VS Naipaul’s glorious failure

V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival is a novel for all seasons. It’s a book about seeing and the failure to see; about the difference between wanting to be a writer and truly becoming one; about understanding one’s place in the world and also understanding what that means in a world defined by constant change, governed by loss, entropy, and the inexorable wingbeat of time. It anticipates and yet far surpasses the contemporary vogue for so-called “autofiction” — or just writing where the main character is also a writer — in part because it’s a strenuous piece of self-criticism, autofiction as auto-correction. It also happens to be the most compassionate work by a writer not much noted for his compassion. In this last sense, although it’s Naipaul’s masterpiece — original, capacious, equally good at the level of part and whole, both world- and mind-altering — it’s a work that illuminates as much through its limitations as its triumphs.

Set mostly in and around a decaying manor estate in Wiltshire, where Naipaul and his wife Patricia Hale rented a cottage for 15 years, beginning in 1970, the overarching story traces the decline and ruin of the house and its grounds somewhat in the manner of classic 20th-century “Great House” novels by Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Elizabeth Bowen, in ways that both indulge and resist sentimentality.

What starts as a sustained piece of pastoral writing with bunnies hopping about upon snowy meadows, rogue deer nibbling at hedges, regular walks on the downs, anecdotes about pear trees, rose bushes, and a neighbour’s well-tended garden — becomes interlaced with more sinister visions of misshapen cows, mutilated horses, and even a murder in a nearby cottage. Into this evocation of the changing farming habits and the different classes and types of people coming into and out of the countryside during depressed Seventies England and up through the early Thatcher years, Naipaul also weaves the story of his own arrival on scholarship to Oxford from Trinidad, the early success of A House for Mr. Biswas and Miguel Street, and the burnout and exhaustion following a failed attempt to write a history of Trinidad that would lead him to the countryside where he’d live for most of the rest of his life.

This second story of Naipaul’s own great expectations refreshes the initial traditional and belated tale of aristocratic decline by placing the whole book in the context of what Naipaul comes to understand as “that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century… in which cities like London were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself”.

Holding the whole thing together at the level of what might loosely be termed drama, Naipaul slowly unfolds the passions and struggles of people from various classes associated with the manor and its still ample grounds: its gardener — “once there were sixteen gardeners, now only Pitton”, caretakers, chauffeurs, tenant farmers, along with his reclusive aristocratic landlord. The reader comes to know them much as Naipaul himself might have, diffidently at first  — they are strangers doing something mysterious, an old man glimpsed tying bits of plastic bags on barbed wire fences — then they are known by their function — caretaker, farm manager, gardener etc — then soon by last name, “Mr. and Mrs. Philips”, “Pitton”, “Bray”, with the exception of the independent farmer who is always plain Jack. Then, over time, he comes to know them so intimately that he can relate their stories in ways that sometimes feel like a soap opera and other times like Wordsworth’s great elegies for the inhabitants of a countryside whose lifeways are threatened by the next wave of industrialisation (“The Ruined Cottage”, or “Michael”). It’s one thing to write about rural life or little England and another thing to reproduce on the page the rhythms of that life, its languorous pace and gossip, and then sudden bursts of change, the minor alteration in the pattern like the death of one tree that heralds a major change. The reader is immersed as gradually and as thoroughly as the writer himself.

The real action happens through Naipaul’s style. Enigma derives its energy from being a work of great patience written at speed. The novel’s last printed words are the dates “October 1984-April 1986”, a rather tight 18-month period for a work of this intricacy, breadth and scope. Naipaul is probably fictionalising to an extent, since what he likes to call “the material” had been building up over the years in notebooks. At the same time, the prose flows and skips with unexpected connections and shifts that lend it immediacy and urgency amid the stately procession of recollected moments. It’s a book that is always revising and correcting itself on the page, its judgements of people and places, and of the author himself. You can see how this works even the deceptively simple opening paragraphs:

“For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and the outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

The river was called the Avon; not the one connected with Shakespeare. Later — when the land had more meaning, when it had absorbed more of my life than the tropical street where I had grown up — I was able to think of the flat wet fields with the ditches as “water meadows” or “wet meadows”, and the low smooth hills in the background beyond the river, as “downs”. But just then, after the rain, all that I saw — though I had been living in England for twenty years — were flat fields and a narrow river.”

