5. An old Celtic name for England; also the name an idealized orderly rural one. of a famous make of British truck. 'Sandlorry'; 2. British novelist and statesman (1804-1881). sand truck. The 'New World' referred to is that of an idealized 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English rural America. poet and philosopher. The 'old England' here is
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V. S. NAIPAUL / 2729 out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green; the avenues are spread with brittle floods.
5
Platonic England, house of solitudes, rests in its laurels and its injured stone, replete with complex fortunes that are gone, beset by dynasties of moods and clouds.
It stands, as though at ease with its own world,
10 the mannerly extortions, languid praise,
all that devotion long since bought and sold,
the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize,3
tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed
in cabinets of amethyst and frost.
1978
3. Billiard rooms in British 'stately homes.' The traditionally covered with green baize dividing the 'soft- thudding baize' may refer either to the soft family side of the home from the servants' quarters,
green cloth covering billiard tables or to the door
V. S. NAIPAUL b. 1932 Widely regarded as the most accomplished novelist from the English-speaking Caribbean, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born to a family of Indian descent in Trinidad and educated at Queen's Royal College, Port of Spain, and at University College, Oxford. After settling in England, he became editor of the Caribbean Voices program for the British Broadcasting Corporation (1954?56) and fiction reviewer for the New Statesman (1957?61). The recipient of many prestigious prizes and awards, he won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State, was knighted in 1990, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He continues to live and write in England.
Naipaul's first three books, The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (short stories, 1959), are comedies of manners, set in a Trinidad viewed with an exile's acute and ironic eye. These early works present a starkly satiric vision, but a more modulated tone appears in Naipaul's first major novel, partly based on his father's experience, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Following the declining fortunes of its gentle hero from cradle to grave, this tragicomic novel traces the disintegration of a traditional way of life, on something approaching an epic scale. Subsequent novels, including The Mimic Men (1967), Guerrillas (1973), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and Haifa Life (2001), have continued to explore the desperate and destructive conditions facing individuals as they struggle with cultures in complicated states of transition and development. Because of his often bitter, even withering critiques of so-called Third World states and societies, he is controversial among readers of postcolonial fiction.
Naipaul has also produced essays on a variety of themes, including a travel narrative about the southern United States, A Turn in the South (1988), and two studies? what he calls 'cultural explorations'?of Islam: Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998). Like his novels, these writings range widely, carrying readers to Africa, England, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, South and North America. With
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2730 / V. S. NAIPAUL
the years Naipaul's vision of the human condition has grown darker and more pessimistic, as he brilliantly lays bare the insensitivities and disconnections that bedevil relations among individuals, races, and nations.
Such tremendous disjunctions and dire consequences are revealed in 'One Out of Many,' die second of three stories that, with two linking diary entries, make up In a Free State, a bleakly ironic yet emotionally engaging study of what it means to be enslaved and what it means to be free. The story?its title playing on the American motto 'E pluribus unum' ('from many, one')?follows the fortunes of Santosh, an Indian immigrant to the U.S., whose sense of self changes dramatically in relation to various liberating and imprisoning spaces, various ethnic, cultural, and sexual others. In contrast to narratives of immigration as empowerment, the story represents the promise of more freedom, more status, more economic opportunity in America as coming at the price of an intensified isolation and alienation. As in the literary journeys of other innocents abroad, Santosh's immersion in America satirically reveals as much about the culture he assumes as about the culture he leaves behind.
One Out of Many
I am now an American citizen and I live in Washington, capital of the world. Man y people, both here and in India, will feel that I have done well. But.
I was so happy in Bombay. I was respected, I had a certain position. I worked for an important man. Th e highest in the land came to our bachelor chambers and enjoyed my food and showered compliments on me. I also had my friends. We met in the evenings on the pavement below the gallery of our chambers. Some of us, like the tailor's bearer1 and myself, were domestics who lived in the street. The others were people who came to that bit of pavement to sleep. Respectable people; we didn't encourage riff-raff.
In the evenings it was cool. There were few passers-by and, apart from an occasional double-decker bus or taxi, little traffic. The pavement was swept and sprinlded, bedding brought out from daytime hiding-places, little oil- lamps lit. While the folk upstairs chattered and laughed, on the pavement we read newspapers, played cards, told stories and smoked. Th e clay pipe passed from friend to friend; we became drowsy. Except of course during the monsoon,21 preferred to sleep on the pavement with my friends, although in our chambers a whole cupboard below the staircase was reserved for my personal use.
It was good after a healthy night in the open to rise before the sun and before the sweepers came. Sometimes I saw the street lights go off. Bedding was rolled up; no one spoke much; and soon my friends were hurrying in silent competition to secluded lanes and alleys and open lots to relieve themselves. I was spared this competition; in our chambers I had facilities.3
