The Enigma Of Arrival - Closing

Our sacred world -- the sanctities that had been handed down to us as children by our families, the sacred places of our childhood, sacred because we had seen them as children and had filled them with wonder, places doubly and trebly sacred to me because far away in England I had lived in them imaginatively over many books and had in my fantasy set in those places the very beginning of things, had constructed out of them a fantasy of home, though I was to learn that the ground was bloody, that there had been aboriginal people there once, who had been killed or made to die away -- our sacred world had vanished. Every generation now was to take us further away from those sanctities. But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honour and remember. It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment. It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory. And that we when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden.


October 1984 -- April 1986

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 316

We were immemorially people of the countryside, far from the courts of princes, living according to rituals we didn't always understand and yet were unwilling to dishonour because that would cut us off from the past, the sacred earth, the gods. Those earth rites went back far. They would always have been partly mysterious. But we couldn't surrender to them now. We had become self-aware. We would have accepted; we would have felt ourselves to be more whole, more in tune with the land and the spirit of the earth.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 264

The man had changed. And -- he was in my cottage, sitting in my wing chair, half reclined, looking small, the upholstered wings above his head, his knees neatly together -- it was a little as if (this was the idea that came to me) the man that one knew had been subjected almost to a moral attack by the unacknowledge personality within; that the man had been pulled down by this inner personality, which now sat like a watchful guardian on the man's shoulder and was the only entity with whom Alan could now have a true dialogue. Of the old personality there remained only the clothes that made the upholstery of the chair look grimy. These clothes were as carefully chosen as ever; but the man within was so quiet, so little ebullient, his movements were so slow and considered, that the clothes did not suggest the old personality.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 252

Pitton's difficulty -- as I understood when I put myself in his place, and examined myself and my own fears -- was that he had lost touch with the idea of work. In fact, after the manor, the freedom there, the routine he had created, the calm he had established for himself, his relationship with the seasons, the year, time itself, what he feared was not work but employment -- and perhaps not employment so much as the idea of the employer.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 243

In 1857, in Madame Bovary, Flaubert could write of the pedlar's six percent interest charge as extortionate, blood-letting. Now we lived easily with that kind of charge. In 1955, when I was very young and new to London and trying to write, I wanted nothing more than five hundred pounds a year; and, more modest than Virginia Woolf thirty years before, I would have undertaken to pay for my own rented room out of those five hundred pounds. In 1962, at a lunch in a London club with a humorous writer and a cartoonist, I put my needs -- the two other men had asked -- at two thousand pounds a year: I had moved up from the rented room to the rented, self-contained flat. This figure had scandalized my fellow lunchers, older men, as far too low. And indeed, just three years later, when I had bought a house and taken on a mortgage, I would have considered five thousand pounds a year as just about fair. Now that was a figure that could be talked about as a heating charge. Not many fortunes would have been able to stand that kind of expense, one among many; and my landlord had retired from the world in 1949 or 1950, some years before I had thought five hundred pounds a year enough for my needs.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 239

Talking about the dereliction he had seen in the back garden, the young man said, 'It's a cruel thing to say. But the best thing would be to cut down all the beeches and plant afresh.'

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 233

It was a Sunday morning, and the Indian was dressed as formally as Pitton was now dressed. The Indian was in blue serge trousers and a white shirt. He had gone to the Sunday morning servce in the mission chapel. The settlement was in a new clearing; the stumps of felled trees still looked raw; the forest still pressed on three sides. And now after that morning service the Indian was on his way back to his forest village, taking the path at the edge of the clearing, just above the river, which in sunlight was the colour of pale wine, and at dusk became black. Night here made for anxiety. Daylight was always reassuring.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 227

Something of this -- some whiff of huts and damp and the swamplands of my childhood -- came to me at Christmas, in the Wiltshire valley, in Pitton's improved agricultural cottage. He was poor. I discovered now that his nerves were rawer than those of the Phillipses or Bray. He was much more vulnerable than they were.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 221

The noblest impulse of all -- the wish to be a writer, the wish that ruled my life -- was the impulse that was the most imprisoning, the most insidious, and in some ways the most corrupting, because, refined by my half-English half-education and ceasing then to be a pure impulse, it had given me a false idea of the activity of the mind. The noblest impulse, in that colonial setting, had been the most hobbling. To be what I wanted to be, I had to cease to be or to grow out of what I was. To become a writer it was necessary to shed many of the early ideas that went with the ambition, and the concept my half-education had given me of the writer.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 219

Service -- a world dead and gone. But not to Bray; his childhood lay there, just as my childhood lay in the vanished world of sugar-cane fields and huts and barefoot children; and ditches and hibiscus hedges; and religious ceremonies which I accepted but didn't understand; and the beauty of the lighting of the lamps after the prayer in the evening; and the fear of the run-shops and the quarrels and fierce fights. Just as 'estate', 'labourer', 'gardeners' called up special pictures for me, so Bray lived with pictures of the valley I could only dimly visualize.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 215

And in this rebuke or resentment of Pitton there was contained an idea of the gardener which I felt to be very old, going beyond the idea of the gardener which I had found at my Oxford college, going back to the beginning of worship and the idea of fertility, the idea even of the god of the node: the gardener as the man who caused the unremarkable seed to grow into leaves, stalks, buds, flowers, fruit, called this all up from the seed, where it has lain in small, the gardener as magician, herbalist, in touch with the mystery of seed and root and graft, which (with the mystery of cooking) is one of the earliest mysteries that the child discovers -- one of the earliest mysteries that I, my sister and my cousins discovered when in the hard yellow earth of our Port of Spain yard, we, taking example one from the other, and just for the sake of magic, planted hard dry corn, maize, three seeds in a shallow hole, fenced the hole round with a little palisade of sticks (to protect it from the chickens that ran free in the yard), and then three days later, in the morning, before going to school, discovering the miracle: the maize shoots the morning breaking the earth, the green outer sheath developing quickly into a thin leaf curling back on itself, like a blade of grass, like sugar-cane, developing until the child became bored, ceased to watch and protect, and the chickens knocked the stick palisade down and pecked the still tender plant down to nothing.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 201

