315. Controversy, Colonialism, & V.S. Naipaul

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0:29Vidya Naipaul, born in rural poverty in colonial Trinidad in 1932, would rise from this unpromising setting to become one of the great writers of the 20th century. This achievement does not mean that all his writing was good or that his behaviour was exemplary, but rather that his cumulative accomplishment outstripped his contemporaries and altered the way in which writers and readers perceived the world. Using simple sentences, he would look at complex modern subjects, extremism, global migration, political and religious identity, ethnic difference, the implosion of Africa, the resurgence of Asia, and the remaking of the old European dispensation in the aftermath of empire.

1:14His achievement was an act of will, in which every situation and relationship would be subordinated to his ambition. His public position as a novelist and chronicler was inflexible at a time of intellectual relativism. He stood for high civilisation, individual rights and the rule of law. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William de Rippel. And what you just heard William reading is an extract from the opening of Patrick French's biography of Naipaul, The World is What It Is, the authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul. Now, We said this on the podcast before. Patrick French was a very good friend of both of us and sadly is no longer with us.

2:02But we have another very distinguished biographer, an award-winning biographer, and a brilliant writer and speaker, our friend Ben Moser. Pulitzer Prize winning, no less. His Susan Sontag, if you just sort of Google it, hoovered up every accolade there is going. And you knew Naipaul very well. I mean, I interviewed him once, Ben. And I have to say, I found the whole experience terrifying and appalling. I just really didn't enjoy it. I'm still quite scarred. I really hated it. How did you find it? This is so funny. This is the usual story for so many people. I mean, he was kind of a legendary monster.

2:40And for me, he was nothing but lovely. I met him when I was really young. I was working in publishing right after I got out of school and I came to New York. And he was published by my boss, Alfred A. Knopf. And he would come in and everybody, including very grand people like Sonny Mehta and the most important journalists and publishers in the city, would sort of run and hide under the table at his approach. And I was this kid and he was extremely kind to me. He was very nice to me when I started wanting to become a writer myself. Very encouraging. So I know all the stories. He certainly made bitchy comments to me sometimes.

3:18But overall, I just, I don't have that story. I have exactly the same, Ben. He was incredibly kind to me as a young writer. Just me, Ben. No, Anita, it's not just you. The whole world, but we were lucky. I knew him a little. I'd met him at a Christie's lunch at the auctioneers, and he knew all about indie miniatures. We chatted very, very intensely about this. I had no idea it was something that he liked. And he actually liked specifically company school painting, which was something I was very, very interested in. So we sort of fell into each other's arms. And I had a book coming out the following month called From the Holy Mountain.

3:51And I invited him rather grandly to my book launch, not imagining that he would come at all. But not only did he come, he was the first person there to arrive before I did. And I arrived in the empty room of the Royal Society of Literature to find V.S. Naipaul and John Julius Norwich in a completely empty room, deep in conversation. Can I just say, I can't imagine that Savidya enjoyed that so much, to be honest with you. I just don't think that would have been up his street. But look, I think what we're describing here, and it's probably a good start to this, is a complicated character. So Ben, I mean, to understand a really complicated man who clearly we don't understand and I don't understand as well as you two do or in a different way, we should really know where he came from.

4:35Can you give us an idea of his origins? He comes from a background of no background. This is really important to understand. So he comes from Trinidad in the West Indies, which is the southernmost island in the West Indies. It's quite a large island by Caribbean standards, but it's a tiny little speck. He says it's the silliest island that ever dotted a sea when he writes to his father in his 20s from Oxford. And the thing about Trinidad that makes it very different from other places and backgrounds that we've discussed or heard discussed on this podcast is that there's no indigenous population at all.

5:11It's been scraped, is his word. I mean, there was an indigenous population, but the British wiped it out. Together with the Spanish and the French. And actually, so Trinidad is resettled in the early 19th century, and it has a population of zero. And this is really different from any other place in the world, except for these Caribbean islands. And what happens is it's transformed into a labor camp, basically. So they bring in a bunch of Africans. There's actually not much slavery there because slavery gets outlawed in the British Empire quite early on in Trinidadian history. So that's quite different from a place like Jamaica or any of the other Caribbean islands which were slave colonies.

