Literary Occasions_ Essays Part 1

Literary Occasions_ Essays.

by V. S. Naipaul.

Introduction.

IN 1836, a few months before Pushkin died in a duel, the Russian review journal Telescope Telescope published the first letter in the collection that came to be known as published the first letter in the collection that came to be known as Philosophical Letters Philosophical Letters by the Russian aristocrat and former army officer Pyotr Chaadaev. For some years, the letters, written originally in French, had been circulating secretly among the Westernised Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg-among the rootless elite that Peter the Great had created in his attempt to make Russia more like Western Europe. But the publication of the first letter in Russian was, in the words of Alexander Herzen, who read it ecstatically while in exile, like "a shot going off in the dark night." It was, later readers would say, the beginning of intellectual life in Russia. by the Russian aristocrat and former army officer Pyotr Chaadaev. For some years, the letters, written originally in French, had been circulating secretly among the Westernised Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg-among the rootless elite that Peter the Great had created in his attempt to make Russia more like Western Europe. But the publication of the first letter in Russian was, in the words of Alexander Herzen, who read it ecstatically while in exile, like "a shot going off in the dark night." It was, later readers would say, the beginning of intellectual life in Russia.

Chaadaev denounced the cultural isolation and mediocrity of Russia; he denounced, too, the intellectual impotence of the Russian elite, of which he was himself a member. "Our memories" he wrote, reach back no further than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves ... That is but a natural consequence of a culture that consists entirely of imports and imitation ... We absorb all our ideas ready-made, and therefore the indelible trace left in the mind by a progressive movement of ideas, which gives it strength, does not shape our intellect ... We are like children who have not been taught to think for themselves: when they become adults, they have nothing of their own-all their knowledge is on the surface of their being, their soul is not within them.

With these lines, Chaadaev made public some intense growing self-doubts among privileged Russians who looked up, out of long-established habit, to Western Europe for cultural direction but felt painfully alienated from the vast wretched majority of the Russian people. In a poem written as early as 1824, Pushkin had made his protagonist wonder if "the truth is somewhere outside him, perhaps in some other land, in Europe, for instance, with her stable historical order and well-established social and civic life." For much of the nineteenth century, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were to define in diverse and fruitful ways their own ambivalent relations.h.i.+p with the West as well as with their semi-derelict society.

ONE OF Pushkin's disciples, Gogol, turned out to be one of the most influential figures in this great intellectual and spiritual awakening of Russia. He published his first stories in 183132, four years before the publication of Chaadaev's letter. It was to these brisk comic sketches about life in the Ukraine that V. S. Naipaul once compared the stories about the peasant Indian world of Trinidad written by his father, Seepersad. Naipaul saw and heard these stories come into being during the first eighteen years of his life, which he spent in Trinidad; then, for three years, from 1950 until his father died, he followed their progress from England. They gave Naipaul not only his literary ambition but also-at a time of poverty and despair in England, when Naipaul began to write and didn't know how to go on-its crucial basis. Pushkin's disciples, Gogol, turned out to be one of the most influential figures in this great intellectual and spiritual awakening of Russia. He published his first stories in 183132, four years before the publication of Chaadaev's letter. It was to these brisk comic sketches about life in the Ukraine that V. S. Naipaul once compared the stories about the peasant Indian world of Trinidad written by his father, Seepersad. Naipaul saw and heard these stories come into being during the first eighteen years of his life, which he spent in Trinidad; then, for three years, from 1950 until his father died, he followed their progress from England. They gave Naipaul not only his literary ambition but also-at a time of poverty and despair in England, when Naipaul began to write and didn't know how to go on-its crucial basis.

The stories drew upon Seepersad's experience as a journalist and government official in the Trinidad countryside, where his own family along with other descendants of Indian indentured labourers had re-created a miniature village India. They dealt partly in romance, in that they presented the Hindu world of the peasants as idyllically whole, in which ancient ritual and myth explained and fulfilled all human desires. Although Seepersad based his characters on members of his own extended family, he did not write about their dereliction and pain, and the humiliation he had himself suffered as a young waif. But then, as Naipaul wrote in his foreword to an edition of Seepersad's stories published in 1976, "certain things can never become material. My father never in his life reached that point of rest from which he could look back at his past."

For Naipaul, the comparison with Gogol ended here. Seepersad found his voice as a writer in the last hard years of life in Port of Spain; Gogol found it at the beginning of his career. Seepersad made the long journey away from his peasant origins, discovered a literary vocation through journalism, only to find that he had little to write about; Gogol overcame in his early stories what Chaadaev saw as a shameful intellectual and literary inertia, and then had, as material, "Russia to fall back on and claim."

As Naipaul saw it, Seepersad was inhibited as much by his "formless, unmade society" as by his personal circ.u.mstances. For three centuries, the Caribbean island of Trinidad had been a labour camp for the empires of Europe. Slaves and indentured labourers from different parts of Africa and Asia had steadily replaced its original Indian population. As a colonial society, it was even more artificial, fragmented and dependent on the metropolitan West than the Russia Chaadeav described. It was also very small, politically unimportant and geographically isolated from the rest of the world. It wasn't much encountered in print; and, as the first attempts of Naipaul and his father proved, it was very hard to write about.

