Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (11 page)

But the queries continued to come in, and once a
decent interval had passed, I agreed that perhaps the time had come to unburden myself. First of all, of a past wrong. Back in 1994, in a review of his
Grandmother's Tale
in the
New York Times,
I had criticized R. K. Narayan's writing in a manner that, I later learned, deeply hurt the old man. (I had not intended to, but was guilty, like most reviewers, of forgetting that writers, however eminent they may be, also have feelings.) My review also offended a number of friends I liked and respected — friends who accused me of lèse-majesté, iconoclasm, and Stephanian elitism, among other sins. So I suppose I had better explain myself.

To begin with, let me stress that my favorite Narayan story is the story of how he got his start as a novelist. “Some time in the early thirties,” Graham Greene recalled, “an Indian friend of mine called Purna brought me a rather traveled and weary typescript — a novel written by a friend of his — and I let it lie on my desk for weeks unread until one rainy day….” The English weather saved an Indian muse: Greene didn't know that the novel “had been rejected by half-a-dozen publishers and that Purna had been told by the author… to weight it with a stone and drop it into the Thames.” Greene loved the novel,
Swami and Friends,
found a publisher for it in London, and so launched a career that was to encompass twenty-seven more books, including fourteen novels.

In giving him the Yatra Award for outstanding lifetime achievement — one of those Indian prizes that seem quite unable to sustain themselves, so that subsequent winners (if any) remain entirely unknown — the distinguished jury's citation declared Narayan “a master story-teller whose language
is simple and unpretentious, whose wit is critical yet healing, whose characters are drawn with sharp precision and subtle irony, and whose narratives have the lightness of touch which only a craftsman of the highest order can risk.” In the West, Narayan is widely considered the quintessential “Indian” writer, whose fiction evokes a sensibility and a rhythm older and less familiar to westerners than that of any other writer in the English language. My friends in India saw in Narayan our country's best hope of a Nobel Prize in Literature.

At his best, Narayan was a consummate teller of timeless tales, a meticulous recorder of the ironies of human life, an acute observer of the possibilities of the ordinary: India's answer to Jane Austen. The gentle wit, the simple sentences, the easy assumption of the inevitabilities of the tolerant Hindu social and philosophical system, the characteristically straightforward plotting, were all hallmarks of Narayan's charm and helped make many of his novels and stories interesting and often pleasurable.

But I felt that they also pointed to the banality of Narayan's concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew. Like that of Austen, his fiction was restricted to the concerns of a small society portrayed with precision and empathy; unlike that of Austen, his prose could not elevate those concerns beyond the ordinariness of its subjects. Narayan wrote of, and from, the mindset of the small-town South Indian Brahmin, and did not seem capable of a greater range. His metronomic style was frequently not equal to the demands of his situations. Intense and potentially charged scenes were rendered
bathetic by the inadequacy of the language used to describe them. In much of his writing, stories with extraordinary possibilities unfolded in flat, monotonous sentences that frustrated rather than convinced me, and in a tone that ranged from the clichéd to the flippant. At its worst, Narayan's prose was like the bullock-cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear, is unable to turn, accelerate, or reverse, and remains yoked to traditional creatures who have long since been overtaken but know no better.

I was, I must admit, particularly frustrated to find that Narayan was indifferent to the wider canon of English fiction and to the use of the English language by other writers, Western or Indian. Worse, his indifference was something of which he was inordinately proud. He told interviewers that he avoided reading: “I don't admit influences.” This showed in his writing, but he was defiant: “What is style?” he asked one interviewer. “Please ask these critics to first define it…. Style is a fad.” The result was that he used words as if unconscious of their nuances: every other sentence included a word inappropriately or wrongly used; the ABC's of bad writing — archaisms, banalities, and clichés — abounded. It was as if the author had learned the words in a school textbook and imagined them hallowed by repetition rather than hollowed by regurgitation. Narayan's words were just what they seemed; there was no hint of meanings lurking behind the surface syllables, no shadow of worlds beyond the words. When asked why he didn't write in an Indian language, Narayan replied that he did, for English was an Indian language. Ironically, though, much of Narayan's prose reads like a translation.

