explored; Sappiness is a fissting, elusive kind of subject. And then there is mc. Political aspect. To describe the ,iinsettled individual and the half-made :uociety, or the immigrant society mimicking poine other society, is not the way to easy PillaritY. How much more attractive to

celebrate the rich diversity of English life,

or 4self as the struggles of Azania to realise 1'f as a nation. Writers, especially in the Un century, have stood in an extremely 13, easy relationship towards both nationali- fatal Ilfdr socialism; the better ones tending to u fascism, the less good being equally ert,id,ed about communism; both sorts ill at ease with the Immigrant — the 4,100 fascists tending to brutish abuse prettlrld, Eliot and Co.), the pro-socialists eicteen?cling that nationality was a trivial ac- which time and revolution would ssOlve, V S. Naipaul's work is therefore

remarkable in several ways; that he has written first and last, for nearly 30 years, about unsettled individuals and unsettled societies — which, after all, comprise a large proportion of the world's population — without at any point deviating into the sentimental or the didactic, and without falling for any of the comfortable cure-alls

that will soothe or explain away the realities: not religion, or socialism, or capitalist development, or indeed political enthusiasm of any sort. He never fails to take careful aim. His scorn withers its vic- tims without parching the surrounding landscape; his pity for the helpless and the bewildered does not drench the continent; and his capacity for farce is reined in, sometimes too much so for the reader who is constantly hoping for every page to be as funny as the funniest pages of A House for Mr Biswas. There is a continuing fineness of discrimination at work, an unwavering seriousness of purpose; temptations to take the easy scores are always resisted. This all makes him sound dry and getting drier; yet there is a glorious free swing about his most recent novel, A Bend in the River — a

triumphant proof that he has not lost the art of letting go.

Finding the Centre is a relaxation of another sort. In these two 'personal nar- ratives', Naipaul deviates from his usual retiring, almost mannered impersonality to offer what he calls a 'Prologue to an Autobiography'; this is followed by a piece — 'The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro' which shows the writer 'going about one side of his business' in a manner which has become familiar to us; here Naipaul is in the Ivory Coast, but the technique is the same as that which he has practised in India, the West Indies, the Middle East, the Congo and elsewhere:

To arrive at a place without knowing anyone there, and sometimes without an introduction; to learn how to move among strangers for the short time one could afford to be among them; to hold oneself in constant readiness for adven- ture or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along, up to a point, by ac- cidents; and consciously to follow up other impulses — that could be as creative and imaginative a procedure as the writing that came after.

Naipaul finds this kind of travel-work glamorous. He also finds it demanding and exhausting (to the rooted homebody, it sounds a bit bleak too.) Yet if the process uses him up, he also uses up the place: I travel to discover other states of mind. and if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adven- ture is over and I become anxious to leave.

I was reminded of the life of a profes- sional player of some highly lucrative sport, tennis or golf perhaps: the same round of hotels and airports; the same kind of meetings with the hangers-on and the of- ficials connected with the game, the equivalent of the expatriates and diplomats of whom Naipaul sees a good deal, and who are usually very helpful to him; and also the same need to keep one's game in good shape, not to go slack or go native, and to stick to the orange juice. As the player has to practise to retain the pure arc of his swing, so Naipaul has to keep his rootless- ness in trim. When the game is over, the player moves on.

This kind of wilful detachment makes some readers uncomfortable; it sticks out so flagrantly against the general mucking-in and joining-up.

A Map of the World, a recent play by David Hare, not one of his best, stars

Roshan Seth as an author who is un- mistakably modelled on Naipaul — witty, fastidious, uncompromising. The character is not treated wholly unfairly — although, towards the end, the play, like many plays, loses its way — and is given the best lines, certainly better than those given to the other rather disillusioned characters who are milling around the milieu of the same Third World conference. Still, the impres- sion is left that a writer, or indeed any per- son who does not associate himself wholeheartedly with the struggles of the Third World is a dubious character or, at the very least, poses a moral question.

This familiar misunderstanding about literature is widely shared by politicians and public persons of all sorts. The fallacy is that political commitment indicates warmth and humanity, while detachment is the sign of a cold fish and a dead soul. Yet what could be colder and deader than to shovel so many ill-assorted and ill-used beings into some huge makeshift bin of ideology or na- tionality? By paying attention to them as in- dividuals the author gives proper value to the diversity and poignancy of their ex- perience; to say that he immortalises their plight is not to say that he is indifferent to it.

Sometimes the only thing shared by such people is a sense of loss. Even those who prospered in the West Indies, like Naipaul's grandfather, often continued to think of In- dia as the real place and Trinidad as 'the in- terlude, the illusion'. When the SS Ganges arrived at Calcutta in 1932 with a thousand unhappy Indians who had served out their indentures in Trinidad, the ship was storm- ed by hundreds of other Indians who had been previously repatriated and now wanted to be taken back to Trinidad again.

