| A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul, London, Picador, 2007, pp.194. ISBN 978-0-330-48524-1 HB |
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| Review by Frank Birbalsingh |
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| Sir Vidia Naipaul’s most recent book A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling collects fragments of autobiography, history, criticism, memoir and travel writing, even literary gossip, into a narrative divided into five chapters and dedicated to the author’s daughter [step-daughter] Maleeha Maria. The first chapter “The Worm in the Bud” considers post-colonial issues with which regular readers of Naipaul will already be familiar, for example, his claim that: “small places [Caribbean territories] with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies.” (p.16) In support of this claim, Naipaul offers excoriating reflections on fellow West Indian writers like Samuel Selvon, Edgar Mittelholzer and Derek Walcott. In the case of Walcott, a Nobel laureate like Naipaul himself, it is cruel to say that, by 1955, when Walcott had completed only a tiny fraction of the poetry he eventually produced: “the first flush of his inspiration had gone,” (p.15) or that he [Walcott] needed to refresh himself in the idea of blackness as a “pool of distress.” (p. 22) For Naipaul, literary failure illustrates “spiritual emptiness,” (p.22) the worm in the bud of the Caribbean soul. |
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Chapter Two “An English Way of Looking” continues in this hypercritical vein which seems less cruel if it is aimed at society in general rather than individuals. For instance, a bell rings, however faintly, when Naipaul asserts that, in the colonial era, life for us West Indians was a “cloud of not knowing,” (p.54) or that we lived in places: “where all judgments were moralistic and hateful and corrupting, the judgments of gossip.” (p.49) There is also truth in his argument that modern English literature developed on the periphery of the world, in the US and the Commonwealth, because: “the centre of the world shifts.” (p.65) Surprisingly, for virtually the first time in his career, Naipaul also turns his guns on English people and culture when he describes his former fellow students at Oxford University in the 1950s as: “for the most part provincial and mean and common: and it was like that at the BBC as well.” (p.49) While he gratefully acknowledges friendships in England with men like Francis Wyndham: “the first true intellectual I had got to know,” (p.47) or Henry Swanzy who hired him for the BBC Programme “Caribbean Voices”, it seems ungrateful for him to come down so hard on the writing of the novelist Anthony Powell who had served as a mentor at the start of his literary career.
Still, Naipaul’s account of his first literary contacts during his early struggles as a writer in England makes Chapter Two easily the best in the book. The chapter also benefits from homage Naipaul pays to his father Seepersad who is mentioned in the first chapter as: “possibly the first writer of the Indian diaspora.” (p.31) As we know, Naipaul has already paid handsome tribute to Seepersad Naipaul in his Introduction to Seepersad’s The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (1976) and Letters Between A Father and Son, but his acceptance, in A Writer’s People, that his father’s stories are now dead, and: “live only for me” (p.45) carries particular poignancy.
If, in his first two chapters, Naipaul wanders back and forth between the West Indies and England, in Chapter Three “Looking and not Seeing: The Indian Way” he reverts to India, and makes a link between the career of Mahatma Gandhi and
Rahim Khan, an Indian indentured immigrant, who lived in Suriname and wrote a novel Jeevan Prakash (The Light of Life). Like most Indo-Caribbeans, Khan projects: “India as a perfect place...the good place that was his, to which he might return if he had to,” (p.121); but this unrealistic view is abruptly quashed by Naipaul’s account of his mother’s visit to India, when Mrs. Naipaul is given a cup of tea by an Indian relative who stirs sugar into the cup with her finger. This unhygienic outrage confirms the author’s earlier comment that, for Indo-Caribbeans: “the India of myth was chipped away, and India became a place of destitution from which we were lucky to have got away.” (pp.123-124)
Again, as regular readers of Naipaul will agree, the West Indies, India and England provide the most fertile sources of subjects for his writing. His tortured love-hate, especially for the West Indies and India, inspire his deepest insights and most acute, if often, most hurtful judgments. But in Chapter Three, the link between Rahim Khan and Gandhi – the bulk of the chapter – is less than convincing, and in Chapter Four “Disparate Ways,” a lengthy commentary on Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, an historical novel about Carthage, seems distracting and irrelevant, despite its learned references to the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. The only justification of such miscellaneous ruminations, like those in previous chapters, is that they are all handed down from the secure vantage point of an author whose name alone will always command our attention.
Evidently this is how A Writer’s World should be read: as the reflections of one of the world’s most celebrated authors, delivered, ex cathedra, in some form or fashion, after a career lasting half a century. This is also why, when Naipaul writes in Chapter Five “India Again: the Mahatma and After” that: “The best part of Gandhi in 1925 had really been made in London and South Africa. And just twenty-five years later he would be out of date,” (p.172) we feel we must listen, even if we don’t necessarily agree. After all, like Nelson Mandela later on, Gandhi is dateless because he helped to achieve Independence or freedom for his country, not because of his policies for India’s post-Independence management. Yet it is pointless to take umbrage. Naipaul seems to relish his reputation for bilious outpourings: “Indian writers, to speak generally, seem to know only about their own families and their places of work.” (p.193) This is both outrageous and untrue. But it is great stuff: stimulating, entertaining, perhaps instructive. We pay attention even if we disagree.
Frank Birbalsingh is Emertus Professor of English at York University, Toronto, Canada.
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