Perhaps the most enjoyable, but also the most misleading, essay on Sir V.S Naipaul was published some 25 years ago by Terry Eagleton-
A Mind So Fine: The Contradictions of V. S. Naipaul
Naipaul wasn't cerebral. Unlike Ved Mehta, he didn't write a book about analytical philosophy. Nor was he interested in Economics or Geopolitics. His work could be considered ethnographic and humanistic. Unlike Niradh Chaudhuri, it made no grand world-historical claims.
I suppose Marxists might say that as a darkie, it was a contradiction for him not to be a Marxist. Indeed, it was a contradiction that there were any non-Marxists in the world. Such people should just slit their own throat rather than put the proletariat to the inconvenience and expense of doing so for them.
If Naipaul didn't become a Marxist, what did he become? It is tempting to compare him to 'outsider' authors like Colin Wilson. These were the 'angry young men' who started to get published around the same time as Naipaul. They were considered Fascists who thought of themselves as Nietzschean supermen. But they were from the wrong side of the tracks and did not have university degrees. Naipaul was more respectable. He stuck to a narrow groove while Wilson and Stuart Holroyd ended up babbling about Space Vampires or ESP. I suppose, having actually got a degree, Naipaul was under no illusions about his own intelligence.
I suppose the same could be said of Dom Moraes who was younger and who achieved fame earlier than Naipaul. But Moraes was a poet, not a novelist. Like Ved Mehta he was quite good at getting international scoops- or what might pass for them. He could get interviews with the King or Prime Minister while Naipaul had to be content to talking to the cab driver. Moraes brought out the glamour and exoticism of foreign places, or- if too drunk to do so- was nevertheless prolific. Naipaul's was stingy and relentlessly morose. It was his one gift.
Arriving at Oxford University from a down-at-heel family in Trinidad,
They were middle class and, on the maternal side, quite wealthy and socially prominent. His father owned his own house and a Ford Prefect car. Trinidad, as an oil exporter, was relatively well off.
the eighteen-year-old V. S. Naipaul wrote: “Gone are the days of the aristocrats. Nearly everyone comes to Oxford on a state grant. The standard of the place naturally goes down.”
They year was 1950. Rationing only ended in 1954. The highest marginal rate of tax was 98 percent. On the other other hand, the country needed scientists and mathematicians more than ever. Thus recruitment from State Schools rose to about 40 percent. The country needed to create 'Comprehensive' Schools on the model of the American High School. In other words, all children should have an opportunity to go on to College, otherwise the country would lose its super-power status. This meant that the quality of teaching had to rise. Thus many more women and working class origin men were entering the two ancient Universities. They were aware of their responsibilities to the State. University would fit them to serve it better. The days of Max Beerbohm & Evelyn Waugh were long gone. The country could not afford intellectual or aesthetic dandyism. Naipaul's own prose was workmanlike.
It was as though Dick Cheney were to complain that there were too few Trotskyists in his golf club.
Plenty of neo-cons were ex-Trotskyites.
My own entry into the dreaming spires, a decade or so later, was unfortunate for just the opposite reason: the place was positively swarming with patricians, almost all of whom seemed to be called Nigel.
Tax rates were high but the Tories were in power. Anyway, you could get rich by writing about sexy secret agents who had been to the right schools and had good tailors. It must be said the 'public' (that is private) schools were upping their game academically. The War had shown that the British bulldog spirit wasn't enough. Brains too were necessary.
Towering in stature as a result of generations of fine breeding, they brayed rather than spoke, elbowed the townspeople off the thin medieval pavements, and joked about letting loose their hounds on “oiks” (working-class undergraduates) like myself.
As a stunted North-of-England plebeian, I found myself ducking servilely between their legs like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. It was the kind of place in which one would as soon have worn a pink tutu as sported jeans. Naipaul would have been in his element.
Wrong colour, old boy. Also, the other Indians at Oxford looked down on him because he was descended from cane-cutters or crab-catchers.
Arriving in England only to become plus anglais que les Anglais is a familiar émigré tale.
It wasn't Naipaul's. He didn't get his B.Litt. Nor did he become a barrister. He worked for the BBC's West Indian service. His colleagues were Leftists.
V. S. Naipaul, who came to the country in 1950 and has made it his home ever since, is one of the latest in a venerable line of literary refugees,
immigrant. Had he got his B.Litt and then a PhD, he'd have been a Professor back home living the good life.
several of them among the most eminent figures in modern “English” literature. There was Joseph Conrad, the Pole who commended the chuckleheaded values of the British merchant navy;
Values that made this country stronger and richer. The merchant marine played a great role in both World Wars.
