Visiting Mrs Nabokov
Page 13
As in the earlier book, Naipaul identifies the caste system as the main form of insulation . . . The bathrooms of a Bombay hotel are ankle-deep in excrement; but the hotel employs four sweepers; the bathrooms are therefore spotless. The fingers of a food-server are grimy and rank; but the food-server is of the designated food-serving caste; nothing served by the fingers of his right hand could therefore be unclean. Caste is a necessary blinker: it also secures the people in their self-defining roles. A street sweeper uses his fingers alone to lift dust from the road into his cart; a woman cleans a giant causeway with a tiny rag, achieving in a day what a child could do with a single push on a broom; but this is their function — it is what they are born to be. Such absurdities were, until recently, a source of reassurance rather than concern; like poverty itself, they were to be 'relished as religious theatre', in Naipaul's worrying phrase. 'Wanted a Telugu Brahmin Vellanadu non-Kausiga Gotram bride below 22 years', specifies a small-ad. Naipaul tells the story of the foreign businessman who educated his untouchable servant and secured him a better job. Before long the man was a latrine-cleaner again. He had been ostracised by his own caste, and no one else would have him.
During the Emergency, an opposition pamphlet was circulated giving details of alarming tortures suffered by political prisoners. A man had had his moustache shaved off! People were forced to walk the streets with shoes on their heads! A university professor 'was pushed from side to side with smearing remarks'! These of course are caste pollutions, 'more permanently wounding, and a greater cause for hysteria, than any beating up' (and not surprisingly, when you reflect that an untouchable can be killed for having a moustache of the wrong shape). The opposition pamphlet, though, as Naipaul says, serenely confuses its aims: a plea for humanitarianism becomes a cry of reactionary caste outrage. With every step forward, India always turns in on its own past.
India gets everything wrong. India never learns: its mimicry cannot rise above travesty. Naipaul has a devastating chapter on the new and expensively equipped National Institute of Design at Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Here, important projects include a portable spraying machine with an innovatory -and very heavy — internal motor, enough to cripple any labourer who strapped it on; another team is working on a pair of bladed reaping shoes, requiring a kind of bucolic gambol from the hale and happy peasant. 'Do you know', someone said to Naipaul in Delhi, 'that the investment in bullock carts is equivalent to the total investment in the railways?' Naipaul was about to comment on this melancholy proposition when his interlocutor went on wistfully: 'Now. If we could improve the performance of the bullock cart by 10 per cent . . .' And, sure enough, high science is now seeking to improve the bullock cart. At some open-air laboratory in the south, in an attempt to analyse the animal's stresses and pressures, there is a bullock as thoroughly 'wired up as any astronaut'. At the same time, on any Indian road, you can see the peasant improving the performance of his bullock
in the immemorial way, by pushing a stick up its anus. It is an unregarded but necessary part of the idyll, one of the obscene sights of the Indian road: the hideous cruelty of pre-industrial life, cruelty constant and casual, and easily extended from beast to man.
In some Indian villages children are preferred to men for the few available jobs, because they are cheaper; children become a source of wealth; suicidal overpopulation is guaranteed. Needy villagers still sell their wives to the 'cages' (the brothels) of the major cities to repay small debts to employers. Bonded labour, slavery as punishment, campaigns of terror against landless untouchables, deliberate starvation: 'none of this was new,' says Naipaul, 'but suddenly in India it was news.' Accordingly, the big cities have meanwhile begun to feel themselves 'under siege'. Every day, it is said, 1,500 people arrive in Bombay to live. They gather in packed, cloacal settlements, where the huts are so crowded that families often sleep in shifts. Now the urban poor have been disinherited even of their alms: 'by becoming too numerous they have lost their place in the Hindu system and have no claim on anyone.' A politician has predicted that the cities would soon 'be barricaded against the poor and guarded by machine-guns'. And, in Delhi, the expulsion of the poor has already begun.
Naipaul sees in India now the complete and graphic failure of Mahatma Gandhi, and of the Gandhianism cheapened by the likes of Vinoba Bhave and Mr Desai. In seeking to awaken India with the example of his courage and asceticism, Gandhi turned India back on itself, on its own atavistic self-absorption. He awakened the old India.
