But in the summer of 1940 my private war was still intermittent. I had a lot of fun, climbing trees, playing cowboys and Indians, learning to chant, with appropriate actions:
Underneath the spreading chestnut tree
Mister Chamberlain said to me:
If you want to get your gasmask free,
Join the blinking ARP.
Of course gasmasks were distributed free anyhow. We had been fitted out, along with a queue of other people, in the front room of a semi-detached house stacked high with brown cardboard boxes. They caused a lot of hilarity at school when we had gasmask drill, giggling at each other in our weird rubber muzzles. We then had to march, or rather, stumble, in disorderly file down the long corridors to the school cloakrooms, which had been reinforced to double as air-raid shelters. It was hard going, since we could not see our feet and the celluloid window steamed up almost immediately. It was hot, and smelt funny, of rubber, and breathing was hard, suffocating work. We would have liked the Mickey Mouse masks, but these were only issued to very young children, who were much admired and envied in consequence.
During the short summer of 1939 there had been several excited reunions with friends or relatives who had managed to get out of Germany. My father’s older sister arrived, minus her luggage. A family with two sons, with whom I used to play in the old days, came to visit us on their way to the States. All this stopped with the outbreak of war. My grandparents had sent me a postcard with their photographs, passport size, pasted to it. I used to look at it a lot once the separation had become final, the silence broken only by a rare Red Cross letter. Some things, many things, had been left too late. It was better not to talk about them too much, not then, or even half a lifetime later. To do so was to arouse feelings of guilt and recrimination, even against the dead, which could never be stilled.
V. S. Naipaul
[1932-]
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in the small town of Chaguanas, Trinidad. In 1938 he and his family moved to Port of Spain. Naipaul attended Queen’s Royal College from 1942 to 1949, and in 1949 he won a Trinidadian government scholarship to study abroad. In 1950 he left Port of Spain for University College, Oxford, where he decided that once he had taken his degree he would become a writer.
In 1954 Naipaul worked in the cataloguing department of the National Portrait Gallery in London – one of the few non-literary jobs he ever held. Between 1954 to 1956 he also worked for the BBC, as a writer and editor for the programme Caribbean Voices. In 1955 he married a former Oxford student, an Englishwoman named Patricia Ann Hale, and by 1958 was a regular contributor to the New Statesman. During this time, Naipaul began to write short stories which were later collected in the volume Miguel Street (1959), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961. His first published work, however, was the Dickensian comedy The Mystic Masseur (1957), which describes its main character’s estrangement from Hinduism and his subsequent rise to prominence as a guru. In 1961 he published A House for Mr Biswas. This novel, which many critics consider his masterpiece, is a fictionalized account of his father’s life.
The Middle Passage (1962), a non-fictional examination of Caribbean society, is the first of Naipaul’s travel books. He recounts his journeys to India in both An Area of Darkness (1964), written with the help of a Phoenix Trust Award, and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). During the earlier visit, Naipaul wrote his first novel with an English setting, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). From 1963 to 1979 he continued to publish novels at regular four-yearly intervals. In 1971, having already received all of Britain’s other leading literary prizes, Naipaul was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State; he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize again with A Bend in the River (1979). In late 1979 and early 1980 Naipaul travelled in the Middle and Far East, gathering material for Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).
Although he continued to write non-fiction during the mid-1980s, Naipaul, beset by illness and devastated by the deaths of his younger sister and his brother, Shiva (also an acclaimed writer), did not write another novel until 1987. That year he published The Enigma of Arrival, a deeply personal work that is at once an elegy for the vanishing English landscape and a reflection upon individual loss.
A perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Naipaul was knighted in 1990. His ‘diasporic sensibility’ has given power and purpose to his substantial body of work. When writing about Trinidad in particular, Naipaul has often been harsh and uncomplimentary. This has led many critics to question his right to be considered a ‘Third World writer’, yet Naipaul insists that his work – in which he seems to uphold the core values of Western civilization while keeping a concerned and often ironic eye on his Caribbean and Indian background – is born not of anger but of acceptance. In 1994 his ‘novel’ A Way in the World suggested that Naipaul was becoming both increasingly frustrated with the novel form and more purposefully meditative. A pillar of the British literary establishment, Naipaul continues to live in England.
