The world woke up last Saturday to the news of the death of Trinidad-born British author, V.S. Naipaul. The Nobel Prize winner passed on at his London home at the age of 85. About 10 years ago, the controversial writer and his wife, Nadira were guests of the Chairman of the board of The Nation Newspaper, Mr. Wale Edun, where the Chairman of the editorial board of the newspaper had a rare interview with him. Excerpts from the rare encounter are reproduced below.
ONCE in a rare while, a journalist comes upon a scoop, a delightfully subversive editorial idea, or a personage of earthquake proportions. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul came to Nigeria in the form of a genius and SAM OMATSEYE, editorial board chairman of The Nation, engaged him for about an hour and a half. Naipaul, winner of the Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for literature among several others, is a treasure some critics have described as the greatest novelist in English writing today.
This treasure arrived in a Mercedes Benz car in the broad verdantly lush and ornate Ikoyi residence of Wale Edun, former Lagos State Finance Commissioner and Chairman of the board of The Nation Newspaper. Treasures are rare, but few are laden with so much great narratives, pithy prose, range of vision, panoply of genres and, of course, controversy as V. S Naipaul.
He alighted from the car into the mellow Ikoyi morning air, betraying some of the unkindness of age. The over 74-year-old, in a jacket – a T-shirt underneath – was helped out of the car by his wife, both of them exuding instant bonhomie as they walked with Edun and Omatseye, a few metres into Edun’s library that Naipaul, who has gulped many a tome, described as impressive.
With tea, coffee, tables and the ambience of books, Omatseye set out to propound questions about his writings, his reason for visiting Nigeria, his views on African writers and writing, his poetics, his preliminary impressions of Nigeria, his Nobel prize, and of course his controversies. He raked up a few in this interview, not least the piece about Nigeria’s prose doyen, Chinua Achebe.
His wife, Nadira, also chipped in some brilliant words during the conversation, showing her fervor for her husband’s activity. She sometimes evinced her awe about the writer’s accomplishments and genius. On Achebe, Naipaul made it clear prior to the questioning that if Achebe had made comments about him in the past, he had not. This interview is his first comment on Achebe’s writings. He tried to restrain his words, but his irrepressible instinct to express himself left out some comments that are published in this interview. But the Naipaul that emerges is a thinking, engaged mind, ever ready to spar, deploying the sparkles resources of a genius. Excerpts
Sir, it is my pleasure to have this interview with you, could you tell us why you are here and your impression of Nigeria?
Naipaul: I am here to see what I can find and have to write about for a chapter of a book I am writing about Africa. I am being selective about the countries. I am not going everywhere. I have already done a piece about Uganda, the first chapter, quite long. I’d like to do an equivalent thing about Nigeria. That requires finding material which should carry on from what I have done in Uganda and not repeat it.
Is it fiction or non-fiction?
Naipaul: It can’t be fiction. I just arrived. How can I make things up?
Some people have had to research for novels and you have had to do that quite a bit. You travelled to the Congo and Asia…
I went to Congo in 1975. I went for the simple reason it would be safe to go there. Let me go back a little bit. I came from a very small place, the island of Trinidad where I was born and spent my early life. It’s 1800 square miles, nothing to compare to Nigeria. I have always been fascinated by size. One of the first things I did when I left Trinidad was to make long journeys in the same country, and in those days it meant travelling from Paris to Barcelona. That was a pretty long journey. Later that ambition grew, and later I wanted to see big rivers and Congo was big river…. That is the start of that. And I went and did a piece for the New York Review of Books. You know if you are a writer and you are living by your writing, you need people to back what you do. That was an article… the material later resulted in A Bend in The River.
And In a Free State
Naipaul: In a Free State was much earlier. It was a book about a people without a place. A people losing their place, about placelessness. It was a very big subject to me at the time I began it in 1969. And it hadn’t been explored by other writers. And the idea of doing this sequence about people who had lost their place came to me and at the heart was a novel was about a place like Uganda, Rwanda, a little bit of Kenya. When the book fortunately won the Booker Prize in 1971, it was an early Booker. It was before the Booker became very commercial. In those days when the Booker began in 1969, it was to acknowledge those books that were of quality that had been overlooked. It was not meant to create commercial sellers. So, I crept in under that banner. I think the very fact that it was so ambitious in that way, with different pieces, with different countries adding up t the point about people without a place.
It disadvantaged the book.
Nadira: Yes, disadvantaged the book. So, we have now removed the preceding stories and we have now reintroduced the novel, In a Free State. It’s a very powerful book. The other stories, too.
Yes, it is. There was the story about the tramp.
Nadira: Yes.
Now, the impression you have about Nigeria so far.
