The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,49

up from memory, almost like personal memories—might provide the details for a fairly short and simple paragraph of narrative. But I was supported by my story, the themes it touched on: discovery, the New World, the dispeopling of the discovered islands; slavery, the creation of the plantation colony; the coming of the idea of revolution; the chaos after revolutions in societies so created.

A great packed education those two years had been. And I had such faith in what I was writing, such faith in the grandeur of my story, that I thought it would find the readers that my books of the previous twelve years had not found. And I behaved foolishly. Without waiting for that response, I dismantled the little life I had created for myself in England and prepared to leave, to be a free man.

For years, in that far-off island whose human history I had been discovering and writing about, I had dreamed of coming to England. But my life in England had been savorless, and much of it mean. I had taken to England all the rawness of my colonial’s nerves, and those nerves had more or less remained, nerves which in the beginning were in a good part also the nerves of youth and inexperience, physical and sexual inadequacy, and of undeveloped talent. And just as once at home I had dreamed of being in England, so for years in England I had dreamed of leaving England. Now, eighteen years after my first arrival, it seemed to me that the time had come. I dismantled the life I had bit by bit established, and prepared to go. The house I had bought and renovated in stages I sold; and my furniture and books and papers went to the warehouse.

The calamity occurred four months later. The book in which I had placed such faith, the book which had exhausted me so much, could not please the publisher who had commissioned it. We had misunderstood one another. He knew only my name; he did not know the nature of my work. And I had misunderstood his interest in me. He had approached me as a serious writer, but he had wanted only a book for tourists, something much simpler than the book I had written; something at once more romantic and less romantic; at once more human and less human. So I found myself up in the air. And I had to return to England.

That journey back—from the island and continent I had gone to see with my new vision, the corner of the New World I had just written about, from there to the United States and Canada, and then to England—that journey back to England so mimicked and parodied the journey of nineteen years before, the journey of the young man, the boy almost, who had journeyed to England to be a writer, in a country where the calling had some meaning, that I couldn’t but be aware of all the cruel ironies.

It was out of this grief, too deep for tears or rage—grief that began partly to be expressed in the dream of the exploding head—that I began to write my African story, which had come to me as a wisp of an idea in Africa three or four years before.

The African fear with which as a writer I was living day after day; the unknown Wiltshire; the cruelty of this return to England, the dread of a second failure; the mental fatigue. All of this, rolled into one, was what lay on the spirit of the man who went on the walks down to Jack’s cottage and past it. Not an observer merely, a man removed; but a man played on, worked on, by many things.

And it was out of that burden of emotion that there had come to the writer, as release, as an idyll, the ship story, the antique quayside story, suggested by The Enigma of Arrival; an idea that came innocently, without the writer’s suspecting how much of his life, how many aspects of his life, that remote story (still just an idea for a story) carried. But that is why certain stories or incidents suggest themselves to writers, or make an impression on them; that is why writers can appear to have obsessions.

I WENT for my walks every afternoon. I finished my book. The panic of its composition didn’t repeat in the revision. I was beginning to heal. And more than heal. For me, a miracle had occurred in