Books
A blinding light
Published 13 September 2007
A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling
V S Naipaul Picador, 256pp, £16.99
The more I read the works of V S Naipaul, the less I understand the man behind them. The history of this slow failure might be told as a three-act play. First comes the lumpish feeling of being the sole person not to get him, leaving me shifting from foot-to-foot like a provincial student shuffling round his cardboard suitcase. The second act introduces the possibility that I am not alone: no one else understands him either. In an old review - circa 1980 - Joan Didion bucks against the prevailing consensus on Naipaul's work. Where other critics see brilliance and clarity, she finds a "radiance that diminishes all ideas of [the world]". Didion suggests Naipaul is blinded by life and his seemingly precise images are designed to recreate this dazzle. I imagine him like a resentful super-villain - Nobel Laureate Man - who has decided that if he cannot see, then no one else will either. Following Didion, it has become common to speak of Naipaul as an enigma, even to suggest that his life's work is an ongoing attempt at self-analysis and self-creation: divergent aims that could never complement each other.
Perhaps there are parallels with the amnesiac described in Oliver Sacks's short case study, "The Lost Mariner". The patient has such profound memory loss, he is constantly taken by surprise and copes by instantaneously fabricating stories that will help him skip over the black holes. Reading the career-spanning collection of Naipaul's essays, published in 2003 as Literary Occasions, I felt I detected a similar compulsion. For instance, Naipaul's essays return again and again to the figure of his father Seepersad. Taking these accounts together, one cannot help but be shocked by how different they all are, as though Naipaul is struggling to invent a character, rather than describe a parent. He occasionally refers to his father as a Brahman, a high-caste scholar, and at others as a possible bastard without forebears. He is sometimes a middle-class professional and at others little more than a slave. He is a dignified writer-historian, and then a hack and aspiring pornographer.
In this new collection of essays, A Writer's People, we discover a version of Seepersad that, at first, appears more stable: a poor man, rather pathetic and, as Naipaul again hints, illegitimate. Yet out of this economy and precision, new confusions emerge: the surface clarity explodes into yet another brilliant and opaque haze, as though Naipaul has deliberately lit a touch paper and stood back.
Naipaul might well be odd, he might be as self-centred as some critics believe, but even he cannot hope to erase his older work with his new. Seepersad Naipaul, for instance, is such a key figure - the model for Mr Biswas - that any interested reader is bound to cross-reference his appearances in his son's work. The only explanation for the discrepant versions is that Naipaul cannot help himself: he is doomed to confabulate and always at risk of being caught out. This would be the climax of my three-act play: Naipaul's work is a cry for help: as his career nears its end, he is becoming more reckless. This is suicide-by-critic.
A Writer's People is subtitled "Ways of Looking and Feeling". It might better be called "Strategies for Coping With Hardly Seeing Anything At All". As Didion suspects, the chief strategy is to explode everything into a dazzling shower. She cites the bauxite cloud hovering above the coast at the opening of the novel Guerillas. In A Writer's People, the tinder-trail is island politics.
Naipaul is far from being a man of the left. Half the pleasure of his writing, for Naipaul if not his readers, is the verve with which he delivers his predictions of catastrophe, sped by fashionable politics. In A Writer's People he is disparaging of the attempts by the various ethnic and mixed-race middle classes of Trinidad to pursue a "melting-pot" politics based on their shared culture. Naipaul finds nothing in his birthplace that "could be called a civilisation", citing the "brutalities of the popular language, and the prejudices of race: nothing a man would wish to call his own". Naipaul is unlikely to be a lover of soca, not even the chutney-soca of his erstwhile community. But he goes too far when he argues that Derek Walcott is symptomatic of this dread emptiness. After admitting that he has a tin ear for poetry, Naipaul confirms this mea culpa with a reading of Walcott's poetry so dim and shallow that he sabotages his own contention that Trinidad is a cultural wasteland.
Naipaul lets the reader believe that his antipathy towards Trinidadian politics is inherited from his family. He claims they shunned West Indian nationalism, and that he never once spoke to a black person as a child (thus providing a context to the previously noted "prejudices of race"). The reason, he insists, is that his people were too embedded in an Indian way of life characterised by its "completeness" and "purity". This is nonsense, and the next moment Naipaul is admitting he "heard no talk of India" as he grew up and has never learned to speak Hindi. Then, in another about-face, he declares that the heroes of Indian nationalism were well-known and much debated by Trinidadian Indians. What is left unsaid is that Naipaul's family was deeply involved in Trinidadian nationalism: they were among the founders of the Democratic Labour Party. Naipaul cannot erase this fact by ignoring it.
The only possible explanation for these elisions is a drive towards self-destruction. Once Naipaul's suicidal streak is admitted, A Writer's Life at last becomes fascinating: a deliberate attempt by Naipaul to kebab himself on pooterish pronouncements and false histories. As in the earlier Literary Occasions, he returns to a lost figure, the writer Nirad Chaudhuri, and it becomes clear why: Chaudhuri is Naipaul's alter ego, a vehicle for Naipaul to pronounce judgement on himself. As he says: "As soon as Chaudhuri attempts analysis he becomes vain and mad . . . So it happens that out of a strange, suicidal vanity his once solid book ends in the air."
Nicholas Blincoe is a novelist and playwright
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