V. S. Naipaul’s fictional account of his first encounter with England, from The Enigma of Arrival (1987), suggests a tone that is entirely different from that of his West Indian-born contemporaries. The writing is elegant and detached, but there is a nervous hesitancy to the voice that one feels is a by-product more of the narrator’s youth than of any fundamental lack of confidence that Naipaul may have in his own abilities. As in C. L. R. James’s essay, Naipaul’s West Indian narrator is quick to display his cultural knowledge, and one imagines that it will not be long before the young man penetrates the veneer of English diffidence and begins to vigorously engage with and challenge the society.
The Journey
After the grey of the Atlantic, there was colour. Bright colour seen from the train that went to London. Late afternoon light. An extended dusk: new, enchanting to someone used to the more or less equal division of day and night in the tropics. Light, dusk, at an hour which would have been night at home.
But it was night when we arrived at Waterloo station. I liked the size, the many platforms, the big, high roof. I liked the lights. Used at home to public places – or those I knew, schools, stores, offices – working only in natural light, I liked this excitement of a railway station busy at night, and brightly lit up. I saw the station people, working in electric light, and the travellers as dramatic figures. The station lights gave a suggestion (such as the New York streets had already given me) of a canopied world, a vast home interior.
After five days on the liner, I wanted to go out. I wanted especially to go to a cinema. I had heard that in London the cinemas ran continuously; at home I was used to shows at fixed times. The idea of the continuous show – as the metropolitan way of doing things, with all that it implied of a great busy populace – was very attractive. But even for London, even for the metropolitan populace of London, it was too late. I went directly to the boardinghouse in Earls Court, where a room had been reserved for me for the two months or so before I went to Oxford.
It was a small room, long and narrow, made dark by dark bulky furniture; and bare otherwise, with nothing on the walls. As bare as my cabin on the Columbia; barer than the room I had had in the Hotel Wellington for that night in New York. My heart contracted. But there was one part of me that rejoiced at the view from the window, some floors up, of the bright orange street lights and the effect of the lights on the trees.
After the warm, rubbery smell of the ship, the smell of the air conditioning in enclosed cabins and corridors, there were new smells in the morning. A cloying smell of milk – fresh milk was rare to me: we used Klim powdered milk and condensed milk. That thick, sweet smell of milk was mixed with the smell of soot; and that smell was overlaid with the airless cockroachy smell of old dirt. Those were the morning smells.
The garden or yard or plot of ground at the back of the house ran to a high wall. Behind that high wall was the underground railway station. Romance! The sound of trains there all the time, and from very early in the morning! Speaking directly to me now of what the Negro in the New York hotel had spoken: the city that never slept.
The bathrooms and lavatories were at the end of the landing on each floor. Or perhaps on every other floor – because, as I was going down, there came up a young man of Asia, small and small-boned, with a pale-yellow complexion, with glasses, and an elaborate Asiatic dressing gown that was too big for him in the arms; the wide embroidered cuffs hid his hands. He gave out a tinkling ‘Goo-ood morning!’ and hurried past me. Was he Siamese, Burmese, Chinese? He looked forlorn, far from home – as yet, still full of my London wonder, my own success in having arrived in the city, I did not make the same judgement about myself.
I was going down to the dining room, in the basement. The boardinghouse offered bed and breakfast, and I was going down to the breakfast. The dining room, at the front of the house, sheltered from the noise of the underground trains, subject only to the vibration, had two or three people. It had many straight-backed brown chairs; the walls were as blank as the walls of my room. The milk-and-soot smell was strong here. It was morning, light outside, but a weak electric bulb was on; the wall was yellowish, shiny. Wall, light, smell – they were all parts of the wonderful London morning. As was my sight of the steep narrow steps going up to the street, the rails, the pavement. I had never been in a basement before. It was not a style of building we had at home; but I had read of basements in books; and this room with an electric light burning on a bright sunny day seemed to me romantic. I was like a man entering the world of a novel, a book; entering the real world.
I went and looked around the upper floor afterwards, or that part of it that was open to guests. The front room was full of chairs, straight-backed chairs and fat low upholstered chairs, and the walls were as bare as the walls everywhere else. This was the lounge (I had been told that downstairs); but the air was so still, such a sooty old smell came off the dark carpet and the tall old curtains, that I felt the room wasn’t used. I felt the house was no longer being used as the builder or first owner had intended. I felt that at one time, perhaps before the war, it had been a private house; and (though knowing nothing about London houses) I felt it had come down in the world. Such was my tenderness towards London, or my idea of London. And I felt, as I saw more and more of my fellow lodgers – Europeans from the Continent and North Africa, Asiatics, some English people from the provinces, simple people in cheap lodgings – that we were all in a way campers in the big house.
