INTERVIEW - V S Naipaul

INTERVIEW
V S Naipaul talks to Farrukh Dhondy

V S Naipaul hasn't been well. Feeling more comfortable with Indian
doctors and medical provision than with the National Health Service, he
has been in New Delhi for several months for treatment and recovery.
Now he's back in England and says he's writing again.

I visit him in his Wiltshire cottage and the following interview is
conducted in short periods over two days.

He'd like me, he says, to follow his own method of interviewing, which
is to take notes in longhand as the subject speaks: he doesn't trust
tape-recorders. I don't trust them either, and so have brought two with
me, pocket-size, and made sure they have fresh batteries. I place them
in the least obtrusive position on the dining table, at which we sit.

Augustus, the cat, periodically appears outside on the window sill as
we speak, and demands to be let in. He is a more than usually imperious
fellow and insists on attention from Vidia, who has a way of commanding
him to sleep. He surprisingly obeys, curling up at our feet.

This is our second extended interview, again for the Literary Review.
The first, in August 2001, was controversial: his comments on E M
Forster, John Maynard Keynes and James Joyce were considered
provocative. As we begin, I suggest that we stay off politics in this
interview and he agrees.


Would you say luck has any part to play in the career and success of a
writer?

I worked so hard for so many things. The luck came at the beginning
when I was trying to get started. That day in the Langham Hotel, the
BBC building where I was working, if it hadn't occurred to me to write
about the street in which I grew up in Port of Spain in Trinidad, I
might have floundered for many years. If the people in the room - the
freelancers' room in the BBC - hadn't encouraged me, I might never have
got started. I felt I was doing it in my own way. It wasn't all easy
going - the book I was writing wasn't published for four years. England
had different ideas of writing then - from what I was doing. This has
gone on right to this day.

Would you say you were writing outside the tradition of English
literature?

That's Leavis and Cambridge and all that - and it's not important.
What's important is that England didn't understand what I was doing. If
it were my own territory it would be different, but I have no
territory. England has not appreciated or acknowledged the work I have
done. My task was to open up a territory of readership. It was very
slow - too slow for me.

Were you conscious of trying to open up this territory of readership?

I always wrote for the smallest audience: my wife (Pat, and now
Nadira), someone I knew at the BBC, my publishers and my editor at
Deutsch.

Surely a book like Among the Believers, which entailed travels through
the Muslim world, was written for a universal audience?

Since writing is a process of learning, writing that book was a process
for me. It found a readership after it was published. It got into a lot
of trouble in places like Harvard and MIT. There are some very wise
people in these places who, in their wisdom, had no need to go to a
country to find out what was going on there. They already knew what was
to be known. I can't stress this strongly enough - everything I
discovered and wrote was done for myself. I didn't know what on earth I
was doing at MIT, but I had accepted their invitation to speak about
the book and I found they were very concerned about Iran. I remember
talking about the Iranian love of blood. When a man fell bleeding in a
religious demonstration, people went and dipped their hands and pieces
of cloth in his blood. The people I was with refused to believe it.
This couldn't happen. Oh God! How wise they were! There was an American
paper which was going to serialise the book in three parts, but they
cancelled.

Why?

They would have been told by the Wise People that it must be stopped.
Twenty years later it may seem that these ideas were to be given to a
waiting world - but they still had a hard time.
Even in the first book, Miguel Street, I was experimenting. I wanted it
to be simple, new and pictorial - every sentence.

Did your experience of writing change as you went on?

My idea of writing developed as I wrote. I still have no big idea of
writing. My only idea is that if you are doing non-fiction it should be
truthful. The people about whom you write should themselves be able to
see the truth of it. After the book we've spoken about, Among the
Believers, was published, people wrote from Iran to say I'd missed the
point. I had written about driving in Tehran. It's dangerous and
precarious. The car I was in returned from every journey with the
scrapings of paint from other cars. And they picked on the same
observation when I read extracts to a Harvard audience. They didn't
like that at Harvard at all. Harvard said it was 'colonial' to write
the truth.

