The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [17]
It is a relief to get back from this to the hotel. Here at least there is decorum and calm; no one insists on an impossible communication. The management is unobtrusive but vigilant. If nothing pleases the eye, everything works; everything has that gloss and warmth which comes from daily use and daily cleaning. Impersonality is softened by little touches, such as the fresh flowers on my table in the dining-room. This room is like a great hall. It is panelled and dark; it has a large decorative fireplace with a high mantelpiece. We dine below oil portraits of our lord and lady. The originals eat with us, separated not by the height of their table but, in this technological age, by a sliding partition of plate glass which permits the same mutual inspection and maintains the same respectful distance. We do not think this distinction is unsuitable; we are grateful for what they provide and we look to them for a continuation of order.
For here is order of a sort. But it is not mine. It goes beyond my dream. In a city already simplified to individual cells this order is a further simplication. It is rooted in nothing; it links to nothing. We talk of escaping to the simple life. But we do not mean what we say. It is from simplification such as this that we wish to escape, to return to a more elemental complexity.
But observe the contradictions in that dream of the rundown cocoa estate. It was a dream of the past, and it came at a time when, by creating drama and insecurity, we had destroyed the past. The Agricultural Society and the Chamber of Commerce were not our friends. The commonest type of political ambition is the desire for eviction and succession. But the order to which the colonial politician succeeds is not his order. It is something he is compelled to destroy; destruction comes with his emergence and is a condition of his power. So the legitimate desire for succession is neutralized; and drama ensues. I feared drama. My dream of the cocoa estate was not the dream of eviction; and it was more than a dream of order. It was a yearning, from the peak of power, for withdrawal; it was a wistful desire to undo. Scarcely the politician’s drive. But then I never was a politician. I never had the frenzy, the sense of mission, the necessary hurt.
Politicians are people who truly make something out of nothing. They have few concrete gifts to offer. They are not engineers or artists or makers. They are manipulators; they offer themselves as manipulators. Having no gifts to offer, they seldom know what they seek. They might say they seek power. But their definition of power is vague and unreliable. Is power the chauffeured limousine with fine white linen on the seats, the men from the Special Branch outside the gates, the skilled and deferential servants? But this is only indulgence, which might be purchased by anyone at any time in a first-class hotel. Is it the power to bully or humiliate or take revenge? But this is the briefest sort of power; it goes as quickly as it comes; and the true politician is by his nature a man who wishes to play the game all his life. The politician is more than a man with a cause, even when this cause is no more than self-advancement. He is driven by some little hurt, some little incompleteness. He is seeking to exercise some skill which even to him is never as concrete as the skill of the engineer; of the true nature of this skill he is not aware until he begins to exercise it. How often we find those who after years of struggle and manipulation come close to the position they crave, sometimes indeed achieving it, and then are failures. They do not deserve pity, for among the aspirants to power they are complete