Writer in the World

Hi!

 

I started the blog, about a year back, to talk about books I had read. For past few weeks I was grazing new pastures. I beg your indulgence as I return to the old grounds in this post.

I am aware that the digits on my hands are way too many to count the people who do afford time and patience to browse my words. And with my insistence to speak on books, I fear, I may lose even these (readers, not digits!). But there is an irrepressible urge lurking stubbornly in a cranny of my mind. This post may see it sated. And I may then find inspiration to think about other matters. 

I bring to your notice two books of V.S. Naipaul, both allegedly travel books, but not really. These are on his craft. I liked them. These showed me new ways to understand the art of a writer. I will straight plunge into them.

A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking & Feeling

V.S. Naipaul

Every sincere writing is foremost the result of author’s irrepressible urge to communicate to the world, something that he feels is his unique experience or a way to look at things. Ideas do not appear in writer’s mind from a void. Their source lies in his environment, i.e. his family, society and the extended public of the country he lives in: with their social, political, economic, religious and cultural components. Each writer’s mind is a product of his own genes too, that enable him to look at the world in a unique fashion. The same society and country, and similar family circumstances generate different books in minds of different writers.

 

I have read a couple of books and short pieces by few writers, wherein they explained how they came to write the books they wrote. I find it fascinating to peep into the workshop of the author admire and witness the tools and methods he uses to put together the books I enjoy. Naipaul’s book A Writer’s People is in this genre. But Naipaul’s analysis of his writing skill is unique and intense, like his other books. Subtitle of the book tells concisely what the book purports to discuss, i.e., how Naipaul came to acquire the feelings and the ways of looking at things, that stimulated the books he wrote.

 

Through work of other authors, Naipaul tries to understand how an author acquires his worldview that so powerfully influences his body of work. He discusses the poet, a fellow Trinidadian, Derek Walcott, a Noble laureate and discusses how Walcott must have found the muse for his poetry in Trinidad and why such a landscape escaped Naipaul’s notice when he too grew up in the same environment. In the process he reminisces about his childhood, his parents and the culture he encountered in his formative years. Poignantly, unsentimentally, and trenchantly he describes the cultural pretensions and shallowness in lives of Indian expatriate community of early twentieth century in Trinidad.

 

In a chapter, An English Way of Looking, he dissects and analyses the work of English novelist Anthony Powell. His forthrightness, sincerity, and honesty in speaking his mind is enchanting. He examines Powell’s work to ascertain the worldview of an English author. Through this analysis he explains why being an expatriate Indian from Colonies he could not imbibe this view or even appreciate works of authors like Graham Greene. Though he is critical of Powell’s work he is effusive in his praise of Powell, the man. In his clear, lustrous prose he brings out greatness of Powell as a friend.

 

‘…I don’t, properly speaking, have a past that is available to me, a past I can enter into and consider; and I grieve for that lack.’ Naipaul writes in a chapter on Indian Way of Looking. He puts forth unhesitatingly, his considered opinion, why he feels he is deprived of a past. Indians are offended by such frank and perhaps brutal observations of their countrymen on their country. But nowhere does Naipaul sound trivializing or mocking. Provoking he may be, but not insincere in his analysis, not facetious. He cites the autobiography of an indentured labourer, who went to Surinam, Dutch Guyana, in 1898. He was Rahman Khan from a North Indian village and the book was Jeevan Prakash. Book is one long fable of Rahman’s exploits, mostly imaginary, with little verisimilitude, as he runs away from his home and lands in Surinam. There is not a word about his family, society, money or the lack of it, education, conditions in India that made him run away. There is no geography, there is no history. Only description of the places Rahman Khan visits, is of the food he eats there. This is the culture Naipaul’s ancestors brought from India. Hence his grief for lack of past in his life. He contrasts this autobiography with Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth and Nehru’s Autobiography. These are galaxies apart. Different ways of looking and seeing and feeling, produce such vast difference in perception of the same geography, society and culture. Naipaul presents an original and thoughtful analysis of Gandhi and his philosophy in this chapter. He returns to Gandhi and India again in the last essay in the book. In this he writes about Nirad C. Choudhary and his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. He has some sharp and plainly uncharitable observations on both. I have read the book and tend to agree with Naipaul. Except for the first half of Choudhary’s autobiography, this and his other books too, seem to mock the ignorance of the reader. Choudhary throws fact after fact in reader’s face, in highfaluting, often obfuscating language, as if cocking a snook at the reader and challenging them, ‘Well, did you know that?’ Naipaul couldn’t be truer when he says, ‘India has no autonomous intellectual life.’ We are a materialist race. Majority of us not only consider matters of mind irrelevant but have only contempt for those who hone intellect and value it. ‘Intellectual’ is an abusive epithet in a vast section of Indian society today. Political party presently in power for more than six consecutive years expresses these views egregiously. ‘Hard work is more powerful than Harvard’, a dig at Amartya Sen; ‘Urban-Naxalites’, ‘Lutyens’s Delhi crowd’, few of the appellations to demean intellectuals; this is a sample of their subjects for public discourse. This hatred, like everything the party professes, has caught the imagination of the middle class and stokes their old prejudices. I realise, my opinion looks more incendiary than Naipaul’s, on whom I had proposed to write. I must stop my tirade.