From the beginning, there was a "mismatch," as Naipaul later wrote in "Reading and Writing" (1998), between his father's "ambition, coming from outside, from another culture, and our community, which had no living literary tradition." As Naipaul himself discovered, reading the literature that Trinidad imported along with the language from England was more confusing than helpful. "Great novelists wrote about highly organized societies. I had no such society; I couldn't share the a.s.sumptions of the writers; I didn't see my world reflected in theirs." Wordsworth's daffodil was a "pretty little flower, no doubt; but we had never seen it." Foreign books worked best when they could be adapted to local conditions. d.i.c.kens's rain and drizzle had to be turned into tropical downpours. "But no writer, however individual his vision, could be separated from his society"; and the imported books remained alien and incomprehensible.

At the same time, the literature from Europe had an irresistible glamour-the "soft power" of a successful imperial civilization. It obscured direct vision of one's own society. If "to be a colonial," as Naipaul wrote in an early essay t.i.tled "East Indian," was "to be a little ridiculous and unlikely, especially in the eyes of someone from the metropolitan country," then to have, as a colonial, literary ambitions was to know an even deeper shame and awkwardness. For, "until they have been written about societies appear to be without shape and embarra.s.sing. embarra.s.sing." It was not easy to resist the doubt that the true subjects of literature lay in Europe, in "its stable historical order and well-established social and civic life."

IT WAS this insidious intellectual colonialism that drained Naipaul of "the courage to do a simple thing like mentioning the name of a Port of Spain street." The embarra.s.sment and difficulty seem to have remained even as Naipaul began, after six futile years in England, to free himself of the metropolitan tradition, and found the courage to write about the Port of Spain street he knew. In this insidious intellectual colonialism that drained Naipaul of "the courage to do a simple thing like mentioning the name of a Port of Spain street." The embarra.s.sment and difficulty seem to have remained even as Naipaul began, after six futile years in England, to free himself of the metropolitan tradition, and found the courage to write about the Port of Spain street he knew. In Miguel Street Miguel Street (1959), his first publishable book, which drew from his childhood in Port of Spain, he simplified and suppressed much of his experience. The memory of the characters came from "a tormented time. But that was not how I remembered it. My family circ.u.mstances had been too confused; I preferred not to focus on them." (1959), his first publishable book, which drew from his childhood in Port of Spain, he simplified and suppressed much of his experience. The memory of the characters came from "a tormented time. But that was not how I remembered it. My family circ.u.mstances had been too confused; I preferred not to focus on them."

But he had made a start. Miguel Street Miguel Street opened up his Trinidad past, which Naipaul hadn't previously thought of as suitable material, and which he began to explore with rapidly increasing confidence. His next three books included what is now seen as the epic of the post-colonial world, opened up his Trinidad past, which Naipaul hadn't previously thought of as suitable material, and which he began to explore with rapidly increasing confidence. His next three books included what is now seen as the epic of the post-colonial world, A House for Mr. Biswas A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). In (1961). In Biswas, Biswas, which drew upon his father's stories of rural Trinidad as well as his lifelong quest for security and stability, Naipaul saw most clearly the "completeness and value" of his experience as a child in Trinidad. which drew upon his father's stories of rural Trinidad as well as his lifelong quest for security and stability, Naipaul saw most clearly the "completeness and value" of his experience as a child in Trinidad.

But this material was fixed: "It couldn't be added to." Naipaul was still some years away from a fuller awareness of Trinidad's history-the history of genocide, exploitation, misery and neglect-that he would reach while researching The Loss of El Dorado The Loss of El Dorado (1969). He couldn't yet write a novel about his years in England; and fiction, which functions "best within certain fixed social boundaries," seemed unable to use fruitfully Naipaul's growing knowledge. Travel books about the Caribbean and India promised a release; but once again, free-floating literary ambition came up against fixed literary tradition. For the travel book, Naipaul discovered, was even more inseparably a part of a metropolitan and imperial tradition than the novel. (1969). He couldn't yet write a novel about his years in England; and fiction, which functions "best within certain fixed social boundaries," seemed unable to use fruitfully Naipaul's growing knowledge. Travel books about the Caribbean and India promised a release; but once again, free-floating literary ambition came up against fixed literary tradition. For the travel book, Naipaul discovered, was even more inseparably a part of a metropolitan and imperial tradition than the novel.

The English travelers Naipaul sought to emulate-D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh-"wrote at a time of empire"; they "inevitably in their travel became semi-imperial." He couldn't be that kind of traveller in either the Caribbean or India, the land of his ancestors. He later wrote of his first trip to India in the early 1960s in The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival (1987) that "there was no model for me here in this exploration, neither Forster nor Ackerley, nor Kipling could help." He couldn't a.s.sume their poses of detachment and light irony because "to look as a visitor, at other semi-derelict communities in despoiled land ... was to see, as from a distance, what one's own community might have looked like." (1987) that "there was no model for me here in this exploration, neither Forster nor Ackerley, nor Kipling could help." He couldn't a.s.sume their poses of detachment and light irony because "to look as a visitor, at other semi-derelict communities in despoiled land ... was to see, as from a distance, what one's own community might have looked like."