Henry James, the American who attended English country-house parties
those given by bluestockings where he met fellow artists and intellectuals
as devotedly as Madonna drops in on fashion shows; T. S. Eliot, who looked and sounded like a rather dotty Anglican vicar.
But he encouraged new writing by authors with widely differing points of view. Indeed, he had boosted G. V Desani who was a broadcaster for the Beeb. Would VS write in his vein? Or would he adopt the view of Niradh Chaudhuri whose Autobiography had enraptured E.M Forster, J.C Squire & even Winston Churchill? Naipaul, disillusioned by the failure of Indian, or African, of Caribbean Socialism, moved in Chaudhuri's direction.
Eliot famously remarked of his compatriot James that “he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” which was a backhanded way of congratulating him on being a kosher Englishman, since the English have customs and pieties rather than fancy theories. It was self-congratulation too: it takes one expertly disguised expatriate to know another.
Where was the disguise? Neither was a cowboy by birth or breeding.
George Bernard Shaw recognized immediately that his fellow Dubliner Oscar Wilde had appointed himself Irish jester to the English court, a role he shared with Shaw and which would later be inherited by Brendan Behan.
Behan was an IRA man. He wanted to bomb the Brits not entertain them.
Shaw was also aware of how dangerous as well as exhilarating this bit part was. The English relished Wilde's mimicry of them
They relished his wit. He wasn't a mimic.
but also suspected that imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. (It was Naipaul who was later to put into currency the phrase “mimic men,” the title of one of his more lugubrious novels.)
It looked as though Naipaul might be moving to the left. The Communists condemned the 'bourgeois nationalists' who had taken power in the colonies. Naipaul had been in Uganda when he started writing the book. Obote had just deposed the Kabaka and was taking his country in a Socialist direction. Naipaul had some sympathy for Cheddi Jagan who had been displaced by Forbes Burnham. Naipaul could be seen as endorsing Afrocentrism. Asiatics merely mimicked the Europeans. African origin people would forge an indigenous path to Socialism.
Wilde's use of the English language was a shade too polished and perfect;
he was a classicist. I suppose one might say he was influenced by Mahaffy who did have Gaelic ancestry. Wilde was a descendant of a Dutchman who came over with William of Orange. His blood was English though his mother was a fervent Irish nationalist.
the genuine English aristocrat of the Victorian era said things like “huntin'” and “shootin',” too indolent to labor over his consonants.
Whereas proles never dropped their aitches.
And indeed, without Farquhar, Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Shaw, Wilde, and O'Casey, there would have been precious little English stage comedy to boast of.
Shakespeare remains the greatest comic dramatist in the language. King Lear is a laugh riot, provided Ophelia's farts are well timed.
Who better placed to write comedy than those who know the natives' language and conventions from the inside, yet are also foreign enough to cast a sardonic eye on their sanctities?
Which is why the Chinese wrote better English comedy than the Irish who, after all, shared the language.
The Irish did not only have to send the British their rents and cattle; they also had to write most of their great literature for them.
While being whipped by Capitalists wearing silk top-hats.
In Ireland, as in Naipaul's Trinidad, one of the most revered of all native customs was getting out of the place.
Ireland had a big famine. Trinidad didn't. Naipaul's ancestors were happy enough to get sent there.
The mountains in Ireland, somewhat unusually, are ringed around the coast, as though divinely arranged to keep the natives in; but writers could usually rely on being driven out by church and state to Boston or Birmingham.
Till the place became a knowledge economy and its per capita income rose above that of the UK.
Although Naipaul found himself hemmed in by an ocean rather than a mountain range, crossing it proved to be a one-way passage, as it did for James Joyce.
Joyce might have settled in Dublin if his cinema venture had taken off. Naipaul had married an English woman and, I suppose, that might have caused awkwardness back then in Trinidad.
Like Naipaul, Joyce abandoned his country early but never ceased to revisit it in imagination; having escaped in reality, both men could then find their way back in fantasy.
Both Ireland and the West Indies were interesting places. Their people were artistically gifted. Still, their populations were small and thus their societies afforded fewer avenues of advancement.
Joyce once remarked that it was this freedom from English social and literary convention that lay at the root of his talent.
Joyce was a student of literature determined to advance the modernist school of writing. His experiments were appreciated for their boldness even when readers were left baffled.
Deprived of a stable tradition, the colonial writer has to pillage, to parody, to make it up as he or she goes along, so that exile and experiment go together like Laurel and Hardy.
One might say this of G.V Desani who left school at 13 and knocked about the world before finding his calling as a journalist and broadcaster. Naipaul had been a student of Tolkien at Oxford. He had a keen sense of literary style and exercised an iron self-discipline over his pen. Indeed, his devotion to his craft was exemplary.
