A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

by V. S. Naipaul

  Slaves at a mill ground corn; it was an immemorial punishment. The mill would have been an everyday sight in the ancient world. There is a mill in the Odyssey; there is a mill in the second-century Metamorphoses by Apuleius; there is a mill in Salammbô. They are all dreadful places. In Flaubert’s mill (on Hamilcar’s estate) the slaves are muzzled so that they won’t eat the flour they are grinding; this is pure Flaubert, cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The truest description, which appears to be taken from life, is in Apuleius. The animals are in an awful way, with the hooves of the donkeys overgrown, to add to their torment; and the slaves are disfigured runts, their eyelids half caked with the smoke from the baking ovens, with letters branded on their foreheads and their half-shaved heads, irons on their legs, and their bodies seamed all over with the marks of old floggings. They are covered with dirty flour, the way the athletes in the arena were covered with dust (a detail that brings the arena to life).

  It is extraordinary that Cicero could contemplate a man, fairly educated, with social gifts, and recently acting like a free man, committed to that kind of hopelessness. But for Cicero, with his lawyer’s instinctive fierceness about slaves and his politician’s wish, in a disturbed republic, to maintain social order, Licinius the slave had simply been criminal and audacious to run away, and had put himself beyond the pale.

  He deals with this matter in a paragraph. Then he goes on, with Roman political news of 60 BC: “And now let me tell you what you most desire to know. The constitution is completely lost to us …”

  IF WE HAVE TO define modern sensibility in literature, we can, I suppose, say that it is one that in its assessment of the world brings all the senses into play and does so within a frame of reason. Virgil’s big poem, the Aeneid, is restricted in many ways, but in its restrictions, its simple landscapes and simpler theology, its celebration of earth rites, its simple ideas of history, it seems to take us straight into the official Roman world view. But it may be that in this poem Virgil was holding himself back; it may be that there was available to him another, more intimate way of looking and feeling—a strangely modern way—that could not be used in formal, imperial work.

  At the end of the two-volume Loeb edition of Virgil the editor prints eight minor poems which may or may not be by Virgil. One of these poems is “Moretum.” It is a hundred and twenty-four lines, five Loeb pages, and is a work of great beauty. The editor describes it as an idyll, which means a rustic or pastoral scene, though it is like no idyll I know. According to the editor, it is derived from a Greek poem, and is also a reworking of a century-old Latin piece; it has sixty-nine non-Virgilian words, and is too realistic to be by Virgil. But in the Georgics, Virgil’s poem about agriculture and country life, there are realistic passages which seem to be drawn from long observation; and Virgil would have known that realism of this kind would not have worked in the formal narrative and artificial landscapes of the Aeneid. The point about the authorship of “Moretum” is not really important, however; what is being suggested here is that Virgil would have known about the style of “Moretum,” and it would have been a style that was open to him.

  The poem is without any supernatural machinery. This immediately makes it closer to the reader. It begins at cockcrow on a winter’s dawn. Simylus, who works a smallholding, hears the cock and, lying on his poor bedding on the floor, awakes in the dark and straight away begins to worry about hunger later in the morning.

  He stretches out his hand to the fireplace. An ember from last night’s fire burns him. He gets up then, takes his lamp, uses a needle to pull out the wick, and holds the lamp at a slant against the coals which still have life; he puffs and puffs to get the wick to catch. It does, but it is not easy. He uses his hand to shelter the flame against draughts, and unlocks the closet door with a key. There is a small heap of corn on the ground. He uses a measure to take what he needs; sets his now faithful lamp (as he thinks of it) on a tiny shelf, which he has put up against the wall for just such a purpose. He is dressed in goatskin. He begins to work his little stone mill, pouring the corn from the top with his left hand, driving the wheel with his right, while the bruised grain runs down the lower stone. Round and round the wheel goes. He begins to sing a country song, and then from time to time he shouts for Scybale.

  She is his only help, and is perhaps a slave, though that isn’t said. She is a black African—the only black African I know in Latin literature—and, perhaps because she is unusual, she (unlike Simylus) is described in detail: curly hair, swollen lips, dark (fusca colore), broad-chested, her breasts hanging low, her belly flat, her legs thin, her feet broad and flat. Her shoes are torn in many places.

  Simylus tells her to put more logs on the fire and heat some cold water. (So far everything in the morning ritual has been physically explained: the dying fire from the night before, the little shelf for the lamp, the storage place in the closet for the grain, the little stone mill. But now some things are left out: we don’t know where the water came from and where it was kept, and we don’t know where Scybale slept.)

  Simylus finishes his grinding, puts the crushed grain in a sieve, and shakes it. The husks remain in the sieve, the pure meal drifts down. This meal he spreads on a smooth table, pours Scybale’s hot water on it, packs and kneads the moistened meal until it is hard, from time to time sprinkling salt on it. Now with his palm he flattens the mixture, makes it round, and marks where it is to be divided into four equal portions. Scybale has in the meantime cleared a space in the hearth, and there the morning’s flat bread is placed, and covered with tiles and fire, Vulcan and Vesta, so to speak.

