The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memoires. And this end of a cycle, and in the life of a manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

For many years, V. S. Naipaul lived in (some kind of) caretaker's cottage on the grounds of a large manor in Salisbury, England, not far from Stonehenge. It was, as Naipaul describes it, a kind of permanence and stability after years of uncertainty and moving around; among other things The Enigma of Arrival describes in touching detail what it was like for a young man from Trinidad to move to England for the first time, a place which was represented in his imagination by the works of classic English literature, and also by the pictures of green fields dotted by dairy cows that appear on the cartons of milk children drank in Trinidad. That experience captures much of what Naipaul wrote about, the anxiety of Empire, of being unable to see either the colonized homeland or the imperial center well because one has been so trained in seeing the myths that regulate the relationship between them. Naipaul struggles, writes, moves back and forth between England, Trinidad, the U.S., and Canada. The manor in Salisbury, coming alongside literary success, gives the man an anchor in the world.

Much of what The Enigma of Arrival has to say, I think, is that such stability is essentially an illusion. The essays collected here are mostly in the pastoral mode, describing the life of the gardens, the fields, the hills, the woods of the manor and its environment. Naipaul is deeply interested in the lives of the lower- and middle-class workers who keep the manor going: caretaker Jack, the Phillipses, the gardener Pitton, the driver Bray. He learns that where he sees stability and continuity there is also change; few of these people have been at the manor any longer than he has and have little claim to its magisterial aesthetic or history. Some are sacked, some die--there is a strangely incommensurate story of an affair that leads to murder--and the sands of the manor shift beneath Naipaul. He, too, grows ill, and must face his own aging and the possible end of his life at the manor. Perhaps this is the enigma of arrival--that it keeps going on, keeps changing, that arrival as such never really comes.

I enjoyed this--Naipaul can really write. In this setting, his English inspirations are worn very openly. But I also found it difficult to penetrate the specific milieu of the English countryside he clearly loves; something about it seems too private, to personally experience, to really resonate. I liked most those images of the young Trinidadian seeing the world the first time from the air.

A Turn in the South by V. S. Naipaul

Satan and God fighting for Paula's soul, Paula herself not responsible for the movements of her passion, helpless, capable only of choosing salvation and asking God to reveal his will: a medieval idea of chaos, and the solitude and helplessness of men, and the necessity of salvation. But this was not set in a medieval world of plague and disease and deprivation, the arbitrariness of the sovereign and the humility of the poor. We were in a town of the Research Triangle; and the theme of this culture was abundance and choice, the paramountcy of the individual (if only as consumer), with the beauty and luxury and sensual satisfactions as imminent possibilities for all.

In 1985, fifteen years before he won the Nobel Prize but nearly as many since the publication of A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul traveled through the American South. Though Naipaul is best remembered for his fiction now, he spent nearly as much time writing travelogues, first of the West Indies, then India, and then among Islamic states in Among the Believers. But the South presented a special challenge for Naipaul, who wrote that America "cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection." And yet, casually inspect, Naipaul does: in metropolitan Atlanta, genteel Charleston, deep swamps and bottomland in Tallahassee and Jackson, and in the up-and-coming cities of the New South, Nashville and Raleigh.

A Turn in the South made me rethink a lot of things, not least among them Naipaul himself. For someone with a reputation as a crank and a bully, Naipaul comes off in A Turn in the South as remarkably open and empathetic. He lets people talk and talk, guiding conversation in only the subtlest of ways, and though perhaps it is only thanks to the writerly tactic of hiding his own questions in narrative voice while faithfully recording the responses of his interlocutors, the effect is of someone reserving judgments: a listener. Sometimes this is frustrating, as when Naipaul interviews an archconservative pastor in Elizabeth City, NC who calls himself a "Jesse-crat" after notorious senatorial douchebag Jesse Holmes, or any number of old white folks who perform paternalistic sadness at the degradation of Black life post-segregation. But it's a gift to get people to say what they probably know they ought not to say, and there's no doubt that in doing so Naipaul really does reveal something at the heart of Southern life. He gets more out of "ordinary people" than he does the black politicos of Atlanta, who are too cagey to stray from their talking points, or Eudora Welty, who is summoned for two paragraphs to talk about the long-gone fad for fur hats.

