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V.S. Naipaul
The Art of
Fiction Sir
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born on August 17,1932, in Chaguanas,
Trinidad, where his ancestors had emigrated from India-his maternal
grandfather, at the turn of the century, had traveled from that country
as an
indentured servant. Naipaul, in
his essay "Prologue to an Autobiography" from Finding the
Center, has written: "Half a writer's work ... is
the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had
been
varied, full of upheavals and moves: from grandmother's Hindu house in
the
country, still close to the rituals and social ways of village India;
to Port
of Spain, the negro, and G.I. life of its streets, the other, ordered
life of
my colonial English school, which is called Queen's Royal College, and
then
Oxford, London and the freelancers' room at the BBC. Trying to make a
beginning
as a writer, I didn't know where to focus." After two
failed attempts at novels and three months before his twenty-third
birthday,
Naipaul found his start in the childhood memory of a neighbor in Port
of Spain.
The memory provided the first sentence for Miguel
Street, which he wrote over six weeks in 1955 in the BBC
freelancers' room
at the Langham Hotel, where he was working part-time editing and
presenting a
literary program for the Caribbean Service. The book would not be
published
until 1959, after the success of The Mystic
Masseur (1957), which received the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial
Prize, and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), which was
awarded the Somerset Maugham Award. A
House of Mr. Biswas was published in 1961, and in 1971 Naipaul
received the
Booker Prize for In a Free State.
Four novels have appeared since then: Guerrillas
(1975), A Bend in the River (1979), The
Enigma of Arrival (1987), and A Way in the World.
Naipaul received a
knighthood in 1990 for his service to literature. In the early
1960s, Naipaul began writing about his travels. He has written four
books on
India: The Middle Passage (1962), An Area
of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization
(1977),
and India: A Million Mutinies Now
(1990). The Return of Eva Peron and The
Killings in Trinidad (published in
the same volume in 1980) recorded his experiences in Argentina,
Trinidad, and
the Congo. Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia are the subject of Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
(1981). He returned
to those countries in 1995; Beyond Belief,
an account of those travels, was published this year. In
conversation with Naipaul, one finds that issues and ideas are always
highly
subtle and complex-of which he keeps reminding you, lest you see things
only in
monochrome-but the language steers clear of obfuscation and cant.
Indeed,
Naipaul can be a difficult companion. The humbleness of his beginnings,
the
long struggles, the sheer scale of his artistic beginnings clearly have
bred in
him deep neuroses-at sixty-six, the neurotic circuitry is still
buzzing.
Despite the edginess, and the slight air of unpredictability it brings
into any
interaction with him, Naipaul proved to be an interviewer’s delight. The
interview is culled from a series of conversations in New York City and
India.
Part of the interview was conducted by Jonathan Rosen at the Carlyle
Hotel on
May 16, 1994. Naipaul spent several minutes rearranging the furniture
in the hotel
suite in an effort to locate the chair best suited to his aching back.
He has
the habit of removing glasses before answering a question, though that
only
enhances his scrutinizing expression and attitude of mental vigilance.
