Sunrise with Seamonsters (16 page)

He said he found writing torture. This surprised me, because his books were humorous and full of ease; the imagery was precise and vivid, the characters completely human. I did not know then that to write well one went slowly, often backwards, and some days nothing at all happened. "Writing should be transparent," Naipaul said. But it took great strength and imagination to make light shine through it. I had read
An Area of Darkness, The Mystic Masseur
and
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion
and
A House for Mr Biswas.
I admired them and reread them, feeling only discouragement for myself, dismay at seeing my own writing.

I wondered what Naipaul read himself. He showed me his books—two of them, Martial in Latin and The Holy Bible. He tapped the Bible and said, "It's frightfully good!"

One day he asked me what I was writing. It was an essay, I said, on cowardice. "It explains why I feel cowardly." He looked at it, scrutinized it, asked me why I used this word and not that word, challenged me and suggested I rewrite it. I rewrote it four times. When I was finished he said, "You should publish it. Send it to a good magazine—forget these little magazines. Don't be a 'little-magazine' person. And write something else. Why don't you write something about this dreadful place?"

He was the first good writer I had ever met and he was then, in 1966, working on one of his best books,
The Mimic Men.
It is almost impossible for me to overestimate the importance of Naipaul's friendship then. I was 25, he was 34. He said he felt very old; he seemed very old. "I'm not interested in meeting any new people," he said. "I should never have come here to this bush place. You've been here for three years—you see how writing keeps you sane? If you hadn't been writing you'd have become an infy"—it was his word for inferior—"like the rest of them."

His praise mattered, and when he gave advice I took it. He demanded that I look at punctuation, at the shape of a paragraph. "And you need to be calm to write well. Be detached—detachment is very important. It's not indifference—far from it!"

It was like private tuition—as if, at this crucial time in my life (I had just finished my first novel), he had come all the way to Africa to remind me of
what writing really was and to make me aware of what a difficult path I was setting out on. When we were together he was very sensible and exact, and he could be terribly severe: Never do this, never do that. "Never give a person a second chance," he said. "If someone lets you down once, he'll do it again." He talked often about writing, the pleasures and pains. He was proud of the fact that he had never had another job. The American Farfield Foundation had financed this Uganda trip, but Naipaul said he was losing money by staying.

"At this stage of your life your writing will change from week to week. Just let it—keep writing. Style doesn't matter—it's the vision that's important, and writing from a position of strength." He was right. I began to notice an improvement, a greater certainty in my writing. It was Naipaul who showed me that Africa was more comedy than tragedy, and that perhaps I should spend more time writing and less time organizing extra-mural classes. He said, "Never take people more seriously than they take themselves."

With me he was a generous, rational teacher. But in Kampala his reputation as a crank was growing. "I hate music," he said. "African music is frightful. Listen to them." He went around saying that Africans were wasteful and unresourceful: "Look at the Italians—they can make cheese out of dirt." Every now and then he shocked a room full of people by describing in detail his punitive mission of Indian gunboats. He claimed that there were very few African writers who were not in some way plagiarists; and several were exposed, though not by Naipaul.

"Those are the ones that frighten me," I heard him say one day to a Makerere lecturer. He pointed to a long-legged African walking on flapping sandals under the blue-gum trees.

"What about him?" the lecturer asked.

"He's carrying a book," Naipaul said. "The ones that carry books scare the hell out of me, man."

He asked me to take him to a brothel. He sat on the veranda, drinking banana gin and smiling in refusal when a girl came near. He said, "I see perfect integration here."

When he finished his novel, he wanted to travel. "Let's go to Rwanda," he said. Naipaul had a car, and even a driver, but his driver had let him down in some way and, in a kind of vengeance, Naipaul did the driving and the African driver sat in the back seat, scowling in remorse. In the event, we took my car to Rwanda, and I did the driving. One day we made a wrong turn and ended up in the Congo. Border guards detained us. They wore colorful shirts and they carried guns. When they sent us away, Naipaul said, "Did you see their uniforms? Did you hear their bad French? Let's get out of here."

