“The Enigma of Arrival” (Part 1, “Jack’s Garden”) by V. S. Naipaul (post 2): Novelized memoir of nameless protagonist, Naipaul’s writing alternate personality.

The Story

The first-person nameless narrator, who now lives near Salisbury and Stonehenge, takes walks, “seeing at that time what I wanted to see.” He had “an immense feeling” for Jack’s garden, because “that brought back very old memories to me, of Trinidad, of a small house my father had once built on a hill and a garden he had tried to get started…(1, p. 28).

Nameless Novelist is a loner, who values privacy, even secrecy: “It was my feeling, of being private and unobserved, that had made me, at the time of my arrival, give false replies to questions from people I later knew to be farm workers or council workers. They had been friendly, interested; they wanted to know in which house I was staying. I lied; I made up a house. It didn’t occur to me that they would know all the houses” (1, p. 33).

Nameless observes one person living in the area with “the face of a man who had endured abuse” and whose wife never smiled. Nameless wondered how “people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage…their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did” (1, p. 33-34).

“My own time here was coming to an end, my time in the manor cottage and in that particular part of the valley, my second childhood of seeing and learning, my second life, so far away from my first” (1, p. 87).

“For me, for the writer’s gift and freedom, the labor and disappointments of the writing life, and the being away from my home; for that loss, for having no place of my own, this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival…” (1, p. 88).

“I had thought that because of my insecure past—peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn’t consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on—I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world” (1, p. 92).

Interview

The Enigma of Arrival “has an autobiographical crust,” Naipaul concedes, “but it’s not an autobiography in the usual sense. It’s impersonal. The man has no qualities of his own. He’s anonymous, an observer. No detail of his own life ever intrudes” (2).

Biography

“…living quietly and ascetically in Wiltshire with Pat [his wife], he was able to write The Enigma of Arrival in a little over a year…As always, Pat helped with the writing. ‘She never gave editorial advice…She knew what was bad, what wouldn’t work. She would just say, I don’t like that. This is all right. That’s enough.’…[In the book,] He did not mention Pat or Margaret [his mistress], but appeared to inhabit his cottage alone…” (3, pp. 417-418).

Comment

Of course, the mistress wasn’t living with them, but was in Naipaul’s life for many years. The point is, Naipaul, the man, is involved in personal relationships. But this book is not about the man, but about the writer, who is an “anonymous, observer” personality.

Search “nameless” and “namelessness” for past posts on this recurring topic related to other writers.

1. V. S. Naipaul. The Enigma of Arrival [1987]. New York, Vintage Books, 1988.

2. James Atlas. “V. S. and the Rest: The Fierce and Enigmatic V. S. Naipaul Grants a Rare Interview in London” [1987], pp. 99-105 in Feroza Jussawalla (Editor). Conversations with V. S. Naipaul. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
3. Patrick French. The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.