'I had no idea that madness in the Islamic world had gone so far'

'I had no idea that madness in the Islamic world had gone so far' By Andrew Robinson

The news came on the phone: “The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2001 is awarded to the British writer, born in Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul.” When, last October, the call from Stockholm came to his house in Wiltshire, Sir Vidia Naipaul pretended to be busy in the garden. In fact, he had taken to his bed. The award was a shock — he had long assumed his work was unpalatable to the academic world, and there had been no prior hint of the honour. His immediate reaction, he tells me, was one of “extreme exhaustion”. “One needs time to think about everything. So I went and lay down.” Later, he issued a statement that the award was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors”. He made no mention at all of Trinidad — as people were quick to note — despite the fact that Naipaul was brought up there until the age of 18 and that Trinidad is the setting for his early books, including his most moving work, A House for Mr Biswas, which had established him as a leading young novelist by the early 1960s. Naipaul is unrepentant. India, from which his Hindu grandfather sailed to Trinidad in the late 19th century, was the subject of three substantial books spread over three decades. Unlike Trinidad, India remains a key influence and concern.

“A billion people and a little island, which has done almost nothing for me . . . We mentioned in the citation that I was born in Trinidad. I thought it was enough.” As for being “British”, Naipaul (who was knighted in 1990) says: “I could not have done this writing in any other country. To that extent, I am a British writer. I’ve been supported by this country in many ways.”

Although seasoned Naipaul watchers are used to his complaints of exhaustion, right now he really does seem fatigued. “I’m sleeping about 14 hours a day. I’m like a cat: immense sleep,” he admits. As a writer acutely aware of the passing of time — he prints the precise period in which he composed a book on the final page — he sounds melancholy about turning 70 this month. “On my 60th birthday, I was working, I was very much a working man. I’m not working now. For the first time in my life, I’m consciously doing nothing. I’m dormant, not agitating my mind in any way. Since my schooldays I’ve always been wound up, and thinking of doing the next thing and the next thing, then with this writing career getting started, the next book and the next book and the next book . . . Now I examine myself and feel that I’ve done the work really. I’ve got rid of the idea of writing about my first marriage. That has been with me for a long time, and I tried to face it and I couldn’t face it. If I do another book, it might be some kind of book about England, where I’ve spent so long. That’s stuff within me that hasn’t been expressed. But I would need to arrive at a narrative, and I don’t know how one does that, how it comes to one.”

Nobelled or not, Naipaul’s is a wide-ranging and original oeuvre, some two dozen books in all, that should satisfy any writer. And it is a genuine tribute to its readability that all of his books remain in print, unlike the works of some Nobel laureates. Indeed, his new publisher, Picador, is reissuing everything, including much of the uncollected journalism, with new covers. As Naipaul himself, ever alert to publishing realities, observes, the prize means “a good strong second wind”.

There are the novels and stories of the Caribbean, chiefly comic, such as The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, A Flag on the Island (including that deadpan classic, The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book) and of course A House for Mr Biswas, based on Naipaul’s father, a struggling journalist. There are the dark, violent novels about Africa, In a Free State and A Bend in the River. And there are the narratives which connect continents, the intricate The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, with clearautobiographical elements, and Half a Life, published just before the Nobel award. Then there is the non-fiction: travel books of a particularly penetrating kind, which describe, report and analyse with formidable intelligence the post-colonial societies of the Caribbean, India, the Islamic world, West Africa, South America and the American South. The most read are probably An Area of Darkness, about India, and Among the Believers, about Islam — both of which provoked a furious reaction from the societies they criticised. Taken together, Naipaul’s fiction and non-fiction unite “perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”, as the Nobel judges remarked.

While that is true, as is the claim made on both sides of the Atlantic that Naipaul is the greatest living writer of English prose, also true is that for many serious readers Naipaul is still only a name. “I’m sure he’s very good, but I don’t feel he’s for me,” a friend of Diana Athill, Naipaul’s first editor, told her. In Stet, Athill’s memoir of working with Vidia, she perceptively identifies three reasons: readers’ lack of interest in the consequences of imperialism; the writer’s lack of interest in writing about women; and, after Mr Biswas, the books’ relative lack of pleasure in life. “They impress, but they do not charm.”

