In this third instalment of our series on what makes distinctive writers distinctive, Robert Butler tackles V.S. Naipaul on the eve of his 31st book

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2010

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932, when literacy among Indian men on the island stood at 23%. Naipaul’s father had taught himself to read and write and became a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian. He gave his son the idea of the writer’s life and the idea that it was a noble calling. The young Vidia slept on the verandah, where the varied life of Port of Spain, captured in his first book “Miguel Street” (1959), “unrolled every day in front of my eyes”. The conditions that made his literary ambitions so raw and improbable also gave Naipaul his unique perspective. His early exposure to Trinidad’s diverse population—Africans, East Indians, Venezuelans, Chinese, Portuguese, Americans, Syrians and Lebanese—ensured that he wouldn’t sentimentalise other cultures. This gift was immeasurably deepened by his travels in South America, Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran and South-East Asia.

Naipaul attaches equal value to his fiction and non-fiction and has mastered (as the Nobel committee said) a form of writing that combines the two. His 31st and latest book, “The Masque of Africa” (out now in Britain, and in October in America), sees this tireless observer return, albeit in a slightly more leisurely style (“we went in his ambassador’s car”), to a continent he first visited 44 years ago.

Golden rule

After university, Naipaul decided the way he had written undergraduate essays was not “proper writing”. He set himself the task of learning to write all over again, this time using only simple direct statements. “Almost writing ‘the cat sat on the mat’. I almost began like that.” For three years he stayed with those rules. He recently provided a list of seven rules for beginners at the request of an Indian newspaper: (1) write sentences of no more than ten to 12 words; (2) make each sentence a clear statement (a series of clear linked statements makes a paragraph); (3) use short words—average no more than five letters; (4) never use a word you don’t know the meaning of; (5) avoid adjectives except for ones of colour, size and number; (6) use concrete words, avoid abstract ones; (7) practise these rules every day for six months.

Key decision

To discard the metropolitan notion of the writer that he had grown up with—a Somerset Maugham or Evelyn Waugh who moves from a place of civilised security to investigate the world beyond his own shores. That kind of “I” was not available to Naipaul. “My subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself.”  (“The Enigma of Arrival”, 1987.)

Strong point

Something he admires in other writers: “Kipling looked hard at a real town.”

Favourite trick

In his later work, he repeats a phrase from one paragraph in the next one, which gives his prose an almost biblical sense of progress. The mythic tone is heightened by short words and inverted sentences: “In the morning there came the fighter plane.” (“A Bend in the River”, 1979.) Every evening Naipaul reads out loud what he has written during the day. Or used to—nowadays he has what he has written read out to him. This lifelong habit gives his prose the weightiness of considered thought and the lightness of conversation.

Role models

His father—“possibly the first writer of the Indian diaspora”—for his short stories about Trinidad’s Indians. Joseph Conrad, for seriousness and a sense of those living on “the other side of the fence”.  Flaubert, for the “selection and achievement of detail”. Shakespeare, for freshness of language and the power of his simplest lines.

Typical sentence

Easier to pick two of them. What’s most typical is the way one sentence qualifies another. “The country was a tyranny. But in those days not many people minded.” (“A Way in the World”, 1994.) 

"The Masque of Africa"  was published by Picador on August 31st, and by Knopf in America on October 19th