V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

And there in the Roman house — where I had prepared the scene for an occasion with an altogether different issue — our agreement was made. The blue-and-white Hong Kong raffia chairs and table, the drinks, the illuminated swimming-pool, the Loeb edition of Martial: all this had been meant less to overawe Browne than to create the picture of a man who, whatever might be said about recent events in his private life, had achieved a certain poise. The Martial can be easily explained. I had taken up my Latin again. It was my own therapy. The acquisition in easy stages of a precise, dead language, through an easy author, was curiously soothing. It called for effort; it filled the time; it led from one day to the other.

My mood might explain the excitement I felt, my ready acceptance of an idea which to so many on the island might have seemed absurd and which to me a few months before would have seemed affronting. But I was also a prisoner of my special relationship with Browne, that understanding which began, continued and faded away in misunderstanding. A burdensome relationship, a boyhood uneasiness never quite forgotten when we met. Now it was flattering. He needed alien witness to prove his reality. For me a similar proof was offered by his literalness, which was like generosity. For him I had been, ever since Isabella Imperial, a total person. He remembered phrases, ideas, incidents. They formed a whole. He presented me with a picture of myself which it reassured me to study. This was his generosity; it was a relief after the continual challenge and provocation of relationships within the group that had been Sandra’s and mine. So between Browne and myself the old relationship was resumed. He invited me to share distress. He presented me with my role. I did not reject him. How can I regard what followed as betrayal?

Even at that first meeting in the Roman house my uneasiness was not wholly suppressed. Where once I carried a name that was like a deformity, so now I felt I had a past to which Browne might at any moment refer. He asked me no questions about Sandra, though; and he made no reference to the Roman house. It was my own uneasiness which made me think, even while we spoke, how little I knew of his private life, how unable I was in imagination to see him at home, relaxed. One detail sharpened this. His beard appearing to be causing him some irritation. He wiped the bumpy skin around his Adam’s apple with his handkerchief, placed it against his neck, and let the beard rest on it. A disturbing mannerism: the perspiration on my own neck began to smart. I made some remark about the beard. He dismissed it in his brisk, self-satirizing way as ‘a Negro’s beard’. I didn’t know what to make of this. He then said that in his three years in London he had never been to a barbershop. It had been no problem; hair like his never really grew long.

I thought he was joking. I still don’t know whether he wasn’t: it is hardly the subject for casual query. But with this amazement at a physical fact which would have caused no amazement to most of the people on the island which I was now claiming as mine, there went the dim knowledge that I was now committed to a whole new mythology, dark and alien, committed to a series of interiors I never wanted to enter. Joe Louis, Haile Selassie, Jesus, that black jackass, the comic boy-singer: the distaste and alarm of boyhood rose up strongly. But already Browne had turned the talk to his nationalist publishing house; the fountains splashed, recalling me to the solidity of the Roman house; the twinge of tribal alarm passed. It was a detail, a drowning man’s second: it stayed with me.

The essay about my father for The Socialist wrote itself. It was the work of an evening. It came easily, I realized later, because it was my first piece of writing. Every successive piece was a little less easy, though I never lost my facility. But at the time, as my pen ran over the paper, I thought that the sentences flowed, in sequence and without error, because I was making a confession, proclaiming the name, making an act of expiation. The irony doesn’t escape me: that article was, deeply, dishonest. It was the work of a convert, a man just created, just presented with a picture of himself. It was the first of many such pieces: balanced, fair, with the final truth evaded, until at last this truth was lost. The writing of this book has been more than a release from those articles; it has been an attempt to rediscover that truth.

So, pettily and absurdly, with the publication of the anniversary issue of the new-look Socialist, our political movement started. Consider the stir we made. Consider the peculiar power of my name. Add to this my reputation as a dandy and then the more forbidding reputation as a very young ‘Isabella millionaire’ who ‘worked hard and played hard’. Consider Browne’s licensed status as a renegade and romantic, a ‘radical’, for whose acknowledged gifts our island provided no outlet. See then how, though as individuals we were politically nothing, we supported one another and together appeared as a portent no one could dismiss. Certain ideas overwhelm by their simplicity. In three months — just six issues of the new Socialist, its finances and organization regulated by me — we found ourselves at the centre less of a political awakening than a political anxiety, to which it was left to us merely to give direction.

It has happened in twenty countries. I don’t want to exaggerate our achievement. Sooner or later, with or without us, something similar would have occurred. But I feel we might claim credit for our courage. The nature of the political life of our island must be understood. We were a colony, a benevolently administered dependency. So long as our dependence remained unquestioned our politics were a joke. A man like my father, extravagant as he was, had been a passing disturber of the peace. He fitted into the pattern of dependence, as did those who came after him, taking advantage of the limited constitution we were granted just before the end of the war. These politicians were contractors and merchants in the towns, farmers in the country, small people offering no policies, offering only themselves. They were not highly regarded. Their names and photographs appeared frequently in the newspapers, but they were slightly ridiculous figures; stories about their illiteracy or crookedness constantly circulated.

To go into politics then was not as simple a decision as it might seem now. We might easily have made the error of appearing to compete with the established politicians. And that would have been disastrous. We would have covered ourselves with ridicule. Instead, we ignored them. We said they were dead and unimportant. We not only made public a public joke; we were a demonstration of what was desirable and possible. We had the resources, in intellect and offers of support, to question the system itself. We denied competition; and indeed there was none. Simply by coming forward — Browne and myself and The Socialist, all together — we put an end to the old order. It was like that.

Courage: this is all I would claim now for our movement in its early stages. It takes courage to destroy any system, however shabby, which has permitted one to grow. We did not see this shabbiness as a type of order appropriate to our circumstances. That we were to see only when we had swept it away. And yet, equally, this shabbiness did not represent us; it could not have lasted. Did we then act? Or were we acted upon? When we were done it was no longer possible for someone like my mother’s father, his money made, to be a nominated member of the Council, to hold this position by being ‘safe’, in a situation which when all was said and done called for little adventurousness; and from this position to strive, by charities and good works, after a decoration or a title.