It is not surprising that Ireland was the only region of the British Isles early last century to produce a flourishing indigenous modernism.
Virginia Woolf's real name was Peggy O'Hara.
Otherwise, Britain had to import its modernism, along with its Ford cars and chinoiserie.
Britain produced cars which it exported. Eagleton may have heard of the Rolls Royce. England produced a lot of Chinese style porcelain from the late Seventeenth century onward.
Naipaul is not nearly as avant-garde a writer as Joyce (who is?), but he has been both blessed and afflicted by a similarly skewed relationship to the metropolis.
Naipaul isn't avant-garde. On the other hand, his real name was Peggy O'Hara. His father was a leprechaun.
Joyce leapt over the imperial capital of London into the arms of the continentals, with whom Ireland had enjoyed a fruitful cultural relationship ever since the monastic émigrés of the Middle Ages.
Irish monks had helped re-light the candle of learning on the continent in the sixth century.
(His fellow Dubliner Samuel Beckett was to do much the same some years later.) As a Trinidadian, however, Naipaul had no such organic affinity to continental Europe; it was England or nothing.
Had he gone to America- like Ved Mehta- he would have done well enough. But he would have been held to a higher journalistic standard.
In the litany of literary refugees, Wilde,
did have to leave England, but he wrote little after that. Shaw did well in England but would have been welcome to settle in Ireland. Like Yeats, he might have been appointed a Senator. Joyce faced censorship. Paris was the ideal place for him. He was pushing forward the program of Mallarme. Either that or Tin Tin. I often confuse the two.
Shaw, and Joyce stand out in one notable way.
Wilde & Joyce were poets but Joyce wasn't much of a dramatist. Exiles is execrable.
They are the only ones who were adamantly on the political left—though “Stalinist” might describe Shaw more accurately than “socialist,” and Joyce's radical sympathies were short-lived.
So, there is no commonality between the three. Wilde ended up converting to Catholicism. Chesterton was more Socialistic- i.e. anti-Semitic.
The others were either studiously “unpolitical,” or ensconced somewhere on the political right. For many—Conrad, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Lewis—the right in question was an unpleasantly embattled one, rather than the moderate Burkean Toryism of many of the English natives.
Conrad's Conservatism was of that sort. The others were a bit mad.
If you think too much about conservatism, you cannot really be an English conservative, and other mimic men recognized as much.
Nor can you do any good as a Socialist if you see the Tory cloven hoof wherever you look.
The resilience of this brand of conservatism lies in its distaste for the political in favor of the customary, instinctual, and spontaneous.
Eagleton had lived through the Thatcher era. Indeed, by the time he wrote this, Labour's Blair was pretty much a Thatcherite.
When Naipaul disowns politics by informing us, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, that he has “no guiding political idea” and cherishes his “intuition alone,” he is telling us his politics.
He is telling us he isn't political. He is an artist.
It is, presumably, pure intuition that leads him to conclude An Area of Darkness with the declaration that the Indians have no sense of history and their country “will never cease to require the arbitration of a conqueror.”
In other words, Naipaul is repeating Niradh Chaudhuri's verdict. At the time is seemed plausible that India might become a client state because it couldn't feed or defend itself. Nehru, 'the last Englishman to rule India', had been a mimic man. He might have gone to the same school as Churchill but he could not do for India what Churchill had done for England.
There is, then, a well-attested affinity in British culture between the émigré and the conservative intellectual
if they fled Communism or 'National' Socialism- sure.
—not only in the literary field but all the way from Wittgenstein
who described himself as a Communist at heart though he also said he was against it in theory but for it in practice. He was a deeply silly man.
and Namier to Popper and Gombrich.
Gombrich was a close friend of Popper. But it was Hayek who influenced Thatcher. One may also mention Michael Polanyi, who was close to TS Eliot. But his brother, Karl, was a Leftist at the time. The theory that emigres are likely to be right wing falls down when you find two brothers who choose opposing ideologies.
Like Conrad, some of these luminaries were in flight from political turbulence at the heart of Europe and turned to what seemed a more sedate, traditionalist milieu in the United Kingdom.
The UK was quite rich and talented men could find a market there for their work. It was only if they wrote frankly about sex that they had to cross the Channel.
Others, such as James and Eliot, were allured by what felt like a more “organic” social order—
they were returning to their ancestral island
mannered, devious, and stratified—in which their thought could flourish more vigorously than it would in an autocratic culture
Doestoevsky's Russia was plenty autocratic.
or in a brashly explicit one like the United States.
Emerson was constantly taking his dick out and slapping it on the table. Henry fled to Rome where the Pope is above that sort of thing.
