nqt
 










RIP


V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced
Naipaul, Thi sĩ của những kẻ bán xới
V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)
This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.
Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”
It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.


Cái chuyện “cà chớn, phách lối, mất dậy…”, [fastidiousness: chảnh] của GCC - ấy chết xin lỗi, của Naipaul  - thì đúng là cả 1 giai thoại. Tôi lần đầu gặp ông ta ở Berlin, khi nhà xb tổ chức lễ ra mắt, bản tiếng Đức, cuốn tiểu thuyết mới nhất của ông. Một em đẹp như tiên, nụ cười rạng rỡ, mời ông ly rượu vang trắng, chắc không phải thứ tệ, Naipaul gỡ cái chai ra khỏi tay người đẹp, nhìn cái nhãn bằng 1 con mắt nghi ngờ của 1 tay nhà nghề trong việc kiểm tra thật-giả trong văn chương, nghệ thuật, rồi, trả lại chai rượu, và nói, với 1 cái giọng dè bỉu thật rõ nét, “lát nữa, lát nữa, em nhá… “, ông có tật cắn phải lưỡi của mình, không phải một, nhưng mà là, vài lần!
Cung cách sống cà chờn như thế đó kiếm ra được con đường của nó để bò vô cái viết của ông, trong “đi và viết”. Ông có thể “tạo hứng cho chính mình”, để làm bật ra những con giận dữ, thí dụ như, về phẩm chất của những chiếc khăn tắm ở khách sạn, hay cách phục vụ hành khách của mấy em “hô tét đờ le”- hostesse de l’air -  hay thức ăn tồi tệ ở 1 khách sạn, như thể chúng có những lý lẽ rất ư là cá nhân, nghĩa là, chỉ nhắm vào riêng ông, một nhà du lịch cực bảnh, không chê vào đâu được!
Nhưng Naipaul sẽ không là Naipaul, nếu thiếu - cái mà ngôn ngữ bây giờ gọi là - xeo phi, coi mình như cái rốn của vũ trụ. Trong du ký đầu tiên của ông, An Area of Darkness, Trong Vùng Tối, 1964, ông kể về chuyến viếng thăm cái làng tổ tiên của ông, ở 1 vùng bụi bặm ở Uttar Pradesh, ở đó, một bà cụ già chộp đôi giày bóng lộn của ông, và ông cảm thấy như bị áp đảo, phóng thể, bị lợi dụng. Ông muốn rời ngôi làng mà tổ tiên của ông đã từng sống nhiều năm trước đó. Một thanh niên xin được quá giang tới 1 thành phố gần nhất, ông lắc đầu, cứ để tên đại lãn cuốc bộ! “Một chuyến viếng thăm vô ích, mất hết cả kiên nhẫn, 1 hành động độc ác vô cớ, tự trách mình, một chuyến bay vô bổ,” ông viết thêm.
Đã có những toan tính, coi Naipaul như là 1 hình tượng ngoan cố, [như khỉ] bắt chước, aping, những hành xử của những tên Hồng Mao cuồng tín, tức lũ thực dân thuộc địa, hay đám Bà La Môn nhăng nhít, không thèm ăn cùng dĩa với tầng lớp cùng đinh, hạ cấp. Nhưng cả hai cách nhìn như thế không đáp ứng được, vào trường hợp của Naipaul. Cái sự cà chớn mất dậy của bạn quí của Gấu – Naipaul chứ ai nữa – thì quá cả cái mà chúng ta gọi là trời sinh tính, hay những “cân não còn ở dạng thô, nguyên”, “raw nerves”, của 1 tên cồ lô nhần, bị tróc gốc, một tên nhà quê, sinh ở 1 tiền đồn xa hoắc của bên ngoài đế quốc, 1 kẻ chiến đấu chống lại bất công, những miệt thị của thiên kiến về sắc tộc, để tạo dấu cho hắn ta: trở thành 1 nhà văn. Nghĩa là, thêm tiếng nói của mình vào cái mà hắn ta gọi là văn minh phổ cập. Khăn tắm dơ, phục vụ tồi, và cái sự bám dai của miền đất tổ tiên, như 1 con điả làm phiền 1 nữ thi sĩ – THNM nặng quá rồi – là những sỉ nhục lên cái mà hắn ta gọi là phẩm giá, “lũ chúng mi quá lắm”, chúng ta như nghe Gấu và bạn của nó là Naipaul, lầu bầu!

https://www.theguardian.com/…/vs-naipaul-nobel-prize-winnin…

Trinidad-born author won both acclaim and disdain for his caustic portrayals, in novels and non-fiction, of the legacy of colonialism