The occasion
for the interview was the publication of A
Way in the World, but despite an initial wish to "stay with the
book," Naipaul relaxed into a larger conversation that lasted several
hours and touched on many aspects of his life and career. - TaTun Tejpal, Jonathan
Rosen, 1998 V.S. NAIPAUL
Let me know
the range of what you are doing and how you are going to approach it. I
want to
know with what intensity to talk. Are we going to stay with the book? INTERVIEWER Would you
like to? NAIPAUL It's a long
career. There are many books. If things are to be interesting, it is
better to
be specific and focused. It's more stimulating to me, too. INTERVIEWER Was A Way in
the World a difficult book to
write? NAIPAUL In what way? INTERVIEWER There are so
many different pieces to it, yet it fits together as a whole. NAIPAUL It was
written as a whole-from page one to the end. Many writers tend to write
summing-up books at the end of their lives. INTERVIEWER Were you
conscious of trying to sum things up? NAIPAUL Yes. What
people have done-people like Waugh in his war trilogy, or Anthony
Powell-is
create a character like themselves to whom they can attach these
reinterpreted
adventures. Powell has a character running through his books who is
like him
but not him, because he doesn't play a dominant role. I think this is
one of
the falsities that the form imposes on people, and for many years I've
been
thinking how to overcome it. INTERVIEWER How to
overcome ... NAIPAUL You didn't
understand what I was saying? INTERVIEWER I'm guessing
that you mean the space between Marcel Proust the author and Marcel the
narrator of Remembrance of Things Past. NAIPAUL No, I was
thinking-well, yes, put it like that. I was thinking that to write
about the
war, which was a big experience for him, Waugh had to invent a Waugh
character.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a
character who
roughly has my background. I thought for many years how to deal with
this
problem. The answer was to face it boldly-not to create a bogus
character but
to create, as it were, stages in one's evolution. INTERVIEWER I'm struck
by how much your autobiography overlaps with the vast history of the
West. Do
you have a sense that to write about yourself is to write about the
larger
world? Did you strive to achieve this relationship or did you find it
naturally
evolving? NAIPAUL Naturally,
it had to evolve, because that's learning, isn't it? You can't deny
what you've
learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your
life. I
grew up in a small place and left it when I was quite young and entered
the
bigger world. You have to contain this in your writing. Do you
understand what
I am saying? INTERVIEWER I do
understand, but I was wondering about something a little different. NAIPAUL Try it
again. Rephrase it. Make it simple and concrete so we can deal with it.
INTERVIEWER I imagine
you as having begun in a place that you were eager to leave but that
has turned
out-the more you studied it and returned to it-actually to be at the
center of
issues that are of enormous importance to the West. You call Trinidad a
small
place, but as you've written, Columbus wanted it, Raleigh wanted it ...
When
did you become conscious of Trinidad as a focus of the desires of the
West, and
a great subject? NAIPAUL I have been
writing for a long time. For most of that time people were not
interested in my
work, so my discoveries have tended to be private ones. If it has
happened,
it's just a coincidence. I wasn't aware of it. Also, it is important to
note,
the work has not been political polemic. Such a work written in the
1950s would
be dead now. One must always try to see the truth of a situation-it
makes things
universal. INTERVIEWER You
mentioned that your readers are coming to you late-do you think that
the world
is now catching up with you? Is this a change in readership or a change
in the
world? NAIPAUL It's a
change in the world. When I began to write, there were large parts of
the world
that were not considered worth writing about. Do you know my book The Loss of El Dorado? It contains all
the research on Raleigh and Miranda. When it was published, the
literary editor
of a very important paper in London told me that I only should have
written an
essay because it wasn't a big enough subject. He was a foolish man. But
it
gives you an idea of how the world has changed. INTERVIEWER Do you think
the world is more understanding now of the psychological displacement
with
which you deal? NAIPAUL It's such a
widespread condition now. People still have the idea of the single
cultural
unit, which has never actually existed. All cultures have been mingled
forever.
Look at Rome-Etruria was there before, and there were city-states
around Rome.
Or the East Indies-people from India went out to found further India,
then
there was the Muslim influence ... People come and go all the time-the
world
has always been in movement. INTERVIEWER Do you think
you have become an exemplar of that mixed world? NAIPAUL I don't
think so. I am always thinking about the book. You are writing to write
a
book-to satisfy that need, to make a living, to leave a fair record
behind, to
alter what you think is incomplete and make it good. I am not a
spokesman for
anybody. I don't think anybody would want me to be a spokesman. INTERVIEWER The three
explorers in A Way in the World are
drawn back to Trinidad at their peril. I sense from your earlier
writing that
you fear you might make one trip too many-that there is an annihilating
aspect
to that place from which you came, which might this time overwhelm you.
NAIPAUL You mustn't
talk like that. It's very frightening. I think I have made my trips
there and I
won't go back again. INTERVIEWER But
imaginatively Trinidad does pull you. NAIPAUL No. I'm
finished with it imaginatively. You see, a writer tries very hard to
see his
childhood material as it exists. The nature of that childhood
experience is
very hard to understand-it has a beginning, a distant background, very
dark,
and then it has an end when a writer becomes a man. The reason that
this early
material is so important is that he needs to understand it to make it
complete.
