“Death was the motif; it had perhaps been the motif all along.”

As I have remarked recently, for me, death nearly inevitably became Naipaul’s subject later in the book. In the beginning, his subject was all that was new and healing, the promise of rebirth.

“I was oppressed by the idea of thousands of busy journalists simply finding new words for stories that had in effect already been written for them.”

What a damning line about the media! I must go back to the piece he wrote for the NYRB on the Dallas convention.

“I wrote the first pages of many different books; stopped, started again.”

What a relief! It isn’t easy for Naipaul either…

“I took the news coldly, therefore; then I had hiccups; then I became concerned.”

I find this quite odd and then think, not entirely convinced by this argument, that he is conveying his honesty.

“It was night; the pyre after six hours was still glowing.”

There is no way of being removed or distant from this scene.

“To go abroad could be to fracture one’s life…”

Again, conflating narrator and novelist, I recall the letters that Naipaul wrote to his family from Oxford. The telegram he sent after getting news of his father’s death.

“To me the ritual in this setting—the suburban house and garden, the suburban street—was new and strange.”

In this book’s earlier pages, he was exploring the Wiltshire countryside. Now, the eye is trained on Trinidad.

“Sati’s son asked in what way Sati’s past had dictated the cruelty of her death.”

One is reminded of what Naipaul had written of the meeting with the medium in that hall at the end of the flight of stairs. Or maybe this is because I’m anticipating the question that the son asks about whether or not he will see his mother again.

“Afterwards the pundit had lunch.”

So much here is redolent of the past described in A House for Mr Biswas: Naipaul’s father, and then young Naipaul, being fed after the puja because he was a Brahmin.

“We were immemorially people of the countryside.”

But change has come and he is reporting about that transformation of the land and the people.

“There was no ship of antique shape now to take us back.”

No, there wasn’t. But he did go back—to India—many times. Distress, drama.

“It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory.”

I might be wrong in thinking that this isn’t a clean line, not as good as the line that follows, the closing line of the book. The closing line says that faced with “real death” and with “this new wonder about men,” he began to write this book that we have read together.

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I paint often but had never thought of that excellent modifier!

“condensed-milk label”

We had encountered this image of the cattle before but only now we are informed of the fulfillment of the childhood fantasy.

“But it didn’t; everything tightened, seized up.”

Tight, tight syntax.

“The water always clear, giving an extraordinary brilliance to the scattered pieces of litter.”

I’m repeating myself but here, again, is writing that makes us see. I, certainly, hadn’t contemplated litter like this before but got an immediate visual sense of it on reading this line.

“I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees.”

A patient education.

“Not a true color, the color of dead vegetation, not a thing one found in, trash.”

So different from Richard Rodriguez’s racialized aria to the color brown but, just like it, filled with feeling.

“pillage”

Another Naipaul word.

“I had trained myself to the idea of change, to avoid grief; not to see decay.”

It is possible to have been sensitive only to the idea of the narrator’s recovery from illness in such benign circumstances but this paragraph reveals only unwelcome change and leads inevitably to grief. (So many changes; so many semicolons.)

“As at a death, everything here that had been a source of pleasure and surprise… became a cause for pain.”

I was still with the repeated evocation of the “first spring” (fine phrase) but was stopped cold by the appearance of “as at a death.”

“I will keep it as long as I live.”

What an extraordinary declaration of sentiment by the narrator. (However, Mrs. Phillips’s thoughts are elsewhere.)

“Squinting at the road, the tears running down his cheeks, Bray said, ‘She’s left. She became very ill and had to go back to the home.’”

Good storytelling. At first we believe the tears are for the landlord, and for the manor, a protest against the brutalities of old age. But no. Bray is talking of the woman who had lately come into his life. (I’m quite amazed at the number of people opening up to Naipaul like this in these recent sections, sharing their grief.)

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We know that death and dying is a theme in the book, but nevertheless the surprise.

“And the more prominent veins at her temples and below her thin hair that spoke of stress and pain.”

How am I to not accept his evidence!

“It was as though he too had died.”