We went to Goma, on Lake Kivu. There were a few Indian shopkeepers
there. Naipaul talked to them, asking them about business, the future, and were their children going to school? Afterwards, he said, "They're all dead men." The hotels were empty except for the large Belgian families which ran them and ate enormous meals, quarreling and shouting the whole time. Rwanda was still a colonial place, with decaying villas and savage guard dogs. A dog snarled at us one night as we were out walking. Naipaul said calmly, "What that dog wants is a good kick."

In Kigali, the dusty capital, the hotels were full. I inquired at the American Embassy and was told that Naipaul and I could use the embassy guest house. This brought from him a melancholy reflection. "Look what it means to come from a big powerful country—you Americans are lucky," he said. "But I come from a ridiculous little island."

We had one argument on the trip. I picked up an African who was hitchhiking. Naipaul had said, "Let him walk." But the African was in the bush; there was no transport at all. I sometimes hitchhiked myself. Naipaul was very angry; the African was a lazy, sponging, good-for-nothing, preying on the conscience of an expatriate. But it was my car.

Later in the trip we stopped at a hotel in a remote town. It was the only hotel. Naipaul said, "I'm not having dinner tonight." I was surprised—he hadn't eaten anything all day. He said, "I was here once before. I had a row with the manager. The waiters had dirty uniforms, and one put his thumb in my soup."

He was fastidious about food, a strict vegetarian. He would not buy food at a market if it was uncovered. He would go hungry rather than eat meat. But he was curious about other people's eating habits, and on one occasion he bought a pound of fried locusts for his African driver and took delight in watching the African eat them.

He was certain that the Indians in Uganda and Kenya would soon be expelled. He often asked Indians about their prospects in Africa. His questions were always direct and challenging. I was with him once when an Indian in Kampala told Naipaul that he was all right, and he explained that he had an elaborate plan for staying.

I was convinced the man would be safe.

Naipaul shook his head. "He was lying."

Doubt, disbelief, skepticism, instinctive mistrust: I had never found these qualities so powerful in a person, and they were allied to a fiercely independent spirit, for his belief in himself and his talent never wavered. He was merciless, solitary, and (one of his favorite words) unassailable. No one had a claim on him.

At last, he left East Africa. I stayed for two more years. We remained friends; we had some common interests. It did not matter to me that he had never mentioned my books. Once in an interview he was asked which
writers he liked. He began by saying, "It would be easier to say who I don't like—Jane Austen, Henry James..."

Nowadays I seldom see him—we have not met for three or four years. During the pointless Falklands War, Naipaul made a public statement. "When the Argentines say they are going to fight to the last drop of blood," he said, "it means they are on the point of surrender."

I laughed! That was the surprising, provocative voice I had heard all those years ago in Africa. He was sometimes wrong, he was often shocking or very funny. He had woken me and made me think.

"When I speak about being an exile or a refugee I'm not just using a metaphor, I'm speaking literally," Naipaul said in 1971, and that same year, as if to dramatize the statement, he lived in Wiltshire, the West Indies, South America and New Zealand. Some people still think of him as a Trinidadian, but when he flies to Port-of-Spain he has to produce an air ticket showing that he intends to leave. So much for being a Trinidadian. One considers his movements over the past thirty-two years and concludes that since he left Port-of-Spain in 1950 his life has been a series of onward bookings—or, speaking literally and figuratively, flights.

In
The Middle Passage
he mentions that when he was in the fourth form he made a vow to flee Trinidad within five years. He fled after six. Ten years later he returned to the West Indies, examined half a dozen places, rejected them all and fled again. Back in London, which he considered a neutral territory, "a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew," he felt confined: "I became my flat, my desk, my name." He fled England; he sought India, and for a year was a resident. He traveled all over the Indian subcontinent, and in Srinagar wrote
Mr Stone and the Knights Companion—
the only novel in which he depicts English life. The end of his Indian experience was another flight, back to England via Madrid. "I had learned my separateness from India," he wrote in
An Area of Darkness,
"and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors." He is a tireless but reluctant traveler, like an unsponsored explorer without a compass in his work as in his life—for his characters share his homelessness; the awkward questions are "Where are you going?" and "Where are you from?"

