'Pissing From A Great Height'

"The trouble with people like me writing about societies where there isno intellectual life is that if you write about it, people are angry.

"If they read the book, which in most cases they don't, they wantapproval. Now India has improved, the books have been accepted.

"Forty years ago in India people were living in ritual. This is one ofthe things I have helped India with," the 69-year-old novelist said duringhis first public appearance since winning the Nobel prize.

Barely had the sniggers died after his last utterance on the "calamitous effect" of Islamthat the literary and liberal mailing lists are full of outraged laments. Butsuch bon mots are only to be expected from Sir Vidia (Sirji, in short). SriThomas Babington Macaulay must certainly be chuckling in his grave. Though SirVidia may well have a point that the "chuntering" classes maynot have read his books.

"I'm not a detective-story writer. I'm not Agatha Christie, who ends asshe begins, in the same limited view of the world. Nor Graham Greene, or P.G,Wodehouse - their world doesn't change. I'm quite different: my world changes asI write." Indeed, he is, and it does.

What I am interested to know is whether Sir Vidia has since revised his opinionof the Nobel Prize Committee which, when he was last heard on the subject on the occasion of Wole Soyinka being given the prize ('Has he writtenanything?') according to him was apparently 'pissing on literature, as they do every year.Pissing from a great height. On books.'

My favourite Naipaulism? Difficult to choose from the interviews on the side,but it is obvious Sir Vidia remembers his own and perhaps has a great blast usingand reusing them. I recall the Hindu interview with Sadanand Menon in 1998, whenasked to comment on Shiv Sena vandalisation of a Delhi art gallery (rememberthat painting of Sita by Hussain?):

"How can I comment on that?" Sir Vidia had countered. "I haven't seenthe Hussain painting. I do not like Hussain as a painter. I think he is obviousand shallow. Of course you must allow me to repeat what I said when I was askedabout a writer being under threat for a book written and some Imam had spokenagainst it. I said, "It's an extreme form of criticism," and it shouldbe accepted in that spirit."

So that's Sir Vidia for you. Never mind the not-much-lamented Ayatollah, but whatdoes that 'writer' have to say? Paul Theroux recounts this incident from Hay-on-Wye

"As I passed Salman, he was smiling and shaking his head. He said, 'Ihave never met him before.'

" 'What did he say?'

" 'He said, "Are you all right?" I told him yes, I am allright. He said, "Good, good, good."' Salman began to laugh"

Laughter comes easy. A decade or so earlier, when asked by Elizabeth Hardwickwhat the dot on a Hindu woman's forehead meant, he replied, "It means, 'Myhead is empty.' "

In a 1998 interview, Sir Vidia had elaborated his views on universities: "Ihave no regard for universities, you know. I think they are great enemies ofcivilisation at the moment. Please quote me on that" and had gone on tosuggest that "anything that comes out of the universities in America,especially the Arts departments, must be treated with amusement -- and distance.Yes, distance. Please quote me on that, "amusement and distance". Thegreat works of history, the things that altered our knowledge of history andaltered our ways of looking have not been done in universities. I cannotsufficiently express my disregard for "academic history.""

He may well have been reacting to Edward Said's devastatingly delicious adhominem attack in a review of Beyond Belief, which had concluded withthese words:

"Somewhere along the way Naipaul, in my opinion, himself suffered a serious intellectual accident. His obsession with Islam caused him somehow to stop thinking, to become instead a kind of mental suicide compelled to repeat the same formula over and over. This is what I would call an intellectual catastrophe of the first order.

"The pity of it is that so much is now lost on Naipaul. His writing has become repetitive and uninteresting. His gifts have been squandered. He can no longer make sense. He lives on his great reputation which has gulled his reviewers into thinking that they are still dealing with a great writer, whereas he has become a ghost. The greater pity is that Naipaul's latest book onIslam will be considered a major interpretation of a great religion, and more Muslims will suffer and be insulted. And the gap between them and the West will increase and deepen. No one will benefit except the publishers who will probably sell a lot of books, andNaipaul, who will make a lot of money."

I am not sure Sir Vidia would agree. Maybe he would laugh dismissively andhope that the books would get read too, apart from being sold.