On V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South

...DuBois and Booker T. Washington, visit writers as disparate as Al Murray in Harlem, who proudly introduces him to the vitality of Harlem architecture and culture, and Anne Rivers Siddons in Atlanta, who speaks with sensitivity about the necessity, in a place where public issues are so charged, to "hoard" passion, spare feeling "for private life...

...Curious to find out why this might be so, Naipaul accompanies his friend to that home, a town in tobacco country, and there we meet his family, go to church with them, drive around the countryside hearing each piece of land identified without (acknowledged) bitterness according to the race of its owner...

...About two-thirds of the way through A Turn in the South, Naipaul admits that the idea of a book composed in natural light must give way, eventually, to "some lines of inquiry," a theme...

...By his own complex connections, he comes around from there—from a demonstration of his respect for both realms—to an appreciation that especially in a racially mixed society where many things have the force of taboos "sensed rather than consciously worked out . . . participation is different from witness...

...In his opening chapter nearly all the book's themes appear: the binding force of community...

...Confronting this family and their sense of home, he begins to understand his friend's rootedness...

...Or when he does ask a probing question—"Is it hard for you to live with Negroes without having authority over them...

...we hear Naipaul's speculations on W.E.B...

...He has moments of irritability and suspiciousness, but most often they have to do with someone's personal rudeness, not with the elusiveness or superficiality of a response...

...But weren't they now a little cramped, even in Mississippi...

...the power of "order and faith and music and melancholy," what Naipaul calls later "the little neurosis" of preoccupation with race, the complex dynamics of change and progress on the one hand and historical continuity and stagnation on the other...

...The black underclass gets caught up in drugs and crime . . . the white . . . in drugs and crime and Klan...

...And that was true for black and white...

...Perhaps the very dignity that the politics of the city offered a black man made him more aware of the great encircling wealth and true power of white Atlanta...

...and the people lived through their leader...

...the racism of certain fundamentalist sects, not to mention many of the mainstream churches...

...If he's charmed by it all that might be because the sins and glories of the condition are fessed up to by a fabulous, gilttongued character named Campbell, who proves no one can say anything worse about your kind than you can and still look good for it...

...It's a perfect beginning for a novelist—character and landscape, expected tensions dissipated, real ones wholly unexpected...

...SUMMER • 1989 403...

...Naipaul, so acerbic in books set in Africa and Trinidad, here seems to be indulging a softness in which the long shadow of time and the wistfulness of defeat lie across his vision, taking off the edge of criticism...

...he allows the cliched response to remain unchallenged: "I've always lived with Negroes...

...Compassion and a refusal to knuckle under to demeaning stereotype is admirable, but the three fishermen represent one of the dangers of "on the road" impressions...

...It isn't fair to expect Naipaul to have gone everywhere and seen everything, especially since he denies any intention to be exhaustive...

...This kind of heat . . . throw[s] people into themselves, as much as the winters of the Far North are said to throw Scandinavians into themselves .. . perhaps this six-month summer weather . . . was a factor .. . in the almost Indian obsession of the South with religion, the idea of a life beyond the senses...

...The decay of each was individual, and they were all beautiful in the afternoon light...

...Yet there are times when he doesn't press quite hard enough and goes back to his motel having bought the company manners and missed the whole story...

...He is shown around Charleston by a man whose mastery of local lore is fascinating but, given Naipaul's diffidence, could have been gathered by a host of faceless interviewers...

...Naipaul's shrewdness makes its appearance sporadically and tends to emerge most often in interpretive summaries rather than in face-to-face encounters when he might have given chase or simply dug more deeply...

...He doesn't see many of the worst irritants that keep the hopeless without hope while the upwardly mobile or the alreadycomfortable congratulate themselves for surviving modest change...

...Canny as this is, Naipaul understands that charisma is well and good but that change will come, as Andrew Young tells him, with such unsexy realities as job training programs: the virtues of this world...

...He reports on the fineness of the line he discovers here between spirituality and politics, between vocation (in the sense of being called) and vocation (as in employment) and begins to understand that southern religion is a container with many corners and layers...

...So, too, his book...

...But he is so taken with the embattled macho image, half-cowboy, half-Indian, that he fails to make the necessary connection...

...has also mentioned, in passing, sixty-three old boxes of lynching records he discovers at Tuskegee...

...they engage different sides of a person...

...Returning to his original sense of the church as the house of the spirit, Naipaul draws a bewitching parallel to his own birthplace...

...He is spared, or spares himself, the conservative, frequently dishonest machinations of inordinately powerful ministers (not all as rich or famous as the Bakkers —just small-time promoters...

...This randomness makes for the considerable strengths of his book and accounts, in part, for its limitations, some of which Naipaul acknowledges...

...He ends with an enraptured visit to the poet/fanner James Applewhite, who, he says, has "arrived at a feeling for 'the sanctity of the smallest gestures.' " That is essentially what Naipaul has done, and his elegiac, unembittered book, only partially successful in its analysis, is large-hearted, naive, and knowing in proportions new for Naipaul...

...You can march until your feet drop, but you ain't going to change it that way...

...In a sense Naipaul has freed himself from the need to make connected, responsible judgments that extend beyond their specific moment...

...Considering a young up-and-coming black politi402 • DISSENT Books cian Naipaul is reminded of comparable Caribbean politicians who might have overthrown a system and established a new power they had fashioned themselves...

...we visit a second and distinctly unrednecked Campbell: Will, the maverick minister...

...Instead he gives us a lovely section that begins with a description of the gate at his grandmother's island house that seems to him, very early, to separate the world within from the world without...