Do you think you met particularly bigoted or silly people at these
universities? The Wise Ones?

I don't think so. I think these universities have passed their peak.
The very idea of the university may be finished. In Oxford, for a long
time, they were producing divines. Then it took a turn and the
University began to produce smart people. The idea of learning came
quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, and it went on
some way into the twentieth. Now, apart from sciences, there seems to
be no purpose to a university education. The Socialists want to send
everybody to these places. I feel that these places ought to be wrapped
up and people should buy their qualifications at the Post Office.

Not including scientific qualifications?

No, those must remain. But the Humanities - they seem to me to be
worthless disciplines.

Though you just said that your ideas of writing developed as you
yourself wrote, in the past you've spoken and written about the
function of writing in a culture, for example in Russia ...

.... and in France. These ideas have themselves developed. They didn't
come to me from the start. I was too ignorant. Say when I began to read
Maupassant I was too ignorant to appreciate him fully. Some wisdom is
needed, some experience is needed before you see a culture and you see
the writers more clearly. If you were talking to me twenty-five years
ago I would have said Balzac was the greatest French writer. Now I say
Maupassant - a very great man. I began to reread Balzac and had a
certain amount of trouble with it. I was disappointed - with myself
really. I came across the Maupassant stories, all the stories - 1,100
pages. They were in chronological order and quite well translated. It
was an education. In the beginning he writes very carefully, not
wishing to put a foot wrong. In the middle he is more secure. He does
things instinctively and well, and then, near the end of his life, his
thoughts are about death, and the pieces get shorter and they are very,
very affecting. There is a character in a Chekhov play who talks about
Maupassant and says his talent is almost supernatural, and I have to
agree with that, because in nearly every story there is a complete life
that is being displayed. And there are so many stories. You wonder
where he got the material and it seems so natural and easy. When you
read, you can analyse it and see his method. It's very precise
geographically and he always gives people a name - very important.
There is a line of emotion in his writing, which varies as he writes so
you follow the emotion of the writer rather than the banality of how
the narrative is going to end. There's no one like him, I think. There
is the brutality of his short life. He began writing when he was
thirty, and then in ten years it was almost all over. He was in pain,
then mad, so everything he did was done in ten years. He must have
worked all the time and yet with a kind of ease. It is a supernatural
talent. And when you read, you ask yourself what is the country that's
giving him all this wonderful material and you have to see, after a
while, that it isn't a country that's giving him the material. He, by
his vision, is creating a country. It's strange. When we read
Maupassant at school he seemed very provincial, very French. That is
still true, but the work is for everybody. This can't be said of
English writers. (We can leave Dickens out of that consideration.)
English writing is very much of England, for the people of England, and
is not meant to travel too far.

Which writers would you say particularly fall into this Englishness?

Hardy. An unbearable writer.

Why?

He can't write. He doesn't know how to compose a paragraph, no gift of
narrative. I would say that the Romantic feminine fiction has that
quality.

Even the great ones? Jane Austen?

What trouble I have with Jane Austen! Jane Austen is for those people
who wish to be educated in English manners. If that isn't part of your
mission, you don't know what to do with this material.
There was a conference at Bath a few years ago and I was invited. I was
a very bad conference guest - I didn't say a word. But they gave me a
copy of Jane Austen's novel set in Bath - Northanger Abbey. In my
recent illness I've been looking at books I haven't read before so I
picked it up.
I thought halfway through the book, Here am I, a grown man reading
about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life - she calls
it 'love', having seen this fellow once. I said to myself, What am I
doing with this material? This is for somebody else, really. It's for
someone down the road, not for me.

Are you then surprised that people make so much of her?