Naipaul really does empathize with white "rednecks"--a word that's more or less new to him--and with the Black Southerners he meets. Fascinatingly, that empathy seems to emerge from Naipaul's own Caribbean identity, which colors everything he sees in the South. Naipaul makes careful and articulate distinctions between the two regions of the New World, noting, among other things, the crucial lack of a white laborer class after the collapse of slavery and colonialism in Trinidad. "The possibilities" for a Black American, he writes, "were far greater than those of a West Indian. But there could be no easy movement forward for the mass; they had lived through too much; the irrationality of slavery and the years after slavery had made many irrational and self-destructive." And yet, when he writes that the culture of the South is defined by loss and by grief, one hears the echoes of his novels, in which colonial subjects struggle to forge an identity unchained by the weight of history: "The grief was special and was like religion; it would last beyond the decline of the nineteenth century empires, beyond the idea of empire itself." I think that, as a Caribbean, Naipaul is able to understand the South in a way that's difficult for an American Northerner, like Paul Theroux.

But it was the last section, titled "Smoke," which really hit home--literally--for me. The last stop on Naipaul's journey is in the "Research Triangle" of North Carolina, where I grew up, and I perhaps have never heard as insightful or as accurate a description of the place as Naipaul's:

...poor North Carolina pineland landscaped into the discreetest kind of industrial garden, many modern technological names represented by new buildings, long low lines of brick or concrete and glass, giving an impression of spaciousness and order and elegance, the land of rural poverty remade to suit its new function, the South seemingly abolished here, as it had been abolished at the space-research town of Huntsville in Alabama.

Durham poet Jim Applewhite, descendant of tobacco planters, takes Naipaul on a tour of the dying industry: the golden-leafed farms that scan still be found growing between the fresh new medical and research facilities, the meticulous handicraft of the curing barns and the packing process. "[I]t is close to the paradox of civilization itself," Applewhite tells Naipaul, "That this essentially poisonous substance formed the basis of a way of life that had so many attractive aspects--a formalized, seasonal cycle to it, which left the land combed into its even furrows after the stalks had been cut in the autumn." There can be no mourning the death of tobacco, if tobacco is dying, and yet the transition from the "folk art" and "nonutilitarian" practice of the small tobacco farm to the sleek anywhere technologies of biomedicine leave the land and its people bereft of something.

Tobacco, Naipaul notes, comes from the name of Tobago, Trinidad's junior island. Though tobacco planting was quickly abandoned there for the more lucrative sugarcane, Naipaul feels a kind of historical link between himself and the tobacco poet. And I felt it, too. Roughly ten months after Naipaul passed through the tobacco fields of the Research Triangle, I was born there. And it strange to read the great writer writing about the place that I would shortly be ushered into, and which I  have not quite always understood. I started A Turn in the South pleased to know a little more about Naipaul; I was unsettled at the end to find Naipaul looking back. But if that's the feeling I got from A Turn in the South, it's because, in Naipaul's own words, we share something way, way back--but not all that far back--in our histories.

A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Nazruddin, who had sold me the shop cheap, didn't think I would have it easy when I took over.  The country, like others in Africa, had had its troubles after independence.  The town in the interior, at the bend of the great river, had almost ceased to exist; and Nazruddin said I would have to start from the beginning.

The town, the river, even the country that make up the setting of V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River all go unnamed.  They're somewhere on the eastern coast of Africa, we might intuit, because Naipaul's narrator is an ethnically Indian Muslim who has grown up on the coast of the Indian Ocean before moving into the interior.  The narrator, Salim, retreats into the "bush" because he can't bear the burden of his family and community at the coast, which he feels are trapped in a crumbling social world whose coming collapse they cannot recognize.  He moves to the bush, buying a small shop in a remote town, because he sees what many see in Africa proper: not quite a nullity, but a ruined place; a place that can only begin again, like him.  It is a place to "start from the beginning."