5:48I didn't know that. It's later than the other ones, is it? Much later. That's why they're all indentured. That's right. Well, the Africans do come from other Caribbean islands. It ends up being a half African, half Indian society, more or less. Of course, there's other people around. But these people are kind of thrown together to work on these plantations. And the Naipaul family come from Uttar Pradesh, from the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. It's his grandparents, Naipaul's grandparents. And they come because India is falling apart, also under the influence of the British Empire. And people are desperate to go somewhere and to get a job.

6:24And so people, Indians, go all over the world. And this is the beginning of the great Indian diasporas in the West Indies and Africa. This is a subject which we have not yet dealt with on this podcast, Intentured Labour, and it's something that deserves a little miniseries itself, because so many of these communities like Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, very much formed by this. In South Africa as well. But they don't actually come at this point to the imperial metropolis, which is to the UK. But anyway, they come there and they're thrown together. There's no real point to this colony, because it's not a particularly rich colony.

6:59It's not a colony where the British invest much into it, they sort of leave it to themselves. And so Naipaul comes from this place. He's the grandson of these indentured laborers, but he's more importantly and seismically importantly for his life, he's the son of a semi-journalist, of a man who has some education and some talent and is trying very hard to write, but he doesn't have even a language. And it's really important to understand Naipaul's relation to English and what this does for him, because these people speak English because they've lost their own language, but they don't actually really know what English is.

7:38So, he gives this great example about reading Wordsworth in school, and he says, reading about the daffodils, he said, we were sure that the daffodil was a lovely flower, but none of us had ever seen it. I remember a version of that, funnily enough, I went to school in Yorkshire and being brought up in Scotland. I'd never really seen spring in the way that you get it in the south of England. All these poems that you're taught in English class about the spring coming, all the Shakespeare sonnets and everything. And it was really only when I got to Cambridge and I saw what is really a full spring with sort of cherry blossoms and all the things that everyone else thinks of spring.

8:11We just had daffodils and snowdrops and that was it. It was no cause for celebration at all. The Indian thing is really, I mean, it hasn't changed either. So I know that my mother, for example, when she was at convent school in India, learned and can still to this day recite the Charge of the Light Brigade and Wordsworth Staffordills. Word for word, you know, meant nothing to her. But yeah, she was taught it by rote. Well, this is how Naipaul learned at this colonial school in Trinidad. And it was very confusing. Over the course of his life, he writes and rewrites the story of coming into this language that refers to things, to cultures, to peoples, to class societies, because there's no classes, really in Trinidad.

8:54Everybody's kind of what we would probably say lower middle class or pretty impoverished peasantry. India has receded because they're two generations out. They've lost their language. They're still Hindus or Muslims, but reflexively, and they feel this whole world around them, but they're very unable to grasp it. There's a lovely quote illustrating exactly your point, Ben, in an essay he wrote towards the end of his life. And he said, the idea came to my father in India with the English language. Somehow, in spite of the colonial discouragements of the place, an idea of the high civilization connected with the language came to my father, and he was given some knowledge of literary forms.

9:36Sensibility is not enough if you're going to be a writer. You need to arrive at the forms that can contain or carry your sensibility. This was part of what was passed on to me at a very early age. All the poverty and the bareness of Trinidad, far away, with a population of half a million, I was given the ambition to write books, and specifically to write novels, which my father had presented to me as the highest form. And this is somebody who had not even really read many novels, his father, because very few books even arrive at Trinidad. It's not like growing up in the backwoods of Australia or of the United States or somewhere.