“People are nervous of me, you know. I don’t know why,” says Naipaul with the slight chuckle which indicates irony, and is part of his charm for admirers. He is referring to a recent visit to India as the star guest at a government-sponsored writers’ congress. “I got myself into a couple of scrapes. But it seemed to be all right in the end. You see, I can be provoked when people set out to provoke me. I’m not philosophical enough to walk away.”

It is well known that he has little time for the Indian writing in English that has boomed since the 1980s (though his writing is revered by many to whose work he is indifferent). And he has never shown the slightest respect for writers and intellectuals who have done well by presenting themselves as victims of colonialism; and has thereby irritated a whole legion of academics. Hence the “scrapes”. But what has really stung some Indians is his sympathy for Hindu revivalism in the form of the BJP, now in government, and his unwillingness to condemn excesses such as the 1992 destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya.

He feels a definite antipathy for Islam’s fanatical role in India, past and present. Of the riots in Gujarat this year, which began with the burning by Muslims of a train carrying Hindu fundamentalists, he says: “The original thing that started it was a terrorist act, and should be considered so. It was meant to create a reaction.”

As the grandson of an indentured labourer from India, Naipaul is drawn to and repelled by the movements of the Hindu downtrodden in India — as he expressed in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). “My feelings about the BJP are very complicated,” he admits; but he has not changed his basic view. “I think every liberal person should extend a hand to that kind of movement from the bottom. One takes the longer view, rather than the political view. There’s a great upheaval in India; and if you are interested in India, you must welcome it.” If his three books on India have been influential, his two books on Islam, especially the one written just after the Iranian revolution of 1979, can be described as prophetic. “That expectation — of others continuing to create, of the alien, necessary civilisation going on — is implicit in the act of renunciation (of the West), and is its great flaw,” he wrote in Among the Believers.

Did his travels give him any inkling of the possibility of the attacks of September 11? “I’ve been aware of madness in the Islamic world. I’ve written about it. The madness of people who have fallen behind technically, and who do not have the will to make the intellectual effort to catch up. I was aware of the religious hatred, I was aware of the indifference to life. I was aware of the anti-civilisation aspect of the new fundamentalism. But I had no idea it had gone so far — the madness. The idea of their strength is an illusion. Nothing is coming from within. The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can’t do is build a plane. What they can’t do is build those towers. I think people have spoken much rubbish about that event. The poor revenging themselves on the rich! It’s nothing but an aspect of religious hatred. And that is so hard to deal with, or even contemplate. You can deal with the poor striking out, but you can’t deal with the threat of a universal religious war.” Though he approved of the recent war in Afghanistan, he is keenly aware of the inherent absurdity of the current war on terrorism: “Your biggest enemy is your great ally — Saudi Arabia — and the foot-soldiers of the terror come from your other ally — Pakistan.”

Perhaps Naipaul’s talked-about marriage to a Pakistani journalist, Nadira Khannum Alvi, in 1996, just after the death of his first wife, might have been expected to make him more sympathetic to Islam, or to Pakistan. Instead, the opposite seems true. Both his books on Islam have been “banned” there, he says: anyway, they cannot be obtained. Naipaul is scathing: “It’s not a book-reading country, it has no intellectual life — it’s against the intellectual life. I think if the fount of all your actions is religion and the idea of the religious war, which involves religious hatred — then books, civilisation . . . these things don’t matter to you. All you need is the Koran, and a ruler with a big stick.”

Vintage Naipaul. His views are original and often surprising. About his all-green garden: “I feel if I wanted to see flowers, I could just take a bus ride and in front of every house there would be a series of shocking colours.” About book reviewing: “One of my golden rules was: never mention the name of a character. If you deny yourself that, you have to go to the heart of a novel.” About himself: “It’s my great regret that I didn’t do science at Oxford. I think I would probably have been a better man if I had studied science profoundly.”

