Half a Life by V. S. Naipaul Page B

setting and the people weren't to be explained. That undid a lot of the difficulty He had only to begin; the story rewrote itself; and though in one way it was now very far from Willie, it was also more full of his feelings. He changed the title to “Sacrifice.”
    Roger had mentioned the movie of “The Killers.” Willie hadn't seen it. He wondered what they had done with the story. He tried idly to work it out. And, with his mind working in this way, it occurred to him over the next few days that there were scenes or even moments in Hollywood movies he might redo in the manner of “Sacrifice,” and with the vague “Sacrifice” setting. He thought especially of the Cagney gangster movies and High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart. One of his first original compositions at the mission school had been something like that. He had written of a man (of no stated country or community) waiting for no stated reason in an undefined place for someone, smoking while he waited (there was a lot about cigarettes and matches), listening for motorcars and doors and footsteps. In the end (the composition was only a page long) the person had arrived, and the man waiting had become full of anger. He had ended it like that because he didn't have a story. He didn't know what had gone before or what was to come. But now, with the moments from the Cagney and Bogart movies, there wasn't this difficulty.
    The stories came quickly to him. He wrote six in a week. High Sierra gave him three stories and he saw three or four more in it. He changed the movie character from story to story, so that the original Cagney or Bogart character became two or three different people. The stories were all in the same vague setting, the setting of “Sacrifice.” And as he wrote, the vague setting began to define itself, began to have markers: a palace with domes and turrets, a secretariat with lines of blank windows on three floors, a mysterious army cantonment with white-edged roads where nothing seemed to happen, a university with a yard and shops, two ancient temples where dressed-up crowds came on certain days, a market, housing colonies with graded dwellings, a hermitage with an unreliable holy man, an image-maker, and, outside the town, the high-smelling tanneries with their segregated population. To Willie's surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school. He began to understand—and this was something they had had to write essays about at the college—how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him.
    The six stories came to no more than forty pages. And now that the first impulse had gone he wanted encouragement, and he thought of Roger. He wrote a letter, and Roger replied right away, asking Willie to lunch at Chez Victor in lower Wardour Street. Willie was early, and so was Roger. Roger said, “You saw the sign on the window? Le patron mange içi. ‘The owner eats here.' Literary people come here.” Roger dropped his voice. “The man across the way is V. S. Pritchett.” Willie didn't know the name. The sturdy middle-aged man was benign, with a well-modelled, humorous face and a humorous, absent-minded air. Roger said, “He writes the main reviews for the New Statesman.” Willie had seen the magazine in the college library, and he knew that there were college students who competed for it every Friday morning. But Willie had not yet developed the need to read magazines like that. The New Statesman was to him a mystery, full of English issues and references he didn't understand.
    Roger said, “My girlfriend is coming. Her name is Perdita. She may even be my fiancée.”
    The strange phrasing told Willie there was some trouble. She was tall and slender, not beautiful, unremarkable,