V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Neither picture, neither the man I thought I had seen, nor the man I had invented, answered to what I was told about my landlord by people in London who knew him and sometimes came to visit him. That other man, coming to me in fragments as it were, remained far away.

A pampered childhood here, in the grounds where I now walked about. In the cold shade of the overgrown orchard there was a round, two-story children’s house, solidly built, thatched, and still more or less whole, though the surrounding vegetation was partly strangled and decayed, as in true forest. In the room downstairs there was a real fireplace, with inset stone or concrete shelves in the wall on either side, and with ladder steps to the upper room, which had dormer windows in the conical thatched roof. More than a doll’s house on a grand scale, and yet less than a child’s play house: an adult’s idea, rather, of a children’s house, with nothing left to the imagination.

After that pampered, protected childhood, a young manhood of artistic talent and promise and of social frivolity. I was shown photographs of those days both by Mr. Phillips and by Bray, the car-hire man, whose father had worked all his life at the manor. Bray lived in the flint and brick cottage his father had bought long ago from the estate; but though Bray was now independent of the manor and proud of it, refusing even to serve people in the manor, he had all kinds of manor souvenirs to show and he liked showing them. Blurred black and white photographs of parties in the grounds, the gardens not yet grown, undergrown; photographs of young people sitting in uncertain light (dusk or dawn?) on the rails of new timber bridges over the creeks in the water meadows. (Photographs — snapshots — melancholy in their effect: each snapshot, capturing a moment of time, with all its unconsidered details, forcing one to think of the tract of time that had followed, and being a kind of memento mori in the way a good painting of the same occasion — charged with the spirit and labor of the painter — would never have been.)

Then in early middle age, after the parties, after the second war, a disturbance of some sort, a morbid, lasting depression, almost an illness, resulting in withdrawal, hiding, a retreat to the manor, complicated after a while by physical disorders and — finally — age.

I was his opposite in every way, social, artistic, sexual. And considering that his family’s fortune had grown, but enormously, with the spread of the empire in the nineteenth century, it might be said that an empire lay between us. This empire at the same time linked us. This empire explained my birth in the New World, the language I used, the vocation and ambition I had; this empire in the end explained my presence there in the valley, in the cottage, in the grounds of the manor. But we were — or had started — at opposite ends of wealth, privilege, and in the hearts of different cultures.

Twenty years before, when I was trying to write at the Earl’s Court boardinghouse, residence in the grounds of the manor would have seemed suitable “material.” But the imperial link would then have been burdensome. It would have tormented me as a man (or boy) to be a racial oddity in the valley. And I would have been able as a writer (at that time) to deal with the material only by suppressing certain aspects of myself — the very kind of suppression and concealment that narrative of a certain sort encouraged and which had led me, even as an observer, eager for knowledge and experience, to miss much.

But the world had changed; time had moved on. I had found my talent and my subject, ever unfolding and developing. My career had changed; my ideas had changed. And coming to the manor at a time of disappointment and wounding, I felt an immense sympathy for my landlord, who, starting at the other end of the world, now wished to hide, like me. I felt a kinship with him; was deeply grateful for the protection of the manor, for the style of things there. I never thought his seclusion strange. It was what I wanted for myself at that time.

I wanted, when I came to the manor, after the pride of ambition, to strip my life down. I wanted to live as far as possible with what I found in the cottage in the manor grounds, to alter as little as possible. I wanted to avoid vanity; and for me then vanity could lie in very small things — like wishing to buy an ashtray. Why a special ashtray, when the empty tobacco tin could serve? So I felt in tune with what I saw or thought I saw at the manor; I felt in myself the same spirit of withdrawal. And though I knew that men might arrive at similar states or attitudes for dissimilar reasons and by different routes, and as men might even be incompatible, I felt at one with my landlord.

Privilege lay between us. But I had an intimation that it worked against him. Whatever my spiritual state at the moment of arrival, I knew I would have to save myself and look for health; I knew I would have to act at some time. His privilege — his house, his staff, his income, the acres he could look out at every day and knew to be his — this privilege could press him down into himself, into non-doing and nullity.

So though we had started at opposite ends of empire and privilege, and in different cultures, it was easy for me, as his tenant now, to feel goodwill in my heart for him.

I never thought it odd or “creepy,” to use the word given me by Alan, a literary visitor, that I never saw my landlord. His wish to be unseen by me was matched by my wish not to be seen by him. A remnant of my old colonial-racial “nerves”; but I was also nervous of undoing the magic of the place. If I had seen my landlord, heard his voice, heard his conversation, seen his face and expression, been constrained to make conversation back, to be polite, the impression would have been uneffaceable. He would have been endowed with a “character,” with vanities, irritations, absurdities; and this would have led me to make judgments — the judgments that, undoing acceptance, can also undo a relationship. As it was, the personality of my landlord was expressed for me by the mystery of the manor and the grounds.

T HE MANOR grounds grew on me. Unused to the seasons (in the way I have described) and, so far as architecture went, still perhaps tending to take things too much for granted, seeing “ordinary” buildings too much as natural expressions of a particular place, it took me time to understand what I was seeing. It took me time to see that my cottage, in spite of its name, was not a simple building.

It was a long low building on two levels (there was a slight, graded slope from the road to the water meadows and the river). It was at the far side of the lawn or manor “green.” Whatever my mood, and however long or short my separation from the cottage, whether I had gone on an overseas assignment of many months or had simply gone to Salisbury or had gone for my afternoon walk, the first sight of the cottage on my return, breaking in upon me at the end of the short, dark lane from the public road, never failed to delight and surprise me.

The lane from the public road was overhung with yew; and summer added the layer-upon-layer shade of beech and copper beech; so that even while I was in that gloom, the openness of the lawn and the soft warm colors of the cottage were visible. I felt delight at the long, low shape of the building set right against the beeches. The roots of one or two beeches began just beyond the cottage wall — and yet, for some reason, there was never any shifting or subsidence of the cottage foundations. I felt delight at the setting, the naturalness, the rightness. And surprise that this was where I lived.

It took me time to understand that this was no country “naturalness,” that the cottage had been designed to create just that effect. The walls were thick, perhaps rubble-filled; but on the surface they were a considered mixture of flint and brickbats and warm yellow stone. And once I saw the design and the intention, I also saw that the masonry was craftsman’s work. One day, on a block of stone set high up on a side wall, I saw the carved initials of the builder or designer — the last initial proclaimed him a member of my landlord’s family — with the year, 1911.