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in the country town of Chaguanas in Trinidad in 1932, of a large Brahmin family which originated in India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh. At the age of seven he was taken to Port-of-Spain to live, and there he received his early education. One guesses that his upbringing was very similar to Anand's (Biswas's son) in
A House for Mr Biswas,
and there is much in Anand's
nature that is in Naipaul's: "Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, an imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and [at ... Shorthills] contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable."

In 1950, Naipaul came to England and was for four years at University College, Oxford. He married Patricia Hale, who had been a fellow student, in 1955, and published his first novel,
The Mystic Masseur
, in 1957. He has published eighteen books since then. Do a little arithmetic and you see that he was furiously reviewing fiction for the
New Statesman
(and was known as a particularly brutal critic) when he was in his mid-twenties; he wrote one of his masterpieces (he regards his first three novels as "an apprenticeship"),
A House for Mr Biswas,
at the age of 29, Mr
Stone
(which is about a Londoner of 62) at 30,
An Area of Darkness
at 32,
The Mimic Men
at 35.
The Times
described him as "the youngest of the W. H. Smith Award winners, and a quarter of a century light of the average". Naipaul explains what is already a shelf of his collected edition ("The Russell Edition"—his publisher has remained the same) by saying, "I was driven by an enormous tension." Even in the early books he gives the impression of being an older, reflective man, of wide experience and considerable learning, capable of wise judgment, with a mature style characterized by an exactitude of phrase. And yet he is now only fifty, and quite relaxed; he disliked Oxford scholarship; he bears only a passing resemblance to any of his heroes, and though he says in interviews that he feels his real work is behind him and that he visualizes simply "going silent", he is still game and on the move.

He is a small, finely-made man with an expressive mouth that can draw itself into a sad grimace, eyes that become hooded and oriental with fatigue, and thick black hair which he flings back when he gives his deep, appreciative laugh. His hands are delicate and his wrists are the size that make a watch slip and flop like a bracelet. He speaks in carefully framed sentences and his voice is precise, and sometimes sharp, except when he pauses to say, "Do you see what I mean?" He often says, "But you knew that, didn't you?" when imparting a totally unexpected piece of information. He is a brisk walker, hard to keep abreast of, as he takes his unusually long marching strides. He eats well, but not hugely; he likes good restaurants and hotels, and can give a thorough report on most places he has eaten in—the decor, the condition of the waiters' uniforms, the treatment, the service ("Try the Lake Victoria," he told me in Uganda. "They warm their cups"). He is a reasonable vegetarian, out of preference rather than any Hindu stricture. I once asked him about it. It was a personal matter; he didn't caution me or proselytize.
He made a face and said, "Biting through sinew. I couldn't do it."

Writing demands an immense amount of physical stamina, and Naipaul's books exhaust him. His health is unreliable, occasionally frail—he is plagued by asthma and insomnia—but he can be energetic, even athletic: he does callisthenic exercises every evening, and in East Africa he was so disturbed by the punyness and heavy drinking of the other expatriates he stopped drinking and took to running a mile every day on a Kampala track in the tropical heat. His chief aversion is to noise and he considers most music as disquieting as the sound of a pneumatic drill. With this concern he is an inveterate double-glazer and he used to subscribe to a magazine called
Noise.
In his flat in Kampala, a place he detested for its raucousness, he drew my attention to a radio blaring upstairs and said through gritted teeth, "Listen to the bitches!" He abandoned the place soon after for a hotel in Kenya, miles from the nearest town, "where you might hear the odd Kikuyu shout, but that's all."