  (I have no Greek; it was not taught at my school. If Robin Lane Fox hadn’t written to me about it, I wouldn’t have known that scybale was Greek for dung or rubbish. So the poor African woman slave was named for what she was thought to work in; she became “Miss Manure”: horrible, this insult lodged in a beautiful idyll.)

  Simylus has little in his house to go with his bread. From the ceiling near his hearth no larder hangs with dried and salted bacon. There are only old round cheeses in baskets of woven fennel. But he has a little herb garden outside, watered when necessary by rills near by, and sheltered by willows and reeds. He works in this garden when it rains and on holidays. He has the gardener’s skills. He grows cabbage, beet, sorrel, mallows and leeks, lettuce that rounds off a rich banquet, and radishes and gourds. This is not for himself. Every nine days he gets together a load of faggots, which he takes to the town to sell. He comes back light in neck and shoulder and heavy in pocket; he doesn’t spend his money on city goods. To curb his own hunger he eats red onions and chives, sharp-tasting nasturtium that pinches the face, and endives. And there is colewort that brings back amorous capacity.

  Outside now in his garden Simylus digs his fingers in the earth and pulls out four bulbs or cloves of garlic, adds to this some parsley, rue and coriander. Then in the cottage he sits by the pleasant fire and loudly calls to the maid for a mortar. He peels off the outer skin of the garlic bulbs, lets that skin fall on the floor, puts the garlic and its leaves in the mortar, sprinkles salt on it, adds some salt-hardened cheese, puts on top the parsley, rue and coriander. With the pestle he crushes first the fragrant garlic, then grinds the whole mixture together. The various elements gradually lose their particular strength, the colours blend into one, not green, not white; and then he adds a few drops of oil and a little strong vinegar, stirs the dish, until at last he runs two fingers around the mortar and presses everything together into a ball. This is the “moretum” which, with his flat bread (Scybale has taken it out of the hearth), he will take to the field as his food for the day.

  Carefree, now that he has lost his fear of hunger for the day, he puts on his leggings and cap, forces his obedient bullocks under the leather-bound yoke, and drives them to the fields, where they bury the plough in the earth.

  THE PHYSICAL DETAILS in this poem, taking nothing for granted, making us see and touch and feel at every point, celebrate the physical world in
an almost religious way—lighting the lamp (the Roman wick-and-oil lamp, which never developed through all the Roman centuries), grinding the corn, kneading the dough—and these details turn the smallholder’s morning into ritual. This kind of writing will appear two thousand years later in the stories Tolstoy did after learning Greek in mid-life in order to read the epics. But the Roman taste was for the rhetorical, in which what was ordinary could be inflated.

  The high style of poetry reached its peak with Virgil and the other poets in the first century BC. What is amazing is how little it developed afterwards. Latin poetry (properly speaking) ended long before the empire ended. The poets of the fourth century play games; they have little to tell us; it is as though the early poets had used up all the high matter of Rome, and there was nothing of that sort left for latecomers.

  Of course there was much to observe. We would love to know about life in the late empire; we would love to be taken into the hut of people like Simylus and Scybale; but the poets don’t help us now, and all of that is closed to us.

  It might seem that satire is outside rhetoric, but, as with the other kind of poetry, the matter of satire was more or less fixed by the early satirists: it could be erotic, or it could deal with the life of the city, or it could rail against the degeneracy that came with Roman wealth. This, absurdly, was the very note struck three hundred years later, near the end of empire, by the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, when he wrote about the life of the city of Rome. Ammianus had witnessed the Roman defeat at Adrianople, which finally let in the barbarians. But when he came to write about the city of Rome it was as though in spite of the upheavals, the endless bloodlettings, the disappearance of the great families, the tyrannies, the Illyrian emperors, the general remaking of Rome, nothing had changed: so strong was the idea of old literary form, and so pleased was Ammianus at being able to do the approved thing.

  The art historian Bernard Berenson was said to be working in his last years on the “deformation of form,” the decay of the classical ideal (or the talent to render it in painting or sculpture) in the Dark Ages, and its replacement by Byzantine angularity or worse. Nothing came out of Berenson’s interest. It was said that the subject was too big. But it may be that the survey of bad art and the picking out of debased motifs was too repetitive. A rise to achievement makes a better narrative than random decay. Perhaps it was enough for Berenson to raise the subject, which could so easily have been ignored, taken for granted.

  The loss of literature in the same period is of comparable interest, and is easier to study in the texts that survive. In the second century Latin prose writing would have seemed alive and developing, able to deal with ever new subjects; yet it very soon was to exhaust itself. Four hundred and twenty years after Caesar there is a reference in Ammianus to an execution in the “old Roman way”; as with Caesar, now deified, there is no explanation. So little has the world moved on. There is still, as in the beginning, the need to use words to hide from reality. In four hundred years language hasn’t illuminated a great deal that is new. In the brutality and now the hideous uncertainty of the Roman world—“madness” is the word Ammianus often uses, not only of wild animals in the arena, but also of men, tormenting and tormented—in this world without balance people need more than ever the classical half view, the ability to see and not see.