...And he understands the bitterness of such a system: "Just as civil-rights legislation gave rights without money or acceptance, so perhaps city politics gave position without strength, and stimulated another, unassuageable kind of rage...

...Here Naipaul's strengths and weaknesses manifest themselves quickly: He is a sharp observer, but in this book a somewhat sentimental, or at least an idealizing, tone shows through...

...he leaves it to us to register it...

...But here in Atlanta, he sees that all the president of the City Council can do is say no...

...But there is no rage, and the only tears are nostalgic...

...Traveling around the impoverished and failing countryside, he pronounces it, lyrically, "a landscape of small ruins...

...Ordinary ideas of morality and propriety didn't apply...

...He writes well about black leaders, wonders if, with black politics "still racial and redemptive and simple" (as in backward or revolutionary countries), blacks in the United States could be expected to "stand apart from their leaders, any more than it was possible for people of the Caribbean or Africa to stand apart from the racial or tribal chiefs . . . they had created...

...I feel very fortunate to have them" (old family servants living next door...

...Somewhere around the middle of A Turn in the South, V. S. Naipaul compares his journey to a film shot in natural light—he is taking his trip as it comes, moving around without a thesis to prove or a desire to "cover" every corner...

...sees "pride and style and a fashion code . . . the pickup trucks dashingly driven...

...Worse, he has elsewhere given us a chapter on nearly all-white Forsyth County, Georgia, where the Klan defends white purity while it makes a rather different fashion statement in bedsheets and pointy hats...

...or rather, reduces the species to the unfairly stigmatized proponents of a style, victims of class snobbery, Huck Finns by the hundreds...

...Again, it takes an "outsider" to admit or submit to Naipaul's bemused education in country music, beer-drinking, wife-bashing...

...If he hears this familiar justification with a sense of irony (or one in which a judge says that the blacks he knew as a child had rhythm...

...Houses and farmhouses and tobacco barns had simply been abandoned...

...At his most acute Naipaul does make connections, the best of them in relation to his own world...

...Most people in Harlem are angry...

...He catches himself sometimes, comments on his disappointment at seeing where his friend's mother lives, in a (typical enough) concrete block house, "not the tree-embowered house I had in my imagination...

...Perhaps he is so humble because he recognizes what an outsider he is—we are, after all, in the company of a man who has to ask someone what a "homecoming queen" is...

...The "formality" of his new black friends in church charms him so much that at one point later he thinks of prayer meetings and begins to cry...

...But books like this implicitly suggest a representative wholeness...

...They look out for us...

...We're good friends...

...What he doesn't see and what would be difficult to rhapsodize over is the shameful poverty of the tiny towns in the Mississippi delta so little changed in generations...

...UMMER • 1989 • 401 the kind of divisiveness between churches in many small communities that long ago gave rise to the joke about needing two churches, one to go to and one never to set foot in...

...But perhaps to his credit—he is, after all, not only a man far from home but a novelist (and sometime journalist), not a sociologist—no clear theme emerges...

...And then there is the rhapsodic encounter between Naipaul and the Rednecks...

...For West Indian blacks, "the leader lived (or lived it up) on behalf of his people...

...those were the virtues of another world...

...It also suggests, with a refreshingly humble honesty —Naipaul has never been known for humility—that with a little flick of the kaleidoscope the pieces of color might have arranged themselves quite differently to show another picture...

...For all that he comments (disparagingly) about the kind of traveller who merely writes about himself, I think he has unintentionally defined himself here as a man profoundly sweetened by the "order and faith and music and melancholy" he finds in our South and perhaps wishes he could have for himself...

...There are other moments when Naipaul fails to press hard, out of courtesy or because, learning a whole new language, he finds it too hard to be challenging...

...He sees "three rednecks fishing in a pond . . . as I might have hurried to see an unusual bird or a deer . . . barebacked, but with the wonderful baseball hats, in a boat among the reeds, on a weekday afternoon . . . people with a certain past, living out a certain code, a threatened species...

...Naipaul might be surprised at the response his patronizing awe would fetch from the barebacked gentlemen in question...

...Because his experience with street-corner preachers in Trinidad has led him to expect a black religion of "ecstasy and trance," he is unprepared for the complex mores of the little local church, for the family continuity it provides, and for its "communalsocial side...

...Shyly, but clearly entranced and trying to be balanced in his admiration (because he knows they're "authoritarian" and not much respected by the higher classes), Naipaul ventures, "From the way [Campbell] had described them, I thought of them as a tribe, almost an Indian tribe, free spirits wandering freely over empty spaces...

...A leader wasn't required to be modest and correct...

...Naipaul knows a young man, black, whose sense of home—a small town in Georgia—is so potent that it keeps him whole in New York, at the same time that it makes him uncomfortable in Harlem because, he says, "My rhythm is different . . . I'm not angry...

...The question is interesting—is there such a thing as a chance journey of this kind, or will a writer's intuitions and needs, try as he might to be "neutral," force him to search out what he wants to see...

...He does not see segregated academies or ineffective black schools...

...In spite of or because of their vilification by their "betters," he tries for independent judgment...

...But there is a good deal more to the effect of the church on the South, and Naipaul's uncharacteristically innocent view fails to confront its alltoofrequent worst...

...Surely the last thing we want from V. S. Naipaul is a program...

...We see a General Motors plant under construction in Tennessee, a catfish farm in Mississippi...

...What we are dealing with now is a problem of the underclass—black and white...

...Lord knows nobody gets kicked around as much as the southern shit-kicker...

...Among its civilizing functions is that "in no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the religious life...

...He has, in the end, manipulated (or been bewitched by) that natural light to show the physiognomy of this place at its most becoming angle...