V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Two Salvation Army girls were also among my material. They were traveling to a conference somewhere in Europe; but they were ready to flirt. This flirtatiousness in religious girls struck me as strange; with my deprivations, I saw oddity where there was none. And there was a young man from the South. He shared the entertainer’s cabin. He was heavy and pockmarked and he wore glasses. In “Gala Night” he appeared — and the scene was written so often by me that in my imagination he remains forever — in undershirt and underpants, sitting on the upper bunk, in the dim top light, peeling and eating an orange, and talking about girls, perhaps the Salvation Army girls.

He said, looking down at his orange, “I’m a plodder. I know what I want and I go get it — see?”

That was material for me: I could show the world — writing like that, observing things like that — that I knew the world. I could say in effect: “I, too, have seen this. And I, too, can write about it.”

But there was another memory, disconnected from the first. In some versions of “Gala Night” I used it. In other versions I left it out.

The young Southerner was talking about “colored people.” He said, “Nowadays they want to get in your bed and sleep with you.”

I was taken aback by that, and then amazed: that he, so full of racial feeling, could talk to me like that, as though he didn’t see me racially. But that topic of race — though it was good, familiar material, and could prove my knowledge of the world — formed no part of “Gala Night.” It was too close to my disturbance, my vulnerability, the separation of my two selves. That was not the kind of personality the writer wished to assume; that was not the material he dealt in.

So that, though traveling to write, concentrating on my experience, eager for experience, I was shutting myself off from it, editing it out of my memory. Editing out the airport taxi driver who had overcharged me — the humiliation had been too great; editing out the Negro at the hotel.

Nor, as a writer, could I acknowledge the other, hideous anxiety of my day in New York. The journey in a liner across the Atlantic should have been pure romance; the going aboard the ship that afternoon in New York should have been pure romance. But romance was in only one part of my mind; there was something else in another part of my mind. I was nervous about sharing a cabin. For months I had worried about that aspect of my journey across the Atlantic. I feared being put with aggressive or disagreeable or sexually unbalanced people. I was small and felt my physical weakness. I feared being assaulted; I feared attracting someone’s malevolence.

That had been a great anxiety for me. But when I went aboard the ship it had been miraculously resolved. Yet I could not, in “Gala Night,” wishing to be the kind of writer I wanted to be, write about that.

The British vice-consul in New York had booked a passage for someone who, when he went aboard the ship at the pier in New York, was clearly seen not to be English and was a puzzle to the purser. I remember it only now — so successful was “Gala Night” in cutting out the memory. Only now, laying aside the material of “Gala Night,” I remember having to stand about for some hours while they decided where to put me. I would have been unplaced, would have been standing about, worried about my few pieces of luggage, even while the ship was leaving the pier. My sight of the New York harbor and the famous skyline would have been tainted by that standing about. And then someone took a decision, and the issue was wonderfully resolved.

I was given a cabin absolutely to myself in a higher class. And I was given a key to open the door that separated that class from the tourist class, where I was to continue to live and eat during the day. This was a wonderful piece of luck. Immediately, much of my anxiety left me. I thought it a very good omen for the future. I thought (still with the fear of sharing cabins, compartments, and hotel bathrooms) that I would be blessed with what I thought of then as “traveler’s luck.”

But that night, when I was asleep, there was a commotion that awakened me. The top light of the cabin was put on. There were voices. I knew then, I knew, what was about to happen. Someone was going to be put with me. Someone else from “tourist” was going to be given a key to the door — which for some hours that evening I had thought of as a very private possession, almost a secret — that separated the classes. And the top light, put on just like that, and the raised voices, were so inconsiderate. I closed my eyes. Like a child. Like someone practicing magic. If I pretended to be asleep, if I pretended to know nothing, then nothing might happen; and the people who had come in might all just go away.

But there was trouble. The man who had been brought in was making trouble. He was rejecting the cabin. His voice was rising. He said, “It’s because I’m colored you’re putting me here with him.”

Colored! So he was a Negro. So this was a little ghetto privilege I had been given. But I didn’t want the Negro or anybody else to be with me. Especially I didn’t want the Negro to be with me, for the very reasons the Negro had given.

And he wasn’t to be with me. The top light went out; the cabin door closed; the people who had come in went out. And the Negro was no doubt taken back past the barrier door to tourist class and fitted into some crowded three- or four-berth cabin, but with white people. Satisfactory to him, the black man; but at what price, at what cost in strain and tension for the days of the journey across the great Atlantic. Frightening, that glimpse of another man’s deprivation and drive. Yet I was also ashamed that they had brought the Negro to my cabin. I was ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me — so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself. And it was shame, too, that made me keep my eyes closed while they were in the cabin.

He, the black man, sought me out the next morning in the lounge of the tourist class, to apologize. He was tall, slender, well dressed, with a suggestion of boniness and sharpness below his fine, thin summer suiting: bony knees, sharp shins. He was well spoken, quieter with me than he had been in the cabin. He had thought that the people from the purser’s office were genuinely offering him a better and less crowded cabin when they led him beyond the tourist door. But when he saw me he changed his mind. He knew that I had become the nucleus of a little ghetto; he knew the Americans, he said. What else did he tell me? What else was there to him apart from his racial passion? Was he so restricted? I remember nothing else. I remember no other meeting with him.

A woman — young, but older than my eighteen — told me more about him one day on deck: he clearly had made an impression on some of the passengers. He was fatigued by American prejudice, the woman said; and she spoke of him with understanding and also a kind of admiration. He was going to live in Germany, she said. His wife was German; they had met when he was serving with the army in Germany; he had grown to like the German people. Strange pilgrimage!

In Puerto Rico there had been the Trinidad Negro in a tight jacket on his way to Harlem. Here was a man from Harlem or black America on his way to Germany. In each there were aspects of myself. But, with my Asiatic background, I resisted the comparison; and I was traveling to be a writer. It was too frightening to accept the other thing, to face the other thing; it was to be diminished as man and writer. Racial diminution formed no part of the material of the kind of writer I was setting out to be. Thinking of myself as a writer, I was hiding my experience from myself; hiding myself from my experience. And even when I became a writer I was without the means, for many years, to cope with that disturbance.