  FIVE

  India Again: The Mahatma and After

  WE GO BACK to India, to the town of Kanpur, to the Indian National Congress conference of 1925. The conference tent was very big. It was more than a hundred yards long and sixty yards wide, and there were seven or eight thousand people sitting on matting on the ground. At the far end was the raised rostrum for speakers and distinguished visitors; they too were sitting on matting.

  The fifty-six-year-old mahatma was there, in his strange garb: the tightly tied dhoti, like a diaper, around his waist and upper legs, with a shawl (a concession to the Kanpur winter) over his shoulders. The writer Aldous Huxley, only thirty-one, also on the rostrum (at one session “all but dead of fatigue” after sitting on the floor for six hours), was a witness of the occasion. He mentions the dhoti and the shawl, but he doesn’t comment on them; he seems to take them on trust as the scant clothing to be expected of an Indian saint. He doesn’t know (he seems to have begun reading Gandhi’s autobiography only later) that that excessive simplicity of dress was Gandhi’s own idea and would at first have been strange, perhaps outlandish, to many Indians, who looked for greater formality in their politicians.

  It was in South Africa, before he became a mahatma, that he began adjusting his costume. In the beginning in South Africa, in the 1890s, in his dealings with the Indian merchants who had called him to South Africa, and with European officials, he had been particular about his dignity as a lawyer (that would have been his London training). Now he thought he should look less like a lawyer and more like the Indian labourers for whom he had become the spokesman. The costume he worked out for himself was a shirt (perhaps a long one), the dhoti, a cotton cloak, and a scarf (which could also serve as a fast-drying towel). It was all of cheap Indian mill cotton, but when he came to India and began to travel third class on the crowded Indian railways he grew to think his many-pieced costume was too fussy and troublesome, and he gave up the scarf and the cloak. The man who appeared raw, so to speak, before Huxley had a history Huxley would not have suspected. Huxley saw him as complete, a Peter the Hermit figure.

  In fact, there was no completeness to him. He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there: his mother’s love of fasting and austerities, the English common law, Ruskin’s idea of labour, Tolstoy’s Russian religious dream (Tolstoy who had fathered twenty-five children, twelve of them by serf women), the South African jail code, the Manchester No Breakfast Association. His strong political cause—in South Africa and India—gave an apparent unity to all these impulses, but there was no real unity; the pieces did not fit together; no piece was indispensable. The simple life did not serve the cause of Indians in South Africa. Nor did the school at Tolstoy Farm, where Gandhi played Mr. Squeers and everyone had to do gardening and where, as it turned out, the children had to do most of the hard work, felling timber and digging and carrying. The children didn’t like it. “Of course some of them, and sometimes all of them, malingered and shirked.” And when Gandhi left South Africa and went back to India, what happened to the farm and the school? Many of Gandhi’s smaller and now forgotten experiments, involving the labour of others, were like this, not thought out, unachieved and abandoned, serving no cause, good for the famous man and not for the people who for various reasons had come (or sent their children) to lend a hand.

  (And this idea occurs. If, as was more than likely, Gandhi had failed to graft himself on to the Indian political scene when he went back to India in 1915, what would have happened to his famous costume? Would he have stuck to it as a man unknown and would he, out of simple stubbornness, have kept on doing his latrine-cleaning? For how long?)

  His intellectual confusion wasn’t obvious to Aldous Huxley, but it was there. Take away his political cause and you see it, all the unrelated impulses. It is not easy to enter the culturally denuded mind of the Gandhi who went to England in 1888. He had the most basic idea, a village idea, of Indian religion and the epics, but he didn’t know the history of India, not even a school version; he didn’t know geography, hardly had a map of the world in his head. He didn’t know about books and modern plays, hardly had an idea of news and newspapers. Busy, modern London would have been a horrible shock. He didn’t know how to keep his footing; he must have felt he was drowning. The few dancing lessons he took, his violin lessons, and the horrible prospect of his elocution course must have depressed him more than he says. He would have seen how culturally far away he was, and with something like desperation he would then have lost himself in the abstractions of his law studies, cramming, reading right through the English common law and studying Roman law in Latin.

  South Afri
ca a few years later showed him that this new world, barely understood, was exceedingly hostile, and even full of physical threat. The shock, the wound, would have been many times greater than the shock of London. He had the law now; it was better than nothing. But he needed more, and so he held on to all the pieces of comfort he could get from European well-wishers and people who came within his orbit, and soon he was a man of many small causes.

  These causes, disguising his wound and his primary, Indian cause, attracted many different people, who saw in him their own personal cause. (Though Tolstoy, Russian nationalist though he was, thought that Gandhi’s Indian nationalism “spoiled everything.”) So Gandhi’s many causes made him appear more universal than he was. He came at the right time; the world was oddly vacant; there was room for him; and in 1909 he could get away with the nonsense and anti-modern simplicities of his first book, Hind Swaraj (“Indian Home Rule”). The book would not be read in India, not even by scholars (and still hasn’t been), but its name would often be taken as a milestone in the independence struggle, and it would be cherished as a holy object. Twenty-five years later, after the Russian revolution, after Hitler, with a world waiting for war, he might have had a harder ride.