Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Chandran makes a living doing what he secretly finds easy: denying his appetites (though his appetites are not so exiguous that he cannot father two children on his backward wife). In Kafka’s story, despite the hunger artist’s protestations to the contrary, there is a certain heroism in self-starving, a minimal heroism befitting post-heroic times. In Chandran there is no heroism at all: it is authentic poverty of spirit that allows him to be content with so little.

  In his first and most critical book about India, An Area of Darkness (1964), Naipaul describes Gandhi as a man deeply influenced by Christian ethics, capable, after twenty years spent in South Africa, of seeing India with the critical eye of an outsider, and in this sense ‘the least Indian of Indian leaders’. But India turned the tables on Gandhi, says Naipaul: by transforming him into a mahatma, an icon, it enabled itself to ignore his social message.4

  Chandran likes to think of himself as a follower of Gandhi. But, Naipaul suggests implicitly, the question Chandran continually asks of himself is not the Gandhian ‘How shall I act?’ but the Hindu ‘What shall I give up?’ He prefers giving up to acting in the world because giving up costs him nothing.

  In honour of his British patron, Chandran names his first-born William Somerset Chandran. Since young Willie comes from a mixed (that is, mixed-caste) marriage, it is thought prudent to send him to a Christian school. Predictably, Willie learns from his Canadian missionary teachers to aspire to be a missionary and a Canadian too. In his English compositions he fantasises himself as a regular Canadian boy with a ‘Mom’ and a ‘Pop’ and a family car. His teachers reward him with high marks, though his father is hurt to find himself written out of his son’s life.

  In due course, however, Willie finds out what the missionaries are really up to: making converts to Christianity, destroying heathen religion. Feeling fooled, he stops going to school.

  Calling in old debts, Chandran writes to Maugham asking him to pull strings on the boy’s behalf. He gets a typewritten letter back: ‘Dear Chandran, It was very nice getting your letter. I have nice memories of the country, and it is nice hearing from Indian friends. Yours very sincerely . . .’ (p. 47) Other foreign friends prove equally evasive. Then someone in the British House of Lords waves a wand and Willie, at the age of twenty, is whisked across the seas on a scholarship.

  The year is 1956. London is bursting at the seams with immigrants from the Caribbean. Before long race riots have broken out: young whites in mock Edwardian clothes roam the streets looking for blacks to beat up. Willie hides in his college rooms. Hiding out is a not unfamiliar experience: it is what he did at home when there were caste riots.

  What Willie learns about in London is, principally, sex. The girlfriend of a Jamaican fellow student takes pity on him and relieves him of his virginity. She then gives him a useful little cross-cultural lecture. Because marriages in India are arranged, she says, Indian men don’t feel they need to satisfy a woman sexually. But things are different in England. He should try harder.

  Willie consults a paperback called The Physiology of Sex and learns that the average man can maintain an erection for ten or fifteen minutes. Dismayed, he puts the book down and refuses to read further. How is he, an incompetent and a late starter, coming from a country where sex is not spoken about and there is no such thing as an art of seduction, going to acquire a girlfriend?

  How can I find out more about sex, he asks his Jamaican friend? Sex is a brutal business, the friend replies; you have to start young. In Jamaica we get our experience by forcing ourselves on little girls.

  Willie plucks up enough courage to approach a streetwalker. Their intercourse is joyless and humiliating. ‘Fuck like an Englishman,’ she commands when he takes too long. (p. 113)

  Chandran the charlatan sadhu and his son the inept lover: they might seem the stuff of comedy, but not in Naipaul’s hands. Naipaul has always been a master of analytical prose, and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife. The male Chandrans are defective human beings whose incompleteness chills rather than amuses; the backward wife and the sister, who grows into a smug left-wing fellow-traveller, are little better.

