Naipaul beset by ‘great melancholy’

THE EDITOR: “One autumn day-the days shortening, filling me with thoughts of winter pleasures, fires and evening lights and books-one autumn day I felt something like a craving to read of winter in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem that I had read more than twenty years before at Oxford.”

This is Vidiahar Surajprasad Naipaul speaking in The Enigma of Arrival easily his most self-analytic novel, the document of his struggle to restructure his psychological foundations, beset by “a great melancholy”, brought on by thoughts of death to which I will refer in this letter to the Editor, in remembrance of Naipaul being awarded the Nobel prize last year. This letter is necessary. The disquiet I felt at the failure of the electronic media to broadcast in his native land the ceremony in which he received the prize, an omission that deprived people of the sight of achievement being rewarded, veers close to anger, that persons of closeted minds should so allow a historical event to pass away, a clear failure by the media in its duty to the nation.

It is worth considering whether the media realised the powerful nature of such an event; the culmination of a lifetime of effort, begun as a schoolboy in Port-of-Spain, then decades of the incessant labour of creation, until the accolade bestowed by the Nobel committee: the final act of polishing to allow a splendid achievement of work its full lustre. Every year the Nobel prize is awarded to people who are masters in their respective fields. What could conceivably be more inspiring to the youthful mind than to behold the ceremony at which a former inhabitant of this nation received the highest honour in the sphere of Literature? Is there anyone in Trinidad and Tobago who has ever attended a Nobel prize giving ceremony? maybe that is why it was not broadcast, such things are too faraway and lofty for the local media to contemplate, maybe it scared them, that a Trinidadian should be shown at such an event.

The Enigma of Arrival is a description by an exhausted mind deprived of its familiar anchors to the everyday world by an increasing awareness of death; “death was the motif; it had perhaps been the motif all along,” and in its writing there is placed an interweaving of events from the author’s first journey from Trinidad and arrival in England with a minute relation of his stay at a cottage at Salisbury near Stonehenge, his surroundings, and the few people he interacted with; the careful record of the process of his healing, that gives the illusion of serenity.

The effect of J O Cutteridge’s West Indian Readers used in primary schools decades ago, is evident. Salisbury was the first English town he had been given some idea of “from the reproduction of the Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral in my third standard reader. Far away in my tropical island, before I was ten.” And then, there is a reference to the painting of the drowned Ophelia, in the lesson on Hamlet, prince of Denmark in a later book. He also clarified a reference in Shakespeare’s King Lear “goose, if I had you upon Sarum plain, I’d drive ye cackling home to Camelot;” Sarum plain he discovers to be Salisbury plain, and Camelot, Winchester, twenty miles away.

Previous commentators, according to the editor of his text, had found the reference obscure. In Miguel Street, The Suffrage of Elvira, The Mystic Masseur, and A House for Mr Biswas, VS Naipaul set a finely incised portraiture of Trinidadian life in the era he knew of, and then he became global in his writing. The tile Enigma of Arrival was given to a painting by Georges De Chirico by the poet Apollonaire, who died in 1918, “to the great grief of Picasso and others.” Naipaul first saw it in a booklet found in the cottage he rented.

SURENDRA SAKAL
La Romaine