V.S. Naipaul, Unyielding : Lionized in the West, the Nomadic Author Roars Back at His Critics in the Third World

The little man sits imperiously behind a desk, his eyes sweeping the room with distaste. Stiff, distant and reserved, he looks like an Oxford don anxious to dismiss an unwanted visitor and get on with his work. With an irritated wave of his hand, he signals that the questions can begin.

But not just any questions. In an icy British accent, the celebrated author V. S. Naipaul says he cannot be bothered with queries about the meaning of his novels and nonfiction. He has little patience with probings of his personal life. And there will be, he adds, no comment about critics who have attacked his travelogues from the Third World as racist and mean.

Letting His Work Speak

“These critics are not important, they’re academics, people without constituencies,” Naipaul says tartly, scanning the bookshelves in his publisher’s office. He is in town to promote his latest book, and makes it clear that controversy is the farthest thing from his mind.

“I won’t talk about this,” Naipaul says. “I’m a writer, so let my work speak for itself. Let my work answer all these questions about who we are, and the world around us.”

For more than 35 years, Naipaul has been struggling to do just that. And despite his cool, cerebral manner, the 57-year-old writer would be the first to concede that he is a restless and unhappy man, dogged as much by personal demons as Third World critics.

An East Indian by descent who was raised in Trinidad and then fled to England to be a writer, Naipaul has long been an artist in search of a homeland. Notebook in hand, he has wandered the globe from Jakarta to Nashville, trying to come to terms with his tangled ethnic origins and lack of a spiritual identity.

While many authors have written about alienation and other existential themes, Naipaul’s life has embodied them. Detached and ironic, he has lived on the fringes of the Western world and served up troubling visions of upheaval in the West Indies, Islamic countries, India and Africa, as well as biting commentaries on Europe and the United States.

“My work has been a search for myself, yes, but also for the world itself,” says Naipaul, a longtime resident of England. “Every book is a discovery. All books are. Without an element of surprise and discovery there is no writing. I don’t analyze myself, because my work is a matter of accident, intuition and instinct. That is my stock in trade.”

With 19 books to his credit, Naipaul has emerged as one of the more accomplished authors in the English language today. While he rarely makes the best-seller lists, his works are praised by critics who view him as one of the most important voices from the Third World.

His most recent book, “A Turn in the South,” is Naipaul’s first extended look at the United States. Focusing on the psychological burdens of Southern history and the relations between blacks and whites, it has been largely well-received by critics, reaffirming his place in the top ranks of modern authors.

‘A Truly Brilliant Writer’

“Mr. Naipaul is a truly brilliant writer, one of the very best we have,” said Alfred Kazin, himself a respected author and critic. “There are few writers who have traveled as he has, and whose probing visions of remote corners of the world are so perceptive.”

Others salute Naipaul for laying bare the myth and pretense of Iran and other post-revolutionary societies. Critic Jane Kramer has called him “the Solzhenitsyn of the Third World . . . someone whose vision of moral fault has marked him with a crazy and arrogant and somehow blessed purity.”

Outside the West, however, Naipaul has been reviled.

A growing number of Third World writers believe he has judged their societies too harshly, presenting an insulting view of blacks, Muslims and other people with a colonial past. Despite his reputation as an intellectual, they say, the Trinidad-born author has a barely concealed contempt for the impoverished world in which he once lived.

“Naipaul’s posture is that of a white man’s nigger, looking down,” charged Edward Said, a Columbia University professor of comparative literature and Palestinian activist. He criticized the “highly derogatory, supercilious” portrayals of Muslims in Naipaul’s work.

Similar criticism has come from Africa, the West Indies, Latin America and India. To all of it, Naipaul has a succinct response:

“I am not a politician, I don’t believe in political causes,” he says. “I have no ideology. I’m a writer who writes what he sees. That’s all I am.”

Despite the controversy, even Naipaul’s worst enemies cannot discount him entirely. In a typical admission, Said noted that “whatever else you say, the man has great literary talent. From his earliest works, he’s had a wonderful gift for the written word.”

Influenced by Father

It is a skill that didn’t come easily to Naipaul, who has said that he wanted to be a writer long before he had any idea about what to write. Influenced by his father, who had been a journalist in Trinidad, the young boy believed the romance of being an author offered an easy ticket out of West Indian society. But his climb to eminence was anything but smooth.

