In Sir Vidia's shadow.

Tejpal, Tarun J.

A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others. (Naipaul, "Steinbeck in Monterey" 334)

Writers do not make the world. Writers make those who make the world. The seeing comes before the doing. The humblest of doers have to first learn ways of seeing. Naipaul came to me early. Between the waning exhilarations of simple sport, and the first intimations of a larger, darker world, where there were no easy rules of play, and winning often had nothing to do with skill, stamina, strength or speed--the four indoctrinated S's of my sporting life.

Naipaul came to me on the cusp of my seventeenth and eighteenth years. Brilliantly footloose in Chandigarh--in the turn of the '70s and '80s a curiously bohemian-parochial town straining at cosmopolitanism--it was in Chandigarh, enrolled for an economics degree in a college that I did not once attend, that I began to turn from the sunny high of sports and friendships to the dark intoxication of books.

Books were not a new territory for me. I had been there before. Between the ages of seven and 13, I had read with unrelenting hunger--much like most other children around me. Read in the manner of a colonial, anglicized elite. As children of the army, growing up in cantonments, we were a peculiar kind of elite: more privileged for being closer to the old colonial metabolism than any other strata, and at the same time disadvantaged by being divorced from the two gathering forces of modern India, money power and political power. (We were to see our fathers go, from positions of pomp and privilege to being treated dismissively as military cranks, with neither purchasing power nor executive clout, who ought to stick to their barracks.) In these cocoons, of cantonments and missionary schools, books were a plenty.

So as a child I read everything. Every kind of comic--from the Harvey spooks to the Marvel mutants; every kind of book--from the teeming Enid Blytons to the aviator Biggles to the deadly gunfighters, Sudden, J.T. Edson, and Louis L'Amour. Then came the spy-guys Nick Carter and Ian Fleming; the war-and-thrills men Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth, Leon Uris, Cornelius Ryan; legal-eagle Perry Mason, and the crime and glamour boys, Mario Puzo, Irving Wallace and Harold Robbins. There was a clammy, almost pornographic, excitement to getting new reading material to fill the long hours left untouched by school and sports. Unashamedly, we trawled libraries, friends' houses, second hand shops; and as a boy I would think nothing of pedalling five to 10 kilometers to pick up a new book or a stack of comics.

Then something happened around the time I turned 13. I ran out of stuff to read, and I became obsessed, to the exclusion of all else, with the drama and physical exhilaration of sports, and the garish happy escapism of films. I played every single day--many different sports--and on average saw a film every other day, mostly Bombay's Hindi movies, from big blockbusters to B and C grade run-alongs. In some way, in retrospect, the wildly imaginative worlds of my childhood books had been replaced by the perhaps equally fantastical productions of Bollywood. I suppose, in many ways, there was more to hold on to there.

It was, then, not until I was 16 that I re-discovered books; and began to shape my world. I forged it, over the next few years, less out of experiences of the real world than from tramping through literary landscapes. Books became the scaffolding of my life. Slowly I phased myself out of the activities of my peers--parties, travels, holidays, drinking--and retreated between book covers looking for myself. Contemptuous of college academia, not interested in the career options my peers were charting, madly in love for the first time in my life, I sought darker things to anchor the balloon of frivolities life around me had become. As the young are inclined to do, I pursued gravitas. The meaning of life, as it were. For a time my parents became anxious for me.

In untutored fashion, randomly, I waded through all the literature I could lay my hands on. I read Hardy, Dickens, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Orwell, Huxley, Joyce, Waugh, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, W hitman, Stevens. Uncommandeered by Eng-lit syllabi, I could reach for the contemporaries: Salinger, Greene, Pynchon, Marquez, Updike, Mailer, Bellow, Heller, Llosa, Amis, Vonnegut, Larkin, Walcott, Hughes, Heaney and V.S. Naipaul.

II

I do not remember the precise moment when I acquired my first Naipaul, but very soon I had them all. What I do remember is the first one I read. It was India: A Wounded Civilisation. It rocked me back on my heels. This man--clearly an Indian--was laying bare the pathologies of my country in a masterful dissection that had the imperiousness and calm of great writing. Yet this was not great writing about distant locales and alien people--as all my young life's reading in English had accustomed me to. This was about something as mundane and scruffy and immediate as my own life and milieu, and yet it had the grandeur and gravity of great writing. How easily, and aptly, the name Naipaul--so unmistakably Indian; not so unlike Tejpal!--sat amid the rows of Updike, Greene, Mailer and Bellow. I felt a bit like Gabriel Garcia Marquez had when he first read of Gregory's overnight transformation into a giant dung beetle in Kafka's Metamorphosis. Boy! This was allowed in literature; this could be done. It set Marquez down the road to magic realism. It set me down the road to consuming Naipaul's books.

