V. S. Naipaul
A WRITER’S PEOPLE
Ways of looking and feeling
193pp. Picador. £16.99.
9780330485241

This will not be an easy chapter for me to do.” The chapter is about V. S. Naipaul’s old friend and early mentor Anthony Powell, whose magnum opus, A Dance to the Music of Time, when Naipaul came to read it with care, “appalled” him. Generous, “people-collecting” Tony had made a hash of it. Why did the chapter have to be written if it threatened to be so hard to write? The question is not easy to answer, and it has gone unanswered in the deferential reviews which I have read of A Writer’s People: Ways of looking and feeling. The opening chapter, which precedes that one, may also have been hard to write. Those of this writer’s people who are writers are found to have faded, staled, failed. Their works have disappeared from the scene. Their “little American success” soon wilts. This writer’s people can look at moments like a cannibal feast.

The five chapters of the book are linked by an idea of vision. There is an English way of looking, in which Powell is implicated, and there is an Indian way of looking, and of not seeing. But there’s a good deal of the miscellaneous in this collection of pieces, and the first two chapters, where the failure of writers supplies a more important link, stand somewhat apart from the later three, two of which are about India, and in which Naipaul’s abilities as a novelist, comedian and critic, and his brilliant simplicity of expression are most in evidence. One of these chapters is a piece of literary criticism where an episode of Madame Bovary, in which Emma’s future medical-man husband is called out to splint a suffering farmer, is wonderfully retold – Flaubert could hardly have done it better – and compared with Flaubert’s Carthaginian Gothic extravaganza, Salammbô, mugged up from books, Naipaul suggests, and in some respects inferior to one of its sources, the Classical historian Polybius. The case is made, and was worth making. Naipaul also writes interestingly about Roman war and Roman atrocity, and about Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico.

The second half of A Writer’s People is divided, like Gaul, into three parts, and this material is flanked by the two chapters on India, the Naipaul family’s homeland, and on what has become of it since he first went there and wrote tartly about it in An Area of Darkness (1964), which was succeeded by the more compendious and more affirmative India: A million mutinies now (1991). Strengths and annoying weaknesses are discovered in Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s writings. Gandhi’s achievement is recognized, but Gandhianism is seen as a spent force – dated, at all events. His renowned eccentricities were owed in large measure to his mother, a simple woman from the country who lived for her rituals, which could last for months on end and “came with a series of fasts and half-fasts”. From this ensued his devotion to diet. He was a man who liked eating but who pledged himself to asceticism and simplicity.

One of Gandhi’s multitude of disciples was “a foolish man”, Vinoba Bhave, whose brain was softened by emulation and self-mortification, and who had to be dragged from the spinning wheel lest he made himself ill.

“He had lived for so long as a parasite, and away from the world, that he had become a kind of half-man, and he thought that Gandhi had been like that too. Vinoba had no means of knowing that Gandhi was a man of appetite, and his sexual abstinence hadn’t come easily. One idle day in the ashram, some time before Gandhi’s death, Vinoba had the idea (or it had been put to him: he had his admirers) that he should take over from the great man. There was the clothes – he could do that. There was the spinning-wheel – he could more than do that; he had practised under the master’s eye; and it would help pass the time. There was the ashram routine, with even a little (but not too much) latrine-cleaning – that was in his blood. Up to there it was easy.”

Bhave knew, though, that Gandhi was a national figure, as well as the master of an ashram, so he threw himself into land reform and went about the villages with a following in order to preach it. But nothing was done when the caravan moved on.

This half-man and Gandhi’s mother’s half-fasts – such teases are the stuff of a superb feline comedy, from a man with an inclination to say things by halves in this way. Earlier, in South Africa, Gandhi had founded a school, Tolstoy Farm, where he “played Mr Squeers and everyone had to do gardening and where, as it turned out, the children had to do most of the hard work, felling timber and digging and carrying. The children didn’t like it”. When he went back to India, “what happened to the farm and the school?”. The comedy of Gandhi’s life, as rendered here, is unlikely to accelerate the decline which has been attributed to the Mahatma’s authority. Indian readers, among others, have long been accustomed to the story of his fads.

