Sir Vidia Naipaul, Nobel laureate and the greatest writer now living in
Britain, chuckles a lot. Here he is on the state of the English novel.
“I think when it’s been done, it’s been done and it can’t be done again ...
You can’t write about the manners of the English countryside, there’s
nothing to write about that’s not been said. It’s true in a larger form
about the novel. After nearly 170 years, starting with Dickens, everything
that a novel could do has been done ...” He pauses. “These are private
views.”
Then the chuckle.
I’ve been watching this chuckle for some years.
It is an important literary phenomenon, but it can easily pass unnoticed. It
is an inward chuckle, very quiet and involving only the slightest movement
of the shoulders. He is chuckling to himself about himself. In this case, he
is chuckling at the thought of the number of people he will annoy. He also
chuckles at his own moments of ironic overstatement.
“Now that I’ve finished this book, I feel washed clean.” Chuckle.
Once I, with a few of his friends, was invited to accompany him to a festival
in his honour in France. It turned out he had agreed to attend on the basis
that he did not have to say anything. His friends were there to do all the
talking. We lined up on the stage, flanking Naipaul, who was seated on some
kind of throne. Chuckling. Meanwhile, I felt like Cary Grant in Bringing up
Baby – “This is probably the silliest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Naipaul chuckles at the gulf that divides all delusions, pretensions,
expectations and vanities from reality. Naipaul is one of the great masters
of black comedy. In fiction, he says that, in creating characters, he likes
simply to walk around, not judge, them. But in doing so, he manages to
expose all their flaws and the dark comedy of their lives. Like Conrad, his
true predecessor (though he would never agree to that), he sees humanity as
irre-deemably flawed, though worth close observation.
Naipaul is hypersensitive to these human flaws. He once said: “I was gifted at
an early age – the minute I saw a person, I could see the flaw in that
person. It was like a curse.” So, naturally, I ask him what flaw he saw in
me. After trying to avoid the question, he says he no longer has the gift.
“You lost it, coincidentally, just before you met me?”
“Exactly.” Chuckle.
His nonfiction does the same walking-around trick to devastating effect.
Notably in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, published in 1981,
simply by letting people speak, he exposed the delusions, anger and
fanaticism that would lead, 20 years later, to 9/11. That book was a
phenomenally prescient document, but it seemed to isolate Naipaul. He
realised the extent of this isolation when, after publication, he was
invited to Harvard.
“They wanted to have a discussion with me – that’s what they said. They wanted
no such thing. They wanted the fellows of their institute to all say their
piece of rage and criticism. It was such a shocking occasion. I think that’s
what happens when people believe their principles are higher than reality...
Now, if someone says they are from Harvard, I feel they are condemning
themselves out of their own mouth.” Chuckle.
The assembled academics could not bear to have their soft liberalism refuted
by a man who was saying, with clear evidence, that Islam was incubating
something rotten. “But, for me, there was no problem in it. It was there,
waiting to be seen. I was rather shocked at the depth of this
antiintellectualism in the Islamic world. It was shocking. I didn’t know
about it.”
I point out that he once said Islam used to be a rather grand, tolerant faith.
“Not really. That’s been said, but it’s not so. It’s a converting religion.
It tends to expand and expand and expand. It’s against dissent ... I don’t
think they were ever tolerant, no. And their achievements in architecture
and mathematics were taken from other cultures that they overran. They took
a lot from Iran.”
Harvard – and many other experiences – convinced him that nothing was to be
expected of academia. And he has, ever since, been one of the harshest
critics of universities.
“I think academics are bad. They spread ideas about things that they are
determined to get one to accept.
“They have their ideas about multiculturalism, for example, or about Africa.
They distort publishing to some extent. They publish the books for these
courses, and it gives an illusion for great popularity, of ideas sweeping
the world. But they’re not. They’re just ideas in grubby little textbooks
that are stuffed in students’ bags.”
Now he says that all university English departments should be closed down. “I
think it would be a great fillip, a great boost to the intellectual life of
the country. It would immediately have a great impact. It would release a
lot of manpower. They could go and work on the buses and things like that.”