  Both father and son believe they see through other people. But if they detect lies and self-deception all around them, that is only because they are incapable of imagining anyone unlike themselves. Their shrewdness of insight is grounded in nothing but a self-protective reflex of suspicion. Their rule of thumb is always to give the least charitable interpretation. Self-absorption, minginess of spirit, rather than inexperience, is at the root of Willie’s failures in love.

  As for Willie’s father, a measure of his constitutional meanness is his response to books. As a student he finds he does not ‘understand’ the courses he is taking, and in particular does not ‘understand’ literature. (p. 10) The education he is subjected to, principally English literature taught by rote, is certainly irrelevant to his daily life. Nevertheless, there is in him a deep impulse not to understand, not to learn. He is, strictly speaking, ineducable. His bonfire of the classics is not a healthily critical response to a deadening colonial education. It does not free him for another, better kind of education, for he has no idea of what a good education might be. In fact, he has no ideas at all.

  Willie is similarly blank-minded. Arriving in Britain, he is soon made aware of how ignorant he is. But in a typical reflex action he finds someone else to blame, in this case his mother: he is incurious about the world because he is the child of a backward. Inheritance is character is fate.

  College life reveals to him that Indian etiquette and British etiquette are equally quaint and irrational. But this insight does not spell the beginning of self-knowledge. I know about both India and England, he reasons, whereas the English know only about England, therefore I am free to say what I like about my country and my background. He invents a new and less shameful past for himself, turning his mother into a member of an ancient Christian community and his father into the son of a courtier. The act of refashioning himself excites him, gives him a feeling of power.

  Why are this unappealing father and son the way they are? What do they reveal – what, in Naipaul’s hands, are they intended to reveal – about the society that produced them? The key word here is sacrifice. Willie has been quick to identify the joylessness at the heart of his father’s brand of Gandhianism because he knows at first hand what it is like to be given up. One of the stories Willie writes as a schoolboy is about a Brahmin who ritually sacrifices ‘backward’ children for the sake of riches, and ends up sacrificing his own two children. It is this story, titled ‘A Life of Sacrifice’, with its not so covert accusation against him, that determines Chandran the father – a man who makes a living out of what he calls self-sacrifice – to send his son away to a foreign country: ‘The boy will poison what remains of my life. I must get him far away from here.’ (p. 42)

  What Willie has detected is that sacrificing your desires means, in practice, not loving the people you ought to love. Chandran reacts to detection by pushing the loveless sacrifice of his son one step further. Behind Chandran’s fiction that he has sacrificed a career for the sake of a life of self-mortification lies a Hindu tradition embodied, if not in Gandhi himself (whom Willie and his mother despise), then in what Indians like Chandran have made of Gandhi in turning him into the national holy man; embodied more generally in a fatalistic philosophy that teaches that best is least, that striving toward self-improvement is ultimately pointless.

  Though bored by his studies, Willie clearly has gifts as a writer. At the prompting of an English friend to whom he shows the stories he wrote at school, he reads Hemingway. Using ‘The Killers’ as his prime model, translating situations from Hollywood movies into vaguely conceived Indian settings, splicing stories from London onto stories he remembers from home, he throws himself into a fury of composition. To his surprise he finds that he can be truer to his own feelings when he uses situations from far outside his own experience
and characters who are quite unlike him than in putting together ‘cautious, half-hidden parables’ of the type he had written at school. (p. 82)

  Naipaul has often in the past mined his own life story for his fiction. In certain respects the apprentice writer W. S. Chandran is based on the apprentice writer V. S. Naipaul. Chandran may be less widely read than Naipaul at the same age (Naipaul could call on as literary models Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, and, for his characteristically English tone, ‘aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing’, Somerset Maugham).5 On the other hand, both find literary inspiration in Hollywood; and in Willie’s discovery that he is truest to himself when he seems most remote it is hard not to hear his author responding anachronistically to the orthodoxy that the writer should write from the position of his or her nationality, race, and gender.

  For weeks on end Willie is absorbed in composing his fictions. But as his writing leads him inexorably to questions he does not want to face, he begins to falter, then quits. Never again in his life – at least in the life we read of in Half a Life – does he take up the pen.

