V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Sandra saw in me a husband. She was right. She saw what was there. I think of the day she left. It was officially on a shopping trip to Miami. This was a pilgrimage our group was beginning to establish as fashionable. From these trips our women returned with large light parcels in unfamiliar wrappings and that day’s edition of the Miami Herald: dramatic sunglassed figures as they stepped out of the Pan-American aeroplane. For me it was a moment of another type of drama: the aeroplane the cinematic symbol: Bogart in Casablanca, macintoshed, alone on the tarmac, the Dakota taking off into the night.

Afterwards I drove back to the Roman house. I walked around the central swimming-pool, the fountains splashing noisily into the blue water, no one now, I thought, to listen to them. I went to her room and looked through her cupboards. There was no sign that she intended to return. Some shoes she had left behind, abandoned for good, some dresses she hadn’t worn for some time. I held a shoe and studied the worn heel, the minute cracks in the leather. I touched the dresses. I was light with whisky; the gestures seemed suitable for a moment of private theatre.

It was only later, minutes later, when the ceaseless splash of the fountains became unbearable and the feeling of relief I was stimulating suddenly vanished, that I knew that the gesture, however self-regarding and theatrical, of handling Sandra’s abandoned shoes and dresses, yet held something of truth: as that other gesture, in London of the magical light, on the day of my first snow, of holding the creased photograph of an unknown girl and wishing for an instant to preserve it from further indignity.

It is with my political career as with that gesture. I used to say, with sincerity, that nothing in my life had prepared me for it. To the end I behaved as though it was to be judged as just another aspect of my dandyism. Criminal error! I exaggerated my frivolity, even to myself. For I find I have indeed been describing the youth and early manhood of a leader of some sort, a politician, or at least a disturber. I have established his isolation, his complex hurt and particular frenzy. And I believe I have also established, perhaps in this proclaimed frivolity, this lack of judgement and balance, the deep feeling of irrelevance and intrusion, his unsuitability for the role into which he was drawn, and his inevitable failure. From playacting to disorder: it is the pattern.

A name of peculiar power had been prepared for me. It was a name I had sought to deny. It was the one thing I kept secret from Sandra, feeling the name like a deformity to which anyone might at any time refer. Now the name claimed me. And with the name there came again that uneasy relationship with Browne which I thought I had left behind for good when I went to London.

We were in London at the same time. But our interests never coincided — Browne, I imagine, was ferociously political and public-meeting and New Statesman — and I had met him only once. It was near Earl’s Court Station. He was in a great hurry, the macintosh flying behind him, and he shouted out to me without stopping as we crossed, ‘How, how, man? You know what happen just now? A bitch spit on me, man.’

‘Spit on you?’

‘Yes, man. Spit on me.’

We crossed; he was on his busy way; and that was all. It was as if he had seen me a few hours before and was going to see me again soon. He was very cheerful, considering the nature of his news. I wasn’t sure whether he had made up the story; whether he had heard of my way of life and was intending some irony; whether he had mistaken me for someone else; or whether the story was true and when he saw me he was still in a state of shock. He was in a hurry, as I have said. But I thought, even from that slight encounter, that London had had an effect on him, as it had had on me. He was lighter and freer than he had been in the sixth form.

Later, on the island, he had become something of a character; and that glimpse of him in London fitted. His character was of a special type. People like Browne were the nearest things we had to poets, renegades, interesting failures; they were people we cherished. He was a good example of the type: a man of the people, a scholarship boy who had not quite made good and was running to seed. He had given up his teaching job and had become a pamphleteer. He wrote articles for the Inquirer, had rows with the editor, and made these rows the subject of further pamphlets. He was an occasional publisher, an occasional editor, and a tireless talker in the middle-class bars.

He talked better than he wrote. He was always intense but always, oddly, negative. He analysed situations acutely and with relish. But he gave equal weight to everything. He was content with a feverish analysis of each succeeding episode. He was saved by his ambivalent attitude towards the subject he most exploited: the distress of his race. He had written a venomous little pamphlet, anti-everybody, about the Negro skull, working out in this way some of the anger he had felt about an article in an American journal. Yet one of his favourite bar stories — he liked doing the upper-class English accent — was of the bewildered but honest English cricket captain who had cabled back to London in the 1880s: Beaten by local team whereof six were black. And it was Browne again who, while campaigning for the employment of Negroes in the firm of Cable and Wireless, supported their exclusion from the banks. He used to say: ‘If I thought black people were handling my few cents I wouldn’t sleep too well.’

On the subject of distress he was serious, without a doubt. But he was bitter only in his writings. He did not give the impression, which many others gave, of regarding a secreted and growing bitterness as a source of strength to come. Perhaps in his conversation he was trying unconsciously to flatter his hearers; for Browne, more noticeably now than at school, preferred the company of other races. It might be that he required alien witness to prove his own reality and make valid the distress he anatomized. Or perhaps it was that he feared to be alone with his distress, and could exercise his wit only with others. His frenzy seemed such a private thing. It was what we expected of our poets and, it might be, our clowns. It was attractive. There were always people to support his most outrageous enterprises. I myself had taken the back cover of his pamphlet on the Negro skull for an understating advertisement: Crippleville is a suburb.

When he came to the Roman house to urge me to proclaim my father’s name he had grown a small beard and was editing a paper called The Socialist. The beard went well with his thin face and slender body. It hid the wart on his chin and made him look less of a comedian. That was its sole motive. It had nothing to do with the paper which, after the first issue in which the policy was stated at length, contained little of socialism. Browne always stated the policy of each of his papers at length. He was a pamphleteer. Having stated the policy of his paper, he became bored with the paper; and most of his energies seemed to go in getting advertisements. What he wrote became increasingly bitty, gossipy and even disheartened; the reader got the impression that the editor was having trouble not only in getting advertisements but in getting things to put between them.

The Socialist was at this stage when Browne came to see me. He said he had a plan and an idea. The plan was that I should put money in the paper, or in some other paper we might start together. The idea was that The Socialist should celebrate the anniversary of the dockworkers’ exodus from the city, and that I myself should write the main article about my father.

Certain ideas overwhelm us by their simplicity. It was the proclaiming of the name first of all that appealed to me; then the idea of the magazine. My excitement astonished, then excited, him. He made those gestures I knew so well — the washing of the hands, the whipping of the right index finger, the great swivel in the chair as he made some telling point. His interest in his own paper revived; he seemed almost ripe for another lengthy statement of editorial policy. His vision widened. He saw The Socialist as an international paper, and he talked about the need for a ‘nationalist’ publishing house in the region. This was one of the schemes he often spoke about, and I knew it was just the sort of thing he might jump into. Even in my excitement, though, I could see a pointless business proposition. I steered him back to The Socialist and the anniversary number.