V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

That wouldn’t have been too fanciful. It would have been like my own wish, coming to the cottage in his grounds, not to interfere, to take things as I found them; and then my later wish, out of my own delight in the place, not to see decay, not to be saddened by that too ready idea of decay, to see instead flux, constant change; and the feeling which I grew to cherish, that in the very dereliction of the grounds I had come upon them at their peak, that the order created by sixteen gardeners would have been too much, would have made for strain and anxiety, that the true beauty of the place lay in accidental, unintended things: the peonies coming out very slowly below the thick dark green of the yews; the single blue iris among the tall nettles; the young deer that for many months lived among the reeds beside the rotting bridges over the water channels, having learned that the place was not frequented by men.

I had come to the manor in a mood of withdrawal myself, and I understood how in that mood one would have felt mocked, it would have debilitated one, to make gestures that were too affirmative. As part of that wish to be unaffirmative, to take things as I found them, not to interfere, I had painted my room in the cottage a deep mauve. It was the least assertive color I could think of, and it came from something in my childhood.

My elementary school in Port of Spain was in a street, Victoria Avenue, that ended in a cemetery. Nearly every afternoon after school I saw the horse-drawn hearses and the mourning procession on foot passing the high, rubble-filled wall of the cemetery, named Lapeyrouse after the French explorer La Pérouse by our late-eighteenth-century French settlers (fleeing the effects of the French Revolution in Haiti and the other French islands). The horses that pulled the hearses to Lapeyrouse were covered with a reticulated pall, black or mauve. As a result, mauve — purple — was never for me the color of power and pomp; it was the color of death. In the mood I was in when I came to the cottage, any more affirmative, life-encouraging color would have been only mocking. (Later that color became associated with the beauty and benignity and welcome of the place.) And since one seeks to understand people by looking for aspects of oneself in them, I was willing to attribute something of the attitudes of my own withdrawal to my landlord.

But perhaps there was as little pattern in his emotions, his sensual responses, as in his poems. He liked summer, the sun, flowers, ivy. Perhaps he was incapable of any effort to put things right. Or perhaps he was merely spoilt, and thought that however much the ivy and the gales destroyed in his garden, there would still be something for him to see; there would still be some sunshine in the summer and some clearing in the ruined garden for him to sit out in.

Ivy so covered and smothered some trees it was hard — especially for me, who knew so little — to tell what kinds of trees they were. A tree that collapsed one year turned out to be a cherry tree. I had known it only for its fitful blossom breaking through the ivy matting. Pitton and Mr. Phillips between them cut up the cherry trunk into discs; they used a chain saw, and the discs were perfect little things, like toys, when freed of the ivy matting. I was offered some of the discs for my fire. I put the discs I had been given in my outbuilding (the half-cottage against the vegetable-garden wall) and left them there to dry. When they did dry out, I couldn’t bring myself to burn them all.

One disc I kept, as a souvenir of the garden, and I had it smoothed down and varnished. It had dried with its sheeny bark on; there were only a few spaces between the bark and the wood; and drying as slowly as it had done, the wood had hardly cracked. Just showing sawmarks, and nondescript as wood, without a definite color, growing dusty in my outbuilding, the cherry-wood disc came up beautifully when it was smoothed down. I counted the rings. There were forty-seven.

For its first two or three years the cherry tree might have grown in a nursery. So it might have been planted in the autumn of 1930. For the first twenty-six years the sapwood had grown at a healthy pace; and the color of the wood at the center was blond. But then, for its last twenty-one years, the growth of the sapwood had slowed down; the lines of the heartwood had grown close together; and the outer wood of the disc was dark.

Here in the secret vegetable life of the cherry tree of the garden was something like confirmation of what I had heard about the life of my landlord. In 1949 or 1950–1950 being the year I had left my own home island, had made my roundabout journey to England, looking for material to write about, and being as a writer (in the pieces I attempted) much more knowledgeable than I was as a person, hiding myself from my true experience, hiding my experience from myself — in 1949 or 1950 my landlord had withdrawn from the world, out of an excess of knowledge of that world. That probably was when he had given orders that the ivy was not to be touched. Up to that time the garden laid out by his parents had been more or less tended, in spite of everything, in spite of the war. Four or five years later, going by the evidence of the rings on my disc of cherry wood, the ivy had taken; and twenty-one years after that the choked, strangled tree had collapsed and become part of the debris of the garden, the debris of a life.

It occurred to me one day that at the time the ivy had taken or become established on the cherry tree, at the time my landlord’s acedia had become permanent, while he was still a youngish man, I would have left Oxford. And since I had to do something, and since I had left home to be a writer, and no other talent or vocation had declared itself in me, I had set myself up as a writer — as deliberately as that. There was no joy in that decision. That was the blankest and most frightening year of my life. And one day in the valley, for no reason, perhaps only for the sake of the thrill, as I was walking up the hill beside the windbreak of pine and beech and hawthorn and field roses to the viewing point, walking in that setting which had given me joy of place like no other place in the world, I found myself thinking myself back into my personality of twenty-five years before, and felt again a panic I had all but forgotten, and the wish it had given rise to, to run and hide: having no money, no job, having developed no talent, having no place to return to that evening except a dark and very damp basement flat rented by a cousin; having nothing to offer my family who, since the death of my father the previous year, were psychologically dependent on me.

Somehow I had done the writing. Somehow — and twenty years later, it was to seem such a piece of luck — I had engaged myself in the world. And twenty years of a life which had been the opposite of my landlord’s had brought me to the solace of the debris of his garden, the debris of his own life. Debris which nonetheless never ceased to have an element of grandeur.

A man with a simpler idea of himself, a simpler idea of his name, would have seen the great value of his property, might have realized its value, and lived elegantly elsewhere on the proceeds. But my landlord preferred to be with what he knew. Other people might contemplate a move for him. He himself could not think of a life away from his house and garden, which perhaps he continued to see in his own way, perhaps even saw as whole and perfect, the way we fail to see the tarnishing that has gradually come to flats or houses where we have lived a long time.

T HE MANOR seemed so much itself, the style of things there so established, that the recentness of the decay was a surprise. And having learned to see that, I saw it in other places as well. I saw it in the cold frames just outside my cottage.