Pico Iyer on V.S Naipaul

 Three Indians who had been broadcasters during the war, were published in England and attained a degree of fame around the time VS Naipaul arrived in Oxford to take up a scholarship. Those three w were G.V Desani, praised by T.S Eliot; Aubrey Menon & Niradh Chaudhuri. All three did quite well as journalists. Naipaul, whose father was a journalist, got his start with the Caribbean Service of the BBC. Initially, his voice was comic & 'humanistic' (i.e. not Marxist, but broadly progressive). Later, like Chaudhuri, he took a jaundiced view of the newly independent countries as well as the crass consumerism of their former Imperial masters. Desani had moved in a spiritual direction & even Menon cashed in on the craze for Indian Spirituality set off by the Beatles pilgrimage to the Maharishi. Naipaul remained immune to this fad but his work was now the lowest sort of journalism- viz travel writing.

Pico Iyer, whose parents may have hoped he'd be the new Theosophical Messiah, is- of course- the Pope of that brand of vacuity. When Naipaul won the Nobel he wrote of him as 

A High Priest of Literature

Naipaul may have had a high opinion of himself but his vocation was personal, not priestly, & his tastes in Literature were narrow & idiosyncratic.  

If writing were a religion, V.S. Naipaul would be its most steadfast monk.

Writing is part and parcel of religious devotion for some priests. Monks don't write for money. Journalists do. Naipaul wrote for money. Had he been devoted to Literature, he would have taught it  edited literary magazines.

Arriving in Oxford in 1950, as an 18 year-old scholarship boy from Trinidad, he already looked old beyond his years, haunted by an outsider’s uncertainties and yet determined to make his way in the world.

This would have been true of any foreigner who got a scholarship to a prestigious University. The odd thing about Naipaul is that he didn't study Law & qualify as a barrister.  

After his father died three years later, the eldest son was obliged to help support his family back home,

his mother was very capable and came from a wealthy and influential family.  

but he stayed on in England and, as he always writes, pursued “no other profession” than writing.

His wife was a teacher. He had a part-time job as a presenter for the Radio & later was an editorial assistant for the trade publication of the Concrete Industry.  I think he'd have been perfectly happy with a full time job with the Beeb. He believed that his colour told against him. He was probably right. 

Living to this day almost alone in the countryside,

he lived with his wife & adopted daughter. Also a cat.  

and writing his way out of disorder with a ruthless chastity and horror of indulgence,

Naipaul was neither a lunatic nor a dipsomaniac. His travel writing was profitable.  

Naipaul carries himself still like a literary sannyasin.

No. Sanyasis don't marry. They live in caves in the Himalayas. They don't jet around the place attending literary festivals.  

When Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, as he is officially known,

because that was his name. People are officially known by their actual names.  

won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, therefore, it seemed that the prize was being awarded to writing itself,

It was being awarded to a darkie- one who didn't like other darkies.  

as practiced, and sanctified, by a man who composes his judgments as if he’s never heard of the Internet or MTV, and holds onto “incorruptible” standards, in the Nobel citation’s apt words, while remaining “singularly unaffected by literary fashion and models.”

He was consistent. I'll grant you that.  

Writing against the current of the times–even as he embodies them (an Indian born in Trinidad claiming the prize for Great Britain)

a British subject by birth who became English by domicile. 

–Naipaul has staked his whole career on the bet that you can best understand the modern world by stepping away from the hype and the swirl and roaming around it with a ferocious detachment.

No. He wrote about what he knew. Sadly, he didn't know very much. But he husbanded his limited resources well enough. 

In the process he has fashioned the most transparent English sentences of our times.

We all aim at transparency. Sadly our own stupidity gets in the way.  

It is typical of Naipaul–a reflection, perhaps, of how much he travels on the page as well as off, always urging himself on to new directions–that none of his great books reads alike; he’s reinvented his style with every major change in his thinking.

There was no change in his thinking. In 1956, when he returned to Trinidad, he found that the Afro-Caribbeans, allied with Indian Muslims, had won the elections. He turned against darkies for the same reason as Niradh Chaudhuri did in 1946.  

A House for Mr. Biswas, the culmination of his early work, bubbles with the zest and color of the Port of Spain of his boyhood,

Because it is set in Trinidad. Sadly, there are no catchy Calypso songs in it.  

telling the poignant story of a frustrated journalist

a successful journalist. 

(based on his father) with a Dickensian confidence almost shocking in one not yet thirty.

Waugh was 24 when he completed 'Decline & Fall'.  

His patient studies of Islam outside the Arabic world,

are shit. He didn't like Muslims though he was smart enough to marry one.  

Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, read like oral histories of the modern faith, so scrupulously does the author absent himself, often, and get his subjects to speak as into a tape-recorder.

Ved Mehta was better. Dom Moraes was more famous & had married a beautiful woman with a shitload of money. Still, Naipaul's 'Area' was more ambitious than anything either of those youngsters could produce.  

And his immortal book, The Enigma of Arrival,

It is shit.  

describes the end of Empire,

It had started turning into a Commonwealth ten years before Naipaul was born 

and the loneliness of a colonial exile

That's 'mimic men'. There were immigrants from the New Commonwealth. I suppose, there may have also been some political exiles. They weren't lonely at all. There were lots of darkies in the bigger Cities.  

simply by evoking, in clean, hypnotic sentences, the writer in his little Wiltshire cottage, at the edge of a once-great estate run by a dying eccentric.