I had forgotten the older Mr. Phillips and the story he had told about the meaning of the appearance of the first rooks.

“Grief was beyond him, was too frightening for him. He could express only resentment.”

As we like to say these days, such entitlement. And so unfair to Mrs. Phillips.

“Was this how he always introduced himself?”

Mr. Tomm’s story is made all the more strange because he appears to be presenting his strange story without being asked. But it perhaps happened a bit differently, an exchange of questions and answers. (I’m reading the whole thing as nonfiction, of course.)

“Mrs. Phillips seemed bemused when I telephoned.”

I wondered whether he was going to telephone after he had taken account of the threat or risk of petty thievery.

“And the people who came to work in what remained of the garden has become marauders, vandals.”

Vandals! Just the right word for the class with which Naipaul claims allegiance.

“women who for various reasons had been squeezed out of a communal or shared life.”

The sentence (and the paragraph) ends on a tender note whereas the rest of the sentence is harsh and dismissive.

“Green was the absinthe color.”

A lesser writer would have been satisfied with the knowing reference to Toulouse-Lautrec but no, Naipaul must press on, and I find the mention of absinthe and absinthe drinkers remarkably evocative.

“Violently colored face, dusted with glitter even for lunchtime on this summer’s day.”

!!!!

“The nurse was a man.”

The decorator’s story was full of unexpected revelations (the details about his clothes, his meals, his plans, his need for pills) but the real twist in the tale is the nurse who turned out to be Mr. Phillips!

“This was the story he told over many days, saving up this detail for last.”

The decorator had lost his house, furniture, wife, but his tears were for Mr. Phillips. (As I am continuing to read this as nonfiction, it is helpful to know that this story, with intimate revelations, developed over many days.)

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Say more!

“How dismal those boutiques and women’s dress shops quickly became, the hysteria of their owners showing in their windows!”

The shop so quickly becomes a character, the window like the character’s face or eyes!

“as in the ancient Roman world at the very beginning of Christianity”

I’m so easily impressed by these historical asides because my ignorance about that world is vast.

“Tithing! Such an old word.”

Exactly.

“I thought that part of the woman’s attraction for Bray would have been the absence of an overt allure.”

An interesting psychological conjecture.

“vapor trails usually like disappearing chalk marks”

How apt this simile in a land with layers of chalk. And quickly followed by a further description of the white arcs of cloud “clearly showing the curvature of the earth.”

“This was my first glimpse of the cottages I was to move to when I left my cottage in the manor grounds.”

The cottages the narrator/Naipaul moved into would be his home until his death.

“And I was horribly embarrassed.”

He is the cause of disorientation in the old lady who has come looking for her childhood home. I share the narrator’s embarrassment at having in a way erased the lady’s past.

“I was also embarrassed to be what I was, an intruder, not from another village or county, but from another hemisphere.”

Despite his long stay in England, he is embarrassed because he feels in some way that his presence on this land with its deep histories is illegitimate. He is an immigrant. I share this embarrassment too, this fear of being an alien.

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Earlier, we had been told about the tints in the old man’s pale clothing but now we see the tints in a new way with the chalk of the landscape entering the picture.

“The noise was made by the flock of rooks…”

An interruption, a loud one. It gives name to the entire section.

“Old wise tale.”

Continuing to delight in language as used by people.

“withies”

A word that I didn’t know before but have needed to know for a long time.

“Old Mr. Phillips, with his memories of chalk and moss; my landlord, loving ivy; the builders of the manor garden; Alan; Jack; me.”

Such a moving little story. And second, the above sentence is punctuated like a piece of music.

“Then memories began to be jumbled…”

Yes, that is understandable but why did Naipaul not keep a journal? Is it wrong to ask?

“So many kinds of religion here, so many relics.”

The whole paragraph preceding this line demonstrates what Naipaul is good at, presenting readers brief histories of changes in societies.

“It was in an upstairs room, reached directly by steps from the pavement; the lamp above the entrance was marked simply HALL.”

The simplest of descriptions leading to a story in two plain paragraphs that is harrowing, profoundly sad.

“So ordinary and dull the street, so desperate the people up there, in the room at the top of the tall flight of stairs.”

