Cussed last stand from the old man of letters (V.S. Naipaul inverview)

He has a reputation as a reactionary curmudgeon who hits out with random ferocity. VS Naipaul has denounced Tony Blair as a pirate responsible for "a plebian culture" and, more recently, laid into EM Forster as a nasty homosexual who wrote "utter rubbish" and preyed on vulnerable Indians with his friend Maynard Keynes.

It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I ventured down his drive, tucked away down a Wiltshire lane. At the door stood the man acclaimed as the finest living writer of English prose. Polite, fastidious in speech and resolutely austere, he offered a warm greeting, and we settled in an airy dining room overlooking the River Avon.

Naipaul believes himself to be more sinned against than sinning. "I have paid the price for doing new things," he says. "But it's in my nature not to do again what I've done. People have not understood and have said foolish things. It doesn't matter. If the books are strong, they will live. If they're feeble, they'll disappear."

I suggest he is becoming something of a Sinatra figure, allowing headlines about his prickliness to obscure his work. He chuckles. "I think in a smaller way I might be a Sinatra figure, willing to provoke people who speak nonsensical things. Probably one shouldn't do it. But I have lived through people saying so many absurd things."

He mentions an American trip in which he discovered that his hosts were giving "outrageous" briefings to a journalist. "One of the things said was that I was pretending to be English and that I would travel to India and Africa to feel more English. Can you imagine the absurdity? But many people have limited perceptions, limited minds, and you have to live with that."

Half a Life is his first novel in seven years, teased out of him in the face of his declarations that "the novel is finished".

"There's this idea that one's non-fiction books are not as important as works you invent in your head. This is wrong. All aspects of my inquiries have the same weight. So now I've done that and I'm required to do one more, then I can hang up my boots."

At 69, there seems little danger of that. In a career spanning four decades, he has won almost every major literary award. including the Booker prize. Born in Trinidad into a family of Indian Brahmin origin, he won a scholarship to Oxford and fell into stints as a BBC broadcaster and a reviewer for the New Statesman.

Still in his twenties, he published three dazzling novels, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and Miguel Street. Then he began to travel, and the painful directness of his works about the colonial legacy provoked howls of outrage. Salman Rushdie labelled him a literary neo-colonialist.

Half a Life weaves a new route across his mental hinterland. It opens in an independent Indian state, where a young man, aspiring to greatness amid a dreary life, makes the Gandhian sacrifice of marrying a low-caste woman. Their son, Willie Chandram, is drawn to England and the immigrant community of 1950s London, before his wife leads him to her home in Portuguese Africa.

Naipaul has lost none of his unfashionable views on the caste system. "My first ideas about caste were ones I got from British books - you know, the great cruel system, and indeed there is a certain degree of cruelty. But India was not organised in a way that the individual could move. He moved only within his clan. And if you had a clan, you had that bit of protection in a hard world."

The real calamity of India, he asserts, was not British rule but 500 years of Islamic conquest and destruction. By glossing this over in a positive light, India has lost a large part of its history. But isn't that human nature? I ask. Don't the British teach their children that the Vikings were tourists and traders who taught us valuable needlepoint skills?

"Well, people have to make the best of a bad job sometimes," he concedes. "To face the calamity of those Viking raids is too painful to deal with. And there's something like this in India now: the Muslims didn't destroy the country for 500 years, they came to teach Indians how to cook.

"Indian civilisation was hit for six by the coming of Islam. They wiped out and they ruled and they replanted their people and sold the villagers. If the British hadn't come to India, the country would have been reduced to dust. The destruction was so complete that, after 200 years of healing, India still looks ravaged."

The French come a close second to the Moguls in his ranking. "I think the French colonies are abominable places, hateful. They are not romantic at all. The French are destroyers of people's souls."

Naipaul was always proud of his mental recall, but last year, on a research trip to Hyderabad, he realised he could no longer take it for granted. "We drove out into a terrorist guerrilla area. Things happened. I met people. I came back very late and the next day I thought I'd make a note of what had happened. It had completely vanished. I think that was the first sign of old age - the loss of one's faculties."

Yet in Half a Life he gives a clear evocation of 1950s Notting Hill, with its dingy clubs and sexual encounters. He confesses he embellished some material and even uses four-letter words for the first time. "I find sexual descriptions in books distasteful. I don't like people kissing on the screen. I look away. It's probably something in my own make-up. And although sex is explicit in the book, everything is suggested."

The book's theme, as the title suggests, is unfulfilled lives. Naipaul believes we all feel there is another body we should have entered and lived out another life.

His biggest grief was believing in the nobility of writing, only to find most of the publishing world had "the morality of barrow boys".

But surely he has triumphed against the odds? "I have not surrendered," he agrees.

"I know there's this great cult of anti-literature. There are people at the cutting edge of anti-literature who are distinguished and doing well. But that's not for me. I have to do my work. I have to live the life of the mind. I can't do otherwise. It's my nature. It's my inheritance."

Half A Life is published by Picador, £15.99, on September 21. It will be reviewed by John Carey in Culture next week.

The French come a close second to the Moguls in his ranking. "I think the French colonies are abominable places, hateful. They are not romantic at all. The French are destroyers of people's souls."

Refreshing candor, or for the French-speaking in the audience, candeur.

I know very little about this writer, although I have heard of him and know I should know more. I will find out more and read his works. Thank you for this intelligent post on a rather light FR day. V's wife.

You might like "A Turn in the South". His travels though our South.

The man is NOT politically correct.

Even though it was written right after Khomeini took over Iran, Naipul's book "AMONG THE BELIEVERS" is an eye-opener about Muslims from Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Indonesia. It is a must read. Fascinating anecdotes and such gripping insights. His book is a priceless today as it was 20 years ago.

You didn't know this? He was a famous "Bloomsbury" pederast until, as a quite mature individual, he allegedly met a Russian ballerina, Lydia Something, and up and married her. Many folks assume this marriage was a business arrangement, though most involved in protecting his legend - yes legend, after all, he's the man who developed an entire erroneous economic theory whose only true objective was how to finance the state on the sly from the citizenry - deny that it was anything but a loving union.

Naipaul is a terrific writer, although he is cordially hated by the politically correct establishment. I would especially recommend "A House for Mr. Biswas" and "A Bend in the River." The first is his autobiographical novel, about growing up in the Carribean; the second is a devastating novel on postcolonial Africa.

WHAH? HUH?-KEYNES A HOMO?!

You didn't know that? Yes, he was homosexual, and a very flagrant and aggressive one at that.

Eventually he married a ballerina. I'm no sure why.

"I think the French colonies are abominable places, hateful. They are not romantic at all. The French are destroyers of people's souls." What does he mean by this???V's wife.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.