With or without Mrs Gandhi, independent India . . . would have arrived at a state of emergency . . . However it is resolved, India will at the end be face to face with its own emptiness, the inadequacy of an old civilisation which is cherished because it is all men have but which no longer answers their needs.
It is a sombre valediction to a sombre book. Although always measured and elegant, there is nothing writerly in these pages; there is no relish. In An Area of Darkness, Naipaul could play the country off against his own perverse anxieties and misplaced expectations; he could capture the almost definitive poignancy of the Indian people, with their teeming, incomprehensible dreams and hurts; he could 'ignore the obvious'. He cannot any longer. The early memoir was humbling because of its sheer quality, because it seemed chasteningly good. India: A Wounded Civilisation attempts something less congenial: it is a long and angry stare at the obvious; it is humbling in a different way, because it seems chasteningly right.
New Statesman, 1977
'FRANKFURT'
Publishers always talk of the Frankfurt Book Fair — or, more simply, 'Frankfurt' - with mystical awe and longing. If anthropologists were ever to make a study of publishers (and perhaps the subject is worth a paper or two), then 'Frankfurt' would have to be accorded totemic status, connected with race history and the birth of the universal mind, when the first publishers swung down from the trees. In one of the old myths, it is said that the Gutenberg Bible, on completion, was taken straight to Frankfurt, where they immediately had a book fair about it. Eden, Byzantium, Elysium, Oz, Frankfurt: to hear publishers talk, you'd think that Frankfurt was a place where only the best and bravest publishers go when they die.
The Frankfurt fable has three main components. First, the Book Fair is made to seem an event of scarcely conceivable glamour. The week-long jamboree is evidently a round of sumptuous hedonism: ensconced in ten-star hotels, the publishers gorge themselves on expensive food and drink, and have the kind of sexual encounters with each other that used to be characterised in novels by phrases like, 'Towards morning, he took her again.' You hear stories of... well, of what, exactly? You hear stories that, once decoded, sound like the usual fallout from the annual office party; heavy drinking, tearful passes made at secretaries, and so on. But how could the outsider understand? In the magical air of 'Frankfurt', these things must seem very, very different.
Frankfurt is also, apparently, a clearing-house for ideas, for creativity, for the exchange of geopolitical truths. In the tea houses and coffee shops of this spangled garden city, the thinkers and seekers of the publishing world can really get together and thrash out such topics as the meaning of life and the destiny of the planet. Liberated from the usual chores of the office, the great men can let their minds dance free upon the spume of things; for a week Frankfurt becomes a kind of Mensaberg, and the whole city thrums with high IQs.
Third — and here the publisher will feign a weary, regretful air — Frankfurt is the arena of super-deals, of mega-business, of transactions so high-powered that entire currencies are but pawns in the publishers' vast dream. Then, too, there are betrayals, twists, scams, stings. All day the stalls groan with egregious gullings, unimaginable skankings. Million-pound contracts, zillion-dollar auctions - these are commonplace. Wall Street looks to Frankfurt in terror as denominations boom and bust. Seen as a triple vertex of high commerce, high culture and high living - clearly, in mid-October, the Frankfurt Book Fair is the place to be.
Listening between the lines, of course, the
outsider had always suspected that the whole thing was a goons' rodeo. And so it proved. Driving in from the airport, I brought to mind the descriptions I had heard of the main exhibition hall where the Fair is staged — the biggest exhibition hall in the world, the largest building in the world, the most enormous edifice in the history of mankind. Well actually the whole of outer Frankfurt resembles an exhibition hall. Corporation office blocks, like upended matchboxes in layered glass and steel, form the only extrusions on the flat land. Nestle, Olivetti, Eurohaus, ICI, IBM. These outbuildings of capitalist HQ are no more interesting than the architects'
models they were based on; they look like lots for sale, The taxi pulls up at one of the international, interchangeable four-star doghouses. I have seen the future (you can't help reflecting), and it stinks.
I didn't get to see Frankfurt proper until the next day, thanks partly to the wanderlust of the cabbie who drove me to the Fair. Expressively bannered as the Frankfurter Buch-messe, the exhibition area resembles an airport in dire need of renovation, and Halle 5 (the scene of all the international action) a windy hangar where half-a-dozen Hindenbergs might have slept. It was Tuesday, the eve of the official opening. Inside, the publishers hastily assembled their stalls. These were low-echelon men, naturally (the bosses tending to fly out later in the week); dressed in berets and chunky sweaters, they looked van-sick and liverish after two days of Belgian roads and Belgian meals. But they were cheerful, and very expectant.
