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Un uomo senza
radici
by V.S. Naipaul
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not
lectures.
I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no
lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man
who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty
years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of
value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any
given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits
the next book. It will with luck come to me during the
actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of
surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of
judging what I am doing which is never an easy thing to
do.
Proust has written with great
penetration of the difference between the writer as writer and the
writer as a social being. You will find his thoughts in some of his
essays in Against Sainte-Beuve, a book reconstituted from his early
papers.
The nineteenth-century French
critic Sainte-Beuve believed that to understand a writer it was
necessary to know as much as possible about the exterior man, the
details of his life. It is a beguiling method, using the man to
illuminate the work. It might seem unassailable. But Proust is able
very convincingly to pick it apart.
"This method of
Sainte-Beuve," Proust writes, "ignores what a very slight degree of
self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is the product of a
different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social
life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular
self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it
there, that we may arrive at it".
Those words of Proust should be
with us whenever we are reading the biography of a writer - or the
biography of anyone who depends on what can be called inspiration. All the
details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid
out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of
documentation, however fascinating, can take us there. The biography
of a writer or even the autobiography will always have this
incompleteness.
Proust is a master of happy
amplification, and I would like to go back to Against Sainte-Beuve
just for a little. "In fact," Proust writes, "it is the secretions of
one's innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that
one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life - in
conversation ... or in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely
more than conversation in print; is the product of a quite
superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only
recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the
world."
When he wrote that, Proust
had not yet found the subject that was to lead him to the happiness
of his great literary labour. And you can tell from what I have
quoted that he was a man trusting to his intuition and waiting for
luck. I have quoted these words before in other places. The reason is
that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to
intuition. I did it at the beginning.
I do it even now. I have no
idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have
written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but
I will fully understand what I have written only after some
years.
I said earlier that
everything of value about me is in my books. I will go further now. I
will say I am the sum of my books. Each book, intuitively sensed and,
in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has
gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my
literary career it could have been said that the last book contained
all the others.
It's been like this because
of my background. My background is at once exceedingly simple and
exceedingly confused. I was born in Trinidad. It is a small island in
the mouth of the great Orinoco river of Venezuela. So Trinidad is not
strictly of South America, and not strictly of the Caribbean. It was
developed as a New World plantation colony, and when I was born in
1932 it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000
were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and
nearly all from the Gangetic plain.
This was my very small
community. The bulk of this migration from India occurred after 1880.
The deal was like this. People indentured themselves for five years
to serve on the estates. At the end of this time they were given a
small piece of land, perhaps five acres, or a passage back to India.
In 1917, because of agitation by Gandhi and others, the indenture
system was abolished. And perhaps because of this, or for some other
reason, the pledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured for many of the
later arrivals. These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in
the streets of Port of Spain, the capital. When I was a child I saw
them. I suppose I didn't know they were destitute ; I suppose that
idea came much later ; and they made no impression on me. This was
part of the cruelty of the plantation colony.
I was born in a small country
town called Chaguanas, two or three miles inland from the Gulf of
Paria. Chaguanas was a strange name, in spelling and pronunciation,
and many of the Indian people ; they were in the majority in the area
; preferred to call it by the Indian caste name of
Chauhan.
I was thirty-four when I
found out about the name of my birthplace. I was living in London,
had been living in England for sixteen years. I was writing my ninth
book. This was a history of Trinidad, a human history, trying to
re-create people and their stories. I used to go to the British
Museum to read the Spanish documents about the
region.
These documents - recovered from
the Spanish archives - were copied out for the British government in
the 1890s at the time of a nasty boundary dispute with Venezuela. The
documents begin in 1530 and end with the disappearance of the Spanish
Empire. I was reading about the foolish search for El Dorado, and
the murderous interloping of the English hero, Sir Walter
Raleigh.
In 1595 he raided Trinidad,
killed all the Spaniards he could, and went up the Orinoco looking
for El Dorado. He found nothing, but when he went back to England he
said he had. He had a piece of gold and some sand to show. He said he
had hacked the gold out of a cliff on the bank of the Orinoco. The
Royal Mint said that the sand he asked them to assay was worthless,
and other people said that he had bought the gold beforehand from
North Africa.
He then published a book to
prove his point, and for four centuries people have believed that
Raleigh had found something.