I couldn’t agree more.

“So small, so thin, so inflamed.”

So much emphasis!

“fancy woman”

The words, the phrase I mean, don’t invite the narrator’s commentary but the description of their dramatic delivery (the words bursting out of Mrs. Bray just as the bus’s doors opened) brings the moment alive. But a little later, when he finds the phrase “demeaning,” I thought the narrator’s gesture was excessive and suspiciously so.

“I wondered whether in 1950, when I was eighteen and new to England.”

I welcomed his persistence with this thought about what he has learned from experience, particularly from his experience as a writer who now recognizes what is his material.

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The repetition of the severe judgment meted out earlier regarding Alan.

“And that writer’s personality of Alan’s was partly genuine, and no more fraudulent than my own character, my idea of myself as a writer, had been in 1950.”

After what had appeared to be a strict dismissal, Naipaul’s honesty here leads to a genuine complexity.

“(as I understood too well)”

Naipaul will keep reminding that he is writing, if not from sympathy, then from self-knowledge.

“A view of the garden, the river, the water meadows on both sides of the river, with the empty downs beyond.”

This view is what the book had been preoccupied with earlier, inviting the reader to take pleasure in it.

“My landlord was the one person to whom Alan could bring news.”

In some other context, I remember Naipaul’s swift criticism of another writer, possibly belonging to the working-class, in similar terms. “He brings news…”

“Alan usually ate alone in the manor.”

The lines that follow are the purest, and seemingly the most accurate, fiction with Naipaul imagining Alan under a dim ceiling bulb.

“A chafing dish!”

I had expected something utterly archaic but Google images has presented me with something hopelessly contemporary.

“There was a part of him that hurt.”

The portrayal of Alan here has a sense of psychological acuity, although I’m not entirely sure how Alan’s desire to emulate the writers he admired also resulted in conditions conspiring to conceal things from himself.

“The venomous little insect came galumphing across the room at Clarissa’s.”

Literary battles are so wearying but there is great energy in this description.

“Diary will take due note.”

Amusing.

“The ambiguity in the personality.”

Naipaul advocated for concreteness instead of abstraction, yet he is being abstract here. It is a fine phrase but what does it mean?

“The man had changed.”

So much noticing. Alan’s changes are described in distressing detail.

“The obituaries were curiously self-regarding.”

More about literary culture.

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A special phrase, spiking the sentence with a refined lyricism.

“Had made him see tints where another person might have seen something neutral.”

I’m repeating myself here but Naipaul is always making us see.

“I had replaced the idea of decay, the idea of the ideal which can be the cause of so much grief, by the idea of flux.”

Is this as neat as the replacement of the Tory ideology with that of Labour?

“gone to pieces”

The unusual words we had learned from Pitton earlier (“tying” being the latest) had been charming; but we hear this phrase in Mrs. Phillips’s voice and it only has the familiarity of a cliché.

“He had lost touch with the idea of work.”

I am moved by the fact that Naipaul arrives at this view of Pitton’s problem by examining himself and his own fears. (A page or two later, Naipaul is going to do the same with his landlord, an act that he will recognize as projection.)

“She is cooked in a cannibal pot and eaten.”

The Enigma of Arrival is a postcolonial text not so much because it denounces such orientalist fantasies; instead, it is working on a different terrain entirely, we are in the present and there is a clear recognition that we are in England and not in a fantasy Africa.

“So it was with people; when their time came, it came.”

There is hard pragmatism here, a mature adult view, but then the simile we are offered is of the child who forgets the grandmother who has died. We are forced to see children differently.

“Gradually he stopped acknowledging me from the laundry van.”

(Small point first: I was tempted to insert a comma after “gradually.” But no, unnecessary.)

The change in Pitton, the coming to fore of the new man, is described in terms of seeing: he saw the narrator and then he didn’t see him.

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Come for the insights about decay but stay for the similes.

“How fragile my little world was here! Just leaves and branches.”

A world threatened by chain saw, but oddly, no mention of death.

“So that, understanding the principle of the damage, it was a little like watching a human or animal limb break.”