There were very many even then. Perhaps fifteen. I meticulously read through the charming early fiction; the later darker works; the travel writing; and the essays. In no time I was a believer; and then, swiftly, an evangelist. At the time it was fashionable in India to run down Naipaul. He was disparaged without being read--mostly for his supposed pronouncements on us. I became a defender, forcing people to the books, and away from the extrapolated views.

I had read R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Anita Desai, but they had somehow felt parochial and fey. Often, a little clumsy too. With Naipaul there was never any sense of the second-rate, of sloppiness, or of mimicry. These appreciations came quickly and easily, and had a lot to do with the prose. Indian writers--and most others--tend to be wordy, overwritten. With Naipaul there were no excesses of language, no flashy turns of phrase, no exhibitions of vocabulary. In fact rarely was there a word out of place. There was no better school to learn the craft of writing.

There was an architecture to the prose that, in its simplicity and design, was classical. The words stacking up, the sentences stacking up, the paragraphs stacking up, had an air of profound inevitability. In each book, in classical fashion, the materials were simple--stone and lime--but by the time the construction was over, a magnificent building--complex and ingenious--was in place. Good readers could spend years unlocking their peculiar wisdoms and secrets.

Yet it was not merely about being his apprentice in the art of writing. It had to do with more, with the mood of my life at the time. Living alone, close to the bone, seized by unusual ambitions and impulses, struggling to discover how to move, I could relate to the stately, austere--great--tenor of his writing. Early enough, one could sense his was not writing as entertainment--its rationale ran deeper, closer to a pure core: of explication, discovery and understanding. Words with a strong resonance for me then. But there were other things, beyond the prose. Attributes that attracted me, whose contours only became clear to me over the years.

There was, most significantly, the integrity. Of inquiry, and of art. The clear assertion that serious writing was its own end, and it could not be compromised by other allegiances and agendas. The idea of writing as a noble thing, as a higher moral activity, came to me from him. Ironically, it crippled my own writing for good--leaving me with the notion that writing had to be a hundred per cent activity, or nothing. It has taken me years to learn to tolerate writers who hammer out books on the side, while engaged in a dozen other activities in the main. Clearly the purity was overplayed in my young mind, but I do not regret it. For integrity is a handy thing to acquire. It is one of the more stable guiding torches in life. It may be acquired through another's writing, but it can easily spread to everything.

But, for me, there was something beyond the inspirations of prose, and the lessons in integrity. It only came to me in 1994 with the publishing of one of his finest books, A Way in the World. The title did it. It immediately became clear to me what I owed Naipaul. He had helped me--in strange, unknowable ways--to find my own way in the world. In the manner ordinary people are inclined to identify themselves with the great, I had--now I realized, in 1994, many years later--seen myself aping his journey from the edge of the world, the margins of nowhere, to the center. Those loaded titles of his books, which said so much about the trajectory of his life--An Area of Darkness, The Mimic Men, Finding the Centre, The Enigma of Arrival, A Way in the World--those titles, I felt, echoed the themes and neuroses of my own life. A kinship was born. The sense of piety deepened.

III

Many years later I took a slow elevator up to his fourth floor flat in Cranley Gardens, London. It was October; it was late evening; and there was a real chill in the air. I was late. I had had trouble locating the building, and had walked up and down in the gathering dark, with no one to touch for directions, unlike as in India. This was the highpoint of my London trip, and I felt some anxiety about the delay. He was known to be pernickety. Seventeen years after I began to read him, I was going to finally meet him, and I did not want to start off on a tacky note. I had called and he had invited me over. The elevator was slow enough to allow the panic to build. Yet I felt strangely calm. Surely the delay had to be only a minor glitch in such a long relationship.

He opened the door, offered me his hand, and was clearly warm. In the woodlined flat we walked up the stairs to his living room. There were a few books on the shelves, and some artworks on the walls. The room had the calmness of his sentences. He opened a bottle of fine red wine, and we began to talk. By the time I left a couple of hours later, a bond had been established. It puzzles people even now why he has so much time for me. As I took the slow elevator down, I thought then--as I do now--that it has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with his work, and his sense that perhaps I understand it. With Vidia--an intimacy I earned on that first evening--everything always has to do, finally, with his writing.

