EUGENE GOODHEART
245
these feelings are just: they constitute, however, a freedom denied by
the democratic ethos of congeniality. Our democratic ears hear this
mandarin freedom of speech as rudeness. And we respond, even
thrill, to it as to any forbidden pleasure . What a bastard, we mutter
with delight. To refuse to ingratiate (as a matter of instinct and
principle) is to have the power to say No, a rare power, in its
articulate form, in a democratic society. To say No, one must see
clearly and have the courage of one's clarity.
Naipaul values above all his clear-sightedness: it is a matter of
conscience, which he connects paradoxically with the holding of
certain prejudices. We, of course, all have prejudices; they belong to
our incorrigible subjectivity. But to flaunt one ' s prejudices as
Naipaul does can be a rare virtue-or vice-in what I've called the
ethos of congeniality, which demands that we publicly tolerate one
another, a condition that produces either hypocrisy (in which we
affect attitudes that we privately disavow) or self-deception (in which
we no longer recognize our true feelings). In either case, perception
and truth suffer. Naipaul does not self-reflectively tell us what his
prejudices are. They are to be inferred from the observation of the
scene.
There are unattractive prejudices-as for instance, when in an
Antigua boarding house, in
The Middle Passage
(the account of his
journey through the Caribbean) , Naipaul responds to the
information that the company at dinner is about to sing "Happy
Birthday" to a Negro doctor who is entering the dining room by
pushing his coffee aside and running upstairs. The impression of
snobbery, possibly racism, is of course unpleasant. But more
important than the particular prejudices is the freedom to be
prejudiced and the power to express it, which is associated with the
freedom and power of imagination itself, as Naipaul himself
recognizes in this admiring comment about Trollope : "I wonder
whether anyone anywhere· will ever be able again to write with his
mid-Victorian certainty. . . . That unapologetic display of
outrageous prejudices ('I hate Baptists like poison'), that fairness,
that cruel humour without a tinge of self-satire, that deep sense of
religion and good business.... " Certainly the mid-Victorian
conviction is irretrievable, but "the unapologetic display of . ..
prejudice" is as good a piece of self-description as Naipaul gives us.
Prejudice, unlike religious or ideological piety, is ingrained in
temperament or character. Prejudiced utterance is authentic
expression. Naipaul's power as an observer of the ideological