Nhà văn Ấn Độ, sinh tại Trinidad, được khen, cũng dữ, và chửi, cũng chẳng thua, do cái sự miêu tả cay độc của ông ta, trong cả giả tưởng lẫn không giả tưởng, di sản của chủ nghĩa thực dân thuộc địa

Naipaul là 1 tác giả quá quen thuộc với độc giả Tin Văn. Ngay khi ông được Nobel, là GCC đã dịch và giới thiệu 1 truyện ngắn của ông trong Phố Miguel, và sau đó, dịch bài diễn văn Nobel. Mới đây nhất, là bài viết- mới đi được 1 mẩu - của James Wood, “Wounder and Wounded” [Kẻ làm kẻ khác bị thương, và bị thương]. Nay, bèn lôi ra, đốt trọn nén nhang vĩnh biệt ông. 

http://www.tanvien.net/D_1/19.html

“The politics of a country can only be an extension of its idea about human relationships”
Naipaul. Pankaj Mishra trích dẫn trong The Writer and the World. Introduction.

"The most splendid writer of English alive today ....
He looks into the mad eye of history and does not blink."
-THE BOSTON GLOBE

Note: Bài viết này,  được 1 bạn văn đăng lại, trên blog của anh, thành thử Gấu phải “bạch hóa” mấy cái tên viết tắt, cho dễ hiểu, và nhân tiện, đi thêm 1 đường về Naipaul.
Ông này cũng thuộc thứ cực độc, nhưng quả là 1 đại sư phụ. TV sẽ đi bài của Bolano viết về ông, đã giới thiệu trên TV, nhưng chưa có bản dịch. 

Bài viết này, theo GCC, đến lượt nó, qua khứu giác của Bolano, làm bật ra con thú ăn thịt người nằm sâu trong 1 tên…. Bắc Kít!

Bằng cách nào tôi bỏ Phố Miguel ( V.S.Naipaul)

Tớ sinh ra ở đó, nhưng đúng là 1 lỗi lầm. Naipaul nói về nơi ông sinh ra, Trinidad, và ông sẽ tự tử, nếu không bỏ đi được. Một người bạn của ông đã làm như vậy.

WOUNDER AND WOUNDED

The public snob, the grand bastard, was much in evidence when I interviews V. S. Naipaul in 1994, and this was exactly as expected. A pale woman, his secretary, showed me in to the sitting room of his London flat. Naipaul looked warily at me, offered a hand, and began an hour of scornful correction. I knew nothing, he said, about his birthplace, Trinidad; I possessed the usual liberal sentimentality. It was a slave society, a plantation. Did I know anything about his writing? He doubted it. The writing life had been desperately hard. But hadn't his great novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, been acclaimed on its publication, in 1961? "Look at the lists they made at the end of the 1960s of the best books of the decade. Biswas is not there. Not there." His secretary brought coffee and retired. Naipaul claimed that he had not even been published in America until the 1970s “and then the reviews were awful-unlettered, illiterate, ignorant.” The phone rang, and kept ringing. "I am sorry," Naipaul said in exasperation, "one is not well served here." Only as the pale secretary showed me out, and novelist and servant briefly spoke to each other in the hall, did I realize that she was Naipaul's wife.
    A few days later, the phone rang. "It's Vidia Naipaul. I have just read your ... careful piece in The Guardian. Perhaps we can have lunch. Do you know the Bombay Brasserie? What about one o'clock tomorrow?| The Naipaul who took me to lunch that day was different

[còn tiếp]
James Wood: The Fun Stuff


Typical sentence

Easier to pick two of them. What’s most typical is the way one sentence qualifies another. “The country was a tyranny. But in those days not many people minded.” (“A Way in the World”, 1994.)

Câu văn điển hình:

Dễ kiếm hai câu, điển hình nhất, là cái cách mà câu này nêu phẩm chất câu kia:
"Xứ sở thì là bạo chúa. Nhưng những ngày này, ít ai "ke" chuyện này!"

Naipaul rất tởm cái gọi là quê hương là chùm kế ngọt của ông. Khi được hỏi, giá như mà ông không chạy trốn được quê hương [Trinidad] của mình, thì sao, ông phán, chắc nịch, thì tao tự tử chứ sao nữa! (1)

Tuyệt.

(1)

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever wonder what would have become of you if you had stayed in Trinidad?

NAIPAUL

I would have killed myself. A friend of mine did-out of stress, I think. He was a boy of mixed race. A lovely boy, and very bright. It was a great waste.