 

In the book Naipaul also writes about his father’s aspiration to be a writer. His empathy and love for his father are clear in his short references.

 

In the chapter Disparate Ways, Naipaul discusses two books of Flaubert, Madame Bovary and Salammbo. His endeavour is to illustrate how same author can have two different ways of seeing and how these produce books with completely different souls.

 

Naipaul also presents snippets of his life as are relevant to the topic he is discussing. And book feels like a memoir too. I glimpsed the birth of A House for Mr Biswas in these passages. His prose is immaculate, his style most austere. He is parsimonious with words. He doesn’t want to waste any. His phrases, his syntax, are breathtakingly beautiful. This is a great book. Every fan of written word would love it. I learnt many ‘ways of looking’ of a writer and this new knowledge gave me much joy

The Writer and the World

VS Naipaul

 

Book is a collection of essays by VS Naipaul. If one must classify these, they are in the way of being travel writing. But I must hasten to add that these are not the run of the mill travel pieces either: There is hardly any mention of the landscape, the sites, the cities, the towns, the hotels or eating joints. In preface Naipaul says that there are two ways of doing ‘foreign-pieces’. A ‘good way’ and also an ‘easy-way’. Easy way is to travel to a foreign country, get in touch with local news-papers, know from them everything there is to know about the country and in a couple of days you have an ‘appetizing’ article ready. Naipaul says this is not his way. He tried to ‘enter the country’ in his travels. He read the local newspapers minutely. He worked out themes he had to follow and then sought people as per the need. This required time and energy. Newspapers were not interested in this sort of journalism. But the knowledge he gleaned from these travels stayed with him for long. ‘It could feed a book later, even a work of the imagination’. Hence the name of the book, The Writer and the World. These essays truly illustrate Naipaul’s efforts to learn about the world he lives in. Every writing, fiction or nonfiction, is a way the author perceives the world. Thus, this book in combination with Naipaul’s earlier book A Writer’s People, offers his fans a chance to see the world that fired the mind of one of the greatest writers of English language in twentieth century.

 

Essays are grouped in three geographical zones: India, Africa, and America. I cannot reiterate enough, that these are not even remotely akin to conventional ‘travel’ articles. Naipaul stayed in each place he writes about, for an extended period, perhaps months. He diligently perused the themes he discusses in the essay. Many pieces, especially on Africa and South America were written after the research he did, spread over many visits. His themes are complex. A common element amongst many is the influence of the culture of colonial powers on the natives. He dissects and assiduously demonstrates the thread of such influence that survives in these colonised lands, decades after the colonial masters were packed home. Naipaul has a unique sense of history, i.e., unsentimental appreciation of human nature and an astute ability to discern the subtle ills that affect societies. Subtlety is only in the provenance of these ills. Effects these generate are massive. He matches this magnificent insight with an unparalleled prose style. His prose is a sheer joy to read. His sincerity, diligence and honesty shines through each paragraph. These essays are not for casual reading. I will have to reread most pieces if I attempt here a brief synopsis of each. But I can say with firm conviction, that if not for anything else, a book-lover will like the book for the way Naipaul strings words together; clearly, succinctly, and beautifully. I’ll close this piece with a small excerpt from one of his essays on India.

‘Yet there remains a concept of India-as what? Something more than the urban middle class, the politicians, the industrialists, the separate villages. Neither this nor that, we are so often told, is the “real” India. And how well one begins to understand why this word is used! Perhaps India is only a word, a mystical idea that embraces all those vast plains and rivers through which the train moves, all those anonymous figures asleep on railway platforms and the footpaths of Bombay, all those poor fields and stunted animals, all this exhausted plundered land. Perhaps it is this, this vastness which no one can ever get to know: India as an ache, for which one has a great tenderness, but from which at length one always wishes to separate oneself.’