And coming back night after night – after my tourist excursions through London – to this bare house, I was infected by its mood. I took this mood to what I saw. I had no eye for architecture; there had been nothing at home to train my eye. In London I saw pavements, shops, shop blinds (almost every other one stencilled at the bottom J. Dean, Maker, Putney), shop signs, undifferentiated buildings. On my tourist excursions I went looking for size. It was one of the things I had travelled to find, coming from my small island. I found size, power, in the area around Holborn Viaduct, the Embankment, Trafalgar Square. And after this grandeur there was the boarding-house in Earls Court. So I grew to feel that the grandeur belonged to the past; that I had come to England at the wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which (like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy.
Such a big judgement about a city I had just arrived in! But that way of feeling was something I carried within myself. The older people in our Asian-Indian community in Trinidad – especially the poor ones, who could never manage English or get used to the strange races – looked back to an India that became more and more golden in their memory. They were living in Trinidad and were going to die there; but for them it was the wrong place. Something of that feeling was passed down to me. I didn’t look back to India, couldn’t do so; my ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a similar feeling of wrongness. In Trinidad, feeling myself far away, I had held myself back, as it were, for life at the centre of things. And there were aspects of the physical setting of my childhood which positively encouraged that mood of waiting and withdrawal.
We lived, in Trinidad, among advertisements for things that were no longer made or, because of the war and the difficulties of transport, had ceased to be available. (The advertisements in American magazines, for Chris Craft and Statler Hotels and things like that, belonged to another, impossibly remote world.) Many of the advertisements in Trinidad were for old-fashioned remedies and ‘tonics’. They were on tin, these advertisements, and enamelled. They were used as decorations in shops and, having no relation to the goods offered for sale, they grew to be regarded as emblems of the shopkeeper’s trade. Later, during the war, when the shanty settlement began to grow in the swampland to the east of Port of Spain, these enamelled tin advertisements were used sometimes as building material.
So I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers. It was of a piece with the abstract, arbitrary nature of my education, like my ability to ‘study’ French or Russian cinema without seeing a film, an ability which was, as I have said, like a man trying to get to know a city from its street map alone.
What was true of Trinidad seemed to be true of other places as well. In the book sections of some of the colonial emporia of Port of Spain there would be a shelf or two of the cheap wartime Penguin paperbacks (narrow margins, crudely stapled, with the staples rusting quickly in our damp climate, but with a wonderful colour, texture, and smell to the paper). It never struck me as odd that at the back of those wartime Penguins there should sometimes be advertisements for certain British things – chocolates, shoes, shaving cream – that had never been available in Trinidad and were now (because of the war, as the advertisements said) no longer being made; such advertisements being put in by the former manufacturers only to keep their brand names alive during the war, and in the hope that the war would turn out well. These advertisements – for things doubly and trebly removed from possibility – never struck me as odd; they came to me as an aspect of the romance of the world I was working towards, a promise within the promise, and intensely romantic.
So I was ready to imagine that the world in which I found myself in London was something less than the perfect world I had striven towards. As a child in Trinidad I had put this world at a far distance, in London perhaps. In London now I was able to put this perfect world at another time, an earlier time. The mental or emotional processes were the same.
In the underground stations there were still old-fashioned, heavy vending machines with raised metal letters. No sweets, no chocolates came from them now. But for ten years or so no one had bothered to take them away; they were like things in a house that had broken down or been superseded, but remained unthrown away. Two doors away from my boardinghouse in Earls Court there was a bomb site, a gap in the road, with neat rubble where the basement should have been, the dining room of a house like the one in which I lived. Such sites were all over the city. I saw them in the beginning; then I stopped seeing them. Paternoster Row, at the side of St Paul’s Cathedral, hardly existed; but the name still appeared on the title page of books as the London address of many publishers.
My tramps about London were ignorant and joyless. I had expected the great city to leap out at me and possess me; I had longed so much to be in it. And soon, within a week or less, I was very lonely. If I had been less lonely, if I had had the equivalent of my shipboard life, I might have felt differently about London and the boardinghouse. But I was solitary, and didn’t have the means of finding the kind of society I had had for the five days of the Atlantic crossing.
