V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

I went walking. In my memory there is only one walk. But I believe now that there would have been two, with a taxi ride in between (to check up on the sailing time for the ship that was to take me away that afternoon). Without the money in the suitcase I would have been penniless; so at least that precaution had served.

I saw a cinema advertising Marius with Raimu. The advertisement was in movable letters. I had never seen a French film in my life. But I knew much about French cinema. I had read about it, and I had even in some way studied it, in case a question came up in a French cultural “general” paper. So much of my education had been like that, abstract, a test of memory: like a man, denied the chance of visiting famous cities, learning their street maps instead. So much of my education had been like that: monkish, medieval, learning quite separate from everyday things.

Marius , Raimu. One name was like an anagram of the other, bar the s (my monkish way of observing, studying, committing to memory). And if it had been afternoon, and if I didn’t have a ship to take, I would have gone, for at home that was where, imaginatively, I lived most profoundly: in the cinema. Really — over and above that quirk of literary ambition — there was a great simplicity to my character. I knew very little about the agricultural colony in the New World where I was born. And of my Asiatic-Hindu community, a transplanted peasant community, I knew only my extended family. All my life, from the moment I had become self-aware, had been devoted to study, study of the abstract sort I have tried to give some idea of. And then this idea of abstract study had been converted into an idea of a literary life in another country. That had committed me to further, more desperate, more consuming study; had committed me to further withdrawal. My real life, my literary life, was to be elsewhere. In the meantime, at home, I lived imaginatively in the cinema, a foretaste of that life abroad. On Saturday afternoons, after the special holiday shows which began at one thirty (and which we simply called “one thirty” rather in the way other people might speak of matinees), it was painful, after the dark cinema and the remote realms where one had been living for three hours or so, to come out into the very bright colors of one’s own world.

But I had not seen any French films. They had never been shown in Trinidad. And perhaps, like British films, if they had been shown they would have found no audience, being of a particular country, local, not universal like the Hollywood pictures, which could quicken the imaginations of remote people. I knew French films from books, especially Roger Manvell’s Film . I knew all the still photographs in that book. His reverential text, and the enthusiasm that had been given me at school for France as the country of civilization, made me see extraordinary virtue in those strongly lighted, poorly reproduced small photographs.

And now, less than a day into my great adventure, seeing the name Marius and its near anagram Raimu on the cinema board, I felt I was close to something that was mine by right (by education, vocation, training, yearning, sacrifice) — like The New York Times itself, which yet (when bought by me) didn’t hold me, being like a crossword puzzle I could only partly fill in.

And a similar feeling of being let down by what should have been mine by right came when I found and went into a bookshop. Great cities possessed bookshops — just as they had cinemas which showed French films. Colonial towns or settlements like my own didn’t have bookshops. In the old colonial main square in Port of Spain — antique roofs and awnings of corrugated iron, once painted red or in alternate stripes of white and red; old carpentry, fretted gables with finials, decorative Victorian ironwork; architecture that spoke to me of our remoteness from the ports where that timber and decorative ironwork and corrugated iron were shipped — in the old colonial square there were emporia that sold schoolbooks and perhaps children’s books and coloring books, and had perhaps as well a short shelf or two of Penguin books, a few copies of a few titles, and a few of the Collins Classics (looking like Bibles): emporia as dull as the emporia of those days could be, suggesting warehouses for a colonial population, where absolutely necessary goods (with a few specialist lines, like mosquito nets and the Collins Classics) were imported and stored in as unattractive and practical a way as possible.

And here, in the city of New York, was a bookshop. A place I should have entered as though I had journeyed to enter it. I loved books, I was a reader — it was my reputation at home. But the books I knew or knew about were few. There were the books in my father’s bookcase: classics from the Everyman series, religious books, books about Hinduism and India. These last were bought from a trader in Indian goods in a petty commercial street in Port of Spain, and bought, most of them, as a gesture of Indian nationalism; few of them were read by my father, and none by me. There were the books I had studied at school; there were the books I saw in the Central Library. Really, though, I knew only the classical or established names, the French, Spanish, and English books I had studied at school, and the very famous names my father had introduced me to.

To enter this New York bookshop was to find myself among unhallowed names. I was traveling to be a writer, but this world of modern writing and publishing I had walked into was not something I was in touch with. And among all these unfamiliar, unhallowed names, I looked for the familiar, the classics, the uniform series, the very things I had looked at (with a feeling of deprivation and being far away) in the dark colonial emporia of Port of Spain, among the reams of paper and the stacks of exercise books, next to wholesalers of various kinds of imported goods (cloth and coal pots), all in a warm smell of spices and damp raw sugar and various cooking oils from the wholesale grocers of South Quay, where there were donkey carts and horse carts and pushcarts among the motor trucks.

This was an American shop, not one with English stock, the stock I was more familiar with. I settled then for the Modern Library series, and bought South Wind . This had been recommended to me by an English teacher who knew of my writing ambitions. I had despaired of finding this book in the emporia of Trinidad. Here, part of the great wealth of New York, was the book, immediately available. I paid one twenty-eight, and the assistant, who must have been eight or ten years older than me, called me sir.

South Wind! But it remained unread. My first attempt to read it was like all the attempts I made later: it showed me that — like the books of Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence and certain other contemporary writers whose names had come to me through my father or through teachers at school — this book, with a young man called Denis and a bishop, and an island called Nepenthe, was alien, far from anything in my experience, and beyond my comprehension. But the alienness of a book, though it might keep me from reading it (I never read beyond the first chapter of South Wind ), did not prevent me from admiring it. The very alienness, the inaccessibility, was like a promise of romance — a reward, some way in the future, for making myself a writer.

So much of my education had been abstract that I could live like this and think and feel like this. I had, for instance, studied classical French drama without having any idea of the country or the court that had produced this drama; without having the capacity to grasp the historical reality of France, and in fact quietly (in my own mind) rejecting as a fairy story all that I was told in introductions or textbooks about kings and ministers and mistresses and religious wars. These things were too removed from my experience and I could not grasp them; I knew only my island and my community and the ways of our colony. I had prepared essays on French and Soviet cinema simply by reading books and articles. I had learnt the great names of art and architecture in the same way.