“The world intrudes. The sons of people once content with the Premier’s benediction go away to study and come back and curse both parties. They talk of Vietnam and Black Power. They undermine the Negro loyalty to the slave past.”
– V. S. Naipaul, “The Ultimate Colony,” in The Overcrowded Barracoon, originally published in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, 4 July 1969.
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Late last year (November 23, 2008) in The New York Times Book Review, the lead review was of the “authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul,” by Patrick French. (Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for writing in 2001.)
The reviewer, one George Packer, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker, refers to the biography as “a magnificent tribute to the painful and unlikely struggle by which the grandson of indentured Indian workers, born in the small island colony of Trinidad, made himself into the greatest English novelist of the past half century. It is also a portrait of the artist as a monster.”
The “monster” part refers to Naipaul’s evident sadomasochism, manifest in two variations involving his wife, Patricia, and his mistress, Margaret. According to the reviewer, the biography “places Naipaul’s tormented sexuality at the center of his creative efforts.”
When one reads creative material, one should not feel compelled to find out about the personality or character of the writer. The writing should be enjoyed (or not enjoyed) on its own merit. It has its reality quite apart from the source of the creation. Who or what Naipaul is, does not have anything to do with the quality of his work.
V. S. Naipaul is, however, the only world class writer I have personally met in my lifetime, and the meeting was a strange one, which later troubled me, angered me. As a result of that meeting, at Government House in Belize, British Honduras, in early 1969, and the subsequent magazine piece Naipaul wrote (quoted above), I thought that V. S. Naipaul was a man who had, as the young people say, “issues.”
I was sent for at the Belize Technical College, where I was teaching English at the time. I believe the UBAD organization was already in effect. The message came from Government House. There was a famous writer in town who wished to have a conversation with me. I do not remember the messenger. I therefore think it is possible that the Technical principal, the late Clive Gillett, delivered the message.
Naipaul was already a legend in the Caribbean as a novelist. I had started one of his works, but had not completed it. I was not a Naipaul fan, but I respected and admired him, because of the region’s and the world’s opinion of him as a writer. I was suitably flattered by the invitation to meet and talk with him.
The session with Naipaul was edgy. The man never smiled. If you know me at all, you will know that it is difficult to hold a conversation with me without smiling. I was a 21-year-old black power leader in Belize. Naipaul’s attitude, and his subsequent magazine article, revealed that he was not a sympathizer.
Naipaul became more and more famous after that. I think when he visited Belize, he was actually on his way to England, where he took up permanent residence. I began to conceive of Naipaul as an Anglophile, because the British world was so slavish in their praise of him. When Naipaul produced Guerrillas in 1975, I believe, I read the whole work. He would be writing about a world I knew, I thought. When the reviewers praised it, while I thought it was ordinary, if not downright bogus, I decided that I knew who V. S. Naipaul was in the white supremacist order of things. He was a collaborator.
If this is so, it would not make him any less great a writer. If he is a sadomasochist, neither would that detract from the magnificence of his works. All it does is explain to me why I always thought he was not a part of the solution, but rather a part of the problem.
When I left Belize at the age of 18 to attend university, it was with the purpose of becoming a writer. I don’t know if anyone in Belize had ever chosen such a profession at that age. The novelist Zee Tucker Edgell had gone to study journalism in Great Britain. After a stint in Belize as a journalist, she became a novelist. But I had not gone to study journalism. I had gone to study creative writing. Because there was no such undergraduate course at Dartmouth, I simply did English.
It was while doing this undergraduate English that I became a black revolutionary, of sorts. By the time I finished school and returned home, my black power beliefs and my writing reality were, to me, as one. Because the political and educational establishment here condemned my black beliefs in 1968, then there was no hope for my writing career within the traditional spectrum. And so there were years when I suffered and drifted, until my professional reality became that of a journalist, of sorts.
I’ve never envied Naipaul his success. Neither have I ever wished to be Naipaul. The “greatest English novelist of the past half century,” had some problems he was trying to work through. Don’t we all? His views and opinions and sentiments, however, coincided enough with those of the rulers of the English world, that he went from triumph to triumph in the world of literature. I do not believe, however, that we Caribbean people should rejoice in the triumphs of V. S. Naipaul. Unlike Derek Walcott, Naipaul always disliked us, and wanted to be like them. He was born from us, but he is not of us. “The world is what it is.”