  He emerges from the creative storm with a manuscript of twenty-six stories, which he offers to a sympathetic publisher. The book, when it comes out, is barely noticed, and by that time he is anyhow ashamed of it. But he does get a fan letter from a girl with a Portuguese name. ‘In your stories for the first time I find moments that are like moments in my own life,’ she writes. (p. 116) Knowing how his stories were put together, Willie finds this hard to believe. Nevertheless the two arrange to meet, and they fall in love. Her name is Ana; she is heiress to an estate in Mozambique. On an impulse, Willie follows Ana to Africa and spends eighteen years there as her kept man. The second half of Half a Life is taken up with the story of those years. Deeply interesting though it is, this second half provides nothing to match, in depth of analysis, the story of the Chandrans, father and son.

  Naipaul’s India is abstract and his London sketchy, but his Mozambique is convincingly realised. Mozambique of colonial times produced no writers of stature. The best-known Mozambiquan writer today, Mia Couto, belongs to the post-independence generation, and is anyhow too much under the sway of magic realism to be relied on as a chronicler of his country’s past. Thus Naipaul would seem to be free to invent a fantasy antebellum Mozambique of his own. But he does not do so. His allegiance is to the real, to real history as borne by real people; the second part of Half a Life has a strongly journalistic flavour, with Willie Chandran used as medium for representative vignettes of colonial life. This part of the novel adheres in fact to a mode of writing that Naipaul has perfected over the years, in which historical reportage and social analysis flow into and out of autobiographically coloured fiction and travel memoir – a mixed mode that may turn out to be his principal legacy to English letters.

  The picture we get of Mozambique in its last years under Portuguese rule (Willie spends the years 1959–77 there) is fresh and surprising. Ana is a Creole, an Africanised Portuguese. On the social scale, this ranks her below European-born Portuguese but above mestizos, who are in turn above blacks. To Willie, coming from caste-bound India, minute social gradations based on parentage are of course far from strange.

  The circle in which Ana and Willie move is made up of plantation owners and farm managers; social life consists of visits with neighbours and trips to town for supplies. Willie (who is in this respect indistinguishable from his author) explores this settler way of life without the condescension one might expect of a bien-pensant Western liberal. In fact he approves of Creole society, notably of the opportunities it allows for sexual variety. Even when the guerrillas close in and the end grows nigh, his settler friends go on ‘enjoying the moment, filling the old room with talk and laughter, like people who didn’t mind, like people who knew how to live with history’.‘I never admired the Portuguese as much as I admired them then,’ he reflects afterwards. ‘I wished it was possible for me to live as easily with the past.’ (pp. 187–8)

  The freedom to swim against the stream evinced here is consistent with Naipaul’s attitude toward his own colonial past, namely that descent from indentured Indian plantation workers need not be allowed to slot one into lifelong psychic victimage. When Naipaul looks back with an historian’s eye over imperialism, colonialism, and slavery, he takes in more than just the Western varieties. Thus he sees India as more deeply marked by its subjection to the rule of the Muslim Moghuls than of the British. Europeans are not the only foreigners to have settled in Africa. The East African littoral has absorbed Arabs and Indians as well as Europeans, and Africanised them.

  One strand of Naipaul’s complex self-conception and self-creation is as participant in the reconquest of Britain by former subject peoples. ‘In 1950 in London,’ he writes in The Enigma of Arrival, ‘I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century – a movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States.’ (p. 141) The Enigma of Arrival itself is the story of a man arriving in England from the ex-Empire to explore and finally settle in rural Wiltshire, one of the so-called home counties.

  Migrants of the kind that Naipaul writes about had received a colonial education that was comically old-fashioned by metropolitan standards. That very education, however, made of them trustees of a culture that had decayed in the ‘mother’ country. ‘Indians are the only surviving Englishmen,’ said Malcolm Muggeridge famously.6 The often magisterial stance that Naipaul adopts in his books is more Victorian that any indigenous Briton would dare to command.

