V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

I had thought of the cinema pleasure as a foretaste of my adult life. Now, with all kinds of shame in many recesses of my mind, I felt it to be fantasy. I hadn’t read Hangover Square , didn’t even know of it as a book; but I had seen the film. Its Hollywood London had merged in my mind (perhaps because of the associations of the titles) into the London of The Lodger . Now I knew that London to be fantasy, worthless to me. And the cinema pleasure, that had gone so deep into me and had in the barren years of abstract study given me such support, that cinema pleasure was now cut away as with a knife. And when, ten or twelve years later, I did return to the cinema, the Hollywood I had known was dead, the extraordinary circumstances in which it had flourished no longer existing; American films had become as self-regardingly local as the French or English; and there was as much distance between a film and me as between a book or a painting and me. Fantasy was no longer possible. I went to the cinema not as a dreamer or a fantast but as a critic.

I had little to record. My trampings about London didn’t produce adventures, didn’t sharpen my eye for buildings or people. My life was restricted to the Earl’s Court boardinghouse. There was a special kind of life there. But I failed to see it. Because, ironically, though feeling myself already drying up, I continued to think of myself as a writer and, as a writer, was still looking for suitable metropolitan material.

Metropolitan — what did I mean by that? I had only a vague idea. I meant material which would enable me to compete with or match certain writers. And I also meant material that would enable me to display a particular kind of writing personality: J. R. Ackerley of Hindoo Holiday , perhaps, making notes under a dinner table in India; Somerset Maugham, aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing; Aldous Huxley, so full of all kinds of knowledge and also so sexually knowing; Evelyn Waugh, so elegant so naturally. Wishing to be that kind of writer, I didn’t see material in the campers in the big Earl’s Court house.

O NE SUNDAY, not long after I had come to London, I was invited to lunch by the Hardings. Mr. Harding was the manager of the boardinghouse, but I had seen almost nothing of him or his wife. I had seen more of Angela, whose last name I seldom used and in the end forgot. Angela was Italian, from the south of the country. She was in her mid or late twenties, but I couldn’t really tell: she was older than me, ten years at least, and I saw her as very mature. She had spent all the war in Italy and had somehow fetched up — like many of her friends — in London.

Angela had a room in the house and some kind of position, but I wasn’t sure what the position was. She sometimes was in the dining room in the basement, serving the breakfasts; and sometimes she was there in the evening. She also worked on some evenings as a waitress in the Italian restaurant, the Venezia or some such name, not far from Earl’s Court station; she served the two-and-six or three-and-six dinners. I had the dinner there a few times. It gave me an indescribable pleasure to be in a restaurant where I knew the waitress, even though I didn’t understand the menu and didn’t particularly like the food.

Angela was the first woman outside my family I had got to know. There was an easiness about her from the start. I found her very attractive and — still a virgin myself — was half in love with her. This acquaintance with Angela gave me, fleetingly, a little metropolitan excitement, told me I was far from home and in a great city in Europe. The boardinghouse; the underground railway at the back of the house, and the entrance to the many-platformed station just around the corner; the Italian restaurant, the waitress one knew. I liked the setting and the props; they were part of the drama; they gave me a sense of myself as a metropolitan man just for a minute or so.

Angela gave me a certain amount of encouragement. She told me she liked me; she told me my color was like the color of some people in her country. But there was a man in her life, an Englishman she had met in Italy during the war. He was a rough, common man, liable to become violent. I never saw him; it was Angela herself who described her lover in that way — half asking you to condemn the man, half asking for sympathy for herself, speaking of the relationship as though it was something unavoidable.

She said that one night, during a quarrel, he had become so violent that she had run out of the room or flat naked except for a coat which she had grabbed as she ran. She had decided after that to live by herself. That was when she had moved to the Earl’s Court house. Her lover was absent; at least I never saw him. Was he in a foreign country? I gathered from things that other people said that he might have been in jail. But I didn’t raise the question with Angela, and she didn’t say. I should have asked her, but because of my feelings for her I didn’t want to. She was loyal to this man nonetheless. And the encouragement she gave me was oddly chaste. Her room was open to me; but it was only when she had other visitors that she encouraged me to be playful — as though witnesses made my playfulness all right. She was more distant and careful when there were no other visitors.

It was because of Angela — in fact, as Angela’s friend — that I went to the Sunday lunch given by the manager, Mr. Harding, and his wife. Mr. Harding I had hardly seen. And even after this lunch — which became part of my “metropolitan” material, something I obsessively wrote about for many months, not only in London in the summer, but also later in Oxford in the autumn, altering the reality to make it fit my idea of what was good material, suitable for someone like myself to write about — even after all that writing I have no impression of what the man and his wife looked like.

The lunch was in a large room on the ground floor at the back of the house. The room at the front, choked with brown furniture and seldom used, was the “lounge.” The room at the back was not so full of furniture; but the walls were as stripped as the walls of the other rooms in the house, as though the war itself had visited some disaster, some looting, on the house. I gathered that this back room was part of the quarters or rooms that the Hardings enjoyed as managers of the boardinghouse.

The tall windows looked out onto the garden — or, more properly, untended ground — that ran to the high brick wall of the underground railway station. There was a tree; there was a view of trees in neighboring plots. The ground was bare in the shadow of the brick wall of the underground station. It was not unpleasant to me; I liked the colors; I liked the feel of a space enclosed and shaded but cool.

There were other friends of the Hardings’. Mr. Harding was the star of the lunch. I believe he was drunk. He wasn’t incapacitated; but he had been drinking. Mrs. Harding — again, I have no picture of her — and Angela looked after the serving of the lunch. Mr. Harding talked. He was not only the star, but also the comic turn; he had a strong idea of who he was, and he talked with the confidence of a man among people whom he knew, people who would laugh at his jokes and be impressed by his manner.

Had he been drinking at home, in a room somewhere, or had he gone to the pub? I didn’t have the social knowledge of London drinking to ask or to guess. I knew nothing about pubs. I didn’t like the idea of pubs; I didn’t like the idea of a place where people went only to drink. I associated it with the rumshop drunkenness I had seen at home, and was amazed that to ordinary people on the London streets a drunk man was comic, and not hateful. Just as I was slightly amazed now that Mr. Harding, drunk at the lunch table, should not be treated with contempt by his guests but with tolerance and even respect. He was listened to. I cannot tell what sort of accent he had. It sounded good to me, like something from a film.