V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

When the organized violence began, when men distraught with anger and fear and outrage, who considered themselves betrayed by me yet saw that in their predicament they had no one else to turn to, when these men, braving the city streets, came to me at the Roman house with tales of Asiatic distress, of women and children assaulted, of hackings, of families burnt alive in wooden houses, I closed my eyes and thought about the horsemen riding to the end of the world. The details of physical suffering entered into me. In a book about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps I had once seen a photograph: an Australian, blindfolded, on his knees, far from home, about to be beheaded. Heroic this central figure had seemed to me, in my quick fear: heroic and very private, and by this privacy ridiculing the ridicule of his tormentors. Now I asked my informers to give me no more details. I offered them the comfort I offered myself. I said, ‘Think about this as something in a book, in a newspaper. Do not give me names. Do not tell me how people died. Say instead, “Race riots occurred”. Say, “There was loss of life”.’

One poor man had brought a stone stained and sticky with blood and fine hair, the hair perhaps of a child. What could I do with his evidence, his witness? I tried to get him to enter my mind, to ride with me to the end of the empty world. His grief made him, as it had made others, receptive. It was night. I took him to the garden of the Roman house and asked him to drop the stone. He was glad to obey. The link between us then was more than the link of speech. The comfort I offered him was the comfort I offered myself, to destroy the images of vulnerable flesh. Was this cruel or fraudulent? The gift of comfort which at that moment I discovered in myself, this ability to transmit my own vision of the world, this was something I could have worked miracles with, I know, even at that late stage. But this would have required an assurance of imminent order, and to a belief in that I could lead no one. The call to action and self-fulfilment was the necessary complement to the vision I offered; without this the gift was useless, destructive. So the gift, at the moment of its discovery, was abandoned. I became a leader too late.

And it would not surprise me to hear that that very man, whose face in the dark garden I couldn’t even see, turned on me a week later when he heard that I had accepted, from our new leaders, the offer of a free and safe passage, to London again, by air, with sixty-six pounds of luggage and fifty thousand dollars. A fraction of my fortune. My irresponsibility extended even to myself: I had not taken the proper precautions. They were simple, frightened men. I am sure they had no wish to harm me. But in their situation they could no longer trust themselves; they offered me only what they hoped they might themselves be offered when their time came.

Perhaps, then, I was a betrayer. But not in the way that was said. This was not something that could be explained to a reporter, if there remained any who wished to interview me. And my acquiescence, again in a role that was given me, need not be wondered at.

I THOUGHT when I began this book that it would be the labour of three or four weeks. Memories of my fluency, on The Socialist, in cabinet, were still fresh; the five-thousand-word paper on the reorganization of the police, not a negligible document, had been the concentrated work of an evening. After eighteen months of the anaesthetizing order of life in this hotel, despair and emptiness had burnt themselves out. And it was with a delicious sense of anxiety and of being employed again that I got the hotel to give me a writing-table, set it beside the window, and composed myself to work.

It was just after breakfast. The pleasant middle-aged Irish chambermaid had got my room ready early and was going to bring me coffee at eleven. My mouth felt clean; my arms were strained and tingling with excitement. At the appointed time the coffee came. My excitement had turned to a type of irritable fatigue; I had written nothing. The wallpaper, in grey, black and red, had a pattern of antique motorcars; the curtain, which hung beside the table, was of a heavy red rep, brownish where it had been handled, discoloured along the folds exposed to the sun; the window, in a modern metal frame, was low, offering a view of the hotel’s putting green, bounded at the far end by a wall of brick, pale-red, washed-out; beyond this, more red brick, warehouses, garages, houses, just a segment of the city. I was overwhelmed as much by the formlessness of my experiences, and their irrelevance to the setting in which I proposed to recount them, as by the setting itself, my physical situation, in this city, this room, with this view, that lustreless light. And it was not until late afternoon, excitement gone, the light faded, the curtains about to be drawn, my stomach, head and eyes united in a dead sensation of sickness, that the memory at last came which, forcing itself to the surface all day, had kept the first page of the Century notebook blank except for the date: the memory of my first snow and the memory, incredulously examined, of the city of the magical light.

Fourteen months have passed since, in a room made over-dry by the electric fire, I re-created that climb up the dark stairs to Mr Shylock’s attic to look through a snowfall at the whitening roofs of Kensington. By this re-creation the event became historical and manageable; it was given its place; it will no longer disturb me. And this became my aim: from the central fact of this setting, my presence in this city which I have known as student, politician and now as refugee-immigrant, to impose order on my own history, to abolish that disturbance which is what a narrative in sequence might have led me to.

In Isabella in the early days I spoke as much as anyone about culture and the need for a national literature. But, to tell the truth, I had no great regard for writers as men, much as I might have enjoyed their work. I looked on them as incomplete people, to whom writing was a substitute for what it then pleased me to call life. And when I settled down to this book, the labour of three or four weeks, as I thought, I was looking beyond to other things. The financial uplift at the end would be small, I knew. But I thought there was a good chance that publication might lead to some form of irregular, agreeable employment: reviews and articles on colonial or ‘third world’ matters, calls from Bush House to prepare talks and even on occasion to indulge in the harmless banter of a radio discussion, and perhaps, after a year or two of this light underground labour, some little niche in television: the colonial expert, keeping his own counsel, calmly leaving his suburban hotel and returning later, in the taxi for which others have paid, to find himself the object of an awe which he will not of course acknowledge. This last, I must confess, was a recurring daydream. Nothing was known about me at the hotel. I had unwisely represented myself as a businessman; and my inactivity, extending over eighteen months, had begun to excite suspicion.

It never occurred to me that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life. It never occurred to me that I would have grown to relish the constriction and order of hotel life, which previously had driven me to despair; and that the contrast between my unchanging room and the slow progression of what was being created there would have given me such satisfaction. Order, sequence, regularity: it is there every time the electric meter clicks, accepting one more of my shillings. In fourteen months the meter has swallowed hundreds of my shillings, now with a hollow sound, now with a full sound. I have seen the putting green in all weathers, preferring it best in winter, when our middle-aged ladies, mutton dressed as lamb, as our barman says, cease to sunbathe, and our homeless men no longer appear on it at week-ends in sporty clothes and make hearty conversation.