It is contained, complete. After that there is trouble. You have to
depend on
your intelligence, on your inner strength. Yes, the later work rises
out of
this inner strength. INTERVIEWER I am struck
by your title A Way in the World. It
reminds me of the end of Paradise Lost-wandering
out after the expulsion. Is the world what you enter when you leave
home? NAIPAUL I suppose it
depends on the nature of where you live. I don't know whether it is a
fair
question or if it should be answered. Put it another way. INTERVIEWER I guess I'm
asking what you mean by world. NAIPAUL People can
live very simple lives, can't they? Tucked away, without thinking. I
think the
world is what you enter when you think-when you become educated, when
you
question-because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.
INTERVIEWER Did you grow
up with a larger idea of the world? An idea represented by the word world? NAIPAUL I always
knew that there was a world outside. I couldn't accept that with which
I grew
up-an agricultural, colonial society. You cannot get any more
depressing or
limited. INTERVIEWER You left
Trinidad in 1950 to study at Oxford-setting out across the seas to an
alien
land in pursuit of ambition. What were you looking for? NAIPAUL I wanted to
be very famous. I also wanted to be a writer-to be famous for writing.
The absurdity
about the ambition was that at the time I had no idea what I was going
to write
about. The ambition came long before the material. The filmmaker Shyam
Benegal
once told me that he knew he wanted to make films from the age of six.
I wasn't
as precocious as he-I wanted to be a writer by the age of ten. I went to
Oxford on a colonial government scholarship, which guaranteed to see
you
through any profession you wanted. I could have become a doctor or an
engineer,
but I simply wanted to do English at Oxford-not because it was English
and not
because it was Oxford, but only because it was away from Trinidad. I
thought
that I would learn about myself in the three or four years I was going
to be
away. I thought that I would find out my material and miraculously
become a
writer. Instead of learning a profession, I chose this banality of
English-a
worthless degree, it has no value at all. But I wanted
to escape Trinidad. I was oppressed by the pettiness of colonial life
and by
(this relates more particularly to my Indian Hindu family background)
the
intense family disputes in which people were judged and condemned on
moral
grounds. It was not a generous society-neither the colonial world nor
the Hindu
world. I had a vision that in the larger world people would be
appreciated for
what they were-people would be found interesting for what they were. INTERVIEWER Unconnected
to the family from which they came? NAIPAUL Yes. I
imagined that one would not be subject to that moralizing judgment all
the
time. People would find what you were saying interesting, or they would
find
you uninteresting. It actually did happen in England-I did find a more
generous
way of looking at people. I still find it more generous. INTERVIEWER Did you
enjoy Oxford? NAIPAUL Actually, I
hated Oxford. I hate those degrees and I hate all those ideas of
universities.
I was far too well prepared for it. I was far more intelligent than
most of the
people in my college or in my course. I am not boasting, you know
well-time has
proved all these things. In a way, I had prepared too much for the
outer world.
There was a kind of solitude and despair, really, at Oxford. I wouldn't
wish
anyone to go through it. INTERVIEWER Do you still
feel the wounds of your early life? INTERVIEWER Do you ever
wonder what would have become of you if you had stayed in Trinidad? NAIPAUL I would have
killed myself. A friend of mine did-out of stress, I think. He was a
boy of
mixed race. A lovely boy, and very bright. It was a great waste. INTERVIEWER Is he the
boy that you mention in the introduction to A House for
Mr. Biswas? NAIPAUL Yes, he is
the boy I had in mind. We shared an admiration for each other. His
death was
terrible. NAIPAUL I think
about how lucky I was to escape. I think about how awful and oppressive
it was.
I see it now more clearly for what it was: the plantation-perhaps a
part of the
New World, but entirely autonomous. No doubt I've healed the wounds
because I
have thought about it so much. I think about how lucky I was not to
have been
destroyed utterly. There has been a life of work since then, a life of
endeavor. INTERVIEWER Why has
writing always been the central need of your life-the way out of
everything? NAIPAUL It was given
to me as an ambition. Or rather, I took my father's example; he was a
writer-a
journalist, but he also wrote stories. This was very important to me.
