The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,106
kept to his room in the cold weather, and went out of doors only in fine weather. He had been granted at birth a great house and a wide view in the dampest part of the county, on the riverbank, in a valley (which often, looking down from the viewing point on my other walk, I had seen covered entirely with mist). But his instincts were Mediterranean, tropical; he loved the sun. Inertia, habit, friendships, a wish to be where his worth was known—perhaps these things had kept him in his inherited house. Perhaps if he could have taken friends and social connections, the knowledge in others of his social worth, everything that protected him, he might have moved. But he stayed in his house, which was his setting, and dreamed of being elsewhere, dreamed in his own way.
He had sent me poems—in my first year as his tenant—about Krishna and Shiva. Mrs. Phillips had typed the poems out and then she had brought them over in person to the cottage. It was my landlord’s gesture of welcome to me; and so Mrs. Phillips treated it, adding to the gesture her own surprising reverence for the act of poetry making. Mrs. Phillips typed out and brought over more poems. She became as it were the living link between my landlord and me. I don’t think he intended the courtesy to be quite like that; but that was how it fell out, and it made my settling into the cottage very much easier.
Krishna and Shiva! There, beside that river (Constable and Shepard), in those grounds! There was nothing of contemporary cult or fashion in my landlord’s use of these divinities. His Indian romance was in fact older, even antiquated, something he had inherited, like his house, something from the days of imperial glory, when—out of material satiety and the expectation of the world’s continuing to be ordered as it had been ordered for a whole century and more—power and glory had begun to undo themselves from within. Ruskinism, a turning away from the coarseness of industrialism, upper-class or cultivated sensibilities, sensibilities almost drugged by money, the Yellow Book, philosophy melting away into sensuousness, sensation—my landlord’s Indian romance partook of all of those impulses and was rooted in England, wealth, empire, the idea of glory, material satiety, a very great security.
His Indian romance—which had very little to do with me, my past, my life or my ambitions—suited his setting. His Krishna and Shiva were names and in his poems they were like Greek divinities, given the color of antique sculpture, literally touched with night-blue, the color of wantonness, the promise of a pleasure (and beauty and Keatsian truth) that made the senses reel.
The conceit about the painted statues was pleasing (I felt it was an old poem). And there was knowledge of a sort of the blue, aboriginal gods of the Hindu pantheon, the lascivious Krishna, the drug-taking Shiva (blue standing, in fact, for the black of the aboriginal inhabitants of India). But in later poems—some typed by Mrs. Phillips, some printed (single sheets, with drawings)—a similar heady sensuousness was attributed to Italian youths of apparently the previous century or young Conradian sailors (again of apparently the previous century) in Peruvian or Malayan or Brazilian ports.
His fantasies (sensual rather than explicitly sexual, to judge by the poems) were unconfined but also unfocused: a warm blur, something that was owed him but which perhaps might disappear with definition: something out there, outside himself, and eventually an aspect of his acedia, the curious death of the soul that had befallen him so early in his life. His anchor was his house, his knowledge of his social worth. Through all the ups and downs of his illness or his acedia, the knowledge of who he was remained with him. All the poems he had sent by Mrs. Phillips had been signed, extravagantly. There was about his signature—in addition to its size—something of the experimental nature of a boy’s signature; it spoke of someone still savoring his personality.
And now he sat before me, in a pool of sunlight in the grounds of his house, the house he had known all his life, next to the broken-paned weed-filled greenhouse, in the ruin of his garden. Seminude, his legs crossed, the fat right thigh (the thigh that was raised, and which I saw) tightly encased in his shorts.
It was the Phillipses who had encouraged me to walk through the back garden and along the riverbank, pooh-poohing as an