Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth
by Shiva Naipaul
Hamish Hamilton

Collections of occasional writings run the risk of being neither fish nor foul. They often represent the urgent efforts of publishers to keep a writer visible in the bookshops or, in some cases, they are the last crumbs and leavings of scholarly activity and posthumous money spinning.

Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth, Shiva Naipaul’s collection of stories, journalism and memoir provides by contrast, a lively insight into the Trinidadian born novelist. His lucid style and directness of expression are brought to bear on a range of linking themes – racial, religious and colonial.

In the title essay Naipaul describes leaving the Dragon’s Mouth, harbour of the Port of Spain, for study at Oxford and the continuation of a process which distanced him from his country and culture of origin but left him sceptical, often acerbic, when he confronted life and manners in England and Europe:

“Having to return to Trinidad- to St. James –nearly always fills me with alarm … I grew up in a no-man’s land. Suburban life with its ease and its unrelenting worship of American standards, American ideas, had not existed when I was a boy. Its assumptions and prejudices were unfamiliar to me. If I was like a fish out of water at a Hindu rite, I was no less a fish out of water at a drive-in cinema scented with the vapours of hot-dogs and hamburgers: Such definition as I do now possess has its roots in nothing other than personal exigency. Every day, I have to redefine myself.”

Naipaul’s recollection of his formative education has a tinge of self-pity and rebuke for his family, including the celebrated novelist V.S. Naipaul, who is never identified (and in so personal a memoir the exclusion speaks volumes). This narrative conflict however, is quite absent in other essays – “The Sanjay Factor” for instance. The success of Sanjay Gandhi and his popular appeal amongst the affluent and ambitious young in India is shrewdly appraised by Naipaul. He is unremitting in his analysis; writing with a coolness which intensified his account of Sanjay’s corruption and cruelty:

“Sanjay was projected as the man of Passion; a prophet possessed by a Vision. If his opponents accused him of dictatorial tendencies, so much the better. They, for their part, threatened only anarchy and garrulous futility. Sanjay was by no means universally loved, but the fear he inspired was an essential part of his appeal. Take it away and there would be nothing left -just, perhaps, a semi-literate Indian street-boy blessed with a famous name and a powerful mother. In fearing him, his enemies helped to create him. Of Sanjay’s death – when skylarking in his light aircraft

Naipaul is cruelly apt:

“ It was a curiously appropriate climax. to a career which had based itself on bending and breaking the rules; which had been conjured out of thin air. Not even Sanjay, it turned out, could defy the laws of gravity.”

But the force of the essay is not in the way Naipaul wittily reveals Sanjay with gradual and damning detail, it is that he understands the paradoxes which allowed Sanjay’s monstrous and infantile egotism to be applauded:

“The Hindu- unsanitary, caste-bound, cow worshipping, idolatrous, underfed. diseased, drained of vigour -has been pilloried for centuries. He is the child, as has been said, of a wounded civilisation. Sanjay’s methods or rather, their magnetic quality -evoked a vitality long ago lost; it held out a debased promise of release from a condition and tradition shot through with defeat and despair and shame.”

Elsewhere, in another essay, also for The Observer; Naipaul analyses “The Rise of the Rastaman”. The wide appeal of reggae music and the cultural charisma of Bob Marley has made the Rasta movement visible throughout much of the world. Naipaul is openly critical of the contradictions and delusions of the Rastas and gives a detailed account of its divisive and self-publicising history. He is conservative, indeed there is much of the Tory about Naipaul, but it is not a simple matter to dismiss his perspective. He still writes as a West Indian and as one who dislikes cant and manipulation in any form. While his account of the Rastas may be incomplete, he makes a case that requires coherent counter-argument if it is to be set aside:

“The Rastaman is not required to justify either himself or his caricature of faith.

Rastafarianism does not bring its devotees closer to self-comprehension. If anything, it has led them further away from any understanding of themselves or their condition. At best, it gives the black a congenial image of himself. At its worst, it stimulates lethal visions of grandeur. Rastafarianism transforms Blackness –being a Negro in a White Man’s world -into a cultic experience; a quasi-apocalyptic ecstasy of empty assertion. Allegory displaces reality.

As Marcus Garvey said – the Negro does not know how to stop hurting himself.”

Naipaul writes with fascinating detail and precision about India, Iran, Africa and the West Indies astutely identifying paradox and relishing the complexities of life and politics. But in his writing about England he is sometimes hindered by culture. In a querulous little piece originally written for The Spectator entitled, “The Road to Nowhere”, Naipaul describes a trip with several other writers to Humberside near Hull, on an Arts Council Writers’ Tour.

Hull is Philip Larkin’s parish; and one that has been anatomised in his careful and oddly compassionate poetry. But Naipaul is bewildered and resentful at the reception accorded him and his fellow writers. By his own admission he often read material unsuited to the school or general public audiences they met and yet he is surprised and irritated by the indifference and incomprehension which greeted him.

“We were achieving nothing. We were really no more than a circus; a collection of curious individuals. Humberside has no need of us. Football satisfied all the tribal desires of it people. The easy fulfilments of advanced industrial society had turned men into barbarians. Why inflict their indifference on us?”

Naipaul in his mode as colonial David Copperfield, expects too much of the culture he believes gave him language and intellectual tradition and here fails to see the class and aesthetic issues involved. In his cultural deracination Naipaul has lost much that his considerable gift of expression does not fully compensate: When he moved beyond the Dragon’s Mouth he was unaware of the perpetual lash of its tail.

“Exile and Cunning”, The Adelaide Review, May, 1985. np.