Yes, it purely depends on political power in the world. If you come
from England when your country is important, then this kind of
nonsensical writing becomes important for you. If the country had
failed in the nineteenth century no one would have been reading Jane
Austen. The books would have been about failure. They would have
demonstrated the reasons for failure. I don't want to be confused, in
what I am saying about Jane Austen, with people from the Wise places,
the Very Wise People who say that she represents a great hypocrisy,
writing in this way about affairs of the heart and young people while
there are the slaves toiling in the plantations of the Caribbean. What
hypocrisy! That's the kind of thing the Wise People do say. And it's
very foolish, because if they knew a bit more, beyond their little
disciplines, they would know that the slave trade, the British slave
trade, was abolished in 1807 and this wish to talk about sensibility,
etc, was part of the climate that made this abolition of the trade
possible and later, very quickly, in 1834, made the abolition of
slavery itself possible. The idea of refinement, manner, that was the
climate.

So Jane Austen has some effect?

She didn't have an effect, she was part of it. She reflects it. If we
compare it with the ancient Romans, they were able to talk about the
good life while encouraging and having the most brutal kind of slavery
all around them. It never occurred to them to question the life around
them. Cicero made jokes about slaves being treated badly or people in
the arena dying horribly. There were different cruel tasks at different
times of day. A criminal would be sent out without any weapons to fight
an armed man. So there was no fight really and that was a simple kind
of excitement for the crowd. It was Seneca who got as far as saying you
must remember that the slave is a man. He never got much further than
that. Roman slavery was brutal. England was the first country to
abolish slavery. We must bear that in mind. We don't have to read Jane
Austen's novels, but we must recognise that those manners and that
sensibility which she writes about were part of the enlightenment that
brought about the end of slavery.

Why do you exempt Dickens from your judgement on English writers?

I read some of the very early essays a short time ago: Sketches by Boz
- they were good. There's so much rubbish in Dickens. Wordiness, too
many words, repetitiveness. He was trying to do something, but by God
the African never had a worse enemy. In one of his essays...

Which essay?

I can't recall. The Wise People will tell you, if they haven't
abolished it. He hated black people. Strange, eh?

Do you judge the British writers of the twentieth century in the same
way?

That's very interesting. It's true of Waugh. The idea of an
international readership doesn't enter until quite late. H G Wells,
writing his early short stories, is not writing for people outside. He
is taking a lot of the cliches of imperialism and making the stories -
good writer though he is. If you read the stories from the 1890s they
have African voodoo and Indian priests, etc. He hasn't been out of the
country, he is just dealing in received ideas. Russell was universal,
even though he didn't write fiction. He wrote very simply, very
clearly, explaining philosophical ideas.

He had a vast readership in English-speaking India.

The History of Western Philosophy? Yes. But people don't have to write
for the world. They must write for themselves, for their friends.

Doesn't that deny books their significance?

No. No. In great periods, what writers write for themselves travels.
Very often it travels because the world is so retarded generally it has
very little of its own to look to. I don't mean people having a message
for the outside world. The writer, by the nature of the interests
expressed in the book, can win the attention of other people. Take
American writing. Mark Twain is universal, in that anybody can read his
work and find matter, whereas Fitzgerald is local to America. In
Twain's work we can find humour, a tone of voice that appears to talk
to all people, and then there's his attitude to his material. He is not
exalting his material. You see your recent Indian writers exalt their
material: they are writing about daddy and mammy and chacha (uncle) and
chachi (aunty) and they are exalting their material. Critics reading
their books, poor innocent critics reading Indian books, might come to
the conclusion, 'My God! X, Y or Z comes from a very grand Indian
family, we didn't know about this!'

We don't only find this in Indian writers.

