Literary Occasions: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  So the present novel begins with events twice removed, in an antique, “pastoral” time, and almost in a land of the imagination. The real world gradually defines itself, but it is still for the writer an imagined world. The novel is well established, its tone set, when my own wide-awake memories take over. So the book is a work of the imagination. It is obviously not “made up,” created out of nothing. But it does not tell a literal truth. The pattern in the narrative of widening vision and a widening world, though I believe it to be historically true of the people concerned, derives also from the child’s way of experiencing. It was on the partial knowledge of a child—myself—and his intuitions and emotion that the writer’s imagination went to work. There is more fantasy, and emotion, in this novel than in my later novels, where the intelligence is more in command.

  The novel took some time to get going. I began it, or began writing towards it, in the latter half of 1957. I was living on the draughty attic floor of a big Edwardian house in Muswell Hill in north London. The sitting room was choked with my landlady’s unwanted furniture. The furniture was from her first marriage; she had lived in Malaya before the war, had seen or glimpsed Somerset Maugham out there, and she told me, as though letting me into a secret, that he was “a nasty little man.” When middle-class Muswell Hill dinner parties were given downstairs (with the help of a very old uniformed maid, a relic, like her mistress, of a dead age), there was the modest smell of Dutch cigars. Upstairs, in my attic, the tattered old sitting-room carpet, its colours faded with old dust, rippled in the winter gales. There was also a mouse somewhere in the room.

  Old furniture, “things,” homelessness: they were more than ideas when I began writing. I had just, after ten weeks, left a well-paid but pointless and enervating job (my first and only full-time job). So, from having money, I had none again. I was also trying to do reviews for the New Statesman, which in 1957 was near the peak of its reputation. The New Statesman tormented me more than the novel. I was trying too hard with the trial reviews, and making myself clouded and physically queasy day after day. But the New Statesman gave me more than one chance; and at last, quite suddenly one day, I found my reviewer’s voice. Two or three months later the novel came alive; as with the reviewing; it seemed to happen at a particular moment. Soon the excitement of the novel displaced the glamour of the New Statesman. And then for two years I wrote in perfect conditions.

  I left Muswell Hill and the attic flat and moved south of the river to Streatham Hill. For twenty-five pounds a month I had the whole of the upper floor of a semi-detached house, with my own entrance off the tiled downstairs hall. My landlady’s daughter lived alone downstairs; and she did a job all day. I had more than changed flats: for the first time in my life I enjoyed solitude and freedom in a house. And just as, in the novel, I was able to let myself go, so in the solitude of the quiet, friendly house in Streatham Hill I could let myself go. There is a storm scene in the book, with black, biting ants. It was written (perhaps in its second draft) with the curtains drawn, and by candlelight. I wanted the atmosphere, and wanted to remind myself of the moving shadows thrown by the oil-lamps of part of my childhood.

  My landlady’s daughter read a lot and was a great buyer of books. I don’t believe she cared for those I had published, but during all my time in her house I felt her as an understanding, encouraging presence, never obtrusive. She made me a gift one day of a little square wool rug she had made herself. It was some weeks before, turning the square rug another way, I saw that the pattern was not abstract, but made up of my initials. She subscribed to the New Statesman; and it was for her, as much as for the literary editor of the New Statesman, that every four weeks I wrote my review of novels.

  In that week I also did other journalism, mainly radio talks for the BBC Overseas Service. Then for three weeks at a stretch I worked on the novel. I wrote with joy. And as I wrote, my conviction grew. My childhood dream of writing had been a dream of fame and escape and an imagined elegant style of life. Nothing in my father’s example or conversation had prepared me for the difficulties of narrative prose, of finding a voice, the difficulties of going on to the next book and the next, the searching of oneself for matter to write about. But, equally, nothing had prepared me for the liberation and absorption of this extended literary labour, the joy of allowing fantasy to play on stored experience, the joy of the comedy that so naturally offered itself, the joy of language. The right words seemed to dance above my head; I plucked them down at will. I took chances with language. Before this, out of my beginner’s caution, I had been strict with myself.

  In the last year mental and physical fatigue touched me. I had never before experienced that depth of fatigue. I became aware of how much I had given to the book, and I thought that I could never be adequately rewarded for the labour. And I believe it is true to say that the labour had burnt up thoughts of reward. Often, out in the Streatham Hill streets, momentarily away from the book, shopping perhaps, I thought: “If someone were to offer me a million pounds on condition that I leave the book unfinished, I would turn the money down.” Though I didn’t really need one, I bought a new typewriter to type out the precious finished manuscript. But I was too tired to type to the end; that had to be done professionally.

  When the book was handed in, I went abroad for seven months. An opportunity for travel in the Caribbean and South America had been given me by the Trinidad government. Colonial Trinidad had sent me to Oxford in 1950, and I had made myself a writer. Self-governing Trinidad sent me on a colonial tour in 1960, and by this accident I became a traveller. It wasn’t absolutely the end of the Streatham Hill house—I was to go back there for nine months, to write a book about my travels. But that was another kind of writing, another skill. It could be as taxing as fiction; it demanded in some ways an equivalent completeness of man and writer. But it engaged another part of the brain. No play of fantasy was required; the writer would never regard with wonder what he had drawn out of himself, the unsuspected truths turned up by the imagination.