Some of my friends felt I was wrong to focus on language — a writerly concern, as they saw it — and lose sight of the stories, which in many ways had an appeal that transcended language. But my point was that such pedestrian writing diminished Narayan's stories, undermined the characters, trivialized their concerns. Other serious readers of Narayan disagree with me, and perhaps so many of them can't be wrong. I was perhaps particularly unfair in suggesting that Narayan was merely a chronicler of the ordinary who reflected faithfully the worldview of a self-obsessed and complacent upper caste (and middle class). “I write primarily for myself,” Narayan had said. “And I write about what interests me, human beings and human relationships…. Only the story matters; that's all.” Fair enough: one should not expect Austen to be Orwell. But one does expect an Austen to enrich the possibilities of the language she uses, to illuminate her tools as well as her craft. Narayan's was an impoverished English, limited and conventional, its potential unexplored, its bones bare.

And yet my case was probably overstated. For there is enchantment in Narayan's world; his tales often captivate, even if they could have been better written. The world that emerges from his stories is one in which the family — or the lack of one — looms as the defining presence in each character's life; in which the ordinary individual comes to terms with the expectations of society; and in which these interactions afford opportunities for wry humor or understated pathos. Because of this, and because of their simplicity, the stories have a universal appeal, and are almost always absorbing. And they are infused with a Hindu humanism that
is ultimately Narayan's most valuable characteristic, making even his most poignant stories comedies of suffering rather than tragedies of laughter.

So I, too, lament the great man's passing. “The only way to exist in harmony with Annamalai,” Narayan wrote in one of his stories of a troublesome servant, “was to take him as he was; to improve or enlighten him would only exhaust the reformer and disrupt nature's design.” Even the most grudging critic should not deny R. K. Narayan this self-created epitaph.

F
OR DECADES, THE POTTED BIOGRAPHY
of V. S. Naipaul that accompanies each of his more than twenty books has carried the curious sentence, “After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession.” It is a fiercely idiosyncratic formulation, as if Naipaul has defined his commitment to his craft by his unwillingness to pursue any other. And it has stayed in my mind ever since, in my teens, I first read Naipaul, as the biographical hallmark of the True Writer, something that those of us who labor at other employment can never really hope to be.

And yet it is only with the publication of the remarkable and moving collection of letters sent to and from the adolescent “Vido” at Oxford (
Between Father and Son: Family Letters,
edited by Naipaul's literary agent Gillon Aitken) that I have fully understood the depth of meaning embodied in that sentence. These letters, for the most part between Naipaul and his father (even though many are addressed, with undergraduate casualness, to “Dear Everybody”),
profoundly reflect both men's efforts to write successfully — which is to say, to write well enough to be published or broadcast, and above all, to be paid for it. They are full of the pathos and struggle of writing — the creative blocks, the malfunctioning typewriters, the distractions of work and family, the depression-inducing rejections, and the anxious accounting of remuneration for each completed effort — as well as mutual appreciation, advice, and encouragement for each other's work.

Naipaul
père
(referred to throughout as “Pa”) was a journalist and subeditor for the
Trinidad Guardian,
but really wanted to write fiction. In his letters, Pa is burned up by the struggle to make ends meet to support his growing family (a seventh child is born in the course of this correspondence), and burning, too, with envy of lesser writers who have attained publication. His son, supplementing a government scholarship at Oxford by living off funds he knows his father can ill afford to send him, writes to pull himself out of the dead-end middle-class penury to which a job in Trinidad would have condemned him, as it condemned his father. When Pa dies following a heart attack at the age of forty-seven, it seems Vido will have to seek a job to support the family. But a variety of international employment possibilities identified by the Oxford Appointments Committee — from the United Nations to the Western India Match Company — fail to materialize. The choice is stark: return to Trinidad (as one surmises his family would have wished) or risk further poverty and failure by pursuing his literary ambitions (as his father would no doubt have wanted).

