by Martin Amis
Michael X’s illiterate fragment was clearly a gift for V.S. Naipaul – and not just for his journalism. ‘The Killings in Trinidad’ was written in 1973. Naipaul then came home and reworked the whole story, as fiction. In Guerrillas (1975), Jimmy Ahmed, the black-power hustler, is writing a novel, or a fantasy; he is the hero, but it is the spellbound white girl, Clarissa, who narrates: ‘This man fills my whole mind to the exclusion of all other trivial concerns … a woman of my class can see what he really is … In the novel, Naipaul’s novel, Jimmy murders his ‘Clarissa’, just as in Michael’s novel Mike would no doubt have been obliged to murder Lena Boyd-Richardson. And in the real world, glimpsed through these phantom projections, Michael X really did murder Gale Benson.
The story is brilliantly told by Naipaul. After his period of celebrity in England, Michael X formed a commune in Trinidad. An ex-pimp and hoodlum, flattered by British journalists, rock-stars and rich kids, Michael X was waiting to lead a revolution that would never come. His head was full of dangerous trash – jargon and self-love. Gale Benson just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was a middle-class dropout, a guerrilla groupie, the adoring mistress of one of Michael’s lieutenants. The murder was motiveless but not meaningless. Michael’s ‘novel’, with its flopped aspirations, its shamed yearning for inclusion in the white world, tells us all we need to know – certainly far more than Michael X could ever have consciously articulated. The novel is the key to the girl’s death, as Naipaul quickly sensed: ‘This was a literary murder, if ever there was one.’
Michael X had something like an anti-talent for fiction: coarse, self-serving and, above all, pitiably transparent. ‘But when he transferred his fantasy to real life,’ as Naipaul says, ‘he went to work like the kind of novelist he would have liked to be. Such plotting, such symbolism!’ Michael and his men loosened up for the deed by killing a calf and drinking its blood. They spoke of the necessity of spilling the girl’s heartblood; Michael ‘wanted the heart’. The girl struggled in the ditch as Michael’s men clumsily hacked at her; then the death-blow was administered, in the throat, by Steve Yeats, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, Lieutenant Colonel of Michael X’s Black Liberation Army. The girl’s body was buried in manure. The men cleansed themselves in the river, lighting a pyre on the bank … Within a few weeks, Michael’s commune had fallen apart. There was another pointless murder, a drowning, a fire – then Michael cut out for Guyana, on the run. He was hanged at the Royal Jail in Port of Spain, in May 1975.
Trinidad looms over the story of Michael X. It is as if his dissolution is no more than a theatrical reply to the nullity and abandoned squalor in which Naipaul locates him. In the fiction of Shiva Naipaul, Trinidad is reimagined as a Dickensian hinterland of comedy, pathos and ebullient caricature; but Vidya, the elder brother, sees only the pervasive terrors of political breakdown and economic rot. ‘Black carrion corbeaux guard the entrance to Port of Spain … In his peripatetic journalism, V.S. Naipaul is turning into the prose-poet of the earth’s destitute; he is also becoming world-weary – or Third World-weary, anyway. Perhaps this is the condition of the exile: compelled to travel, condemned to find nothing new.
It was a good place for getting lost in … after years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
Where is this? Trinidad? Uganda? Borneo? No. It is Naipaul’s description, written in 1964, of his first visit to London.
‘The Return of Eva Peron’ – the other major piece in the present book – takes Naipaul to Argentina and Uruguay. His method of assimilating a place is by now familiar. He begins with a passionately tendentious run-through of the country’s recent history, in a style that could be regarded as the demonic opposite of a Look at Life documentary (in which, for example, a clotted refugee camp might be described as a hardy work-force crying out to be tapped). A century ago the Argentines, marooned Spaniards and Italians, sought out and annihilated the native Indians. They built ‘vast estancias on the stolen, bloody land’. Within a few pages Naipaul has casually referred to ‘the desolate land’, ‘the alien land’, ‘the blighted land’. The scene is set, and so is the mood. With Naipaul, they are more or less the same thing.
