Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  Later in the trip we stopped at a hotel in a remote town. It was the only hotel. Naipaul said, "I'm not having dinner tonight." I was surprised—he hadn't eaten anything all day. He said, "I was here once before. I had a row with the manager. The waiters had dirty uniforms, and one put his thumb in my soup."

  He was fastidious about food, a strict vegetarian. He would not buy food at a market if it was uncovered. He would go hungry rather than eat meat. But he was curious about other people's eating habits, and on one occasion he bought a pound of fried locusts for his African driver and took delight in watching the African eat them.

  He was certain that the Indians in Uganda and Kenya would soon be expelled. He often asked Indians about their prospects in Africa. His questions were always direct and challenging. I was with him once when an Indian in Kampala told Naipaul that he was all right, and he explained that he had an elaborate plan for staying.

  I was convinced the man would be safe.

  Naipaul shook his head. "He was lying."

  Doubt, disbelief, skepticism, instinctive mistrust: I had never found these qualities so powerful in a person, and they were allied to a fiercely independent spirit, for his belief in himself and his talent never wavered. He was merciless, solitary, and (one of his favorite words) unassailable. No one had a claim on him.

  At last, he left East Africa. I stayed for two more years. We remained friends; we had some common interests. It did not matter to me that he had never mentioned my books. Once in an interview he was asked which writers he liked. He began by saying, "It would be easier to say who I don't like—Jane Austen, Henry James..."

  Nowadays I seldom see him—we have not met for three or four years. During the pointless Falklands War, Naipaul made a public statement. "When the Argentines say they are going to fight to the last drop of blood," he said, "it means they are on the point of surrender."

  I laughed! That was the surprising, provocative voice I had heard all those years ago in Africa. He was sometimes wrong, he was often shocking or very funny. He had woken me and made me think.

  "When I speak about being an exile or a refugee I'm not just using a metaphor, I'm speaking literally," Naipaul said in 1971, and that same year, as if to dramatize the statement, he lived in Wiltshire, the West Indies, South America and New Zealand. Some people still think of him as a Trinidadian, but when he flies to Port-of-Spain he has to produce an air ticket showing that he intends to leave. So much for being a Trinidadian. One considers his movements over the past thirty-two years and concludes that since he left Port-of-Spain in 1950 his life has been a series of onward bookings—or, speaking literally and figuratively, flights.

  In The Middle Passage he mentions that when he was in the fourth form he made a vow to flee Trinidad within five years. He fled after six. Ten years later he returned to the West Indies, examined half a dozen places, rejected them all and fled again. Back in London, which he considered a neutral territory, "a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew," he felt confined: "I became my flat, my desk, my name." He fled England; he sought India, and for a year was a resident. He traveled all over the Indian subcontinent, and in Srinagar wrote Mr Stone and the Knights Companion— the only novel in which he depicts English life. The end of his Indian experience was another flight, back to England via Madrid. "I had learned my separateness from India," he wrote in An Area of Darkness, "and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors." He is a tireless but reluctant traveler, like an unsponsored explorer without a compass in his work as in his life—for his characters share his homelessness; the awkward questions are "Where are you going?" and "Where are you from?"

  Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in the country town of Chaguanas in Trinidad in 1932, of a large Brahmin family which originated in India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At the age of seven he was taken to Port-of-Spain to live, and there he received his early education. One guesses that his upbringing was very similar to Anand's (Biswas's son) in A House for Mr Biswas, and there is much in Anand's nature that is in Naipaul's: "Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, an imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and [at ... Shorthills] contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable."

  In 1950, Naipaul came to England and was for four years at University College, Oxford. He married Patricia Hale, who had been a fellow student, in 1955, and published his first novel, The Mystic Masseur, in 1957. He has published eighteen books since then. Do a little arithmetic and you see that he was furiously reviewing fiction for the New Statesman (and was known as a particularly brutal critic) when he was in his mid-twenties; he wrote one of his masterpieces (he regards his first three novels as "an apprenticeship"), A House for Mr Biswas, at the age of 29, Mr Stone (which is about a Londoner of 62) at 30, An Area of Darkness at 32, The Mimic Men at 35. The Times described him as "the youngest of the W. H. Smith Award winners, and a quarter of a century light of the average". Naipaul explains what is already a shelf of his collected edition ("The Russell Edition"—his publisher has remained the same) by saying, "I was driven by an enormous tension." Even in the early books he gives the impression of being an older, reflective man, of wide experience and considerable learning, capable of wise judgment, with a mature style characterized by an exactitude of phrase. And yet he is now only fifty, and quite relaxed; he disliked Oxford scholarship; he bears only a passing resemblance to any of his heroes, and though he says in interviews that he feels his real work is behind him and that he visualizes simply "going silent", he is still game and on the move.

  He is a small, finely-made man with an expressive mouth that can draw itself into a sad grimace, eyes that become hooded and oriental with fatigue, and thick black hair which he flings back when he gives his deep, appreciative laugh. His hands are delicate and his wrists are the size that make a watch slip and flop like a bracelet. He speaks in carefully framed sentences and his voice is precise, and sometimes sharp, except when he pauses to say, "Do you see what I mean?" He often says, "But you knew that, didn't you?" when imparting a totally unexpected piece of information. He is a brisk walker, hard to keep abreast of, as he takes his unusually long marching strides. He eats well, but not hugely; he likes good restaurants and hotels, and can give a thorough report on most places he has eaten in—the decor, the condition of the waiters' uniforms, the treatment, the service ("Try the Lake Victoria," he told me in Uganda. "They warm their cups"). He is a reasonable vegetarian, out of preference rather than any Hindu stricture. I once asked him about it. It was a personal matter; he didn't caution me or proselytize. He made a face and said, "Biting through sinew. I couldn't do it."

  Writing demands an immense amount of physical stamina, and Naipaul's books exhaust him. His health is unreliable, occasionally frail—he is plagued by asthma and insomnia—but he can be energetic, even athletic: he does callisthenic exercises every evening, and in East Africa he was so disturbed by the punyness and heavy drinking of the other expatriates he stopped drinking and took to running a mile every day on a Kampala track in the tropical heat. His chief aversion is to noise and he considers most music as disquieting as the sound of a pneumatic drill. With this concern he is an inveterate double-glazer and he used to subscribe to a magazine called Noise. In his flat in Kampala, a place he detested for its raucousness, he drew my attention to a radio blaring upstairs and said through gritted teeth, "Listen to the bitches!" He abandoned the place soon after for a hotel in Kenya, miles from the nearest town, "where you might hear the odd Kikuyu shout, but that's all."

  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."

  Kazantzakis' England

  [1972]

  "And what's more," says Nikos Kazantzakis in his travel book, England, speaking of En
glishmen 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.