You can say this for the Book Fair: it reminds you, with great force, of the extremes of human variety. With 8o-odd countries represented, and God knows how many hundred thousand books on display or stowed in boxes or as yet only twinkling in publishers' eyes, there is no gainsaying the superabundance of Earthling enthusiasms. Even before the opening it was a world tour in miniature to stroll through the half-completed stalls.
The Cuban stand was a shambles, featuring countless unopened boxes and two swarthy figures slumped over a bottle of Havana Club. The Kenya stand consisted of a dapper young black, a framed photograph of the latest tyrant, and nothing else. Decor varied: the Portuguese section was all bare brown wood softened by sashes and curtains; the Unesco stall, with its piping of light blue bars, typically combined the feel of a bamboo hut with that of a Habitat kitchen. One of the main Italian stands was completely deserted. The Nigerian stand had yet to be built.
But such glimpses of human multiplicity seemed as nothing the following day, when the actual books adorned the shelves in all their vulgar and radiant diversity. Every year there is an informal competition for the Most Unlikely Title (I spoke to one book-packager who talked fondly of an old favourite, Industrial Sealants and Adhesives). My search for a contender took me first to the stands sponsored by the emergent nations. In the Zimbabwean section there was a wide selection of books by and about Robert Mugabe, the odd novel (Under a Raging Sky, etc.), and monographs on Shona customs from the Mambo Press. More parochial still was the stand of neighbouring Uganda: The Crisis of Secondary School Education in Uganda, 1960—70, Abudu Kayizzi's Revision Primary Mathematics. Of course, these men weren't selling but buying, and hoping for distribution rights from other countries, the Third World presence at Frankfurt often being no more than a tentacle of international relations.
The titles in the European stands at first seem a little more adventurous, but after a while some of the books look as familiar as the A to Z sported by the AA stall. Yo, Claudius, for instance, rings a bell, as does Princesca Daisy; and you don't have to puzzle long over El 'shock' del Futuro by Alvin Toffler. Mills and Boon, the pap heartache people, clearly qualify as a country of their own, or even a planet: A World of Romance. The titles shimmer by — Untamed Witch, Dark Enigma, Dangerous Rapture. These too are cravenly duplicated across Europe: II Tempio della Luna, Si Beau et Si Etrange. No doubt some frazzled translator is scratching his head over the latest run of hot paperbacks from Beeline Books in New York: To Sir, With Lust, How Do I Lust Thee, Lust Me or Leave Me, To Know Her Is To Lust Her.
For it is to the New World that one must go for the prize lemons, for horrendous superfluity, for that mix of the frivolous and morbidly perverse. I have never seen so many books geared to the anxieties of sexual performance. What is going on over there? The New Couple: Women and Gay Men provides a clue. Ditto with Finding Hope Again:
A Pastor's Guide to Counseling Depressed Persons, With sound counselling you'll soon be back to How to Renovate Yourself from Head to Toe and Good Lovemaking. Why not forget the whole thing and curl up with The Second Quitter's Companion or Fifty New Creative Poodle Grooming Styles?
In the hubbub of this endless hypemarket the publishers hedge and bob. They wield their special Frankfurt Diaries -all appointment-crammed. The hall is loud with false laughter and willed camaraderie. What is this year's 'Pope book' (i.e. the high-priced dud)? What will happen at the Harper and Row auction (for Thomas Thompson's bosomy novel of Fame, Passion, and Vengeance, Celebrity)? They cruise and hunker, closing those deals. George! Fran! Bud! Yukio, Sven, Fetnab! Simone, Gunther, Rashid! Bernardo! Ogbogbo! Piotr!
