The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  A caricature of a caricature; but Jamal, turning Malik into an American, infecting Malik, in the security of Trinidad, with the American-type racial vehemence Malik had so far only parodied, was creating a monster. “Nigger,” success as a kind of racial revenge: these are among the themes of the novel Malik was writing about himself in a cheap lined quarto writing pad, solid unparagraphed pages in pencil or ballpoint, the writing small, very little crossed out, the number of words noted at the top of each page. At least fifty pages were written; and some of them survived the events they seem so curiously to foreshadow.

  The setting is Guyana. A well-appointed house, Malik’s, is being described: modern furniture imported from England, fitted carpets, radio phonograph, records, “a gigantic bookshelf Shakepeare [sic] Shaw Marx Lenin Trotsky Confucius Hugo.” The narrator takes up “Salammbo that masterpiece of Flaubert’s” and finds it dust-free. “I discover that he not only have the books but actually reads and understands them I was absolutely bowld, litteraly. I took a seat, and gazed upon this marvel, Mike.”

  The narrator is a thirty-year-old Englishwoman, Lena Boyd-Richardson. She has been four years in Guyana, doing a bogus job created for her in the firm of Clarkson’s by Sir Harold, a friend of her father’s; and she is “really of the opinion these natives are all shiftless good for Nothings.” Her house is not far from Michael Malik’s, and she often sees “Mike leaning against the Coconut tree like some statue on a Pedestal, some god, and his little subjects, his little people, Paying Homage to him.” He is in the habit of greeting her in pidgin: “Like it gwine rain today, mam”; but they do not meet until, for some reason (the early pages are lost), she visits the house. And then “to top it all he was even talking with a slight Cockney accent to stupify me the more.” He plays some jazz for her on the phonograph, and the “Thihikosky 1812”; and then the time comes for her to bid “goodbye to this Amazing man with the Promise to call again.” So the first chapter ends.

  Chapter Two is titled “Run in with Fate.” Lena doesn’t call again; but she drives past Mike’s house every day and begins to note “his eyes sometimes Mocking and laughing.” She notes his light complexion and wonders about his idling, his shabby clothes, his “weird double Life.” “And then again I find myself closing up my doors at night … the truth I am [afraid deleted] scared I am mortally afraid of this man of this Mike the grinning ape, and I can’t help liking him, something about him drawing you to him. I wonder how he would look without that Big Beard.”

  The run-in with fate follows. Lena, driving through the town one day, nearly runs over a young girl. The girl is Jenny, Mike’s eldest daughter, and Lena offers to take her home. Jenny is uneasy, “scared of what daddy will do if he finds out”; but allows herself to be driven home. “And there was Mike leaning against the tree as usual with his little retinue around him.” Terror. “Mike’s voice boomed, ‘Jenny come here.’” Jenny screams and doesn’t move; she is “shaking too much to say anything sensible.” “Was it fear?” Lena wonders. “And if so Fear of what?” Mike’s wife, pregnant, runs up “at a fantastic speed despite her large Stomach.” Mike himself doesn’t leave the coconut tree; but “His Retinue Pulled slightly away from where they were but still out of earshot.” Jenny is led by her younger sister to Mike. Lena—curiously choosing this moment to observe “what a great Bond there was” between Jenny and her father—explains that nothing has happened. Mike kisses Jenny, who sobs and says, “They didn’t touch me, daddy.” He walks off towards the house, but the girl still sobs.

  “It took me Just one minute to see why the child kept insisting ‘They didn’t touch me,’ Just a minute to see why she was so scared, and what of. For her father came walking out of the front door as Calm as Ever with a shot gun Under his Arm and Box of shells stuffing some down in his Pocket.” Mike’s wife is about to faint, but Lena catches her; and when Mike comes to her, “she then made a most amazing Transformation, recaptured her poise and said to her husband, ‘Be Careful darling, and think first All the time.’ For someone who did not know the happenings before they could never imagine what this man was going to do. There was that look of finality about him.” Jenny pleads; Lena—“I too was like if I was dumb”—is silent; the wife faints. And Mike walks down the road to the corner.

