V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

No one is born a rebel. Rebellion is something we have to be trained in. And even with the encouragement of my father’s rages — political rages, as well as rages about his family and his employers — there was much about our family life and attitudes and our island that I accepted — acceptances which later were to mortify me.

The noblest impulse of all — the wish to be a writer, the wish that ruled my life — was the impulse that was the most imprisoning, the most insidious, and in some ways the most corrupting, because, refined by my half-English half-education and ceasing then to be a pure impulse, it had given me a false idea of the activity of the mind. The noblest impulse, in that colonial setting, had been the most hobbling. To be what I wanted to be, I had to cease to be or to grow out of what I was. To become a writer it was necessary to shed many of the early ideas that went with the ambition and the concept my half-education had given me of the writer.

So the past for me — as colonial and writer — was full of shame and mortifications. Yet as a writer I could train myself to face them. Indeed, they became my subjects.

Bray had no such training, no such need. The prewar depression, the war, the postwar reforms and boom lay between him and his past. The further away he was taken from that past, the more the world changed, the more perhaps it pained him.

Politically he was a conservative. “You know me,” he would say. “I’m a down-and-out Tory,” running together “downright” and “out-and-out.” By that, being a conservative, he meant really that he worked for himself and was a free man; that he had less regard for people (like Pitton) who lacked the will to be free and worked for other people; and that he had no regard at all for people who were parasites on the state, and hated the idea of paying taxes to support these people. With this Toryism, however, and his hatred of the Labour Party and the “commonest,” there went a strong republicanism. He depended for his livelihood on people with money; he liked the odd ways of the rich and liked to talk about these ways. But at the same time he hated people who drove Rolls-Royces; he hated landowners, people with titles, the monarchy, and all people who didn’t work for a living.

He hated titled people and old families and people of inherited wealth in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible for an English person, until I read William Cobbett. There, in the prejudices and strongheadedness and radicalism of one hundred and fifty years before, a radicalism fed by the French Revolution (which in the pages of Cobbett, in the living, breakneck speed of his prose, could still feel close), I found many of the attitudes of Bray. An empire had intervened, a great new tide of wealth and power; but the passions of Bray were, miraculously, like the passions still of a purely agricultural county, the passions connected with manors and big farms and dependent workers. Much of this, with Bray, was rooted in his own family connections with the manor, and with some still rankling humiliation connected with his holiday period “in service” there.

Pitton, the gardener with the tied cottage, dressed carefully; he aimed at a kind of country-gentleman style. Bray, the free man, wore a driver’s peaked cap. He said (when we were some months into our business relationship, which had developed into something like a village acquaintance) that he wore the cap because it helped with the police. And he was right, as I saw on many occasions, especially at the airport. The police, uniformed themselves, acknowledged the peaked cap, responded to it, and were easier (in every way) with this badge of a trade.

He also said another time that he wore the cap to distinguish himself from the ordinary taxi drivers, who spent so much time parked and idle and skylarking. But they, the taxi men, thought the peaked cap servile, mocked Bray for it, as they criticized him for his low charges (seeing servility there as well). And that — Bray’s “servility” and general old-fashionedness — was the reason why Bray — who, because he was punctual and reliable and fair, had built up a bigger clientele than he could singlehandedly manage — that was the reason why Bray couldn’t get a driver to work for him for any length of time. Bray asked too much of the drivers he employed; he wished them to work the hours he himself worked; he wished them to dress formally, even to wear a uniform.

Bray himself didn’t dress formally. He wore the peaked cap. But everything else he wore went counter to the suggestions, the implied deference, of that cap. He wore a cardigan, mostly; very seldom a jacket. A cardigan can be unbuttoned or buttoned in many ways; it can suggest formality, casualness, indifference; it can suggest, as Bray often made it suggest, a man called away from fireside and slippers and television. And the peaked cap — it would be set at many different angles: it could express regard or disregard. Set correctly, that cap (together with a buttoned-up cardigan) could suggest not deference so much as a man handling himself with care: a self-respecting more than a respectful man.

The cap helped Bray to assert himself, to pass opinions and judgments on people he came into contact with. It would have been harder for him without the cap; he would have had to find words, set his face in different ways. He would as a result have been constantly embattled (the car-hire or taxi business being what it is). The peaked cap, with its many angles, together with the various ways of wearing the cardigan, enabled Bray to make (and make clear) a whole range of subtle judgments.

In fact, for the very reason that he was reacting against the service manner of his father, Bray had the variable, fluid personality of the servant: the various accents, voices, expressions. Bray, unlike Pitton, had no model. And, depending on himself alone, he gave a distinct impression of oddity. And that variable, passionate personality of Bray’s, that many-sided personality, was perhaps fundamentally unstable. He didn’t serve the manor. (There might have been some quarrel there, about which I knew nothing: the Phillipses never mentioned it, and the quarrel might have been before their time.) Yet his resentment of Pitton was also partly the resentment of someone he felt to be an intruder. Because he, Bray, felt and claimed that he knew more about the manor and our landlord than Pitton ever could.

Similar houses, improved agricultural cottages, and both with working men who, for all their differences and conflict, aimed at the same thing: dignity.

So tensions surrounded Pitton both where he lived and where he worked. Because at the manor Pitton returned or vented to the full — but on the Phillipses — Bray’s resentment of him as an outsider and interloper. Pitton, in spite of his buttoned-up look and lack of words, had his way of passing on his “feelings”; and, as much as the Phillipses might indicate to him that he didn’t know, he could pass on to them that they were townies, newcomers in the manor.

So these three sets of people, so physically close, and all in different ways “in service,” lived in a net of mutual resentment. An odd thing about them was how differently they dressed. Choice in dress — cheap versions of stylish clothes — was limited by what the shops in Salisbury offered. And though I soon got to know the shop or “outfitters” where Pitton bought his country-gentleman clothes (and they were not particularly cheap), and the “sports” shop (much cheaper) where the Phillipses bought their padded anoraks or zip-up pullovers, and though I couldn’t help seeing the clothes as merchandise, not truly personal to the wearer, more as samples of a vast stock, and though the shops in Salisbury were so close to one another, yet this “difference” in their clothes was important to them all.