Such unavoidable reminders of his own past-the past he had barely outgrown in the early sixties-made Naipaul a "fearful traveller" in India. But it also forced him to "define myself very clearly to myself": a reckoning with historical and literary location that became a habit with Naipaul and, eventually, the basis for his a.s.sessments of other writers as well. His literary and autobiographical essays, which form a companion volume to the close readings of Indian, African and American societies collected in The Writer and the World The Writer and the World (2002), discuss writers as varied as Kipling, Gandhi, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Conrad and R. K. Narayan. They depend on particular, often highly original, interpretations of history and invariably turn upon the problems of self-definition: how writers incarnate or reject the deeper a.s.sumptions of the societies they belong to and write about; how their chosen literary form reflects or distorts their particular experiences of the world. (2002), discuss writers as varied as Kipling, Gandhi, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Conrad and R. K. Narayan. They depend on particular, often highly original, interpretations of history and invariably turn upon the problems of self-definition: how writers incarnate or reject the deeper a.s.sumptions of the societies they belong to and write about; how their chosen literary form reflects or distorts their particular experiences of the world.

FOR NAIPAUL, both the virtues and limitations of Kipling's both the virtues and limitations of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills Plain Tales from the Hills derive from the author's members.h.i.+p in the cosy elite club of imperial Anglo-India. "This artificial, complete and h.o.m.ogenous world did not require explanations." It made Kipling's irony subtle and "private," and his prose "allusive, elliptical ... easy but packed." However, in Naipaul's complex historical a.n.a.lysis, the same parochial Anglo-India that made Kipling's early work possible prevented the growth of self-knowledge among Indians. derive from the author's members.h.i.+p in the cosy elite club of imperial Anglo-India. "This artificial, complete and h.o.m.ogenous world did not require explanations." It made Kipling's irony subtle and "private," and his prose "allusive, elliptical ... easy but packed." However, in Naipaul's complex historical a.n.a.lysis, the same parochial Anglo-India that made Kipling's early work possible prevented the growth of self-knowledge among Indians.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British in India moved far from the "New Learning" of Europe they had originally represented to modernising Indians. They came to sympathise more with the "unintellectual simplicities of the blue-eyed Pathan" than with the Bangalis discussing Darwin and Mill. "Suburban and philistine," they became indifferent to the Indian aspirations to modernity which fed the nineteenth-century Bengali intellectual renaissance, and whose pa.s.sing Nirad C. Chaudhuri mourned in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951). Not surprisingly, the cultures of India and Britain remained "opposed"; and the shared language-English-only made for more "cultural confusion." (1951). Not surprisingly, the cultures of India and Britain remained "opposed"; and the shared language-English-only made for more "cultural confusion."

Naipaul saw the "misunderstandings and futility of the Indo-English encounter" and the "intellectual confusion of the new India" reflected in Indian autobiographies, in their lack of physical detail and rigorous self-questioning. The books spoke to him of a society "which has not learned to see and is incapable of a.s.sessing itself, which asks no questions because ritual and myth have provided all the answers." Gandhi's "obsession with vows, food, experiments, recurring illness" had turned his autobiography into a "b.a.s.t.a.r.d form in which a religious view of life, laudable in one culture, is converted steadily into self-love, disagreeable in another culture."

For Naipaul, the novel in India was another example of a misunderstood and misapplied literary form. As he saw it, the novel developed, and had its greatest masters, in Europe. This was not an accident. The novel had emerged from the complex interplay of such specific historical factors as industrial growth, imperial expansion, ma.s.s literacy, widespread secularisation and the rise of the middle cla.s.s. The form, "so attractive, apparently easy to imitate," was suffused with, as Naipaul wrote in "Reading and Writing," "metropolitan a.s.sumptions about society: the availability of a wider learning, an idea of history, a concern with self-knowledge." In post-colonial India, Naipaul found that either the a.s.sumptions were "wrong" or the wider learning was "missing or imperfect."

The novelist R. K. Narayan was a "comfort and example" to both Naipaul and his father in attempting the difficult task of writing in English about Indian life. To Naipaul, he "appeared to be writing from within his culture." "He truly possessed his world. It was complete and always there, waiting for him." But that world proved on closer examination by Naipaul to be static. Narayan's characters seemed to Naipaul "oddly insulated from history"-a history of defeat and subjection that was so oppressively present in India that Narayan's fictional world could only reveal itself as "not, after all, as rooted and complete as it appears." As Naipaul saw it, the novel in India, and specifically Narayan, could "deal well with the externals of things," but often "miss their terrible essence."

NAIPAUL HIMSELF had begun with the externals of things, hoping to arrive, through literature, at "a complete world waiting for me somewhere." "I suppose," Naipaul wrote in an essay on Conrad he published in 1974, "that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammelled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer." Instead, a "political panic" had awaited Naipaul out of his stagnant colonial world of Trinidad. To move in the bigger world was, for Naipaul, to know a cruelly fraught imperial history and his own place in it; it was to be exposed to the "half-made societies" that "constantly made and unmade themselves": the anguished realizations that were made more acute, instead of being mitigated, by his choice of a literary vocation in England. had begun with the externals of things, hoping to arrive, through literature, at "a complete world waiting for me somewhere." "I suppose," Naipaul wrote in an essay on Conrad he published in 1974, "that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammelled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer." Instead, a "political panic" had awaited Naipaul out of his stagnant colonial world of Trinidad. To move in the bigger world was, for Naipaul, to know a cruelly fraught imperial history and his own place in it; it was to be exposed to the "half-made societies" that "constantly made and unmade themselves": the anguished realizations that were made more acute, instead of being mitigated, by his choice of a literary vocation in England.

