The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [106]
The vision of hysteria, wrongheaded, criminally irresponsible: perhaps. But it weakened me. I was overwhelmed by the cruelty of what I saw. I withdrew into my role. So too did Browne, who had talked so much of distress and dignity as discoveries in themselves, but had not thought to go further. He never learned anything beyond that first day. He remained the folk-leader, waiting like me for crunch-time. His role was his strength. Mine exposed me to danger from my colleagues.
I continued to run The Socialist as before, proclaiming the dignity of distress. My speeches maintained their old tone of protest. I never abandoned the character of the dandy. In this was neither honesty nor dishonesty; it was the easiest way out. But I became identified in the public mind with a type of opposition from within, and this won me favour. Soon I saw how by my blind consistency, my refusal to manoeuvre, my position, in the eyes of my colleagues, became one of strength and especially dangerous. I held too many of the cards. I could have got the big money on my side, to apply a squeeze here and there when necessary; I could have got the banks, the Stockwells, the bauxite companies; I could have got that middle-class to which by instinct I belonged; and I could have drawn numbers from the rural workers, picturesque Asiatics like myself, ever ready to listen to the call of the blood. I might have rescued myself from the falseness of the position of the simple sharer of distress: the convert, suspect to both the faithful and the infidel. The cards were all mine. I played none and puzzled everyone by my folly.
Like Browne, I was no politician. The prospect of power in Isabella fatigued me. Easier, much easier, the path that had been chosen for me. And there was my correspondence with Browne, and with Wendy’s brother in Quebec. To one I wrote fanciful disquisitions about the cosmic dance. To the other I wrote more and more about history, with which I was becoming absorbed. I remember I wrote a long essay about the behaviour of Pompey during the Civil War, which had always seemed to me a puzzle – this was the sort of ‘safe’ subject Browne and I now corresponded about. I thought I kept up this correspondence for the sake of the people I wrote to and for the sake of that self they saw in me. But it had the effect of deepening my conviction that I had a secret, deeper life. Below the public dandy, the political manœuvrer and organizer; below that, this negation. I distrusted romance. See, though, how I yielded to it.
A man, I suppose, fights only when he hopes, when he has a vision of order, when he feels strongly there is some connection between the earth on which he walks and himself. But there was my vision of a disorder which it was beyond any one man to put right. There was my sense of wrongness, beginning with the stillness of that morning of return when I looked out on the slave island and tried to pretend it was mine. There was my sense of intrusion which deepened as I felt my power to be more and more a matter of words. So defiantly, in my mind, I asserted my character as intruder, the picturesque Asiatic born for other landscapes.
And then there was the madman’s lure: my belief in my star, not the star of fortune, but the star that, if only I surrendered to situations, if only I did what I had been called upon to do, would take me to my appointed place. The compassion of the messiah, the man doing penance for the world: I have already explained the absurd sentiments which surprised me at the moment of greatest power and self-cherishing, the feeling that we were all riding to the end of the flat world: the child’s vision, or the conqueror’s, the beginning of religion or neurosis.
4
THE child, driving with his grandfather along a country road on a day of rain, sees the sodden mud-and-grass huts