Intimations of
compassion
It has been said (mostly by me) that the achievement of
Kingsley Amis and Philip Larking was that they turned self-pity and whingeing
into an art form. Almost. The contrast with V.S. Naipaul puts them in their
place. His portrait of the post colonial world is black, and it is bitter, but
it is made in good faith, it contains a large portion of the truth, and it is
depicted with consummate artistry. Starting with his experiences as a very
junior clerk in his native Trinidad, Naipaul's
narrator notes "The volumes smelled of fish glue. This was what they were bound
with; and I suppose the glue was made from a boiling down of fish bones and skin
and offal. It was the colour of honey; it dried very hard, and every careless
golden drip had the clarity of glass; but it never lost the smell of fish and
rotteness." Note the first unappetizing sensation, how the three physical
details in the next sentence shift our attention from the first fact, only to be
recapitulated in the final word. This is a special, subtle form of writing.
The theme of the novel consists of several portraits of
flawed men who lived and experienced Trinidad.
There is the promising English travel writer Foster Morris, who ultimately
failed to achieve his full potential. There is the radical black revolutionary
Lebrun who is highly intelligent and has many acute things to say about the
narrarator's writing, yet ends as an apologist for the Soviet Union and for various African tyrannies. There is a
long chapter on Sir Walter Raleigh's futile attempt to find El Dorado, with a
discussion of the lies and brutalities he committed in a futilte attempt to save
his neck from an ungrateful English government. There is an even longer one on
General Miranda, who attempted to free Latin
America from the Spanish. The pictures of Raleigh and especially
Miranda are damning. Miranda promises to free the slaves of Venezuela, at
another time promises his English and Franco-Haitian allies he will do nothing.
He has traded slaves in the past, his career has been marked with incompetence
and venality, and his political program is vague and pompous. It is not
suprisingly that when he arrives in Venezuela the priests will successfully rouse the
common people against him as an infidel, that Venezuela will
collapse into racial and class strife and that Miranda will be captured and die
in a Spanish jail. Finally there is the narrator's visit to a dreary one party
state, marked with corruption and violence against the East Asian minority, and
where an old colleague of the narrator will be murdered by powerful officials
for being too effective against bribery. There is an everpresent ugliness and
bigotry. Everywhere there is violence and cruelty: the Spanish and the British
in Miranda's Trinidad both butcher slave rebels
who have their own violent customs. In one African country a child is butchered
so that a chief can be washed in its blood. But the crushing of the chiefs by
the central government is no force for progress, but merely a newer and even
more unpleasant tyranny. Yet in all these pictures there is something more than
condemnation. It is not quite compassion, not quite mercy, in the way that
Naipaul agrees that there is something more, something worthy in their lives. It
appears to be the truth.
Is it? Naipaul's portrait of Lebrun is based, very
obviously, on C.L.R. James, the famous author of The Black Jacobins. Yet Lebrun
is at times a dishonest apologist for the Soviet
Union, while the real James was very famously a Trotskyist
sympathizer. The difference is important: it would not be fair to blames
American fundamentalists for the Inquisition. In the end of the Lebrun chapter
Lebrun is unable to fully recognize his own memories. "For the interviewer or
the television producer it was enough, a text for today; not understanding that
Lebrun's anguish had begun there, with the old coachman taking him far back,
almost to the times of slavery, as to the good times. But perhaps, too, in
extreme old age, he had become a child again, looking only for peace." This is
very subtle, but it is not as magnaminous as it appears. It is less an act of
justice, as an indulgence, to a character whom Naipaul has subtly manipulated
for his convenience. It reminds us of the other side of Naipaul; the spiteful
comments on E.M. Forster and the ungenerous attitude towards Salman Rushdie, the
critic of Indira Gandhi and Evita Peron who praised the Hindu Communalist
government of India during a particularly nasty bout of intercommunal rioting,
the man who is admired and praised by the Anglo-American right for condemning
the Third World, less for its cruelties (so often unavoidable), but for not
being English. Is Naipaul really showing sympathy or is he just too infinitely
graceful and subtle to reveal his full contempt? Does he fear showing
spontaneity, even love, because he thinks it is only really sentimentality?
Something is missing.