But the Africa of A Bend in the River isn't exactly well suited for rebirth.  Like Salim, it remains haunted by colonialism, of the European avatars who have abandoned it and who still come back, time and time again, to remake Africa in their own image.  Naipaul, as many writers noted after his death in 2018, might have been the greatest writer of postcolonial insecurity, that feeling that the postcolonial world will never catch up to, or free itself from, the colonial powers who have retreated from it.  Africa, like Naipaul's Trinidad, is a place that exists in Europe's long shadow.  Into the vacuum the colonial powers have left, multitudes flow: speculators, like Salim, but also white academics, rebel militias, and strongmen like the president only referred to as "The Big Man," whose dream of a new Africa births empty concrete suburbs and bloody violence.

As much as I enjoyed A Bend in the River, I found myself yearning for the less aware, more irony-laden protagonists of books like Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, whose limited understanding of their communities, and their place in them, reflects, for Naipaul, the stunting affects of the postcolonial age.  Salim, by contrast, may not always know how to navigate the complexities of his social situation--how, exactly, is he meant to "look after" the young student entrusted to him by one of the marchandes who come in from the deep bush to trade?--but he's typically aware of what the complexities are.  Even intelligence and awareness, Naipaul shows, may not be enough to protect you (and sure enough, eventually Salim's shop is "nationalized" by the Big Man and given to an ethnically African "citizen" who has no idea how to run it).

Salim is so aware of himself that I was surprised by the moment when, in a pique of violence, he begins to hit the white European woman with whom he's been having an affair:

This time she was given no chance to reply.   She was hit so hard and so often about the face, even through raised, protected arms, that she staggered back and allowed herself to fall on the floor.  I used my foot on her then, doing that for the sake of the beauty of her shoes, her ankles, the skirt I had watched her raise, the hump of her hip.

This is an incredibly difficult passage to read, not least because Naipaul was notoriously cruel to the women in his own life.  But it's a bravura piece of writing, because suddenly the stunted postcolonial subject emerges from Salim, where I had least been expecting it.  It comes out in the passive voice ("She was hit so hard and often"--by whom?) and the vague diction (how does he "use" his foot exactly?").  Salim's resentment, his understanding of his own diminished position in the world, are at the root of both his infatuation with this woman, Yvette, and his violence toward her.

The most insightful moments of the book come when the disillusioned Salim flies on a whim to London to visit an old friend and escape the ruin of his relationship with Yvette.  What he sees there is not the glittering civilization that is Africa's foil, but a neighborhood of African-Indian expats who have carried their social positions with them.  What he learns is that the postcolonial world isn't just in Africa; it's everwhere.

Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more.  But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else.  Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.

In the vignette "The Mechanical Genius," the narrator of V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street offers a brief sketch of his Uncle Bhakcu.  Bhakcu isn't quite a mechanical genius, though he fancies himself one.  Most of the time when he slides beneath an automobile he's trying to fix a problem that isn't there, and when he slides back out he's made things a little bit worse.  But he has a little more knowledge than his nephew, or most people, so that gives him a kind of relative prestige, even when the mechanic called in to fix his mistakes looks up angrily and says, "When you have all sort of ignorant people messing about with a engine the white people build with their own hands, what the hell else you expect?"  At which point Bhakcu winks at his nephew and says, "I think is the carburettor."

Though the characters whose lives make up the vignettes in Miguel Street are all different from one another, they are all, in a sense, like Bhakcu.  For Morgan, it's not cars but the homemade fireworks he makes that are his pride.  For Edward, it's ties he paints by hand, for Popo it is carpentry, for Titus Hoyt, it is a tutelary knowledge of letters and law.  Their gifts and passions are minor things, on an absolute scale, but they're not any more minor, I'd reckon, than those of people in small communities all the world round.  And yet there is a kind of common knowledge, often flouted but not denied, that such things are better left to whites--to English colonials, to American soldiers.  A lot of the obituaries for Naipaul, who died this week, talk about this big theme: the way that colonialism creates stunted societies and stunted people.  Bhakcu really does screw up the cars, and Titus Hoyt is the kind of person who brings "Volume 2 of the Everyman edition of Tennyson" as a gift, not knowing or willing to see just how incomplete the present is.

