Civilization and V.S. Naipaul

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Bawer, Bruce

Last December, on the day after being presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul sat down in Stockholm for a televised conversation with three fellow literary laureates, Gunter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, and Seamus Heaney, and with Per Wastberg, a member of the Swedish Academy. One might have expected that the topic under discussion would be writing and literature, but the Nobelists soon turned to politics. Naipaul, alone in resisting this direction, protested that he is not political: he just writes about people. "Perhaps that's too frivolous," he suggested slyly. Gordimer, perhaps failing to understand that there was more than a little irony in the air, and that in Naipaul's view writing about people, far from being frivolous, is in fact precisely what a serious writer does, was quick to challenge his self-characterization, insisting: "Your very existence as a boy living under colonial rule in Trinidad was political!"

This was, needless to say, meant as praise. To many members of the literary (and academic) establishment, after all, colonialism is the paramount literary theme and political issue of our time, and to be a child growing up in a colonial setting is to fill a strictly defined role in a familiar morality play. It is to be a victim, and thus a figure of virtue-and thus, of course, political. And to be political is to be serious. (In such circles, indeed, politics is the ultimate seriousness.) For Naipaul, contrarily, who was that boy in Trinidad (he was born in Chaguanas, a village of 1500 that his father sardonically called "the peasants' paradise"), and who would certainly place colonialism at the head of his own list of literary themes, to be truly serious is to transcend the merely political. To be serious is to notice and remember the specifics, the contradictions, the ambiguities-to honor the whole human person rather than to reduce him or her to a one-dimensional symbol of virtuous victimhood or (for that matter) anything else. It is to tell the truth about the world, however much that truth may confound ideology, rather than (as Naipaul himself put it in his Nobel Prize speech) to turn "living issues into abstractions."

Naipaul, born in 1932, has honored the human from the very beginning-though at the beginning, to be sure, he did it largely with humor. His first book, The Mystic Masseur-which was published in 1957, seven years after his emigration to England (where he still lives)-is a brief, hilarious tour de force about Ganesh Ramsumair, a bumptious, good-natured young Trinidadian of modest education and limited spiritual proclivities who stumbles into a successful career as a holy man and healer (and, eventually, a national political leader).1 It sounds like a racket, but the naive, sincere, and rather innocent Ganesh isn't really out to con-a fact that only makes the whole thing funnier. (As a character in Breakfast at Tiffany's says of Holly Golightly: "She's a phony. But she's a real phony. You know why? Because she honestly believes all this phony junk she believes in.") The book, which in some respects brings to mind Joyce Cary's classic Mister Johnson, is a pitch-perfect feast of Trinidadian dialect and captures aspects of that island's culture with an irony that sometimes amuses

He never saw Leela again until the night of their wedding, and both he and Ramlogan pretended he had never seen her at all, because they were both good Hindus and knew it was wrong for a man to see his wife before marriage.

-and sometimes stings:

Leela continued to cry and Ganesh loosened his leather belt and beat her.

It was their first beating, a formal affair done without anger on Ganesh's part or resentment on Leela's; and although it formed no part of the marriage ceremony itself, it meant much to both of them. It meant that they had grown up and become independent. Ganesh had become a man; Leela a wife as privileged as any other big woman. Now she too would have tales to tell of her husband's beatings; and when she went home she would be able to look sad and sullen as every woman should.

The moment was precious.

Three more volumes of Trinidad fiction followed. After The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), another satirical yarn, and Miguel Street (1959),2 a linked sequence of Chekhovian character sketches, Naipaul published the most splendid book of his entire career: A House for Mr. Biswas (1961).3 A chronicle of one man's life from birth to his death at age forty-six, it is partially based on the life of Naipaul's own father, Seepersad Naipaul, who grew up in a destitute Hindu family in an obscure Trinidad village and ended up a journalist in Port au Prince who sent his sons to Oxford. Naive, irresolute, timid, and baffled by life, yet at the same time sharp, opinionated, temperamental, and derisively witty, Mr. Biswas spends most of his life under the thumb of his despised, domineering in-laws, who provide him with both ajob and a roof over his head. He longs for a house of his own; and it is this longing that, in the end, defines his life.