Print Email to Friend| From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 34, Dated 25 Aug 2012

CULTURE & SOCIETY   BOOKS

80 VS Naipaul

A man with no masters

VS Naipaul, that most singular and independent of minds, turns 80. Shougat Dasgupta pays tribute to one of the world’s literary giants

View Slideshow Photo: Getty Images ALSO READ “In high-tech societies there is no need for an intellectual life” The Converter Of Opinion - Part III The Cartographer Of Mutinies

SAMUEL BECKETT’S strange, gnomic novel The Unnamable concludes: “I’ll go on. You must say words as long as there are any… it will be the silence where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” I am mindful of the fact that Beckett’s narrator stops with “I’ll go on”, that he lapses into silence, but there is, in his frenzied speech, the writer’s fear of silence, the writer’s need to persevere with words, however ill-equipped they are to name the unnamable.

VS Naipaul turned 80 on 17 August. Last year, speaking to the editor of this magazine at its THiNK festival, Sir Vidia seemed preoccupied with the idea of going on — circling around the subject like a plane caught in traffic circles in an airport, waiting to land. “How to go on especially was the problem,” he said, “I had a panic about that very thing, about not being able to go on, and it took the concrete form of feeling that I was losing my voice, that I was losing the gift of speech… a concrete expression of the deep disturbance, the disturbance being: ‘Can I go on?’ ‘How can I go on?’… If you’re a writer, you do the one book and then you have to go on and do the second and then the third and it never ends. At the age of nearly 80, I’m still tormented by this need to go on a little bit, so perhaps a lot of the discoveries about the nature of writing came to me from this need to go on.” Later, when asked about his views on what he once described as the nobility of being a writer, he replied: “The idea of nobility has been subsumed, to use that word, in the idea of going on, going on…” And talking about writing, he said his urge “came from this old, old idea of wishing to go on, needing to go on, not wishing, needing to go on to be a writer, to go on because if I didn’t go on, I wouldn’t be a writer”.

It was a poignant performance: the ageing writer, the great writer (perhaps the greatest living writer), with more than 30 books behind him, still desperate to fend off silence. There is the danger in a commemorative article of imposing silence on a still living writer, one whose career spanning over half a century is still going. Naipaul presumably is writing even now, and if his turning 80 is as good a time as any to celebrate his astonishing body of work — an oeuvre as distinctive as any writer’s, certainly any living writer’s — he is not done yet, still travelling, still with things to say.

Naipaul, of course, was born in Trinidad, in Chaguanas, a town south of Port of Spain, in 1932, some 30 years before the country gained independence from the British. He is a writer formed by the colonial experience, his family uprooted from India as indentured labour, essentially slaves with a contract. The children born into such families were cast between the forced diversity of the country of their birth, their families who clung fast to moribund traditions from a lost homeland, and Macaulay’s Minute. From this tumult, this churning together of Indian, Caribbean and English influences, Naipaul emerged, searching for a self. Amit Chaudhuri, in an essay on Naipaul, writes of “the exceptional trajectory of Naipaul’s oeuvre” thus: “the figure of the father, the life of the writer, and, finally, an inquiry into the origins of the colonial landscape itself, into how one came to exist in ‘one of the Conradian dark places of the earth’.”

If constructing a self can be said to be the modern project and displacement, in this migratory age, the contemporary condition, it is easy to understand why Naipaul is so important, so essential a writer. As someone in his 30s, educated mostly in English schools and, therefore, shaped by an Anglocentric conception of European tradition, a person rendered homeless by his education, I’m drawn to Naipaul’s experience. His search for, and ultimately invention of, a centre is exemplary. As Pankaj Mishra writes in his introduction to The Writer and the World: Essays by VS Naipaul: “That is why it is astonishing to realize that… by 1957, decades before our glamorous multicultural times, had already begun, with scarcely an audience in sight, in what now looks like a dispiriting vacuum, one of the most brilliant — and by far the unlikeliest — literary careers of the last hundred years.”

To understand just how unlikely Naipaul’s career has been, let us turn to Finding The Centre: Two Narratives, a couple of passages from which it is necessary to quote at length:

Half a writer’s work, though, is the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves: from my grandmother’s Hindu house in the country, still close to the rituals and social ways of village India; to Port of Spain, the Negro and G.I. life of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which was called Queen’s Royal College; and then Oxford, London, and the freelances’ room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn’t know where to focus.

In England, I was also a colonial… My very particularity — which was the subject sitting on my shoulder — had been encumbering me.

The English or French writer of my age had grown up in a world that was more or less explained. He wrote against a background of knowledge. I couldn’t be a writer in the same way, because to be a colonial, as I was, was to be spared knowledge. It was to live in an intellectually restricted world; it was to accept those restrictions. And the restrictions could become attractive.

