Naipaul’s early work remains his lightest and most easily accessible and enjoyable. His comic novels set in Port of Spain and the small Caribbean villages nearby, like Chaguanas where he had grown up, opened up a new world to non-Caribbean readers in the late ’50s. The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and Miguel Street are all warm and wryly amusing books, full of life, humour and original first-hand observation of a place.
Here was a completely innovative voice, and one that represented the beginning of the great shift in ethnicity and vision in English letters—the Empire writing back, as Pico Iyer would later call it—that would eventually see the triumph of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai. Little of this would have been possible without the groundwork put in by Naipaul, building on the foundations laid by R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali. At his best, Naipaul’s prose was distinguished by its startling clarity and precision, its spare and deceptive simplicity, and its penetrating directness and honesty.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Naipaul’s work deepened and darkened. A House for Mr Biswas is rightly recognised as one of the epics of post-colonial literature, albeit a deeply depressing one. In his travel writing, New York Review of Books essays and novels of the period—The Overcrowded Barracoon, India: A Wounded Civilisation, A Bend in the River—Naipaul shed his earlier joie de vivre and began to assume the persona of a post-colonial Conrad, coolly and perceptively examining the painful wounds on the human psyche—those hearts of darkness—left by European colonialism, exposing at the same time the mutual corruption of the coloniser and the colonised.
Here Naipaul was at his very best: the detached outsider, struggling to understand, taking the time to go to even the most remote places and talk to people, to chip away at them and their illusions. Then he would expose them with their own words, and their confused and contradictory thoughts, before pinning them to the page with the cool detachment of a Victorian butterfly collector. Even when one strongly disagreed with his views or politics—such as his relentless negative assessment of life in the Islamic world, or his positive spin on Hindutva and tacit support for the destruction of the Babri Masjid—it was impossible to deny the power of his writing.
From the mid-’80s, however, as he grew older and grander, Sir Vidia became more and more self-absorbed, and increasingly made himself his own favourite subject. First in Finding the Centre, then in The Enigma of Arrival, and thereafter in numerous non-fiction essays and fragments of autobiography—A Way in the World, A Writer and the World, Literary Occasions, Reading and Writing—Naipaul came increasingly to turn his vision inwards. He wrote of the trials and struggles he endured as a young writer trying to find his voice, of his "jangling nerves", the "pain" of his creativity.
Naipaul’s new book, A Writer’s People, continues to mine this now-familiar seam of his struggles and influences, but with ever-diminishing returns. There is still the odd flash of the old brilliance, but the constant emphasis on his pain and anxiety seems increasingly overdone: after all, Naipaul had family in London who put him up while he wrote; he was never hungry or without income; his books had immediate success, and he was immediately and warmly welcomed into the Republic of Letters. Many writers have much more painful beginnings.
There is, in fact, very little in this book that we have not heard before: we have already read at some length about his scorn for the "half-made" society of the Caribbean, of the example of his father’s writing, his views of Gandhi, and of Nirad Chaudhuri, and so on. All that is really new here is the relentlessness of his self-obsession; and the now-comprehensive nature of his contempt for everyone and everything he writes about.
Naipaul was once a penetrating and unpredictable literary critic, but here criticism has been reduced to a series of spiky provocations ("personal prejudice can be amusing in the autobiographical mode," he writes) interspersed with brisk assassination attempts on every one of the perceived rivals who he writes about: A Passage to India has "no meaning"; Walcott grew "stagnant" after his first book ("his inspiration had gone and he was now marking time"); Waugh is "mannered (and) flippant... with nothing to write about, except, in the end, his own breakdown"; Anthony Powell’s writing is "over-explained... there was no narrative skill" and his characters are "one-dimensional"; Nirad Chaudhuri is "vain and mad"; Henry James writes only "sweet nothings"; Philip Larkin is "a minor poet"; Flaubert after Madame Bovary descended into "artificiality" and wrote "bad nineteenth century fiction". And on it goes.
Naipaul’s view of the places that moulded him are no less sour: Trinidad "had nothing that could be called a civilisation, no great architecture...no memory of style or splendour" and was ultimately a "spiritual emptiness"; Oxford students were "provincial and mean and common"; India has "no autonomous intellectual life" and its fiction, successful though it may be, is still largely mimicry and "imitation".
In small doses this is all amusing in a curmudgeonly grumpy-grandfather sort of way; but at length it is first tedious, then actually distasteful. Naipaul’s theme in the book is about "vision, a way of seeing and feeling"; yet in this work, more than ever, Sir Vidia is blinded by his own ego and prejudices, and much of what he writes is simply lazy, mean-minded and frequently offensive nonsense: this is especially true when he writes with deep contempt of the "Bible-crazed Negro" of his Caribbean upbringing.
More surprisingly, Naipaul’s discussion of Gandhi is superficial and dull; far more can be learned about this complex and oddly elusive man in the introductory passage of Kathryn Tidrick’s brilliant new biography than the two repetitive chapters Naipaul produces here.
Likewise, Naipaul’s assertion that India has no independent intellectual life or literary criticism is simply demonstrably wrong: the universities in India are buzzing with the same vibrant life as one sees today in Indian commerce, and the country is exporting academics at an unprecedented rate to Oxbridge and the Ivy League, exactly as its software companies are exporting their engineers to Silicon Valley. In Biblio, India has a literary journal that compares favourably in many ways with the tls or the lrb. Moreover, India now hosts two major literary festivals; new bookshops and publishing houses are opening at an amazing speed across the country; new writers continue to emerge (quicker than the old ones can emigrate); and the number of books published, bought and read here is increasing exponentially, not only in English but in a variety of Indian languages, especially Marathi, Malayalam, Hindi and Bengali.
Ultimately, A Writer’s People is an indulgent grand old man’s book: meandering, ponderous and pedantic, full of narcissism and touchy self-regard; it is as if Naipaul’s famous Olympian disdain has finally left him exhausted—the acidity of his own derision now makes him write contemptuously even of those he once loved and admired.
There is a tragedy here. As Philip Roth has so dramatically shown, old age need not mean the end of a great writer’s productivity. Humility, energy and ambition can still spur even the finest writer to attempt to scale ever greater peaks. Naipaul, in contrast, has died as a writer: the more he writes about his calling, the more impotent his pen seems to have become. The wisdom, the warmth, the humour and, above all, the compassion have all gone from the prose; and what we are left with now is only the bitter and desiccated husk of that once lively, warm and surprising writer from the village outside Port of Spain.
(William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Penguin India, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for History.)