Almost alone among all major writers in English, Conrad seems to have helped Naipaul understand his peculiar situation and predicament: the predicament of the colonial exile who finds himself working in a world and literary tradition shaped by empire. Conrad was "the first modern writer" Naipaul had been introduced to by his father. He initially puzzled Naipaul: "stories, simple in themselves, always seemed at some stage to elude me." Then, there were the simpleminded a.s.sumptions Naipaul made. Reading Heart of Darkness, Heart of Darkness, he took for granted the "African background-the 'demoralised land of plunder and licensed cruelty.'" he took for granted the "African background-the 'demoralised land of plunder and licensed cruelty.'"

Travel and writing were to later expose this political innocence of the colonial. For Naipaul, the value of Conrad-also an outsider in England, and an experienced traveller in Asia and Africa-came to exist in the fact that he "had been everywhere before me"; that "he had meditated on my world," "the dark and remote places," where men, "for whatever reason, are denied a clear vision of the world."

Naipaul saw Conrad's work as having "penetrated to many corners of the world which he saw as dark." Naipaul called this fact "a subject for Conradian meditation"; "it tells us something," he said, "about our new world." No writer has meditated more consistently on such ironies of history than Naipaul himself, but with a vitality that seems the opposite of Conrad's calm, slightly self-satisfied melancholy. Naipaul appears to be constantly clarifying and deepening the knowledge or experience that seems complete and hardened in Conrad. Taken together, his books not only describe but also enact how he, starting out in one of Conrad's "dark and remote places," moved slowly and fitfully towards a "clear vision of the world." There is no point of rest in this journey, which now seems an ironic reversal of the Conradian journey to the heart of darkness. Each book is a new beginning, which dismantles what has gone before it. This explains the endlessly replayed drama of arrival, and what seems an obsession with writerly beginnings, in Naipaul's writings.

"Half a writer's work," Naipaul wrote in "Prologue to an Autobiography," "is the discovery of his subject." But his own career proves that such a discovery can occupy a writer most of his life and also const.i.tute, at the same time, his work-particularly a writer as uniquely and diversely displaced as Naipaul, who, unlike nineteenth-century Russian writers, had neither a developing literary tradition nor a vast complex country to "fall back on and claim."

To recognise the fragmented aspects of your ident.i.ty; to see how they enable you to become who you are; to understand what was necessary about a painful and awkward past and to accept it as part of your being-this ceaseless process, the process, really, of remembering, of reconst.i.tuting an individual self deep in its home in history, is what much of Naipaul's work has been compulsively engaged in. Proust's narrator in In Search of Lost Time In Search of Lost Time defines the same vital link between memory, self-knowledge and literary endeavour when he says that to create a work of art is also to recover our true life and self, and that "we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it." defines the same vital link between memory, self-knowledge and literary endeavour when he says that to create a work of art is also to recover our true life and self, and that "we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature, that is to say to discover it."

Pankaj Mishra

PROLOGUE.

Reading and Writing

A Personal Account

I have no memory at all. no memory at all. That's one of the defects of my mind. I keep on brooding over what interests me. By dint of examining it from different mental points of view I eventually see something new in it, and I That's one of the defects of my mind. I keep on brooding over what interests me. By dint of examining it from different mental points of view I eventually see something new in it, and I alter its whole aspect. alter its whole aspect. I point and extend the tubes of my gla.s.ses in all ways, or retract them. I point and extend the tubes of my gla.s.ses in all ways, or retract them.

STENDHAL, The Life of Henry Brulard The Life of Henry Brulard (1835) (1835)

1.

I WAS ELEVEN, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition. The early age is unusual, but I don't think extraordinary. I have heard that serious collectors, of books or pictures, can begin when they are very young; and recently, in India, I was told by a distinguished film director, Shyam Benegal, that he was six when he decided to make a life in cinema as a director. no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition. The early age is unusual, but I don't think extraordinary. I have heard that serious collectors, of books or pictures, can begin when they are very young; and recently, in India, I was told by a distinguished film director, Shyam Benegal, that he was six when he decided to make a life in cinema as a director.

With me, though, the ambition to be a writer was for many years a kind of sham. I liked to be given a fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman ink and new ruled exercise books (with margins), but I had no wish or need to write anything; and didn't write anything, not even letters: there was no one to write them to. I wasn't especially good at English composition at school; I didn't make up and tell stories at home. And though I liked new books as physical objects, I wasn't much of a reader. I liked a cheap, thick-paged children's book of Aesop's Fables Aesop's Fables that I had been given; I liked a volume of Andersen's tales I had bought for myself with birthday money. But with other books-especially those that schoolboys were supposed to like-I had trouble. that I had been given; I liked a volume of Andersen's tales I had bought for myself with birthday money. But with other books-especially those that schoolboys were supposed to like-I had trouble.

For one or two periods a week at school-this was in the fifth standard-the headmaster, Mr. Worm, would read to us from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, from the Collins Cla.s.sics series. The fifth standard was the "exhibition" cla.s.s and was important to the reputation of the school. The exhibitions, given by the government, were to the island's secondary schools. To win an exhibition was to pay no secondary-school fees at all and to get free books right through. It was also to win a kind of fame for oneself and one's school. from the Collins Cla.s.sics series. The fifth standard was the "exhibition" cla.s.s and was important to the reputation of the school. The exhibitions, given by the government, were to the island's secondary schools. To win an exhibition was to pay no secondary-school fees at all and to get free books right through. It was also to win a kind of fame for oneself and one's school.