The magic of Raleigh's book,
which is really quite difficult to read, lay in its very long title:
The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana,
with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the
Spaniards call El Dorado) and the provinces of Emeria, Aromaia,
Amapaia, and other countries, with their rivers adjoining. How real
it sounds! And he had hardly been on the main Orinoco.
And then, as sometimes
happens with confidence men, Raleigh was caught by his own fantasies.
Twenty-one years later, old and ill, he was let out of his London
prison to go to Guiana and find the gold mines he said he had found.
In this fraudulent venture his son died. The father, for the sake of
his reputation, for the sake of his lies, had sent his son to his
death. And then Raleigh, full of grief, with nothing left to live
for, went back to London to be executed.
The story should have ended
there. But Spanish memories were long - no doubt because their
imperial correspondence was so slow: it might take up to two years
for a letter from Trinidad to be read in Spain. Eight years
afterwards the Spaniards of Trinidad and Guiana were still settling
their scores with the Gulf Indians. One day in the British Museum I
read a letter from the King of Spain to the governor of Trinidad. It
was dated 12 October 1625.
"I asked you," the King
wrote, "to give me some information about a certain nation of Indians
called Chaguanes, who you say number above one thousand, and are of
such bad disposition that it was they who led the English when they
captured the town. Their crime hasn't been punished because forces
were not available for this purpose and because the Indians
acknowledge no master save their own will. You have decided to give
them a punishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let me know
how you get on."
What the governor did I don't
know. I could find no further reference to the Chaguanes in the
documents in the Museum. Perhaps there were other documents about the
Chaguanes in the mountain of paper in the Spanish archives in Seville
which the British government scholars missed or didn't think
important enough to copy out. What is true is that the little tribe
of over a thousand ; who would have been living on both sides of the
Gulf of Paria; disappeared so completely that no one in the town of
Chaguanas or Chauhan knew anything about them.
And the thought came to me in
the Museum that I was the first person since 1625 to whom that letter
of the king of Spain had a real meaning. And that letter had been
dug out of the archives only in 1896 or 1897. A disappearance, and
then the silence of centuries.
We lived on the Chaguanes'
land. Every day in term time - I was just beginning to go to school;
I walked from my grandmother's house; past the two or three main-road
stores, the Chinese parlour, the Jubilee Theatre, and the
high-smelling little Portuguese factory that made cheap blue soap and
cheap yellow soap in long bars that were put out to dry and harden in
the mornings; every day I walked past these eternal-seeming things;
to the Chaguanas Government School. Beyond the school was sugar-cane,
estate land, going up to the Gulf of Paria. The people who had been
dispossessed would have had their own kind of agriculture, their own
calendar, their own codes, their own sacred sites. They would have
understood the Orinoco-fed currents in the Gulf of Paria. Now all
their skills and everything else about them had been
obliterated.
The world is always in
movement. People have everywhere at some time been dispossessed. I
suppose I was shocked by this discovery in 1967 about my birthplace
because I had never had any idea about it. But that was the way most
of us lived in the agricultural colony, blindly.
There was no plot by the
authorities to keep us in our darkness. I think it was more simply
that the knowledge wasn't there. The kind of knowledge about the
Chaguanes would not have been considered important, and it would not
have been easy to recover. They were a small tribe, and they were
aboriginal. Such people - on the mainland, in what was called B.G.,
British Guiana; were known to us, and were a kind of joke. People who
were loud and ill-behaved were known, to all groups in Trinidad, I
think, as warrahoons. I used to think it was a made-up word, made up
to suggest wildness. It was only when I began to travel in Venezuela,
in my forties, that I understood that a word like that was the name
of a rather large aborginal tribe there.
There was a vague story when
I was a child - and to me now it is an unbearably affecting story;
that at certain times aboriginal people came across in canoes from
the mainland, walked through the forest in the south of the island,
and at a certain spot picked some kind of fruit or made some kind of
offering, and then went back across the Gulf of Paria to the sodden
estuary of the Orinoco. The rite must have been of enormous
importance to have survived the upheavals of four hundred years, and
the extinction of the aborigines in Trinidad. Or perhaps; though
Trinidad and Venezuela have a common flora; they had come only to
pick a particular kind of fruit.
I don't know. I can't
remember anyone inquiring. And now the memory is all lost; and that
sacred site, if it existed, has become common ground.