And émigrés do not kick a hole in the lifeboat they are clambering aboard;
sadly, some do.
they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats—but aristocrats of wit and style rather than of blood and property.
There are plenty of left-wing aristocrats. But a man of wit and style might end up the Earl of Beaconsfield.
From Wilde to Tom Stoppard, Ernest Gellner to Isaiah Berlin, expatriates intent on out-Englishing the English have
confined their conversation to the weather. I find it is a mistake to dwell too much on ones relations with the Royal family even if one is the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and thus entitled to tell the publican to kiss my black arse if he suggests I am inebriated.
resorted to humor, satire, and an acerbic vein of wit. In doing so, they become spiritually superior to the philistine middle classes who want to ship them back home.
I wasn't aware that anybody wanted to ship Stoppard or Gellner 'back home'. On the other hand, I did have a student who tried to mug Stoppard's son.
Naipaul's conservatism has been lambasted often enough, notably by postcolonial critics, though his opinion of this school of thought is not, one imagines, all that different from what Clint Eastwood's would be if he ever got wind of it.
He wasn't particularly conservative. He liked the Shiv Sena. But he also thought India would go to the dogs without the Dynasty.
Dagmar Barnouw's Naipaul's Strangers is a bravely unfashionable attempt to rescue the writer from those who accuse him of racism, chauvinism, and snobbery; and, although some might consider this as easy as defending George Bush from the charge of being parochial,
that would be difficult. He was parochial- if not the veritable village idiot. Cheney ran things.
the book yields some admirably sensitive readings of Naipaul's prose, despite being extravagantly uncritical of its revered subject. Its pages are everywhere redolent of the smell of incense.
She was White- German white. She had to say nice things about a darkie.
Barnouw does aim a few well-targeted shots at the postcolonial romanticizing of “the other,” recording Naipaul's distaste for, in the words of another critic, “privileged people who are sentimental about primitivism in the Third World.”
i.e. guys who rave about Satyajit Ray movies.
Anyone suffering from this widespread affliction could certainly do worse than read a few of Naipaul's books, even if the cure might turn out to be more nauseating than the disease.
Vomiting is a good thing if it gets rid of a toxin.
This, after all, is the man whose oracular pronouncements include the judgment that nothing was ever created in the West Indies;
except calypso. Lord Invader's 'Rum & Coca Cola' was a hit for the Andrew Sisters during the War.
that the West Indians never seriously doubted the virtue of the imperialist culture to which they aspired;
Because being rich is better than being as poor as shit.
and that the ethnic situation of African Americans cannot be the subject of serious literature.
Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book about carpentry.
If Naipaul is understandably irritated by well-heeled sentimentalists, it is partly because they dispute his insinuation that when it comes to colonialism, the natives were at least as much to blame as their masters.
This was the Leftist view. Local elites were very evil. Indeed, they still are. Why can't they all just slit their own throats?
If you do not wish to provoke your compatriots to helpless fury, it is probably advisable not to open your account of the Caribbean, The Middle Passage, with the sentence: “There was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat-train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class to the West Indies.”
Who wouldn't be glad of travelling first class more particularly if the Government is picking up the tab?
Boa Vista, in Brazil near the border with British Guiana, is a “preposterous city” (the Waugh-like epithet is significant), which probably means, among other things, that they did not bring Naipaul his coffee quickly enough.
It meant it was built on the Parisian model. I suppose it had declined economically somewhat.
It is hard to know, muses Naipaul, what the Guianese are thinking—just as it is hard to know what he himself is thinking when churning out an obtuse cliché such as that.
No. We understand that the Guyanese are agreeable conversationalists but play their cards close to their chests.
Like the equally dyspeptic traveler Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia seems to find most of the people he meets in his wanderings so disagreeable that one wonders why he doesn't just stay at home.
Disagreeable people are more entertaining to read about more particularly if they live far far away.
Perhaps traveling is a way of staying faithful to having grown up nowhere in particular;
Naipaul has told us a lot about where he grew up.
you can feel homeless anywhere at all.
More particularly if you don't have kids.
Like Gulliver, Naipaul finds the same pettiness, corruption, and betrayal everywhere he goes. India, he announces in An Area of Darkness, “invited conquest” and has nothing to contribute to the world. It is a country “with an infinite capacity for being plundered,”
Not any more. The Chinese had found nothing worth taking and had withdrawn unilaterally.
which is rather like claiming that Ethiopian children have an infinite capacity for starving to death.
No. They have just the same finite capacity as the rest of us.
The Taj Mahal, he reflects, might as well be transported slab by slab to the United States, since in India it is sheerly wasteful. No doubt some enterprising Texan will take the hint. In Naipaul's own contemptuous imagery, India comes down to the starving child defecating by the wayside and the mangy dog waiting to eat up the excrement.
