An Area of Darkness

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was all there in Kipling, barring the epilogue of the Indian inheritance. A journey to India was not really necessary. No writer was more honest or accurate; no writer was more revealing of himself and his society. He has left us Anglo-India; to people these relics of the Raj we have only to read him. We find a people conscious of their roles, conscious of their power and separateness, yet at the same time fearful of expressing their delight at their situation: they are all burdened by responsibilities. The responsibilities are real; but the total effect is that of a people at play. They are all actors; they know what is expected of them; no one will give the game away. The Kipling administrator, perpetually sahib-ed and huzoor-ed, hedged around by fabulous state, is yet an exile, harassed, persecuted, misunderstood by his superiors and the natives he strives to elevate; and on his behalf Kipling can rise to towering heights of mock-anger and can achieve a mock-aggressive self-pity: play within play.

  At home they, the other men, our equals, have at their disposal all that town can supply – the roar of the streets, the lights, the pleasant faces, the millions of their own kind, and a wilderness of pretty, fresh-coloured Englishwomen.… We have been deprived of our inheritance. The men at home are enjoying it all, not knowing how fair and rich it is.

  Self-congratulation coquettishly concealed by complaint to be the better revealed: it is the feminine note of the club writer who has accepted the values of the club and genuinely sees the members as they see themselves. It is the tone exactly described by Ada Leverson in her novel Tenterhooks, published in 1912:

  ‘I feel all the time as if he [Kipling] were calling me by my Christian name without an introduction, or as if he wanted me to exchange hats with him.… He’s so fearfully familiar with his readers.’

  ‘But you think he keeps at a respectful distance from his characters?’

  To say that Kipling is a club writer is of course to use a loaded word. The club is one of the symbols of Anglo-India. In Something of Myself Kipling tells how every evening in Lahore he went to dine at the club and there met people who had just been reading what he had written the day before. He regarded this as a valuable discipline. The approbation of the club was important to him: he wrote about the club for the club. In this lies his peculiar honesty, his value as a poetic chronicler of Anglo-India. But in this also lies his special vulnerability, for by applying to the club only the values of the club he has exposed both the club and himself.

  His work is of a piece with the architecture of the Raj; and within the imperial shell we find, not billiard-room cartoons or a suburban taste in novels, as in the district clubs, but Mrs Hauksbee, the wit, the queen, the manipulator and card of Simla. How she suffers from the very generosity which sought to bestow on her the attributes she desired! Her wit is no wit; and to us today the susceptibility of her admirers is a little provincial, a little sad. Yet the circle – queen, courtiers, jester – is so complete; something, whether we approve of it or not, has been created by which men can live in special circumstances; and it seems an intolerable cruelty to point to its falseness. A response to Kipling cannot but be personal and on this level. He is too honest and generous; he is too simple; he is too gifted. His vulnerability is an embarrassment; the criticism he invites can only seem a type of brutality. Mr Somerset Maugham has already disposed of the pretensions of Mrs Hauksbee. She once said of the voice of another woman that it was like the screech of the brakes of an underground train as it came into Earl’s Court station. If Mrs Hauksbee were what she claimed to be, Mr Maugham commented, she had no business to be in Earl’s Court; and she certainly oughtn’t to have gone there by underground. There is much in Kipling that can be dealt with in this way. He genuinely saw people bigger than they were; they, perhaps less securely, saw themselves bigger than they were. They reacted one on the other; fantasy hardened into conviction. And to us they are now all betrayed.

  *

  There is a night train from Delhi to Kalka; from Kalka you continue to Simla by road or by the narrow-gauge, toy railroad that winds up the mountains. I went by road, in the company of a young IAS officer, encountered on the train to Kalka. He spoke sadly of the decay of the town since 1947. To him, as to all Indians, the myth was real. The glory of Simla was part of the Indian inheritance, which was being squandered: there were now pan-shops in the town. While we talked rustles came from the back of the van from the officer’s pet weaver-birds. They were in a large covered cage, and when the rustles appeared to be reaching a pitch of frenzy the officer clucked and cooed and spoke soothingly to the cage. From time to time we had a glimpse of the toy train going into or coming out of a toy tunnel. It was mid-January, the air frosty, but the shirtsleeved passengers leaned passively out of open windows as though, this being India, it was always summer.

