TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071089/07108900.075

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.4 KB | 235 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 58

Wanderer Of Endless Curiosity


A self-made man of many parts, the Trinidad-born and
Oxford-bred writer V.S. NAIPAUL mirrors a world in constant
social flux

By R.Z. Sheppard


    Between Madras and the shore temple town of Mahabalipuram,
the Tamil farmers spread their harvest across the road and wait
for the traffic. Cars, buses and trucks burst through the
sheaves; the rubber meets the rice, and the grains are pinched
free from their husks. The vehicles move on, and women, children
and Indian crows drop down through the exhaust fumes to gather
in their share.

    The scene delights the trim, crisply dressed man in the
backseat of the Ambassador, India's doughty knockoff of the
1954 Morris Oxford. "Look at them doing their threshing," he
says eagerly. "They're so happy threshing, threshing."

    Friends say that Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul often talks
in bis, a reference to the musical notation for "repeat phrase."
But what could be mistaken for an affectation is actually a
ritual of concentration that is performed on something as simple
as the way a lintel rests on an ancient pillar or as complex as
how the past weighs on the present.

    The burdens of history are balanced in the pages of
Naipaul's many books and published daily on his mobile face. The
muscles for consternation, annoyance, mirth, sadness,
disappointment and disdain are well developed. A lifetime
overcoming obscurity, asthma and anxiety among strangers in
strange lands has taught him to expect the worst. His
autobiographical writings toll with such gloomy remarks as "To
see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment
of creation: it was my temperament." To a visitor who has just
blown through 10 1/2 time zones to arrive promptly for a meeting
in Madras, he says, "When someone says I'll meet you between 3
and 4 p.m., it means our relationship is finished."

    Evelyn Waugh said that punctuality is the virtue of the
bored. In Naipaul's case, arrivals and departures constitute the
story of his life, and tardiness disrupts the narrative. "If one
is not on time, things won't go right," he warns, though one
learns quickly not to take the author's fretful comments
personally.

    Vidia, as he is known to friends, operates at a high level
of stress. It may be genetic, he suggests, sadly recalling that
his brother Shiva, the novelist and journalist, wrote him
shortly before he died of a heart attack three years ago at the
age of 40 that "anxiety was his truest feeling." Apprehension
also comes with the territory. Naipaul was born an outsider 56
years ago in the British colony of Trinidad. A member of neither
the white ruling class nor the black majority, he was part of
the island's large, self-contained Indian community. As a child,
he lived a Hindu village life in the country. In Port-of-Spain
during World War II, he experienced a polyglot street life that
included the language of American G.I.s. Later, as a scholarship
student at Oxford, the accents were more refined, but the sense
of being a colonial was even stronger.

    Few writers have made better use of their estrangement than
Naipaul. He recently returned to India to gather material for
his third book on the subcontinent, and things could be going
more smoothly. A recent election in the southern state of Tamil
Nadu has been disruptive. Madras' main streets are filled with
festive tides of celebrators waving the red-and-black banners
of the victorious Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party. Naipaul is
trying to sort out the issues, which include the historic
antagonism of South Indians toward traditional Brahman power.
Eventually, he will decipher the complexities of culture and
politics on paper, but for the moment, he says pointedly, "it
is the old story: the darker-skinned people against the
lighter-skinned people."

    The sorting out takes time and patience. An interview with
a local bureaucrat seems to support Naipaul's contention that
"everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last
more than two." After much difficulty, he has arranged a chat
with two Tamil radicals. The pair are escorted to the writer's
hotel room by two plainclothesmen. The luxurious Taj Coromandel
is overrun by an international gathering of leather-goods
manufacturers, and for all anyone can tell, Naipaul and his
group could have just concluded an agreement to turn sacred cows
into discount luggage. His reaction to the interview indicates
that he would have found such a deal more interesting. "They
were criminals with nothing to say," he remarks impatiently. "No
patterned narrative, just fanatical belief."

    Rumors that V.S. Naipaul has mellowed are somewhat
exaggerated. His testiness seems for the moment to be tempered
by weariness. "The mind fills up with so many images," he says,
and one is suddenly aware how many of our images of the Third
World come from his tightly woven books. He once wrote, "I have
no attitudes; no views. I have appetites and reactions, violent
reactions." Naipaul claims he is now content to be a quiet
listener. Readers looking for a verbal lynching by the leading
chronicler of modern folly and delusion may have been
disappointed by his recently published A Turn in the South. But
what they got was far more than the standard tour of the new
liberal Dixie. In texture and tone, the work is a departure for
Naipaul. "I was not interested in what I thought; I was
interested in what the people thought," he says. Working up to
14 hours a day, Naipaul roamed the old Confederacy talking to
black intellectuals, redneck philosophers, white-collar workers
and auto-factory hands now employed by the Japanese. The result
is a book of scenes and voices and, of course, a layering of
past and present. The South's agricultural and religious roots,
its history of slavery, and the evolution of its race relations
and economy are played off against the comments of people trying
to understand the small parts of what Naipaul eventually conveys
as a whole: a region of America that is like an emerging nation
within a nation.