  The adventures Willie Chandran has in Africa turn out to be mainly sexual. His relations with Ana are not passionate for long. Soon he begins to visit African prostitutes, many of them, by Western standards, children. From child prostitutes he graduates to an affair with a friend of Ana’s named Graca, and Graca shows him how brutal sex can be. ‘How terrible it would have been,’ he thinks afterwards, ‘if . . . I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself.’ With uncharacteristic sympathy his thoughts go to his parents in benighted India, to ‘my poor father and mother who had known nothing like this moment’. (pp. 190, 191)

  Willie has one more step to climb in his sexual ascent. With delicate obliqueness, Ana gives him to understand that Graca is mentally unstable. And indeed, as the Portuguese troops pull out and the guerrillas move in, Graca falls into a mania of self-abasement. Willie begins to see why religions condemn sexual extremism. Anyhow, he has grown tired of his colonial adventure. He is forty-one; half his life is over; he takes leave of Ana, retreats to his sister in the snows of Germany; the book ends.

  Half a Life is the story of the progress of a man from a loveless beginning to a solitary end that may turn out to be not an end, just a plateau of rest and recuperation. The experiences that bring about his progress are sexual in nature. The women with whom he has them figure as objects of desire, repugnance, or fascination – sometimes all three – reported on with a mercilessly unclouded eye.

  In the London part of the book we visit, for the third or fourth time in Naipaul’s oeuvre, since The Mimic Men of 1967, the upstairs room with the naked electric bulb and the mattress on newspapers on the floor where the young man first has sex. Each time the scene is reworked; progressively it has become more bestial and more desperate. It is as though Naipaul will not let go of the scene until he has wrung a last meaning from it that it will not yield.

  In Africa, as he embraces his first child prostitute, the ghosts of the women from his London past rise up before him. But just as he is about to falter, ‘an extraordinary look of command and aggression and need filled [the girl’s] eyes, her body became all tension, and I was squeezed by her strong hands and legs. In a split-second – like the split-second of decision when I looked down a gun-sight – I thought, “This is what Alvaro [the friend who has brought him to the brothel] lives for,” and I revived.’ After that experien
ce ‘I began to live with a new idea of sex . . . It was like being given a new idea of myself.’ (p. 175)

  The moment with the girl evokes the unlikely other passion Willie has discovered in Africa: guns. Aiming and pulling the trigger becomes, for him, an existential testing of the truth of the will, at a level beyond the reach of rational control. The African women he sleeps with test the truth of his desire in an equally naked way.

  It is in identifying the sexual embrace as the ultimate testing-place of the truth of the self that Naipaul comes closest to articulating the nature of the spiritual journey Willie Chandran is engaged on, and to measuring his distance from a way of life – represented, if only parodically, by his father – that treats denial of desire as the road to enlightenment. Impersonal though they may be, it is through his intimate encounters with African women that Willie is able to exorcise the ghosts of London. Yet what is so different about these African women? Watching a covey of girls dancing provocatively before their clients, he glimpses the answer: they embody something beyond their individual selves, some inscrutable ‘deeper spirit’. ‘I began to have an idea that there was something in the African heart that was shut away from the rest of us, and beyond politics.’ (p. 173)

  Naipaul knows Africa well. He has lived and worked in East Africa: ‘Home Again,’ in A Way with the World (1994), is based on his time there. In a Free State (1971) and A Bend in the River (1979) are both ‘about’ Africa. Overall, Naipaul’s vision of Africa has remained remarkably constant, one might even say rigid. Africa is a dreamlike and threatening place that resists understanding, that eats away at reason and the technological products of reason. Joseph Conrad, the man from the fringes of the West who became a classic of English literature, has been one of Naipaul’s lifelong masters. For good or ill, Naipaul’s Africa, with its images of rusting industrial machinery overgrown with forest vines, comes out of Heart of Darkness.