I spent two years in the exhibition cla.s.s; other bright boys had to do the same. In my first year, which was considered a trial year, there were twelve exhibitions for the whole island; the next year there were twenty. Twelve exhibitions or twenty, the school wanted its proper share, and it drove us hard. We sat below a narrow white board on which Mr. Baldwin, one of the teachers (with plastered-down and s.h.i.+ny crinkly hair), had with an awkward hand painted the names of the school's exhibition-winners for the previous ten years. And-worrying dignity-our cla.s.sroom was also Mr. Worm's office.

He was an elderly mulatto, short and stout, correct in gla.s.ses and a suit, and quite a flogger when he roused himself, taking short, stressed breaths while he flogged, as though he were the sufferer. Sometimes, perhaps just to get away from the noisy little school building, where windows and doors were always open and cla.s.ses were separated only by half part.i.tions, he would take us out to the dusty yard to the shade of the saman tree. His chair would be taken out for him, and he sat below the saman as he sat at his big desk in the cla.s.sroom. We stood around him and tried to be still. He looked down at the little Collins Cla.s.sic, oddly like a prayer book in his thick hands, and read Jules Verne like a man saying prayers.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea wasn't an examination text. It was only Mr. Worm's way of introducing his exhibition cla.s.s to general reading. It was meant to give us "background" and at the same time to be a break from our exhibition cramming (Jules Verne was one of those writers boys were supposed to like); but those periods were periods of vacancy for us, and not easy to stand or sit through. I understood every word that was spoken, but I followed nothing. This sometimes happened to me in the cinema; but there I always enjoyed the idea of being at the cinema. From Mr. Worm's Jules Verne I took away nothing and, apart from the names of the submarine and its captain, have no memory of what was read for all those hours. wasn't an examination text. It was only Mr. Worm's way of introducing his exhibition cla.s.s to general reading. It was meant to give us "background" and at the same time to be a break from our exhibition cramming (Jules Verne was one of those writers boys were supposed to like); but those periods were periods of vacancy for us, and not easy to stand or sit through. I understood every word that was spoken, but I followed nothing. This sometimes happened to me in the cinema; but there I always enjoyed the idea of being at the cinema. From Mr. Worm's Jules Verne I took away nothing and, apart from the names of the submarine and its captain, have no memory of what was read for all those hours.

By this time, though, I had begun to have my own idea of what writing was. It was a private idea, and a curiously enn.o.bling one, separate from school and separate from the disordered and disintegrating life of our Hindu extended family. That idea of writing-which was to give me the ambition to be a writer-had built up from the little things my father read to me from time to time.

My father was a self-educated man who had made himself a journalist. He read in his own way. At this time he was in his early thirties, and still learning. He read many books at once, finis.h.i.+ng none, looking not for the story or the argument in any book but for the special qualities or character of the writer. That was where he found his pleasure, and he could savour writers only in little bursts. Sometimes he would call me to listen to two or three or four pages, seldom more, of writing he particularly enjoyed. He read and explained with zest and it was easy for me to like what he liked. In this unlikely way-considering the background: the racially mixed colonial school, the Asian inwardness at home-I had begun to put together an English literary anthology of my own.

These were some of the pieces that were in that anthology before I was twelve: some of the speeches in Julius Caesar; Julius Caesar; scattered pages from the early chapters of scattered pages from the early chapters of Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and and David Copperfield; David Copperfield; the Perseus story from the Perseus story from The Heroes The Heroes by Charles Kingsley; some pages from by Charles Kingsley; some pages from The Mill on the Floss; The Mill on the Floss; a romantic Malay tale of love and running away and death by Joseph Conrad; one or two of Lamb's a romantic Malay tale of love and running away and death by Joseph Conrad; one or two of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare; Tales from Shakespeare; stories by O. Henry and Maupa.s.sant; a cynical page or two, about the Ganges and a religious festival, from stories by O. Henry and Maupa.s.sant; a cynical page or two, about the Ganges and a religious festival, from Jesting Pilate Jesting Pilate by Aldous Huxley; something in the same vein from by Aldous Huxley; something in the same vein from Hindoo Holiday Hindoo Holiday by J. R. Ackerley; some pages by Somerset Maugham. by J. R. Ackerley; some pages by Somerset Maugham.

The Lamb and the Kingsley should have been too old-fas.h.i.+oned and involved for me. But somehow-no doubt because of the enthusiasm of my father-I was able to simplify everything I listened to. In my mind all the pieces (even those from Julius Caesar Julius Caesar) took on aspects of the fairytale, became a little like things by Andersen, far off and dateless, easy to play with mentally.

But when I went to the books themselves I found it hard to go beyond what had been read to me. What I already knew was magical; what I tried to read on my own was very far away. The language was too hard; I lost my way in social or historical detail. In the Conrad story the climate and vegetation was like what lay around me, but the Malays seemed extravagant, unreal, and I couldn't place them. When it came to the modern writers their stress on their own personalities shut me out: I couldn't pretend to be Maugham in London or Huxley or Ackerley in India.

