Time to be in Earnest: A fragment of autobiography

by P.D.James

Faber and Faber: London, 1999.

Time to be in Earnest is written as a diary. The author decides to write a diary of a year of her life starting on her 77^th  birthday on August 3^rd 1997. The thing that struck me after just a few pages was the pace of life this woman, close to being an octogenarian, was living. Not a day seems to pass without a lunch or dinner engagement, book-signing – that involved a travel load that would daunt a thirty something as well as giving speeches and talks all over the place. I started to think if this was a writer’s life I would have to start thinking of a new vocation! Maybe on the days there are no entries she takes a breath from the social whirl.

I find that I amreading about a year that I remember particularly well. I was myself in England, visiting the family (and the past) from May to October of 1997. As I note the dates in her book I think back to my recollections of that visit. A major event that occurs a few pages into the book is the catastrophic death of Princess Diana. It is one of those dates when everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news.

At the time I was staying with my Mum, at the family home of forty years, in a small town in Dorset in the southwest of England. My sister, who lives in Richmond and works at Kew was also home for the weekend. I was suffering from a peculiar type of claustrophobia that almost immediately afflicted me under that roof. In my mind I was planning an escape to revisit a spiritual community that had become a second home. There I experienced freedom and relief from the rigid routines that Mum lived under.

My sister and I shared a bedroom just as we had as children. We were lying in our childhood beds next to each other on this particular Sunday morning. Mum, always an early riser, was already up and had, as was the tradition, brought us both a cup of tea in bed. I was idly scanning The Guardian Review (the high spot of the weekend) and Pat was dozing while we waited for Mum to finish her ablutions in the bathroom so that we could then emerge from the horizontal on to the next stage of getting up.  Action was always stunted in this way in Bungalow World, the impetus for spontaneity always doused by strict regimes. Mum had the radio on. And suddenly we hear an exclamation  ‘Oh no, Oh no’. I jump out of the bed and call down the hallway to the bathroom – what’s up Mum – daughterly concern breaking through the inertia. In horrified tones she made the announcement – Princess Diana’s been killed.

It’s funny, just a V.S. Naipaul always returns to his origins in Trinidad – my writing always returns to Mum and life in  ‘Bungalow World’. I eventually hope to find a way of writing about it that really gives the atmosphere of that lost era.

To return to P.D: She uses the diary form to delve into the memories of her life that surface as she write. I am employing a similar technique here in that I am using the book review format to jumpstart me into writing something  -whether it be memories or ideas - whatever that comes to the surface. 

The Writer and the World: Essays

V.S.Naipaul

Picador: London, 2002

Yesterday I picked up this weighty book with the fantastic photo of V.S. on the cover. A young Indian man, wearing a dark overcoat, with raven hair falling over one side of his face, disdainfully holds a cigarette up to his mouth. His heavy lidded eyes look sideways and down. He is standing against an unfocussed background of potted palms and trees that are outlined against the light coming through large high windows. When I look at this picture I am influenced by all I know about this young man through reading his semi-autobiographical novel, A House for Mr Biswas:  how he grew up in Trinidad in a poor Indian family whose ancestors were no more than indentured slaves: how his father instilled in him a love of literature and how against all the odds this young man made his way to the metropolis, or as he says, moved from the margins to the centre, and became a nobel prize-winning writer. Hail, V.S.Naipaul!

In his final essay of the book, ‘Our Universal Civilisation’, he attributes his success and his ability to achieve this success to the ideas underpinning Western philosophy: the triumph of individualism and the responsibility that this entails; the notion of progress; ambition and achievement; a belief in perfectability; choice; the life of the intellect; that he sums up in the idea of, ‘the pursuit of happiness’. His writing allows me to see the positive side of our civilisation, our society: those ideas that have taken centuries to build. It takes his journey from the periphery to the centre to show me the benefits of the centre that I have never appreciated and taken for granted. I tend to look at the evils of the society I was born into – the evils of consumerism and greed underpin in the search for happiness. This search is focussed on the outside; what can be bought. Yet what else do we need once we have achieved a reasonable level of comfort and education? 

A V.S.Naipaul needs to pursue happiness: to search for freedom from restricting traditional ideas: to find an environment where he can develop his talents and express himself beyond the rigidity of belief. Yet for us who were born into this centre and take it for granted a different direction opens up. For me the search took an inward turn. In the pursuit of happiness there comes a point when I realised that more ‘stuff’ whether material or intellectual was not necessarily going to make for more happiness: it started to be a burden. 

That's as far as I've got today with these thoughts today....