My father
examined our Hindu background in his stories. He found it a very cruel
background,
and I understood from his stories that it was a very cruel world. So I
grew up
with the idea that it is important to look inwards and not always
define an
external enemy. We must examine ourselves-our own weaknesses. I still
believe
that. INTERVIEWER You have
said that you see writing as the only truly noble calling. NAIPAUL Yes, for me
it is the only noble calling. It is noble because it deals with the
truth. You
have to look for ways of dealing with your experience. You have to
understand
it and you have to understand the world. Writing is a constant striving
after a
deeper understanding. That is pretty noble. INTERVIEWER When did you
start writing? NAIPAUL I started
work on a novel in 1949. It was a very farcical, a very interesting
idea-a
black man in Trinidad giving himself the name of an African king. This
is the
idea I tried to explore. It dragged on as a piece of writing for two
years
because I was too young to know much. I began it a little bit before I
left
home and finished it during a long vacation from Oxford. I was very
glad I did
finish it because at least it gave me the experience of finishing a
long book.
Of course nothing happened to it. Then, after
I left Oxford, really in great conditions of hardship, I began to write
something intensely serious. I was trying to find my own voice, my
tone-what
was really me and not borrowed or acting. This serious
voice led me into great shallows of depression, which dragged on for a
while
until I was told to abandon it by someone to whom I had sent the
manuscript. He
told me it was rubbish; I wanted to kill him but deep down in my heart
I knew
he was absolutely right. I spent many weeks feeling wretched because it
had
been five years and nothing was happening. There was this great need to
write,
you see. I had decided it was to be my livelihood-I had committed my
life to
it. Then something happened: out of that gloom, I hit upon my own
voice. I
found the material that was my own voice. It was inspired by two
literary sources-the
stories of my father and a Spanish picaresque novel, the very first
published,
in 1554, Lazarillo Tormes. It is a
short book about a little poor boy growing up in imperial Spain, and I
loved
its tone of voice. I married these two things together and found that
it fitted
my personality-what became genuine and original and mine really was fed
by
these two quite distinct sources. INTERVIEWER This is when
you began writing Miguel Street? NAIPAUL Yes. It is
immensely hard to be the first to write about anything. It is always
easy
afterwards to copy. So the book I wrote-that mixture of observation and
folklore and newspaper cuttings and personal memory-many people can do,
but at
the time it was something that had to be worked out. Imagine
writing a book like Miguel Street in
1955. Today people are interested in writing from India or other former
colonies, but at the time it was not considered writing. It was very
hard to
have this book with me for four years before it was published. It
really upset
me and it is still a great shadow over me. INTERVIEWER You had
written two books by 1955, The Mystic
Masseur and Miguel Street, but
the first book was not published until 1957 and the stories not until
1959. NAIPAUL My life was
very hard. When you are young, when you are destitute, when you wish to
make
known your presence in the world, two years is a very long time to
wait. I was
really made to suffer. Then The Mystic
Masseur was finally published, and it was dismissed by my own paper
(I was
working at the New Statesman at the time) where an Oxford don, quite
famous
later, described it as a little savory from a colonial island. A little
savory,
which didn't represent labor. It would be
interesting to see the books that were considered real books by the
reviewers
at that time. It is useless to tell me now, All right, the books have
been
around for forty years, they are still printed. I was damaged. I was
wounded by
this neglect. People today have it much easier, which is why they
complain. I
never complained; I just had to go on. INTERVIEWER You must
have been sustained largely by self-belief? NAIPAUL Yes. I never
doubted. From the time I was a child, I had the feeling that I was
marked. INTERVIEWER You started
writing A House for Mr. Biswas just
as your first novel was published. NAIPAUL Yes. I was
casting around in a desperate way for a subject. It was so despairing
that I
actually began to write with a pencil-I didn't feel secure enough. The
idea I
had involved someone like my father, who at the end of his life would
be
looking at the objects by which he is surrounded and considering how
they came
into his life. I wrote laboriously without inspiration for a very long
time-about nine months. INTERVIEWER Did you
write every day? NAIPAUL Not strictly
every day, because when you are not inspired you do things with a heavy
heart.
Also, I was trying at the same time to become a reviewer. Someone had
recommended me to the New Statesman-they
sent me one thing and then another, but I was trying too hard and it
failed.
Then they sent me some books on Jamaica, and this nice, easy voice came
to me.
