Naipaul’s mother and older sister pleaded with him to come home to Trinidad and take up his family duty. Before his death, his father had asked the same thing, and Naipaul had written from Oxford: “If I did so, I shall die from intellectual starvation.” With his father dead, the pressure to return became intense. “Our family was in distress. I should have done something for them, gone back to them. But, without having become a writer, I couldn’t go back.” And so for three years Naipaul put his family off. He was living in London, writing occasional scripts for the BBC Caribbean Service, and trying to complete the book that would make him a writer and lift his family out of debt.
Years later, Naipaul would come across a de Chirico painting to which Guillaume Apollinaire had given the title The Enigma of Arrival. In his book of the same title, Naipaul wrote, “I felt that in an indirect, poetical way the title referred to something in my own experience.” It gave him the idea for a story:
My narrator. . .would arrive—for a reason I had yet to work out—at that classical port with the walls and gateways like cutouts. He would walk past that muffled figure on the quayside. He would move from that silence and desolation, that blankness, to a gateway or door. He would enter there and be swallowed by the life and noise of a crowded city. (I imagined something like an Indian bazaar scene.) The mission he had come on—family business, study, religious initiation—would give him encounters and adventures. He would enter interiors, of houses and temples. Gradually there would come to him a feeling that he was getting nowhere; he would lose his sense of mission; he would begin to know only that he was lost. His feeling of adventure would give way to panic. He would want to escape, to get back to the quayside and his ship. But he wouldn’t know how. I imagined some religious ritual in which, led on by kindly people, he would unwittingly take part and find himself the intended victim. At the moment of crisis he would come upon a door, open it, and find himself back on the quayside of arrival. He has been saved; the world is as he remembered it. Only one thing is missing now. Above the cutout walls and buildings there is no mast, no sail. The antique ship has gone. The traveler has lived out his life.
Put this unwritten fantasy alongside the moment when Naipaul chose his vocation over the expectations of his family. It required an immense leap of faith for a young Indian in the grip of “a panic about failing to be what I should be” not to lose his own sense of mission. His letters home, often filled with shame, also display an astonishing assurance: “Look, I am going to be a success as a writer. I know that. I have gambled all my future on that possibility. Do you want to throw your lot with me or don’t you?” And yet all his life the enigma of arrival has haunted Naipaul—the sense of living out his life, like the traveler in the unwritten tale, without having achieved his purpose.
The bet paid off. At the end of 1955, he sold his first novel, The Mystic Masseur. Half a century and two dozen books later, Naipaul at last has his Nobel Prize.
When the announcement came last fall—after years of rumors, short lists, and steadily avowed indifference from Naipaul himself—an article in Le Monde Diplomatique compared the selection to Henry Kissinger’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. According to Pascale Casanova, Naipaul “disavows his past; he sees himself as an English writer. . . [He] is contemptuous of the peoples of the South, and he is a mouthpiece for extreme conservative and nationalist views.” And, as if that weren’t bad enough, “His favorite novelist is Balzac.”
Through much of his career, Naipaul has been denounced from the left, especially by partisans of third world countries and cultures, those societies that he’s called “half-made.” Derek Walcott, a fellow West Indian Nobelist, attacked the author of The Enigma of Arrival as racist. And, as his rejection by the left grew, Naipaul became something of a hero to the right, the one dark-skinned writer who could be counted on to tell the third world what it didn’t want to hear about itself. The embrace culminated in this country a decade ago with an invitation for Naipaul to speak before the conservative Manhattan Institute. Last fall, when the World Trade Center attacks and Naipaul’s Nobel followed each other in rapid succession, the address to the Manhattan Institute circulated on the Internet.
Its title is “Our Universal Civilization,” and in an unspoken way, it takes one back to the crucial period when Naipaul defied his family’s wishes and stayed in London to become a writer. Naipaul turns seventy this summer, in the same month that his latest work, a collection of his essays called The Writer and the World, including the Manhattan Institute address, is to be published. He appears to have reached the end of his career. His most recent novel, Half a Life, turning over much-plowed ground, is barely half a book. V. S. Naipaul seems to have said what he has to say. Seen from this vantage point, the course of his work follows an internal logic that was not at all clear before. The decision not to return to Trinidad, the pivotal moment of his literary career, also holds the key to the vision that receives its most explicit expression in “Our Universal Civilization.” And Naipaul himself turns out not to be what his shallower critics and admirers imagined.