What was past was past. I
suppose that was the general attitude. And we Indians, immigrants from
India, had that attitude to the island. We lived for the most part
ritualised lives, and were not yet capable of self-assessment, which
is where learning begins. Half of us on this land of the Chaguanes
were pretending - perhaps not pretending, perhaps only feeling, never
formulating it as an idea - that we had brought a kind of India with
us, which we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat
land.
My grandmother's house in
Chaguanas was in two parts.
The front part, of bricks
and plaster, was painted white. It was like a kind of Indian house,
with a grand balustraded terrace on the upper floor, and a
prayer-room on the floor above that. It was ambitious in its
decorative detail, with lotus capitals on pillars, and sculptures of
Hindu deities, all done by people working only from a memory of
things in India. In Trinidad it was an architectural oddity. At the
back of this house, and joined to it by an upper bridge room, was a
timber building in the French Caribbean style. The entrance gate was
at the side, between the two houses. It was a tall gate of corrugated
iron on a wooden frame. It made for a fierce kind of
privacy.
So as a child I had this
sense of two worlds, the world outside that tall corrugated-iron
gate, and the world at home - or, at any rate, the world of my
grandmother's house. It was a remnant of our caste sense, the thing
that excluded and shut out. In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we
were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of
protection; it enabled us; for the time being, and only for the time
being; to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live
in our own fading India. It made for an extraordinary
self-centredness. We looked inwards; we lived out our days; the world
outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about
nothing.
There was a Muslim shop next
door. The little loggia of my grandmother's shop ended against his
blank wall. The man's name was Mian. That was all that we knew of him
and his family. I suppose we must have seen him, but I have no mental
picture of him now. We knew nothing of Muslims. This idea of
strangeness, of the thing to be kept outside, extended even to other
Hindus. For example, we ate rice in the middle of the day, and wheat
in the evenings. There were some extraordinary people who reversed
this natural order and ate rice in the evenings. I thought of these
people as strangers; you must imagine me at this time as under seven,
because when I was seven all this life of my grandmother's house in
Chaguanas came to an end for me. We moved to the capital, and then to
the hills to the northwest.
But the habits of mind
engendered by this shut-in and shutting-out life lingered for quite a
while. If it were not for the short stories my father wrote I would
have known almost nothing about the general life of our Indian
community. Those stories gave me more than knowledge. They gave me a
kind of solidity. They gave me something to stand on in the world. I
cannot imagine what my mental picture would have been without those
stories.
The world outside existed in
a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. I was just old
enough to have some idea of the Indian epics, the Ramayana in
particular. The children who came five years or so after me in our
extended family didn't have this luck. No one taught us Hindi.
Sometimes someone wrote out the alphabet for us to learn, and that
was that; we were expected to do the rest ourselves.
So, as
English penetrated, we began to lose our language.
My grandmother's house was
full of religion; there were many ceremonies and readings, some of
which went on for days. But no one explained or translated for us who
could no longer follow the language. So our ancestral faith receded,
became mysterious, not pertinent to our day-to-day
life.
We made no inquiries about
India or about the families people had left behind. When our ways of
thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know
nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of
them came from Nepal. Two years ago a kind Nepalese who liked my name
sent me a copy of some pages from an 1872 gazetteer-like British work
about India, Hindu Castes and Tribes as Represented in Benares; the
pages listed - among a multitude of names -those groups of Nepalese
in the holy city of Banaras who carried the name Naipal. That is all
that I have.
Away from this world of my
grandmother's house, where we ate rice in the middle of the day and
wheat in the evenings, there was the great unknown - in this island
of only 400,000 people. There were the African or African-derived
people who were the majority. They were policemen; they were
teachers. One of them was my very first teacher at the Chaguanas
Government School; I remembered her with adoration for years. There
was the capital, where very soon we would all have to go for
education and jobs, and where we would settle permanently, among
strangers. There were the white people, not all of them English; and
the Portuguese and the Chinese, at one time also immigrants like us.
And, more mysterious than these, were the people we called Spanish,
'pagnols, mixed people of warm brown complexions who came from the
Spanish time, before the island was detached from Venezuela
and the Spanish Empire; a kind of history absolutely beyond my
child's comprehension.