So there was some achievement at the time-learning how to write short,
interesting pieces about a book and to make the book absolutely real to
the
reader. Eventually, the novel caught fire and thereafter it was all
right. I
began to devote three weeks out of every four to this work. I think
that I knew
pretty soon that it was a great work. I was very pleased that, although
I was
so young, I was committing myself to a major piece of writing-; because
I had
begun rather small-thinking that only when one had trained oneself
enough would
one attempt grand work. If someone had stopped me on the street and
said, I'll
give you a million pounds now on one condition: you must not finish
your book,
I would have told him to go away. I knew I must finish my book. INTERVIEWER How was the
book received? NAIPAUL It was
received well from the moment it was read by the publisher. It would be
nice to say that there was a rush on the book when it was published,
but of course
there wasn't. It would be nice to say that the world stood up and took
notice,
but of course the world didn't. The book just clanked along in the way
of my
earlier books, and it was some time before it made its way. INTERVIEWER A House for Mr. Biswas was a departure from your
first
three books, which were social comedies-you moved away from light,
frothy comedy
toward a more grim and serious tone. NAIPAUL Actually the
tone is not grim. The book is full of comedy. Perhaps the comedy is
less
verbal, less farcical hut it is in everything, I assure you. I can read
you a
page of my writing from any book, however dark you might think it is,
and you
will laugh. The jokes have become deeper. The comedy has become more
profound. Without
the humorous view, you couldn't go on. You can't give a dark, tragic
view all
the time-it must be supported by this underlying comedy. INTERVIEWER In A Way in
the World, you write, "It
was that idea of the absurd never far away from us that preserved us.
It was
the other side of that anger and the passion that made the crowd burn
the black
policeman ... " It reminds me of the humor in your early books about
Trinidad, and the other side of that humor-hysteria-in the books that
followed.
NAIPAUL It's very
curious, isn't it-the same people who burned a policeman alive would
dance and
sing and tell a funny story about it. INTERVIEWER I was
particularly struck by the word us-your inclusion of yourself in that
situation. NAIPAUL Well, it was
in Port of Spain. It has to be us because one is growing up in that
atmosphere.
It was our idea of the absurd, which comes out in the calypso-it's
African,
this idea of the absurd. It is something in late life I have come to
understand-the hysteria and the sense of the absurd. INTERVIEWER And
appreciate it more? NAIPAUL I'm more
frightened by it. Understanding that the people who can be so absurd
and write
such funny songs also have a capacity for burning policemen. I fear
cruelty. INTERVIEWER I can't help
noticing that A Way in the World
ends, like The Enigma of Arrival,
with a funeral. NAIPAUL That was
pure accident. I probably didn't think of it until you told me now.
What I was
aware of as I was writing was an emphasis on dead bodies and funerals
and
corpses. It begins with a man dressing a corpse and goes on to corpses
in the
Red House, where I worked, and there are lots of corpses in the Raleigh
story. INTERVIEWER Is that a
growing sense of mortality or is that a sense of the way of the world? NAIPAUL Probably
it's facing it more boldly when one is older. When one is young, one
has ways
of dealing. Really, this is the physical thing of dying-I don't know
what
prompts it. It is for the reader to assess it; the writer mustn't judge
himself. INTERVIEWER Are you
conscious of reworking the elements of earlier fiction? NAIPAUL Yes. Getting
the angle right: having acquired the material, writing about it another
way and
so producing new material. INTERVIEWER Would you agree
that your later fiction takes a gentler angle? It seems to me that you
now have
a more accepting approach. NAIPAUL Be concrete.
Where am I rough? Where have you found me harsh? Give me an
example. INTERVIEWER Well, In a
Free State. NAIPAUL That book
was written out of great pain and very personal stress. It was written
very
carefully-put together like a watch or a piece of engineering. It is
very well
made. In 1979, for the first time, I was asked to give a reading in New
York,
and at the moment of the reading, I was aware of the extraordinary
violence of
the work-I didn't know it until then, so it wasn't conscious. I was
shocked by
the violence. When the jokes were made, people laughed; but what
followed
immediately stopped them. It was a very unsettling experience. Probably
that reflects
the way it was created-out of personal pain related to my own life, my
own
anguish. INTERVIEWER Can you
describe the way you write? NAIPAUL I write
slowly. INTERVIEWER Always? NAIPAUL I used to
write faster when I was younger-about one thousand words a day when I
was
really going. I can't do that now. Now, on a good day, I write about
three
hundred words-very little. INTERVIEWER Do you ever
not write? NAIPAUL Very
often. Most days are like that. INTERVIEWER Hemingway
called a day he had not written a day closer to death. NAIPAUL I'm not
romantic like that. I just feel rather irritated. But I'm wise enough
now and
experienced enough to know that it will be all right. If it’s in my
head, it'll
come out all right eventually. It’s just finding the right way. INTERVIEWER Do you think
language should only convey and not, as with John Updike, dance and
dazzle? NAIPAUL Well, people
have to do what they want to do. I wish my prose to be transparent- I
don't
want the reader to stumble over me. I want him to look through what I'm
saying
to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh goodness, how
nicely
written this is. That would be a failure. INTERVIEWER So even as
the ideas are complex, the prose stays uncluttered. NAIPAUL Simple, yes.
