Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [41]
The poet and his wife looked on aloof and unsurprised and disdaining. Peter was vacant. Serafina held herself upright and showed her profile to Richard. Marcus, mentally restless, thinking of this and that, more than once began to talk about something quite unrelated, and then stopped at the sound of his own voice. But Willie was fascinated by the editor's story. To him it was all new. There were not many concrete details to hold on to, but he was trying as he listened to see the editor's town and to enter the editor's life. He found himself, to his surprise, thinking of his own father; and then he began to think about himself. Sitting beside Serafina, who had turned away from him, and was stiff, resisting conversation, Willie leaned forward to concentrate on the editor.
He, the editor, was aware of Willie's interest, and he weakened. He began to choke on his words. Once or twice he sobbed. And then he was on the last galley. Tears were running down his face. He seemed about to break down. “… His deepest life was in the mind. But journalism is by its nature ephemeral, and he left no memorial. Love, the divine illusion, never touched him. But he had a lifelong romance with the English language.” He took off his misted glasses, held the galleys in his left hand, and fixed his wet eyes on a spot on the floor three or four feet in front of him. There was a great silence.
Marcus said, “That was a very nice piece of writing.”
The editor remained as he had been, looking down at the floor, letting the tears flow, and silence came back to the room. The party was over. When people spoke, saying goodbye, it was in whispers, as in a sickroom. The poet and his wife left; it was as though they hadn't been. Serafina stood up, let her gaze sweep unseeing past Richard, and took Peter away. Marcus whispered, “Let me help you clear away, Perdita.” Willie was surprised by a pang of jealousy. But neither he nor Marcus was allowed to stay.
Roger, saying goodbye to them at the door of the little house, lost his worried look. He said mischievously, not raising his voice, “He told me he wanted to meet my London friends. I had no idea he wanted an audience.”
*
THE NEXT DAY Willie wrote a story about the editor. He set it in the quarter-real Indian town he used in his writing, and he fitted the editor to the holy man he had already written about in some of the stories. Up to this point the holy man had been seen from the outside: idle and sinister, living off the unhappy, waiting like a spider in his hermitage. Now, unexpectedly, the holy man showed his own unhappiness: imprisoned in his way of life, longing to get away from his hermitage, and telling his story to a seeker from far away, someone passing through, unlikely to return. In mood the story was like the story the editor had told. In substance it was like the story Willie had heard over many years from his father.
The story, growing under his hand, took Willie by surprise. It gave him a new way of looking at his family and his life, and over the next few days he found the matter of many stories of a new sort. The stories seemed to be just waiting for him; he was surprised he hadn't seen them before; and he wrote fast for three or four weeks. The writing then began to lead him to difficult things, things he couldn't face, and he stopped.
It was the end of his writing. Nothing more came. The movie inspiration had dried up some time before. While it had held it had seemed so easy that sometimes he had worried that other people might be doing the same thing: getting story ideas, or dramatic moments, from High Sierra and White Heat and The Childhood of Maxim Gorky. Now, when nothing was happening, he wondered how he had done what he had done. He had written twenty-six stories in all. They came to about a hundred and eighty pages, and he was disappointed that so many ideas and so much writing and so much excitement had produced so few pages.
But Roger thought it a fair size for a book, and he thought the collection complete. He said, “The later stories are more