Naipaul: You mustn’t go by what I say. What will happen is that I will think a lot more about what I’ve seen and reflect, and I will know more clearly in about a month or so while working on it.
What are your preliminary impressions?
Naipaul: It’s unlike other colonial places; that should be said. And an important thing is its size. Size matters. We see in the news about small countries. They don’t have proper leaders because in our global world, talents go away to bigger countries, to Harvard or places like that. They leave there to their home bases…the difference in size matters. It is as people say about, eh, you know Gulliver’s Travels?
Yes
Naipaul: When it began small and the grass is a particular height (Jonathan) Swift doesn’t make the grass smaller. So, size matters and increasingly this will become a problem for small places. Absence of talent, the diminution of talent, the training of talent and then goes away. I don’t think that will be your problem here. Nigeria is a big country and it should be treated by its people as a big country. It should not be treated like a village. It is hard sometimes not to do so. Like in India, many politicians sometimes treat India as though it is a village. So they miss the point about the country. That’s the main point about Nigeria. There is another important point, too, is that they (Nigerians) are a very urbane people.
(Laughter)
Nadira: Why do you laugh?
Naipaul: Because he is very urbane
I can say that for myself
Naipaul: they have a wonderful sense of humour and urbanity is a marvelous quality to have as a people. It will see you through. The rest I don’t know the economics and things like that. These will come.
What other countries are you visiting for this book?
Naipaul: I’ve gone to Uganda, I spent six weeks there. I will spend a little less here. There are special reason for that. I want to go to Ghana, to go to the Ivory Coast. I wanted to check what has happened to Houphet Boigny’s capital, Yamasoukro. This is a man who has made up a religion for himself. He built a palace with its rituals, he built a moat and filled it with crocodiles and turtles and he had them fed by a man with a long white gown from Morocco every afternoon. He also built great buildings and great roads. I also wanted to go to Senegal briefly. I went to Senegal though for a short time. I have forgotten the year now to consider the nature of their religion. But it was not interesting enough at the time to persevere with the theme and now something else has come up. I think I will go to Gabon (Libreville). After that I will go to the Congo, after that South Africa. I will also go to Swaziland. That’s my itinerary. It’s amazing how much of Africa I’ve been to. I went to Mozambique on which I wrote Half a Life.
How long will all of these take?
Naipaul: I am writing in between the segments of my travels. But I would like to give the publisher the book by the end of next year. The book will come out at 2010.
Some people said you won the Nobel Price many years after you should have won it. Why do you think that was the case?
Naipaul: Because there are lots of people who think I don’t write optimistically enough and there are a lot of people from the left who thought that for a modern world this was not the kind of writing. I never think like that. I tend to write what I see. And that early novel we talked about in 1969 (Miguel Street) and 1971, In a Free State, is about a colonial country considering the expatriate. You can write that today. Now you have to write from an African point of view, which will require another kind of angle. Many people require you go against what your eyes tell you. You outline a very terrible situation and the last paragraph you say yes there is hope. It (Nobel Prize) came much later than it should, but that’s good for me because it didn’t affect me. I think it might have affected me if it had come when I was 45.
Wole Soyinka has been writing a lot of non-fiction after the Nobel Prize. Is there something about the prize that say it’s time to concentrate on non-fiction?
Naipaul: I consider my non-fiction became a lot long time ago an important part of my work. I think the idea has built up in the last hundred years that writing is writing fiction. That means making up a narrative as though that’s the only type of writing. It’s only one kind of writing and I think it’s been overplayed now. It’s now time for other sides of writing. There is philosophy, history, biography. There are very important disciplines and important for us to understand the world in which we live. I began of course, wishing to write because I had a talent for it because it was what was presented to me as being a writer. But because of my background, my Trinidad background, a very small background. I came to the end of my material very quickly. I couldn’t just repeat what I had done because I had the mind. Because I had lived a long time in England and I had travelled and I had also been to India and places like that and Africa, I used the non-fiction form to ex myself, to extend my vision. It wasn’t means of short-changing the reader or the publisher. You asked at the beginning if I was going to write fiction about Nigerian and I had to say very quickly I had just arrived, how I could do it, because you write fiction about places you know very, very well. You know people and read people your way. To do non-fiction is not to do it lesser thing because every art, including literature, is dynamic. It develops, it changes. If it doesn’t do that, it’s dead. I’ll tell you this story. Wordsworth became the poet laureate of England for many years. He was writing wonderful little poems, the lyrical ballads, little stories in verse. Beautiful, very beautiful. Somebody said you can’t do much with this these days. There is a young man called Dickens who is writing these other books. That’s what people want to read. Before Dickens them was Wordsworth, and before him there was restoration comedy.