Life under Nehruvian Socialism had its drawbacks. His successors big plan for India involved everybody skipping a meal.
These and similarly insulting fatuities are the language of a writer who detests political generalities, works by innocent intuition alone, and is celebrated by Barnouw, among others, for the delicate particularity of his perceptions.
At least the fellow didn't gas on about evil elites and the suffering subaltern.
The portrayal of the Muslim world in Among the Believers would make the book enjoyable bedtime reading for Richard Perle.
It was an accurate enough reflection of popular opinion at the time. 'Beyond Belief' went further because Islamists were going further.
With their Jamesian sense of nuanced judgment and fine discrimination, novels such as Guerrillas and In a Free State appear to view all colonial emancipation as self-interested, self-deluding fantasy.
Naipaul had been in Uganda before the place turned to shit. Museveni has helped the country rebuild from the bottom up. This involves respecting local history and traditions and bringing back the Kabaka etc.
Naipaul has only to sniff an ideal to detect in it the stirrings of self-aggrandizement. He complains of his people having been stripped of history, but does just the same himself in order to avoid the discomforting truth that colonialism may have had a hand in their present plight.
Many share Lee Kuan Yeuw's view that colonialism ended too soon.
Few writers have a shrewder understanding of what has been called colonial cringe, and few are more adept at analyzing the self-serving myths of the powerless.
Niradh got there first and did a more thorough job.
In my own country of Ireland, it has not been unknown for some dejected soul to down one pint of Guinness too many out of sheer depression over the Gaelic defeat at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, or for the odd nationalist, outraged by the injustice of the eighteenth-century Penal Laws, to find it hard to struggle out of bed in the morning.
The same thing happens to me when I remember the ejection of Iyers from Iyerland by Maratha leprechauns like Leo Varadkar.
Colonial peoples can indeed be marked by shame and fantasy, self-loathing and self-deception, pious rhetoric and sentimental bluster.
Anybody can do stupid shit.
But some of them can also laugh about the fact; and there is a difference between recognizing this syndrome and asserting, as some in Ireland have, that the Irish themselves were largely responsible for the Great Famine.
The Finns were certainly responsible for theirs. Malthusian problems have Malthusian solutions.
This is just another version of the self-odium for which the natives are being castigated.
Everybody should scold everybody for ever and ever.
The colonial who rebukes his compatriots had better be careful that his complaints are not just another symptom of the whining he condemns in them. Naipaul sees with brutal realism how the dispossessed can sometimes collude in their own subjugation, but he does not dwell at length on the moral obscenity of the subjugation itself.
Not to mention the moral obscenity of having money in the bank. Everybody should simply starve to death to avoid this fate.
Instead, he believes that all causes, including the idea of justice, are corrupting, that every man is an island, and that pity and compassion for a colonial people will not do because they baselessly encourage hope.
Also, Naipaul had some money in the bank. Yet he didn't even try to chop off his own head! This is morally obscene.
Rare is the writer as exquisitely talented as he who is so long on observation and so short on sympathy. Naipaul does not seem to know the meaning of geniality, which may well be the ultimate judgment of the colonial system under which he grew up.
West Indians are terribly genial.
In An Area of Darkness, we learn at one point that Naipaul's female companion has suddenly fainted at his side—a surprising revelation, since he had not previously bothered to mention her presence at all.
His wife was white- a fellow Oxford graduate. Naipaul chose his wives well. The one nice thing he did was take the blame for his wife's infertility.
What champions like Barnouw would no doubt call steelily disenchanted realism is in fact the lopsided antirealism of one who can hardly bring himself to acknowledge the realities of love and courage.
Unlike Eagleton who praises the patriotic love and courage the British Merchant Marine displayed in two world wars.
When he writes of how the powerless lie about themselves and to themselves, he cannot resist ruining the point by adding “since it is their only resource,” which is itself a sort of lie.
They should scold elites instead.
Literary Occasions gathers together some of Naipaul's essays about writing, mixing autobiographical pieces, prefaces to his own novels, and his Nobel Prize speech with articles on Conrad, Kipling, Nirad Chaudhuri, and other Indian writers. The volume charts the extraordinary spiral of displacements that make up Naipaul's career.
There was no displacement- just a steady rise into affluence and international recognition.
It is a life in which one fantasy gives way to another, one fiction is concealed within a second, one potential homecoming turns out to be yet another assignation with strangeness.
Nonsense! He did well at school and well enough at Uni. He fell on his feet with the BBC- a recognized path into the book racket. Two of his books- 'House for Mr. Biswas' & 'Area of Darkness' were good. After that, he turned out dreck which, however, found a ready enough market. He was a brown Eeyore at a time when things were improving for darker skinned people.
