Nobel laureate Naipaul is constructing a pathway of autobiographical and critical essays to connect the great houses of his novels. In his latest collection, he portrays his literary mentors. And as always with prickly, discerning, and uncompromising Naipaul, the discussions are stern in their testimony to the wounds of imperialism and prejudice, and tart with disdain for hypocrisy and artistic cowardice. Returning to his boyhood in Trinidad, he ponders with renewed sympathy and regret his father’s predicament as an unappreciated writer in a tiny, insular Indian community in a small place bereft of a literary tradition. In describing his own trial by fire as an aspiring writer in England in the 1950s, he tells the discomfiting story of his friendship with Anthony Powell, admits to being “baffled” by the big British novels of the day, and asks if a specific cultural background is necessary for understanding literature, or if a writer’s mission is to dig deeper into the human experience in pursuit of universal and timeless concerns. In the most trenchant sections in this altogether piquant, magisterial, and maddening volume, Naipaul wrestles with the paradoxes of India. Naipaul is exacting, even excoriating, because he cares so very deeply about literature and the world. --Donna Seaman
Review
“A bracing, erudite ride . . . Wonderfully written . . . One may question Naipaul’s premise, but it in no way negates that he is a very great writer . . . What remains impressive is Naipaul’s sense of wonder at the worlds he has discovered.”
–New York Times Book Review
“Looking hard at cruelty, taking nothing for granted, are the hallmarks of Naipaul’s stance. His writing gleams with brilliance . . . It’s impossible not to admire the prose.”
–Seattle Times
“What we have here is a mixture of genres: a meditation on art and life, with a strong dash now and then of personal memoir marked by the restless, sometimes withering, intelligence of its author . . . It’s a book about its author, still panning for the pure gold of a clear and honest vision firmly grounded in this world . . . Bracing.”
–Joseph Lelyveld, New York Review of Books
“Naipaul has taken alienation from amorphous inner complaint to make it a true journey: an Odyssey with himself as both Odysseus and Homer but without a return home.”
–Richard Eder, Boston Globe
“Rich with surprise and erudition, informed by an alchemist’s imagination . . . Naipaul explores [ways of looking] sometimes through the experiences of the notable (Gandhi), sometimes through the eyes of the nearly anonymous (an upholsterer), sometimes through those tiny moments of immense significance that have long been a feature of Naipaul’s work.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Praise from the UK:
“This is an important coda, on a lifetime of ‘seeing’ . . . For Naipaul, ‘seeing’ with clarity is all-important to both constantly remaking the world through literature and to fashioning a history for oneself . . . Brilliant.”
–Amit Chaudhuri, The Guardian
“Naipaul’s latest collection of essays, A Writer’s People, is essential reading for those who admire his work and want to understand it further. But there is much there for any enquiring mind, as it offers the insights and observations on literature, history and cultural sensibility of an honest and truly global thinker.”
–The Evening Standard
“Many sides of the complicated Naipaul personality are on show as he sets them out . . . Naipaul is at his best here when teasing out the ironies and complexities of cultural exchange in the persons of figures with whom he can identify.”
–Sunday Telegraph
“It is Naipaul’s‘way of looking and feeling’ that has made his work so controversial . . . But this is a brilliant work from a man who more than anybody else embodies what it means to be a writer . . . As it turns out, Naipaul’s reading has been as wide and deep as his peregrinations through the decolonised world . . . As ever, hissentences are tightly coiled and muscular; they embody the very qualities they praise . . . Revelatory.”
–The Observer
About the Author
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty-five books of fiction and nonfiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, Magic Seeds and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Sven Birkerts
One of the perquisites of achieved greatness might be the freedom to let go, to relax from the exertions that had so much to do with getting there. This natural tendency, less charitably known as coasting, could help explain why V.S. Naipaul's recent works -- the novel Magic Seeds and two collections of essays, Literary Occasions and now A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling -- feel so un-Naipaulian. The force that propelled such novels as A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, as well as scourging documentary nonfiction like Among the Believers, has slackened. In place of the Nobel Prize winner's signature directness, we find an insistent digressiveness. Naipaul's voice too often sounds querulous, unable or unwilling to build toward an indictment. It has become a kind of distracted grumbling.
A Writer's People comprises five essays, reflecting on, in sequence, a cluster of writers from the Caribbean; Naipaul's complicated friendship with novelist Anthony Powell; the Indian "way of seeing"; Flaubert's Salammbô and the historical imagination; and, again, India, in particular its difficulty surmounting its colonial past.
The first piece, "The Worm in the Bud," is emblematic of his current discursive mode of essaying. (To be fair, we should keep in mind that at its origins, in Montaigne, the essay form was nothing if not discursive.) Naipaul begins by looking back to 1949, to the appearance in his circumscribed world (he was born in Trinidad of Indian descent) of a small book by an ambitious poet from nearby Saint Lucia named Derek Walcott. He remarks what a splash, relatively speaking, the book made, and in the process reveals exactly how provincial the Caribbean literary universe was. When he himself read Walcott's work a few years later, he beheld his home-world and was enthralled: The "sight of fishermen, silhouettes in the fast-fading dusk . . . was something we all knew. Reading these poems in London in 1955, I thought I could understand how important Pushkin was to the Russians, doing for them what hadn't been done before."