Also, I mustn't use jargon. You are surrounded by jargon-in the
newspapers, in
friends' conversations-and as a writer, you can become very lazy. You
can start
using words lazily. I don't want that to happen. Words are valuable. I
like to
use them in a valuable way. INTERVIEWER Do you
despair for English literature? NAIPAUL No, I don't
despair for it. It doesn't exist now, partly because it is very hard to
do
again what has been done before. It is in a bad, bad way in England. It
has
ceased to exist-but so much has existed in the past, perhaps there is
no cause
for grief. INTERVIEWER What about
writers emerging from India? Do you feel the same about them? NAIPAUL I haven't
examined that, but I think India will have a lot of writing. For many
centuries
India has had no intellectual life at all. It was a ritualized society,
which
didn't require writing. But when such societies emerge from a purely
ritualistic life and begin to expand industrially, economically, and in
education, then people begin to need to understand what is happening.
People
turn to writers, who are there to guide them, to provoke them, to
stimulate
them. I think there will be a lot of writing in India now. The
situation will
draw it out. INTERVIEWER To return to
the question of violence, I'd like to read a passage from A Way in the
World:
"I had grown up thinking of cruelty as something always in the
background.
There was an ancient, or not- so-ancient, cruelty in the language of
the
streets: casual threats, man to man and parents to children, of
punishments and
degradation that took you back to plantation times." NAIPAUL Yes. You
always heard people saying things in calm language that were what the
driver would
have said to the slave: I'll beat you till you pee; I'll take the skin
off your
back. These were awful things to hear, don't you think? INTERVIEWER Yet you have
always resisted simplifying the anger-blaming it on colonialism or on
the white
masters of black slaves. There is no easy villain for you. NAIPAUL Of course
there is no easy villain. These are safe things to say. They're not
helpful in
any way, they're not additions to any argument or discussion. They are
just
chants. Blaming colonialism is a very safe chant. These people would
have been
very quiet in colonial days; they would have been prepared for a life
of
subordination. Now that there is no colonialism, they speak very
fearlessly.
But other people were fearless long before. INTERVIEWER You have
been criticized for running into the arms of the oppressor. NAIPAUL Who's
criticized me? INTERVIEWER Derek
Walcott, for one. NAIPAUL I don't
know. I don't read these things. You mustn't ask me; you must ask him.
You must
judge these things yourself. I can't deal with all these things. It's
been a
long career. INTERVIEWER I'd like to
ask ... NAIPAUL You
shouldn't have asked me that question about running to the British and
the
masters ... Does it show in my work? INTERVIEWER I wouldn't
say so. NAIPAUL Then why did
you ask it? INTERVIEWER Because you
always have resisted the simplifications, but you have been surrounded
by
critics who have not resisted them. NAIPAUL Well, that's
their problem. Have you read my book The
Middle Passage? That book tells black people they can't be white
people,
which caused immense offense. In 1962, black people thought that
because
independence was coming, they had become closer to white people. INTERVIEWER The Middle Passage was your first attempt at
nonfiction. NAIPAUL It is wrong
to think of anyone as a producer of fiction because there is a limited
amount
of material you can work Onto Yet to be a writer is to be observing, to
be
feeling and to be sensitive all the time. To be a serious writer is not
to do
what you have done before, to move on. I felt the need to move on. I
felt I
couldn't do again what I had done before-I shouldn't just stay at home
and
pretend to be writing novels. I should move and travel and explore my
world-and
let the form take its own natural course. Then a happy thing: a racial
government, thinking they should give an appearance of being nonracial,
invited
me to come back and travel around the region. That's how I began to
travel, and
how I wrote The Middle Passage. INTERVIEWER You travel
to India often. You first visited thirty-five years ago and keep coming
back,
both to write and to holiday. What is the source of your continuing
fascination
with India? NAIPAUL It is my
ancestry, really, because I was born with knowledge of the past that
ended with
my grandparents. I couldn't go beyond them; the rest was just absolute
blankness. It's really to explore what I call the area of darkness. INTERVIEWER Do you think
it is crucial to your function and material as a writer to know where
you came
from and what made you what you are? NAIPAUL When you're
like me-born in a place where you don't know the history, and no one
tells you
the history, and the history, in fact, doesn't exist, or in fact exists
only in
documents-when you are born like that, you have to learn about where
you came
from. It takes a lot of time. You can't simply write about the world as
though
it is all there, all granted to you. If you are a French or an English
writer,
you are born to a great knowledge of your origins and your culture.