Born into an Indian community in Trinidad, the grandchild of indentured immigrant laborers, Naipaul came from an island that was geographically ambiguous—marooned between the Caribbean and South America—and an ethnic background that was even more so.
Nonsense! He was from the Caribbean. His ethnicity was North Indian. There was nothing ambiguous about any of this.
Trinidadian Indians still had a smattering of their indigenous culture but one that was already on the wane, so Naipaul claims, when he was a child.
Rising affluence meant the reverse was the case. The Arya Samajis felt themselves equal to the Presbyterians.
He could understand Hindi but not speak it.
His sister studied at Benares Hindu University. She decided that Hindi is only good for talking to cows. After Independence, many Indians stopped learning a Vernacular language. It was the Brits who had insisted on it.
His community, at home neither in the West nor in the East, held itself aloof from the racially mixed life of the street and knew nothing of Muslims.
They knew them well enough. There was a syncretic element to life in the villages.
Naipaul would eventually come to see his own detached, passive, observer-like status as a kind of Hindu trait;
He identified as a Brahmin but had little interest in Vedanta which teaches that the atman (soul) is a detached observer.
it certainly proved easily translatable later on into the sardonic, de haut en bas judgments of the English gentleman.
Like whom? Anthony Powell? Whatever Naipaul's faults, he never tried to pass himself off as the Duchess of Devonshire. I suppose that is one reason the English literary establishment hasn't taken to me in the way they took to Naipaul.
In both cases, there is an apartness, a quick sense of caste, and a horror of uncleanness.
Nonsense! The English gentleman does not practice untouchability. I suppose India, being very hot, has a sense of caste because of a primitive type of pathogen avoidance theory.
This insider/outsider status within Trinidad, which the colonial relation to Britain simply wrote large, was a social one too: the Naipaul family was lower middle class, furnished with some rudimentary culture but socially impoverished.
The African origin people had urbanized and risen through education and skills training. The Indians were at the bottom of the heap being concentrated in rural areas.
Naipaul senior, an odd-job man turned journalist and short-story writer, tried to raise himself a little by writing,
he succeeded. A White editor spotted his talent.
only to look in the mirror one morning and fail to see his face reflected there. He had merged back into the anonymous masses and suffered a mental breakdown.
He had written an article which provoked the wrath of some rural Hindus. He was forced to sacrifice a goat to Kali. Being an Arya Samajist, this caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown.
Along with the émigré, the lower middle class occupies an honorable niche among the architects of English literature. It was from this Janus-faced social stratum (“contradiction incarnate,” Marx called it) that the major realist novel of the nineteenth century was produced. The Brontë sisters
didn't do realism.
were the children of a poor Anglican parson; George Eliot was the daughter of a provincial farm bailiff;
No. He managed a big estate. Bailiffs worked under him.
Charles Dickens was the son of an impecunious civil-service clerk; Thomas Hardy's father was a small-time West Country builder.
He was himself an architect- a step up from being a stone-mason and builder.
Squeezed precariously between the social establishment and the impoverished plebs, this group lived out the conflict between aspiration and frustration,
No. It rose. The whole country did.
individual ambition and communal loyalty, which also marks the work of so many colonial authors.
The nineteenth century Brits were writers living in an age of expanding affluence and political enfranchisement. They wrote for people like themselves. Colonial authors who wrote for a foreign audience faced very different challenges and had much more limited opportunities.
If the émigré is literally foreign, the lower middle class are internal migrants.
No. They are indigenous. Some rise, some fall.
They are inside and outside conventional society at the same time, peevish, resentful, and pathologically insecure,
like Marx & Engels?
yet powered by a formidable drive for cultivation and respectability.
This may or may not be the case. George Eliot & Mrs. Gaskell was happy to use dialect words to add verisimilitude to their novels.
The impulse to belong, and the urge to break away, fight it out in the Brontës as they do in Naipaul's Mr. Biswas, a portrait of his self-divided father.
Nonsense! Biswas is a journalist with Arya Samaji leanings. He wants reform, rationality and the purging of superstition. He reads Samuel Smiles & Epictetus. He believes in progress.
Biswas is 'ghar jamai'- i.e. financially dependent on his in-laws- and Indians easily understand the source of his frustration. But so do people from Hong Kong. Timothy Mo's 'Monkey King' features a protagonist in the same position. More daringly than Biswas, he won't consummate his marriage till his father-in-law pays the customary dowry.
The colonial writer's talent, which allows him to portray his own people, is also what cuts him adrift from them.