You only have to look at that dreadful American man Henry James. The
worst writer in the world actually. He never went out in the world.
Yes, he came to Europe and he 'did' and lived the writer's life. He
never risked anything. He never exposed himself to anything. He
travelled always as a gentleman. When he wrote English Hours about what
he was seeing in England - written for an American magazine - this man
would write about the races at Epsom and do it all from a distance. He
never thought he should mingle with the crowd and find out what they
were there for, or how they behaved. He did it all from the top of a
carriage or the top of a coach. A lot of his writing is like that. And
he exalts his material because he thinks that this subject matter he
has alighted on - the grandeur of Europe and the grandeur of American
new money - is unbeatable. Elizabeth Hardwick said to me about Henry
James many years ago, 'What's he going on about? These people he is
talking about are just Americans!' It has the effect that young
American people still think they can 'do a Henry James' - come to
Europe and write a book like Henry James.

You couldn't say the same about Hemingway, whom young Americans also
try to follow. He did mingle with people.

Hemingway didn't know where he was, ever, really. He was so busy being
an American and that was his subject matter. You wouldn't have any
idea, from Hemingway or Fitzgerald and their stories or writings about
Paris, that Paris was in the most terrible way between the wars. They
just talked about the cafes, the drinks and oysters and things like
that. They don't see the larger thing outside. I find it very difficult
to read that kind of writing or to take it seriously. It's for other
people - people down the road...

We've come across them before...

This idea of Gay Paris and all of that, that's what they wrote about.
The catastrophe of the wars, the death of men - they weren't aware of
that. Nowadays they don't go to France to write about it any more.
Because when a place is OK, as France now is, it is very hard to know
how to write about it. It's easier to go to places where you can stand
out against the local people more easily. You go to India, you go to
Nepal. There's a whole crowd of them. You can scarcely get into the
travel agents for these people pushing their way into writing books.
You don't know. The books are sent to me in any number every month.
They wouldn't be sent to you because you've not written about India in
that way.

No. You think the writing of these Europeans or Englishmen is
consciously dedicated to standing out from the population?

People do the expatriate novel not only about India, but also - in the
old days - about Italy, about Greece, Mexico and Latin America. They
themselves begin to be defined by the background so they don't have to
do any more work.

Explain.

Take Graham Greene and Our Man in Havana. He doesn't have to define his
people, his lead expatriate characters. They are defined by what they
see around them - Captain Segura, the police, and the general seediness
of the place. When I was reviewing books in 1958-63, those little
expatriate books came in all the time. People who want to put words in
italics: senores and senoras, so it looks like real writing.

This exaltation of the material, the pretences in Indian writing - is
this a recent trend, or was it always so?

No. I don't think R K Narayan exalted his material or that Mulk Raj
Anand, writing in the Thirties and later, did. I think it's occurred
with the latest crop of writers, who have been encouraged by all kinds
of foolish people to do these family sagas, and it's so bad for India,
the encouragement of this rubbish. Because writing isn't that. It
shouldn't be about cracking yourself up so that people on the outside
say, 'We knew Indians were grand people after all. Kipling didn't say
so, and others didn't say so, but here we have the evidence.'
You know and I know there's no such thing as Indian grandeur. Here
these boys are doing it, all in a great rush since the Nineties, and
it's as bogus as hell. It really implies that they have never looked
outside their little tawdry family circle.

Why do you think this trend has taken hold of Indian writing?

The instinct to boast is prevalent among people who've suffered. They
boast easily. (I have a lot of boasters in my family.) Or perhaps
that's too grand a way of looking at it, actually. Put it this way: it
makes it easier to have a point of view if you can boast like that.
There's only one Indian writer, in my little experience, who has not
boasted. I am thinking of Bond - Ruskin Bond. I am talking now of his
autobiography, which is called Scenes from a Writer's Life.

Why do you find him fascinating - or at least free of this bogus
attitude?

