The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  There is one road, however, that even the cultural colonist treads warily. This is the Way, or the Path – the ‘hippie trail’ to the Enlightenment centres and Revelation strongholds of the East. The literature of these journeys has dwindled in modern times: the travellers fall prey to dysentery or dope, or forget how to write, or never come back, or return with an understanding too ineffable for syntax. The Eastern road is a humbling one; the trekker treks on tiptoe, or on all fours, cruelly burdened by his knapsack of Western guilt and self-loathing; he longs to prostrate himself before the first smiling guru who will redeem and legitimize him, and kiss away his confusion and his cares. You begin Andrew Harvey’s book feeling like an averagely soiled and venal Westerner. You finish it in far worse shape. I don’t know whether the reader will want to retrace the steps of Harvey’s quest, but he will certainly contemplate a brief visit to a health farm. At the very least, the book reminds all of us here in the West, as we sweat it out in our mangled cityscapes, that it might be time to cut down on the smoking and the drinking, the adult videos and the Big Macs.

  As the preposition in its title half-suggests, A Journey in Ladakh describes a spiritual odyssey. Yet the journey begins conventionally enough, in all respects. Enervated by the ‘bitterness and solitude’ of his twenties, harassed by ‘the complex civilised ironies and melancholies of Europe’, Harvey, a talented and tempestuous Oxford academic, makes his long-anticipated pilgrimage to Ladakh, in northern India, ‘one of the last places on earth … where a Tibetan Buddhist society can be experienced’. He sets off from Delhi, pondering a saying from the Dhammapada: ‘By oneself the evil is done, by oneself the evil is undone, no one can purify another.’ An experienced traveller, Harvey is none the less struck by the ‘splendour and majesty’ of the mountains and the ‘age and uncomfortableness’ of the buses. In Leh, he acquires the usual gushing guide, the usual Ahmed. ‘You name it, I am knowing it very fully. This is truth, sir.’

  Not yet searching for Truth, Harvey is free to write rapturously and hungrily about the crispness of the Ladakhi landscapes, the gentleness and simplicity of the people. Ladakh, it transpires, is a land that time forgot – or a land that time is just beginning to recall. It is an endangered culture, threatened by the twentieth century and by its own prelapsarian innocence. But then, Harvey sounds innocent too, in his yearning generosity, and the reader isn’t sure what goes unobserved while the ‘silent splendour’ proceeds to ‘rinse’ the author’s mind ‘of everything but calm’. ‘I have seen very little cruelty,’ Harvey is assured by an American psychologist. ‘Once I saw a child tormenting a dog. That’s about all – in three years.’ Ladakhis are taught that every living thing has been their mother in a previous incarnation. There are no unhappy lovesongs in Ladakhi folk culture, and there is no concept of tragedy in Ladakhi literature. Harvey meets with much kindness, hospitality, and good humour – a teasing gaiety. Right up to the highest levels of Enlightenment, he finds that the (Tibetan) Buddhist emphasis is on pleasure rather than asceticism. ‘Don’t worry,’ a monk tells him, as they share a flask of chang. ‘Padma-sambhava himself drank. A great deal.’

  Meanwhile, as Harvey encounters the familiar crew of Western searchers and finders, seekers and seers, he eventually notes with regret that there is also ‘ugliness’ in Ladakh, to which he devotes a brief paragraph. This is the first suggestion that Harvey is visiting a deprived area in one of the poorest countries on earth. There are, for example, ‘mangy flearidden dogs nosing for food in the gutters’. My first thought, on reading this, was that Harvey hadn’t really looked at the dogs – ‘mangy’ and ‘flearidden’ are received, automatic adjectives; and what else do pariah dogs do but nose for food in gutters? (Indian dogs are in fact highly distinctive creatures: they look like abruptly promoted rats, bemused by their sudden elevation, and pining for a quiet return to the rodent kingdom.) Harvey reminds us a dozen pages later that he spent much of his childhood in India; and we must again acknowledge how this fact, so little emphasized in the text, crucially slants A Journey in Ladakh.

