The Writer and the World (2 page)

In the book Naipaul wrote subsequently,
The Middle Passage
(1962), his first work of nonfiction, you can see his curiosity as well as knowledge shaped by what John Updike called a “pained partial identification” with his subjects. Some of the colonies Naipaul visited were then readying themselves, after the centuries of exploitation and misery, for self-rule. Naipaul found himself a “colonial among colonials”: among a people isolated from, but also dependent upon, the outside world,
eagerly embracing the “new slavery of tourism,” or competing, as in the case of Indian and Black Trinidadians, for the favours of “an unacknowledged white audience.”

An intense personal fear of “the void of non-achievement” seemed to lie behind Naipaul’s acute analyses in
The Middle Passage
of the colonial habits of dependence and mimicry. A greater precision marks the essays Naipaul wrote after travelling in 1969 through British Honduras, St. Kitts, Anguilla and Trinidad. The Caribbean was then awash with the ideologies, imported from the United States, of Black Power and Pan-Africanism. With characteristic nuance, Naipaul admitted the political potential of black identity in the United States. But he saw it in the Caribbean as a “sentimental trap, obscuring the issues,” which were related as much to “the smallness of the islands and the absence of resources” as to the past of “slavery and colonial neglect.”

The problems in the Caribbean were of “manufactured societies, labour camps” that had been dependent for a very long time on empire for “law, language, institutions, culture, even officials.” “How, without empire, do such societies govern themselves?” There were no easy answers. In Naipaul’s bleakly realistic—but also deeply felt and prophetic—view, a “renewed or continuing exploitation” awaited the small islands which were “dangerous only to themselves” with their eruptions of frustration and rage. For—and this was to be proved true again and again over the next decades—“they will always be subject to an external police. United States helicopters will be there, to take away United States citizens, tourists; the British High Commissions will lay on airlifts for their citizens.”

Four years later, Naipaul would write about Michael X and how the torment and despair concealed by the slogans of Black Power—something middle-class whites in “provincial, rich and secure” England co-opted into the fashionable causes of the sixties, and then abandoned just as quickly—had degenerated into lunacy and murder in Trinidad. In 1984, Naipaul would witness in Grenada the confused aftermath of another pseudo-revolution: a small island unable yet again to deal with its free state, and overrun by Americans, “serving their own cause.”

But already, in 1969, he has a sharp, if melancholy, sense of the way real—as opposed to rhetorical—power works in the world. The same year Naipaul had published
The Loss of El Dorado
, a narrative about Trinidad that describes several crucial events between Walter Raleigh’s
raid on the island in the sixteenth century to its virtual abandonment by the British in the early nineteenth century. By 1969, Naipaul had also spent much time in India and some newly independent parts of Africa. The intense, ironic observer you meet in the essays is as alert to the self-deceptions being bred by new ruling elites in post-colonial societies as he was to the older cruelties and delusions of the Spanish and British empires in Trinidad.

O
F
N
AIPAUL’S
travels in the 1960s, the visits to India seem to have yielded the greatest number of intellectual and personal discoveries. India was the land of his ancestors, about which Naipaul had inherited a noble idea—an idea that long separation rather than first-hand experience had strengthened among the Indian community in Trinidad, and, supported by the prestigious names of Gandhi and Nehru, had formed part of Naipaul’s identity in England.

But the India Naipaul travelled to, in the last days of Nehru, was a country made complacent and sanctimonious by the victories of the freedom movement; and while expecting to find a vibrant post-colonial country with many human possibilities, Naipaul came across wretchedness of the sort his ancestors had escaped from almost a century ago.

Instead of metropolitan confidence and generosity, he met “colonial self-distrust” and “a spirit of plunder.” In Calcutta, once the capital of India’s first modern culture, Naipaul found a decaying city, full of the freak products of a “violent” encounter between the East and the West: an Indian-built extravagantly European marble palace, Lord Curzon’s “studiedly derivative” Victoria Memorial, golf-playing corporate executives with nicknames like Jimmy and Bunty. Elsewhere, Gandhi was being imitated, in a ritualistic way: a further disaster in a country that was still trapped in the quasi-religious self-righteous passivity that Gandhi had turned into a partially effective anti-colonial program. Naipaul’s later visits to India—in 1967, against a background of serious political and economic crisis, and then in 1971, to cover a parliamentary election in Rajasthan—only confirmed his perception of a “profoundly dependent” country ruled by “slogans, gestures and potent names,” still in thrall to its ancient decaying civilization, and far from the inevitable and many-sided reckoning with the modern world that Naipaul later described in
India: A Million Mutinies Now
(1990).

I
N
1969, N
AIPAUL
also travelled to the United States; and although these essays covering Norman Mailer’s mayoral campaign in New York City and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in California describe a society much more organized and secure than the one found in the Caribbean and India, the writer’s restless moral intelligence continues to insist on standards of clarity and rationality.

The Monterey peninsula in California, just a few miles away from the “endless lettuce level fields of Salinas, the bitter landscape of stoop-labour,” has been turned into “fairyland”: a fantasy in which Naipaul sees Steinbeck, despite his social concerns, as having played a part. The existentialist pose of Mailer and the “glamour and ambiguity” of his campaign are not very different from the “equivocations of Black Power” that offer “something to everybody”: in both cases drama and style become a substitute for practical politics.

Later, in 1984, at a time of right-wing ascendancy in America, Naipaul would describe the “tribal-religious” nature of the Republican party convention in Dallas. If a great intellectual tension seems to have produced the short sentences, the swift paragraphs, and the briskly summarized arguments of Naipaul’s early writings, the wit, intimacy and insight of the later essays are of a writer possessed of greater knowledge and experience. At Dallas, the celebrations of Americanism and Bible-Belt Christianity remind Naipaul of a Muslim missionary gathering in Pakistan: “I felt it would not have been surprising, in Dallas, to see busy, pious helpers going around giving out sweets or some kind of symbolic sacramental food.”

