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Literary Review
Essays
Ways of forgetting
IMRAAN COOVADIA
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A Writer’s People is evidence that at 75, Naipaul understands nothing new and has forgotten everything he once understood.
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A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, V.S. Naipaul, Picador/Pan Macmillan, price not stated.
Granted: Life is a mixed condition. But the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Literature has spent two thirds of his writing career proving that genius and idiocy, insight and corrosive racial prejudice, discontent and utter complacency, mumbo jumbo and an equal hatred of mumbo jumbo can thrive in the mixed compartment of a single human being.
Naipaul’s early Caribbean comedies (Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, Suffrage for Elvira) are light and sure. A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul’s masterpiece, borrows from Dickens and Hardy to create a picture of colonial distress which is as vivid as Bleak House or Great Expectations and more moving than Jude the Obscure. You, I, learn better from Naipaul at his best than from anyone else in his generation of writers how to balance an English sentence, how to use sense data in constructing a scene, and how to represent the everyday life of non-Western societies.
The five essays newly collected in A Writer’s People study the culture of post-war India, Trinidad, Britain, and they are the products of the other Naipaul. The unforgiveable racism of In a Free State and A Bend in the River is again on display. Naipaul retells a joke he once printed in the New Statesman as something which would be difficult to get away with today: “A banana a day will keep the Jamaican away.” I don’t mean to be a scold but was that funny in the 1950s? Wasn’t that the decade of the great Ealing comedies like Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets?
The unreliable Naipaulian anecdote which stigmatises by race and class returns in A Writer’s People. “In 1945,” he tells us, “when newsreels of concentration-camp sufferers were shown in Port of Spain cinemas, black people in the cheaper seats laughed and shouted.” How does he know it was just the cheaper seats? How does he know it was black people? Don’t they watch movies in the dark in Trinidad? And where do we begin with a writer who borrows the testimony of genocide to put down the “black people in the cheaper seats”?
Labouring the obvious
Then there is Naipaul’s crashing obviousness which has no parallel in any significant writer since William Wordsworth. Naipaul, like Wordsworth, often mistakes clarity and plainness of speech for imagination (when it’s only a precondition of imaginative possibility). So in a discussion of Flaubert’s Salammbo we hear that “Carthage was a great Mediterranean trading power. It lived by the sea and had a powerful navy.” In the same section Naipaul makes the astonishing mistake of suggesting that second century Roman Carthage was religiously continuous with the city State of the Punic Wars. In fact Punic Carthage was burned to the ground, its people either massacred by Roman arms or dispersed into slavery, and the city only rebuilt as a Latin colony a century later. But why let facts, especially facts about genocide, get in the way?
Then there’s the minor but repeated key of Naipaulian malice. He admires Derek Walcott’s early career (“a maker of startling images”) before dismissing the later poetry as imaginatively exhausted (“a kind of Robinson Crusoe but with the pain of a Friday”). Naipaul briefly regrets the death of his friend Anthony Powell before instructing us how little he liked Powell’s fiction. He refers in passing to the “minor poet Philip Larkin” and disposes of Henry James in a sentence.
One essay in A Writer’s People makes short work of the Trinidadian nationalist politician Albert Gomes. Gomes, Naipaul tells us, “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.” Don’t you hate big words too?
Capacity for admiration too
Yet Naipaul is capable of enormous admiration, whether of himself or his father Seerpersad whom he canonises here as “possibly the first writer of the Indian diaspora”. And then there’s Mahatma Gandhi who, we learn, “was the opposite of vain”. That sealed it for me. I like this Mahatma guy.
The most remarkable realisation one reaches reading A Writer’s People is that V.S. Naipaul identifies with Gandhi. He has found his match at last. When he describes Gandhi’s history, Naipaul is practising a form of not-so-secret autobiography. “Everything about Gandhi is clear, even,” Naipaul concedes, “when wilful and irritating. A certain amount is even funny.” We can read that line as a condensation of Naipaul’s self-understanding and we can say that, at the age of 75, he understands nothing new and has forgotten everything he once understood.
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, V.S. Naipaul, Picador/Pan Macmillan, price not stated.
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