That makes Miguel Street sound rather cruel.  A lot of the humor is predicated on the pretensions of the residents of Miguel Street, just as the joke is ultimately on the proud protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas.  But the stories seem to be to be full of empathy for the Miguel Street Club, who are presumably versions of the same folks that Naipaul knew growing up in Trinidad and who formed his first knowledge of the world.  Their pride is touching, not tragic, and perhaps the saddest error they make is assuming that the English and the Americans are any better than they are--that the biggest difference between Bhakcu and the (possibly) white engineers who designed his car is their inherent aptitude, and not a system of marginalization on a worldwide scale:

To hear Edward talk, you felt that America was a gigantic country inhabited by giants.  They lived in enormous houses and they drove the biggest cars in the world.

Edward used to say, 'Look at Miguel Street.  In America you think they have streets so narrow?  In America this street could pass for a sidewalk.'

Naipaul died too late.  If he'd passed away five, maybe ten years earlier, his savage treatment of his wife and mistress might have been minimized in his obituaries, but that's not the way the world leans anymore, much for the better.  It might have been easier to forget he once said that women can't write fiction, which just goes to show how sometimes only very intelligent people can make claims of such gross stupidity.  Nearly all of the vignettes in Miguel Street are about men, with the exception of one, "The Maternal Instinct," about a woman who has eight children by seven men, named Laura.  Laura's story, situated between tragedy and comedy, is not so different from those of the men, but it emphasizes how few female voices are really heard throughout the novel.  Nearly all of the men beat their wives, and the wives themselves are often used to provide a sitcommy kind of humor about nagging and henpecking.

Miguel Street doesn't extend the same empathetic eye toward the women of the Miguel Street, which is probably to say that the young Naipaul didn't pay enough attention to the women of the street where he grew up.  (He spent the rest of his life not giving women enough attention, or the wrong kind.)  But take it as it is: Miguel Street is, among other things, a story about growing up in a kind of masculine crucible, an instruction in how to be a man.  I loved the story "The Coward," about the street bully, Big Foot, who makes the narrator promise not to divulge his secret--that he once cried after cutting his foot on a shard of glass in the street--only to reveal it himself, after losing badly to a white American soldier in a highly publicized boxing match.  Big Foot is so embarrassed he has to leave Miguel Street--so many people do in these stories; for many of them life in Trinidad is so transitory--but the story itself suggests that Big Foot has been done dirty by some force larger than Miguel Street, something tied up with masculinity as well as colonialism and anti-blackness.

Miguel Street is very funny, even when it's very sad.  There's the story of the boy Elias, who takes and fails the Cambridge admittance exam several times, only to admit it is the "English and litritcher" and the "poultry" that have done him in.  I also liked the image of Eddoes, the rubbish collector, whose need to be seen as clean drives him to walk around all day with a toothbrush in his mouth.

In the end, the narrator--no doubt not far removed from Naipaul himself--leaves Miguel Street to go to England.  He leaves not just for a better life, but because it's become apparent to him that Bhakcu is not a mechanical genius, that the dreams of the people around him seem small and futile.  Walking out to the plane he sees his own shadow as "a dancing dwarf" on the tarmac, a painful image of what the real Naipaul seems to have felt about his own place in the world as a colonial subject.  He inflicted as much cruelty as he observed--James Wood calls him the "Wounder" as well as the "Wounded"--but what he observed he did so with a powerful vision and a bittersweet humor.

Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul

You were on the outside because you wanted to be. You’ve always preferred to hide. It’s the colonial psychosis, the caste psychosis. You inherited it from your father.

In the Magic Seeds V.S. Naipaul continues the saga of Willie Chandran which he began in Half a Life. Willie is born into an (almost) post-colonial world into which he finds a brilliant array of options but none that are quite suitable. In the final portion of Half a Life we find Willie living in Africa with his Portuguese girlfriend only to experience further alienation as the colony is plunged into Civil War.

Magic Seeds opens with Willie dreaming about having returned from Africa to Berlin where he is living with his sister. His actual life, clambering through the jungles of India in the company of guerilla fighters, is becoming unbearable and Willie longs to return to Europe which, in time, he does. But not before he stumbles through miles of jungles being forced to sort his way through a phantasmagoric world of psychopaths and abecedarians.

The Magic Seeds was certainly not V.S. Naipaul’s finest work and pales in comparison to his better work like In a Free State. Nevertheless, few writers can portray the tangled mass of humanity and confusion of the postmodern and post-colonial era with such conviction as V.S. Naipaul.