Essays from a writer who rose above his limitations

From the age of 11, V.S. Naipaul had the consuming ambition to be a writer but, by his own account, lacked most, if not all, of the proclivities usually associated with a literary vocation. But in the long run, as we all know, this would not prevent him from becoming the author of some two dozen estimable works of fiction and nonfiction and being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001.

Unlike most children who grow up to be writers, young Naipaul was not an avid reader. Nor would you have found him deeply absorbed in creating an imaginative world of his own in the manner of the young Brontes weaving their stories of Gondal and Angria: “I liked to be given a fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman ink ... “ he recalls, “but I had no wish or need to write anything; and didn’t write anything, not even letters: there was no one to write them to. I wasn’t especially good at English composition at school; I didn’t make up and tell stories at home. And though I liked new books as physical objects, I wasn’t much of a reader.”

In several of the essays collected in “Literary Occasions,” Naipaul conjectures that he may have gotten his literary ambition from his father, a struggling journalist and short-story writer who, in turn, may have gotten his ambition from his lingering sense that it was a profession befitting his hereditary Hindu caste: a way of being a “pundit.”

This would certainly appear to be a rather empty motive for any writer: One would expect such a person to be a mere literary poseur with nothing substantive to say. But, in the approved modern manner of warts-and-all self-portraiture, Naipaul is being hard on himself. For, it is also evident to anyone familiar with his work that Naipaul writes to understand himself and the world.

Naipaul attributes his youthful inadequacies as a reader and a writer to the marginal milieu in which he lived. He was born in Trinidad in 1932, part of an Indian immigrant community that had first come to the island as indentured agricultural laborers: “The island was small ... but the population was very mixed and there were many separate worlds.”

Unlike the island’s majority, descendants of African slaves who tended to live in the city, most of Trinidad’s Indian population lived in the countryside, where many, having served out their indentures, had become landowners.

The rural world where Naipaul spent his earliest years was self-enclosed: “It enabled us ... to live in ... our own fading India. It made for an extraordinary self-centeredness ... the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about nothing.” Yet the idea of India that permeated village life in rural Trinidad was only a faded memory of ancient rituals, having little to do with the real India.

Exposed to a somewhat wider world in school and in the city, where the family later moved, young Naipaul felt Trinidad to be a marginal place, lacking the coherent history and social stability that informed life in distant places such as England and Canada.

He found it almost impossible to understand much of English fiction because he could not imagine the society that serves as background to “The Pickwick Papers” or “Pride and Prejudice.” Like Henry James before him, Naipaul sensed that a writer cannot operate without a sense of tradition; unlike James, he did not feel able to appropriate English tradition for himself:

“Fiction works best in a confined moral and cultural area, where the rules are generally known; and in that confined area it deals best with things -- emotions, impulses, moral anxieties -- that would be unseizable or incomplete in other literary forms.... The metropolitan novel ... comes with metropolitan assumptions about society: the availability of a wider learning, an idea of history, a concern with self-knowledge.”

(Perhaps Naipaul’s problem came from too limited a view of the novel: novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Defoe, Smollett and Fielding, seemed to thrive on confusion and social instability.)

Travel books presented a similar problem. What, Naipaul wondered, might be an appropriate narrative stance for an Indian not from India, a Trinidadian with little knowledge of the island’s history? By what implicit familiar standards could he presume to evaluate the qualities of an exotic milieu?

In time, Naipaul found his voice as a novelist and as a travel writer. The key, he found, was to be as faithful as possible to the particularities of whatever he saw, felt or remembered. Working on his first stories as a young man in London, he stumbled upon an approach that enabled him to overcome his inhibitions: “to be fast, to add one concrete detail to another, and above all to keep the tone right.”

There are only 11 essays in this collection, and several of them cover similar terrain: Naipaul’s sense of marginality, Trinidad’s lack of historicity, the anomalies of being an East Indian from the West Indies, his father’s struggles to be a writer, the difficulty of writing fiction in the absence of a stable society. Although each essay functions well if read on its own, the cumulative effect can be a bit repetitive.

Four of the pieces, however, display Naipaul’s astuteness as a literary critic. In one, he shows a subtle understanding of Rud- yard Kipling. In two others, he provides some startling insights into Indian writers and India itself, conveying his sense of astonishment at the capacity of many Indians simply to ignore the vast “dereliction” that is the first thing that strikes a visitor.

And in the fourth, “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” he contemplates the works of a writer for whom he feels a strange affinity. It is an instance of literary criticism at its most personal and most profound.

There is a kind of sourness in Naipaul’s writing that sometimes seeps into his pronouncements on life and literature, in general. But this sourness is closely related to Naipaul’s great gift: a necessary and salutary astringency that clears away cant and enables us to see things as they are.