When you
are born like me, in an agricultural colony far away, you have to learn
everything. The writing has been a process of inquiry and learning for
me. INTERVIEWER You have
written three books on India over the last thirty-five years: An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilization,
and A Million Mutinies Now. Your
response to the country has varied with each book. NAIPAUL Actually,
the three books stand. Please understand that I do not want anyone to
supersede
another. All three books stand because I think that they all remain
true. The
books are written in different modes: one is autobiographical, one is
analytical,
and the last is an account of the people's experience in that country.
They
were written at different times, and of course, like India, people
exist in
different times. So you could say that An
Area of Darkness is still there-the analysis of the invasions and
defeat,
the psychological wound, is still there. With the Mutinies
book, in which people are discovering some little voice
with which to express their personality and speak of their needs-that
remains
true. The books have to be taken as a whole-as still existing, still
relevant,
still important. In all of
this, you must remember that I am a writer-a man writing a paragraph, a
chapter, a section, a book. It is a craft. I am not just a man making
statements. So the books represent the different stages of my craft. An Area of Darkness is an extraordinary
piece of craft-an extraordinary mix of travel and memory and reading. A
Million Mutinies Now represents the
discovery that the people in the country are important. It's a very
taxing
form, in the way that a lot happens during the actual traveling-a lot
happens
when you meet people. If you don't know how to talk to them, if you
don't know
how to get them to talk to you, there is no book. You use your judgment
and
your flair. I look at this and then that person, what he says about
himself ...
His experiences lead you to consider something else and then something
else and
so on. The book happens during the actual traveling, although the
writing takes
time, as always. So the books are different bits of craft-always
remember that
I am a craftsman, changing the craft. I am trying to do new things all
the
time. INTERVIEWER Do you use a
tape recorder when you interview people for your nonfiction? NAIPAUL I never use
a recorder. It shortens the labor and makes the whole thing more
precise-it
puts me in control. Also, people find it hard to believe, but an hour
and a
half with anyone is as much as any text of mine can take. INTERVIEWER Do you begin
an interview as soon as you meet a person? NAIPAUL First I'd
meet you and talk to you; then I'd ask to come and see you. In ninety
minutes, I can get two or three thousand words. You'll see me writing
by hand
and you'll speak slowly and instinctively. Yet it will be spoken and
have the
element of speech. INTERVIEWER An Area of Darkness suggests a lot of anger,
as does
much of your journalism about India. Do you think anger works better
than understanding
for a writer? NAIPAUL I don't like
to think of it as journalism-journalism is news, an event that is
important
today. My kind of writing tries to find a spring, the motives of
societies and
cultures, especially in India. This is not journalism. Let me correct
that-it
is not something that anybody can do. It's a more profound gift. I'm
not
competing with journalists. INTERVIEWER But does
anger work better than understanding? NAIPAUL I think it
isn't strictly anger alone. It is deep emotion. Without that deep
emotion there
is almost no writing-then you do journalism. When you are deeply
churned up,
you know that you cannot express this naked raw emotion; you have to
come to
some resolution about it. It is this refinement of emotion, what you
call understanding
that really makes the writing. These two things are not opposed to one
another
understanding derives from what you call anger. I would call it
emotion, deep
emotion. Emotion is necessary to writing. INTERVIEWER I want to
ask a question that comes from reading An
Area of Darkness. You write about the Hindu idea that the world is
illusion, which seems enormously attractive and, at the same time,
terrifying
to you. I'm wondering if I read that right ? NAIPAUL I think you
put your finger on it. It is both frightening and alluring. People can
use it as an excuse for inactivity-when things are really bad and you
are in a