Nonsense! R.K Narayan wasn't adrift from his people. If you have enough talent, your people will love you.
To write about your people is already to write your way out of them.
It really isn't. To do it well you need to find out more about them. Journalism is a good stepping stone into novel writing.
The act of portraying from the inside is also inescapably one of alienation;
It may be if you become more and more critical of your milieu
in possessing yourself in the act of authorship, you come to dispossess yourself of your place.
Or your loving recreation of it increases the pleasure you derive from it.
Childhood for most of us is a time when one has no idea what on earth is going on, but for the young Naipaul
the eldest son and his father's confidante
this state of ignorance was painfully compounded.
The boy suffered when his father suffered. He produced a great book to commemorate that remarkable man. But VS was no 'village Hampden'. He was a guy who got a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 16.
His own experience was profoundly strange to him,
he believed it was strange to his father. But he made a career for himself as a journalist. VS would make a place for himself in the world. But other Trinidadians had been equally successful in rising from generation to generation.
as though the usual human faculties for orienting and identifying had simply crumbled.
I suppose one might speak of 'estrangement'. I suppose Naipaul read a lot of French modernist novels.
Not knowing others, in a fractured, unstable society cobbled provisionally together and cut loose from history, he could know nothing of himself.
He needed to get some distance from himself. Dad is nice. But to write about him you have to see him as others saw him.
Trinidad was a “borrowed culture,” a belated society with “that feeling of having entered the cinema long after the film has started.”
During the War, the Trinidadians were glad enough to be far away from German or Japanese bombers. Indeed, the War brought prosperity- 'Rum & Coca Cola' not to mention the Yankee dollar.
Racism permeated the place like an invisible gas.
It was much worse in the American South.
The novels he devoured as a boy were an imported product,
like films
the fruit of an organized metropolitan knowledge that Naipaul lacked.
All kids lack knowledge.
Bereft of this coveted knowledge, his early efforts at fiction were thrown back on pure impressions.
First novels are derivative. My own account of growing up as an Italian Pope in the Ireland of Parnell drew too much upon the first few pages of 'Portrait of the Artist'.
He knew nothing of his own Hindu community except for what he learned from his father's stories, so that even experience close to hand had to be mediated through art.
No. He participated in family 'puja' and listened to the Pundit and the Arya Samaji pracharak same as everybody else.
As for historical memory, that fizzled out around the time of his grandparents. The past, like the idea of India, was a dream.
Not really. It was easy enough to find your ancestral village where the Pundit would have your genealogical records.
Within the official, “real-life” India of Nehru and Gandhi there was a more elusive, semi-fictional India from which his family obscurely stemmed.
It was the same place. The last Indian immigrants had come only about 15 years before Naipaul was born.
He hailed from a half-remembered subcontinent, and when he later visited the place it turned out to be not, as he had expected, the whole of which his childhood community was a fragment but a solitary, separate, derelict nation, just like life at home.
Niradh Chaudhuri had made the point once and for all.
Later, in a repetition of Trinidad, the England he knew would be mainly Oxford and literary London. (He was an undergraduate at Oxford's University College, whose tradition of distinguished overseas visitors has since dwindled to encompass Chelsea Clinton.)
The daughter of two of the most powerful American politicians.
The Oxford of his day could give him little help with writing:
He wrote essays same as everybody else. His Latin must have improved. He didn't know Greek but, I suppose, did learn Anglo-Saxon from Tolkien.
it was the 1950s, when Tennyson and Thackeray were considered by the English faculty rather too recent to be adequately assessed.
People read them for pleasure.
But it was through writing that Naipaul would explore who he was, reclaiming in such works as The Middle Passage and Among the Believers the areas of darkness around him; it was by investigating other “half-made” societies that he would be able at last to get a grip on his own.
Had Naipaul joined the Labour party and taken up journalistic assignments covering strikes and so forth, his picture of England would have been more rounded. I think his one English novel- Mr. Stone & the Knights Companions- shows an interest in the 'Corporatist' philosophy popular with Catholics. Like Niradh Chaudhuri, Naipaul feared England might tear itself apart over questions of Social Justice. But, unlike Niradh, his theme was anomie. Without the joint-family, though women might thrive, men were adrift. Apparently, his wife liked India. He didn't. There were lots of people there who looked like Mama & Chacha. But they weren't Mama or Chacha. They were strangers. How fucked is that?
The Indians, Naipaul considers with his usual withering contempt, are botched parodies of the English;
some were. But the botched parodies of Chairman Mao were worse.
but England was a fantasy as well, encountered as a child only in the pages of Dickens and a few other literary imports, on which he then modeled the real-life Trinidad around him.
He should have stuck to Enid Blyton. That is the secret to my success.
