A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

by V. S. Naipaul

  Acclaim for V.S. Naipaul’s

  A Writer’s People

  “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.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “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 the peregrinations through the decolonised world that marked the second phase of his career.… As ever, Naipaul’s sentences are tightly coiled and muscular; they embody the very qualities they praise.… Revelatory.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “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 (London)

  “This is an important coda, on a lifetime of ‘seeing.’ … Its most brilliant pages (and the brilliance is still there, even in this late phase) are its most idiosyncratic and individual ones.… Its combination and crystallisation of the artistic and the political explains the swiftness with which Naipaul can move from the subject of literature to that of history, from Derek Walcott, Powell and Flaubert to the fascinating chapter on Gandhi and Nehru.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “Many sides of the complicated Naipaul personality are on show as he sets them out. There are some amazingly lofty and chilling lines. But there are also explorations of his own woundedness, of his personal myth of origins, or lack of origins.… His sympathies come to life.… Naipaul is at his best here when teasing out the ironies and complexities of cultural exchange.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  V. S. Naipaul

  A Writer’s People

  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 he 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, and Magic Seeds, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

  ALSO BY V. S. NAIPAUL

  NONFICTION

  Literary Occasions

  The Writer and the World

  Between Father and Son:

  Family Letters

  Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions

  Among the Converted Peoples

  India: A Million Mutinies Now

  A Turn in the South

  Finding the Center

  Among the Believers

  The Return of Eva Perón

  with The Killings in Trinidad

  India: A Wounded Civilization

  The Overcrowded Barracoon

  The Loss of El Dorado

  An Area of Darkness

  The Middle Passage

  FICTION

  Magic Seeds

  Half a Life

  A Way in the World

  The Engima of Arrival†

  A Bend in the River

  Guerillas

  In a Free State

  A Flag on the Island†

  The Mimic Men

  Mr. Stone and the Knights

  Companion†

  A House for Mr. Biswas

  Miguel Street*

  The Suffrage of Elvira*†

  The Mystic Masseur*

  *Published in an omnibus edition entitled Three Novels.

  †Published in an omnibus edition entitled The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2009

  Copyright © 2007 by V. S. Naipaul

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in

  Great Britain by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd., London, in 2007,

  and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2008.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and

  colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Naipaul, V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), [date]

  A writer’s people : ways of looking and feeling : an essay in five parts /

  by V.S. Naipaul. —1st American ed.

  p. cm

  1. Naipaul, V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932– . 2. Authors, Trinidadian—

  20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  PR9272.9.N32Z475 2008

  823′.914—dc22

  [B] 2008003571

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37067-9

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For my daughter,

  Maleeha Maria

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE The Worm in the Bud

  TWO An English Way of Looking

  THREE Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way

  FOUR Disparate Ways

  FIVE India Again: The Mahatma and After

  Up to about the age of six or seven I lived mainly in my grandmother’s house in a small country town in Trinidad. Then we moved to the capital, Port of Spain, to my grandmother’s house in the Woodbrook area. I immediately fell in love with what I could see of the life of the Woodbrook street, and its municipal order, the early-morning washing of the gutters on both sides, the daily gathering-up of rubbish into the blue city-council horse carts. My grandmother’s house stood on tallish concrete pillars. It had a front verandah hung with ferns in open metal baskets lined with the netting or bark from the sheathing of new coconut branches at the top of the tree. The ferns made for privacy in the verandah and watering them morning and evening was part of the house ritual. Concrete steps covered by a small pitched corrugated-iron roof led down to the front gate and the pavement. To stand beside the banisters on the steps gave a perfect view of the street and the people. I got to know the people well, though I never spoke to them and they never spoke to me. I got to know their clothes and style and voices.

  Sixteen years later, in London, in a darker time, when I had grown to feel that I would never get started as a writer, I remembered the street and the people, and they gave me my first book.

  It was a “flat” view of the street: in what I had written I went right up close to it, as close as I had been as a child, shutting out what lay outside. I knew even then that there were other ways of looking; that if, so to speak, I took a step or two or three back and saw more of the setting, it would require another kind of writing. And if, in a greater complication, I wished to explore who I was and who the people in the street were (we were a small immigrant island, culturally and racially varied), that would require yet another kind of writing. It was to that complication that my writing, in fact, took me. I had lived all my writing life in England; that had to be acknowledged, had to be part of my world view. I had been a serious traveller; that had to be acknowledged as well. I couldn’t pretend as a writer I knew only one place. There were pressures to do that, but for me such a world view would have been false.

  All my life I have had to th
ink about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world.

  ONE

  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 affiliation, 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 the Trinidad 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 shoul
d 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 university (I had read English) and for a year or so I had been living in poor circumstances in London trying to get started as a writer. The only blessing of that time—and it was a very great blessing—had been the parttime job I had by a lucky chance managed to get with the BBC Caribbean Service as editor of their weekly literary programme, Caribbean Voices.

  Caribbean Voices was a post-war BBC idea, part of a general new dawn in the world, as it seemed, and was about ten years old. I and my father had contributed stories to it, and during my time at the university I had got to know the producer, Henry Swanzy. It happened now that Henry—whose family had or used to have trading interests in West Africa: Henry told me that there was or used to be a famous rum there known as Swanzy Rum—it happened that Henry was going for a few years to Ghana to work in the radio there (part of the new dawn), and it was his charitable idea that I should take over the Voices part of his BBC duties.