mess, it can be comforting to possess and enter that little chamber of
thought
where the world is an illusion. I find it very easy to enter that mode
of
thinking. It was with me for some weeks before writing A Bend in the
River. I
had the distinct sense of the world as an illusion- I saw it spinning
in space
as though I really had imagined it all. INTERVIEWER You have
been to so many places-India, Iran, West Africa, the American Deep
South. Are
you still drawn to travel? NAIPAUL It gets
harder, you know. The trouble is that I can't go places without writing
about
them. I feel I've missed the experience. I once went to Brazil for ten
days and
didn't write anything. Well, I wrote something about Argentina and the
Falklands,
but I didn't possess the experience-I didn't work at it. It just flowed
through
me. It was a waste of my life. I'm not a holiday-taker. INTERVIEWER Didn't
Valery say that the world exists to be put in a book? Do you agree? NAIPAUL Or to be
thought about, to be contemplated. Then you enjoy it, then it means
something.
Otherwise you live like a puppy: woof
woof, I need my food now, woof woof
INTERVIEWER Your new
book, Beyond Belief, returns to the
subject of Islam, which you also examined in Among the
Believers. Do you anticipate any trouble from the
prickliness of Islam's defenders with the book's publication? NAIPAUL People might
criticize me, but I am very careful never to criticize a faith or
articles of a
faith. I am just talking now about the historical and social effects.
Of
course, all one's books are criticized, which is how it should be. But
remember
this is not a book of opinion. This goes back to my earlier point about
all
one's work standing together: in the books of exploration that I have
been
writing, I've been working toward a form where, instead of the traveler
being
more important than the people he travels among, the people are
important. I
write about the people I meet-I write about their experiences and I
define the
civilization by their experiences. This is a book of personal
experiences, so it
will be very difficult to find fault in the way you said because you
can’t say
that it is maligning anything. I looked at personal experiences and
made a
pattern. In one way, you might simply say that it is a book of stories.
It is a
book of tales. INTERVIEWER Much in the
way of A Turn in the South and A Million
Mutinies Now? NAIPAUL Absolutely,
yes. This book was a different challenge because I am very particular
about not
repeating a form, and here there were thirty narratives, which I tried
to do
differently-each one differently so that the reader would not
understand the
violation that was being done him. I didn't want the stories to read
alike. INTERVIEWER Are you
drained when you finish a book? NAIPAUL Yes, one is
drained. These careers are so slow-I write a book, and at the end of it
I am so
tired. Something is wrong with my eyes; I feel I'm going blind. My
fingers are
so sore that I wrap them in tape. There are all these physical
manifestations
of a great labor. Then there is a process of just being nothing-utterly
vacant.
For the past nine months, really, I've been vacant. INTERVIEWER Does
something begin to agitate you to get back to writing? NAIPAUL I actually
find myself being agitated now. I want to get back to my work. INTERVIEWER Do you have
a new project in mind? NAIPAUL I'm unusual
in that I have had a long career. Most people from limited backgrounds
write
one book. I'm a prose writer. A prose book contains many thousands of
sentiments,
observations; thoughts-it is a lot of work. The pattern for most people
is to
do a little thing about their own lives. My career has been other. I
found more
and more to write. If I had the strength, I probably would do more;
there is
always more to write about. I just don't have the energy, the physical
capacity.
You know, one can spend so many days now being physically wretched. I'm
aging
badly. I've given so much to this career for so long. I spend so much
time
trying to feel well. One becomes worn out by living, by writing, by
thinking. Have you got
enough now? INTERVIEWER Yes. NAIPAUL Do you think
I've wasted a bit of myself talking to you? INTERVIEWER Not, of
course, how I'd put it. You'll
cherish it? INTERVIEWER You don't
like interviews. NAIPAUL I don't like
them because I think that thoughts are so precious you can talk them
away. You
can lose them. The Paris Review
Interviews, IV Issue 148,
1998
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