English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Because she was so stunningly original and burst upon the leaden post-war scene with such a delicious sizzle, as though this was the first time we could afford proper fireworks again, it is easy to forget how beautifully rooted in their settings those early books are. She had only just begun writing novels at the age of thirty-nine, having thought of herself till then as a poet. Yet in a few masterly lines she gets up for us the clapped-out pubs and factories of Peckham and the boozy gangs wandering across the Rye as indelibly as she does the corridors of Marcia Blaine School for Girls and the Princess May of Teck Club, based, quite closely, on her times at James Gillespie’s High School for Girls and the Helena Club in Lancaster Gate respectively. She was a realist before she was a surrealist. As Fleur Talbot, her alter ego novelist heroine in Loitering with Intent, says: ‘When I first started writing, people used to say my novels were exaggerated. They never were exaggerated, merely aspects of realism.’

  When her books ran thin, as they began to do all too soon after her golden flowering, it was because they no longer had much solid ground to take off from. These later stories were derived not from life but from the glossies and newspapers and film mags. They became as insubstantial and shadowy as those late paintings by Sickert that he worked up from newspaper photographs.

  It is hard to read the early novels without an inappropriately seraphic smile breaking out on one’s face like the ghoul at the weepie in the Charles Addams cartoon. By contrast, I find her later books strangely hard to get through, though they are just as short, 50,000 words or so. It is like trying to operate an apparently simple gadget which has been supplied without some vital part though you cannot identify what it is. Those little macabre jumps into the future no longer take your breath away: ‘She will be found tomorrow dead from multiple stab wounds.’ The little nudges to the reader are no longer so winning: ‘Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?’ Even the most devoted fan may feel like whispering ‘Who cares?’

  I cannot help feeling that her exile from her material was part of the trouble. By then she was too famous for anyone to tell her anything. In any case, she was never one to admit error, except in her choice of men (‘I was a bad picker’). On the contrary, she claimed grandly that ‘it was Edinburgh that bred within me the condition of exiledom. It has ceased to become a fate, it has become a calling’, the calling of the real artist, just as it had been the calling of other high priests of modernism, such as Eliot, Joyce and Auden.

  Yet it is also true that she simply could not get on with people and places for very long. As Martin Stannard shows in this massive biography, which is simultaneously inspiriting and dispiriting, for years ‘her only intimate relation to other human beings had been with her readers’. After leaving London, she moved between New York and Rome, travelling all over the place in between, accompanied by an ever-changing cast of gay cavaliers, some kind-hearted and solicitous for her welfare, others catty and freakish like the bizarre Baron Brian de Breffny, a Mormon genealogist who was the son of a London cabbie or possibly bookie. She never liked to warm her hands too long at any one camp fire.

  But her gay friendships lasted better than most of those with her fellow writers. Ved Mehta said ‘She went through people like pieces of Kleenex’. In Muriel’s own brief and sunny memoir, Curriculum Vitae, she claims that ‘I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends’. In reality, by the end she had accumulated a mountain of paper recording every transaction in her life but scarcely a single old friend, except her charming and level-headed companion Penelope Jardine, in whose Tuscan priest-house she lodged for her last twenty years and more, only once or twice threatening to decamp or at least to stop paying her share of the expenses. Her devoted publisher, Alan Maclean, she eventually wrote off as ‘an indescribably filthy liar’. Of the poet and critic Derek Stanford, a queer fish admittedly but the only man she seriously loved and wanted to marry, her closing words were ‘I hate the man’s guts’. Her conversation became as brittle as her books, snapping off a topic the moment she tired of it, leaving her audience with a feeling of inadequacy.

  At her death in April 2006, she was brewing up for a monster row with Stannard, describing the draft of his biography as ‘based on negative rhetoric and terribly mean and hostile and very poorly written’. In fact it is perfectly well written, sometimes rather witty and painstakingly based on all the documents she gave him the run of. The worst you could accuse him of is now and then flinching from Muriel’s own plain speech. He refers, for example, to her ‘street-slang annotation’ on an enquiry from a reader and her ‘scribbling something uncomplimentary’ on a whingeing letter from Stanford, without spelling out what she actually wrote.

  Above all, Stannard demonstrates with unfailing sympathy why she armed herself with such an adamantine carapace. She had come through a terrible mixture of relentless poverty, recurrent bad luck and dogging ill health. She needed all the defences she could muster to protect her reputation and her self-confidence. Her father, Barney Camberg, was a fitter and mechanical engineer at the North British Rubber Company all his life. As a member of the kingly tribe of Cohens, he went first into the synagogue, but he was looked down on for not being in business like the rest of the Edinburgh Jewish community.

  Muriel described herself as a Gentile Jewess, which was to lead to a literally blood feud with her only child Robin, who insisted on being barmitzvahed, claiming that he was fully Jewish because his grandmother, Barney’s wife Cissy, was also Jewish by maternal descent. Muriel fiercely disputed this. Stannard does his best to unravel the truth of the matter. But whichever of them was right, it scarcely excuses Muriel’s festering contempt for her son or her eventually cutting him out of her will at the end of her life, just as she had cut him out at the beginning by leaving him behind in Rhodesia at the age of five when she fled her mad and violent husband, Solly Spark. She had married Solly at the age of nineteen to get away from her family, scarcely knowing him and soon wishing she never had. Quoting the title of her famous story, Muriel remarked, accurately enough, ‘I was really myself a Go-Away Bird’. She diagnosed herself as not the marrying type. As Stannard puts it nicely, her pram was always to remain in someone else’s hall.