I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own.

2.

WE WERE an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World. To me India seemed very far away, mythical, but we were at that time, in all the branches of our extended family, only about forty or fifty years out of India. We were still full of the instincts of people of the Gangetic plain, though year by year the colonial life around us was drawing us in. My own presence in Mr. Worm's cla.s.s was part of that change. No one so young from our family had been to that school. Others were to follow me to the exhibition cla.s.s, but I was the first. an immigrant Asian community in a small plantation island in the New World. To me India seemed very far away, mythical, but we were at that time, in all the branches of our extended family, only about forty or fifty years out of India. We were still full of the instincts of people of the Gangetic plain, though year by year the colonial life around us was drawing us in. My own presence in Mr. Worm's cla.s.s was part of that change. No one so young from our family had been to that school. Others were to follow me to the exhibition cla.s.s, but I was the first.

Mangled bits of old India (very old, the India of the nineteenth-century villages, which would have been like the India of earlier centuries) were still with me, not only in the enclosed life of our extended family, but also in what came to us sometimes from our community outside.

One of the first big public things I was taken to was the Ramlila, Ramlila, the pageant-play based on the the pageant-play based on the Ramayana, Ramayana, the epic about the banishment and later triumph of Rama, the Hindu hero-divinity. It was done in an open field in the middle of sugar-cane, on the edge of our small country town. The male performers were barebacked and some carried long bows; they walked in a slow, stylised, rhythmic way, on their toes, and with high, quivering steps; when they made an exit (I am going now by very old memory) they walked down a ramp that had been dug in the earth. The pageant ended with the burning of the big black effigy of the demon king of Lanka. This burning was one of the things people had come for; and the effigy, roughly made, with tar paper on a bamboo frame, had been standing in the open field all the time, as a promise of the conflagration. the epic about the banishment and later triumph of Rama, the Hindu hero-divinity. It was done in an open field in the middle of sugar-cane, on the edge of our small country town. The male performers were barebacked and some carried long bows; they walked in a slow, stylised, rhythmic way, on their toes, and with high, quivering steps; when they made an exit (I am going now by very old memory) they walked down a ramp that had been dug in the earth. The pageant ended with the burning of the big black effigy of the demon king of Lanka. This burning was one of the things people had come for; and the effigy, roughly made, with tar paper on a bamboo frame, had been standing in the open field all the time, as a promise of the conflagration.

Everything in that Ramlila Ramlila had been transported from India in the memories of people. And though as theatre it was crude, and there was much that I would have missed in the story, I believe I understood more and felt more than I had done during had been transported from India in the memories of people. And though as theatre it was crude, and there was much that I would have missed in the story, I believe I understood more and felt more than I had done during The Prince and the Pauper The Prince and the Pauper and and Sixty Glorious Years Sixty Glorious Years at the local cinema. Those were the very first films I had seen, and I had never had an idea what I was watching. Whereas the at the local cinema. Those were the very first films I had seen, and I had never had an idea what I was watching. Whereas the Ramlila Ramlila had given reality, and a lot of excitement, to what I had known of the had given reality, and a lot of excitement, to what I had known of the Ramayana. Ramayana.

The Ramayana Ramayana was the essential Hindu story. It was the more approachable of our two epics, and it lived among us the way epics lived. It had a strong and fast and rich narrative and, even with the divine machinery, the matter was very human. The characters and their motives could always be discussed; the epic was like a moral education for us all. Everyone around me would have known the story at least in outline; some people knew some of the actual verses. I didn't have to be taught it: the story of Rama's unjust banishment to the dangerous forest was like something I had always known. was the essential Hindu story. It was the more approachable of our two epics, and it lived among us the way epics lived. It had a strong and fast and rich narrative and, even with the divine machinery, the matter was very human. The characters and their motives could always be discussed; the epic was like a moral education for us all. Everyone around me would have known the story at least in outline; some people knew some of the actual verses. I didn't have to be taught it: the story of Rama's unjust banishment to the dangerous forest was like something I had always known.

It lay below the writing I was to get to know later in the city, the Andersen and Aesop I was to read on my own, and the things my father was to read to me.

3.

THE ISLAND was small, 1800 square miles, half a million people, but the population was very mixed and there were many separate worlds. was small, 1800 square miles, half a million people, but the population was very mixed and there were many separate worlds.

When my father got a job on the local paper we went to live in the city. It was only twelve miles away, but it was like going to another country. Our little rural Indian world, the disintegrating world of a remembered India, was left behind. I never returned to it; lost touch with the language; never saw another Ramlila. Ramlila.

In the city we were in a kind of limbo. There were few Indians there, and no one like us on the street. Though everything was very close, and houses were open to every kind of noise, and no one could really be private in his yard, we continued to live in our old enclosed way, mentally separate from the more colonial, more racially mixed life around us. There were respectable houses with verandahs and hanging ferns. But there were also unfenced yards with three or four rotting little two-roomed wooden houses, like the city slave quarters of a hundred years before, and one or two common yard taps. Street life could be raucous: the big American base was just at the end of the street.

