The following is the text of the introductory address madeat the launch of Magic Seeds on November 18 at Oxford Bookshop, Calcutta.
The discussion of writing in V.S. Naipaul's work is more than a literary discussion on technique and sensibility; it is a description of writing as a habitation, constantly struggled over, constantly fought for, constantly in the process of being cre
The following is the text of the introductory address madeat the launch of Magic Seeds on November 18 at Oxford Bookshop, Calcutta.
This morning, I looked at my copy of The OvercrowdedBarracoon to reread his record of his first visit to Calcutta, an accountcalled "Jamshed into Jimmy", which appeared in the New Statesman aslong ago as 1963. For all its satire, the piece has the freshness of a giftedwriter, himself young, discovering, unexpectedly, a great city rising among therubbish-heaps and rioters. The essay begins with a snatch of conversation:‘"You’ve come to Calcutta at the wrong time," the publisher said. "Ivery much fear the dear old city is slipping into bourgeois respectabilityalmost without a fight."’
Today, forty one years later, at the end of a twenty-four-hour bandhfiercely opposed by the government and the high court, we feel we’realmost there: that Sir Vidia is here at the right time. "Nothing had preparedme for the Maidan," the young V.S. Naipaul goes on to say, "tree-dotted, nowin the early evening blurred with mist and suggesting Hyde Park, withChowringhee as a brighter Oxford Street…" Quick comparisons, each containinga brilliant, distilled picture, follow: "Lutyen’s New Delhi is a disaster…a city built for parades rather than people"; Bombay "is cosmopolitan to thepoint of characterlessness" — which is a pitilessly accurate description ofthe city I grew up in in the Sixties and Seventies. Only in Calcutta does theyoung Naipaul find a "rooted grandeur".
To me, one of V.S. Naipaul’s principal achievements is theway in which he, as a writer without a real community, a real history, a realhome, turned his gaze directly from these things one automatically "owns"towards the act and vocation of writing itself, the writer’s struggle withmaterial, the mythology of the writer’s career, from the first embryonicdaydreams to the discovery of one’s subject-matter and later. The discussionof writing in V.S. Naipaul’s work is more than a literary discussion ontechnique and sensibility; it is a description of writing as a habitation,constantly struggled over, constantly fought for, constantly in the process ofbeing created, by a man without a home or history. Something happens in thisnarrative about writing, and the writer’s life, in V.S. Naipaul’s middleperiod. The old disjunction, proposed and then investigated so eloquently byEuropeans like Mann, between the writer and society, the writer and the world,is conflated, imperceptibly, subtly, in The Mimic Men, Finding theCentre, The Enigma of Arrival, with the disjunction between thepost-colonial and his place in the world he came from as well as the world hejourneys to. The European idea of the writer’s homelessness merges, in Naipaul,with the homelessness of the post-colonial: it is a conflation that has hadprofound and far-reaching consequences for the contemporary literaryimagination.
Not too long ago, I finished reading Magic Seeds. It isa deeply impressive work, a work, as the critic and novelist, Philip Hensher,pointed out acutely in the Daily Telegraph, in V.S. Naipaul’s "latestyle"; by which Hensher means, I think, that the writer here is both morespare and unsparing than he has been before. Willie Chandran, whom we first metin Half a Life, is waiting, after emigrating from Africa to Berlin, fordestiny to direct him. Destiny speaks to him in the voice of his sister,Sarojini, who exhorts him not to waste his life in self-centredness and to joina revolutionary movement in south India. This Willie does; finds he has joinedthe wrong movement; moves helplessly from scene to scene, action to action;until, much later, when he feels most trapped, his sister and an old friend finda way of rescuing him and bringing him to London as the writer of a forgottenbut rediscovered pioneering work of post-colonial fiction.
The above first appeared in The Telegraph of Calcutta.