V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

But there were not many people like that, people to whom Alan expressed open hostility. The public objects of Alan’s dislike were mainly certain kinds of buildings, paintings, gardens, flowers. And here even my landlord was not exempt. My landlord liked gladioli. Pitton grew them for him in the garden. Alan hated them for their gaudiness and size. He said, closing his eyes, a shudder going right through him, “They should be that high”—bending and holding his open palm down to the level of his shin. He could shudder with distaste like this when he spoke of these things — flowers, pictures, buildings — as though making up, in the violence of his aesthetic responses, for all the coyness he imposed on himself with other people, all the talk about “notes” and the writing he was preparing to do about them (“All this is going down in the diary,” he would say, or, personalizing it, “This is for Diary,” or, “Diary will take due note”), all the sweets he offered the world to buy peace. It was this aesthetic violence — at bottom quite genuine, reflecting a genuine sensibility, a true concern for the life of the mind — that gave his radio talks and discussions their bite and attack and suggested that they were the merest glimpse of a fuller life and more prodigious personality.

It happened sometimes that months passed without our meeting — he might not come down, or I might be away when he did come down. One day, quite unusually, he telephoned me from London; and I was aware only then that I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more. There were the sounds of music in the background. The music was very loud; it made me ask where he was telephoning from. It was from his flat. He said, “You talk like my neighbors. Of course I am blasting away.” And he gave his great choking laugh.

The old Alan, it would have seemed. But it wasn’t. He was drunk; and as he began to speak, it became clear that he was very drunk. Alcohol and music: the supports of solitude. This was new to me: not the solitude, but the drinking. I had never thought of Alan as a drinking man. But even drunkenness didn’t alter Alan’s character or show the other side of the man; drunkenness didn’t liberate him. It exaggerated, made ludicrous, his appeasing public character. Hardly able to control his words, he was seeking only to send messages of love, to flatter, to speak to me about my work.

And he was asking nothing in return. For there was, as it were, no means of getting back to the person from whom all this issued. The person that wished to buy peace from the world was beyond the reach of the world, was hardly known, it might be said, to Alan himself. It didn’t matter how much one flattered back; it didn’t matter how much love one sent back; one could never touch the true person.

Some months later he reappeared at the manor. He had greatly changed. His eyes, once so seemingly unreliable and shifty, had become dead, lackluster; there was a very old sadness there. The knobby little face had become white and soft; it had become like the face of a frail old woman. And it was as if this transformation gave a glimpse of the ambiguity in the personality, perhaps just one of the many ambiguities that had tormented Alan.

Especially noticeable to me was the skin of his cheeks. It was very white and seemed to have become very thin, seemed to flutter above the flesh (as though there was some vacancy between skin and flesh) whenever Alan spoke or closed his mouth too firmly. This thin, delicate skin made me think of the outer petal of a blown rose; it seemed to have something of the texture. It made me think also of the faded black plastic sheeting that covered the old cottage-shaped hayrick on the droveway, plastic sheeting so beaten about by wind and rain that it had not only lost its luster and snap but appeared also to have developed within its thinness little blisters and air pockets.

The man had changed. And — he was in my cottage, sitting in my wing chair, half reclined, looking small, the upholstered wings above his head, his knees neatly together — it was a little as if (this was the idea that came to me) the man that one knew had been subjected almost to a moral attack by the unacknowledged personality within; that the man had been pulled down by this inner personality, which now sat like a watchful guardian on the man’s shoulder and was the only entity with whom Alan could now have a true dialogue. Of the old personality there remained only the clothes that made the upholstery of the chair look grimy. These clothes were as carefully chosen as ever; but the man within was so quiet, so little ebullient, his movements were so slow and considered, that the clothes did not suggest the old personality.

From the Phillipses I later heard about the drunken telephone calls Alan had made to the manor at about the time — or perhaps a little before — he had telephoned me. The first three or four had been taken. But then — perhaps Alan had pushed his luck too far, had begun to make the telephone calls at odd hours, perhaps had said things he hadn’t said to me — my landlord had become alarmed. Alan’s disturbance, so manifest, had given my landlord fresh glimpses of his own acedia again, his own hell. To fear that kind of illness was, in effect, to start being ill again. And for a while my landlord had had a relapse.

Alan’s telephone calls had been refused; Mr. Phillips had ordered Alan not to telephone again. Alan had been forbidden to come to the house. All Mr. Phillips’s protective feelings towards his employer, the sick man, were awakened; the prohibition on Alan’s visits was lifted only when Mr. Phillips was sure that Alan had stopped drinking.

But the man who had reappeared in the manor was ravaged. That old lady’s face was the face of a man beyond cure. And though he refused the glass of wine I offered (quite innocently, not knowing at the time his recent history), though he refused, while insisting (with beautiful courtesy, almost as though he were my host) that I should have a glass myself, his apparent cure was — as with some other bad diseases — only a remission, enabling him, perhaps cruelly, perhaps in a spirit of reconciliation, to look at the world he was leaving and to say his good-byes.

He said good-bye. He never came back. I heard him once or twice on the radio — as bubbling as ever. If only he could have lived there, at that pitch, in something like a radio-studio atmosphere, something of that artificial social arrangement, instead of having to go home and be alone. And then one day I heard — some days after the event — that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death. Theater would not have been far from Alan’s mind that evening. It might so easily have gone the other way. Somebody might have telephoned, or he might have telephoned somebody, gone to a party in brilliant clothes, been witty or flattering or outrageous, would have ridden over the theatrical moment of suicide. But his solitude would almost certainly have brought him there again.

The news was kept from my landlord. Mr. Phillips thought it would be bad for him to be told. But somehow my landlord found out. For him it was one person less in his shrinking world; another person not to be mentioned again.

Of Alan’s books and “notes” there was of course almost nothing. Out of his love for the life of the mind, and the artist’s eye and hand, he had flattered very many people. And it was this flattery that was his odd memorial for a week or so. A number of people who wrote about Alan after his death wrote with that part of their personalities that had almost been created by Alan’s flattery. Their obituaries were curiously self-regarding; as much as to Alan — who came out in these notices as an eccentric, an anachronism, someone from “before the deluge” (the words were actually used in one piece) — these people paid tribute to themselves for having known and befriended Alan, for having spotted his talent and sensibility, having been singled out by him for his confidences, his confessions of sadness. No one spoke of his flattery. And more than one person, it turned out, had been telephoned by Alan in distress just a few days before he had died.