His writing life falls into three phases. First there was an early, comic phase. Working alarmingly hard, he produced four books while still in his twenties, books about Trinidadian Indians and their marginal lives and strivings and futilities, culminating in the great portrait of his father, A House for Mr. Biswas. Trinidad hasn’t yet become one of the “half-made societies.” Naipaul is recording what he knows from childhood, and everything—even the epic-length Biswas—comes across as a dense miniature, befitting the scale of the insular world where he would have faced intellectual starvation. The speed of composition betrays what Naipaul would call “a fear of extinction.”
Then, knowing that he had come to the end of his childhood material, and riding the confidence of having written a masterpiece, in the early 1960s Naipaul began to travel. The travel began his middle phase, a severe and tragic phase, for the places he traveled to, repeatedly, even obsessively (back to the West Indies where racial revolution was stirring; then to his ancestral India; and finally to newly independent Africa) brought out a new kind of panic in Naipaul. This wasn’t the merely personal raw nerves of a young colonial becoming a writer in the imperial center. His travels put politics in his writing, and his panic became a political panic:
The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me. They were not things from which I could detach myself.
Instead of suppressing this political panic in order to write, he wrote directly out of it—beginning with The Mimic Men (1967), a lesser-known novel that marks the start of the new phase, and then in the novels from the 1970s that made him an international writer: In a Free State, Guerrillas, and A Bend in the River.
The violence that characterizes these books, physical and emotional, confirms that Naipaul could not easily “detach himself.” He had nowhere to go, no position from which to view the world’s disorders with equanimity. The Europeans in these books appear to have a free ride in the third world countries where they seek personal or political fulfillment, dabbling in Caribbean revolution or African authenticity, only to find out in brutal, sometimes fatal ways that the late colonial world has turned back on them in nihilistic rage. A group of expatriates in A Bend in the River, set in a thinly disguised Zaire under Mobutu, sit in a room listening to Joan Baez songs, and only the narrator, an Indian from the east coast of Africa, entranced though he is by the sound of the voice, knows that “it was make-believe. . . .You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!” The narrator’s own credo, set down in the opening sentence, is that of a man who lives outside the room, without the luxury of indulgent fantasies: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
And so Naipaul’s great novels from the middle phase gave him the reputation of a conservative. Not only that: a traitor as well, for a writer with brown skin was not supposed to point out the shams and illusions of third world politics. In fact, there’s no use pretending that Naipaul’s political panic made him a sympathetic or even fair interpreter of the post-colonial world. Under his scrutiny Africa in particular is prone to dissolving in a singularly powerful mood of menace, fear, and disgust. Naipaul never tells you what country is inducing these feelings; it is, indiscriminately, “Africa.” After picking up a couple of African hitchhikers, one of the English expatriates driving through Africa in In a Free State (1971), for which Naipaul won the Booker Prize, comments on the “smell of Africa . .. It is a smell of rotting vegetation and Africans. One is very much like the other.”
Guerrillas (1975), about racial disturbance on a Caribbean island, is even uglier. It ends with a scene in which a mixed-race man of revolutionary delusions sodomizes a white Englishwoman who’s taken a passing sexual and political interest in him. Just before leading her out to be slaughtered by machete,
He said, very softly, “You are rotten meat.”
It was his tone, rather than the words, that alarmed her. When she turned over to look at him she saw that his eyes were very bright and appeared sightless, the pupils mere points of glitter. He was still erect and looked very big.
He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and said, “You look frightened, Jane.”
“I’m thinking I have to go back.”
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, he allowed his hand to slip off her shoulder, and she stood up.
“But I haven’t come, Jane.”
This is the Naipaul most people think they know. The ruthlessness of observation is matched by the precision of language, as if Naipaul can only represent the source of panic with the utmost syntactical control. “The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength,” he once said. “Aspire to that.” But the idea of a supreme and cold-hearted detachment is an illusion. Naipaul couldn’t enter the experience of his blighted characters as deeply as he does, even in a novel like Guerrillas, if he were not writing about rage and despair from the inside.
