V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

I leave the hotel every lunchtime to go to a public house a few hundred yards away. The hotel does not serve lunch on weekdays; and, apart from an appalling restaurant, the public house is the only place within two miles or so that offers food; we are in that sort of area. The public house has to be approached through its vast car park; the gardens this asphalt replaced are commemorated inside in photographs which hang between advertisements of the humorous variety. It is my custom to take a cheese sandwich and a glass of cider; I do not feel I can risk more. The barmaid, cutting ham or beef with that appearance of relish which explains her success, forever wipes her hand on her apron, while the pimply boy dips dirty glasses in dirty water. The talk is of crowded roads and foreign holidays. A chattering churl on a barstool asserts that the aeroplane is ‘no way for a gentleman to travel’; he is impressed by what he has said; he says it again. Everyone does everything too assertively or too noisily; glasses are banged down too hard, knives screech too often on plates, the talk is too loud, the laughter too hearty, the clothes too vulgar. I do not believe in the chumminess; I do not believe that there is communication between these people any more than I believe in the hilarity of the advertisements by which they are surrounded: those irritating drawings in which the mouths of funny men are too wide open, to denote humorous speech, those beer-mats whose circular legends I know by heart. Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer. And the other, attributed to Charles Dickens: Oh, I’m slain! I’d give a pot of beer to live again.

It is a relief to get back from this to the hotel. Here at least there is decorum and calm; no one insists on an impossible communication. The management is unobtrusive but vigilant. If nothing pleases the eye, everything works; everything has that gloss and warmth which comes from daily use and daily cleaning. Impersonality is softened by little touches, such as the fresh flowers on my table in the dining-room. This room is like a great hall. It is panelled and dark; it has a large decorative fireplace with a high mantelpiece. We dine below oil portraits of our lord and lady. The originals eat with us, separated not by the height of their table but, in this technological age, by a sliding partition of plate glass which permits the same mutual inspection and maintains the same respectful distance. We do not think this distinction is unsuitable; we are grateful for what they provide and we look to them for a continuation of order.

For here is order of a sort. But it is not mine. It goes beyond my dream. In a city already simplified to individual cells this order is a further simplication. It is rooted in nothing; it links to nothing. We talk of escaping to the simple life. But we do not mean what we say. It is from simplification such as this that we wish to escape, to return to a more elemental complexity.

But observe the contradictions in that dream of the rundown cocoa estate. It was a dream of the past, and it came at a time when, by creating drama and insecurity, we had destroyed the past. The Agricultural Society and the Chamber of Commerce were not our friends. The commonest type of political ambition is the desire for eviction and succession. But the order to which the colonial politician succeeds is not his order. It is something he is compelled to destroy; destruction comes with his emergence and is a condition of his power. So the legitimate desire for succession is neutralized; and drama ensues. I feared drama. My dream of the cocoa estate was not the dream of eviction; and it was more than a dream of order. It was a yearning, from the peak of power, for withdrawal; it was a wistful desire to undo. Scarcely the politician’s drive. But then I never was a politician. I never had the frenzy, the sense of mission, the necessary hurt.

Politicians are people who truly make something out of nothing. They have few concrete gifts to offer. They are not engineers or artists or makers. They are manipulators; they offer themselves as manipulators. Having no gifts to offer, they seldom know what they seek. They might say they seek power. But their definition of power is vague and unreliable. Is power the chauffeured limousine with fine white linen on the seats, the men from the Special Branch outside the gates, the skilled and deferential servants? But this is only indulgence, which might be purchased by anyone at any time in a first-class hotel. Is it the power to bully or humiliate or take revenge? But this is the briefest sort of power; it goes as quickly as it comes; and the true politician is by his nature a man who wishes to play the game all his life. The politician is more than a man with a cause, even when this cause is no more than self-advancement. He is driven by some little hurt, some little incompleteness. He is seeking to exercise some skill which even to him is never as concrete as the skill of the engineer; of the true nature of this skill he is not aware until he begins to exercise it. How often we find those who after years of struggle and manipulation come close to the position they crave, sometimes indeed achieving it, and then are failures. They do not deserve pity, for among the aspirants to power they are complete men; it will be found that they have sought and achieved fulfilment elsewhere; it takes a world war to rescue a Churchill from political failure. Whereas the true politician finds his skill and his completeness only in success. His gifts suddenly come to him. He who in other days was mean, intemperate and infirm now reveals unsuspected qualities of generosity, moderation and swift brutality. Power alone proves the politician; it is ingenuous to express surprise at an unexpected failure or an unexpected flowering.

But more often we see the true politican in decay. The gifts, unexpressed, the skills, undiscovered, turn sour within him; and he who began as wise and generous and fighting for the good cause turns out to be weak and vacillating. He abandons his principles; with every defeat he becomes more desperate; he loses his sense of timing, changing too early or too late; he even loses a sense of dignity. He turns to drink or to fine food or to women coarse or superfine; he becomes a buffoon, contemptible even to himself, except in the still hours of the late evening, when he has no audience save himself and his wife who, though embittered, remains loyal because she alone knows the true man. And through everything he never gives up. Here is your leader. Here is your true politician, the man with the nebulous skill. Offer him power. It will revive him; it will restore the man he once was.

I do not seek to describe myself. For me politics remained little more than a game, a heightening of life, an extension of the celebratory mood in which I returned to my island. Someone better equipped, someone who had paid more attention to the sources of power and had more of the instincts, would have survived. Celebration: after London this was what I wished to maintain. Power came easily; it took me by surprise. It filled me with a degree of tremulousness which more than anything else unfitted me for the position I found myself called upon to hold. I remember so well — how far away that emotion seems now, though I know that, given power again, it will come back — I remember so well the pity I felt for people of all conditions. All were so far below me; and my inexplicable luck made me fearful.

At my secretary’s slightest summons the barber would leave his little shop and come running to my house. His joy in this house exceeded my own. I had built it a few years before, when my marriage was breaking up; it was modelled on the house of the Vetii in Pompeii, with a swimming-pool replacing the impluvium. The happy barber would run his hands through my hair and say, ‘Your hair very soft, sir. What you use? Something special?’ It was the sort of thing Lieni might have said; and I would grieve for the man. It was naturally fine hair, it was true, and Lord Stockwell himself complimented me on it at our first meeting: ‘You’ll never grow bald, that’s for sure.’ But that was at an awkward moment; it was during our little nationalization crisis, and Stockwell’s estates were at issue. By this sentence Lord Stockwell not only removed tension but also, as I could not help noticing with admiration, dismissed his own immense, clumsy height, from which he could no doubt see little more of me than my hair. For Lord Stockwell there was an excuse, and for Lieni. But not for the lowly barber; and I thought, ‘How can this man endure? How, running his hands daily through the hair of other people, can he bear to keep on?’ And not only the barber and the ridiculous shoeshine men, applying themselves with vigour and a curious feminine pleasure to the removal of the last speck of dust and dirt from my shoes, and inviting me to commend their work. How could the newspaper men endure, ‘meeting me at the airport’ — words which occurred, deliciously, in their printed reports? They ran so eagerly to meet me, as full of the importance of their jobs as the girl apprentice at the hairdresser’s. They had lost their sense of their place in the scheme of things. How did they preserve their self-esteem?