The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home
Rachel Donadio, The New York Times
Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.
A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what is arguably Naipaul’s finest novel, ”A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ”a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind.”
Knighted in 1990, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is Britain’s only living Nobel laureate in literature, having been awarded the prize in October 2001, a season when many were just awakening to realities Naipaul had been writing about for more than 20 years. Also significant is that he had explored Islamic fundamentalism and other issues of global import not through fiction, but through nonfiction reportage. The novel’s time was over, he had said. Others had made the claim before, but it resonated more deeply coming from a contemporary giant. What is more, Naipaul said, only nonfiction could capture the complexities of today’s world. It was a profound observation. But did it speak to a larger cultural situation, or was it simply the personal judgment of one cantankerous writer, who in fact continued to publish a novel every few years even after declaring the form dead?
Naipaul recently offered some thoughts on the matter, in an interview in the cozy sitting room of his cottage in Wiltshire. Photograph portraits were on the mantle. French novels lined one bookshelf. The sounds of the outside world could be heard: a lawnmower, the buzzing of a fighter jet from a nearby airbase. A compact man of 72, Naipaul has been ill in recent months, and said he is not working on a book at the moment. Although it was unseasonably hot on the splendid sunny afternoon of the longest day of the year, he wore a tweed jacket and corduroy pants. Unsmiling, he settled somewhat stiffly onto a straight-backed armchair and began to chart the trajectory of his thinking.
”What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material,” he said. ”And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn’t know fully.” Naipaul’s voice is rich and deep and mellowed by tobacco, and when he pronounced the word ”world,” he savored it, drawing it out to almost three syllables. ”I thought if I didn’t have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I’d have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.”
Naipaul has said he wrote the novel ”Half a Life” (2001) only to fulfill a publisher’s contract, and that ”Magic Seeds” (2004) would be his last novel. (Over the years, he has often hinted at retirement, only to publish another book soon after.) Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form’s limitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate. ”If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it’s O.K., but it’s of no account,” Naipaul said. ”If you’re a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it’s of no account.”
What is of account, in Naipaul’s view, is the larger global political situation — in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ”I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,” he said. To what extent, he wondered, had ”people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut themselves away from the active busy world”? ”To what extent without knowing it” were they ”parasitic on that world”? And why did they have ”no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them”? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today’s situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.
In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ”a war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green card.” What happened on Sept. 11 ”was too astonishing. It’s one of its kind. It can’t happen again,” he said in our conversation. ”But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.” The bigger issue, he said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks ”a strong cultural life,” making it vulnerable to Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women shouldn’t wear headscarves in the West. ”If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture,” he said. ”It’s a form of aggression.”