Huge chuckle. In fact, he believes universities should “deal in measurable
truth” and teach only science.
Naipaul doesn’t trade in ideas, like academics, he trades in stories. When I
ask him to generalise about human nature on the basis of the spectacle of
radical Islamism, what it says about the eternal human need to find meaning
by killing and being killed, he tells a story.
“This comes from a book called the Chachnama – it’s an account of the conquest
of Sind, that bit of India that first fell to the Muslims. There is an
account there of one of the local soldiers seeing the enemy at prayer, all
bowing at the same time, all thoroughly disciplined. He gets very frightened
and says, ‘I can’t defeat that.’
“So I think that might be the attraction of it [Islamism], joining a big crowd
that will be on your side, the need to belong. You are seeing that
especially among the black people from Jamaica and places like that. They
are so excited to belong to the Islamic movement over there.”
Naipaul continues to be a victim of the Harvard effect. Though he has been
multiply honoured, there is still a feeling that his cold, clear gaze is not
quite respectable in polite circles.
Politically, he inspires intense unease. When he won the Nobel prize, in 2001,
no invitation arrived from Downing Street. Blair was, perhaps, not big
enough to overlook Naipaul’s past rudeness.
“I said he was a pirate in 1999, or whenever it was. I said something about
the dangers of encouraging a popular culture that honours only itself.
These are good thoughts, interesting thoughts.” Big chuckle.
But the point is that Blair was something of a pirate, radical Islamism isan
antiintellectual creed of mad delusions, and academics dopeddle ideas
for the sake of it. Naipaul tells the truth. He not only looks, he sees.
Looking and seeing are the subjects of his new book of essays, A Writer’s
People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. It is an autobiographical work, but
then, much of his work, fact and fiction, is autobiographical.
And, like all his autobiographical excursions, A Writer’s People is centred on
the pain he feels at having no past. Born to an Indian family in Trinidad,
he knew nothing of any family before his parents.
“That’s always been a great blow to me. I’m reading Pepys. Here is Pepys
writing about himself. I’m quite shocked to learn that Pepys can trace his
people back to when they were villeins in the 13th century. It’s wonderful.
I don’t have that – it all stops with my father.
“I don’t know anything about them, and nobody has recorded anything about
them. I don’t have that kind of past. I think I would have been a different
man if I had had a past. I would have had something extra from walking about
in this past and understanding it.”
The small Indian community from which he came invented a past for themselves,
an imaginary India of great and impossible glories. His mother succumbed to
this myth. In one particularly telling essay in this book, Naipaul writes of
her diary of a visit to her ancestral country. She visits relations and is
given a cup of tea. One woman wipes the side of the cup with the palm of her
hand and another brings her sugar and stirs it into the tea with her finger.
That single and, to her, disgusting gesture destroys his mother's Indian
fantasy, and the diary simply stops.
“The land of myth,” he writes, “of a perfection that at one time had
seemed vanished and unreachable, had robbed her of words.”
Though hungry for a past, Naipaul never fell for this myth, and his mordant
observations of the shortcomings of India have earned him yet more enemies.
There was one prissy, middle-class Indian myth that, because of the Hindu
emphasis on purity, India was a particularly clean place. By looking and
seeing, Naipaul destroyed that absurdity. India was, to him, a mess. And, if
there is one thing he hates more than anything else, it is mess.
“I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It comes from my background. There was
always a mess, and my father hated it too. He didn’t like putting his foot
down on the ground. He always wore those wooden sabots people made for
themselves. He wouldn’t walk barefooted.”
Naipaul himself got into trouble in India for refusing to take his shoes off
when entering a temple. “The Indian thing about cleanliness and purity
becomes confused. But it’s worse if you take your shoes off. I did that in
India in 1962, and got ringworm later. It’s a lovely idea, walking barefoot,
but, if it’s not clean, it becomes horrible.”
Mess has been rigorously expelled from his life. His house, a few miles
outside Salisbury, is a neat essay in undemonstrative English style. But the
big garden is where he really unleashes his antimess campaign. He doesn’t
like the mess of flowers, particularly suburban mounds of multi-coloured
roses. If there must be flowers – blossoms, for example – then they must be
white. As a result, the ferociously neat, beautifully kept garden is a solid
green all the way down to the River Avon, which marks his boundary. Yet,
bizarrely, one pink rose has emerged near the back door. He shakes his head
sadly.