Naipaul then goes on to produce a gloomy cacophony of local voices: ‘the film-maker says’, ‘the publisher-bookseller says’, ‘the ambassador’s wife says’, ‘the provincial businessman says’. What they say is always elegiac, paranoid, discordant. Next, Naipaul settles the hash of whatever indigenous culture happens to be on offer. This being Argentina, he has a bigger fish to fry than usual, in the person of Jorge Luis Borges; but he settles down to the task, allotting Borges a chapter of his own, ‘Borges and the Bogus Past’. ‘For the contemplation of his country’s history Borges substitutes ancestor worship’, and so on. Naipaul’s own fiction has been denounced for its socio-political shortcomings, and it is puzzling to watch him haul Borges through the same old hoops. I have never valued Borges as a pundit on Argentina’s problems, nor seen him as much of a contemplator of its history. But of course he does do these things, inevitably, as all artists do. Stories like ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ and ‘The Library of Babel’ could be read as intensely vivid reflections of Argentine inertia, sterile frenzy and wasted espiritismo. Naipaul’s sympathy and responsiveness, however, are held in check, and Borges is duly pressed into his vision of degeneracy and decline. ‘And Borges is Argentina’s greatest man.’ In other words – is that the best they can do?
Finally, and most memorably, Naipaul prowls out to mingle with the people: a peeled sensorium. We see him sighing and suffering in airports, walking among ruins, disaffectedly lending his presence at strained dinner-parties, sparring with bureaucrats, inspecting street scenes, monuments, hotel rooms – always on the lookout for mimicry, falsity, any pretence at civilization. He is isolated, alone with his preoccupations, which tend to be sexual, scatological and demonic. Naipaul mingles with the braying machos who parade the streets of Buenos Aires: ‘Money makes the macho. Machismo requires, and imposes, a widespread amateur prostitution; it is a society spewing on itself.’ In the short piece on Zaire which follows, Naipaul watches two old men in Kinshasa strolling out with their teenage whores: ‘Old men: their last chance to feed on such young blood.’ By this stage Naipaul is ready to label the country, or the continent, with the kind of sonorous abstraction (preferably alliterative) that his readers have come to expect: ‘the Indian emptiness’, ‘the Argentine sterility and waste’, ‘the South American nightmare’, ‘the nihilism of Africa’, ‘the abjectness of Africa’.
Naipaul’s best book about the Third World is An Area of Darkness. It is likely to remain his best book about the Third World. Written in the early Sixties, it has a dimension of human richness absent from his later travel writing. That dimension has to do with Naipaul’s historical ties with India, naturally, but it is more a question of the untempered traveller confronting his own neuroses. ‘I was longing for greater and greater decay, more rags and filth, more bones.’ By the time he returned in 1975/6 to write India: A Wounded Civilisation his style had hardened, had become public and ‘responsible’. Such a narrowing of focus was perhaps a necessary form of self-protection. Naipaul has seen enough bones by now.
The new book ends with a short piece on Conrad – ‘Conrad’s Darkness’, as opposed to Naipaul’s. It records a personal journey and a personal debt:
But in the new world I felt that ground move below me. The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me.
The ‘political panic’ which possessed the young Naipaul has not gone away. It has been assimilated into a stance, a rhetorical attitude. He writes about peoples as if they were people – patients on the psyc
hiatrist wing, with their ‘hysteria’, ‘frenzy’, ‘withdrawal symptoms’ and ‘spiritual distress’. But the stance is punitively moral – and, of course, intensely literary. There is a fashionable temptation to see history as a process of helplessness, of blind movement. Naipaul does not submit to this. He thinks that everyone has choices to make, even if they haven’t made them yet, and probably never will.
