A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, by VS Naipaul
Picador, £16.99
Being too young when I tried to read them, or perhaps too provincial or of the wrong class, I never got much joy from A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell's 12-novel sequence depicting a certain type of English life—the type Powell knew best—in the middle years of the last century. I enjoyed other novels by Powell—his first, Afternoon Men, and his last, The Fisher King—but the series that was said to be his masterpiece seemed to depend for its effect on the reader already knowing the kind of people the author was writing about. Today Powell and his characters would be called "toffs," but I don't think it was the social difference between the reader and the read-about that stood as a barrier to the books' pleasure; Evelyn Waugh wrote from and about the same territory and made it sharp, funny and sad to people who had never heard of Jermyn Street or White's. Powell, by contrast, looked to be engaged in a long-winded private satire, with footmen posted at the door to keep the wrong sort of reader out.
Anthony Powell befriended VS Naipaul in 1957. It was a generous act. Powell was 52 and approaching his great years as a country gentleman and distinguished litterateur. Naipaul was 25, had just published his first novel, and was scraping a living from book reviews. We don't know quite what attracted Powell to the young Trinidadian; Powell, according to Naipaul, was a generous "collector of people." But his kindness was seized by Naipaul and returned with affection and admiration. Powell represented a way of living and talking that Naipaul had been seeking ever since he came to Oxford from his small colony. Naipaul writes that Oxford, and later the BBC, provided fellow students and colleagues who were "for the most part provincial and mean and common." Powell was none of those things. To quote Naipaul: "He was proud of being an English writer; he thought it something delicate and special." He represented the worth of the journey. As Diana Athill, Naipaul's first editor, has written elsewhere, Naipaul was "a man raised in, and frightened by, a somewhat disorderly, inefficient and self-deceiving society, who therefore longed for order, clarity and competence." And so, according to Athill, he "overvalued a sense of history and respect for tradition, choosing to romanticise their results rather than to see the complex and far from admirable scenes with which they often coexist.'"
Naipaul tells the story beautifully. As with all the pieces in this book—as with almost everything he writes—Naipaul hangs his arguments and prejudices from a seductive personal narrative that is jewelled with detail; while learning about Powell, we also come to know that Naipaul, at the time he met him, was living in a "neglected attic flat in Muswell Hill" where on some evenings he would hear someone practising "When the Saints Go Marching In" from a house across the green. The sound summarises an English epoch— New Orleans jazz, Chris Barber, the aftershock of Suez that would soon blow the Last Post on the civilisation that Powell flourished in—but Naipaul says no more about it. He never wastes words; he is the least abstract of writers.
To build an intellectual argument through storytelling has its pitfalls, and one of the common charges against Naipaul is that he overgeneralises from the particular. In this book, for example, India is condemned for its materialism because an Indian publisher produced a shoddy version of a book by Naipaul's father. This is Naipaul in his dinner-party mode, snappily assertive, brooking no dissent. But the Powell essay isn't guilty of that fault. The particulars illustrate the book's essential argument that Naipaul had to find a new way of writing, entirely his own, because he could find no models that fitted his experience. He couldn't, in the end, understand why Powell was a writer. Where was the need? European society was already "over-written-about" when Powell set out in 1930. Dickens, Eliot, the great Russian and French novelists—they'd crawled all over it: "very little about these great European societies had been left unsaid. The societies themselves had been diminished for various reasons… a diminished society couldn't be written about in the old way, of social comment." Poor Tony. The world had changed, his material was dead. Naipaul writes: "It is hard to be first. It is possibly harder to come near the end."
It is hard to be first, and it is hard not to think that this is Naipaul describing himself, succeeding where his journalist father had failed in unlocking a way of life both to those who lived it and to those, far away, who did not. Naipaul's first stories did fit into a small tradition. They were inspired by his memories of what he could see of the street outside his grandmother's house in Port of Spain when, as a boy of six or seven, he would hide behind the verandah plants and watch the people who came and went. This collection, Miguel Street, wasn't the first book he published; his publishers, typically then as now, wanted the more certain commercial prospects of a novel. But when it came out as his third book, its comedy attracted nice reviews—he might have become the RK Narayan of the Caribbean. Instead, Naipaul perceived it as a kind of lie. His view of the street was close-up and "flat"—it ignored what the writer knew lay outside because by this time the writer was living in England, had travelled widely, and couldn't pretend as a writer that he knew only one place. "It was to that complication," Naipaul writes, "that my writing took me."
So as a writer he became the opposite of Powell, believing that the "better and truer part of a writer from a new place [is] to wring substance from the unwritten-about and unregarded local scene." He believed in clarity, which made him impatient with poetry and the kind of English writing that assumes too much knowledge on the reader's part (Graham Greene's The Quiet American was baffling to him for this reason—Naipaul knew nothing of Vietnam). The great Russians were clear, Mark Twain was clear, he would be clear.
Around the same time I was struggling with Powell, I read Naipaul's second book of non-fiction, An Area of Darkness, which describes his first visit to his ancestral homeland, India. I'd never been to India, but that didn't matter. The book created India for me as a series of people and episodes, evoked with such intelligent imagination, that even now, after many years going to India, they seem almost as vivid as my own experience there. (Trinidadians who reach London after reading Dickens or Conan Doyle must have similar feelings.) And it is surely the mark of a great writer to give us the rewards of his curiosity and shoe-leather before we are quite ready for them—as Naipaul has with his inquiries into the nature of terrorism, Islam and what was known as the "developing world."
In this wise book about the nature and purpose of writing, Naipaul chastises the decadent metropolis. He writes: "And it seemed, in a strange way, that at the end, when the dust settled, the people who wrote as though they were at the centre of things might be revealed as provincials." Poor Tony.
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