  The two years spent on this novel in Streatham Hill remain the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden. Hence, more than twenty years later, the tears in Cyprus.

  March 1983

  PART TWO

  Indian Autobiographies

  THE DERELICTION of India overwhelms the visitor; and it seems reasonable to imagine that the Indian who leaves his country, and all its assumptions, for the first time is likely to be unsettled. But in Indian autobiographies* there is no hint of unsettlement: people are their designations and functions, and places little more than their names. “We reached Southampton, as far as I can remember, on a Saturday.” This is Gandhi writing in 1925 of his arrival in England as a student in 1889. That it was a Saturday was more important to him than that he had exchanged Bombay for Southampton. He had landed in a white flannel suit and couldn’t get at his luggage until Monday. So Southampton is no more than an experience of embarrassment and is never described; as later London, never described, is converted into a series of small spiritual experiences, the vows of vegetarianism and chastity being more important than the city of the 1890s. A place is its name.

  London was just too big for me and the two days I spent there so overwhelming that I was glad to leave for Manchester. My brother had arranged some digs in advance so that I settled in straight away.

  We are forty years beyond Gandhi, but the tone in Punjabi Century, the memoirs of a high business executive, remains the same. India is one place, England another. There can be no contrast, no shock in reverse. It is only near the end of My Public Life that Sir Mirza Ismail, after listing the recommendations he made to President Sukarno for the improvement of the Indonesian administration—he recommended four new colleges, five new stadiums and “publication of the President’s speeches in book form”—it is only after this that he observes:

  The standard of living is higher in Indonesia than in India. People are better clad and better fed, alt
hough cloth is much dearer. One hardly sees the miserable specimens of humanity that one comes across in the big cities in India, as well as in rural areas.

  The effect is startling, for until that moment the talk had mostly been of parks and gardens and factories, and of benevolent and appreciative rulers. We have to wait until Nirad Chaudhuri’s Passage to England, published in 1959, for something more explicit.

  I failed to see in England one great distinction which is basic in my country. When I was there I was always asking myself, “Where are the people?” I did so because I was missing the populace, the commonalty, the masses …

  The attitude might be interpreted as aristocratic; in no country is aristocracy as easy as in India. But we are in reality dealing with something more limiting and less comprehensible: the Indian habit of exclusion, denial, non-seeing. It is part of what Nirad Chaudhuri calls the “ignoble privacy” of Indian social organization; it defines by negatives. It is a lack of wonder, the medieval attribute of a people who are still surrounded by wonders; and in autobiographies this lack of wonder is frequently converted into a hectic self-love.

  For its first half Gandhi’s autobiography reads like a fairytale. He is dealing with the acknowledged marvels of his early life; and his dry, compressed method, reducing people to their functions and simplified characteristics, reducing places to names and action to a few lines of narrative, turns everything to legend. When the action becomes more complex and political, the method fails; and the book declines more obviously into what it always was: an obsession with vows, food experiments, recurring illness, an obsession with the self. “Thoughts of self,” Chaudhuri writes in The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,

  are encouraged by a religious view of life, because it emphasizes our lone coming into the world and our lone exit from it and induces us to judge values in their relation to the individual voyager, the individual voyage, and the ultimate individual destiny.

  In Punjabi Century Prakash Tandon seems to set out to tell the story of the transformation of the Punjab from 1857 to 1947. He barely attempts the theme. He minutely describes festivals, marriage customs, his father’s engineering duties, the various family houses; and the book is transformed into a tribute to his province, his caste, his family and himself: it contains an embarrassing account of his courtship in Sweden, to which is added an injured and recognizably Indian account of his difficulties in getting a job. “Friends not only in my own country but scattered on three continents have suggested I should write my memoirs,” Sir Mirza Ismail says.

  It is not easy, however, to write about oneself, and partly for this reason, and partly in order to make the memoirs more interesting, I have quoted from letters received.

  Not a few of these letters are tributes to the writer. “You’re a wonder!” writes Lord Willingdon. “I would like to name a road after you,” writes the Maharaja of Jaipur.

  An old-fashioned Muslim vizier, a modern Hindu businessman, the Mahatma: assorted personalities, but recognizably of the same culture. “Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West,” a “God-fearing” friend said to Gandhi on the Mahatma’s day of silence. “I know of nobody in the East having written one except amongst those who have come under western influence.” And it is in this bastard form—in which a religious view of life, laudable in one culture, is converted steadily into self-love, disagreeable in another culture—that we can begin to see the misunderstandings and futility of the Indo-English encounter.

