V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

The Africa of my imagination was not only the source countries — Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, Rwanda; it was also Trinidad, to which I had gone back with a vision of romance and had seen black men with threatening hair. It also now became Wiltshire. It was also the land created by my pain and exhaustion, expressed in the dream of the exploding head. A little over a year before, towards the end of the book about the New World, I had had the waking fantasy of myself as a corpse tossing lightly among the reeds at the bottom of a river (a river like the one in the Pre-Raphaelite painting of the drowned Ophelia, reproduced in the Nelson’s West Indian Reader I had used in my elementary school in Trinidad, a river that turned out to be like the river in Wiltshire at the back of my cottage). Now every night at some stage an explosion in my head, occurring in a swift dream, giving me the conviction that this time I had to die, that this time I could not survive the great, continuing noise, awakened me.

Such violence in my Africa, in the security of my stone cottage, where I had a coal fire every night! So much had gone into that Africa of my fantasy. As a point of rest, as a refreshment, a promise of release, I allowed myself to play, lightly, with the ancient Mediterranean idea that had come to me from the Chirico painting, The Enigma of Arrival .

The empty wharf; the glimpse of the mast of the ancient ship; the doorways; the wicked, hypnotizing city towards which the two cloaked figures walk.

For two days they had sailed, staying close to the shore. On the third day the captain wakened his deck passenger and pointed to the city on the shore. “There. You are there. Your journey’s over.” But the passenger, looking at the city in the morning haze, seeing the unremarkable city debris floating out on the sea, unremarkable though the city was so famous — rotten fruit, fresh branches, bits of timber, driftwood — the passenger had a spasm of fear. He sipped the bitter honey drink the captain had given him; he pretended to get his things together; but he didn’t want to leave the ship .

But he would have to land. Such adventures were to come to him within the cutout, sunlit walls of that city. So classical that city, seen from the ship; so alien within, so strange its gods and cults. My hero would end as a man on the run, a man passionate to get away to a clearer air. In desperation he was to go through a doorway, and he was to find himself on the wharf again. But there was no mast above the walls of the wharf. No ship. His journey — his life’s journey — had been made.

It did not occur to me that the story that had come to me as a pleasant fantasy had already occurred, and was an aspect of my own.

I had no means of knowing that the landscape by which I was surrounded was in fact benign, the first landscape to have that quality for me. That I was to heal here; and, more, that I was to have something like a second life here; that those first four days of fog — before I went out walking on the downs — were like a rebirth for me. That after twenty years in England, I was to learn about the seasons here at last; that at last (as for a time as a child in Trinidad) I would learn to link certain natural events, leaves on trees, flowers, the clarity of the river, to certain months. That in the most unlikely way, at an advanced age, in a foreign country, I was to find myself in tune with a landscape in a way that I had never been in Trinidad or India (both sources of different kinds of pain). That all the resolutions and franknesses I was going to arrive at through my writing were to be paralleled by the physical peace of my setting; that I was to be cleansed in heart and mind; and that for ten years I was to turn this landscape of down and barrow, so far from my own, into the setting for concentrated work.

The man who went walking past Jack’s cottage saw things as if for the first time. Literary allusions came naturally to him, but he had grown to see with his own eyes. He could not have seen like that, so clearly, twenty years before. And having seen, he might not have found the words or the tone. The simplicity and directness had taken a long time to get to him; it was necessary for him to have gone through a lot.

A long time later, seeking as always a synthesis of my material, my worlds, my own developing way of seeing, I thought of the present book and returned to live in the past. And it was actually during the writing of the first chapter or section that I remembered something from the first week of my time in London, when I was staying in Angela’s boardinghouse. My writer’s ambition, my social inexperience and anxiety, had suppressed so much of that empty time, had expunged so much from my memory.

I used to go out doing the sights. It was what tourists did. And one day, somewhere in central London, perhaps along the Embankment, I saw someone from the S.S. Columbia sitting on a bench below a statue. He was like part of the monument. He was in a dark suit; a small man hot in the month of August (the month and the weather were fitted together later by the writer). He was tired. He had been doing the sights and possibly having as little idea of what he was doing as I had: travel was a pleasure so much in the mind, so much something for later narrative.

He was a butler, I thought, the man from the Columbia . Perhaps he had told me that on the ship; or perhaps I had made it up, finding in him a resemblance to a butler in some film. He was slightly offhand with me. It was as the night watchman had said during the gala night on the Columbia , when he had lectured those of us who were outside the dance lounge on the quirks of human behavior. After three days on a ship everyone was faithless, he had said; on shore, though, people became themselves again and forgot shipboard romances and even acquaintances.

The butler was going on to France. A week there — no doubt in Paris: more sights — and then another ship would take him from Le Havre or Cherbourg back to New York, and the wandering holiday life would be over. He would be back home, free of hotels and the daily tramping and the fatigue and the strange food. And I passionately wanted to go with him. I didn’t want to be his companion or talk to him or be in his house or apartment. I wanted to be as he was at that moment, a man on the move. I passionately wanted, though hardly arrived in London, to be free of London. I didn’t want to go back home, though; I knew there was nothing there. I just wanted that day, trying to engage the offhand butler in conversation, trying to claim acquaintance with him in the strangeness of London, I wanted that day to feel that England was temporary for me too.

Like the character in the story that came to me twenty years after, when I first came to the valley, I wanted to stay with the ship.

M ORE THAN ten years after I had moved to the valley, when I was almost at the end of my time there, my time in the manor cottage, my second life, I was strongly reminded of my first week in England. I had a letter from Angela.

I hadn’t heard from her or about her for thirty years. Even her name had ceased to be familiar; it was something I had to fumble for when I thought back to those early days. And this letter from Angela was more than a word or a note. It was many pages long, written over many days and, as the handwriting showed, written in many moods.

It was a round, fluent, thin-nibbed hand, now erect, now leaning to the right. Now the lines were straight, now crooked; now the letters were carefully shaped, now they moved up and down and were left unfinished. But the writing had an essential mode: it was the feminine English hand, round and fluent, the round shapes of the letters occasionally flattened, becoming wider than they were tall, egg shapes, speaking of a passive sensuality. The Englishness of the handwriting was a surprise; it was as though, purely by living in England, Angela had acquired that hand. The envelope carried the postmark of a town in Buckinghamshire: middle-class, commuter country.