Born in 1932, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul arrived in a world that reflected the bitter legacy of about 144,000 East Indian laborers lured to the West Indies in the mid-19th Century by unscrupulous traders. These immigrants, many of them doomed to menial jobs, were ill-prepared for their new lives. They practiced the Hindu faith in a strange, tropical land, living alongside blacks, Asians, Europeans and other unhappy refugees.

A gifted student, Naipaul left the West Indies in 1950 after winning a scholarship to Oxford. He immersed himself in literary studies and soon began to write wry, satirical stories about the Caribbean world he had left behind. His work produced at least one masterpiece, the novel “A House for Mr. Biswas.” But the young author soon confronted the central anxieties of his life: Who was he, where was he from, and for what audience could he write?

“I live in England and depend on an English audience. Yet I write about Trinidad, and more particularly about the East Indian community there,” he wrote at the time. “But I have certain handicaps. The social comedies I write can be fully appreciated only by someone who knows the region I write about. Without that knowledge it is easy for my books to be dismissed as farces and my characters as eccentrics.”

Naipaul has also found the act of writing to be an ordeal. When sitting down to begin a book, he is fearful of setting an artificial tone and getting off on the wrong track.

“It is such an artificial thing, the beginning,” he says. “You’re finding the right tone, and all that. There is so much thinking and rejecting, beginning again, and rejecting. It’s important because one tone controls what is to follow. At some point, one finds the answer, but it is never easy.”

Intimidated by His Craft

Even when a project is under way, Naipaul says he can be intimidated by his craft. For years, he has preferred to write drafts in his own hand instead of using a typewriter or word processor. The reason is that “your handwriting is something you can control . . . it doesn’t make noise, it’s very unpretentious. But a typewriter banging away sounds very authoritative and frightening, you almost feel ashamed.”

As his craft developed, Naipaul reached a turning point in 1961, when he received a grant from the Trinidad government to return to the West Indies and write about his impressions. The result was “The Middle Passage,” an ironic blending of journalistic observation and literary vignettes that won critical praise. In one scene after another, Naipual cast a withering eye on the blacks, Indians and other ethnic groups inhabiting the region, finding their lives empty and their culture almost non-existent.

But there were also moments of compassion. At one point, Naipaul encountered an old Indian man living in poverty in a remote village in Surinam. Recalling the legacy of slavery that had brought so many East Indians to the New World, he was anguished by the sight:

“A derelict man in a derelict land; a man discovering himself, with surprise and resignation, lost in a landscape which had never ceased to be unreal because the scene of an enforced and always temporary residence; the slaves kidnaped from one continent and abandoned on the unprofitable plantations of another, from which there could never more be escape.”

There would be other travelogues, focusing on the Muslim world and India, where Naipaul voyaged in search of his ancestral faith. In each of these books, he blended the journalist’s eye for detail with the novelist’s ear for dramatic dialogue. The secret, he says, has been learning how to seek out intriguing characters and ask the right questions.

People Lead to People

“It’s a very subtle thing, you get to know people where you are traveling, and people lead you on to other people,” he says. “Then your instincts say, ‘Yes, I’ll talk to this man, I’ll pull out my notebook.’ You don’t do that for everyone.

“At first, people can be somewhat banal, because they’re not sure who you are; they’re not sure why you’re talking to them. But there’s a gift of asking the right question, that’s the mark of the serious inquirer. And it invariably happens, you ask something that will touch people, and they will respond,” he says.

As his travelogues reached a wider audience, Naipaul began to attract even more attention for his fiction, which explored political upheaval in Third World countries. In explosive novels like “Guerrillas” and “A Bend in the River,” he portrayed the bloody aftermath of revolutions and mocked the pretense of new leaders who were as corrupt as their predecessors.

Researching Projects

The research for these tumultuous projects often carried Naipaul far from the quiet London flat and Wiltshire country cottage that he shares with his wife, Patricia. But he has invariably returned to the solitude of his home to complete his books. As a young man, Naipaul was able to write every day, but now advancing age has begun to slow him down.

“Now, I do it (writing) when I can,” he says. “I do it in little bursts, in the late afternoon, perhaps. But there’s no routine. When I used to sleep well, I would do it the minute I got out of bed. But now, one is winding oneself up, one is rejecting and thinking all the time.”

It has been a draining process, yet Naipaul says he takes little comfort in the intervals between books. The task of promoting his most recent work, for example, has made him eager to get on with his next project, even though he has not yet decided what that will be.

“I’ve always been restless, impatient to get on with my work,” he said. “Impatient almost to the point of rudeness. One carries an entire book around in one’s head, after all. When I’m finished with a book, I practically know it by heart.”