This is as generous as the author gets. So far as he can see, Walcott more or less realized his greatness in that early work, and for the rest of his career, which of course includes the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature (Naipaul got his Nobel in 2001), he looked to fit himself to more cosmopolitan templates. Naipaul's implication is that the vast output that followed was a denouement, in some way even a betrayal, of what was greatest in the poet. Nowhere does he attempt to reckon with Walcott's changing ambitions. It is almost as if Naipaul cannot allow his fellow islander a place by his side on the dais.
Much of the rest of that first essay looks at the frustrations and failures of what might have been comparably worthy careers, including those of the Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer, the Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon and Naipaul's own father. The latter, a newspaper correspondent with literary aspirations -- his son drew his portrait in his great early novel A House for Mr. Biswas -- misdirected his gift of observation and evocation by pitching his stories toward what he saw as the requirements of the larger (American and English) market, outfitting them with trick endings in the O'Henry mode.
This is the theme throughout: the overpowering of natural or indigenous ways of looking and feeling by the dominant, or imperial, expectation. Naipaul sees cultural self-subversion at work in the writers mentioned, but he also marks it as the impulse that undermines not only the Indian diaspora in his native Trinidad but also the developing culture of India after independence.
In "Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way," he anatomizes an island population that in the space of a generation had cut itself off from its memories. For Indian emigrants, the homeland very quickly became myth, unreal, at least until travel became possible after World War II. "Little by little," Naipaul writes, "the India of myth was chipped away, and India became a place of destitution from which we were lucky to have got away." That destitution is the subject of his two searing books of reportage, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.
The rest of A Writer's People is likewise bent upon the piercing of illusions, particularly the concluding essay, "India Again: The Mahatma and After," which makes the case that Gandhi owed his success in part to the credulity of the Indian people, who projected their great hunger for coherence upon what was in fact a grab bag of policies and personal traits: "He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there." The people saw what they wanted to see in his spinning wheel, his poor man's garb. And for Naipaul this is yet another instance of the refusal to see the truth that has marked the Indian way of looking, and that has fueled his own insistently compensatory agenda.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Worm in the Bud
Early in 1949, in Trinidad, near the end of my schooldays, word came to us in the sixth form of Queen’s Royal College that there was a serious young poet in one of the smaller islands to the north who had just published a marvellous first book of poems. We had never had news like this before, not about a new book of poetry or about any kind of book; and I still wonder by what means this news could have reached us.
We were a small, mainly agricultural colony and we said all the time, without unhappiness, that we were a dot on the map of the world. It was a liberating thing to be, and we were really very small. There were just over half a million of us. We were racially much divided. On the island, small though we were, the living half-cultures or quarter-cultures of colonial Europe and immigrant Asia knew almost nothing of one another; a transported Africa was the presence all around us, like the sea. Only segments of our varied population were educated, and in the restricted local way, which we in the sixth form understood very well: we could see the professional or career cul-de-sacs to which our education was leading us.
As always in these colonial places, there were little reading and writing groups here and there, now and then: harmless pools of vanity that came and went and didn’t add up to anything like an organised or solid literary or cultural life. It seemed unlikely that there were people out there who were guardians of the life of the mind, were watching out for new movements, and could make a serious judgement about a new book of poetry.
But in the strangest way something like that had happened. The young poet became famous among us. He came from the island of St. Lucia. If Trinidad was a dot on the map of the world, it could be said that St. Lucia was a dot on that dot. And he had had his book published in Barbados. For island people the sea was a great divider: it led to different landscapes, different kinds of houses, people always slightly racially different, with strange accents. But the young poet and his book had overcome all of that: it was as though, as in a Victorian homily, virtue and dedication had made its way against the odds.
There might have been other promptings. There was much talk at the time about cherishing our local island “culture”; it was when I grew to hate the word. This talk focused on a talented dance group called the Little Carib (operating in a residential house not far from where I lived), and on the steel band, the improvised and extraordinary music-making of the back streets, done on oil drums and scrap metal, which had developed in Trinidad during the war. With these rare things, it was felt, local people would no longer go empty-handed into the community of nations; they would have something of their own to proclaim and be able at last to stand as men and possess their souls in peace.
Many who looked for this kind of comfort were actually the better-off, middle class and higher, in various ways racially mixed, in good jobs, but with no strong racial affili- ation, not wholly African, not European, not Asian, people who had no home but the island. A generation or so before they would have been content to be neither black nor Asian. But now they had begun to suffer in their jobs and in their persons from what, with their success, they saw more clearly as colonial disrespect. They were no longer content to hide, to be grateful for small mercies; they wanted more for themselves.
