HE WAS struck again and again by the wonderofbeingin hisown house, the audacityofit: to walkdown a farm track in Wiltshire to hisown frontgate, to close his doorsand windowson hisown space, privacy and neatness, to walk on cream carpet through book-lined rooms where, still in a towellingrobe atnoon, he could summon a wife to make coffee or take dictation. Outside, he could wanderoverlawns to the manorhouse, ora lake where swans glided, or visit the small building that served ashiswine cellar. Vidia, his friends called him; he disliked his name, but liked the derivation, from the Sanskritfor seeing and knowing. He looked hard, with his eagle stare, and sawthingsastheywere. The house, which he rented, was paid forbyhisbooks, more than 30 ofthem. He had nottaken up writingto getrich or win awards; that was a dreadful thought. Dreadful! To write was a vocation. Nonetheless his fourth book, “A House for Mr Biswas”, based on his father’s search for a settled place, had luckily propelled him to fame, and in 2001 he had won the Nobel prize for literature. He had been knighted, too, though he did not care to use the title. Hence the countrycottage, aswell as a duplex in Chelsea. For, as Mr Biswas said, “howterrible itwould have been…to have lived without even attempting to lay claim toone’sportionoftheearth.” Which portion of the earth, though, was the question. Mr Naipaul’s ancestors were Indian, but that part lay in darkness, pierced onlybyhisgrandmother’sprayers and quaintritualsofeating.
Journeys to India later, which resulted in three books excoriatingthe place, convinced him that this was not his home and never could be. He was repelled by the slums, the open defecation (picking his fastidious way through buttsand twistsofhuman excrement), and by the failure of Indian civilisation to defend itself. His place of birth and growth wasTrinidad, principallyPortofSpain, the humid, squalid, happy-go-luckycity, sticky with mangoes and loud with the beat of rain on corrugated iron, that provided the comedy in “Biswas” and “Miguel Street”. But he had to leave. England was his lure, as for all bright colonial boys who did not know their place, and his Trinidadian accent soon vanished in high-class articulation; but Oxford was wretched and London disappointing. He kept leaving, travelling, propelled byrestlessness. Books resulted, butnotcalm. Notcalm. Much of his agitation, even to tears, came from the urge to write itself; what he wasto write about, and in what form. The novel was exhausted. Modernism was dead. Yet literature had taken hold of him, anoble purpose to hislife, the call ofgreatness. He had moved slowly into writing, first fascinated by the mere shapes of the letters, requestingpens, Waterman ink and ruled exercise books to depict them; then intrigued by the stories his father read to him; then, in London, banging out his first attempts on a BBC typewriter. For a long time he failed to devise a story. Beginnings were laborious, punctuation sacred: he filleted an American editorforremoving his semicolons, “with all theirdifferentshades ofpause”.
Once going, though, he wrote at speed, hoping to reach that state ofexaltation when he would understand himself, aswell ashissubject. Truth-telling, defyingthe darkness, was his purpose. His travels through the postcolonial world, to India, Africa, the Caribbean and South America, made him furious: furious that formerly colonised peoples were content to lose theirhistory and dignity, to be used and abandoned, and to build no institutions oftheir own, like the Africans of “In a Free State” squealing in theirforest-language in the kitchens oftourist hotels. He mourned the relics of colonial rule, the overgrown gardens and collapsed polo pavilions, the mock-Tudor lodges and faded Victorian bric-à-brac he saw in Bundi or Kampala; but even more than these, the lossofhuman potential. Many people were offended, and he cared nota whitwhethertheywere or not. It was his duty and his gift to describe things exactly: whether the marbled endpaper of a dusty book, the stink of bed bugsand kerosene, the waythatpurple jacaranda flowers shone against rocks after rain, orthe stupidityofmostpeople. He resisted all editing, of writing or opinions. Without apology, he also slapped his mistressonce until hishand hurt. Severity and pride came naturallyto hisall-seeing self.
To the plantation The furtherpurpose ofwritingwasto give order to his life. He carefully recorded all events, either in his memory for constant replays or in small black notebooks consigned to hisinside jacketpocket. Convertingthese to prose imposed a shape on disorder; it provided a structure, a shelter, protection. His rootless autobiographical heroesoften dreamed ofsuch calm places: a cottage on a hill, with a fire lit, approached atnightthrough rain; a room furnished all in white, looking towards the sea; orin “The MimicMen” the mostalluringvision, an estate house on a Caribbean island among cocoa groves and giant immortelle trees, whose yellow and orange flowers floated down on the woods. Though he ended his days in Wiltshire, more or less content, it was somebody else’s sun he saw there, and somebody else’shistory. Hisdeep centre remained the place from which he had fled.
Source: The Economist