  This is how Lena becomes involved with the family. After some missing pages we find Lena and Mike’s wife exchanging memories of England, and Lena hears of Mike’s courtship. Nothing, apparently, has happened; tension has been created for its own sake, to prove a point about Mike. Not the least illogical aspect of the scene—with a child screaming, a wife fainting—is the stress on Mike as a family man; but Jamal, in his article about Malik for younger readers, had laid that on with a heavy American hand. A few more pages are missing here; but it is fairly clear that some kind of relationship has developed between Lena and Mike.

  And then something extraordinary happens. There is a stumble in the narrative: the writer, without knowing it, suddenly loses his narrator, Lena. In a few connected lines the writer moves from the first-person narrative to third person and then back to first. But now it is Sir Harold, Lena’s father’s friend, appearing in Guyana, who is the narrator.

  Sir Harold comes upon Mike addressing a street-corner meeting in pidgin. Mike’s speech is given at length; it is quite incoherent. People must work; but there is nothing wrong with being lazy; Mike himself is lazy and can be seen any day standing in the shade of his tree; he doesn’t like to work; but he has worked hard since he was fourteen, and he has worked in England; in England no one pays for the doctor and everything is free, but the taxes are high. The crowd, mixed African and Asian, receives this speech ecstatically. Then Mike, switching from pidgin, says to Sir Harold: “You come late Sir Harold, I am never at my best when I have my wife waiting.”

  Lena, lost for some pages, now reappears. “‘What do you think about him,’ she asked. I met him once before in England, I said, now I don’t know for he seems somehow different. We noticed a movement in the bushes to the side of the house ‘Don’t Pay any attention to that’ she said ‘that Probably some of his Retinue, wherever he is you can be sure there will be some of them hanging around.’ I felt a Cold wind Pass through me, and decided to go inside.” Mike and his wife prepare to leave. “Jenny will not sleep if I am not at home,” Mike says. And Sir Harold continues: “I stood at the door and watched them walk down the Path about thirty seconds after I saw six dark figures slowly follow them ‘England was never like this’ I said to myself and turned inside.”

  The pages are now disconnected: “We could not tear ourselves away from the Presence of this man”—“the fantastic following he had in the country”—Mike ill with malaria, contracted in Africa when he was young (“never less than two score People standing around the house with a look of anxiety about them”: which reads like a borrowed sentence)—Sir Harold offering a job with Clarkson’s—shouts in the street: “We go crown him king.”

  An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally. And Malik’s primitive novel is like a pattern book, a guide to later events. That scene of causeless tension at the house with the daughter, the wife, the retinue: just such a scene was witnessed at Arima by a black woman visitor on the Sunday before Joe Skerritt was murdered. “I can’t describe it. I spent just ten minutes in that house that day. Michael was in the street flying kites. Jennifer wanted some Coke. Her mother said she had to ask her father.” That “look of finality” that made Lena Boyd-Richardson “like if I was dumb”: it was with “a satanic look,” according to Stanley Abbott, that Malik, cutlass in hand and about to murder Skerritt, ordered Abbott: “I am ready. Bring him.” The political speech in Guyana: even that was to take place, twelve days after the murder of Skerritt. The malaria: that was the excuse Malik gave when, on the run in Guyana, he stayed for three days in his hotel room without drawing the curtains. There remains the mystery of Lena Boyd-Richardson, repelled, fascinated, inv
olved, and then abruptly disappearing as narrator.

  So, during November and December 1971, Hakim Jamal and Michael Abdul Malik, in the security of the commune, produced their literature: Jamal, on the typewriter, offering the vision of a triumphant “nigger,” Malik dourly writing his novel in ballpoint and soft pencil, counting each word, awakening old disturbances, arriving at some new definition of himself.

  The uneducated Belmont boy had become a man of culture. The London X had become a political hero at home. The man with the silent retinue was the man who in 1965 had told Colin McGlashan of the Observer, “It may sound melodramatic, but there are people who would die for me.” Such a success required witness, English witness; and people like Lena Boyd-Richardson and Sir Harold felt a cold wind of terror. “England was never like this”: Malik, as he wrote, filling the cheap pad, was discovering that he, like his bodyguard and familiar, Steve Yeates, carried the wound of England.