There was epic poem
Naipaul: Exactly, and Shakespeare and Marlowe and all of that. So, it’s always moving on, I think what people should do is try to see what writers are arriving at after the novel. The novel has been around too long. Everybody writes the novel. There are schools to teach you how to write the novel. I can’t imagine Dickens going to such a school. He did it out of his own brain. What will be the new direction? Some people think there will be no new directions. Maybe biography or writing for the films. So, there are many possibilities.
What are the limitations of the novel? You have grappled with the idea of stopping writing the novel. You would say this is my last and then, here is another book?
Nadira: This is the last book on Africa
Naipaul: Yes, that is genuinely felt because every book is exhausting to write. One gives it so much. One has to feel that after this there can be no more.
What is the limitation of the novel?
Naipaul: It’s all been done before.
You didn’t have good thing to say about the following writers: Conrad, Flaubert
Naipau: I had few good things to say about Flaubert.
What of Joyce, Steadhal and Proust?
Naipaul: They so are so the European civilization. It’s so much about social ambition in that setting. It can’t have no meaning for me I have never lived in that world. Other people have lived in that world. They can feel moved by it. They can be informed or entertained by it, but it is too far away for me. I think Proust (The remembrance of things Past) is too self-indulgent for way it is written. It goes on and on.
But you have good things to say about Dickens?
Naipaul: Early Dickens. Dickens’ carefully exemplifies the difficult of the novel. He began in 1836 with the Pickwick Papers and before that he was a reporter and writing articles…. Everything is brand new and vigour and the freshness of vision. That makes his work much memorable. Then very quickly he becomes very tired, he begins to copy, he begins to parody himself. And that is what people are doing most of the time with the novel. They read the novel and try to write one like that too. They don’t write one like that too.
Just formalistic?
Naipaul: Yes, yes
I think with a certain amount of pain when I began reading Dombey and son…
Nadira: Unreadable. And Hard Times too
Naipaul: Yes
Nadira: Hard Times is really bad. In fact the novel killed Dickens.
Naipaul: That’s what I said. Dickens died early. He was killed by Dickensian novel.
That’s suicide
Nadira: He was worn out. He died very young
He was 58 years old.
Naipaul: Yes Nadira: He wrote such books as David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickelby and then he ran out of material.
Some people said your condemnation of those books coincide with the View that modernism is dead, so what we have now is post-modernism. This means you have to dismantle the concept of the novel as you know it today.
Naipaul: I don’t think that will work. They tried it. The French Rob Grier tried it. They began in the 50’s I reviewed an earl Rob Grier for The Statesman, in which I made a joke, one of the many jokes people hold against me. It’s a novel so called about a man making a journey to visit his former mistress and ends in the south of France. He is in this train, stopping, yanking doors. It would be of interest if no one had been on a train before. I don’t think there is any that says we must avoid the narrative. I think the art of fiction has done its work, terrific amount of work. But literature has to move on. I mean we should set aside narrative. Everything is narrative. Without narrative there is no writing. You can’t have a string at unrelated thoughts and ideas. They have to be connected to something one way. There is no new kind of novel, it’s all been done. If you go into the classical world, the Roman world, you know there are things like novels, which come down to us. They are pretty much like novels written today.
Let us speak about African literature.
Naipaul: I am not an expert. I’ll talk about it nonetheless.
We have writers like Soyinka, Achebe, and Coetzee
Naipaul: You are bringing South Africa.
Do you think the continent has underachieved?
Naipaul: I am not making any judgment of their writers. You might mention Nadine Gordimer as well. The thing about writing is that it happens when they have to happen. There is little point in trying to force them. When I was in Congo or Zaire it was called in 1975, Mobutu was trying to get a novel off the ground for a celebration in Lagos.
It was Festac in 1977
Naipaul: He said that why can’t we get one off? You know, novels are not written like that.
The Soviets used to commission novels
Naipaul: Exactly.
Would you comment on individual writers like Achebe and Soyinka?
Naipaul: (A long pause) I think Achebe should have done more. I think he had been too tempted by the American universities. He spent too much time away from Africa. He probably has good reasons for that. I don’t know the circumstances. I last saw him during the Biafran conflicts.
That was a long time ago.
Naipaul: I think I saw him in New York.
He said your writings are not really true about Africa.
Naipaul: I won’t fight anybody who says anything like that. I can’t do it. I do what I do. If it’s untrue. I am very sorry.
Nadira: I like his Things Fall Apart. That is the book that put Achebe on the map. After that, there is no book. We celebrated that book. You should be very grateful, Africa. That book was recommended. We had to study it.