To give you this idea of my
background, I have had to call on knowledge and ideas that came to me
much later, principally from my writing. As a child I knew almost
nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's
house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not
knowing who they are. But for the French child, say, that knowledge
is waiting. That knowledge will be all around them. It will come
indirectly from the conversation of their elders. It will be in the
newspapers and on the radio. And at school the work of generations of
scholars, scaled down for school texts, will provide some idea of
France and the French.
In Trinidad, bright boy
though I was, I was surrounded by areas of darkness. School
elucidated nothing for me. I was crammed with facts and
formulas. Everything had to be learned by heart; everything
was abstract for me. Again, I do not believe there was a plan or plot
to make our courses like that. What we were getting was standard
school learning. In another setting it would have made sense. And at
least some of the failing would have lain in me. With my limited
social background it was hard for me imaginatively to enter into
other societies or societies that were far away. I loved the idea
of books, but I found it hard to read them. I got on best with
things like Andersen and Aesop, timeless, placeless, not excluding.
And when at last in the sixth form, the highest form in the college,
I got to like some of our literature texts - Moliere, Cyrano
de Bergerac - I suppose it was because they had the quality of
the fairytale.
When I became a writer those
areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land;
the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the
Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then
England, where I was doing my writing. That was what I meant when I
said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of
my books. That was what I meant when I said that my background, the
source and prompting of my work, was at once exceedingly simple and
exceedingly complicated.
You will have seen how simple
it was in the country town of Chaguanas. And I think you will
understand how complicated it was for me as a writer. Especially in the
beginning, when the literary models I had; the models given me by
what I can only call my false learning; dealt with entirely different
societies. But perhaps you might feel that the material was so rich
it would have been no trouble at all to get started and to go on.
What I have said about the background, however, comes from the
knowledge I acquired with my writing. And you must believe me when I
tell you that the pattern in my work has only become clear in the
last two months or so. Passages from old books were read to me, and I
saw the connections. Until then the greatest trouble for me was to
describe my writing to people, to say what I had done.
I said I was an intuitive
writer. That was so, and that remains so now, when I am nearly at the
end. I never had a plan. I followed no system. I worked intuitively.
My aim every time was do a book, to create something that would be
easy and interesting to read. At every stage I could only work within
my knowledge and sensibility and talent and world-view. Those things
developed book by book. And I had to do the books I did because there
were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to
clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself.
I had to go to the documents
in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the
history of the colony. I had to travel to India because there was no
one to tell me what the India my grandparents had come from was like.
There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi; and strangely it was
Gandhi, with his South African experience, who gave me more, but not
enough. There was Kipling; there were British-Indian writers like
John Masters (going very strong in the 1950s, with an announced plan,
later abandoned, I fear, for thirty-five connected novels about
British India); there were romances by women writers. The few Indian
writers who had come up at that time were middle-class people,
town-dwellers; they didn't know the India we had come
from.
And when that Indian need was
satisfied, others became apparent: Africa, South America, the Muslim
world. The aim has always been to fill out my world picture, and the
purpose comes from my childhood: to make me more at ease with myself.
Kind people have sometimes written asking me to go and write about
Germany, say, or China. But there is much good writing already about
those places; I am willing to depend there on the writing that
exists. And those subjects are for other people. Those were not the
areas of darkness I felt about me as a child. So, just as there is a
development in my work, a development in narrative skill and
knowledge and sensibility, so there is a kind of unity, a focus,
though I might appear to be going in many directions.
When I began I had no idea of
the way ahead. I wished only to do a book. I was trying to write in
England, where I stayed on after my years at the university, and it
seemed to me that my experience was very thin, was not truly of the
stuff of books. I could find in no book anything that came near my
background.
The young French or English
person who wished to write would have found any number of
models
to set him on his way. I had none. My father's stories about our
Indian community belonged to the past. My world was quite different.
It was more urban, more mixed. The simple physical details of the
chaotic life of our extended family; sleeping rooms or sleeping
spaces, eating times, the sheer number of people; seemed impossible
to handle. There was too much to be explained, both about my home
life and about the world outside. And at the same time there was also
too much about us - like our own ancestry and history - that I didn't
know.