10:09It was really a place where there just wasn't much available. And the society that makes literature possible, and that makes intellectual life possible just doesn't exist there. And so in a great act of will, he manages to win one of the two scholarships that are available each year to come to the UK. And in 1957, he comes to Oxford and has this incredibly bleak time, not knowing what he's doing. It's of course cold, you know, the weather, I guess it's warm if you're coming from Scotland, but it's certainly not if you're coming from Trinidad. Yes, for me, it was the end of the Ice Age. Rome and Naples.

10:51Yeah, yeah. But for him, he's absolutely struggling to find his way in the world. And he has this vocation. And when he's at Oxford, his father dies, having published a few stories, which Naipaul presents ever after as this incredible triumph of the will, that he managed to publish a few short stories in local newspapers in Trinidad. Why is that such a triumph? Why is that so incredibly impossible? It's because this society that he's coming from has not been described at all by literature. And so he's very aware of coming from a place where nothing has been given shape. and he believes that literature and language and the intellectual life that those things indicate are really the only things that allow people to give their experience any kind of form or any kind of understanding.

11:48This is an experience as shared by many who come over from India to study in England. The weather is bleak, the rooms are small, the sun is only up for a short amount of time and the food. They all talk about being starved of all warmth inside and out. I wonder though, with Naipaul in particular, who has this sense of, I don't know, maybe rootlessness in Trinidad because it isn't a country of deep roots. Then he's taken out of that soil and put into a place where his roots are even shallower. He calls himself doubly or trebly displaced. Does that lend itself to sometimes the accusations or the praise of his writing that it is often bleak and it is often cold, like a transplanted sapling from a place that doesn't belong.

12:31Well, I think that's true. I never find it bleak or cold at all. I find it extremely alive and absolutely fascinating. I think there's no question he's one of the greatest writers of the century, possibly the greatest in English. It's very hard to think of anyone who achieved what he achieved. God, no wonder he liked you. No wonder he bloody liked you. Well, you know, I loved him. I came from a background that is incredibly, it's so different to his that it's not even comparable. You know, I came from the imperial center, as it were. I came from the exact sort of society that he did not come from.

13:06And I am utterly intimidated by him to this day. I don't find myself worthy in a very profound way. He oppresses me in a way. What he achieved, and particularly achieved coming from this background of nothing, it's a titanic accomplishment. But I find it very alive, and I think the uprootedness and the deracinated nature of the people that he writes about and that he himself reflects. What's so fascinating about him and what's so relevant about him is that that's the same reality for millions, if not billions, of people in the 20th century. So, he comes to Paddington. He describes, I think, in one of his last books, this boarding house he ends up in.

13:45It's a very down-at-the-heels place. Paddington is literally the kind of first place you get off the train from Oxford. He sounds like he's literally come off the platform. I think he's actually coming from Trinidad, and he gets to London, and he has to stay somewhere before he goes to Oxford. And he sees people from Malta, people from Egypt, people from India, people from China. And this is right after the war. You have to remember London was a completely different place to what it is now. London was a very poor city. It was a place that was totally bombed out still in the 50s. It was a place that wouldn't have looked like the shiny, aspirational London of today.

14:23But all these people's countries have been destroyed. The war had happened. And they all wash up there. And he realizes later that he has this great subject. You know, he says, until then, most of the world cities, like most people in London would have been British. You know, most people in Paris were French. suddenly, and within a space of just a few years, these cities fill up with millions and millions of people from absolutely everywhere. The implosion of empire. The implosion of empire, the emergence of these new metropolises that are quite different to what they would have been even 20 years before.

14:58And you say, Ben, when we've talked about it, you've talked about how he realized that he couldn't just go off and become a writer like Houseman writing a Shropshire ad, that he had to do something completely new, that there was no precedent for somebody from Trinidad writing a high art novel in English. There's absolutely no precedent at all. And he talks about reading some of these imperial travel writers that go to the West Indies. So I think even Waugh goes to Jamaica. And these kind of people descend from Cambridge or Oxford, and then they go sort of look at the picturesque natives and write these cute novels or descriptions, for someone like Naipaul, who's actually from those societies, that is a completely alien way of looking.