Sir V.S. Naipaul (1932- ): Nobel văn chương 2001

“Con người và nhà văn là một. Đây là phát giác lớn lao nhất của nhà văn. Phải mất thời gian – và biết bao là chữ viết! – mới nhập một được như vậy.”
 (Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer’s greatest discovery. It took time – and how much writing! – to arrive at that synthesis)
 V.S. Naipaul, “The Enigma of Arrival”

Trong bài tiểu luận “Lời mở đầu cho một Tự thuật” (“Prologue to an Autobiography”), V.S. Naipaul kể về những di dân Ấn độ ở Trinidad. Do muốn thoát ra khỏi vùng Bắc Ấn nghèo xơ nghèo xác của thế kỷ 19, họ “đăng ký” làm công nhân xuất khẩu, tới một thuộc địa khác của Anh quốc là Trinidad. Rất nhiều người bị quyến rũ bởi những lời hứa hẹn, về một miếng đất cắm dùi sau khi hết hợp đồng, hay một chuyến trở về quê hương miễn phí, để xum họp với gia đình. Nhưng đã ra đi thì khó mà trở lại. Và Trinidad tràn ngập những di dân Ấn, không nhà cửa, không mảy may hy vọng trở về.
Vào năm 1931, con tầu SS Ganges đã đưa một ngàn di dân về Ấn. Năm sau, trở lại Trinidad, nó chỉ kiếm được một ngàn, trong số hàng ngàn con người không nhà nói trên. Ngỡ ngàng hơn, khi con tầu tới cảng Calcutta, bến tầu tràn ngập những con người qui cố hương chuyến đầu: họ muốn trở lại Trinidad, bởi vì bất cứ thứ gì họ nhìn thấy ở quê nhà, dù một tí một tẹo, đều chứng tỏ một điều: đây không phải thực mà là mộng.

Ác mộng. 

“Em ra đi nơi này vẫn thế”. Ngày nay, du khách ghé thăm Bắc Ấn, nơi những di dân đợt đầu tiên tới Trinidad để lại sau họ, nó chẳng khác gì ngày xa xưa, nghĩa là vẫn nghèo nàn xơ xác, vẫn những con đường đầy bụi, những túp lều tranh vách đất, lụp xụp, những đứa trẻ rách rưới, ngoài cánh đồng cũng vẫn cảnh người cày thay trâu… Từ vùng đất đó, ông nội của Naipaul đã được mang tới Trinidad, khi còn là một đứa bé, vào năm 1880. Tại đây, những di dân người Ấn túm tụm với nhau, tạo thành một cộng đồng khốn khó. Vào năm 1906, Seepersad, cha của Naipaul, và bà mẹ, sau khi đã hoàn tất thủ tục hồi hương, đúng lúc tính bước chân xuống tầu, cậu bé Seepersad bỗng hoảng sợ mất vía, trốn vào một xó cầu tiêu công cộng, len lén nhìn ra biển, cho tới khi bà mẹ thay đổi quyết định.

Duyên Văn
1 2

Chính là nỗi đau nhức trí thức thuộc địa, chính nỗi chết không rời đó, tẩm thấm mãi vào mình, khiến cho Naipaul có được sự can đảm để làm một điều thật là giản dị: “Tôi gọi tên em cho đỡ nhớ”.

Em ở đây, là đường phố Port of Spain, thủ phủ Trinidad. Khó khăn, ngại ngùng, và bực bội – dám nhắc đến tên em – mãi sau này, sau sáu năm chẳng có chút kết quả ở Anh Quốc, vẫn đọng ở nơi ông, ngay cả khi Naipaul bắt đầu tìm cách cho mình thoát ra khỏi truyền thống chính quốc Âu Châu, và tìm được can đảm để viết về Port of Spain như ông biết về nó. Phố Miguel (1959), cuốn sách đầu tiên của ông được xuất bản, là từ quãng đời trẻ con của ông ở Port of Spain, nhưng ở trong đó, ông đơn giản và bỏ qua rất nhiều kinh nghiệm. Hồi ức của những nhân vật tới “từ một thời nhức nhối. Nhưng không phải như là tôi đã nhớ. Những hoàn cảnh của gia đình tôi quá hỗn độn; tôi tự nhủ, tốt hơn hết, đừng ngoáy sâu vào đó."

Image may contain: 1 person, closeup





Image may contain: 1 person, closeup


V.S. Naipaul, 1968

https://www.nybooks.com/…/v-s-naipaul-poet-of-the-displaced/

V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced

Ian Buruma   

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)
This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.
Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”
It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.
These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of Eldorado (1969), a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.
Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And, from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)
When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or in England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped, in vain, to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.
Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By going back into the world of his childhood, he found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.
If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and who tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists it could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.
My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas, or the later novel A Bend in the River (1979), his various books on India, or even his 1987 masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center (1984). It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his own voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world, and how he puts this in words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how people see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place, too, in his own inimitable words.
The second part of Finding the Center, called “The Crocodiles of Yamassoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, about how they see themselves fitting in. African Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes in a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held onto a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false mimicry. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.
Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretentions of religious fanatics, Third World mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.
 