  And at first it seemed that the officer was right, that Kipling’s city had altogether decayed. It was wet and cold; the narrow streets were muddy; barefooted stunted men stamped uphill with heavy loads strapped to their backs; their caps recalled Kashmir and those ragged porters who ran shouting after every arriving bus at village resorts. Could glamour ever have been found here? But so it was with every Indian landscape known from books. Deception, one thought; and then, decay. But it was only that the figures in the foreground had to make their impact before fading from a vision grown as selective as when, in a dark room full of familiar objects, one’s eyes have grown accustomed to the dark.

  Vision contracted: Simla outlined itself: a town built on a series of ridges, a network of switchback lanes in which it was easy to get lost. In my imagination the Mall was broad and straight; it turned out to be narrow and winding. Every few yards notices warned against spitting; but the pan-shops were there, as the IAS man had said, and the streets were stained red with betel-juice. The photographers’ windows carried faded photographs of Englishwomen in styles of the thirties. They were not relics; the shops were busy. But in India everything is inherited, nothing is abolished; everything grows out of something else, and now the Mall was given over to the offices, clamantly labelled, of the Himachal Pradesh administration, whose officers drove about the narrow lanes in green Chevrolets of the late nineteen-forties: decay upon decay. The sun sank behind the mountains; the cold grew intense. The unsettling figures disappeared, the bazaar impression faded. The ridge sparkled with electric light, and in the lamplit darkness the town centre defined itself more clearly: an English country town of fairyland, of mock mock-styles, the great ecclesiastical building asserting the alien faith, the mean-fronted shops, ornately gabled, out of which nightcapped, nightgowned men might have appeared, holding lanterns or candles: a grandiloquent assertion of a smallness and cosiness that never were. A fabulous creation, of fantasy supported by a confidence which it was impossible not to admire. But it was not what I had expected. My disappointment was the disappointment we momentarily feel when, after reading of the house at Combray, we see the photograph of the house at Illiers. The vision is correct; but it is a child’s myth-creating vision. No city or landscape is truly real unless it has been given the quality of myth by writer, painter or by its association with great events. Simla will never cease to be Kipling’s city: a child’s vision of Home, doubly a fairyland. India distorts and enlarges; with the Raj it enlarged upon what was already a fantasy. This is what Kipling caught; this is his uniqueness.

  During the night it snowed, the first snow of the winter. In the morning the hotel servant, like a magician, announced: ‘Barf! Snow.’ He pulled the curtains to one side and I saw the valley white and wet with mist. After breakfast the mist cleared. The roofs dripped; the crows cawed, flapping from pine to pine, shaking down snow; the dogs barked far below and there was a sound as of revelry. On the government boards marked ‘Himachal Pradesh’ – sweet name: the Snow State – snow lay emblematically, as in a Christmas poster. The Mall was busy with holidaymakers, doing the morning promenade. For a long way down the snow was still thick. As we left Simla farther and farther behind, high up in the sky, the s
now thinned, became like scattered cakings of salt on hard ground, then disappeared; and it was through a thick and very white Punjab fog, which delayed trains and grounded aircraft, that we crawled all the way to Delhi.

  To understand the eighteenth-century England that one saw in India, it was necessary to see it as part of India. Warren Hastings can only with difficulty be read as an Englishman; as an Indian, he fits. But the Raj, though so completely of India, is part of nineteenth-century England.