  Harvey’s Indian childhood provides him with all kinds of vaccinations and culture-shock-absorbers denied to that mental traveller, the reader. In An Area of Darkness V.S. Naipaul speaks of the Indian facility for ‘ignoring the obvious’ – for ignoring the suffering, the excrement, and the stench that initially stupefy the Westerner. Indians do not see what we see. Nor does Harvey. Eclectic myopia is the necessary mysticism of India; it is what Kipling is referring to when he talks of the ‘ecstatic’ quality of the ordinary, the urban, the unknown Indian, whose life is variegated and sustained by a fabric of religious consolations. Harvey has something of this otherworldliness. To an extent that he doesn’t sufficiently discuss or allow for, he is not the pilgrim so much as the prodigal son.

  Halfway through the book, however, Harvey has yet to set off down the Path. He has had many rambles, on foot and in conversation. He tells of his troubling dreams and his husky crying-jags up in the mountains. But his moments of uplift are not readily distinguishable from mere pantheistic euphoria. The extreme, cleansing beauty of Ladakh is summoned in these pages not by description but by Harvey’s detailed reports on the joy these landscapes give him. Even the most blemished readers will feel that they could improve their spirituality without really trying if they spent more time in Ladakh and less time in, say, Piccadilly Circus. At this point, though, and quite inadvertently, Harvey stumbles across his guru, his Rinpoche (pronounced Rinpochay), and from here on A Journey in Ladakh follows Harvey’s tutorials at the feet of the great man.

  The book gets less enjoyable around now but much more original, as Harvey’s own temperament becomes its dramatic core. Throughout, Harvey presents himself openly, unpointedly, as if the book were simply a diary that had somehow fallen into the hands of a publisher. He comes across as eager, un-self-sparing, perhaps rather helpless in his pain and narrow in his humour, charged with tearing desire; and the reader feels protective of his fragile excitability.

  Thuksey Rinpoche has none of the lisping hucksterism of the Bhagwan Rajneesh or the Maharishi. He emerges as endearing and likeable, and convincingly holy and wise. He got that way by the following means: abstinence, prayer, study, meditation, and spending ten years alone in a cave. Spending ten years alone in a cave is obviously the hard bit. Your only chance of skipping this stage is by being an Incarnation right from the start, like Drukchen Rinpoche, another voluble genius – a spiritual princeling at twenty, happy in his ‘simple monk’s robe’ and his ‘small bare room’. Harvey’s induction begins. Time is short, but he manages to make the big breakthrough on his very last night, up there with the old Rinpoche: having experienced Emptiness, his first glimpse of the Void, Harvey is finally led into the Way of Compassion.

  Here the reader is in the position of anyone buttonholed by a convert’s account of revelation. You are obliged to ask yourself, however reluctantly, Why is he telling me this? Harvey certainly fails to commemorate or enshrine the moment with any new intensity in his writing. There isn’t much difference in energy, or indeed in content, between Harvey’s exaltation when he alights from the bus –

  … each winding dark stream, each small shrub clawing the sides of the road, each bird, seemed to be so full of its own essence that it hovered on the brink of dissolution, so brimming with energy that I feared often it could not survive itself …

  – on page 15, and his climactic trance of ‘Sunyata’, thirty pages from the end:

  Each object looked at once startlingly, intensely real – and completely fabricated … Even the Rinpoche looked at once imposing and a doll … The fruit in front of him seemed at once solid and so fragile that a breath could blow it away or break it.

  There are other things that trouble the reader, the Westerner marooned in his own inner city. Approximately half the book is in the form of dialogue, or distributed monologue, with Harvey allowing the munshis and mystics their full say. Now, it is hard to imagine Harvey asking the Rinpoche, ‘W
ill you teach me the meditation on Avalokiteshvara?’ with one finger tensed on the REC button of a Sony. Jam Yang, a Ladakhi acquaintance, mentions Harvey’s ‘big black notebooks, full of illegible writing’. But when did all the transcription take place? Is Harvey also granted Perfect Recall? The questions become more pressing towards the end, by which point Harvey is too blissed out to do much more than bask in the Rinpoche’s gaze. And yet the jotting got done somehow, pages of complicated and technical instruction, all in immaculate English.

  One has always understood, furthermore, that an initiation such as Harvey underwent is as non-transferable as a mantra. Yet Harvey holds nothing back. Indeed, he would seem to have written a book about it all. Isn’t it ‘materialist’, or at any rate paradoxical, to popularize and profit from an experience in which the author triumphantly turns his back on worldly preferment? Even if it should transpire that the royalties are going straight to a Ladakhi children’s home, certain anxieties would still hold, and Harvey ought to have helped purge them.