Here, in this slow raising of the curtain, like the glints of the river, are nearly all the glimmers of what’s to come. There’s the emphasis on sight and the way it might deceive (the river above the land); the contrast with a bit of information, “the Avon”, that can prove equally disorienting, “not the one connected with Shakespeare”; and then the way that a single view is transformed not only through change of weather but change of experience in the sudden leap of the sentence beginning “Later” that also lets on that the narrator was once a stranger and remained an outsider.

“I saw what I saw very clearly, but I didn’t know what I was looking at,” Naipaul says towards the beginning, and so establishes the internal conflict between what the writer sees and what he thinks he knows that allows him to order those perceptions into a story.

Recalling his encounters with two black men on his initial passage to England, he writes: “In Puerto Rico there had been the Trinidad Negro in a tight jacket on his way to Harlem. Here was a man from Harlem or black America on his way to Germany. In each there were aspects of myself. But with my Asiatic background, I resisted the comparison; and I was traveling to be a writer. It was too frightening to accept the other thing, to face the other thing; it was to be diminished as a man… Thinking of myself as a writer, I was hiding my experience from myself; hiding myself from my experience.”

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This is a different-sounding Naipaul from the writer who became infamous for his contemptuous remarks about black people, fellow South Asians, and all sorts of former British colonial subjects in much of his non-fiction writing featured in publications like The New York Review of Books. The ugly Naipaul, the wounded man who wounds others, as James Wood observes, has come to dominate his legacy so much so that one-time admirers Abdulrazak Gurnah and Pankaj Mishra now state publicly that they can no longer read him.

The purpose of Naipaul’s multiple self-revisions in Enigma was not to apologise or disarm his critics, who existed even at the time he was writing it, but, as Naipaul puts it, “to bridge the gap between man and writer”, the crack that begins on that first journey across the Atlantic and widens. His account of the juvenile fiction, “Gala Night”, that he attempted to write about the ship journey, where he omits the racist incidents on board in the interest of conforming to an idea of “Literature”, is as painful and scathing as anything Naipaul wrote about anyone else. We can feel him trying to be a real writer by rewriting these mostly unconscious lies and distortions, much as Pinocchio becomes a real boy.

It is here, however, that the novel also falls short of the ambitious goal Naipaul sets for it, namely to reveal “The writer’s greatest discovery” that “man and writer were the same person”. For it turns out this apparently solitary narrator, living in a cottage on the broken estate, taking his long walks, devoted to the minutest observation of seasonal changes and shifts in the emotional climate and circumstances of those closest to him, has — in the actual life of the man who wrote it all down — been married all this time and been living with his wife, though also sometimes with his Anglo-Argentine mistress whom he liked to beat up, though not all of them together. Much of what is presented as independently arrived at observation about the lives of others most likely emerged, at least partially, in dialogue with Patricia Hale, who nowhere appears in the book’s pages.

This deliberate omission in a work that otherwise strives for unsparing, clear-eyed honesty can spoil the book for some people. I confess I find it adds to my appreciation for it. Our own age attaches so much importance to being right, even for writers of imaginative literature. It’s important to have demonstrated the right attitudes in advance, to never have anything shameful to hide. Naipaul in his own ways remains a captive of an earlier version of this: he still puts the writer of Enigma above everyone he writes about, including himself. But he couldn’t go all the way, he couldn’t, so to speak, land the last punch.

This last failure humanises Naipaul in a way that his own self-castigations and revisions, recast as triumphs, do not. The perfect synthesis between writer and man, the great Romantic project of literature that Naipaul chooses to inherit while writing Enigma — to make literature at every point congruent with life — remains an impossible desire. No one can do it: not Cusk, not Knausgaard, not Lerner, not even Wordsworth or Naipaul. The failure is built into the project from the beginning, but the ruin is glorious and doesn’t even look like a ruin until you understand that Enigma of Arrival is also a book steeped in and punctuated by its many ruins. In other words, the colour and quality of the failure matters. To have struggled so much against his own instincts as a judge, a semi-satirist, to have tried to write about a place and its people that he almost loved — to try to find a language in himself capable of articulating love, or, at least, compassion; to have done it so well in the cases of wounded horses, dying trees, men like Jack, Pitton, and Bray, and still to fail. Well, that’s encouraging.

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