A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling | V. S. Naipaul

This is very typical, for the truth is that Naipaul is rather ungracious about other writers. It turns out that no one influenced him very much. We are left with the impression that as a writer he sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus. His accounts of his contemporaries almost always begin with hero-worship and end with irascible disappointment. Derek Walcott, the Carib-bean poet and playwright who was his first literary hero, is soon rejected as banal, derivative and provincial. Waugh and Wodehouse wrote nostalgic fairy tales. A long essay on Salambbô, rather artificially spatchcocked into the middle of this book, eventually arrives at the conclusion that Flaubert is overrated. Caesar’s Gallic Wars are OK, his terse Latin a model in its way for Naipaul’s English. But all modern French literature is dismissed with a wave of the hand. Of the various authors passed under review here, only Maupassant, Tolstoy and Gandhi come in for unqualified praise. A generation of Indian writers is criticised for writing in English for a largely British and American audience. Even Nirad Chaudhuri, the expatriate Bengali writer, comes in for a mouthful of measured abuse. The irony of all this has entirely escaped Naipaul. So completely assimilated has he become that he can regard a man like Chaudhuri as an outsider, without noticing how close his position in English letters is to his own.

Naipaul’s remarks about Gandhi are particularly revealing. He is unstinting in his admiration for Gandhi the man and Gandhi the politician. Does this mark his repentance of his acid views about the Third World? Not a bit of it. His point is that Gandhi was an Englishman: made in England and in British South Africa, formed by the Inner Temple, Ruskin and Tolstoy via London Christian socialism. Naipaul’s position on this is oddly close to that of Gandhi’s British critics in the 1930s. The difference is that they regarded his inner Britishness as the measure of his treachery and hypocrisy. But Naipaul, characteristically unconcerned with the rights and wrongs of Gandhi’s campaigns, rejoices in it. For him, it is just a question of identity.

A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling
by V. S. Naipaul
Picador, £16.99, pp. 194,
ISBN 9780330485241
£13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655