The Writer's World

The following is the text of the introductory address madeat the launch of Magic Seeds on November 18 at Oxford Bookshop, Calcutta. 

It’s not only a privilege and an honourto be able to welcome Sir Vidia to Calcutta, but also something of a relief tohave him here finally. Some thing happened a few weeks ago which delayed hisvisit, and threatened to rob the event of its momentum; but, as it happens, oneof the results of the delay is that one feels one can receive Sir Vidia in amore relaxed way this time; one has the illusion of him having been here not toolong ago.

This morning, I looked at my copy of The OvercrowdedBarracoon to reread his record of his first visit to Calcutta, an accountcalled "Jamshed into Jimmy", which appeared in the New Statesman aslong ago as 1963. For all its satire, the piece has the freshness of a giftedwriter, himself young, discovering, unexpectedly, a great city rising among therubbish-heaps and rioters. The essay begins with a snatch of conversation:‘"You’ve come to Calcutta at the wrong time," the publisher said. "Ivery much fear the dear old city is slipping into bourgeois respectabilityalmost without a fight."’

Today, forty one years later, at the end of a twenty-four-hour bandhfiercely opposed by the government and the high court, we feel we’realmost there: that Sir Vidia is here at the right time. "Nothing had preparedme for the Maidan," the young V.S. Naipaul goes on to say, "tree-dotted, nowin the early evening blurred with mist and suggesting Hyde Park, withChowringhee as a brighter Oxford Street…" Quick comparisons, each containinga brilliant, distilled picture, follow: "Lutyen’s New Delhi is a disaster…a city built for parades rather than people"; Bombay "is cosmopolitan to thepoint of characterlessness" — which is a pitilessly accurate description ofthe city I grew up in in the Sixties and Seventies. Only in Calcutta does theyoung Naipaul find a "rooted grandeur".

Well, much has changed and happened sincethen, both in our cities and in the writer’s own career. But, in this earlypiece, we’re with someone who’s already written one indisputablemasterpiece, A House For Mr Biswas, and would go on to write otherconsiderable works, including The Mimic Men, Finding the Centre, ABend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival; already, in this piece,the gifts — the instinct for comedy, the eye both as an astonishing receptacleand filter of detail, fixing what’s important, ignoring the unnecessary, theear for dialogue and the sentence, the unillusioned satire, the alwaysunexpected but abiding capacity for wonder — these gifts, which make V.S.Naipaul, in my view, the pre-eminent writer in the English language of thesecond half of the 20th century, are already in evidence.

To me, one of V.S. Naipaul’s principal achievements is theway in which he, as a writer without a real community, a real history, a realhome, turned his gaze directly from these things one automatically "owns"towards the act and vocation of writing itself, the writer’s struggle withmaterial, the mythology of the writer’s career, from the first embryonicdaydreams to the discovery of one’s subject-matter and later. The discussionof writing in V.S. Naipaul’s work is more than a literary discussion ontechnique and sensibility; it is a description of writing as a habitation,constantly struggled over, constantly fought for, constantly in the process ofbeing created, by a man without a home or history. Something happens in thisnarrative about writing, and the writer’s life, in V.S. Naipaul’s middleperiod. The old disjunction, proposed and then investigated so eloquently byEuropeans like Mann, between the writer and society, the writer and the world,is conflated, imperceptibly, subtly, in The Mimic Men, Finding theCentre, The Enigma of Arrival, with the disjunction between thepost-colonial and his place in the world he came from as well as the world hejourneys to. The European idea of the writer’s homelessness merges, in Naipaul,with the homelessness of the post-colonial: it is a conflation that has hadprofound and far-reaching consequences for the contemporary literaryimagination.

Not too long ago, I finished reading Magic Seeds. It isa deeply impressive work, a work, as the critic and novelist, Philip Hensher,pointed out acutely in the Daily Telegraph, in V.S. Naipaul’s "latestyle"; by which Hensher means, I think, that the writer here is both morespare and unsparing than he has been before. Willie Chandran, whom we first metin Half a Life, is waiting, after emigrating from Africa to Berlin, fordestiny to direct him. Destiny speaks to him in the voice of his sister,Sarojini, who exhorts him not to waste his life in self-centredness and to joina revolutionary movement in south India. This Willie does; finds he has joinedthe wrong movement; moves helplessly from scene to scene, action to action;until, much later, when he feels most trapped, his sister and an old friend finda way of rescuing him and bringing him to London as the writer of a forgottenbut rediscovered pioneering work of post-colonial fiction.

One of the things that startled me aboutthis work is the rapidity and visual vividness with which it moves from localeto locale, place to place: from a café in Berlin to an aeroplane flying toIndia, from a hut in a village in south India to a tannery, from there to a postoffice in a small town, then to, for instance, a landlord’s house, then toLondon, to St John’s Wood, and from there to the image of a council estate,and, finally, a post-modern suburban wedding; it is a photographer’saesthetic, employing both risk and chance as narrative methods and introducingthem as constituents of our lives in a way that is without precedent in Naipaul.I found the London section particularly disturbing and impressive. The more onelives in a neighbourhood, I think, the more one becomes familiar with it; butthe longer one lives in the world, the less familiar it becomes. This is thesense the London section, and this novel as a whole, conveys as few other worksin recent memory have. The contemporary world is, in a wholly new way,unrecognizable and estranging; and this novel has turned upon it an equallyestranging and unrecognizable gaze. It’s the unrecognizability of this gaze,rather than the familiar Naipaulean virtues, that I find, here, so oddlyunsettling and moving.

The above first appeared in The Telegraph of Calcutta.