IV

Over the years I have seen him break down twice. Both times it had do with his writing. The first time it happened, he was telling me the story of his early years. We were in Delhi in my house. We were not alone. Nadira, his wife was there, as was mine, Geetan, and a few others. But they all sat outside of the conversation. Vidia, as he spoke, his grave eyes far away, was now a young man. Living in London, he was struggling to write. It was the early '50s, and Indian writing in English had not yet been invented except as a curio. Struggling to write is perhaps inaccurate. He was writing, actually strongly and well, but was struggling to be published. Not yet 25, he had finished writing three books. He had also finished trying his hand at suicide. Then one day, his third manuscript, The Mystic Masseur was bought by Andre Deutsch. For it, he was paid an advance of a hundred pounds.

"I took it to the Barclays Bank," he said, "where I used to deposit my little cheques of five and ten pounds that I got from the Carribean service of the BBC. When I gave it to the clerk sitting behind the counter, he looked at it, and then he stood up and he shook my hand."

And with that he went silent. His face became marmoreally still, even as his eyes welled up and began to close. Ever alert, Nadira jumped up and rushed to him, and buried his face in her arms. As she crooned soothingly, the rest of us silently calculated the incalculable price of the writerly life. We also took stock, as one tends to in his presence, of an incredible journey.

The second time I saw it happen, it was him taking stock of an incredible journey. We were in the Stockholm Concert Hall, witnessing the perfectly choreographed, incredibly somber, Nobel Prize awards ceremony. I had spent 24 hours bumping into endless Nobel laureates, doddering away in the corridors and elevators. It was the centennial celebration of the Nobel, and the hotel was crawling with most of the world's living winners--glorious names slung out in the lobby and bar, trying to protect their wattage. In the night I would be seated at a spectacular banquet with four literature laureates--Jose Saramago, Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe, and Gunter Grass--at my table.

It was all impossibly grand, and the only reason I was there was Vidia. I was one of his eight personal invitees, and when asked I had not once thought about making the trip across the world for a mere 36 hours. It was not the best of times for me. I was involved in pitched journalistic battles with the Indian government, and the money was very tight. But there was no question of not going. It was a singular moment for him, and the years of knowing him had if anything only deepened my sense of piety and debt.

So there I was. On the stage were arrayed the Swedish royal family in one set of regal chairs, and in another ordinary set opposite them, 13 winners of the current year. Behind them, in a flashy swathe of genius, stacked row upon row like spectators in an arena, sat more than 150 Nobel laureates. This year Vidia was the only single winner of the prize--the four other awards were shared three apiece. Inevitably then, he received the longest and loudest ovation--three times the others, and more--and in that grave setting the clapping ebbed and flowed for a long time when he rose to receive the honor.

Before it actually happened, I sensed it--many rows from the front. Knowing him--mostly from the writing--knowing his history, temperament, sensibility, his peculiar metabolism I expected him to break down. I do not know if I actually saw it--from so many rows away--but I knew, as he stood there erect in his ducktails, surrounded by the finest of the species, at the very apex of an incredible career, the ovation ringing in his ears, I knew he was probably thinking of his father, his childhood of impossible yearnings in Trinidad, his many years of deep frustration in England, and the long journey done all alone with nothing for company except memories and ambition.

I knew he was probably thinking of an entire life of unrelenting literary toil--in which he had turned his back on all other loyalties--of family, friends, jobs, country--to pledge himself solely to his art. There had to be a deep sadness, a wrenching grief at all he had lost and gained. It is the peculiar burden of those who come from nowhere, and have to give up much to find their rightful place in the world. It cannot be understood by those to whom the world is readily given.

Later I asked my other companions--Gillon Aitken, Peter Straus, and George Andreou, his agent and key publishers--whether they had seen him break down while receiving the award. None of them had. It took the zoom lenses of a myriad television and still cameras to confirm the truth. The famous face crumpled, the welled-up eyes, the tears. The abiding sorrow in the moment of triumph.

V

The fact is to know Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, you have to know his writing. And if you know the writing of V.S. Naipaul then you know Vidia. Even as he explores the world--with more ambition perhaps than any other major writer--endeavouring to understand and explain it, his greatest theme remains himself. Through the sieve of the self--precociously developed from an early age--he relentlessly processes the world, stirring through a distillate of people, places, ideas and events. And in it always can be seen the guiding intellect, the classic writing style, and the fearless self-belief.