  *

  Consider Adela and Ronny in A Passage to India. The sun is going down over the Chandrapore maidan; and they, turning their backs on the polo game, walk to a distant seat, to talk. He apologizes for his bad temper earlier in the day. She cuts into his apologies and says: ‘I’ve finally decided we are not going to be married, my dear boy.’ They are both disturbed. But they remain controlled; nothing passionate or profound is said; and the moment passes. Then Adela says:

  ‘We’ve been awfully British over it, but I suppose that’s all right.’

  ‘As we are British, I suppose it is.’

  It is an amusing exchange, still fresh after forty years. It might be said that ‘British’, as Adela uses it, is given point by the imperial Indian background; but the word might have been used by many of Forster’s characters and its intention would have been the same. To Forster’s characters their Englishness is like an extra quality which challenges, and is challenged by, all that is alien. It is a formulated ideal; it needs no elucidation. The word British, as used by Adela, can almost be spelt with a small b. It is difficult to imagine the word being so used in Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice it occurs once, when Mr Collins, on his first visit to Longbourn, is speaking of the virtues of his patroness’s daughter, Miss de Bourgh:

  ‘Her indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her being in town; and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine myself one day, has deprived the British court of its brightest ornament.’

  For Jane Austen and Mr Collins the word is geographical; it is entirely different from Adela’s ‘British’.

  Between the two uses of the word lie a hundred years of industrial and imperial power. In the beginning of this period we can sense the swiftness of change, from stagecoach to railway, from the essays of Hazlitt to those of Macaulay, from the Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend. In painting it is like a second springtime: Constable discovering the sky, Bonington discovering the glory of light, of sand and sea: youth and delight that can communicate themselves to us even today. It is a period of newness and self-discovery: Dickens discovering England, London discovering the novel; newness even in Keats and Shelley. It is a period of vigour and expectation. And then, abruptly, there come fulfilment and middle-age. The process of self-discovery is over; the English national myth appears, complete. The reasons are well known: the narcissism was justifiable. But with this there was loss. A way of looking was weakened. What was English was settled; by this the world was to be assessed, and in the travel-writing of the century we can observe a progressive deterioration, from Darwin (1832) to Trollope (1859) to Kingsley (1870) to Froude (1887). More and more these writers are reporting not on themselves but on their Englishness.

  At the beginning of this period Hazlitt can dismiss the English writings of Washington Irving with scorn because Irving insisted on finding Sir Roger de Coverleys and Will Wimbles in a country that had moved on since the days of The Spectator. Hazlitt’s myth-rejecting attitude is like the attitude of those today who object to British travel advertising in the United States. (‘Loverly Way to London,’ says the advertisement in Holiday in 1962. ‘Fly Sabena to Manchester. Drive right off past thatch-roofed cottages and start wending your way to London. Gradually. Beautifully.’) But soon the myth becomes important; and in the new narcissism class consciousness as well as race consciousness are heightened. Punch in the 1880s has Cockneys talking in the vanished accents of Sam Weller. The consciousness of class in Forster is altogether different from the knowledge of class as an almost elemental division in Jane Austen. In a country as fragmented by class as England the stereotype might be considered necessary if only as an aid to communication. But, excessively cherished, it limits vision and inquiry; it occasionally even rejects the truth.

  To this dependence on the established and reassuring might be traced the singular omissions of English writing in the last hundred years. No monumental writer succeeded Dickens. In the English conditions the very magnitude of his vision, its absorption into myth, precluded as grand an attempt. London remains Dickens’s city – how few writers since appear to have looked at the city! There have been novels about Chelsea and Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court; but on the modern mechanized city, its pressures and frustrations, English writers have remained silent. It is precisely this, on the other hand, which is one of the recurring themes of American writers. It is the theme, in the words of the novelist Peter de Vries, of city people who live and die without roots, suspended, ‘like the fabled mistletoe, between the twin oaks of home and office’. It is an important theme, and not specifically of America; but in England, where narcissism applies to country, class and self, it has been reduced to the image of the bank clerk, always precise, always punctual, who farcically erupts into misdemeanour.