The talk about a local culture, the steel band and the dance, also came from people with political ambitions. Such talk could flatter a potential black electorate. The franchise was still restricted; but it was known that self-government was coming. Someone who spoke and wrote a lot about the culture was a man called Albert Gomes. He was a city politician who aimed to go higher. He was Portuguese and enormously fat. The fat did him no harm; it made him a character, easily recognisable in the city, much talked about (even in our sixth form), and much loved by the black people in the streets, who at that time, in the 1940s, strange as it might appear, still had no black leader. Albert Gomes saw himself as that leader. As a black leader in the city he had a hard anti-Asian, anti-Indian line; Indians were country people and no part of his constituency. I heard that at one time he smoked a pipe, wore a walrus moustache, and tried to look like Stalin.
Before he came to politics he was a man of culture. In the 1930s and early 1940s he published a monthly magazine called the Beacon. He also wrote poetry. At home we had the slenderest book of his poems: Thirty-three Poems, four or five inches square, bound in a patterned magenta cloth, dedicated to his mother, “because she does not read verse.” I have a half memory of the first poem: Weep not or wail / Pleasure and grief are vain / The wheel must turn, the river flow / And the day unveil.
Albert Gomes had a column in theTrinidad Sunday Guardian. He signed it Ubiquitous, which not many people knew the meaning of and few knew quite how to pronounce (“you” or “oo,” “kit” or “quit”?). He was famous for his big words; it was part of his size and style. It was in a Gomes column that I first came across the word “plethora” and decided it wasn’t a word for me. When Gomes wrote about the local island culture he could make it part of his anti-Indian turn, since Indians were staying outside that culture. But there were many sides to Gomes, many strings to his lyre, and I suspect (though I am not really sure now) that it was he who wrote in his vigorous way about the young poet from St. Lucia—part of the theme of an island culture—and made us take notice.
The reader will have guessed by now that the poet was Derek Walcott. As a poet in the islands, for fifteen or sixteen or twenty years, until he made a reputation abroad, he had a hard row to hoe; for some time he even had to work for the Trinidad Sunday Guardian. Forty-three years after his first book of poems came out, self-published, he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
As for Albert Gomes, who might have been his champion in 1949, he came to no good. In 1956, six years after I had left the island, there arose a proper black leader, Williams, a small black man with dark glasses and a hearing aid, stylish (a necessary quality) with these simple props, and soon overwhelmingly popular. He talked a lot about slavery (as though people had forgotten). By that simple means he made all island politics racial; and Gomes, the Portuguese, with no true constituency now, for all his anti-Indian postures, all his talk about the island culture, the dance and the steel band, was broken and humiliated and cast aside by the same black people who just a few years before had liked to see him as a fat-man character, their protector, a local carnival Stalin with moustache and pipe.
So I knew the name Walcott. But I didn’t know the verse. Albert Gomes (and others) might have quoted some of the lines in their articles, but I didn’t remember anything.
I had no feeling for poetry. Probably language had something to do with it. Our Indian community was just fifty years away from India, or less. I had a Hindi-speaking background. I couldn’t speak that language but I understood it; when older people in our joint family spoke to me in Hindi I replied in English. English was a language we were just coming into. English prose was the object of my writing ambition, and such limited feeling as I have now for the poetry came to me later, through the practice of prose.
I didn’t do English in the sixth form; and when I saw the text books, the Lyrical Ballads and so on, I considered myself lucky. Poetry in school had stopped for me the year before, with Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I had loved the rollicking children’s verses in the junior reading books at school; more than sixty years later they still come back to me. Palgrave should have built on that pleasure, if I were ready for him; but I didn’t get on with his Victorian anthology. I hated the very sight of the red soft-covered book (the soft cover an economy of wartime book-production). The poems he had chosen made me think of poetry as something far away, an affectation, a searching for rare emotion and high language. And just as Albert Gomes had made me decide that “plethora” was never a word I would use, so Palgrave made me decide that poetry was not for me.
So I wouldn’t have known in 1949 what to make of Walcott. But we should at least have bought the little book. It wasn’t cheap (more than the price of a Penguin, and twice the price of a very good cinema seat) but it wasn’t expensive: a local dollar, four shillings and twopence, twenty-one pence in modern money. But if English was something we were just coming to, this kind of book-buying was something we were as yet very far from. We bought school books; we bought cheap editions of the classics; my father, an Indian nationalist in this small way, occasionally went to a shop in Charlotte Street in the centre of the city and bought Indian magazines (the Indian Review and the Modern Review) and books about India from Balbhadra Rampersad (with his big purple stamp on the fly leaf of the books he sold: I never got closer to him than that stamp: I never got to know the man or his shop). But to go out and buy a new book like the Walcott because people were talking about it would have seemed an extravagance; and that was where we were in the end ruled by the idea of our poverty. And though as a writer I was to depend on people buying my new book, that idea of book-buying as an extravagance stayed with me for many years.
It wasn’t until 1955 that I came across the Walcott book. I had been in England for more than four years. They were bleak years. I had done the universi...