    On the road, Naipaul operates largely through honed
instinct, avoiding official sources and searching for the
obscure informant and off-center incident. Asked why he did not
interview Reuben Greenberg, the black Jewish police chief of
Charleston, S.C., Naipaul grimaces and says simply, "Too
obvious." An ironic comment, considering that Naipaul, also a
self-made man of many parts, is now widely considered to be
England's greatest living writer. His own faceted history
parallels the breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of
London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the
beginning of a great movement of peoples after the war, a great
shaking up of the world, a great shaking up of old cultures and
old ideas." In his new novel My Secret History, Paul Theroux
offers an affectionate and accurate sketch of his friend and
mentor. The character's name is S. Prasad, but the facts and
mannerisms are V.S. Naipaul's: "He was an unusual alien: he knew
everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned his own
house, and had published half a shelf of books. He had won five
literary prizes... Still, he called himself an exile. He said
he didn't belong -- he looked it in his winter coat. Seeing me,
he frowned with satisfaction."

    A similar expression flickers when Naipaul assesses his own
career. "I really don't have a success story to tell," he
begins. "My story is one of slog and grind and disappointment
and overcoming." Growing up in Trinidad "among advertisements
for things that were no longer made," Naipaul rebelled against
the prevailing backwater mentality. His model was his father,
a journalist who tried to bring new ideas to his insular
community. Seepersad Naipaul died in 1953, a defeated man of 47.
Yet, as his son has written, "he made the vocation of the writer
seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble
thing."

    Naipaul's success story is similar to those of other gifted
outsiders who have become part of the tradition of English
letters. Coming from backgrounds they found provincial and
embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to
discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I
was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul
of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination
back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first
successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island
society.

    Later books grew out of the need for fresh subjects.
"England is not laid out like Trinidad. Its life goes on behind
closed doors," he notes. "To get material, I've had to travel."
What Naipaul conveyed in nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness
and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A
Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the
underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new
nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa
the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in
India he observed that poverty was more dehumanizing than any
modern machine. Eight years before Salman Rushdie outraged the
Imam, Naipaul had pinpointed the problem of true believers: "In
the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has
constantly to be re-created. The only function of intellect is
to assist that re-creation."

    Such declarations give Naipaul the appearance of a
political curmudgeon. But, he says with some surprise, "I don't
think that way. People turn things around. I'm for individual
rights and for law." It is a long view that includes his
fascination with ancient Rome ("I can barely express my
admiration for it") and the imperial record of the English.
Their achievement calls forth some of his best bis: "Pretty
terrific. It would be churlish to say otherwise. It would be
foolish to say otherwise. It would be unhistorical to say
otherwise."

    Naipaul is English not so much by an accident of history as
by personal acts of intelligence and will. Thirty-eight years
in Britain have given him a proper accent, a direct way with
service staff and an impatience with romantic abstraction. He
has a British wife, Patricia, with whom he shares a house in
Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge and a military training area
from which distracting gunfire can frequently be heard.

    England is where he writes -- slowly. A good day at a
recently acquired computer is 400 words. If he produces more,
he notes with a laugh, he invariably writes less the following
day. On average it takes Naipaul about a year to compose a book.
"I'm with it all the time, anxious to get to the end," he says
with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes
a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he
performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family
pundit in Trinidad. It is a difficult yoga bend that leaves the
writer arched backward with his head on the floor.

    Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains
unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that
I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose
own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader,
although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the
prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too
smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My
writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he
confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and
reads the dramas at night. Among his favorites are the Henry
plays, with their themes of chaos and shifting fortunes.

    Critics generally agree that Naipaul's fortunes are on a
permanent foundation. Irving Howe, no pushover, says, "There
can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him." Alfred Kazin
calls Naipaul the "most compelling master of social truth that
I know." The writer himself is not overly responsive to praise.
He claims to dislike interviews and awards and describes himself
simply as a "maker of books." Though England is his base and
spiritual home, he prefers the convenience and anonymity of
large hotels and jetliners where, 30,000 ft. above the chaos,
he can clasp a pillow to his stomach, insist that "reading is
too important to do on airplanes" and begin once again to turn
high anxiety into high art.