To arrive, after three years in the city, at Mr. Worm's exhibition cla.s.s, cramming hard all the way, learning everything by heart, living with abstractions, having a grasp of very little, was like entering a cinema some time after the film had started and getting only scattered pointers to the story. It was like that for the twelve years I was to stay in the city before going to England. I never ceased to feel a stranger. I saw people of other groups only from the outside; school friends.h.i.+ps were left behind at school or in the street. I had no proper understanding of where I was, and really never had the time to find out: all but nineteen months of those twelve years were spent in a blind, driven kind of colonial studying.

Very soon I got to know that there was a further world outside, of which our colonial world was only a shadow. This outer world-England princ.i.p.ally, but also the United States and Canada-ruled us in every way. It sent us governors and everything else we lived by: the cheap preserved foods the island had needed since the slave days (smoked herrings, salted cod, condensed milk, New Brunswick sardines in oil); the special medicines (Dodd's Kidney Pills, Dr. Sloan's Liniment, the tonic called Six Sixty-Six). It sent us-with a break during a bad year of the war, when we used the dimes and nickels of Canada-the coins of England, from the halfpenny to the half-crown, to which we automatically gave values in our dollars and cents, one cent to a halfpenny, twenty-four cents to a s.h.i.+lling.

It sent us text books (Rivington's s.h.i.+lling Arithmetic, s.h.i.+lling Arithmetic, Nesfield's Nesfield's Grammar Grammar) and question papers for the various school certificates. It sent us the films that fed our imaginative life, and Life Life and and Time. Time. It sent batches of It sent batches of The Ill.u.s.trated London News The Ill.u.s.trated London News to Mr. Worm's office. It sent us the Everyman Library and Penguin Books and the Collins Cla.s.sics. It sent us everything. It had given Mr. Worm Jules Verne. And, through my father, it had given me my private anthology of literature. to Mr. Worm's office. It sent us the Everyman Library and Penguin Books and the Collins Cla.s.sics. It sent us everything. It had given Mr. Worm Jules Verne. And, through my father, it had given me my private anthology of literature.

The books themselves I couldn't enter on my own. I didn't have the imaginative key. Such social knowledge as I had-a faint remembered village India and a mixed colonial world seen from the outside-didn't help with the literature of the metropolis. I was two worlds away.

I couldn't get on with English public-school stories (I remember the curiously t.i.tled Sparrow in Search of Expulsion, Sparrow in Search of Expulsion, just arrived from England for Mr. Worm's little library). And later, when I was at the secondary school (I won my exhibition), I had the same trouble with the thrillers or adventure stories in the school library, the Buchan, the Sapper, the Sabatini, the Sax Rohmer, all given the pre-war dignity of leather binding, with the school crest stamped in gold on the front cover. I couldn't see the point of these artificial excitements, or the point of detective novels (a lot of reading, with a certain amount of misdirection, for a little bit of puzzle). And when, not knowing much about new reputations, I tried plain English novels from the public library, too many questions got in the way-about the reality of the people, the artificiality of the narrative method, the purpose of the whole set-up thing, the end reward for me. just arrived from England for Mr. Worm's little library). And later, when I was at the secondary school (I won my exhibition), I had the same trouble with the thrillers or adventure stories in the school library, the Buchan, the Sapper, the Sabatini, the Sax Rohmer, all given the pre-war dignity of leather binding, with the school crest stamped in gold on the front cover. I couldn't see the point of these artificial excitements, or the point of detective novels (a lot of reading, with a certain amount of misdirection, for a little bit of puzzle). And when, not knowing much about new reputations, I tried plain English novels from the public library, too many questions got in the way-about the reality of the people, the artificiality of the narrative method, the purpose of the whole set-up thing, the end reward for me.

My private anthology, and my father's teaching, had given me a high idea of writing. And though I had started from a quite different corner, and was years away from understanding why I felt as I did, my att.i.tude (as I was to discover) was like that of Joseph Conrad, himself at the time a just-published author, when he was sent the novel of a friend. The novel was clearly one of much plot; Conrad saw it not as a revelation of human hearts but as a fabrication of "events which properly speaking are accidents accidents only." "All the charm, all the truth," he wrote to the friend, "are thrown away by the ... mechanism (so to speak) of the story which makes it appear false." only." "All the charm, all the truth," he wrote to the friend, "are thrown away by the ... mechanism (so to speak) of the story which makes it appear false."

For Conrad as for the narrator of Under Western Eyes, Under Western Eyes, the discovery of every tale was a moral one. It was for me, too, without my knowing it. It was where the the discovery of every tale was a moral one. It was for me, too, without my knowing it. It was where the Ramayana Ramayana and Aesop and Andersen and my private anthology (even the Maupa.s.sant and the O. Henry) had led me. When Conrad met H. G. Wells, who thought him too wordy, not giving the story straight, Conrad said, "My dear Wells, what is this and Aesop and Andersen and my private anthology (even the Maupa.s.sant and the O. Henry) had led me. When Conrad met H. G. Wells, who thought him too wordy, not giving the story straight, Conrad said, "My dear Wells, what is this Love and Mr. Lewisham Love and Mr. Lewisham about? What is all this about Jane Austin? What is it all about? What is all this about Jane Austin? What is it all about about?"

That was how I had felt in my secondary school, and for many years afterwards as well; but it had not occurred to me to say so. I wouldn't have felt I had the right. I didn't feel competent as a reader until I was twenty-five. I had by that time spent seven years in England, four of them at Oxford, and I had a little of the social knowledge that was necessary for an understanding of English and European fiction. I had also made myself a writer, and was able, therefore, to see writing from the other side. Until then I had read blindly, without judgement, not really knowing how made-up stories were to be a.s.sessed.