After the Second World War it became less arduous for the Indian community of the Caribbean to visit the country whose civilization they’d borne with them across the sea. Naipaul’s mother paid a visit to her family’s ancestral village, where she didn’t feel like venturing on her relations’ food, but accepted tea. Naipaul, himself devoted to diet and to purity, describes how her relations offered sugar. She did not resist. “But the grey grains of sugar came on somebody’s palm and were slid from the palm into the tea. And that person, courteous to the end, began to stir the sugar with her finger.” Mrs Naipaul may have felt herself exposed to a less civilized way of eating and drinking. The story is reminiscent of a scene from Britain’s Age of Reason, when, to Thomas Carlyle’s subsequent disgust, Boswell visited Samuel Johnson “to sip muddy coffee with a cynical old man, and a sour-tempered blind old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full, with her finger)”.

It is the earlier chapters of A Writer’s People which raise the question of what it is to write against the work of contemporaries (and, in passing, against that of Henry James and E. M. Forster). Part of the answer may lie in the company Naipaul kept when he left Trinidad for the metropolitan West. Literature, English literature certainly, is spiteful, and so is literary company. Writers (and their people) are often jealous. He was shocked by the displays of malice he witnessed once he’d established himself as a man of letters in England.

He explains that his youthful feeling for poetry was less acute than his feeling for prose. Poems were apt to overdo it. He was like the narrator in his novel Half a Life who objected as a student to the bombast of sensibility which he came across in English Romantic verse. The young man wanted to say: “This is just a pack of lies. No one feels like that”. But Naipaul was very excited by the arrival of a first book of poems by Derek Walcott from neighbouring St Lucia. Here, in so many words, was his own paradisal landscape and seascape. But then, he claims, Walcott’s poetry went off (the poet would one day refer to Sir Vidia as V. S. Nightfall and it isn’t hard to imagine why). The work of another West Indian writer, the novelist Samuel Selvon, also went off, and a book of his drew from Naipaul the word “wretched” when he interviewed him for the BBC’s Caribbean Service. Edgar Mittelholzer did not so much go off as go up in self-inflicted flames, Naipaul conveys. He has earlier noted that the novelist had been pleased to discover that his London publisher, Fred Warburg, was almost as dark as himself. The fate of these Commonwealth writers, as they used to be known, is enough to recall the Romantic poet Wordsworth’s awareness of the despondency and distress of the poets who were his contemporaries.

Now it is Anthony Powell’s turn. He was a friend of long standing who, Naipaul records, bade him a ceremonious goodbye some while before his death but went on seeing other friends. He was fifty-two, Naipaul twenty-five, when they met. The day came when Naipaul was invited by an editor to discuss his friend’s work. “I didn’t think anyone would believe that after all the years of friendship I had not read Powell in any serious and connected way, had only just done so, and didn’t now think of him as a writer. It was a piece of Ibsen-like horror.” This last allusion relates to his sense that “every Ibsen great man has near-murder in the background”.

A vicarious unkindness, at Powell’s expense, enters the stew. One of the points where Naipaul’s severity engages with the ill-will of others concerns “the minor poet Philip Larkin”, as he thinks him. Powell took to Larkin and his poems; perhaps he was going to add him to his collection of friends. “I was glad that he didn’t because soon we were to read, after Larkin’s death, the most awful abuse of Tony, in Larkin’s diary or in a Larkin letter.” I had thought that Larkin, like his friend Kingsley Amis, was a friend of Powell’s, but it seems that you never know with writers. Naipaul attracts a par-for-the- course abusive reference in Amis’s letters, and Amis once told Powell that Terence Kilmartin of the Observer, a translator of Proust, was “a very foolish man” – a Vinoba Bhave, as it were. This was Amis’s “little joke”, Naipaul writes. He himself knew better. But then so, of course, did Amis.

