Measuring Repute

In one view Naipaul is “our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced”; the author himself his own best character, his ideas about politics and the nation state absurd.

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A few years ago now, I was driving these two odd boys across the county; I’d been like doing it for months, you know, a bit of cabbing, getting the money together for a good coffin; for my funeral, it’s not too far away, you know how it is, always expecting it around the corner; very fatalistic I can get on occasion. Had a dream the other night, it was about this spiderman, he was hiding behind a wall, and he had this ruddy great truncheon, and he was waiting for me; though when I told Ivor he said it must have been the penis envy. A wag is our Ivor. So you can’t be too careful can you. It won’t be one of those cheap things either, you know the two boxes for the price one, that deal they do at the parlour close to my place. No, I want to be in one piece to hear the parson’s oration. And it’d look silly, don’t you think, having two coffins there up front when they sing the hymns. Everybody needs some respect. I can see Gwyn sniggering over his smut; had to cut the damn thing off, old Rhys needing a whole coffin for his hard on. Sorry love. Sorry love. I can get carried away. Well, the point is, that I was in this car, see, and these two odd boys were in the back talking about well, strange old things, like you know, concepts, I think they called them, and all that palaver. University stuff. Educated men they were, especially the older chap; he sounded like a colonial, you know the type, used to ordering his inferiors about, telling us what to do; but always nicely he’s doing it, as if asking; asking us to volunteer, you know; so polite he is, like a master with his puppy, stroke, stroke, there’s a good boy. These rich bastards they like their animals don’t they, we could be horses and dogs to them. How would you like to be a horse or a dog? I’ve thought about being an armadillo; no worry then about the Welsh weather, have you. Sorry love. I know I know. Dare say being a dog has its attractions. So polite. They both were. These two odd boys were talking, and do you know what? They were talking about me! It was lovely what they were saying, not that I agreed so much with what they said; the poor dab, that old chap, having mixed me up with his usual; he hadn’t noticed the accent, see, and well, us Welsh, we have a long history but nobody knows nothing about us. Though our memories are a bit short too. Some rag at the club told me once they’re no longer than the end of a rugby game. Like a joke where I come from, you can see that. A right valley of laughs we have here. Sorry love, I know - who would have thought it, hey, in the Western Mail! - I know I know you want my story. It was years go now, and then last week my nephew, he is a writer, do you know him, Paul Schloss, strange kind of name it is, I think he has pretensions you know, wants to be lah-di-dah; well he asked me to read this article; it was on one of them new-fangled computers, saying I was in it. I am! A real nice old boy he was. They both were. Really nice chaps, really nice. I wish I’d said something now, you know, cleared up the misunderstanding. 

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, England, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. The man was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I am not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning India politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on. (Ian Buruma, V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced)

There are three men in this car; two are intellectuals, one of whom has a myth for his muse; V.S. Naipaul a special kind of intellectual, the artist, who, because he projects his solipsism onto everything around him, cannot be trusted when he talks about other people, countries, cultures or politics; the views too egoistic and idiosyncratic to be true, even remotely so. A writer’s truth lying elsewhere, in their art; its textures of phrase, its style, its patterns and harmonies, and in those droplets of insight that once fell upon Hazlitt’s head. It is a truth that lies in the feeling and craft of the work. 

To be of any quality the novel will contain maxims and general statements, and these also contain truths, though we should never apply them wholesale to places and individuals; Rochefoucauld wrote belles-lettres not scientific treatises. Did all Londoners feel “the magic of the city go away, and had an intimation of the forlornness of the city and of the people who lived in it”? Do we all accept that the “[t]he world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it”? Isn’t this, by now celebrated phrase, largely untrue? Our world so designed to ensure that those “who are nothing” - those “bogus students” as Naipaul calls them - have everything; they can be famous on Facebook, leave college with a nice degree, work in a smart business; even write for a national newspaper, industrious enthusiasm more important than talent or insight; and how much effort do they exert to gain this success… These two wonderful sentences - all found in Thomas Meaney’s TLS piece - though they capture feelings and realities have little connection to the facts. 

