The Enigma of Arrival | Day 9
pp. 97-109 (through "overtures of friendship.")
“the early paintings of Giorgio de Chirico…. The Enigma of Arrival.”
I feel I have found a key whenever a book reveals the secret of its title.
“My story was to be set in classical times…”
The story that he would write is explained and dealt with in a couple of paragraphs. It is an intriguing tale. Why did Naipaul not write it?
“It did not occur to me that the Mediterranean story was really no more than a version of the story I was already writing.”
Is that the reason? Is that the answer, then, for the question I ask above? He goes on to say in the very next paragraph that the story was an attempt to give coherence to a nightmare he had been having—for a year!
“But that is why certain stories or incidents suggest themselves to writers, or make an impression on them; that is why writers can appear to have obsessions.”
Fear and failure—are these, then, his obsessions?
“I went for walks every afternoon.”
I don’t know whether writing leads to healing—but walks do!
“And indeed there had been a journey long before.”
After all the talk of death, the return to youth, his journeying out from Trinidad. Such a relief for the reader!
“Minutes later, the sea.”
Naipaul’s description refers to Tennyson’s line “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”
“There was a Negro in the hangar.”
Did I want to use the theoretical term “objectifying gaze” when discussing the description of Brenda? Maybe I did. Maybe I want to use that term here too.
“So I wrote my diary. But it left out many of the things that were worth noting down.”
I find these lines—these pages—so remarkably suggestive. The details (the “‘indelible’ mauve pencil”), the not-entirely-understood ambition to become a writer, and profound insight that would come years later about what was “material” and how it had been left out of the diary.
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 | A guest post by
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Today at #APSTogether we have come to that part of The Enigma of Arrival where Naipaul discusses the de Chirico painting. The ekphrastic description not only reveals the secret of the book-title, it also gives us a glimpse into another of Naipaul’s books (In A Free State) and, going further, lays bare his obsessions. What are they, these preoccupations that guide the writer? They are the particular anxieties of an immigrant writer, doubly displaced, faced with the fear of creative and physical death.
"And then I discovered that to be a writer was not (as I had imagined) a state - of competence, or achievement, or fame, or content - at which one arrived and where one stayed."
Many passages like these have been echoing - and clarifying - my own sense of myself as a writer, particularly as I've recently come across things I wrote at age 19 (for underground 1970s feminist journals) and at 20, 21 (as columnist and reporter for USC's Daily Trojan). I quit college "to become a writer" - then went back after a year, to become a professor, having learned instead to say, " I want to write." And now in my 70s - I still want to, and still do.