  When such a theme is ignored it is not surprising that there exists no great English novel in which the growth of national or imperial consciousness is chronicled. (It is useless to look for this in the work of historians. They, more than novelists, work within the values of their society; they serve those values. It is undeniable that the possession of an empire greatly influenced British attitudes in the nineteenth century; yet G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History – regarded, I believe, as a classic – devotes exactly one page and a half to ‘Overseas Influences’, and in this vein: ‘… the postage stamp kept the cottage at home in touch with the son who had “gone to the colonies”, and often he would return on a visit with money in his pocket, and tales of new lands of equality …’) An early novel by Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock, attempted the theme in a small way; this is the story of a farmer who strives, by a superior nationalism, to establish his claim to the superior class into which he has married. For the rest, we are presented with stages in the transformation, which can thus best be charted through individual books.

  Osborne in Vanity Fair sees himself as a solid ‘British merchant. But British’ here is only contrasted with, say, ‘French’. It is no more than the patriotism of someone like de Quincey. Thackeray’s solid British merchant would dearly have liked his son to marry Miss Swartz, the West Indian Negro heiress. Mr Bumble and Mr Squeers are English; but that is not their most important feature. Twenty years later, however, what different characters begin to appear in Dickens! There is Mr Podsnap of Our Mutual Friend, he knows foreigners and is proud to be British. John Halifax is only a gentleman; Rider Haggard dedicates one of his books to his son in the hope that he will become an Englishman and a gentleman; it was with a similar hope that Tom Brown was sent off by his father to Rugby. By the time we get to Howards End even Leonard Bast can be found saying ‘I am an Englishman’, and meaning by this more than de Quincey ever meant; now the word is loaded indeed.

  Writers cannot be blamed for being of their society; and in the novel, then, interest shifts from human behaviour to the Englishness of behaviour, Englishness held up for approval or dissection: a shift of interest reflected in the difference between the inns of the early Dickens and Simpson’s Restaurant in the Strand just seventy-five years later, of which Forster in Howards End (1910) says:

  Her eyes surveyed the restaurant, and admired its well-calculated tributes to the solidity of our past. Though no more Old English than the works of Kipling, it had selected its reminiscences so adroitly that her criticism was lulled, and the guests whom it was nourishing for imperial purposes bore the outer semblance of Parson Adams and Tom Jones. Scraps of talk jarred oddly on the ear.

  ‘Right you are! I’ll cable out to Uganda this evening …’ />
  Forster has made his point exactly. He has pointed at the contradiction in the myth of a people overtaken by industrial and imperial power. Between the possession of Uganda and the conscious possession of Tom Jones there is as little connexion as there is between the stories of Kipling and the novels of his contemporary, Hardy. So, at the height of their power, the British gave the impression of a people at play, a people playing at being English, playing at being English of a certain class. The reality conceals the play; the play conceals the reality.

  This endears them to some and exposes them to the charge of hypocrisy from others. And in this imperialist period, when the pink spreads like a rash on the map of the world, the English myth is like a developing language. Quantities alter; new elements are added; codification, repeatedly attempted, cannot keep pace with change; and always between the projected, adjustable myth – Parson Adams in Simpson’s, the harassed empire-builder in Uganda or India – and the reality there is some distance. It is long after Waterloo, in a period which begins with the disasters of the Crimea and ends with the humiliations of South Africa, that we have a period of jingoistic militarism. It is after the empire has been built that the concept arises of the merchant and administrator as an empire-builder; and, sternly, Kipling summons the rulers of the world to their pleasant duties. It is the play of puritans. At Home it creates Simpson’s in the Strand. In India it creates Simla, the summer seat of the Raj where, as Philip Woodruff tells us in The Guardians, the ‘affectation’ existed among officials, at about the same time, ‘of being very English, of knowing nothing at all about India, of eschewing Indian words and customs’.