Certain undeniable things, though, had been added to my anthology during my time at the secondary school. The closest to me were my father's stories about the life of our community. I loved them as writing, as well as for the labour I had seen going into their making. They also anch.o.r.ed me in the world; without them I would have known nothing of our ancestry. And, through the enthusiasm of one teacher, there were three literary experiences in the sixth form: Tartuffe, Tartuffe, which was like a frightening fairytale, which was like a frightening fairytale, Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano de Bergerac, which could call up the profoundest kind of emotion, and which could call up the profoundest kind of emotion, and Lazarillo de Tormes, Lazarillo de Tormes, the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque story, the first of its kind, brisk and ironical, which took me into a world like the one I knew. the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque story, the first of its kind, brisk and ironical, which took me into a world like the one I knew.

That was all. That was the stock of my reading at the end of my island education. I couldn't truly call myself a reader. I had never had the capacity to lose myself in a book; like my father, I could read only in little bits. My school essays weren't exceptional; they were only crammer's work. In spite of my father's example with his stories I hadn't begun to think in any concrete way about what I might write. Yet I continued to think of myself as a writer.

It was now less a true ambition than a form of self-esteem, a dream of release, an idea of n.o.bility. My life, and the life of our section of our extended family, had always been unsettled. My father, though not an orphan, had been a kind of waif since his childhood; and we had always been half dependent. As a journalist my father was poorly paid, and for some years we had been quite wretched, with no proper place to live. At school I was a bright boy; on the street, where we still held ourselves apart, I felt ashamed at our condition. Even after that bad time had pa.s.sed, and we had moved, I was eaten up with anxiety. It was the emotion I felt I had always known.

4.

THE COLONIAL government gave four scholars.h.i.+ps a year to Higher School Certificate students who came top of their group-languages, modern studies, science, mathematics. The question papers were sent out from England, and the students' scripts were sent back there to be marked. The scholars.h.i.+ps were generous. They were meant to give a man or woman a profession. The scholars.h.i.+p-winner could go at the government's expense to any university or place of higher education in the British empire; and his scholars.h.i.+p could run for seven years. When I won my scholars.h.i.+p-after a labour that still hurts to think about: it was what all the years of cramming were meant to lead to-I decided only to go to Oxford and do the three-year English course. I didn't do this for the sake of Oxford and the English course; I knew little enough about either. I did it mainly to get away to the bigger world and give myself time to live up to my fantasy and become a writer. government gave four scholars.h.i.+ps a year to Higher School Certificate students who came top of their group-languages, modern studies, science, mathematics. The question papers were sent out from England, and the students' scripts were sent back there to be marked. The scholars.h.i.+ps were generous. They were meant to give a man or woman a profession. The scholars.h.i.+p-winner could go at the government's expense to any university or place of higher education in the British empire; and his scholars.h.i.+p could run for seven years. When I won my scholars.h.i.+p-after a labour that still hurts to think about: it was what all the years of cramming were meant to lead to-I decided only to go to Oxford and do the three-year English course. I didn't do this for the sake of Oxford and the English course; I knew little enough about either. I did it mainly to get away to the bigger world and give myself time to live up to my fantasy and become a writer.

To be a writer was to be a writer of novels and stories. That was how the ambition had come to me, through my anthology and my father's example, and that was where it had stayed. It was strange that I hadn't questioned this idea, since I had no taste for novels, hadn't felt the impulse (which children are said to feel) to make up stories, and nearly all my imaginative life during the long cramming years had been in the cinema, and not in books. Sometimes when I thought of the writing blankness inside me I felt nervous; and then-it was like a belief in magic-I told myself that when the time came there would be no blankness and the books would get written.

At Oxford now, on that hard-earned scholars.h.i.+p, the time should have come. But the blankness was still there; and the very idea of fiction and the novel was continuing to puzzle me. A novel was something made up; that was almost its definition. At the same time it was expected to be true, to be drawn from life; so that part of the point of a novel came from half rejecting the fiction, or looking through it to a reality.

Later, when I had begun to identify my material and had begun to be a writer, working more or less intuitively, this ambiguity ceased to worry me. In 1955, the year of this breakthrough, I was able to understand Evelyn Waugh's definition of fiction (in the dedication to Officers and Gentlemen, Officers and Gentlemen, published that year) as "experience totally transformed"; I wouldn't have understood or believed the words the year before. published that year) as "experience totally transformed"; I wouldn't have understood or believed the words the year before.

More than forty years later, when I was reading Tolstoy's Sebastopol sketches for the first time, I was reminded of that early writing happiness of mine when I began to see a way ahead. I thought that in those sketches I could see the young Tolstoy moving, as if out of need, to the discovery of fiction: starting as a careful descriptive writer (a Russian counterpart of William Howard Russell, the Times Times correspondent, not much older, on the other side), and then, as though seeing an easier and a better way of dealing with the horrors of the Sebastopol siege, doing a simple fiction, setting characters in motion, and bringing the reality closer. correspondent, not much older, on the other side), and then, as though seeing an easier and a better way of dealing with the horrors of the Sebastopol siege, doing a simple fiction, setting characters in motion, and bringing the reality closer.