  In December, Gale Benson was sent to Guyana to beg for money. To Stanley Abbott, in England, Malik sent a letter with one word: “Come.” “Peace and love”: that was how the “brothers” usually signed off in their letters. But the cable from Stanley Abbott that was telephoned to Malik at half-past four on December 10 read like this:

  ARRIVING 1055 PM SATURDAY IITH STOP FLIGHT 537 FROM NEW

  YORK MUCH LOVE TO ALL PEACE AND POWER STANLEY.

  From Jamal there went a summons to the United States, to the Negro known as Kidogo, one of his “co-workers.” Four months before, in London, Jamal had told Jill Tweedie of the Guardian: “If you’re going to kill, it must mean something. You should kill people because they are evil, not because they are white.” “He [Jamal] told me he wanted to send for one of his co-workers,” Malik said in his statement afterwards. “And just about the same time I noticed through the correspondence I was having from Abbott that he too was coming down to Trinidad.”

  So, in December 1971, they began to gather in the two houses of the Arima commune. Simmonds, a white woman who said she had known Malik for ten years, came down from England; and—as she told The Bomb afterwards—had “total involvement” with Steve Yeates, “an excellent lover … compassionate … understanding … a sense of humour … a wonderful man.” Kidogo arrived; he didn’t stay with Jamal, who knew him, but with Malik, who said he wanted to talk to him about America. Abbott stayed across the road with Jamal. In the third week of December Benson returned from Guyana. She had failed in her begging mission.

  On December 31 Steve Yeates, using his Black Muslim name of Muhammed Akbar, went to Cooblal’s Hardware and bought a six-inch corner file, charging it to the account of “Mr. Abdhul Mallic, Arima.” Such a file is used in Trinidad for sharpening cutlasses. There was a party at the commune that evening: it was Simmonds’s thirtieth birthday. She remembered the food. “We had bought a calf,” she told The Bomb, “and we had a nice birthday party. A big feed.” Jamal had other memories. He remembered the “atmosphere of violence” at the commune, and he especially remembered the slaughter of a cow on a neighbouring farm around Christmas time. He told the Boston correspondent of the Daily Mail he believed Malik had drunk some of the blood. “They handed me the cup but I ain’t no blood drinker.”

  On January 2, 1972, Gale Benson was stabbed nine times, one stab going right through the base of her neck. She was buried while still alive in a four-foot hole on the bank of the ravine some two hundred feet north of Malik’s house. And she was not missed. Simmonds stayed at the commune until mid-January. Jamal and Kidogo left for the United States on January 20. Benson’s body was not discovered until February 24. Five men were charged with her murder: an Indian boy called Parmassar, who had attached himself to Malik; a well-to-do Indian of good family called Chadee, who had become mixed up with the commune in December; Malik; Stanley Abbott; and the man called Kidogo, who has still not been found.

  • • •

  NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO was a year of rain and floods in Trinidad. Everything was green; bush grew fast. Nineteen seventy-three opened with drought. Every day the hills smoked with scores of separate fires; bamboo clumps ignited; fire, almost colourless in the sunlight, crackled on the roadside verges. The year before the grave of Gale Benson was fresh, hidden from the road by low bush; this year the ravine bank was brown and bare, and the grave was only a shallow hole, dry, crumbling, cleansed by light and heat. During the great days of the commune, Jamal, “looking out of the glass doors and seeing green, blue and cloud covered mountains,” had written to a white correspondent in the United States: “It is very hot here in the tropics, but it is peaceful, and that is what I both want and need.” Sixteen months after the murder of Benson, Jamal was himself put down, shot on May 2, 1973, by a four-man black gang in Boston.

  The commune had ended swiftly. Jamal survived it by more than a year. On February 7, 1972, five weeks after the death of Benson, Joseph Skerritt, a renegade recruit, was brought down to the commune from his mother’s house in Belmont. A hole was prepared for him the next morning, and just after midday he was chopped on the neck and buried in the position in which he fell, sprawling, legs apart and slightly raised.