I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, England, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. The man was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”
I am not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning India politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.
There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.
August 13, 2018, 1:39 pm




https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/15/naipaul-in-the-review/

Aug 16th 2018

https://www.economist.com/…/…/vs-naipaul-died-on-august-11th

No settled place!

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HE WAS struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk down a farm track in Wiltshire to his own front gate, to close his doors and windows on his own space, privacy and neatness, to walk on cream carpet through book-lined rooms where, still in a towelling robe at noon, he could summon a wife to make coffee or take dictation. Outside, he could wander over lawns to the manor house, or a lake where swans glided, or visit the small building that served as his wine cellar. Vidia, his friends called him; he disliked his name, but liked the derivation, from the Sanskrit for seeing and knowing. He looked hard, with his eagle stare, and saw things as they were.

The house, which he rented, was paid for by his books, more than 30 of them. He had not taken up writing to get rich or win awards; that was a dreadful thought. Dreadful! To write was a vocation. Nonetheless his fourth book, “A House for Mr Biswas”, based on his father’s search for a settled place, had luckily propelled him to fame, and in 2001 he had won the Nobel prize for literature. He had been knighted, too, though he did not care to use the title. Hence the country cottage, as well as a duplex in Chelsea. For, as Mr Biswas said, “how terrible it would have been…to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth.”

Which portion of the earth, though, was the question. Mr Naipaul’s ancestors were Indian, but that part lay in darkness, pierced only by his grandmother’s prayers and quaint rituals of eating. Journeys to India later, which resulted in three books excoriating the place, convinced him that this was not his home and never could be. He was repelled by the slums, the open defecation (picking his fastidious way through butts and twists of human excrement), and by the failure of Indian civilisation to defend itself. His place of birth and growth was Trinidad, principally Port of Spain, the humid, squalid, happy-go-lucky city, sticky with mangoes and loud with the beat of rain on corrugated iron, that provided the comedy in “Biswas” and “Miguel Street”. But he had to leave. England was his lure, as for all bright colonial boys who did not know their place, and his Trinidadian accent soon vanished in high-class articulation; but Oxford was wretched and London disappointing. He kept leaving, travelling, propelled by restlessness. Books resulted, but not calm. Not calm.

Much of his agitation, even to tears, came from the urge to write itself; what he was to write about, and in what form. The novel was exhausted. Modernism was dead. Yet literature had taken hold of him, a noble purpose to his life, the call of greatness. He had moved slowly into writing, first fascinated by the mere shapes of the letters, requesting pens, Waterman ink and ruled exercise books to depict them; then intrigued by the stories his father read to him; then, in London, banging out his first attempts on a BBC typewriter. For a long time he failed to devise a story. Beginnings were laborious, punctuation sacred: he filleted an American editor for removing his semicolons, “with all their different shades of pause”. Once going, though, he wrote at speed, hoping to reach that state of exaltation when he would understand himself, as well as his subject.

Truth-telling, defying the darkness, was his purpose. His travels through the post-colonial world, to India, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, made him furious: furious that formerly colonised peoples were content to lose their history and dignity, to be used and abandoned, and to build no institutions of their own, like the Africans of “In a Free State” squealing in their forest-language in the kitchens of tourist hotels. He mourned the relics of colonial rule, the overgrown gardens and collapsed polo pavilions, the mock-Tudor lodges and faded Victorian bric-à-brac he saw in Bundi or Kampala; but even more than these, the loss of human potential.

Many people were offended, and he cared not a whit whether they were or not. It was his duty and his gift to describe things exactly: whether the marbled endpaper of a dusty book, the stink of bed bugs and kerosene, the way that purple jacaranda flowers shone against rocks after rain, or the stupidity of most people. He resisted all editing, of writing or opinions. Without apology, he also slapped his mistress once until his hand hurt. Severity and pride came naturally to his all-seeing self.

To the plantation

The further purpose of writing was to give order to his life. He carefully recorded all events, either in his memory for constant replays or in small black notebooks consigned to his inside jacket pocket. Converting these to prose imposed a shape on disorder; it provided a structure, a shelter, protection. His rootless autobiographical heroes often dreamed of such calm places: a cottage on a hill, with a fire lit, approached at night through rain; a room furnished all in white, looking towards the sea; or in “The Mimic Men” the most alluring vision, an estate house on a Caribbean island among cocoa groves and giant immortelle trees, whose yellow and orange flowers floated down on the woods. Though he ended his days in Wiltshire, more or less content, it was somebody else’s sun he saw there, and somebody else’s history. His deep centre remained the place from which he had fled.