This is the other side of Naipaul, our Jeremiah suddenly hidden, showing only tenderness.

“Tying, Mr Pitton?”

You knew he was going to ask him about this unusual word!

“It was a cruel thing to say.”

How do we know it was cruel? Well, Naipaul says it but also: “His eyes were quite bright with pleasure.” Perfect!

“It wasn’t like my cottage; its scale was more than human; it exaggerated human needs.”

Naipaul is describing the manor. I understand the first part of the sentence, and also the second, but the last part is a challenge. I recognize in it, however, the expert hand.

“In 1857, in Madame Bovary…”

The literary reference, usefully recalled, is only a quick sentence and so precise.

“Sometimes, coming out of the summer bush as clean as a cat.”

For a reader like me, inserting just five percent of the right imagery makes the book twice as better.

“He wanted someone to witness and share his outrage; he could not bear to be with himself.”

We don’t know whether Naipaul is expressing any solidarity, but he is very attentive to Pitton’s anger.

“Like an ant whose nest had just been smashed, he moved about hither and thither.”

It is immaterial whether Naipaul feels any allegiance or pity because his writing about Pitton’s disorientation provides witness. In the following paragraph, particularly the last line, Naipaul does express more clearly, to the reader if not to Pitton himself, his sympathy.

“And it was strange, Pitton’s silence of the previous day.”

We remain with the disturbing strangeness of the silence; it would be impossible to part that silence and understand exactly what was going on; a novel more easily allows you to inhabit ambiguity.

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The shout, quickly identified for us as a call, is followed by a dense inventory of sounds that are particular to the place and give it its identity.

“Beardsley-like drawings, of another age”

You want to say—or, at least, I do—oh, how clichéd!

“It was the toughness of people who wanted to be as tough as they had found the world tough.”

What Naipaul says about the Phillipses, isn’t that true of Naipaul too?

“This worry about his physical appearance perhaps explained Alan’s clowning.”

Alan, based broadly on a writer called Julian Jebb, is quickly presented here as a “character”: in such portrayals this book becomes more akin to fiction.

“Alan had no book to his name.”

Again, such a Naipaulian line! At once more writerly and judgmental and dismissive.

“A forest Indian in a new mission settlement in the Guiana highlands.”

This sentence launches us into a brief, striking tale, magical in nature: at its heart is a story about the kanaima, the killing spirit that is believed to take a human form, and the question that I was left with was: why did the Indian not think that Naipaul, in the figure of the man approaching him, was the kanaima!

“I’ve been drinking champagne.”

In a book that is clouded with a deep melancholic gloom, this moment contains comedy, especially because we have been offered in the preceding sentences the great buildup: “He was full of news. Bursting with news.”

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A good understanding here that his imagined idea would have suggested its opposite, decay, to others who had come before him.

“Vocation or achievement.”

All that anxiety and achievement in the service of what is sacred to Naipaul: the idea of writing as a vocation.

“My childhood lay in the vanished world of sugarcane fields and huts and barefoot children”

A truly lovely evocation of Naipaul’s past, a past that is as important as all the later travels in countries of Africa, Asia or South America. A past that is invoked here with the purpose, as with Bray, of indicating “how far he had come.”

“I had developed a lot since 1950; had learned how to talk, to inquire.”

Once again in Naipaul, as always, a lesson about writing. (Also I need to keep reminding myself that this is fiction. Admittedly, nothing is really gained by the reminder. What does it matter, fiction or non-?)

“I found so many abuses I took for granted…”

Naipaul speaks here of abuse and prejudice, and his present mortification. I feel tenderly toward that. At the same time, why does he imagine all of it is in the past and that he has overcome or entirely escaped those limiting ideologies?

“The past for me—as colonial and writer—was full of shame and mortifications.”

But, as he says, he could train himself to face them and, indeed, recognize that those feelings were his true subject.

“I always liked cutting the lawn.”

One can form a picture in one’s mind, Naipaul, in middle age, pushing the sputtering machine.

“My earliest observations as a child were about the lies of poverty.”

All the boasting and the pretending among the families (and also outside the home) recalled in fine, comic, heartbreaking detail in A House for Mr. Biswas!