  Two days later the commune went on an excursion to Sans Souci bay in the north-east, and Steve Yeates was drowned. A length of bamboo attached to a rope was thrown out to him but he didn’t grasp at it. Did he give a grimace of pain before he went under? Or did he grin? Stanley Abbott said: “Steve gave his life.” So it ended for him, after the thirteen years in England, after the two years of waiting in Trinidad, after the solitary night walks around the Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain and the coded messages from the leader in London. After the commune had lasted exactly a year and a day, after the two killings, Muhammed Akbar, Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam, Lieutenant Colonel of the Black Liberation Army, was swept out to sea. Nine days later, on February 19, Malik and his family flew to Guyana. That evening the empty commune house burned down.

  The lease had expired on February 9. Malik, unwilling or unable to exercise his option to buy, had, after a long wrangle with his landlords, received notice to quit. He had gone wild when he had heard, Stanley Abbott said. And to Abbott himself, after the two killings and the drowning of Steve Yeates, the news that Malik didn’t own the house, owned nothing, came as a surprise. He felt “ashamed” and “deeply hurt.” He had given Malik a book on leadership; and when he saw Malik reading this book, after they had discussed the notice to quit, and after they had discussed their “needs,” Abbott felt like “going outside for the cutlass” and killing Malik. But then he thought of Malik’s children and Malik’s pregnant wife.

  Abbott told Malik he was tired and needed a rest. Malik gave him a hundred dollars, twenty pounds; and, two days before Malik and his family went to Guyana, Abbott went to Tobago. He stayed with relatives and didn’t try to hide. He spent four sleepless nights after he heard that the house had burned down. On February 24—the body of Gale Benson being disinterred, Malik hiding in a darkened hotel room in Guyana—Abbott flew back to Trinidad. From the airport he took a taxi to Port of Spain. He told the driver to drive slowly. He and the driver talked. He told the driver about the commune. The taxi stopped a little way from police headquarters, and the driver shook Abbott by the hand. Abbott walked to the main entrance of the Victorian Gothic building, spoke to the police sentry at the top of the steps and passed inside. It was a few minutes before midnight.

  A YEAR LATER the Malik house was as the fire had left it. The garden was overgrown, the grass straggly and brown. But the drought had drawn out bright colour from every flowering plant, and bougainvillaea was purple and pink-red on the wire-mesh fence. Beside the peach-coloured hibiscus hedge in the north-west, the hole of Joe Skerritt was dry and cleaned out and shallow, as without drama as that other hole, on the ravine bank. The cover of the septic tank had been dislodged: a dead frog floated. A moraine of litter flowed out from the back door of the house onto the concrete patio between the blackened main house and the untouched servants’
quarters. Solidified litter—many burned copies of Malik’s autobiography, newspapers and magazines burned and sodden and dried into solid charred cakes. The kitchen was black; the fire was fiercest here. The ceilings everywhere had been burned off and showed the naked corrugated-iron roof, a sheet of which hung down perpendicularly in the living room. All the woodwork was charred. But already a green wild vine, a single long green vine, had run from the over-grown garden onto the gritty terrazzo of the living room.

  A murderer can become celebrated and his survival can become a cause. A murdered person can be forgotten. Joe Skerritt was not important, and he is remembered, as a person, only in his mother’s house in Belmont. A large unframed pencil portrait is pinned to the wall of the small living room. There are framed photographs of his more successful brother, Anthony (in sea scout uniform), who is in Canada, and of his sister, who was for many years a nurse in England; on a glass cabinet there are the sporting cups won by Michael, another brother. The house is shabby; Mrs. Skerritt does lunches for some schoolchildren, but money is short. She looks after her mother, who is senile and shrunken, skin and bones, with thin grey hair tied up tight and sitting on the skull like a coarse knotted handkerchief. Mrs. Skerritt ceaselessly relives that morning when Malik came for her son. He called her “Tantie” and she looked up and saw “that red man.”