New Statesman July 1980
Great Books
Broken Lance
The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Translated by Tobias Smollett
While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability. This reviewer should know, because he has just read it. The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedy; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75 per cent of the whole), inhumanly dull. Looming like one of the Don’s chimerical adversaries, it is a giant ‘with legs like lofty steeples, and arms resembling the masts of vast and warlike ships; while each eye, as large as a millwheel, beams and bums like a glass furnace’. But the giant has a giant weight problem, and is elderly, and soft-brained. Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 – the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right: not tears of relf or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.
Written in the days before novel-reviewing – indeed, in the days before novels – Don Quixote was probably never intended to be read in the modern manner: that is, straight through. Group or family recitations of a chapter a night were, in all likelihood, the most that Cervantes expected anyone to manage. His epic is epic in length only; it has no pace, no drive. An anthology, an agglomeration, it simply accrues. The question ‘What happens next?’ has no meaning, because there is no next in Don Quixote’s world: there is only more. Through Don Quixote we stare into the primal soup of fiction, steaming, burping, fizzing with potential life, thick with crude and pungent prototypes.
In his introduction Carlos Fuentes (whose surname, by a pleasant coincidence, is glossed in the text: ‘Fuentes signifies … fountains’) salutes Don Quixote as the central, all-encompassing supernovel. With its antic bookishness and its rival realities, Quixote plainly sets off deep stirrings in the blood of Fuentes’s own work. But his tradition is not our tradition. The Latin-American novel has always been Quixotic – playful, self-conscious, magical-realist. In the fiction of the North Atlantic mainstream, however, realism provides a heavier undertow, modified not by magic but by irony. Furthermore, while we are obliged to adapt to the great strange books of the past, they are obliged to adapt to us, changing through time (in the way that Jane Austen was ‘modernized’ by Lionel Trilling and others) to greet each rising generation. How does ‘the Quixote’, in Borges’s glamorous phrase, shape up to the twentieth century and its wizened reality? How does it cope?
The following will give some idea of what the book is like to read. Its first twenty chapters are squalid, savage, and attritional – rather well suited, in fact, to modern tastes. In his copious free time, ‘which engrossed the greatest part of the year’, a humble gentleman called Alonzo Quixano grows addicted to books of chivalry, and, like all addicts, soon pauperizes and deracinates himself in lone gratification. Now the newly styled Don Quixote de la Mancha – ‘so long, so lank, so lean’, or, as Cervantes later describes him, ‘so long, so lank, so lean, so yellow’ – sallies forth in quest of adventure on his horse Rosinante, ‘so long and raw-boned, so lank and meagre’. With him, after a while, rides Sancho Panza, who with Hispanic panache has ‘deserted his wife and children’, without a farewell, the better to serve his master. That golden age of chivalry was always a fiction; now, in 1605, it isn’t even a memory. But off they go. The knight impelled by madness and high ambition, the squire by stupidity and greed, they burst out into the unchivalrous reality (‘this detestable age’, ‘these iron times’, ‘these degenerate times’) of rural Spain.
Here are their achievements. Unprovoked except by chivalric paranoia, Don Quixote beats up a carrier (‘with such good will’, ‘so effectually mauled’) and shatters the skull of his innocent companion. Interfering in a squabble, he then causes a blameless young rustic to be flogged ‘so severely, that he had like to have died on the spot’. Next, attempting to beat up a merchant, the Don crashes from his horse and is flogged himself (‘so severely’). Now comes the business with the windmills, in which ‘knight and steed are whirled aloft [’with so much fury’] and overthrown in very bad plight upon the plain’. During an altercation in which it is Sancho’s turn to be beaten ‘so unmercifully’, Quixote tries to murder a Biscayan traveller, who strikes back ‘with such force and fury’ that he slices off half the Don’s ear.