Other disparagements of Powell, by other people, are cited. His literary editor at the Telegraph, David Holloway, squinted, apparently, but managed to look Naipaul in the eye before asking him what he thought about his friend’s writing. “Before I said anything he said, with something like rage, his bad eye working hard, ‘I would pay him to stop writing’. Just like that; and yet week by week he ran Tony’s lead review at the top of the page.” Meanwhile Powell’s editor at Punch, the cartoonist Bernard Hollowood, had been heard to say that he could do the literary pages himself. Those editors! It is later reported that David Holloway “had retired or died; that dull career was over”.

Naipaul was shocked when Auberon Waugh, Evelyn’s son and one of the specialists in malice who do so well in English journalism, delivered a routine excoriation of Powell, his father’s friend. But it can’t have surprised him. “Bron’s review preyed on Tony’s mind.” But it may have been that there was no reason for the attack, that “Bron had simply wished to be cruel, and Tony was an easy target”. England exempts its Brons from any requirement of accuracy or fairness, and allows them to say, as this one did, that his public schoolfellows thought that a black boy at the school was some sort of health hazard. Naipaul’s recoil from the Caribbean island of his youth, with its easy malice, its far from paradisal race relations, took him to a Western world with deficiencies of its own and a malice of its own, to a wounded experience of the West, as some have perceived it, and to the triumphant exercise of a rare talent.

None of this is calculated to make anyone but aspiring specialists of this kind long to join the London literary world. “Somebody told Sonia Orwell one day that in Tony’s big book people were driven by the will. She made a face and seemed about to snort. And yet Tony and his wife Violet adored George Orwell . . . .” Sonia’s half-snort is the sad thing here; that and the non sequitur which follows it. Powell is sometimes said to have been hurt, or it is said that he would have been hurt had he known what was being said about him behind his back. I can testify that many good things were said about him behind his back. He is cast down at one point because contemporaries “had done so much better – Waugh, Greene, Orwell, Connolly (though perhaps Connolly hadn’t done so well), Betjeman, Amis”. Had they? All of them? So much better? Powell’s pre-war comedies, seldom mentioned here, stand up well in relation to this list of notables, from which the names of Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor are noticeably absent. Powell’s generation did well, and so did he, even if we feel that the later instalments of his big book are a falling-off.

It is possible to sympathize with those who have deferred to A Writer’s People and steered clear of its problems, which are at times an enigma. Questions of conscious intent arise. At Naipaul’s Oxford college, “they were for the most part provincial and mean and common; and it was like that at the BBC as well”. He may perhaps have heard Angus Wilson talking, as he liked to do, of “that common word ‘common’”. It’s a word that can blow up in the fist of the aggressor. Is Naipaul using it in that knowledge, as a mischief or provocation?

Elsewhere in the book he complains that Indian writers of the present day have left their native country and have gone on writing about family life there, writing autobiographically and for the most part poorly, it would appear. He must know that another writer will spring to mind here – the Naipaul who left his native country and wrote autobiographically about its family life, though he is right to stress the range and versatility of what he has written. India has no literary criticism, he insists, “no autonomous intellectual life”, and the country’s expatriate writers have had a part to play in the situation he describes: “no national literature has ever been created like this, at such a remove, where the books are published by people outside, judged by people outside, and to a large extent bought by people outside”. Some of the new Indian writers, moreover, “have even been to writing schools”. Foreign readers of the new Indian writers are entitled to think that this exaggerates a real difficulty.

Naipaul says at one point that Latin American literature exists, and is making a contribution. The statement summons up the quite well-known if possibly apocryphal story that he once asked the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa where he came from and what he did, and then came out with what may have been intended as a joke: “I didn’t know there were any writers in Peru”. Since then, he has published a number of remarks which can only have served to fix that story in the folk memory of those who attend and will continue to attend to his life and work.

Karl Miller founded the London Review of Books and edited it for its first ten years. His recent books include The Electric Shepherd: A likeness of James Hogg, 2003, and a memoir, Dark Horses: An experience of literary jpurnalism, published in 1998. He wrote the introduction to the Everyman edition of V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, published in 1995.

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