A Short, Painful Life

MR. STONE AND THE KNIGHTS COMPANION by V. S. Naipaul. 159 pages. Macmillan. $3.50.

This grotesque tale of a happy marriage has the unsettling effect on a reader of a stop-motion film, in which otherwise familiar flowers bud, blossom and decay in a few shallow breaths of a viewer's time.

Novelist Naipaul takes as his hero a 62-year-old bachelor, Mr. Stone, head librarian in a commercial firm, who treasures all the "uncreative years" of his life "comfortingly stacked away in his mind." But one day, sitting in the pub at lunchtime sipping his glass of Guinness, he becomes aware of a "new sensation of threat, nagging him at last into an awareness of his own acute unhappiness." He looks in a.shop window on the way home and sees the reflection of an old man. In terror, he marries a widow and commences his life.

They suffer all the pangs of early marriage: "He became a 'man,' a creature of particular tastes, aptitudes and authority." Mr. Stone had only briefly felt like a man, when he sat at the head of the table at his sister's house. "It was intermittent solace which he welcomed but which he was in the end always glad to escape. Now there was no escape." He learns gradually that his wife is a "woman." They quarrel and make up over a midnight snack: "They went to the bathroom and got their teeth. They went down to the sitting-room and ate large pieces of cake."

A year passes, and in the first creative act of his life, Mr. Stone suggests to the head of his firm a scheme for keeping in touch with retired employees, sending the more active ones to visit the bedridden with small gifts and words of cheer. He sees it simply as "protection for the old." But the company sees it as grand public relations and names it the "Knights Companion" scheme, putting Mr. Stone in charge.

He becomes a Personage in the firm; he and his wife redecorate their shabby home and begin to entertain. Mr. Stone's picture appears in the daily papers.

But in six more months he is ready for retirement, and he realizes ruefully that the firm "had taken the one idea of an old man, ignoring the pain out of which it was born, and now he was no longer necessary to them." His three-year-old life is over--and in both its brevity and its pain, it can stand for the life of any man who has committed himself too late to living.

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