Naipaul persists, writing three books in a year. When,
toward the end of the collected correspondence, his first novel —
The Mystic Masseur
— is accepted for publication, we share the author's exhilaration, and celebrate the vindication it carries, not just of himself, but of his father. Comic and keenly observed, it is the kind of novel his father might have written — in a style that Naipaul himself would soon outgrow.

There is much material in the correspondence for the serious student of Naipaul's work, so much of which reflects the angularities of his personality. We read of his inability to accept “the responsibility of deserving affection” and of the nervous breakdown he attributes to “loneliness, and lack of affection.” We learn repeatedly of his contempt for Trinidad, his dismissiveness toward acquaintances and relatives who do not measure up to his civilizational standards (all too often based on their failure to master the English language), and his awareness of his impact on others (“A friend told me the other day that people don't like me because I made them feel that I knew they were fools”). But we juxtapose these with the wise, compassionate, and invariably sound advice his father gives him in letter after letter on both life and literature. When Vido underlines his observation that “I think a man is doing his reporting well only when people start to hate him,” his father replies, “I think it's the other way: a [writer] is doing his work well when people begin liking him.” What a difference of worldviews lies between those lines! “Write sympathetically,” Pa goes on — an injunction one wishes his increasingly acerbic and judgmental son had taken more to heart in the course of his distinguished but often dyspeptic writing career.

Writing sympathetically is not something V. S. Naipaul has done much of in his twenty-five books, which reveal many of the personal qualities that have made him so impressive, so readable, and yet so contrarian a writer. His novels are, to me, much the lesser achievement; his nonfiction, wrong-headed though it often is, is monumental. Naipaul's books of “journeys” and “excursions” are not quite travel books, though they are invariably about his own travels; they are not works of political scholarship, though they abound in political judgments; they are as much about himself — his ideas, values, prejudices, his own sense of dislocation as an Indian born in “unhallowed” Trinidad and settled in England — as they are about the countries he visits.

And yet sympathy has not been entirely lacking. Naipaul describes his method as that of a “discoverer of people, a finder-out of stories.” In his books (most notably the curiously lumpy
India: A Million Mutinies Now
) he has tended to repeat verbatim long conversations with his interlocutors (not always getting them right, as some howlers in the
India
book testify), letting the stories go on when the reader is clamoring for interruption, context, analysis. But in his more recent works Naipaul injects himself a little more into the tales of the people he listens to, and even sometimes interprets them for the reader. His second book on Islam,
Beyond Belief,
is — despite the harshness of some of his depictions of Muslims — a more compassionate work than Naipaul's earlier books; whereas much of his nonfiction could be faulted for generalizing carelessly from small particulars, here Naipaul writes of individual needs, fears, and motivations with great delicacy and precision, and his individual
cases have depth and humanity, while combining to make a compelling larger picture. Naipaul says the individual stories themselves are the point of his book: “the reader should not look for ‘conclusions.’”

Naipaul's own sense of displacement, so effectively chronicled in his earlier books, most notably
The Enigma of Arrival,
is at the heart of his view of the world: his scathing contempt for “half-formed civilizations,” his rejection of the passionate certitudes of those who act out a “rage” against a world that has advanced beyond their comprehension. In his books, he often spurns the “incompleteness” and “emptiness” of his native Trinidad, and dismisses people “without an idea of the future.” This is a recurrent theme: in
Among the Believers
he poured contempt on Islam's failure to keep up with “the spread of universal civilization,” arguing that “it was the late twentieth century — and not the faith — that could supply the answers.” If he has begun to seem slightly less dismissive in his later work, some of his judgments of the Muslim world are no different from those he has levied at non-Islamic societies he has found similarly “half-formed,” from India to Zaire.