V.S. Naipaul, wife Alvira and daughter Meleha from previous marriage

Robert Crum penned a fascinating piece on V.S. Naipaul, world-famous Nobel-winner and crank, in the Sunday Observer. He’s a man who turned away the Nobel Prize phone call because ‘he was busy, writing, and did not wish to be disturbed’:

Everyone agrees that V.S. Naipaul is fully alive to his own importance. A mirror to his work, his life is emblematic of an extraordinary half century, the postwar years. Let it not be said that he does not know this… [Link]

To Naipaul, writing in Caribbean patois seemed unimaginable at first:

… to a thoughtful and sensitive young man, for whom literature was a salvation, English both worked and did not work. ‘I couldn’t understand the settings,’ he says. Dickens’s ‘rain’ was never a tropical downpour, his ’snow’ was unimaginable, and how could Naipaul relate to daffodils he had never seen? [Link]

In a separate piece, Hari Kunzru says Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon pioneered the technique. It’s much like how Salman Rushdie is credited with bringing Hinglish to respectability:

[Selvon’s] pioneering use of Caribbean vernacular was acknowledged by peers such as Naipaul, who said in a 1958 interview that “because Sam has written so authentically, he has made it easier for the rest of us who want to make people talk the way they do. Sam was the first man, and I think we ought to give him credit for this, who made it possible.” [Link]

The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950’s/60’s… In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as White Teeth… and The Buddha of Suburbia... [Link]

On Naipaul’s writing process and prolific work ethic:

Many writers will claim to hate writing, and will do anything to postpone the moment of truth. Not Naipaul. ‘It’s what one lives for,’ he says intensely. ‘My idea of bliss,’ he goes on in a rare moment of rhapsody, ‘is to be in the middle of a work which you know is good, to write well all day, and to go to a dinner party in the evening, and have nice wine…’ ‘I think Proust was right: the self that writes the books is the most secret and deepest…

‘You can’t just sit and wait for the beautiful idea to form and to be complete in your mind before writing. You’ve got to go out and meet it…’ [Link]

On Zadie Smith not yet having equaled her debut:

Naipaul has not read White Teeth, but sympathises with the author’s predicament: ‘The problem for someone like that is: where do you go, how do you move? If you’ve consumed your material in your first book, what do you do?’ [Link]

It’s obvious: go out and live some more. Naipaul’s non-fans include Junot Díaz (Oscar Wao), his former editor, and writer Paul Theroux, with whom he had a falling out. His description of this is as barbed as you’d expect:

Junot Díaz… sees Naipaul as ‘a warning and a lure. How can you not be repulsed by the nonsense that has spewed out of his mouth, and yet stunned by the power of his prose?’ …

… his British editor, Diana Athill.. after Naipaul’s departure from his publisher: ‘It was as though the sun came out. I didn’t have to like Vidia any more…’

Paul Theroux’s account of his friendship with Naipaul, Sir Vidia’s Shadow… when Theroux found through a bookseller’s catalogue that one of his own books, inscribed to Naipaul and his first wife, was being offered for sale, he demanded an explanation, by fax. [He was] piqued by… Naipaul’s advice in a chance encounter on the street (’Take it on the chin, and move on’)…

‘Theroux was very witty when I met him in East Africa, full of jokes. I liked the chap. I think the wish to be a writer, an American writer, corrupted him. And then he had a kind of modest success, which corrupted him even more…’ [Link]

How he feels about other famous writers like Rushdie, Philip Roth, Dickens and Austen:

Naipaul questions me eagerly, and quite closely, about Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, affecting to know little of their recent work. He says he does not enjoy meeting fellow writers. ‘Every serious writer has his own way of looking. I think to run into somebody with another way of looking at the same event, the same world, which is not like yours, is very unsettling…’

His most recent book, A Writer’s People, a collection of essays, ignited some embarrassing controversy over his contempt for, among others, Hardy, Austen and Dickens.

‘I don’t dismiss them,’ he says, resisting this interpretation, and placing the argument in the context of his younger self’s struggle to assert a distinctive voice. ‘What I’m saying is that they’re not for me…’ [Link]

Naipaul’s second wife seduced him with a kiss the first time they met:

For years, Naipaul was married to his first wife Patricia Hale in a passionless relationship… On her death in 1996, from cancer, Naipaul astounded his friends by turning his back on his long-standing mistress, an Anglo-Argentinian named Margaret Murray, and marrying Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist with family connections to the government (her brother is a general). It is said that when this vivacious divorcee first saw her future husband at a party she came up and kissed him on the lips, the beginning of an impetuous romance… [Link]

Like the fictional Mr. Biswas, Naipaul’s father worked at a Trinidadian newspaper. He was forced to kowtow to the same Kali worshippers he dismissed, and it broke him:

As a Trinidad Guardian reporter, Seepersad, who had a horror of Indian cult magic, possibly linked to a conflict with his wife’s primitive beliefs, had written a number of articles exposing the use of Kali cult practices to fight diseases in cattle. His reports had aroused intense local hostility and finally death threats from the devotees of the goddess Kali, who now declared that unless Seepersad made a conciliatory gesture, he would become poisoned and die.

In June 1933, when little Vidia was barely a year old, his father was forced publicly to sacrifice a goat to atone for his journalism. It was a terrible humiliation. His career was ruined, he had a breakdown, lost his way in the world and died of a heart attack in 1953, before his son had published a word. When Naipaul later asked his mother about his father’s insanity, she replied, ‘He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.’ [Link]

Related posts: Naipaul on Charlie Rose, Desi Galore