I have read nothing like that from India or anywhere else. It's very
simple. Everything is underplayed, and the truths of the book come
rather slowly at you. He is writing about solitude, tremendous
solitude. He himself doesn't say it. He leaves it all to you to pick
up. I haven't read another book about solitude from India. In a way,
from this great subcontinent full of people, to write a book about
solitude is quite an achievement. I was very moved by his book. He
comes from a kind of darkness. There is a darkness all around him: a
broken family in the background. There's a love for the father. He
stays with the father after the family breaks down. He is quite a
little boy. His father has a stamp collection. It's a serious stamp
collection, a great family possession. Typical of Bond that he should
put in a letter from his father, just saying 'the last letter from my
father' - just prints it. Very affecting, very educated and sensitive,
the letter. And then he just says: 'Two weeks later my father died.'
That's the way he does it. After his father's death he looks for the
stamp collection and he never finds it. It pains one to read about it.
He does it in the Bond way, in a sentence or two. His father was in the
RAF - fell ill somewhere near Calcutta, and probably died in the
hospital. And the stamp collection was never found. Dead men's effects,
you can do what you want with them because there's no family coming to
look at them either.

Tragic?

Yes, but the writer doesn't make much of it. There's a sentence in the
book which tells you what the book's about: 'I was alone, I was lonely,
but I was not afraid.' Whereas other Indian writers have their
elaborate family structure to write about, Bond has nothing, just a few
individuals here and there. Very few. So he's an orphan actually.

Does that give him a unique standpoint in India?

I think so. But there's some personal quality there. His father called
him Ruskin after the English social commentator and critic. He prints
some letters at the back of the book from Diana Athill, that very
gifted woman who was at Andre Deutsch and made Deutsch an important
publisher. Her point is that he can take this paring-away of
inessentials too far. He must understand that you've got to give the
reader time to sink into a new mood or a new setting. This is his way
of writing, though. He doesn't, as it were, make a meal of events like
the death of his father. The book ends with a little letter to his dead
father. He tells his father about the ride to the old school and how
it's changed. He says he had a dream about a friend of his. I think he
appears as a big man and the friend was still small, and he asks: 'I
wonder when I dream of you I will be a big man or a child?' Very
moving.

He has, by and large, been ignored as an Indian writer. The attention
has gone recently to the imitators and boasters. Why do you think that
is?

I don't know the fiction but I think this autobiography is quite
extraordinary. He has a kind of small following in India.

You've always been an art collector.

Yes, but never been rich enough to be.

Well, not to be Charles Saatchi, but you've always been interested in
art or in having these things around you...

William Morris said, only have that around you which is useful or
beautiful.

Your taste in art has changed. You used to look at Mughal art.

I used to look at Rajput art, very coarse Rajput art. You've got to
understand that I began with nothing. You know the place that I come
from never gave me any training in art or architecture, the things of a
civilisation. We were very good about drums, but the other things ... I
knew nothing. It's been a process of learning. I had to teach myself.

You know, one needs to be guided by writers. I am almost ashamed to say
that my interest in Indian art began with a book published in 1951 in
the series The Faber Gallery of Oriental Art, a book on Kangra art by W
G Archer. I am ashamed because I think Kangra art is pretty insipid,
awful, but it is what many people think of as Indian art. It's taken me
quite some time to understand that in the region of the Himalayan
states there was a great painter, great by any standards. He was called
Nainsukh - seventeenth century. But it took one a long time to get
there. I began in 1952 with this calendar stuff from Kangra. Kasmin
once called it 'merchant's art'. I allowed myself to be persuaded that
there was a special beauty in Rajput art. Not the Mughal but the local
Indian art of the Indian courts. It's fooling yourself with
intellectual ideas. They have to collapse one day. I now realise I
don't like Rajput art and I don't like Kangra art. I don't like Mughal
art either because it's wasteful, extravagant, decorative, and just
done for one man holding a book. You can't say they are your pictures,
a nation's art, a people's art.

It's only done for the Emperor, you say...

It's done for whoever you want to call the scoundrel, the 'Emperor' or
'ruler' or whatever. They are not impressive people. The awfulness of
what I've just said is that there was once a great album, not of the
highest quality but secondary. It fell into the hands of the 'ruler' in
the state of Oudh in North India, after the break-up of the Mughal
Empire. And what did the man do? He gave it to the Queen of England,
and it's still there in the Queen's collection. How can you go to that
collection and say 'this is Indian art'? It isn't Indian art. Indian
art has to belong to the soil of India, to the people of India. Many of
the Mughal albums are now abroad and broken up. They don't belong to
India. They were created by foreigners. It was a foreign way of
painting and so it's found its resting place abroad and should not be
considered Indian.