In oil-rich Texas, Naipaul saw the “consciousness of power and money and rightness” as leading to an “intellectual vacancy.” In Argentina, which Naipaul repeatedly visited in the 1970s and travelled to again in 1991, somewhat similar assumptions of wealth and grandeur had pushed its quasi-European population into gigantic national self-deceptions. The banality and avarice and ruthlessness of European discoverers and settlers in the New World—the theme of Naipaul’s essay on Christopher Columbus—weren’t things the Argentines were able to face up to in their not so distant past. Even the great Borges was vulnerable to the “ancestor worship” that had replaced history in Argentina—the
unillusioned comprehension of the greed and brutality with which settlers from Italy and Spain had exterminated the native Indian population, parcelled out the huge rich land among a few families, and then, while holding down the poor, tried to re-mould themselves, mostly through wholesale imports from the Old World, in the image of the civilized European.

“The politics of a country”—and this is one of Naipaul’s key perceptions—“can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships.” As he saw it, Peronism, as much as the aimless guerillas and the brutal military dictators of the 1970s, was inevitable in Argentina: far from being a program, it was an expression of rage and despair, an “insurrection” against a heartless materialist society, where the exploiter-exploited relationship had long offered the only model of human association, a revolt that itself fed off, and could only feed, other insurrections.

Travelling to Mobutu’s Zaire in 1975, Naipaul encountered another kind of cynicism and blindness about the past. Mobutu had carefully preserved the various forms of Belgian despotism. But his rhetoric dealt in African “authenticity”; and he and his courtiers arbitrarily dismantled the apparatus of the colonial state—the life of the bush meanwhile going on as it always had—and replaced it with nothing other than his personal authority. It was totalitarianism sanctified by a bogus Africanism. Together, it had stifled the nascent intellectual life of Zaire: the growth, for instance, of the bright students at the university, who can talk of Stendhal and Fanon, whose enthusiasm “deserves a better-equipped country,” but who, with only a government job in sight, already are “Mobutists to a man.”

T
HESE
unsettled men with peasant or tribal backgrounds are always there in Naipaul’s essays. These are people swallowed up by a cruel history—like the extinct native Indians of the Caribbean and South America Naipaul often remembers—or thwarted by the ideologies of revolution and racial or cultural identity.

It is easier to examine the ideologies now: they are what newly educated and privileged men in post-colonial nations took from their former imperial masters even while turning away from them—the ill-adapted borrowings, which, once glossed over in the heady days of post-colonial
nationalism and Third Worldism, now preoccupy a new generation of scholars and academics, long after they locked whole societies in a fruitless cycle of false expectations, disappointment, rage and despair.

The individuals these ideologies work upon are usually absent from academic and journalistic accounts of African and Asian countries. But in Naipaul’s essays, they stand very clearly, in the midst of the chaos and pain of their underdeveloped societies, and “awakening to ideas, history, a knowledge of injustice and a sense of their own dignity.” You can place them at the beginning or middle of the journey Naipaul himself has made: the slow climb from destitution; the makeover in the new world; the long glance back at one’s ancestral societies; the illusion-free awakening to the larger world—all the self-discoveries of uprooted men that are the cumulative work of generations but in Naipaul’s case have been telescoped, through the rigours of writing and travel, into just one lifetime.

Naipaul’s own multi-layered experience—the many deprivations of Trinidad, the painful wretchedness of India, the “rawness of his nerves” as an outsider in England—is ever present in these essays. It pre-empts in them the abstractions of politics and economics; keeps away the fleeting shallow passions of the journalistic report or overview, accounts for their rare fusing of personal and social enquiries, and suffuses them, despite the occasional severity of tone and judgement, with a profound compassion.

They consistently uphold a belief in modern civilization, and all that it offers to peoples around the world: the dignity of individuality, of self-knowledge, so many different private and professional fulfilments. But this faith in the redemptive power of modernity is balanced by a sense of wonder about the past. Naipaul’s regard for vanished or threatened ways of being—for the “completeness” of La Rioja, the remote Spanish-built half-Indian city in Argentina, for the mysteries of animist religion in the Ivory Coast, for the “logical life” of the African bush—gives a melancholy undertow to the vigorous humanism of his essays.

This is the melancholy that shadows Ralph Singh, the failed postcolonial politician and aspiring imperial historian in Naipaul’s novel
The Mimic Men
(1968), as he surveys, from a suburban hotel in England, his life and times, and finds himself overwhelmed by the “great upheaval” he wishes to write about: by “the great explorations, the overthrow in three continents of established social organizations, the unnatural bringing
together of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors.”

Ralph Singh wants to elaborate upon his vision of the history that has deracinated and then rendered him weightless and futile. But he finally sees himself as “too much of a victim of that restlessness which was to have been my subject.” In a powerful sense, the great intellectual endeavour Singh hopes to begin one day is what his creator, Naipaul, though faced with much stronger odds, has completed over the last four decades, eloquently expressing, without being undermined by, the same worldwide turmoil and restlessness that, in 1945, Evelyn Waugh, secure until then within empire, had shrunk from.

It is hard to think of a writer more fundamentally exilic, carrying so many clashing fading worlds inside him. But what’s more remarkable is that Naipaul’s acute sense of lost glory and contentment, his anguished perception of deception and tragedy—things inseparable from his background and experience—co-exist with an attitude of acceptance and optimism, with a well-founded faith in human striving and perfectibility. These visions aren’t usually compatible. But they work together in Naipaul, give his work its peculiar tension and richness, and make it the most sustained and wide-ranging meditation on our world.

Pankaj Mishra

   INDIA