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This writer-friend Tony is Anthony Powell. I learned from the Naipaul biography by Patrick French that the gardener is named after a village in Wiltshire.

“Style was modeled on that of a superior.”

While French, the biographer, writes that Naipaul isn’t interested in writing about the class machinations in the valley, I do feel that Naipaul always, at least often, wants to “fix” those from lower classes in some way in his descriptions. He wants to not just point, he wants to put them in their place, as it were, in the social hierarchy.

“of normally hidden family relationships now publicly exposed”

The above phrase is from Naipaul’s account of the “open day” at the artillery school. It is a novelist’s phrase, not a journalist’s. I like it.

“the poorer very concerned not to be outfaced.”

Another phrase from the same day; again a novelist’s phrase, but a novelist like Naipaul, slightly sneering.

“Or it might have been that I was at the age when I was able to observe these things with detachment.”

Not least the detachment of the novelist who consciously kept out his wife Pat, and his mistress Margaret, from these pages.

“a form of caste behavior, something acquired, as unnatural as formal manners”

The novelist as sociologist.

“The manor formed no part of Pitton’s idea of romance.”

I do not completely grasp why this is so disappointing to Naipaul.

“I noticed then his precise way with the loaded wheelbarrow, before pushing it off.”

Naipaul compares the movement that Pitton makes with the men who carried sedan chairs in the eighteenth century. This strikes me as accurate. Also, it makes me think of his back problems that laid him low for long stretches.

“What had disappointed me no longer disappointed me.”

Surely someone has written about the repetitions in Naipaul’s prose? How the rhythm creates its own music and magic.

“Felt as old, that emotion, that need, surviving here, in England, the first industrial country.”

This is why one ought to celebrate Naipaul, for his capacity to make three maize seeds planted in the yellow earth of Port of Spain sprout with the turn of a page somewhere in a mean industrial town in England.

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I didn’t know this word and had to look it up: “an underground drainage system that collects excess surface water and slowly disperses it in the surrounding soil.”

“Nothing was natural here; everything was considered. Grass and trees concealed as much engineering as a Roman forum.”

The second half of both of the quoted sentences have a Naipaulian feel to them.

“The dereliction of the place was new.”

While this, well may be an accurate observation, for me it points to Naipaul’s Tory tendencies, the railing against the new.

“And kept his plots in good heart.”

Naipaul is describing Jack. I’d imagine this phrase is more common in England than in the U.S.

“There were no more roses.”
He has quoted with some vehemence Mrs. Phillips’s statement: “I’ve cut them right back.” This has left Naipaul—and this reader—annoyed.

“At least, he wasn’t my idea of a gardener.”

We have been given a quick sketch of Pitton in his three-piece tweed suit and a tie—but I like the little social history that unfolds here about peasant society in Trinidad.

“a barefoot gardener”

A wonderfully evocative adjective that is then repeated with further details: “a barefoot man, trousers rolled-up to mid-shin.” I know such gardeners from my own past.

“Working the way men work only when they work for themselves.”

Small words, with their echoing sounds, delivering a whole world of understanding.

“And oily or sweated felt hats folded at the back to fit the head like a visored cap.”

Drawing so much—and so precisely—on childhood memories.

“He, the carefully dressed, paunchy, staid figure, became known to me and turned out to be only the gardener.”

I don’t think anyone writing today would want to use “only.”

“thornproof”

A knowledge of this kind of clothing would have been acquired by Naipaul in rural Wiltshire.

“She was a woman of great, delicate beauty, which was extraordinary in someone of her station.”

Again, as with Mr. Pitton, the description of his wife with an explicit link being made to her station and then, at the end of the sentence to “some fine strain,” suggests a degree of class consciousness that is wedded to hierarchies.

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More reminiscent of A Bend in the River (1979), the repeated talk of bush.

“They were unexpectedly unattractive, as nervous as rats…”

An unexpected comparison of trout with rats.

“The miniature volcano of the salmon’s nest in the white chalk of the riverbed.”