It was these novels, from the middle phase, that introduced me to Naipaul. I read him before I knew not to like him. I had come back from living in Africa in my early twenties, I was trying to write about it, and Naipaul’s ability to evoke the anxiety and disorientation I was feeling presented a model from which a young writer could learn. I couldn’t feel close to him as I did to other writers—the ugliness was too much—and I was fairly sure that if I met him I wouldn’t like him (Saul Bellow once said that after spending an hour with Naipaul he could skip Yom Kippur that year). But as a master of literary craft and a writer fearlessly dedicated to a vision, Naipaul inspired, and still does. It didn’t matter that his vision of Africa was different from mine and in some ways repelled me. It was the intensity of his commitment that mattered.
A Bend in the River is Naipaul’s masterpiece, and also the last novel of the middle phase. Its imaginative range is broader than anything before it. Indians, Europeans, and Africans are all portrayed as individuals caught in the swell of history, trying to realize themselves against their own and the world’s limitations. In the middle of the novel there is an extraordinary passage, a monologue filling fifteen pages. Indar, a childhood friend of the narrator—both Indians from the east coast of Africa, meeting again as adults in Mobutu’s Zaire—tells the story of how he went down from Oxford to London in search of a career. In the story, he presents himself at India House as a candidate for the Indian diplomatic service and is humiliated by a series of lackeys and time-servers. He leaves in a daze of rage and starts walking along the Thames, playing with a fantasy of going back to his old village life. Then he begins to notice the wrought-iron dolphins on lamp standards along the Embankment, the wrought-iron camels acting as bench supports. And he has an insight:
I understood that London wasn’t simply a place that was there, as people say of mountains, but that it had been made by men, that men had given attention to details as minute as those camels.
I began to understand at the same time that my anguish about being a man adrift was false, that for me that dream of home and security was nothing more than a dream of isolation, anachronistic and stupid and very feeble. I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make-believe. Home—what for? To hide? To bow to our great men? For people in our situation, led into slavery, that is the biggest trap of all. We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves.
“Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake!” No! I want to be a man myself.
In the middle of his great novel about Africa, Naipaul is suddenly writing the central story of his own life, of his younger self—of that moment when he decided not to return to Trinidad after his father’s death. And this would become the constant subject of his third, late phase—an autobiographical phase, an obsessive and, finally, exhausted return to his origins as a writer, in books like Finding the Center (1984), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994), and last year’s Half a Life. The anxiety has subsided. The fiction has turned inward, and the nonfiction (for Naipaul has been an equally obsessive traveler, writing journalism about the troubled corners of the world well into his seventh decade) has grown more generous—his portraits of static and decaying societies are no less harsh, but individuals trapped within those societies emerge as the true voices of these books.
Then what are we to make of the charge that Naipaul has repudiated his background, that he identifies with the oppressor and despises the oppressed? The truth is that Naipaul has no easily identifiable political views. The great ideological struggle of his writing life, the cold war, is totally ignored in his work. He hasn’t chosen sides in competing visions of how modern societies should be organized. He is profoundly skeptical of every ideology. What interests him is the individual, and his fiercest passion has always been for the individual to be free from the dead hand of the given. The closest he’s come to expressing something like a vision of the good society is the Manhattan Institute talk. In it, he tells the story of a young Indonesian whom he met years ago, and who was thwarted in his desire to become a poet. Naipaul then describes the “universal civilization” that made room for him, a young Indian from Trinidad, when he was trying to become a writer.
I would say that it is the civilization that both gave the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfill that prompting; the civilization that enables me to make that journey from the periphery to the center; the civilization that links me not only to this audience but also that now not-so-young man in Java whose background was as ritualized as my own, and on whom—as on me—the outer world had worked, and given the ambition to write.
It sounds like utter hubris and the worst sort of solipsism: the “universal civilization” is the one that made room for Naipaul to become a writer. And yet, in one form or another, this is the longing of millions of people the world over—those oppressed and nameless masses whom Naipaul is supposed to despise. It is an idea that his critics take entirely for granted. Looking back over the half-century of his writing life, one can now see that his purpose all along was to give value to that longing. At the end of his talk to the Manhattan Institute, Naipaul suddenly mentions the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” He says: “So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea.” Naipaul, often accused of making himself over as an Englishman, turns out to be an American.
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