Nevertheless, India has a vast tradition of people's arts intermingled
with religion.

I am not interested in that kind of coarse art.

The temples, the sculptures of deities, the architecture?

Oh, that's great stuff! I was thinking of work on paper. At the end of
local power, there were artists who found patrons for a short time in
the British. The British wanted another approach to the natural world.
They wanted flowers and various things to be drawn very accurately.
These artists met their demand. And from thinking that this was a bad
art, the art of a conquered people, I grew to feel, having rejected the
Mughal and the Rajput, that this art, where artists were expressing
individual talent - they signed all their pictures - that this is very
good. This is the Indian art I like.

The Company School?

Yes, but that's a bad word for it. It lasts from about 1780 to 1840, a
very short period. It is the high technique of the Prince's school and
it's a concern with the real world - real horses, real people. I grew
to like that. And on the way I picked up an unbearable love for
Japanese art. I find it so beautiful.

Where does that affection come from?

I don't know. I never read about it or anything. I just saw it and was
stirred by it. I asked a man who was an expert in Persian art. I asked
how he fell in love with Persian art and he said when he was a child
his parents would take him to the museum on Sunday to keep him quiet;
they would go and leave him there and he fell in love with it. I asked
him, 'Is your love today greater than when you were a child?' and he
said, 'No, it's the same.'

You were never interested in the modernist movement?

No. I am not interested in it. From about 1100 and 1200 AD to Van Gogh,
artists were learning things and passing them on - about the rendering
of the natural world. And then there was nothing more to pass on, and
we are at that stage now when there's nothing more to pass on. If it
can be defined like that, art is what you no longer can pass on. In
terms of learning and talent and technique, it's over. Take modern
singing, pop music: people say it's very profound and it's part of our
common present. It's sucking the world dry of aspiration, of a wish to
learn and of striving. All that's gone with these movements in 'art'.
Aspiration is of the essence of civilisation. Otherwise you live like
pigs in a sty. What's happened yesterday happens again tomorrow and it
goes on like that.

Your friend Harold Pinter is the first writer in English after yourself
to win the Nobel Prize and you said you were very happy.

I was hoping that Pinter would get it and for this reason, which
perhaps he wouldn't agree with, or the Swedish Academy wouldn't agree
with. I think it's very hard if you're writing about English or French
people to avoid social comment. Pinter in the beginning - I don't know
how he did it - found a way of writing without social comment. I think
it's quite remarkable. Now he might say he didn't intend it and I'd
have to say, 'Well I was wrong, I am sorry, I was wrong.'

People have said that Pinter is merely imitating the nihilistic
blankness of Samuel Beckett. It was a fashion to write without social
reference.

I think Pinter has more of a human quality than Beckett. He writes
about real people. I think the political Pinter has been a great red
herring. I am sorry it has been dragged into an assessment of his
achievement.

Will you tell me what you are writing now?

I can't begin to write again till I am well. You can't write if you are
not well. That's why I exercised so much those years, to keep myself
fit for writing. If I become well again - I am on my feet now - I might
want to write. My writing has always been dependent on energy -
travelling, moving around. You can say that the books radiate energy.
Do you think that's true, Farrukh? If I can get well, properly well - I
am seventy-three and something, and you might feel what's the point of
getting well if there's such a short time to go? There's a story about
old folk at a memorial service, I think in Paris, one of these French
occasions. I think it was for Malraux. Freezing weather, freezing
weather. A couple of old men there. One of them said, 'This has been
going on for so long, we don't have to go home - we just stay here.'

You didn't actually tell me what you are writing.

Let's leave it like that.

.