  The civilizations were, and remain, opposed; and the use of English heightens the confusion. When Gandhi came to England for the Round Table Conference in 1931 he stayed for a night at a Quaker guest-house in the Ribble Valley. The garden was in bloom. In the evening Gandhi, in sandals, dhoti and shawl, walked among the flowers. He scarcely looked at them. The story is told by Tandon, who got it from the warden.

  I consoled him that it was quite characteristic of Gandhiji that though he passionately advocated a return to nature he completely lacked interest in its beauty.

  But was it strictly a “return to nature” that Gandhi advocated? Wasn’t it something more complex? Was Gandhi’s aim to reawaken wonder, or was it rather an unconscious striving after a symbolism acceptable to the Indian masses, a political exploitation, however unconscious, of the “ignoble privacy” of Indian attitudes? The Gandhian concept is not easily translated. A “return to nature” and “patriotism”: in India the concepts are linked; and the Indian concept of patriotism is unique. Tandon tells how, in 1919, the Independence movement made its first impression on his district.

  These visitors spoke about the freedom of India, and this intrigued us; but when they talked in familiar analogies and idiom about the Kal Yug, we saw what they meant. Had it not been prophesied that there were seven eras in India’s life and history: there had been a Sat Yug, the era of truth, justice and prosperity; and then there was to be a Kal Yug, an era of falsehood, of demoralization, of slavery and poverty … These homely analogies, illustrated by legend and history, registered easily, but not so easily the conclusion to which they were linked, that it was all the fault of the Angrezi Sarkar.

  We are in fact dealing with the type of society which Camus described in the opening chapter of The Rebel: a society which has not learned to see and is incapable of assessing itself, which asks no questions because ritual and myth have provided all the answers, a society which has not learned “rebellion.” An unfortunate word perhaps, with its juvenile, romantic 1950s associations; but it is the concept which divides, not the East from the West, but India from almost every other country. It explains why so much writing about India is unsatisfactory and one-sided, and it throws into relief the stupendous achievement of Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian which, containing within itself both India and the West, has had the misfortune of being taken for granted by both sides.

  Chaudhuri’s Autobiography may be the one great book to have come out of the Indo-English encounter. No better account of the penetration of the Indian mind by the West—and, by extension, of the penetration of one culture by another—will be or can now be written. It was an encounter which ended in mutual recoil and futility. For Chaudhuri this futility is an almost personal tragedy. Yet we can now see that this futility was inevitable. To the static, minutely ordered Indian society, with its pressures ever towards the self, England came less as a political shock than as the source of a New Learning. Chaudhuri quotes from Rajani, a Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterji:

  He did not disclose his business, nor could I ask him outright. So we discussed social reform and politics … The discussion of ancient literature led in its turn to ancient historiography, out of which there emerged some incomparable exposition of the classical historians, Tacitus, Plutarch, Thucydides, and others. From the philosophy of history of these writers Amarnath came down to Comte and his lois des trois états, which he endorsed. Comte brought in his interpreter Mill and then Huxley; Huxley brought in Owen and Darwin; and Darwin Buchner and Schopenhauer. Amarnath poured the most entrancing scholarship into my ears, and I became too engrossed to remember our business.

  The astonishing thing about this novel is its date, which is 1877. Kipling’s Plain Tales were to appear in book form just eleven years later, to reveal the absurdity of this New Learning, nourished by books alone. Between the New Learning and its representatives in Simla there was a gap. Dead civilizations alone ought properly to provide a New Learning. This civilization survived; it had grown suburban and philistine, was soon to become proletarian; and it was fitting that from 1860 to 1910, which Chaudhuri fixes as the period of the Indian Renaissance, the educated Bengali should have been an object of especial ridicule to the English, to whom the unintellectual simplicities of the blue-eyed Pathan were more comprehensible. Chaudhuri, lamenting the death of the Indian Renaissance, and the corrupting, “elemental” Westernization that took its place, pays little attention to this aspect of the encounter.

  The élite Indo-
English culture of Bengal was as removed from the Anglo-Indian culture of Simla as it was removed from the culture of the Indian masses. It was a growth of fantasy; the political liberalism it bred could not last. It was to give way to the religious revivalism of a mass movement, to all the combative hocus-pocus of revived “Vedic” traditions such as the launching of ships with coconut-milk instead of champagne, and finally to that cultural confusion which some sentences of Tandon’s illustrate so well:

  Gandhi rechristened India Bharat Mata, a name that evoked nostalgic memories, and associated with Gao Mata, the mother cow … He … spoke about the peace of the British as the peace of slavery. Gradually a new picture began to build in our minds, of India coming out of the Kal Yug into a new era of freedom and plenty, Ram Rajya.

  Language has at last broken down. Gao Mata, Ram Rajya: for these there are no English equivalents. We can see “national pride” now as an applied phrase, with a special Indian meaning. In the definition of Ram Rajya the true stress falls on “plenty,” while “freedom” is an intrusive English word. Here is the futility of the Indo-English encounter, the intellectual confusion of the “new” India. This is the great, tragic theme of Chaudhuri’s book.