There are different kinds of truth - the artistic and the empirical - and the danger for any artist is mixing them up; Naipaul too often talking about the world as if it were a novel. A maxim like “the world is what it is” is both true and false; Obama abbreviating it too finely, and seeing only its truth, thus disabled his progressive impulses. It’s a tricky business separating the good from the bad in a beautifully crafted phrase. And we have to do it. These abstract statements being useful, capturing, as they do, an aspect of life, with most lives containing unique variations of the cosmic theme. However, the beautiful aphorism, the acute generalisation, is also dangerous, easily ossifying into an absolute truth that blinds us to the world’s variety; art degenerating into religion; the sensitive writer become the adamantine prophet, a character out of their own fiction. Being an outsider to the English cultural scene Naipaul thought himself immune to the abuse he would attract - he was above its village mentality - and of course he blamed us for our stupidities, our ignorance, our coarse aestheticism: we weren’t good enough for our criticisms to count. He was mostly right, his reputation proves this so. But we were right to condemn him for his solipsistic naiveties, his opinions reducing him to a caricature of his own creation. The balance of right and wrongs nicely achieved in Meaney’s commemorative article.

Tariq Ali and CLR James weight the scales unfairly.

In later years, James (in private conversation) would refer to Naipaul as someone who is often needed in an imperialist country trying to create a post-colonial culture so as to say things about native peoples that are no longer acceptable in polite society.

Heinemann’s African Writers Series, the celebration of Commonwealth fiction in the 1970s - “the empire writes back” - and now the dissing of Britain’s imperial past: all these the hypocrisies of “polite society”? Tariq has forgotten his mates at New Left Review and Verso. There are vast numbers of Brits who detest racism, and who believe talent should receive reward. Ali and James a little too quick on the striking apothegm, Ben Pimlott guns them down. In his majestic biography of Harold Wilson, it is a literary masterpiece, Pimlott shows that racism has long been abhorred at the top; Ali overlooking the obvious though uncomfortable fact for a Marxist that the Left has had an enormous influence in the British Isles; there are the universities, the culture industries, artists, painters, writers, as well as the Labour Party; the once radical LSE, as well as Mill and Methodism, informing its and therefore Britain’s political history. Like Naipaul, Ali has allowed his pundit’s itch to push aside the scholar’s patient rigour; his generalisation too crude to elucidate the actual texture of the British nation. What Ali sidesteps is that Naipaul’s comments often created genuine dismay amongst those in the arts - the overwhelming majority - who dislike any kind of prejudice (except when against a Tory). Naipaul’s reputation has surely suffered because of his politics. How many writers of his talent and stature have their eulogies this qualified…

Buruma takes too many weights off the other side of the scales.

Ian Buruma is a different kind of intellectual from Naipaul. Not requiring a myth to inform and sustain the work he remains closer to the empirical realities, although, like most of us who work with ideas, he is apt to over-conceptualise the world he encounters. What was uncle thinking about as he drove that car? He can’t remember, but let us have a guess: the ham, eggs and chips his wife is cooking; the lawn he must mow; Southampton FC on the telly; a pint in the Papyrus and Quill, with Jack and Ted, who owe him a few drinks. The details of his own intensely personal life will occupy most of his thoughts, the idea of Wales making an appearance only when politics is discussed, usually in the pub or when watching the news with the missus. And the Welsh past and his own ancestors, how much will he know and talk about them? Very little. In Ulverton Adam Thorpe shows that a villager’s knowledge of even his own family history rarely goes back beyond two generations; and what is remembered is a smattering of facts and a few outstanding events. It is the incomers who are interested in the village’s history. They know more about the place than the natives.

So Buruma wins? Very quick to jump to a conclusion, aren’t you? Reading too much James and Ali, clearly. No, Buruma is wrong too. Wales is absorbed into my uncle’s being until there is no distinction between himself and the country: he lives, breathes, eats, sleeps, but does not think about Wales. Where there is no thought there is wholeness: Wales and himself are one, in instinct, feeling and the contingent life, largely ritualised.

Naipaul and Buruma think too much about the countries they inhabit. This alienates them from the culture; perennial outsiders intellectuals are natural foreigners, their distance deriving from the intellect, with its analytical eye, its comparative ear; always they are comparing, contrasting, taking the culture apart, pathologists of the national psyche. Analysis. Dissection. The exercises of reason. These break the object of study down until it is seen only in fragments; a way of thinking engendered by the rational faculty and encouraged by education; and whose effects are redeemed by art, that attempt to replace the wholeness of instinct with the unity of a felt intelligence. Exiled from the human race Naipaul sought re-entry through his work. In the novels he found that lost unity. In life he was forever chasing a chimera.