Western writers have praised Naipaul’s stinging commentaries. But they have been answered by the chorus of Third World critics who deplore these same works. The debate reached its zenith in 1981 with “Among the Believers,” a travelogue based on Naipaul’s travels through the Islamic world, including Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, in which he acknowledged a deep alienation from the Islamic world, missed the conveniences of modern life and was contemptuous of the poverty that surrounded him. Naipaul’s work was applauded by some critics. Roger Shattuck, who writes for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, said it showed the author’s “honest, courageous voice. It’s a stark voice. He reports accurately what he sees and hears.”

But others disagreed. Said, echoing a widely held belief in the Islamic world, suggested that Naipaul was prejudiced against Muslims and victimized by his own preconceptions.

“I found there was a total lack of sympathy with the region,” he said. “He didn’t know much about their culture, except that it had failed him, and he made no effort to learn the language. His mind was made up before he left.”

Apologist for West

More important, Said charged in an interview that Naipaul had become an apologist for the West, catering to prevailing dislike for the Islamic world.

“He (Naipaul) seems to be a novelist who addresses a select audience of liberals in the West, who are prepared to see the Third World as disappointing them,” Said continued. “The idea that, we supported the natives, but look at what they’ve done. They gave us Khomeini and Idi Amin, and so forth. And a lot of people in the West are anxious to hear that message.”

Criticism also came from the West Indies. Derek Walcott, an award-winning West Indian poet, said in a telephone interview that Naipaul “seems unable to resist a compulsive contempt for what is called the Third World. For many, this is a very sensitive subject.”

In particular, Walcott criticized Naipaul’s views on the emptiness of West Indian life.

“To write about this lack as if it were the fault of the African and the Indians is not only to betray them, but to lie,” he said in an essay. “Naipaul is unfair. He is unjust. . . . Slavery and indenture were technological concepts, not aesthetic ones.”

Listening to these comments in his publisher’s office, Naipaul seems unconcerned. But then, suddenly, they seem to strike a nerve.

“I’m not interested in these political judgments; they’re very boring,” he snaps. “I think they are nonsensical things to say.”

Had he been too critical of his own people?

“What nonsense,” he replies. “Why don’t they say it about Dickens, or Mark Twain, or Turgenev? Probably people did say that nonsense about them. But it’s a very foolish thing to say. As a writer, are you to puff your people up? One is not a branch of the public relations department.”

Did he pay a high price for alienating Third World readers?

“I hate this thing that one is a Third World writer,” Naipaul says. “To talk about this idea, that I’m the Solzhenitsyn of the Third World. What a trivial thing to say. How limiting. It shows very little regard for what one has been doing, whether critical or not.”

By now, Naipaul is ready for battle.

“Oh, I think these people who criticize me are fighting on very safe ground,” he says. “The world changed in 1947; the British Empire ended, and with that all the other empires vanished. This division of the world, between them and us, it was finished. And the people who have gone on fighting the old wars are really fighting wars that have long been won. No one will lift a finger against them.”

Enjoys the Sparring

It is vintage Naipaul, and he seems to enjoy the sparring. Leaving no stone unturned, the author also charges that he has been badly treated by Vintage Books, his paperback publisher, and he questions the need for doing press interviews.

The session is ending, but now Naipaul makes a startling admission: After years of controversy, he is, God forbid, beginning to mellow.

“I think there is probably something there, yes,” he says, agreeing with critics who have pointed this out. “Yes, because one thinks of human beings as much more frail, you see. And because they’re so frail, you don’t want to run them down so much.”

Naipaul agrees that the seeds of this change appeared in his 1987 autobiographical novel, “The Engima of Arrival.” In it, an author returns to the West Indies for the funeral of his sister. Grief-stricken, he comes to terms with his own mortality and the Hindu rites he had once criticized. His final words are tinged with compassion and resignation:

”. . . We came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honor and remember. It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death that I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief whose melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment. It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory.”

The new tone grows stronger in Naipaul’s book about the American South. He is willing to forgive the foibles of his white characters, ranging from rednecks to aging Southern belles, and writes admiringly of the black struggle for economic justice. For once, it seems, satire and anger have given way to something more charitable.

Weary of Travel

Leaning back in his chair, Naipaul explains that he has grown weary of his travels and would do no more travelogues. He complains of being physically tired and mentally exhausted. From now on, he will spend more time in England, his adopted home, however imperfect.

“Although one talks young and writes young, one is really not young any longer,” Naipaul adds, looking relaxed for the first time. “One can’t go knocking around the world forever.”