‘Ragged and lousy’ from all his encounters with these ‘rascally scum’, Don Quixote attacks some more carriers (giving one ‘such a hearty stroke, as laid open … a large portion of his shoulder’), who in return stave him ‘with infinite eagerness and dexterity’, leaving him senseless at Rosinante’s feet. Brawling at an inn, Quixote receives ‘such a terrible blow … as bathed his whole countenance in blood’, and is moreover drenched in boiling oil. The next day, imagining a flock of sheep to be an advancing army, the Don wades in, chopping up ‘about seven’ little lambs before the shepherds send over a hail of stones (‘the least of which was as large as an ordinary fist’) that break two of his ribs and smack out half his teeth. As Sancho inspects the damage, his ‘stomach turned, and he emptied his bowels upon his master … a handsome pickle’. Continuing on his sociopathic way, Quixote assails some defenceless mourners, robs a barber, and pummels an itinerant prison guard (‘such wonderful dispatch’, ‘dangerously wounded’), thus freeing a band of convicts, who then turn on their liberator (‘with such force’, ‘a most furious application’), leaving him robbed, stripped, and soundly trounced.
At this point it dawns on the reader that there are still 700 pages to go. Cervantes, you feel, will have to change tack pretty soon – while his principals remain in one piece. And so it proves. Although my notes continue to be dotted with havoc (‘most miserably mauled’, ‘most handsomely drubbed’, ‘sufficiently pummeled’, ‘such a thwack’), and although there is many a clubbing and drubbing and sousing and scalding along the way, Cervantes does begin to diversify. He begins to pad.
And goes on padding. Sancho and the Don are reduced to helpless onlookers as Cervantes just goes on padding, using all the trash, all the hay and straw, of popular contemporary literature. It is a bizarrely shameless spectacle, as if Senor Fuentes, say, had bulked out The Death of Artemio Cruz with half a dozen supermarket romances. Here is the goatherd’s tale, the muleteer’s tale, the captive’s tale; here is a thirty-page digression of labyrinthine intrigue (which even the Penguin translator implores you to skip); here are ditties, serenades, the swoonings and weepings of thwarted love; here are gross coincidences, surprise reunions, instant rehabilitations. Piling error upon inconsistency, excrescence upon excrescence, Cervantes maintains the cheerful havoc as Volume I enters its final tailspin and eventually wafts and flutters to a close.
The author took a decade to recover from the first part of Don Quixote before completing and publishing the second. The modern reader, of course, enjoys no such holiday, and soon finds himself eyeing the fortress of Volume II. Luckily, and for various conflicting reasons, it is immeasurably more accomplished than its predecessor. It seems that the comedy of humours (where the Hispanic tradition does cross paths with our own) works by a dual process of attrition and sedation: to win your somnolent and exhausted assent, the characters need do no more than what they have always done. And by this stage, also, the intransigent greatness of the book has begun to press in on you. Crossing and uncrossing your
legs, and always wondering what else you could be doing, you follow the poor enchanted knight and the swag-bellied lurcher towards their remote epiphany.
Since the technique of Don Quixote is that of periphrasis, of lapidary duplication, of saying everything (at least) twice, it is appropriate that the second half should be a mirror image of the first – with one important reversal. Both in the actual world of Cervantes and in the fictional world of the novel, Volume I has been published, to vast international acclaim. Don Quixote has not read Don Quixote and awaits news of its reception with suitable diffidence. His ‘Adventures’, he learns, have been criticized on predictable grounds – the digressions, the Inadvertencies’ (whereby, for instance, Señora Panza is given three different Christian names), the remorselessness of ‘those infinite drubbings’ – but the Don is now as famous as he could ever have wished, if for all the wrong reasons. Sallying out once again with his squire, he is universally humoured and hoaxed by a colluding reality. His baseless imaginings of Volume I are, through a series of elaborate deceptions (often as cruel and gratuitous as the beatings the Don earlier dispensed), given sham life in the observable world. Don Quixote was driven mad by books; now he enters a reality driven mad by Don Quixote.