V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Two weeks away from home, when I had thought there was little for me to record as a writer, and just eighteen, I had found, if only I had had the eyes to see, a great subject. Great subjects are illuminated best by small dramas; and in the Earl’s Court boardinghouse, as fellow guests or as friends of Angela’s, there were at least ten or twelve drifters from many countries of Europe and North Africa, who were offering themselves for my inspection, men and women, some of whom had seen terrible things during the war and were now becalmed and quiet in London, solitary, foreign, sometimes idle, sometimes half-criminal. These people’s principal possessions were their stories, and their stories spilled easily out of them. But I noted nothing down. I asked no questions. I took them all for granted, looked beyond them; and their faces, clothes, names, accents have vanished and cannot now be recalled.

If I had had a more direct, less unprejudiced way of looking; if I had noted down simply what I had seen; if in those days I had had the security which later came to me (from the practice of writing), and out of which I was able to take a great interest always in the men and women who were immediately before me and was to learn how to talk to them; if with a fraction of that security I had written down what passed before me, frankly or simply, what material would I not have had! For soon the time would come when I would look, professionally, for material for a London book about the time of my arrival, and then I would find very little.

What remained in my memory was what I had written about obsessively in those early days, and much of that was about Angela’s sexuality: the feel of her breasts when, sitting or reclining on the bed beside me in her room, our backs against the wall, and the room full of her strange friends, she had allowed me to press my hand against her breast; the shape of her mouth; the brilliant wartime red of her lips; and the feel of her fur coat; and the sight, thrilling and unexpected, of her apron in the restaurant.

Of Angela’s past and time in Italy I noted down nothing, never thinking to ask. I noted down only her railing against the Italian priests of the south, who became fat during the war, she said, when everybody else went hungry. I noted that down, I remember it now, because it was “anticlerical.” “Anticlericalism”—that was one of the abstract issues of European history that I had got to know about, from teachers’ notes and recommended textbooks, at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad. History as abstract a study for me as the French or Russian cinema, about which I could write essays, just as I could write essays on French history without understanding, without having any idea about, kings and courtiers and religious sects, any idea of the government or social organization of an old and great country.

And how could my knowledge of the world not be abstract, when all the world I knew at the age of eighteen was the small colonial world of my little island in the mouth of the Orinoco, and within that island the world of my family, within our little Asian-Indian community: small world within small world. I hardly knew our own community; of other communities I knew even less. I had no idea of history — it was hard to attach something as grand as history to our island. I had no idea of government. I knew only about a colonial governor and a legislative council and an executive council and a police force. So that almost everything I read about history and other societies had an abstract quality. I could relate it only to what I knew: every kind of reading committed me to fantasy.

I was, in 1950, like the earliest Spanish travelers to the New World, medieval men with high faith: traveling to see wonders, parts of God’s world, but then very quickly taking the wonders for granted, saving inquiry (and true vision) only for what they knew they would find even before they had left Spain: gold. True curiosity comes at a later stage of development. In England I was at that earlier, medieval-Spanish stage — my education and literary ambition and my academic struggles the equivalent of the Spanish adventurer’s faith and traveler’s endurance. And, like the Spaniard, having arrived after so much effort, I saw very little. And like the Spaniard who had made a long, perilous journey down the Orinoco or Amazon, I had very little to record.

So, out of all the things I might have noted down about Angela’s Italian past, I noted down only her anticlericalism. It was a confirmation of what had up till then been abstract; it thrilled me because I had expected to find it.

The flotsam of Europe after the war — that was one theme I missed. There was another, linked to that.

Shortly after she had taken over from the Hardings, Angela took me up to a room one Saturday afternoon to show me “something,” as she said. She behaved as though this “something” was something she had just discovered, something the deposed Hardings might have been responsible for. Though this couldn’t have been true: Angela had been connected with the house for some time.

She took me to a room on the second or third floor. It was a big and dark room, much bigger than mine. The curtains were closed. The room smelled of old dirt and urine, old unwashed clothes, old unwashed bodies. It was as though the smell hung on the darkness of the room; as though the darkness was an expression of the smell. There was an old man on the bed; he was the source of the smell. A stick was leaning on the bed. Angela said to the figure on the bed, “I’ve brought someone to see you.”

He paid no attention. Playfully, and greatly to Angela’s amusement, he took the stick that was leaning on the bed and tried to raise her skirt with it. She was showing me the old man and his sexual playfulness as an oddity; that was how I accepted it. She told me nothing else about him and I didn’t ask. The questions come only now. Had he come to the house before the war, when the lounge might still have been a lounge and the dining room perhaps a true dining room? Had he stayed there throughout the war, and was he too old now to move? Had the Hardings taken up his meals to him, and did Angela do so now? Was he utterly dependent on the people who ran the boardinghouse?

If, as I thought (though at the age of eighteen I had no means of assessing the age of old people), he was now about eighty, it meant that he had been born in 1870. Born in the year Dickens died; the year Lord Alfred Douglas was born; the year the Prussians defeated the French. Or, considering it from another angle, the year after Mahatma Gandhi was born. As a young man he would have known people whose memories went back to the early decades of the nineteenth century; he would have lived among people to whom the Indian Mutiny was a recent affair. Now, after two wasting wars, after Gandhi and Nehru, he was ending his days in one of the big houses of Victorian London, a part of London developed in the Victorian time. And now the houses there, which had survived so much, were too big for the people; and the old man in the big dark room was like a stranger among the people who lived in the house. Against these houses there beat a new tide of people — like myself, and the other Asiatics in the house, and Angela and the other Mediterraneans — who still hardly knew where they were.

I saw the old man once later. He was shuffling about one of the staircase landings. There was an odd, humorous-seeming restlessness about his old face. It might have been that that was the way the flesh and muscles on his face were now set; it was as though his face was, very slightly, twitching with age. He didn’t look at me with any kind of recognition; he just had his fixed seeming smile. He was concentrating on his steps and what for him would have been the long walk down to the hall and the street. It was summer, late August, but he was wearing an overcoat. It was dark blue and looked heavy; it might have been made to measure some time before. He was tall; and the overcoat, though he needed it for warmth, seemed too heavy for his shoulders. He had his stick. His smell preceded him and lingered after him. I suppose he was going out for a little walk; it would have taken him a long time to prepare.