There can be few people who enjoy dreaming about history who have not remembered Gone with the Wind and Stonewall Jackson and imagined the Southerners winning the war. There is even a book (written by a Yankee of course) entitled If the South had Won, and musing with sentimental fondness on Lincoln’s honourable captivity after Mosby’s troopers had kidnapped him from Washington, and General Lee’s masterly encirclement of the Union army at Gettysburg. It ends with North and South agreeing to join up again after both have fought for the allies in the Great War.

Sentimental dreams, certainly; and the issue of Slavery tactfully left out. But they show the power of myth and the might have been. Jefferson Davies, the Southern president, remarked, though probably not in public, that slavery would come to a natural end anyway; and at least in the short term the black population of the Confederacy would have had a better time if the South had been left undisturbed. The war was fought not on the issue of slavery but of secession. Lincoln would not tolerate disunion: his predecessor, Buchanan, argued that the states had a right to it. As so often in history the will of one man, at one time, decided the issue. Irish Americans who denounce Britain’s policy, past and present, have no trouble in accepting the brute force which kept the United States together: they reserve their indignation for the poor old UK’s bumbling attempts to satisfy the conflicting demands for freedom or union of its outlying peoples.

Naipaul’s book is not concerned with history and hardly mentions the war. But it reaches history in a different, more subtle way. Naipaul is the most deadpan author that we have, a rare qualification at a time when travel writers, commentators, novelists, are expected to sound off about what they think, believe, mean, and appear on TV or Kaleidoscope to explain their work and what they were ‘trying to do’. The extraordinary delicacy, dignity, and reticence of Naipaul’s style (although he is also, in a quiet way, the most in time of authors) seems to get without display or effort on the inside of any subject. Indeed he is at his best when there is practically nothing there to write about. His most haunting book, and my own personal favourite, is his last one, The Enigma of Arrival, listed here as a novel though it could also be described as a travel book. It describes – or rather meditates on – the country round about Salisbury, Wiltshire, and the cottage near a big house in which the author stayed. This is mixed with another meditation on the author’s first arrival in England from Trinidad. A wonderful book.

A Tum in the South is not quite in that class. It is, more frankly, in the category of Going there to Write a Book. Not a bad category either, as Peter Fleming used to show, when he brought news from Tartary or adventures from Brazil, and offered them to the reader with a lopsided deprecating grin, a ‘not much here I’m afraid, old boy’. (According to Anthony Powell , Fleming could not bear seeming to show off, and was once heard to excuse himself from an invitation by mumbling ‘Sorry – got to help a friend give a hot meal to the Queen’). Nowadays travel writers buy boats to go down the Mississippi or donkeys to cross the Sahel, or else, like William Boyd, they make a virtue and an excellent book out of touring the South as a ‘young Englishman’, and pointing the contrasts. Naipaul has no nationality to play with, and slips into the Southern background like an analyst into the chair behind his patient’s couch.

The results are admirably revealing, as is the quiet manner. Around Charleston:

… the land is flat and marshy and it goes on for miles. The forest – oak, gum, maple, pine, sycamore, magnolia: tall forest – speaks of the fertility of the soil. The flatness and easiness and extensiveness of the land make clear the need in the old days for abundant slave labour; and they also make painful the thought of the labour.

Like Swift, Naipaul is a master of the punctuation that goes with understatement. In the Mississippi delta, on a huge plantation known as ‘Egypt’, cotton is still grown, but most of the area is given over to intensive catfish farming. A tricky business getting the flavour right. ‘The fish being loaded that morning into the processing-plant trucks had passed all but one of their tests’. A more facetious author might talk of Catfish lib: Naipaul doesn’t have to. It is a land that produces and has produced raw goods in bulk – lumber, cotton, catfish, slaves…

Charleston is a tourist town, but South Carolina benefited from a second ‘Yankee invasion’ in the eighties of the last century, when industry and the large corporations gave new jobs to blacks and whites alike. The Scotch-Irish rednecks further north resisted and retained their communal identity. Negroes after the war could only be migrants, settling where they were needed or tolerated, as on the big tobacco farms near Durham. In a county outside Atlanta, where a white girl had been raped and killed by negroes in 1912, all the blacks were chased out, and Forsyth county takes pride in being all white to this day, except that Hosea Williams, a dedicated black integrationist often in gaol, has done his best for peace and persuasion. Naipaul met him but only briefly: he was much too busy to argue the case.

Anne Siddons, a southern belle whose family have lived near Jackson for two hundred years, had a fear which she described as common in her class, that of being ‘cut out of the herd’ . Losing your identity, not being part of the chivalric herd , is the worst that can befall a long-established white southerner, of any class. The Scottish heritage is strong: one thinks of the ‘45 rebellion and its aftermath, and the Klan is a clan. The Confederate flag had its blue St Andrew’s cross; Mark Twain thought that reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott had been the ruin of the south. Reading Naipaul’s placid, disenchanted pages on Charleston I also remembered the town poet, with the delightful name of Henry Timrod, whose lines are on the war monument there , and in the Oxford Book of American Verse.

There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies
By morning beauty crowned.

But dash away those tears and let us be realistic. Naipaul might have quoted the comment of one of the very few opponents of the secession from the Union of South Carolina in 1860. The state, he said, ‘is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum’. Southern aggression was intensely populist, based on the conviction of the white yeoman class that although they might not own slave and plantations they owned ‘the most important property of all – a white skin’. The quotation is from Lacy K Ford’s fascinating analysis of the rural south in his book Origins of Southern Radicalism (OUP). By having a class beneath them, by not being ‘wage-slaves’ as the Northern proletariat was fast becoming, poor southerners felt themselves to be the true heirs of Washington and the revolution, and for that birthright they would fight to the death. But in 1860 no one expected they would have to, for had not the southern senators proclaimed that with 80% of the world’s cotton grown in the south, King Cotton could dictate his terms not just to the north but to the whole world? That hubris was not so very different from the kind that was to seize the central powers of Europe in the next century, and unleash new styles of woe and conquest.