The big business is done at night, in the big hotels — the teaky Schlösser, the shadowy Gasthäuser. This would seem to be the trend: in fact the coolest of the cool don't take stands any more but simply wallow in their suites, receiving visitors and torturing room-service. In the bars of what remains of old Frankfurt, and in the dives and supermarkets and cash-and-carry outlets of the red-light district, you will find the atmosphere of the affordable resort: block your ears, and it could be Biarritz, or Blackpool, on a rainy night. 'Is this your first Frankfurt?' everyone asked me. 'Yes,' I said, 'this is my first time' (be gentle with me, Frankfurt). 'Oh well then,' they all said. 'You'll like it better the second time.' But there may not be a second time. Actually that's a pretty good definition of frivolity: going to Frankfurt, as a non-publisher, for the second time. Enough of this carping, and these whimpers of exclusion. You never feel at your best, perhaps, when you crash the works outing of another firm.
Observer, 1981
MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK
This piece is a book review — with a couple of differences. It was read out loud by me in Haifa, Israel, and in the presence of the book's author. The occasion was a Saul Bellow Conference organised, or spearheaded, by the distinguished Israeli novelist A.B. ('Bully') Yehoshua. At this convocation of Bellovians most of the papers were delivered by American academics. Jolted awake on my first morning by a call from the foyer telling me that 'the Conference miniboose' was revving in the forecourt, about to begin its journey to the Conference Centre, I then sat breakfastless through two or three lectures called things like 'The Caged Cash-Register: Tensions between Existentialism and Materialism in Dangling Man'. During the first session Bellow was overheard to say: 'If I have to listen to another word of this I think I'm going to die.' Thereafter he was not often to be found at the Conference Centre. He was in stalwart attendance, however, on the day I gave my paper alongside Amos Oz and Alan Lelchuk.
The 'wallet' referred to in the first sentence was a leatherette lecture-pouch presented to each delegate on arrival with the compliments of Bank Hapoalim. My assignment was the novel More Die of Heartbreak, published later the same year (1987).
I am delighted to be here, for all sorts of reasons: the sun, the sea breezes, this new wallet, the convulsive coughing fits that will punctuate my discourse. And I have further grounds for self-satisfaction. We are all familiar with our Herzogs and Humboldts and Hendersons, we all know our Augies and our Arturs; but nobody here has read the new one. Perhaps you have heard tell of it, you are acquainted with its lovely title: More Die of Heartbreak. But only I have read it. That is to say I have reread it; and I become more and more convinced that you cannot read writers like Saul Bellow; you can only reread them. I have read the new one — and you haven't. Not even Saul Bellow has read it. Oh, he has peered at the typescript, he has agonised over the proofs. He has written it. But he has not read it, as I have.
Once the first days of creation are over (once life has been assigned to various hunches and inklings), writing is decision-making. After the big decisions, the medium-sized decisions; then the little decisions, lots of little decisions, two or three hundred a page. When Bellow reads More Die of Heartbreak he isn't reading; he is squirming and smarting, feeling the pulls and shoves and aftershocks of a million decisions. For him the book is a million clues to a million skirmishes — scars, craters, bullet-holes. For me, it is a seamless fait accompli. And I am here to tell you - I am literally here to tell you - that it is as dense, as funny, as thought-crammed, as richly associational and as cruelly contemporary as anything he has written. He's over seventy. What's the matter with him?
Here are further grounds for extreme complacence on my part: Bellow has been reading Philip Larkin. Now the narrator of More Die of Heartbreak grew up in Paris at the feet of heavy thinkers like Boris Souvarine and Alexandre Kojève who talked about geopolitics and Hegel and Man at the End of History and wrote books called things like Existenz (note the powerful z on the end, rather than the more modest ce). I grew up in Swansea, Wales, and Philip Larkin was a good deal around. He didn't talk about posthistorical man. He talked about the psychodrama of early baldness. Bellow quotes Larkin as follows: 'In everyone there sleeps a sense of life according to love.' 'He also says that people dream "of all they might have done had they been loved. Nothing cures that".' And nothing - i.e. death - did cure that. Love was not a possibility for Larkin. Because to him death overarched love and rendered it derisory. He died in 1985; by Bellow's age, incidentally, he had been dead for years. For him, death crowded love out. With Bellow, it seems to be the other way around. More die of heartbreak, says the title. Well, Larkin never had any heartbreak, not in that sense.* Perhaps one of the many, many things the new novel has to say is that you need heartbreak, to keep you human. You need it to keep America off your back. (The book is sometimes like a rumour of war against America.) The right kind of heartbreak, mind you. Anyway, whether you need it or not, you are certainly going to get it.