The Wound That Refuses to Heal

If ever there was a writer who made a supreme virtue out of an enduring necessity, surely that writer is V.S. Naipaul. The virtue is the bright, burning development of an unusually strong intelligence; the necessity is a temperament that nurses humiliation as one would nurse a seeping wound. The result: 50 years of literary interpretation of this, our one and only world, almost exclusively in terms of its crippling meanness. Naipaul is often coupled with writers such as Conrad and Forster because they, too, wrote of colonial Africa and India, but his true counterpart is Jonathan Swift, whose brilliant prose was also put to work to demonstrate human existence as the sum of its disabilities.

Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932 into a large, noisy Indian family started by grandfathers who came to the island as indentured servants. From earliest childhood, he wanted out. Everything about Trinidad and Indian family life made his skin crawl. At 18, he won an Oxford scholarship and went off to England, never again to live on the island. In England--now a man without a country--he suffered an unspeakable panic and loneliness that sent him into a near clinical depression. But he came out of it, got his degree, went up to London, got a job at the BBC and within five years began writing the Trinidad novels that readers of English everywhere quickly recognized as the work of a genuine literary talent. Then, at 32 , he went to India, to discover the country of his “roots.” What he saw shocked and repelled him. The repulsion turned to rage. Out of the rage he wrote an exciting and vituperous book called “An Area of Darkness.”

For the next 25 years Naipaul would repeat this experience. He traveled the Third World (India, Africa, the Caribbean and the Arab East), writing brilliant journalism out of the sparking anger that had been put on hold during the breakdown years in England, turning some of it into even more brilliant fiction: the piece about Michael X and Black Power in Trinidad became the novel “Guerrillas,” the one about Mobutu Sese Seko and the Congo “A Bend in the River.” He had found his subject. Now, he had to teach himself how to serve it.

It was in India that Naipaul had realized that he didn’t fit in anywhere, that he never had, never would. It had been an illusion to think he could make himself into an emigre English novelist. His mind, he realized, was his only home. He must occupy it. To go on looking hard at the kind of place he had come from--to see things as they are, in the here and now, without blinders or sentiment--was the rock on which he would build his church.

Refusing to put a good face on things became Naipaul’s article of faith. The places where everything and everyone within living memory had been subjected to Empire, where no one had ever belonged, especially not the natives, these were countries, he came to believe, that were overwhelmed with the task of making modern society and thus were hopelessly disposed to lassitude, terror and an overriding self-deception. Everywhere he went, he experienced--and didn’t hesitate to say he experienced--intellectual deficiency and moral blindness masquerading as an assertion of “authenticity.” He despised the Africanization of Africa, the spirituality of India, black power in the Caribbean and the social illness of political Islam. He thought it all the mark of a fatal self-division within cultures that now had vast need of a compensating single-mindedness if they were to go forward. He was, he felt, watching “people who are really ill-equipped for the twentieth century, light years away from making the tools they’ve grown to like.” And for this he had no pity.

In a 1981 interview, Naipaul, speaking of the breakdown he had suffered 30 years before, revealed that he had seen a doctor about it, that everything the doctor had said was true, and that he (Naipaul) had hated him for saying it and stopped seeing him. “I cured myself. It took me two years. Intellect and will, intellect and will. And the only thing that gave me solace ... was the intricacy of language. I lost myself in my studies of the derivations of words.”

This is exactly what he expects of the Third World: that it will “cure” itself, not through some long, harrowing process of self-understanding, but by an act of will that simply pushes back the hysteria of magic and myth, employing the kind of disciplined mental work it takes to create a society ruled by reason and historical analysis.

The collection of essays we now have in hand is made up of travel pieces written over the last 40 years: more than 500 unremitting pages of Naipaul casting his famously cold eye on a huge cut of the world. Actually, the coldness is overrated; there is warmth beneath it: the dangerous warmth of emotional identification. We are in the presence of a writer aroused by the sight of people who look just like himself struggling to make themselves human--and failing, failing, failing. From this perspective his intelligence cannot be diverted. And because his intelligence is his genius, to watch Naipaul think about what he is looking at (no matter what the vantage point) is to learn how exceptional writing is done. The rage is the drive, the mind is the talent, but the sentences he taught himself to write, they are the magic.

Very few writers as gifted as Naipaul have given themselves so fully to nonfiction writing. He brings to the genre an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought: The human application he prizes above all else. He is a writer for whom language is the enemy: He despises beautiful writing as much as he does mysticism. Also, his idea of narrative has little or nothing to do with plot or character. Observe hard, he says, think even harder, figure out what you are thinking in the simplest, clearest language, and you will arrive at narrative. So Naipaul looks hard, thinks even harder, then of course darts to an unexpected place in the psyche where a flash of intuitive insight allows him to make narrative, very often the way the poet, rather than the essayist, does. Among hundreds of instances, here’s one perfect illustration:

In a piece on India, Naipaul is telling us that the religious rites of Hinduism belong to the ancient world, that the holy cow is absurd, as are the caste marks and the turbans. Then he writes, “[They speak] of a people grown barbarous, indifferent and self-wounding, who, out of a shallow perception of the world, have no sense of tragedy.” No sense of tragedy. W.H. Auden could have written that. Suddenly, in a single phrase, the reader is gripped by the meaning of cultural arrest: the way it acts like a narcotic, drains off urgency, substitutes ceremony for experience.

Yet, to read Naipaul steadily is to feel something of the dilemma of attraction without love. Five hundred pages of strong and original writing applied to a social critique that uniformly withholds sympathy leaves the reader both excited and unsatisfied. First, there is the taste of pleasure, then the taste of ashes. It’s not that the experience cancels itself out (certainly not), but it is reduced, it is reduced.

The fullest indictment in this collection is reserved for Argentina, a country to which Naipaul returned four times between 1972 and 1992, and of which, for nearly a hundred pages, he has this--and this alone--to say:

“Politics reflect a society and a land. Argentina is a land of plunder ... and its politics can be nothing but the politics of plunder ....[A]n artificial, fragmented, colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths .... The failure of Argentina, so rich, so underpopulated, twenty three million people in a million square miles, is one of the mysteries of our time .... But ... the politics of a country can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships ....[The idea of work done honestly, in order to find oneself in the work] was the opposite of the idea behind the first Spanish conquest. [In Argentina, it remains] the missing moral idea.”

Nowhere in this piece--not among all the scenes revisited, or the history related, or people evoked (including Jorge Luis Borges)--do we feel ourselves in the presence of fully recognizable human beings. Nowhere do we experience the wit of local idiom, the eloquence of melancholia, the sorrow of sexual passion or the devastation of intellectual impotence. No one in Argentina, it seems, suffers or laughs or hungers or regrets as we do. Not a single Argentine sees what Naipaul sees. In short, there is nothing in “Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Peron, 1972-1991” to remind the reader that human beings and the worlds they make and occupy are painfully mixed--even though it is always the mixture that makes us feel the life within ourselves: which is, after all, why we read.

Yet, I can no longer imagine the world without Naipaul’s writing. I can easily, for instance, see it without more of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow or John Updike. But not Naipaul. It’s interesting to realize that the Americans have been writing for the same 50 years as he, have also broken literary ground and also distilled neurotic discontent into a signature brilliance. But now their discontent is solipsistic, while his is not; theirs the grief of men simply dissatisfied with their own lives, while Naipaul’s continues to drain out of a sickening meanness of political history that keeps his own pathologies attached to a way of thinking about the world that will compel our attention throughout his working life and well beyond.