Terrifying Honesty

No living writer has spawned as many books about himself as V.S. Naipaul has. Books onhim easily outnumber the over two dozen books he has written in the last 50 years.Curious, considering all his books are, by his own admission, as much about himself asabout the world he lives in. Curiouser still, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in thisanthology of articles published after his Nobel win last year, considering “that hehas gone out of his way, from time to time and far beyond the call of duty, to burnish hisreputation as a cantankerous curmudgeon”. Those who claim he got the Nobel for hisMuslim-bashing do him an injustice: is there any man or institution or country or religionthat this most dyspeptic of writers has spared? “I know it ought to be liberallywonderful to say it’s okay,” Naipaul said not so long ago about Keynes’alleged habit of sodomising his students, “but I think it’s awful.”It’s this “terrifying honesty” that the writers in this volume celebrate inNaipaul who is, above all other things, the archetypal writer’s writer. The way toapproach his writing, says Amitava Kumar in his introduction, is the way Naipaul himselfapproaches every new subject: “Beginning anew, without preconceptions.... In a worldthat is shrinking into rigidly opposed ideologies and camps, a willingness to start at thebeginning, relearning the alphabet of our simplest prejudices can be an act of greathumility. And creativity.”

In a long-distance telephonic interview with journalist Akash Kapur, Naipaul providesthe key to his own work: “You must ask questions which genuinely interest you... youmustn’t ask things which you think sound nice.” In a long essay, Pankaj Mishrapaints a moving portrait of the young Naipaul, grandson of an impoverished pujari inTrinidad, who sets out on an odyssey to England to become a writer. We get a sense of hisordeal, “the fear and panic and helplessness”. Caryl Phillips perhaps has theanswer as to why Naipaul still inspires as much writing as he produces in this sentence:“It is the huge gaps between who he was and who he is; what he wants us to think andwhat we think we know that encourages us to write about, think of, and most importantlyread this man.”