V. S. Naipaul

V. S. NAIPAUL is acting like a jerk by wagging his tongue and throwing tantrums that illumine an area of darkness in his character and show him as a bigot beyond belief among the believers of a wounded civilization.

The 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature is a man who has constantly refused to avoid unwelcome topics, characterizing his role as a writer “to look and to look again, to re-look and rethink.”

This is the same person, I would like to think, whose writings helped me understand the cultural confusion of the Third World and the problem of being an outsider to myself. Now, however, I am forced to think and rethink my relation to this Brahmin enfant terrible who at one time tried to commit suicide by gassing himself as a nervous wreck.

Today, of course, he is a big babu, a pukka sahib, and a Sir to boot.
Perhaps he is personifying his own enigma of arrival in the limelight of high society as a hardcore misfit. By all accounts, he appears to be imposing his own sense of superiority upon the likes of Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry and others in a free state of self-indulgent impudence at the recent international literary jamboree in India.

"Barbarism in India is very powerful because it has a religious side," Naipaul once stated. One finds it rather strange that, speaking just a week before the Hindu-Muslim communal violence enveloped India, the Nobel laureate actually denounced India’s Muslims en masse and praised the extremist nationalist movement, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which is the fascistic wing of the World Hindu Council.

“Naipaul makes himself a fellow traveller of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award,” wrote the notorious British author Salman Rushdie in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.

For Naipaul, perhaps that’s a way in the world.

One feels like the American writer Paul Theroux who has depicted his 30-year friendship with Naipaul in an angry and unforgiving 1998 book, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. Wrote Theroux: “I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person.”

A monomaniac or a megalomaniac? It’s hard to tell.

What are the chances of Naipaul emerging from the deep-seated area of darkness within his own restless soul and finding the centre of his own being to face the enigma of arrival and having a way in the world?

My guess is that your guess is as good as mine, for literary creators are often unlike their creations.

At a literary gathering in Toronto the other day, someone remarked that he was utterly disappointed with Naipaul’s public rantings and his reportedly predictable tantrums. “He is a social misfit with a split personality who suffers from schizophrenia like Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Platt. It is evident that the man doesn’t like himself.”

This is an old refrain.

The creator and his creation are not necessarily the same, or even similar. What goes into an artist’s work is the best part of him, what he aspires to; what comes out of him socially and personally may be the dregs left over after the vintage has been poured.

Some of the finest, most sensitive poets are like that too. So much distilled loveliness goes into their work that the residue is dark and bitter. Robert Frost was one such; Dylan Thomas, in quite a different way, was another.

Humorists, too, take the booby prize. Not that they’re usually not funny in private, yet they are often crotchety and vain and mean, so that you cannot believe they have written such delightful piffle.

This is as hard to believe as the fact that Lewis Carroll was the Reverend Dodgson.

Even the great James Thurber, in one of his less attractive moods and moments, was not the sort of fellow you’d want to ask in for a drink. Though he was a great humorist, Thurber’s testiness got worse as he got older, and his writing curdled into petulance and acerbity. He resented not having won a Nobel Prize.

People are people, whatever else they may be. The poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer was fond of telling a story on himself to illustrate this point. He was attending a New Year’s Eve costume party one evening and flinging himself into the spirit of the thing by wearing a ridiculous paper hat and raucously blowing a horn. A college girl walked up to him, peered into his face, and then turned on her heel. “Hah!” she snorted as she walked away. “And he’s Required Reading!”

We need to overestimate ourselves in order to achieve our highest level of success, as Naipaul has done to merit the Nobel, and underestimate ourselves in order to make that success palatable to others, as Naipaul must do to win back the disenchanted.

I know one thing for sure: If Naipaul’s not in conflict with himself, he wouldn’t be in conflict with the society around him. As long as he is not at peace with himself, it is not possible for him to be at peace with others.

In summing up her reporting of Naipaul’s boisterous shenanigans in India’s highest literary circles, Sandra Martin of The Globe and Mail wrote: “The problem with Naipaul is that his own vision is so powerful that he has no patience or empathy for anybody else’s view, especially when it is being expressed by a woman. That makes him a great writer, but not a great man.”