On the previous page, I was able to see the blue iris in my mind, but here I’m stumped. Siri, show me the miniature volcano of the salmon’s nest!

“I lived not with the idea of decay—that idea I quickly shed—so much as with the idea of change.”

More acceptance here than possible with mere decay.

“the sun on the fat shining leg”

The whole season is fixed through this detail.

“Krishna and Shiva”

This is a postcolonial text because Krishna and Shiva are juxtaposed with Constable and Shepard. The British empire is the link.

“Blue standing, in fact, for the black of the inhabitants of India”

Is that really true? If yes, it is remarkable. New knowledge for me. This is not what I had been taught as a child during visits to various temples.

“What did he see? Whatever he saw would have been different from what I saw.”

Always, always, the insistence on ways of seeing.

“And since one seeks to understand people by looking for aspects of oneself in them.”

I accepted this as Naipaul’s mantra. His discovery of something that disgusts him is accompanied by disgust at his own disgust.

“The secret vegetable life of the cherry tree of the garden.”

Ivy, after which this section is named, has smothered the cherry tree. The disc of cherry wood offers a fascinating secret history. Naipaul imaginatively recovers for the reader his own history and the history of his landlord; opposing lifestyles and goals but here they are together on the manor grounds.

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A surprise and a delight to encounter these emotions in a book often touching on a sense of melancholy. (“Delight” and “surprise” pop up, like spring flowers, in the paragraph that follows.)

“One day, on a block of stone set high up on a side wall, I saw the carved initials of the builder or designer.”

Naipaul has a deep appreciation for craft but what is also evident here is a delight in play. The surprise of play.

“How often, as a child, having had my fever, I had longed to have it all over again…”

I don’t think I had encountered this sentiment before in any literature. Have you?

“Right through the valley, in open, sun-struck gardens.”

I like everything here, especially “the sun-struck gardens,” and the description of the peonies “blooming away too fast in bright light,” but don’t know about the word that the sentence ends with: “rapidly losing their virtue.” Virtue?

“Once there were sixteen gardeners. Now there was only Pitton.”

Okay, so we are finally back with Pitton. How has Naipaul thought of it structurally? Is it that after “Jack’s Garden,” we are now in this new section in “Pitton’s Garden”?

“Refuse, refuge: two separate, unrelated words.”

Once again, Naipaul’s pleasure in language and usage.

“He would have looked out on something like perfection.”

The rhapsodic prose that follows offers justification. (And we learn in the next paragraph that a part of the charm of this landscape is that it is the same as the view that Constable saw.)

“But perfection such as my landlord looked out on contained its own corruption.”

This reading is a lesson in landscape psychology. I’m not sure I’m convinced. It is not class and wealth but the view that leads to passivity? Hmmm.

“To replace its wilderness with order.”

Order. That’s a Naipaulian word. A supreme virtue.

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After the story of the journey from Trinidad, and other journeys, we are now back at the manor.

“The dusty, ragged, half-rotted carcass of a hare.”

We have returned not only to the manor, we have returned to death and decay.

“The past was like something that one could stretch out and reach.”

Entirely aided by art, the art of Constable and Shepard—because those paintings represented the landscape so accurately?

“light-shot green”

So, prose can also be as good as painting at evoking an image.

“So this glimpse of my landlord—this glimpse of someone unexpectedly ordinary—made him, after all, more mysterious.”

Why does the landlord receive this level of awed attention? (I’m like that person who doesn’t understand why their friend is dating a particular someone.)

“Photographs—snapshots—melancholy in their effect.”

Is this true? That paintings can never mark the passage of time because they are “charged with the spirit and labor of the painter”?

“It might be said that an empire lay between us.”

This sentence is as important as the one that follows, about empire also being the link between Naipaul and the landlord.

“I felt an immense sympathy for my landlord, who, starting at the other end of the world, now wished to hide, like me.”

Okay, there perhaps is the answer to the question that I had posed above.

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Writing as healing. He’s here talking about an earlier book, but the present book is serving the same purpose too.

“With me, everything started from writing.”

That is Naipaul’s salience for me.

“black men with threatening hair”

Racial neurosis?