The new book has already begun to add to his list of critics and enemies in
India. His assessment of Gandhi has provoked anger. This is absurd, because
he regards Gandhi as a very great man indeed. But he emphasises the extent
to which the Gandhi who dressed as a peasant was a careful construct. More
important, the reason Gandhi was great, he says, was not simply that he
fought for independence, but that he saw what was wrong with India and,
instead of turning away in disgust, became a reformer.
“It was so depressing when he went back to India and saw the people he was
going to win freedom for . . . If it had been me, I would have turned around
and said, ‘I’ll become a lawyer; I’ll live my life quietly and forget about
this.’ But he just plunged in and in and in. That was very great of him,
really.”
Meanwhile, large parts of the Eng Lit establishment will probably be incensed
by his assessment of the novelist Anthony Powell. Incomprehensibly – to me,
at least – Powell’s long novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time is
regarded by many as a great work of art. During his early days in London in
the 1950s, Naipaul became a great friend of Powell. He still talks about him
with immense affection and gratitude – “The people he really liked he never
judged, and that’s beautiful.” But, in his essay on Powell, he virtually
dismisses him as a serious writer.
Naipaul is now 75, and, I would guess, has a few years left yet to tell the
truth and make enemies. I hope so because, even when chuckling, he is one of
the most serious men I have ever known. His austere, monkish devotion to his
art and his courage in seeing and telling the truth represent a level of
high seriousness that has all but vanished from contemporary Britain. He
also has something else that has vanished – a love of and respect for the
country. The last story he tells me concerns a lecture he gave in India. In
it, he tried to explain to the Indians the need for a culture to back power
and economic success. It was replete with admiration for the British past,
but . . .
“There was not a glimmer of understanding. I told them that, in their great
days, the British didn’t just have generals winning the wars. At the back of
that, there was a lot of social thought – Ruskin, Morris, all these people.
And there was a lot of science, great science – theoretical and practical.
Faraday, for example. There was also a great literary life at the back of
it. But they don’t understand what I say.”
There’s a soft rumble, as of a Tube train deep underground. He’s chuckling.
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by VS Naipaul is published by
Picador on September 7 at £16.99 www.bryanappleyard.com
Pariah or muse?
One of the most intriguing aspects of VS Naipaul’s career is that he is both
English literature’s greatest living “postcolonial” writer and a pariah to
the postcolonial academic and literary establishment. To his fellow
Caribbean Nobel-winner Derek Walcott, he is “VS Nightfall”, possessed with a
“chronic dispiritedness”, whose brilliant prose is “scarred by scrofula” and
a “repulsion towards Negroes”. For Salman Rushdie, books such as Beyond
Belief: Islamic Excursions (1998) place Naipaul in dangerous alignment with
Hindu nationalism.
His detractors’ issue is not with his talent: nobody dares to deny Naipaul
writes as one sided with the angels. Their problem is his political and
racial views, and a perceived misuse of an immense talent that, it is
argued, betrays his heritage. Naipaul is a product of empire: brought up in
Trinidad, a descendant of Indians indentured to work there by the British.
Yet some feel that when he sailed for Britain, the dark heart of the evil
empire, he became a postcolonial Darth Vader who, when surveying the new
commonwealths, sided not with the newly liberated, but with the former
oppressors. In The Middle Passage (1962), he infamously offended his
Caribbean birthplace by stating: “Nothing was created in the West Indies.”
Critics such as Edward Said found A Bend in the River (1979), which is set
in Africa, deeply offensive. In it, Said argued, Naipaul “allowed himself
quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution”.
Interestingly, a younger generation of postcolonial writers value the writing
while distancing themselves from Naipaul’s politics. Kiran Desai, awarded
the 2006 Man Booker for The Inheritance of Loss, and Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie, who won the 2006 Orange prize for Half of a Yellow Sun, both cite
Naipaul as a key influence.
Patricia Nicol