No wonder his former friend Paul Theroux’s envious memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, is so fascinating — “a portrait of Mozart by Salieri”, as A. N. Wilson called it. For V. S. Naipaul can never be dull. He is always thinking, always moving on.

“The artist, the writer, the filmmaker, moves on, and the friend who liked him no longer likes him. It has to be like this — people fall away,” Naipaul reflects. “I’m not lonely. It’s a fantasy about the writer’s life being lonely; I’m never happier than when I’m writing. Writers live when they’re writing: the other side of them is probably not as important as this life during the writing, in the writing.”

Andrew Robinson is the literary editor of the THES; V. S. Naipaul’s books are being reissued by Picador

http://www.tehelka.com/channels/literary/2001/aug/13/lr081301naipaul1.htm

"Indian writers don't know why their country is
in such a mess"

In this controversial interview, first published in the Literary Review, V S Naipaul speaks to Farrukh Dhondy about Half A Life, his first novel in 22 years, and lashes out against other established writers, some of them his contemporaries: Forster: "…someone who didn't know Indian people", Narayan: "…his India is a ruin", Soyinka: "…a marvelously Establishment figure actually" and Joyce: "…he is not interested in the world." While

indulging in his characteristic plain-speak, Naipaul manages to remain consistently insightful about the big issues: religion, history, society and the writerly life, without ever losing sight of the individual struggles for existence that constitute the heart of the human condition. In doing so, he shows how a writer's worldview, achieved after a painful journey of self-discovery and self-knowledge, can hold important lessons for humanity.

Also read: Lit Chillum - A Notebook for Mr Biswas: Amitava Kumar celebrates Sir Vidia's 69th birthdayI drive to Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer's day to interview V S Naipaul in his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in the USA), and this interview anticipates the publication next month of his new novel, Half a Life. Before we begin our conversation, Vidia shows me round his garden, which stretches for an acre down a slope to the water meadows of the River Avon. It contains myriad shades of green, the deep purple of copper beech, several varieties of holly, some white blossoms, but no flowerbeds. Vidia tells me the names of the trees and the prospects for their growth, saying two or three times what a copse or hedge will look like in years to come, 'when I shall be gone'.

You said not long ago that the novel doesn't interest you any more, that 'the novel is finished'. But you've written one now. Was that declaration just a tease?
No. The novel is so bastardised a form, and it's so passing. Everyone writes a novel, and it's so much a copy, unconsciously, unwittingly, of novels that have gone before. The really true books are the ones that last - not the copies. I was saying that I preferred reading the originals.

This latest novel finds a new way of telling a story. Why is it called Half a Life?
It's a lovely title.

It does fit.
Yes, it does fit.

But you don't want to give the game away?
You must allow me to keep a few secrets.

All right. It's not set out in dramatic scenes. I was reminded of your non-fiction, of India: A Million Mutinies Now and of Beyond Belief, where you recreate the stories real people tell you.
Plain narrative, yes.

It's different from your other fiction. If one adapted A House for Mr Biswas for the screen for instance, the dialogue is all virtually there. To adapt Half a Life would be different.
I've always tried not to write the same book. Every book is new. It does different things. The material was knocking around in my head for a quarter of a century. I don't keep a journal, but sometimes when I'm moved by certain things I just make very brief notes in a particular notebook. So there have been notes about this for a long time. But I didn't find any way of putting it together. I got taken up with these major books you mentioned. They were very taxing. But I had this material, and my publishers and my agent required me to do a work of imagination. I was required to do it.

Well, it's a very powerful work of the imagination. It takes us through three different settings, and three different eras, and we meet people in different ways. We follow its central character, Willy, from pre-independence India, to postwar London, to a Portuguese province in Africa.
I tried to make it easy, and light, and a small book, and yet full of things.

The theme is that of man in our times looking for a life and perhaps having to borrow a life. Never living life to the full?
Don't you think most people or many of the people we know are like that?

Possibly, but I hadn't thought of it in those terms before. I didn't estimate the percentage of life people had acquired for themselves. But it's a telling way of estimation.
I think most people think about it, and you feel less critical of yourself for not achieving a full life. You will understand that many people are living only fractions of lives.

