"I Have A Cloth Ear"
"We thought it was quite original. In the end, though, I'm afraid we just weren't quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further." So wrote Barbara Levy, a London literary agent, when typed manuscript of the opening chapter of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul's 1971 Booker Prize winning book In a Free State was submitted to her disguised as that by an aspiring novelist. Other major literary agencies PFD, Blake Friedmann and Lucas Alexander Whitley all turned down the book.
Sirji was not perturbed. "To see that something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent and there is not a great deal of that around," he said. "With all the other forms of entertainment today there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is." Indeed.
As the year drew to a close, he delivered a rare public address to the Royal Society of Literature and spoke of wanting intensely to be a writer, always, but "my talent took about five years rather than three years to develop. It did come, to my great relief, and until it came, I was very very wretched. It was the pain below everything I did." But it is a much mellower Naipaul now. For example, when asked why he hated Thomas Hardy (about whom he has famously said in the past: "can't compose a paragraph ... has no narrative gift") and if it is because he is such a poetic writer, Sirji was grace personified: "I arrived at poetry very late in my life" and "I have a cloth ear ... It is a deficiency. I am not proud of it ... But I am full of deficiencies like this, because I have been so focused on my own work that it's shut out a lot of other things."
When asked if he regretted missing out on life, he said, "I felt that very much when I was younger. I regretted that I didn't have the time to - shall we say - have emotional adventures because I was doing my work. I have often wished that I could have three lives: one to read, one to write, and one to experience."