At last one day there came to
me the idea of starting with the Port of Spain street to which we had
moved from Chaguanas. There was no big corrugated-iron gate shutting
out the world there. The life of the street was open to me. It was an
intense pleasure for me to observe it from the verandah. This street
life was what I began to write about. I wished to write fast, to
avoid too much self-questioning, and so I simplified. I suppressed
the child-narrator's background. I ignored the racial and
social complexities of the street. I explained nothing. I stayed at
ground level, so to speak. I presented people only as they appeared on
the street. I wrote a story a day.
The first stories were very
short. I was worried about the material lasting long enough. But then
the writing did its magic. The material began to present itself to
me from many sources. The stories became longer; they couldn't
be written in a day. And then the inspiration, which at one stage
had seemed very easy, rolling me along, came to an end. But a book
had been written, and I had in my own mind become a writer. The
distance between the writer and his material grew with the two later
books; the vision was wider. And then intuition led me to a large
book about our family life. During this book my writing ambition
grew. But when it was over I felt I had done all that I could do with
my island material. No matter how much I meditated on it, no further
fiction would come.
Accident, then, rescued me. I
became a traveller. I travelled in the Caribbean region and
understood much more about the colonial set-up of which I had been
part. I went to India, my ancestral land, for a year; it was a
journey that broke my life in two. The books that I wrote about these
two journeys took me to new realms of emotion, gave me a world-view I
had never had, extended me technically. I was able in the fiction
that then came to me to take in England as well as the Caribbean -
and how hard that was to do. I was able also to take in all the
racial groups of the island, which I had never before been able to
do.
This new fiction was about
colonial shame and fantasy, a book, in fact, about how the powerless
lie about themselves, and lie to themselves, since it is their only
resource. The book was called The Mimic Men. And it was not about
mimics. It was about colonial mimicking the condition of manhood,
men who had grown to distrust everything about themselves. Some pages
of this book were read to me the other day - I hadn't looked at it
for more than thirty years - and it occurred to me that I had been
writing about colonial men schizophrenia. But I hadn't thought of it
like that. I had never used abstract words to describe any writing
purpose of mine. If I had, I would never have been able to do the
book. The book was done intuitively, and only out of close
observation.
I have done this little
survey of the early part of my career to try to show the stages by
which, in just ten years, my birthplace had altered or developed in
my writing: from the comedy of street life to a study of a kind of
widespread schizophrenia. What was simple had become
complicated.
Both fiction and the
travel-book form have given me my way of looking; and you will
understand why for me all literary forms are equally valuable. It
came to me, for instance, when I set out to write my third book about
India; twenty-six years after the first; that what was most important
about a travel book were the people the writer travelled among. The
people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it
required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling.
And it was the very method I used later when I went, for the second
time, into the Muslim world.
I have always moved by
intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no
guiding political idea. I think that probably lies with my ancestry.
The Indian writer R K Narayan, who
died this year, had no
political idea. My father, who wrote his stories in a very dark time,
and for no reward, had no political idea. Perhaps it is because we
have been far from authority for many centuries. It gives us a
special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humour
and pity of things.
Nearly thirty years ago I
went to Argentina. It was at the time of the guerrilla crisis. People
were waiting for the old dictator Perón to come back from exile. The
country was full of hate. Peronists were waiting to settle old
scores. One such man said to me, "There is good torture and bad
torture." Good torture was what you did to the enemies of the people.
Bad torture was what the enemies of the people did to you. People on
the other side were saying the same thing. There was no true debate
about anything. There was only passion and the borrowed political
jargon of Europe. I wrote, "Where jargon turns living issues into
abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people
don't have causes. They only have enemies."
And the passions of Argentina
are still working themselves out, still defeating reason and
consuming lives. No resolution is in sight.
I am near the end of my work
now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad creatively to have
pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way in
which I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my
material, every book has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed
me; up to the moment of writing I never knew it was there. But the
greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel and the anxiety
is still vivid to me - that I might easily have failed before I
began.
I will end as I began, with
one of the marvellous little essays of Proust in Against
Sainte-Beuve. "The beautiful things we shall write if we have
talent," Proust says, "are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of
a melody which delights us though we are unable to recapture its
outline. Those who are obsessed by this blurred memory of truths they
have never known are the men who are gifted... Talent is like a sort
of memory which will enable them finally to bring this indistinct
music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note
it down..."
Talent, Proust says. I would
say luck, and much labour.
dicembre 2001
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