There is a sense of sadness throughout in the failures of Willy, of his family. And what comes out strongly is sexual failure: his own experience, his conviction that his parents never achieved proper sexual experience.
You know we are not responsible for what comes out in a book. We are not fully in control of it. What comes over is probably quite different from what we intend. I spent much more time working out the narrative very slowly, almost picture by picture. Now that you've said that about the sex, I suppose it is true. I think it probably reflects something in my own life, a lack of sexual fulfilment until quite late. And then although sex may be very prominent in this, as you've discovered, there is no absurd description of sex at all.

Nothing that would qualify for the 'Bad Sex Prize'.
(Laughs) Nothing like that.

You've used four-letter words a few times, which you've not done in previous books.
I tried to leave them out and it looked absurd, so I went back and spelt the word out. I made them say it as they would say it. On the sexual theme, I think everybody's sexuality is very important. Seduction is important, and the grossness of pornographic writing annihilates the importance of it. It suggests that you just have to deal with it in this gross way, and you've handled the matter. But it's too profound to be dealt with in that way. In a way the physical description of sex, which is what people go to the books for sometimes, is very far from the difficulties of fulfilment.

My concern in the book is also the historical side of things. Willy runs away from his background, and even when he gets to Africa, this Portuguese province, he is reminded of the background from which he came.

We will return to the new book later. Can we go back to when you started to write? You have written about waiting for an agonising time before you knew what it was you had to write. You describe the first sentence that came to you when you were working in the Langham Hotel building of the BBC. It's from Miguel Street. And yet that wasn't your first published book. Could you clarify the chronology?
It's actually an important question: it's part of the pain I suffered when I was beginning. I wrote Miguel Street first, and it was taken by Andrew Salkey, a friend, to André Deutsch. Diana Athill, the editor at Deutsch, liked it, but André Deutsch, who knew about these things, said 'short stories don't sell'. And they kept the book for a long time. I had little moments of terror, panic. They wanted a novel first, so I wrote The Mystic Masseur. I finished it in January 1956. It should have been published that year. To a destitute man it mattered to be published. Of course you can't wait six months and then six months again. But The Mystic Masseur wasn't published until May 1957, and then another novel, and finally, in 1959, they published Miguel Street. The stories, which had been written in 1955, have never been out of print; they've made a fortune for André Deutsch. But look at the trouble they gave me. The publishers could have eased my path a little, but they didn't. It was the trouble I had with André Deutsch. He believed that only one person's interest had to be served. But it must be said that at that time, in 1955 or thereabouts, it would have been hard for my material to be considered a real book by any London publisher. André Deutsch took it up and I think it was because of Diana Athill. She was a remarkable editor, she always softened the awfulness of the man Deutsch.

You say softened - and you often use the word 'hard' in your autobiographical pieces. You use the same word about your father and his life and ambition. What does the word mean?
A very simple thing. Shall we say for my father it means - heaven knows where the spark came from, in that plantation colony of Trinidad - getting the wish to be a writer and not having anyone interested. To this day they're not interested. I would say that my father's grandchildren are not interested in his work. It's bitter, isn't it?

Why was it so?
Well, my wife's daughter has recently been looking at some of my father's writing. She's from Pakistan. She's enchanted by the writing, because the people he was writing about are closer to the subcontinent. That's one reason. And the other reason is that we come from a peasant culture. It's not a literary culture. There's no tradition of reading. There's sacred reading, there's reading of the epics, there's reading of the scriptures on religious occasions. And there is an oddity, then, in his ambition, that he should want to write when in his culture there is no tradition of reading or writing.

That becomes a theme in Mystic Masseur doesn't it? The main character wants to write and doesn't know what on earth to write about. So he reads all these books, orders them by mail.
You know the Masseur is slightly autobiographical, symbolically, because the wish to be a writer represented my own wish. The hardness for me was actually learning how to write.

But the Masseur doesn't. His first book is a hundred questions and answers about Hinduism.
Yes. That's his book. And the author of the book is wishing that it could be so easy for him too. Actually I had an uncle who wrote a book like that.

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