Eventually, in The Enigma of Arrival, he reverses the relation and speaks of projecting an African landscape onto a Wiltshire one, in order to write about Africa from the only spot where he has felt truly at home.
Nobody is at home in the Gloucester road.
Yet even the English rural landscape is portrayed here as one in decline, marked by that sense of decay, fragility, and impending chaos that inspires so deep-seated a fear in his novels.
Thus Naipaul was like Niradh Chaudhuri who despaired of India and then despaired of the England he had moved to.
The young Naipaul had to translate the English classics into his own Trinidadian terms in order to make them work—
which is why few of the characters are chimney sweeps or Dowager Duchesses.
though he would later come to realize that writing is a kind of translation anyway, distilling and distorting the actual world into aesthetic shape.
Or distilling and distorting the books that formed you so that they become part of the reality you inhabit.
When he came to England in 1950, the nation that had previously figured only as a fantasy
an object of knowledge
became one in another sense, full of English people pretending to be English.
They were only pretending to pretend- unless they were Russian spies.
If the Indians and the Trinidadians were mimic men, the English were mimics of themselves, self-consciously performing their Englishness like a second-rate drawing-room comedy;
rather than a French farce
men like Evelyn Waugh and the later Kingsley Amis really were irascible old reactionaries, but they also reveled in acting the part.
It is difficult not to be an irascible reactionary when you grow old and drink too much.
At the same time, the social reality of England served to dispel the literary fantasy: the more Naipaul knew of English culture, the less he felt in possession of its literature.
He contributed to it but didn't want to own it. Borges said 'every author creates his precursors'. Who were Naipaul's precursors? I don't know. He doesn't write like Niradh Chaudhuri. Who does he write like? I can't tell.
A country of the mind was forced to yield to the reality.
What was that country? Naipaul had a mind but it was not of any country in particular. He did not create a Malgudi which, over the decades, had to yield to the reality of social change.
Knowledge was thus inseparable from loss, as it was in Naipaul's relationship to his small-time journalist father. It was his father's unpublished writings about Trinidadian street life
a lot of it was published.
that inspired Naipaul to begin writing himself, so that the son's text became an extension of the father's.
Lots of people from his family took up the pen. Why? It was part and parcel of the Social Reform movements which enabled communities to rise up.
What Naipaul did not know at the time, however, was that his father had suffered disgrace and humiliation: he was caught sacrificing a goat to ward off a curse placed upon him by some farmers whose cavalier way with government regulations he had exposed in the press.
Nonsense! He had criticized animal sacrifice because he was an Arya Samaji. Then his life was threatened. He had to sacrifice a goat to Kali.
To this extent, Naipaul's knowledge of him was mixed with a saving ignorance, a salutary blankness that lies somewhere at the origin of his art.
Eagleton has plenty of ignorance. What precisely is it saving him from? We know the origin of Naipaul's art. Like Niradh or Desani or Aubrey Menon, he wrote for radio and developed a distinctive voice and an effective writing style. We also know he was rubbing shoulders with other ambitious young men and women some of whom would go on to be successful writers. He studied the market and found his own niche in it.
Literary Occasions, like most of Naipaul's writing about himself, is remarkable for its honest lucidity and stringent self-criticism.
This was part and parcel of 'Reformist' literature. Sadly, Naipaul had no interest in Religion. Take Religion out of Indian or Russian literature and you have miserabilist dreck.
If he is hard on others, he is quite as ungenial about himself. He admits, for example, that his early narrators in novels such as Miguel Street are a good deal more streetwise than he ever was;
because he was a swot.
that he did not feel competent as a reader until his mid-twenties; and that “the ambition to be a writer was for many years a kind of sham.”
This could be said by any writer looking back on his youth. You have to fake it to make it or- in my case- not make it and turn to blogging.
He is not in the least given to posturing or self-dramatizing. The collection is the work of an artist who nevertheless exemplifies one of the minor catastrophes of the twentieth century: the fact that the conflicts and instabilities that issued in so much superb writing led also, all too often, to a harsh, unforgiving elitism.
Naipaul was born into a stable world. He moved to England after it became entirely peaceful. Things just kept getting better and better for Naipaul and his family and the people of Trinidad and the UK. Even India turned the corner as did Museveni's Uganda.
Is Naipaul's writing 'superb'? No. It is good enough for its purpose. Naipaul was modest in his aims and, for that reason, was able to succeed. As for 'elitism', it curled up and died when a grocer's daughter became the British Prime Minister.
Great art, dreadful politics: it is the link between the two that needs to be noted.
There is no link between the two. One might as well say Gentzen or Teichmuller were shit at logic & math just because they were Nazis.