15:41He can't write about Trinidad the way that somebody from, you know, Shropshire writes about Trinidad. And so, there's no precedence for him. And I thought, when I was younger, I used to think he's kind of putting us on a bit with this, I'm so original, I'm the first person. But then, you know, the older I've become, And the more I've read and traveled, the more I realize how unbelievably novel this was. I know a lot of Indians listen to this podcast. He's obsessed by Gandhi and by the image of Gandhi that comes out of the autobiography. And he writes about what Gandhi would have known coming out of Gujarat when he does and going to England and what he would have read and what he would have known about the outside world.

16:23And it's basically nothing because this knowledge just wasn't available to people and it wasn't available to him. And he gets out of Oxford, where he's severely depressed, including because his father dies. And he remembers the street that he grew up in in Port of Spain, which he calls Miguel Street. It's a different name. And he writes this comic novel just about the neighbors and the people down the street, which is an absolute masterpiece. I really encourage people to read it, because I think if you read it, you will get the taste of Naipaul in this comic vein. I absolutely love the early Nipols when I was in Trinidad and Tobago.

17:01And I actually went and stayed with his family. I went and stayed with his sister, Kamala, in Chiguanas. And those early novels, particularly I thought The Suffrage of Elvira, which is not one of the ones that critics sort of rave, just very funny, gorgeous book, light, warm, affectionate, and just a wonderful, wonderful read, and very much a young man's novel. A young man's novel, but still so good that you just can't believe that he's so young when he does it. And these novels, I think, are absolutely perfect. They hold up after 60 or 70 years, 60 plus years, I guess, at this point. In terms of just the sheer enjoyment, the most enjoyable books he ever wrote.

17:40Yeah, probably. And I think he starts off as a comic novelist, which is why people say that he's bleak. And I always push back against that because I don't think he is. I think he's hilarious. And I knew him personally, as I said. and he was a funny, funny man. He was mischievous. He was kind of obnoxious sometimes. He loved provoking people. He loved kind of trying to get a rise out of you. And he does all this in the prose as well. But I find it all of one piece. I think the thrill of reading Naipaul from the beginning to the end is that it's an evolution and the development of a truly great mind.

18:12Since you also, both of you knew him quite well. When he, you know, you described this coming to Paddington and sort of being this maelstrom of other people who've come from other parts of the world. Did he see kinship with those people or did he sort of categorize them almost sort of out of India caste system of who is worth knowing and who is not worth knowing? I think he did a bit. He had great social anxiety. He writes about that a lot as a young man, especially. He doesn't feel that because of his education and the fact that he is someone who went to the finest school in his island and then, you know, became the best student and then goes to Oxford.

18:49He's what the French call des classés. You know, he's not of a class. He doesn't really identify with working class, what we would now call the windrush generation, which is sort of happening about the same time. He's highly educated, but he also is very aware of racism against Indians, against any people of color in the UK. He pushes back against that quite a lot, and he finds it everywhere he goes. He even goes on television early on, speaking out against racism against immigrants, which is not something we associate with the later nightfall at all. No, because he gets associated, he gets this reputation for being this ferocious racist.

19:29I mean, I think this is the most unfair thing of all. But he is somebody who doesn't have a place. Again, it's another form of deracination. It's another form of uprootedness. We're going to take a break, but just before we go to the break, you were sort of saying he has this reputation of being a racist. I think we should tell listeners who aren't aware maybe of Naples' work and also reputation. What is it detractors would say about him when it comes to race? That's one of the sort of primary things that comes up in a search when you look Naples up. Yeah. I mean, this is something that, as with other things that happen on the internet, It's something that I think got a life of its own even before the internet.

20:07He writes critically about people he knows and with whom he identifies in a way and at a time when this sort of critical writing was not acceptable because everyone was supposed to be excited about decolonization. This was a great thing and independence. This was going to lead to development and peace and prosperity. And of course it doesn't. In the Caribbean, it doesn't. In Africa, it doesn't. in large parts of Asia, a lot of the history of many post-colonial countries is trying to find their way after colonization. And a lot of white imperial people really liked to write pretty condescending things that he thought were not fair.