Stephen Tennant- the model for Waugh's Miles Malpractice. Apparently the old boy had taken to Vaishnavism in his dotage. The comedy here is that Tennant was an admirer of Firbank. He probably hoped that the author of 'the Mystic Masseur' was a male Mrs. Yajnavalkya who always 'finished off with a most charming sensation'.  

The shadow side of Naipaul’s fearlessness is that he has done nothing to ingratiate himself to the world.

Whites are content if darkies run down other darkies. Look at Nirad Chaudhuri.  

His contemporary and fellow Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, has written with sorrowful eloquence of Naipaul’s determination to put down Trinidad, and especially its African heritage, as if he were trying to push down the chaos and luxuriance of his boyhood.

Walcott understood that the Indians in Guyana & Trinidad were rivals of the Afro-Caribbeans. Naipaul's point was that the 'Negroes' were better educated & more urbanized than the cane-cutters & crab catchers of the rural areas.  

Those who share his Indian background have followed with fascinated alarm his vexed dialogue with the country of his ancestors over three books and 26 years

Not really. Both Chaudhuri & Naipaul were considered to reflect a reality both were fortunate enough to have escaped.  

(Naipaul being the rare writer who returns again and again to the places that get at him, as if to do them better).

Only if his books sell. There is no second 'Turn in the South'.  

And hiding behind the disguise of a snuff-taking 18th century English country squire

He never did any such thing.  

in tweeds, he has turned a pitiless eye on the failures of the developing world, in books with acid titles like The Mimic Men and The Overcrowded Barracoon.

He meant Mauritius which is doing very well.  

Tightly buttoned with semi-colons and taking pains to speak clearly and never to sing,

It is difficult to sing while whining. No pains are necessary.  

his straight-backed prose

journalistic 

reads as if it has never seen a tropical sunrise.

Tropical sunrises are very fast. Blink and you have missed it.  

Yet what begins to redeem this unsparingness is the fact that Naipaul has turned the same honesty on himself. The Enigma of Arrival is an unusually moving allegory of immigration and reinvention

No. Naipaul really did immigrate to England. The book isn't about his popping down to the offie as an allegory of his colonization of Mars.  

partly because it bodies forth the newcomer’s anxieties so nakedly,

Will the country folk hunt down the darkie with pitchforks?  

as he watches the “idea of decay” being replaced by “the idea of flux.”

Thatcherite England did have that quality.  

In life, the writer has thought nothing of talking about his adventures with prostitutes as a young man,

Burgess was more forthright. He could be called a high priest of Literature except his first love was Music. 

deriding even the fiction of his younger brother

it really wasn't very good.  

and marrying a divorced journalist 25 years his junior in the same year his devoted wife of 41 years passed away.

He chose his wives well. Having a feisty Muslim for a wife kept him safe from the Hindutva mob. 

He has sired no children

his first wife couldn't have any. With unusual sensitivity he took the blame on himself. He was happy to adopt his second wife's accomplished daughter.  

and seems to allow himself few diversions.

He was a man of limited interests.  

Even the knighthood in 1990

Thatcher like Naipaul. The feeling was mutual. 

that might have seemed a culmination of all his efforts has not stopped Naipaul from writing as astringently, as restlessly, as ever.

He was ready to put the boot into Islam when everybody else was running scared after the Ayatollah's fatwa.  

The new Nobel laureate stands, in some ways, for a rigor and a discrimination that many find uncomfortable.

He was a man of the Right but also a darkie. A regular 'twofer'.  

Yet without embracing any of the half-measures of the age, he has quietly, almost unobtrusively, thrown light on the fury of faith in the Islamic world,

No he hasn't. The fact is the guys with moustaches dressed in khaki had fucked up. Maybe the beardies in turbans could do better. The first Gulf war was between beardies & moustaches. The King of Jordan temporised by maintaining a five o'clock shadow.  

the dissolution of East and West

Communism? That was out of his range.  

and the estrangement of those caught between worlds, simply by tracking his own anxieties.

He suspected he would have done better if he'd been white. He'd probably have got his B.Litt & become a Don if his colour hadn't told against hi.  

In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, the writer’s former friend and near-disciple Paul Theroux describes bitterly how even a longtime running-mate

they'd been friends since 1966 when Naipaul had a teaching gig in Uganda 

got sacrificed to Naipaul’s sense of his mission (sometimes he has seemed too busy–or fastidious–even for love).

Naipaul's wife spotted Theroux as a wrong 'un. She, though born in Africa, belonged to the Pakistani upper class.  

But the main thrust of the book’s early pages–a kind of post-colonial version of Boswell’s life of Johnson–is simply that Naipaul made the life of writing seem a plausible, even a noble occupation.

Travel-writing. Theroux was quite good at it. But it really isn't a noble occupation unless, like Pico, you have nothing to say and no gift of observation.  

Writing is how one finds order–a center–in a world ever more without a sense of orientation, he tells us; and everything must be sacrificed for clarity.

Editors prefer clean prose. Everything must be sacrificed for getting paid. Nobody went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average reader.