Naipaul: But again, it was a book about the customs of a particular people. And he had all the customs, birth, marriage, and dance, everything else. So, in a way, he had exhausted his subject. Just like Indian writers who have come out in the last 20 years or so, have grown to feel that their subjects have to be their family history. If you have written your family history, you can go home and eat your rice and stew to your heart’s content.
Somebody once wrote that there are three things to great writing: perception, observation and language. Some are good in language like Joyce, but not so much in observation. Where would you put yourself?
Naipaul: Observation and language. I wouldn’t claim perception because what is there is there. Language is important. Language clarifies your thought because it tells you what you feel about everything. As said, I would be sure about what I feel about Nigeria when I am writing. That is the effect of language. It requires precision. I also like to award big words. I like to reduce important ideas into very small pieces, small words and that’s a great help in clarifying ideas.
Talking about language and precision, yon have always been compared to Joseph Conrad in other areas. Would you comment on that, because I know that Joseph Conrad used a lot of big words? Conrad used big words and some critics have accused him of a lack of restraint in the way he wrote. But then you have had similar trajectories. He was from a small country, just like you. He went to England, just like you. He also went and wrote about the Congo and Asia, just like you.
Naipaul: I’ll tell you how all of these things began. Conrad died in 1924. He died in the University of Kent. They asked me to write a long essay about Conrad, so I read as much as I could before writing the piece (1974). And that has encouraged this idea that I am related to Conrad. In fact, the essay I wrote was full of admiration but it said the trouble I had approaching Conrad because of what it talked about.
Nadira: Lack of restraint
Naipaul: Lack of restraint, the wordiness, until I had grown older. I think all these things are really admirable. If you read his first novel, if someone reads it…
Almayer’s Folly Naipaul: Yes, you can begin to see what he is doing, you can be in to feel the weather, you begin to feel the river, see the colour, see it, and he doesn’t want to let anything go. And so, that matters a lot more to me now. When I was young, it was painful. As l said that, that is what l said and I told them about his virtues, his analysis of revolutionaries 1 since heard or learnt, I just hope it is not true that as at the time he wrote that (The Secret Agent), he had not met any revolutionary. (Laughter) he had made them up in his head, and there is a very beautiful thing he did. He did a criminal revolutionary, a very fad man who he called Michaelis
Naipaul: He gave Michaelis a patroness. What is this aristocratic lady doing with this evil who wants to blow the world up? And he worked it out. He says, she behaves that there was too much a compound of the plutocracy in the social setting and a little bomb would blow it all away and possibly her unscathed. And so, he worked that out. And one of the things I also wrote about is his gift as a middle-aged man, writing in middle age, of summing up great truths like a middle-aged man. Not the way a young man can do it. Young men don’t have the experience. I quoted a lot of it, about five or six from different books. And the one that struck me at that time because there was a kind of crisis in my own life. ‘A man to whom love comes late not as the most precious of illusions, but as an enlightening and priceless misfortune.’
Beautiful!
Naipaul: Conrad at that age. He would have had his up and downs. He married a Simple woman, Jessie Conrad. Her father was a warehouse man. So the great writer, his private life had one rather low. But no matter. Something else happened to her. One day, she went out shopping in the winter. The place was so frozen, she slipped and damaged her back irretrievably and she became immense. She was this elegant figure.
That was a favourite Conrad word, immense.
Naipaul: (Laughter) He was landed with this very big cripple and he would pretend when they went out together for their holidays or something that he had nothing to do with her (laughter)
Naipaul: And his children, two boys, did nothing.
The idea of priceless misfortune. That is a beautiful one
Naipaul: Enlightening. Priceless misfortune, enlightening. To describe an affair of the heart like that, it is marvelous. No other writer has done that before in the world.
In fact, when he was writing, in his introduction to The Secret Agent, he also reflected on how difficult it was for him. He said it was like moving from a forest into a plain. He said there is a lot of light but there is not much to see.
Naipaul: And that led him to an act of plagiarism actually. A very early piece of writing he did. The second story he wrote. The first was called an “An Outpost of Progress” which remains a classic. A little bit overdone at the end but a classic. And then, he wrote something that tormented him called The Return. He set it in England, in London. And the story is like this: a man comes home from the railway station one day…But in that description of people getting off the train, he has inched something from Flaubert. Flaubert is writing something about the French aristocracy in the country who how an easy dominion over animals and women. And something else among the furniture… Conrad lifted that and put it in English in The Return.
Naipaul: So that was the one thing I spotted and wrote a little piece about it in the New York Review of Books
Conrad fascinated me at one time in my life. I read nothing but Conrad. I had to really cut myself away from him…
Naipaul: Yes, you have to look after yourself.
Alright, thank you very much, sir
Naipaul: Thank you. You asked very wonderful questions. It’s been very stimulating for me.