“The Chirico painting, The Enigma of Arrival.”

Seventy pages later, we return to the painting. This time, we get a little sketch of the story that had come to him. But it is clear that he didn’t turn it into anything longer.

“I had no means of knowing that the landscape by which I was surrounded was in fact benign.”

Maybe, but we understand that that is why he wrote of it in such detail at this book’s beginning.

“The man who went walking past Jack’s college.”

He sets himself at a distance. He refers to himself in the third person. It allows for assessment.

“I thought of the present book and returned to live in the past.”

The recovery of what he had forgotten or what he had “expunged” from memory makes this piece of writing creative. (Creative in a general sense—I don’t think of it as fiction.)

“I wanted to be as he was at that moment, a man on the move.”

Again, routes, not roots.

“Dear Victor.”

In David Hare’s play A Map of the World the Naipaul-like writer is named Victor Mehta. A quick search reveals that the play was written long before this novel.

“And she rewrote her past as once I had done.”

We are all fabulists.

“‘Walk out’—extraordinary language. I had never heard the phrase used by anybody.”

An immigrant’s imperfect grasp of the language—I make such mistakes myself. In her short-story “Hell-Heaven” Jhumpa Lahiri turns this feature to excellent use.

Thank you for joining us to read Enigma of Arrival with Amitava Kumar. Join APS Together to receive his notes every morning as we read together.

And then join us on Tuesday, April 21 at 7:00 pm (ET) for a finale conversation with Amitava Kumar and A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes.

I was surprised by this (reluctant) expression of solidarity.

“That rawness of nerves among black people had become like a communal festering.”

This dislike in Naipaul of the expression of black resistance was to find expression in Guerrillas.

“I could imagine myself at the beginning of things if I looked selectively.”

A rare move in Naipaul, the attempt to see better by not seeing what is before one’s eye.

“Sugar and slavery had created that simplicity.”

A musical line that is also a truthful line.

“With grainy ridges all the way up like healed wounds.”

I don’t think of Naipaul as a manufacturer of imagery, but when he does, I like the freshness.

“I saw all this under the spell of the book I had written.”

The nonfiction he has pulled together seems to him to be as much an imaginative act as his novels.

“I had given myself a past, and a romance of the past.”

Too much of a romance perhaps because the mention of “Haitian anarchy” doesn’t mention anything about the role of the U.S. and the CIA.

“In a time of anxiety that was like the anxiety of my first arrival.”

Always, the raw nerves.

“The writer’s life: whatever one’s mood, it was always necessary to pick oneself up and start again.”

A life dedicated to our sacred vocation!

“The blessing I felt as a blessing still.”

Along with the blessing he says he has experienced disappointment—disappointment that is like “the pain that attends love,” which sounds fine actually but no, for Naipaul it is the cause of “a terrible solitude.”

“The handwriting spoke of a woman absolutely at peace, sexually fulfilled, without anxiety. I envied her this calm, this absence of ambition.”

Dude, how, how are you reading all this from a bill?

(Am I remembering this correctly—did I read somewhere that he performed handwriting analysis?)

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Naipaul links this aesthetic idea to other ideas “bred essentially out of empire, wealth and imperial security”

“To wish you ask questions, to keep true curiosity alive.”

I’m guessing he is saying that opposed to the idea of inward development is the practice of asking questions and exploring the outer world?

“And then, but only very slowly, man and writer came together again.”

This happens because he recognizes his material, his own memories.

“My subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”

It began with his writing about a street (Miguel Street).

“I went back in 1956 by steamship.”

No account here of writing anything like “Gala Nights”; instead of fantasy, just sharp observations about what the senses were taking in.

“The smallness of that past, the shame of that smallness.”

The discovery of what he had ignored or thought he had left behind.

“Four years later it had all changed for me.”

In those intervening years, he had written A House for Mr. Biswas. What an achievement!

“People had no news; they revealed themselves quickly.”

A perfect Naipaul sentence, by which I mean a Naipaulian sentence, a mix of cold intelligence and seeming cruelty.

“the fear of extinction”

The familiar Naipaul phrase is suddenly given psychological depth: he fears being swallowed up by the simplicity of any one side.