In the middle of farmyard dereliction and his own insecurity in his job and cottage, Jack kept his elaborate gardens and did his digging for vegetables and flowers and kept his plots in good heart. So, in the middle of an equal insecurity -- since at any time their employer might die, and they would have to move on with their possessions to another job and another set of rooms -- the Phillipses made their cosy home. Jack was anchored by the seasons and the corresponding labours of his gardens. The Phillipses had a different kind of stability. It was events outside their home, festivities outside, that gave rhythm and pattern and savour to their townish life: the outings, the visit two or three times a week to their pub, their annual holiday in the same hotel in the south.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 195

That wouldn't have been too fanciful. It would have been like my own wish, coming to the cottage in his grounds, not to interfere, to take things as I found them; and then my later wish, out of my own delight in the place, not to see decay, not to be saddened by that too ready idea of decay, to see instead flux, constant change; and the feeling which I grew to cherish, that in the very dereliction of the grounds I had come upon them at their peak, that the order created by sixteen gardeners would have been too much, would have made for strain and anxiety, that the true beauty of the place lay in accidental, unintended things: the peonies coming out very slowly below the thick dark green of the yews; the single blue iris among the tall nettles; the young deer that for many months lived among the reeds beside the rotting bridges over the water-channels, having learned that th eplace was not frequented by men.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 190

On this walk, as on the longer walk on the downs past Jack's cottage, I lived not with the idea of decay -- that idea I quickly shed -- so much as with the idea of change. I lived with the idea of change, of flux, and learned, profoundly, not to grieve for it. I learned to dismiss this easy cause of so much human grief. Decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past. But would I have cared to be in my cottage while the sicteen gardeners worked? When every growing plant aroused anxiety, every failure pain or criticism? Wasn't the place now, for me, at its peak? Finding myself where I was, I thought -- after the journey that had begun so long before -- that I was blessed.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 143

These references -- to the Spanish Empire and the Haitian revolution -- would not have occured to me when I had lived on the street. Even when at school I had got to know (as part of school learning) the historical facts about the region, they did not have any imaginative force for me. The squalor and pettiness and and dinginess -- the fowl-coops and back yards and servant rooms and the many little houses on one small plot and the cesspits -- seemed too new; everything in Port of Spain seemed to have been recently put together; nothing suggested antiquity, a past. To this there had to be added a child's ignorance; and the special incompleteness of the Indian child, grandson of immigrants, whose past suddenly broke off, suddenly fell away into the chasm between the Antilles and India.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 139

If there was a place, at this stage of my career, where I could
fittingly celebrate my freedom, the fact that I had made myself a writer and
could now live as a writer, it was here, on this island which had fed my panic
and my ambition, and nurtured my earliest fantasies. And just as, in 1956, at
that first return, I had moved from place to place, to see it shrink from the
place I had known in my childhood and adolescence, so now I moved from place to
place to touch it with my mood of celebration, to remove from it the terror I
had felt in these places for various reasons at different times. Far away, in
England, I had re-created this landscape in my books. The landscape of the books
was not as accurate or full as I had pretended it was; but now I cherished the
original, because of that act of creation.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 135

I wrote of the simplest things in my memory. I wrote about the
street in Port of Spain where I had spent part of my childhood, the street I had
intently studied, during those childhood months, from the security and distance
of my own family life and kouse. Knowledge came to me rapidly during the
writing. And with that knowledge, that acknowledgment of myself (so
hard before it was done, so very easy and obvious afterwards), my curiosity
grew fast. I did other work; and in this concrete way, out of work that cam e
easily to me because it was so close to me, I defined myself, and saw that my
subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, byt the world I contained
within myself, the worlds I lived in: my subject turning out to be a version of
the one that, unknown to me, I had stumbled upon two weeks after I had left home
and in the Earls Court boarding house had found myself in the too big house,
among the flotsam of Europe after the war.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 132

I was, in 1950, like the earliest Spanish travellers to the New World, medieval men with high faith: travelling to see wonders, parts of God's world, but then very quickly taking the wonders for granted, saving inquiry (and true vision) only for what they knew they would find even before they had left Spain: gold. True curiosity comes at a later stage of development. In England I was at that earlier, medieval Spanish stage -- my education and literary ambition and my academic struggles the equivalent of the Spanish adventurer's faith and traveller's endurance. And, like the Spaniard, having arrived after so much effort, I saw very little. And like the Spaniard who made a long, perilous journey down the Orinoco or Amazon, I had very little to record.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 120

Such a big judgement about a city I had just arrived in! But that
way of feeling was something I carried within myself. The older people in our
Asian-Indian community in Trinidad -- especially the poor ones, who could never
manage English or get used to the strange races -- looked back to an India that
became more and more golden in their memory. They were living in Trinidad and
were going to die there; but for them it was the wrong place. Something of that
feeling was passed down to me. I didn't look back to India, couldn't do so; my
ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a
similar feeling of wrongness. In Trinidad, feeling myself far away, I had held
myself back, as it were, for life at the centre of things. And there were
aspects of the physical setting of my childhood which positively encouraged that
mood of waiting and withdrawal.

The Enigma Of Arrival - pg. 102

I witnessed this change in my personality; but, not even aware of it as a
theme, wrote nothing of it in my diary. So that between the
man writing the diary and the traveller there was already a
gap, already a gap between the man and the writer.