The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [3]
Later, sitting in the train, going past the backs of tall sooty houses, tumbledown sheds, Victorian working-class tenements whose gardens, long abandoned, had for stretches been turned into Caribbean backyards, I wondered about the firebrand. Was he pining away tamely in some office job? Or was he, too broken to take up employment, idling on a meagre income in a suburban terrace? Many of us, it must be said, are poor. The tale is there in the occasional small paragraph on the financial page which tells of the collapse of some little-known Swiss bank. Too much shouldn’t be made of this, however. Most of us were too timid to make a fortune, or too ignorant; we measured both our opportunities and our needs by the dreams of our previous nonentity.
They talk of the pessimism of the young as they talk of atheism and revolt: it is something to be grown out of. Yet less than twenty years after Mr Shylock’s death, with this journey to London which I feel is final, sealing off such experience and activity as were due to me, my present mood leaps the years and all the intervening visits to this city-leaps the Humbers, the hotels, the helpful officials, the portrait of George III in Marlborough House; leaps my marriage and my business activities – leaps all this to link with that first mood which came to me in Mr Shylock’s attic; so that all that came in between seems to have occurred in parenthesis. Which is the reality? The mood, or the action in between, resulting from that mood and leading up to it again?
I last saw Mr Shylock’s boarding-house some years ago. I wasn’t looking for it; the minister with whom I was dining lived nearby. The heavy panelled front door with its studs and its two panes of patterned glass had been replaced by a flush door, painted lilac, on which the number was spelt out in cursive letters; it suggested the entrance to a ladies’ underwear shop. I felt little emotion: that part of my life was over and had been put in its place. I wonder whether I would be as cool today. Kensington, though, is not the part of the city I live in or care to visit. It has become a little too crowded and is, I believe, rather expensive. It has also become a centre of racialist agitation, and I do not now wish to become involved in battles which are irrelevant to myself. I no longer wish to share distress; I do not have the equipment. No more words for me, except these I write, and in them the politician, chapman in causes, will be suppressed as far as possible. It will not be difficult. I have had my fill of political writing. My present urge is, in the inaction imposed on me, to secure the final emptiness.
I have seen much snow. It never fails to enchant me, but I no longer think of it as my element. I no longer dream of ideal landscapes or seek to attach myself to them. All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of the reality. I could not, like so many of my fellow exiles, live in a suburban semi-detached house; I could not pretend even to myself to be part of a community or to be putting down roots. I prefer the freedom of my far-out suburban hotel, the absence of responsibility; I like the feeling of impermanence. I am surrounded by houses like those in the photograph I studied in Mr Shylock’s attic, and that impulse of sentimentality embarrasses me. I scarcely see those houses now and never think of the people who live in them. I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and the oppressed. Hate oppression; fear the oppressed.
The christening was at three. At about five to I went down to Lieni’s room. It was in a greater mess than usual: assorted haberdashery on the mantelpiece together with bills and calendars and empty cigarette packets; clothes on the bed and the lino and the baby’s crib; old newspapers; a sewing-machine dusty with shredded cloth. Beyond the grilled basement window