20:51There's one sort of moment where he writes about, and you all know Ben where this is from, but his character is coming down this stoop, and it's surrounded by Caribbean people who are playing music and sort of dancing. And it's almost sort of snarling representation of them, calling them hubshis, which was a word I had to go and look up. I had no idea what that was. And the whole thing just made me feel really ick. Like, and that person is not morally judged for feeling that way about these people. It's the Indian equivalent of the N word, hubshi. Patrick has a very, very nice passage, which I just got here, about Naipaul's tendency to caricature himself in public outside his books.

21:28His books were very serious, but he liked to stir things up. He said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, that Islam was a calamity, that France was fordulent, and interviewers were monkeys. If Zadie Smith of White Teeth fame, optimistic and presentable, was a white liberal's dream, V.S. Naipaul was the nightmare. Well, I love this. This speaks to my own sense of not liking these white liberal pieties, which were the same ones I grew up with. It's very important to understand as well that he grew up in a non-white society where there were basically zero white people. And he often says that, you know, in the West Indians, we threw around racial terms at each other all the time.

22:07You know, blacks did to Indians and Indians, the Hindus did to the Muslims. And this was sort of how this society talked to each other. And of course, he realized later that that was a great way to get a terrible reputation. So I'm not here to defend that. I'm just saying that he didn't like white liberals. He thought they didn't understand the part of the world that he came from and the parts of the world that he spent so much of his life seeing. He didn't like their extreme respect for it. But also, he didn't like the music that they were making, Anita, to your point. He called Rastafarianism a disease.

22:39Well, yeah, he thought it was loud. He was a writer, and I'm a writer too, and I don't love noise. And I sympathize with him with this kind of loudness of a lot of places. But it's not just loudness that he's talking about. I mean, that particular scene that I'm thinking of, it is racially loaded because it's the kind of sound of the unevolved. Again, I wish I could remember what it was exactly, but I do remember drawing away from it going, bloody hell. I'm not here to defend everything he says, but I think that he definitely does this about his own communities, his people that he identifies with as well as other people.

23:14And I think it's part of his being uprooted also of just not really identifying with the same things. Let's take a break and join us after the break where we've sort of talked a little bit about some of his early work. Let's get into the meat of what makes Naipaul the legend that he is.

23:38Welcome back. So we've talked a little about Naipaul in his early novels, these wonderful comic, light, affectionate looks at his Caribbean background. But we're going to look now at some of his nonfiction. It was the Caribbean that he wrote his first nonfiction book about, which very much set the tone for what was going to come. Tell us, Ben, about the Middle Passage, which was commissioned by the government of Trinidad and Tobago, and greatly regretted by them ever since, because it gave a deeply unfattering portrait of the islands he was meant to be writing up. Well, I think this comes back to what we're saying about some of the accusations of racism stuff.

24:18I think that when people expect to be flattered, they're looking to the wrong writer. You know, a lot of these people want to write a book, oh, isn't it beautiful and something that will promote tourism or something. This is why governments and states often commission writers to come to sort of blow smoke up their ass. Naipaul doesn't do it. He comes in 1961. So he's just a few years out of Oxford. And he comes because he wants to see the rest of the Caribbean, which he hasn't really seen. So, he goes to, I think it's Jamaica, British Guiana, Suriname, Trinidad, and I think he goes to St. Kitts or maybe St.

24:50Lucia. I can't remember. I don't think it's a bleak view. Again, I push back on it. This book is incredibly good to me because the extent of the observation, the things that he sees, every sentence feels so rich to me. It's a very, very complex portrait written from inside these societies by a great writer, which I don't think in any of these cases has existed before coming from within the society. And so, of course, the Trinidadians are disappointed by it. But at the same time, if you talk to West Indians now, I mean, he's still, as in India, he's still a writer that any West Indian writer has read and read extensively.