There was the British Council. They ran a meeting place for foreign students like me. But there one evening, the first time I went, I found myself, in conversation with a bored girl, turning to the subject of physical pain, a fearful obsession of mine, made more fearful with the war (and one further explanation of the austerities I practised at various times). I began to talk of torture, and persevered, though knowing it to be wrong to do so; and was so alarmed by this further distortion of myself (more distorted than my behaviour during the flight to New York, first with the Negro in Puerto Rico, then with the Englishwoman in the seat beside me) that I never went to that British Council place again, for shame.
I had only the boardinghouse and that curious, mixed, silent company of English people, Europeans in limbo, and a few Asiatic students to whom English was difficult. And perhaps that boarding-house life might have meant more to me if I were better read in contemporary English books, if, for example, I had read Hangover Square, which was set in the very area just eleven years or so before. A book like that would have peopled the area and made it romantic and given me, always needing these proofs from books, some sharper sense of myself.
But in spite of my education, I was under-read. What did I know of London? There was an essay by Charles Lamb – in a schoolbook – about going to the theatre. There were two or three lovely sentences – in another schoolbook – about the Embankment, from ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’. But Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street was just its name; and the London references in Somerset Maugham and Waugh and others didn’t create pictures in the mind, because they assumed too much knowledge in the reader. The London I knew or imaginatively possessed was the London I had got from Dickens. It was Dickens – and his illustrators – who gave me the illusion of knowing the city. I was therefore, without knowing it, like the Russians I was to hear about (and marvel at) who still believed in the reality of Dickens’s London.
Years later, looking at Dickens during a time when I was writing hard myself, I felt I understood a little more about Dickens’s unique power as a describer of London, and his difference from all other writers about London. I felt that when as a child far away I read the early Dickens and was able with him to enter the dark city of London, it was partly because I was taking my own simplicity to his, fitting my own fantasies to his. The city of one hundred and thirty years before must have been almost as strange to him as it was to me; and it was his genius to describe it, when he was an adult, as a child might have described it. Not displaying architectural knowledge or taste; not using technical words; using only simple words like ‘olld-fashioned’ to describe whole streets; using no words that might disturb or unsettle an unskilled or unknowledgeable reader. Using no word to unsettle a child far away, in the tropics, where the roofs were of corrugated iron and the gables were done in fretwork, and there were jalousied windows hinged at the top to keep out the rain while letting in light and air. Using, Dickens, only simple words, simple concepts, to create simple volumes and surfaces and lights and shadows: creating thereby a city or fantasy which everyone could reconstruct out of his own materials, using the things he knew to recreate the described things he didn’t know.
To Dickens, this enriching of one’s own surroundings by fantasy was one of the good things about fiction. And it was apt that Dickens’s childlike vision should have given me, with my own child’s ideas, my abstract education and my very simple idea of my vocation, an illusion of complete knowledge of the city where I expected this vocation to flower. (Leaving room at the same time, fantasies being what they are, for other, late-nineteenth-century ideas of size and imperial grandeur, which neither Buckingham Palace nor Westminster nor Whitehall gave me, but which I got from Paddington and Waterloo stations and from Holborn Viaduct and the Embankment, great Victorian engineering works.)
I had come to London as to a place I knew very well. I found a city that was strange and unknown – in its style of houses, and even in the names of its districts; as strange as my boardinghouse, which was quite unexpected; a city as strange and unread-about as the Englishness of South Wind, which I had bought in New York for the sake of its culture. The disturbance in me, faced with this strangeness, was very great, many times more diminishing than the disturbance I had felt in New York when I had entered, as though entering something that was mine by right, the bookshop which had turned out to have very little for me after all.
And something else occurred in those very early days, the first days of arrival. I lost a faculty that had been part of me and precious to me for years. I lost the gift of fantasy, the dream of the future, the far-off place where I was going. At home I had lived most intensely in the cinema, where, before the fixed-hour shows, the cinema boys, to shut out daylight or electric street light, closed the double doors all around and untied the long cords that kept the high wooden windows open. In those dark halls I had dreamt of a life elsewhere. Now, in the place that for all those years had been the ‘elsewhere’, no further dream was possible. And while on my very first night in London I had wanted to go to the cinema for the sake of those continuous shows I had heard about, to me the very essence of metropolitan busyness, very soon now the idea of the cinema, the idea of entering a dark hall to watch a moving film, became oppressive to me.