This autobiographical fragment is dominated by the story of Naipaul's father, a story which he fully discovered only in 1970, 17 years after his father's death. An English journalist, Gault MacGowan, brought out to modernise the Trinidad Guardian, had encouraged Naipaul's father to become a sprightly reporter writing in an up-to-the-minute Fleet Street style. Then MacGowan left the island, Naipaul's father was reduced to a stringer, fell ill and had a nervous breakdown lasting years, becoming a listless wanderer, dependent on his wife's family. What had happened? From press cuttings Naipaul pieced the story together: his father had written a report mocking the superstition of local Hindus who were sacrificing goats to guard their cattle against paralytic rabies instead of having them vaccinated; he received an anonymous threatening letter in Hindi ordering him to perform the very same ceremony which he had criticised or he would die within a week. After blustering defiance in the col- umns of The Guardian, he then yielded to his terror, less of divine retribution than of the violent feuding gangs on the island, and performed the ritual sacrifice. His image of himself as a modern-minded, rational man collapsed. Caught between the borrowed ways and the inherited ways, the new home and the old home, the present and the past, life is an endless series of catches; there is no permanent lodge or purchase, no home for Mr Biswas.

In the Ivory Coast, celebrated as the most successful former colony in black Africa, Naipaul finds something different: a glimp-

The Spectator 5 May 084 se of an African Africa, an Africa which `has always been in its own eyes coMPlete' achieved, bursting with its own powers'. Something like this, a similar religious feeling, was, fleetingly, at the back of many of the slave revolts in the Carib' bean. The idea of African completeness endures in various Caribbean religt°tIs cults; and touches the politics ofthe region. Many of the recent political movements in the black Caribbean have had a millenarian, ecstatic, Intreb African side. Naipaul rather indulges this feeling, filid; ing in the feeding of the crocodiles roils the President's palace not only a tour!st sight but also a sinister, mysterious rite touched with the magic and power whic'' the President doubtless intended it to have. For Africans, we are told, the real world is the world of the night, the world of gh°5,i„s and magic; the world of the day, t"' Western world, seems rather childish to them; and when the Europeans go, their world will go with them. Here I think Naipaul strains for effect a little. After all a Chinese official touring Britain who strayed off the M4 and lost bids way and found himself watching Lec/re Bath's lions being fed, then took ref % from the weather in a tin but with a cross 01.1 it and there happened to find an old mail., a long robe mumbling in Latin and Placir1„7- small fragments of bread on the tongues his followers — such a highly rational pe.'e son might well feel somewhat uneasy as til.„ West-country rain drummed on the rugated iron roof. The idea of spirit.tu"' completeness is not confined to Afriea_; Country people almost everywhere have, °I. used to have, much the same feelings °A amused superiority as they conten1Plate;7 cthheildfrisahntfiacdsscurryings of townees with the' The sight of a stain on the wall °..feata modern flat in Abidjan where the tr°P rain has penetrated reminds the narrator:i. es oarml ieetrh: in, Ag frainca esxepeaptsritahtreouhgahs .saiBd t But ion itlhdiaot sense, England seeps through too. D° of most places. In 'The Crocodiles Yamoussoukro' we have in fact been cltilier ly, .unconsciously carried over the. h°rue which divides reporting from creating, 1.11:: setting down of experience from the w°' ing up of material, journalism from art'oh Yet the working up of mumbo-iumh., to jungle and keeps them there. It is their

which is to be told. is essential:1o,

• ts or) the strict sense of that term) Mr Naipaul's narrative; for the rntirat,e is jumbo is the background to the people ".,e really dealing with — the expatriates,lia`ii. marginal, the displaced, the and Europeans; this mixture of excitement, the fear is what lures them to the edge 01 force °f And story-telling is the driving for tive Naipaul's work: 'any attempt at .riarra,,ht can give value to an experience which otherwise evaporate away.' It is Prec_on, the inconsequential which most needs-t or sequences; the story which has no P°1 ,PAcjie twist which most needs a beginning,, m us and an end. The narrative im19` dignifies, sharpens, intensifies effects, whether of pathos or humour. Narrative and simplicity. How beautifully and clearly Paul starts his autobiographical frag- ment by telling the story of how he wrote Miguel Street, a collection of Trinidad tales Which has the carefree fluency of so many of his first books: he was sitting in a gloomy office in the BBC; he describes the room and he sets down the first sentence he tapped out on the old typewriter and the magical feeling of having written it: Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, 'What happening there, Bogart?' I read Miguel Street years ago; that first sentence brings it all back in a rush, and to recall the rush of pleasure is to present as moral a justification as any, if justification were needed, which it isn't.