  When she went to Edinburgh in later years, she stayed, not with Cissy and Robin, but with the high sheriff or at the North British Hotel. On her last visit, she did not bother to see her son who was only a ten-minute walk away. Robin’s life was nothing to be ashamed of. He had risen in the Civil Service to become chief clerk to the Scottish Law Commission, then resigned to become a well-regarded painter. But Muriel would concede nothing to him: he was only stoking up the row about their Jewishness because he wanted publicity for his lousy paintings which he couldn’t sell.

  Not that she found life much easier back in London when she first set up as an independent woman earning her own living. She was turfed out of her job at the Poetry Society by a claque of querulous poets. Publisher after publisher whom she worked for or submitted work to went bust, and one went to prison. She was outstandingly industrious and competent – the publisher Peter Owen described her as ‘the best bloody secretary I ever had’. But nothing much went right for her, certainly not the weak and cowardly men she fell in with. Like Evelyn Waugh, she began to suffer from hallucinations, and for the same reason, addiction to chloral in his case, Dexedrine in hers (Waugh became a loyal admirer and told her he thought The Comforters was much better than Pinfold). After reviewing The Confidential Clerk, she got it into her head that T. S. Eliot was sending her threatening messages, encoding them in the theatre programme and in the play itself, and then going on to pose as a window cleaner to spy on her friends.

  A little earlier, she had been baptized and confirmed, first as an Anglican, then as a Catholic, and she began the practice of retiring now and then to places of retreat like Allington Castle to restore her balance. At one point, she thought of becoming a nun. The Church remained a comfort and an anchor to her, a bulwark against the materialist philistin
es, although the joy that she had experienced on first reading Newman’s Apologia inevitably dried up a bit. Towards the end of her life she rarely went to church, except at Easter. She was, notoriously, more interested in theology than in morality. But she denied that her books were amoral or inhuman. They were simply true to life as everyone knew it really was but did not like to say. ‘I love all my characters; when I’m writing about them I love them most intensely, like a cat loves a bird.’

  Certainly no writer could have been in person more like her books: exuberant and stony-hearted, switching without any sort of notice from charming and flirtatious to chilly and dismissive. You never knew where you were with her, and that’s how she liked it. She picked up the trick from Dame Edith Sitwell, whom she greatly admired as another woman who didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything except art and the Catholic Church: ‘My dear, you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, focus the glasses on that man and sit looking at him through them as if he were an insect. Just look and look.’

  And she did. It was just about the only piece of advice she ever took from anyone.

  V. S. NAIPAUL: NO HOME FOR MR BISWAS

  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.

  Yet in literature, migration does not crop up all that often. There are plenty of books about strangers arriving and unsettling established 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 experience of being unsettled. Even writers who use a foreigner to represent The Outsider tend to use him mainly for un-local colour; Joyce chooses Bloom for Ulysses, not because he is interested in what it was like to be Jewish in Dublin at the turn of the century but because he is interested in Dublin and in being Irish at the turn of the century.

  Perhaps this is not so odd: writers like to write about substance not absence. The gaps in the substance are to be deplored, not explored; gappiness is a testing, elusive kind of subject. And then there is the political aspect. To describe the unsettled individual and the half-made society, or the immigrant society mimicking some other society, is not the way to easy popularity. How much more attractive to celebrate the rich diversity of English life, or to hymn the struggles of Azania to realize itself as a nation. Writers, especially in the twentieth century, have stood in an extremely uneasy relationship towards both nationality and socialism; the better ones tending to fall for fascism, the less good being equally deluded about communism; both sorts ill at ease with the Immigrant – the pro-fascists tending to brutish abuse (Pound, Eliot and co.), the pro-socialists pretending that nationality was a trivial accident which time and revolution would dissolve.

  V. S. Naipaul’s work is therefore remarkable in several ways; that he has written first and last, for nearly thirty 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 victims 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 late-ish masterpiece, 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 narratives’, Naipaul deviates from his usual retiring, almost mannered impersonality to offer what he calls a ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’, 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 adventure or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along, up to a point, by accidents; 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 adventure is over and I become anxious to leave.

  I was reminded of the life of a professional 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 officials 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 rootlessness 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.

  David Hare’s play A Map of the World, not one of his best, stars Roshan Seth as an author who is unmistakably 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 impression is left that a writer, or indeed any person, 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 nationality? By paying attention to them as individuals, the author gives proper value to the diversity and poignancy of their experience; to say that he immortalizes 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 India as the real place and Trinidad as ‘the interlude, the illusion’. When the SS Ganges arrived at Calcutta in 1932 with a thousand unhappy Indians who had served out their indentures in Trinida
d, the ship was stormed by hundreds of other Indians who had been previously repatriated and now wanted to be taken back to Trinidad.

  This autobiographical fragment is dominated by the story of Naipaul’s father, a story which he fully discovered only in 1970, seventeen years after his father’s death. An English journalist, Gault MacGowan, brought out to modernize 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 criticized or he would die within a week. After blustering defiance in the columns 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 glimpse 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 Caribbean. The idea of African completeness endures in various Caribbean religious cults; and touches the politics of the region. Many of the recent political movements in the black Caribbean have had a millenarian, ecstatic, purely African side. Naipaul rather indulges this feeling, finding in the feeding of the crocodiles round the president’s palace not only a tourist sight but also a sinister, mysterious rite touched with the magic and power which the president doubtless intended it to have. For Africans, we are told, the real world is the world of the night, the world of ghosts and magic; the world of the day, the Western world, seems rather childish to them; and when the Europeans go, their world will go with them.