  In his Western incarnation, Harvey is a poet and a teacher. His poetry has always erred on the side of precocity and dazzle, but A Journey in Ladakh, as an act of writing, is a subdued performance. This is deliberate: early on, Harvey abjures the temptation ‘to fling names at things’ and learns to treasure ‘the gift of silence’. One of his key questions to the Rinpoche involves the conflict between spirituality and art. If spirituality grows, doesn’t art begin to end? The Rinpoche’s riposte is a good one. He concludes:

  With time and sincerity you will discover a way to work and write that does not harm you spiritually, that does not tempt you to vanity, that is the deepest expression of your spirituality. You will find a voice that is not your voice only, but the voice of Reality itself, and free from all delusion and stain of personality.

  Harvey made his journey in 1981. He doesn’t tell us whether his illuminations survived re-entry. He doesn’t tell us – he probably doesn’t yet know – whether his art can now prosper in the weak and wanton West, where the gods are Talent and Hard Work and Immersion in the Consensus Reality. Religion used to be a part of that consensus. It isn’t any longer, and Harvey will have to choose which gods to honour. A Journey in Ladakh is not the kind of book in which the reader follows the free play of perception and inquiry; it doesn’t seek inclusion in the corner of art that travel writing inhabits. It is bleached by exposure to a higher light.

  Atlantic Monthly July 1983

  More Bones

  Finding the Centre by V.S. Naipaul

  ‘You are a damn good writer, boy,’ an elderly voyager tells V.S. Naipaul early on in The Middle Passage (1962). ‘Yes, man, I watch you at the post office in the Azores. Writing off those cards so damn fast I couldn’t even read what you was writing.’

  One often speculates about the content of Naipaul’s postcards. ‘Not having nice time’? Or to an enemy. ‘Wish you were here’? James Fenton said recently in Granta magazine that travel writing is always ‘hedonistic’ in tendency. But the form has its stoical, even its self-punitive practitioners. Disquiet, futility, corruption, half-made societies, areas of darkness: these are the things that excite Naipaul, and inspire his best work.

  At first, Finding the Centre looks like an opportunist or desk-tidying volume. It consists of two unrelated ‘narratives’ written one after the other and ‘offered as a book principally for that reason’. And, at first, both pieces seem surprisingly low on energy and impact, the pacing hesitant, the prose listless, unmodulated, under-rehearsed. Wavering readers, however, are urged to put the book aside for a while and fortify themselves with the scandalous brilliance of Among the Believers, say, or The Overcrowded Barracoon. On their return they will discover that Finding the Centre is, in its quiet way, an original and highly artistic piece of work. The two narratives form a subtle and satisfying whole, and Naipaul’s instinct was sound when he chose to publish them in tandem.

  The opening section, ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’, begins with an endearing glimpse of the young Vidya, just down from Oxford, working in Langham House as a freelance for the BBC Caribbean Service. He sits at the typewriter with his knees drawn up, his shoes resting on the top rung of the chair ‘in something like a monkey crouch’ – the characteristic posture of Indian vigil. With superstitious self-effacement he writes his first sketches of Trinidadian life; he writes Miguel Street. Unable to face a return to his benighted island (even on the death of his father), Naipaul finds that fiction offers a form of mental repatriation, of homecoming. ‘Without having become a writer, I couldn’t go back … I wrote my book; I wrote another. I began to go back.’

  The journey was hard then, and it is hard now. One sees, in the diffidence and difficulty of this essay, how little of the self is present in Naipaul’s work. In the novels, a past is used, but a self is not used. In the travel writing, a controlling intelligence is present, but the self remains inscrutable and undisclosed (even during his frequent losses of self-command). There is a natural fastidiousness in him, a brahmin distance, which has to be mollified or appeased; and there are strange origins to be assimilated.

  In his mental travel at Langham House, Naipaul practised ‘magic’ – and not only the conjurations of literary talent. Naipaul’s magic was superstitious, propitiatory. He always used stolen ‘non-rustle’ BBC paper (‘it seemed less likely to attract failure’). He never numbered his pages, ‘for fear of not getting to the end’. And on the typescripts of his first four books, he never wrote his own name. ‘Such anxiety; such ambition.’ Such modest voodoo. But this too was a necessary re-enactment of the hidden past.

  Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, ‘had made himself into a journalist’ on the Trinidad Guardian: a tremendous achievement for this morose autodidact, himself the son of an immigrant farmer. He wrote local – i.e., rural, Indian, Hindu – news stories, bylined ‘The Pundit’ (in the loose sense of ‘guru’). Young Vidya took enough interest in Seepersad’s work to share his distress when it ceased. But it wasn’t until 1970 that he discovered the startling reasons for his father’s professional humiliation and personal decline.

  Investigating one of many Hindu feuds, a horrified Seepersad reported a blood sacrifice in rural Chaguanas. He then received a death threat: he would die within a week unless he performed ‘the very ceremony he had criticised’. And he submitted: ‘the goat anointed and garlanded with hibiscus … the cutlass on the tree stump’. The quarrel becomes public, and Naipaul Sr has no choice but to bluff his way through an account of his own supplication to Kali:

  He will never sacrifice again, he says; he knows his faith now. And he records it as a little triumph that he didn’t wear a loincloth … The odd, illogical bluster continues the next day, on the front page of the Sunday paper. Mr Naipaul Greets you! – No poison Last Night. ‘Good morning, everybody! As you behold, Kali has not got me yet …’

  Soon afterwards he is demoted. He becomes mentally ill; he starts to die. In 1972 V.S. Naipaul asked his mother what form her husband’s madness had taken. ‘He looked in the mirror one day,’ she replied, ‘and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream,’

  Less need be said about the second narrative, ‘The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro’, a more conventional exercise in Naipaulian travel. It is a familiar self-exposure of nerves and senses, forming a psychiatric report on the condition of an emergent nation. In this instance the Ivory Coast is on the couch; and here, for the first time, Naipaul glimpses ‘light at both ends of the African tunnel’, the possibility of African ‘completeness’. On the one hand there is prosperity, spread wealth; on the other, there is an undiminished (if illusory and often repellent) sense of cultural integrity, the African night-world of fantasy and totemic power coexisting with the sober routines of day. In a delightfully insidious way, the second narrative enacts the themes that the first narrative only states. As its beautiful title suggests, it is about magic and order; it is about naming and identifying; it is about writing.

  Finding
the Centre is not, perhaps, one of Naipaul’s most important books, though it may turn out to be of great transitional significance. Both narratives are, in effect, success stories: the Ivory Coast towers over its neighbours (‘Liberia, illiterate, impoverished’, ‘Guinea, a murderous tyranny’ – this is the more recognizable voice); and while Seepersad Naipaul suffered the nullity of the writer manqué, his son has resplendently fulfilled that lost ambition. Paradoxically, though, Naipaul is happiest with misery, and most deeply stirred by failure. After all, the postcard that tells of fine weather and good food is less fun to write – and to read – than the postcard that tells of missed connections, belly trouble, snatched passports and collapsing hotels.

  One could go a little further. In all his work Naipaul writes about civilization by writing about its absence. His great theme is that of the exile, the emigrant, the man without a society. We accept this as a central twentieth-century experience but we probably underestimate its harshness. It is not a Nabokovian experience of elegy and playful alienation. It is an experience of despair, fear and above all hatred – the journey of the silent travellers in In a Free State, who will never know

  what bus we will take when we get to the station, or what other train, what street we will walk down, what gate we will go through, and what door we will open into what room.

  (‘Tell Me Who to Kill’)

  Observer May 1984

  The Return of Eva Peron, with The Killings in Trinidad

  by V.S. Naipaul

  While planning the murder of Gale Ann Benson, Michael X also found time to start work on a novel. The narrator is a thirty-year-old Englishwoman called Lena Boyd-Richardson, but the hero, or the star, is Michael X himself. At the outset, Lena is of the opinion that ‘these natives are all shiftless good for Nothings’. Then she encounters the enigmatic Michael. She becomes strangely drawn to this strange man (‘something about him drawing you to him’); she sees him ‘leaning against the Coconut tree like some statue on a Pedestal, some god’; there is talk of ‘the fantastic following he had in the country’; she hears shouts in the street – ‘We go crown him king.’ One day Lena visits the strange man at his imposing house. He plays her ‘the Thihikosky 1812’ and she admires his ‘gigantic bookshelf’: ‘I discover that he not only have the books but actually reads and understands them I was absolutly bowld, litteraly. I took a seat, and gazed upon this marvel, Mike.’