“The island had given me the world as a writer.”

He didn’t acknowledge Trinidad when awarded the Nobel, but this is good.

“I could not be that kind of traveler.”

Graham Greene couldn’t be his model.

“The India that was like a loose end in my mind.”

This is why An Area of Darkness is such a personal book, a book about a country but shot through with the anxieties and rage of a man searching for himself and his past.

“So now I was amazed, reading the documents of my island in London, by the antiquity of the place to which I belonged.”

The Middle Passage, his first nonfiction book, according to his editor, was the book where Naipaul “examined the reasons why he feared and hated the place where he was born.”

“Through writing—knowledge and curiosity feeding off one another—I had arrived at a new idea of myself and my world. But the world had not stood still.”

Restlessness, within and without.

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Is that the secret to being universal, to be able to put yourself in the mind of the reader and imagine what it would take to create a visual picture? (This would explain, at least partly, the level of detail in this book.) In the wonderful paragraph that follows, further elaboration: “using no words that might disturb or unsettle an unskilled or unknowledgeable reader.”

“I lost the gift of fantasy, the dream of the future, the far-off place where I was going.”

It is so interesting that the imaginative sense of a place is linked to the dream-like space of the darkened cinema-hall. When fantasy is lost, we learn on the next page, he is no longer a dreamer but a critic.

“Somerset Maugham, aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing.”

A model for a writer. Naipaul has written about Maugham elsewhere too. In our time, we would think of it as a kind of cosmopolitan ease, people who pass through places without friction. A consummate hipster?

“I was dazzled by that passage of dialogue.”

He doesn’t completely grasp the conversation but it doesn’t matter. Our narrator is describing his sense of wonder.

“Did he know that the eighteen-year-old among the guests at his lunch was a writer who would cherish those words of his and go up to his room and write them down?”

I’m ready to applaud this youth except that there is a problem: He says that his “overreadiness to find material” was an obstacle to a clearer apprehension of the truth of the situation. What was it—a memory that he had suppressed? a few bits of sexual detail? horror?

“Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples.”

So it seems that the larger truth was the fact of migration and the vast changes it brought.

“But I noted nothing down. I asked no questions. I took them all for granted.”

The cardinal sin as far as Naipaul is concerned: taking a place or a people for granted (not that he was above doing it himself, over and over again).

“the brilliant wartime red of her lips”

Naipaul doesn’t usually startle the reader with an astonishing piece of language; his language, precise and accurate, is more often plainer.

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Was this the first story he wrote? He writes that this was the first he wrote “based on metropolitan material.” I like his application!

“How the sexual impulse, like drink, clouded and distorted people I knew, men and women.”

This might be accurate but it betrays such anxiety and fear and also an old-fashioned fastidiousness.

“My ignorance and innocence, my deprivations (of which the asceticism was a disingenuous sign).”

That parenthetical is a sign of what I regard as Naipaul’s unforgiving honesty.

“People changed after three days on a ship, he said.”

A nice line to give to a character who, as Naipaul says, “talked like someone in a film.”

“But that topic of race… was too close to my disturbance, my vulnerability…”

So much of what we write presents to the world only the strategies we have used to avoid what we needed to write.

“Colored! So he was a Negro.”

This is an utterly fascinating scene not least because our narrator keeps his eyes shut throughout!

“In each there were aspects of myself. But with my Asiatic background, I resisted the comparison.”

There is some basis for what we call these days racial solidarity but he is alert to his own difference, not least because his primary identification is as a writer. He admits, however, that his was a strategy of avoidance. (I see avoidance even in his use of the distant term: “disturbance.”)

“So I grew to feel that the grandeur belonged to the past.”

In other words, decay was there for him from the start, it didn’t appear in rural Wiltshire.

“My ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a similar feeling of wrongness.”

The West as the sun, the center of things, for Naipaul—this is a critique often advanced about him. (Unlike, say, Ousmane Sembène who said he wasn’t a sunflower, he was the sun.) But, as Naipaul writes here, this feeling didn’t come without its own sense of wrongness.

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