Naipaul sets out his dilemma in a letter to his mother from Oxford in 1954. “The fact is this,” he wrote, “I don’t see myself fitting into the Trinidad way of life. I think I shall die if I had to spend the rest of my life in Trinidad.” And yet, he confessed, “[d]o not imagine that I am enjoying staying in this country. This country is hot with racial prejudices… My antipathy to a prolonged stay in this country is as great as my fear of Trinidad.” In London, working piecemeal for the BBC’s Caribbean service, Naipaul understood the danger of becoming, as he put it in a later novel, a mimic man, understood the need to find his own voice, to mine his memories, to recollect in tranquility those powerful emotions engendered in him by the people and streets of Port of Spain.

The comic brio of those early novels, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and Miguel Street, culminating in A House for Mr Biswas, notwithstanding, the voice I associate with Naipaul is the voice of the non-fiction and the mature fiction, the likes of In a Free State, The Enigma of Arrival, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River or A Way in the World. In the latter books, Naipaul melds fiction, essay, memoir and reportage, his entire range of experience, to represent an entire way of seeing the world. I cannot imagine the space for a writer like WG Sebald or, much more recently, Teju Cole, without Naipaul having paved the way. Naipaul’s sentences, so clean and elegant and artful, contain grief, loss, disgust, rage. Here again is the need to quote at length to show the degree of Naipaul’s mastery:

Our sacred world — the sanctities that had been handed down to us as children by our families, the sacred places of our childhood, sacred because we had seen them as children and had filled them with wonder, places doubly and trebly sacred to me because far away in England I had lived in them imaginatively over many books and had in my fantasy set in those places the very beginning of things, had constructed out of them a fantasy of home, though I was to learn that the ground was bloody, that there had been aboriginal people there once, who had been killed or made to die away — our sacred world had vanished.

There cannot be many sentences in all of English literature as exquisite, as supple. It is this elegiac Naipaul that I cherish, suffusing a single sentence with the entirety of his experience, his sorrow. The sentence above, at the end of The Enigma of Arrival, expertly incorporates so many of Naipaul’s preoccupations — childhood, rituals, memory, cruelty, homelessness, the colonial encounter, death. This is what writing is to him: a thinking through, an intensive self-searching. In a long interview with The Paris Review, Naipaul said that “to be a writer is to be observing, to be feeling and to be sensitive all the time”. “The writing,” he added, “has been a process of inquiry and learning for me.”

It is this spirit of inquiry that moves him to travel. Naipaul doesn’t seem, in his books, a natural traveller — anxious, fretful, obstreperous, raw with nerves as he is; he travels out of fidelity to his writerly ambitions, a sense of dharma. He is not a mere novelist, a man who weaves fantasies in his room. As he put it in that interview: “To be a serious writer is not to do what you have done before… I shouldn’t just stay at home and pretend to be writing novels. I should move and travel and explore my world — and let the form take its own natural course.” Naipaul needs to travel because of what he calls the “areas of darkness”, the gaps in his own history. He travels to what he describes as half-made societies, countries enmeshed in invention and reinvention just as he invents and reinvents himself.

His three books on India, An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilisation, and A Million Mutinies Now, are cases in point, tracking as much Naipaul’s own evolution as a writer as they are the evolution of India as a modern nation (in the Western sense). It is Naipaul’s inwardness, his relentless search within, that extends to encompass the countries in which he travels, exhorting post-colonial societies to search too within themselves, to submit themselves to forensic self-examination. Naipaul, let us not forget, is as damaged by the imperial enterprise as any person in any post-colonial society. It is a constant wonder that his floundering for meaning — a floundering, as Patrick French reveals in his exhaustive biography, with dark consequences in his personal life — resolves itself so beautifully, so precisely on the page.

This is not the forum to debate Naipaul’s politics, such as they are, but even his opponents will concede that his verdicts are not delivered de haut en bas from his Wiltshire study. Naipaul travels and, particularly in A Million Mutinies Now and Beyond Belief, listens. He understands aspiration, pipedreams, the big talk of small men, to borrow his own formulation. Besides, as Naipaul pointed out in his Nobel lecture, quoting Proust, “A book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.” Whatever Naipaul says in interviews (and French in his biography is very convincing about the sort of mischief-making Naipaul indulges in being a Trinidadian tradition), his books emerge from a desire to tell the truth; not a superficial truth, but the truth about his innermost self. With each successive book, Naipaul writes himself, showing the displaced that their homes are in their imagination, in their ways of being in the world. In his limpid prose, “transparent” he calls it, is the order and wholeness so markedly absent in his chaotic, fragmented background and in the chaotic, fragmented lives of the mimic men in their half-formed countries. Naipaul’s way of seeing is individual, idiosyncratic, a product of singular experience. Ironically, it is that individuality that makes him so representative of the age. How essential that he find it in himself to go on.

with inputs from Saim Saeed

Shougat Dasgupta is an Assistant Editor with Tehelka.
shougat@tehelka.com

Saim Saeed is an editorial intern with Tehelka.
letters@tehelka.com