It is his sense of self that has made him, and his vast achievements. For in the beginning there was nothing. Nothing that could midwife a great literary talent. There was an ancestry of indentured labour--forefathers who left the district of Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh in the mid-nineteenth century to work on the sugarcane plantations of Trinidad. There was the claustrophobia of an Indian joint family, forever negating individual vision and instinct. There was the increasingly empty ritualism of a Hinduism transported long ago, demanding compliance not creativity. And then there was the colonial torpor, in a small colony at the end of the world.

But, redemptively, there was a father. A father who had gained, from the reading of books, a larger idea of the world and a man's place in it. It was he, the father, Seepersad--or as in India, Shiv Prasad--who first turned his back on the countryside calling of his ancestors, and becoming a journalist, began to write. He published a fine collection of short stories, The Adventures of Gurudeva, but far more importantly for literature he seeded the love of writing in his two sons, particularly the elder. So sustained and powerful was the father's literary influence and engagement with the son that it provides, in the world of art, one of the most moving and potent portraits of early mentoring.

It is only with the publication of Letters Between a Father and Son (1999), that the tremendous impact of Seepersad on Vidia became apparent. In letter after letter, the father exhorts Vidia--18 now, in Oxford on a scholarship, resolved to become a writer--with criticism, encouragement, and endless exegesis on books, authors, and the art of writing. The letters are important as illustration because they reveal a spectacular talent in the shaping of the Nobel laureate. The letters are important because they remind us the writer began early, never stopped, and never compromised.

Even now, if you lack the stomach, you can be offended by the man, or the books. Despite appearances--the prose: cool, clear, uncomplicated; the man: calm, deliberate, self-possessed--neither give of themself easily. Long before you read him, you have read of him; long before you meet him, you have heard of him. For far too long he has been the presiding eminence of English writing--a tribute to both his precocity and his stamina--and even as the sunrise and sunset and sunrise of Indo-Anglian writing plays itself out in media driven cycles, he continues to cast his own strong, individualistic glow. Even as an entire generation of excellent Indian writers has learnt to write from him, he has, for over 50 years now, stood apart. His own man. His own writer. Railing against mimicry, fads, irrationality, and humbug.

The man is as memorable as his prose. Stories of his fastidiousness and eccentricity swell literary folklore. There's the one set in a fancy literary salon in New York, where a middle-aged lady is assiduously working the crowd in search of Ved Mehta. A wide-eyed American, and admirer of Ved's vivid style, she does not believe the hostess's claim that the writer is blind. Soon enough, arriving in front of the slight Indian she begins to gesticulate gently, then frenetically, waving her arms about. The Indian looks on, unperturbed, unblinking. Just then the hostess shows up at her elbow, embarrassed that her guest has become a flapping rooster. "You're right," says the sceptic, pulling her arms in. "He really can't see." "That," says her friend, "is not Ved Mehta. That is V.S. Naipaul."

Anyone who encounters him comes away with an anecdote. Young writers as diverse as Patrick French and Sagarika Ghose have experienced his lofty--or as Salman Rushdie put it "Olympian"--disdain. French--a neighbor of the Naipauls in Wiltshire, and now busy writing Naipaul's biography--while working on a fabulous first commission for The New Yorker, had once recounted in an interview in early 2003 to Outlook, a Delhi-based weekly magazine edited by Vinod Mehta, "Don't let The New Yorker worry you. Don't let it worry you. The New Yorker knows nothing about writing. Nothing." Ghose's fate is more tragic still. In the late '90s, trawling Bhubaneshwar on election duty, she learns Naipaul is in town. Electrified, she tears up and down the city and ferrets out that he is staying at the Oberoi hotel. Photographer in tow, she shows up outside his room, and fearfully knocks. The great man appears, flossing his teeth, and even as the girl begins to talk, he waves them away gently but firmly stating she is too young to have read his books.

As many stories are perhaps apocryphal. There is always talk of his fetishes. He has a phobia about noise and dirt, and his apartment in London--stacked with his collection of old Indian art--is supremely serene. There is the story of how he forced a Swedish mission to change their entire decor to white as a pre-condition to accepting an invite. He has a Brahminical fervor about hygiene and cleanliness, and hates people eating with their hands. He is repelled by meat, but doesn't mind fish--apparently something to do with the way they look when cooked. He drinks very little, but is an oenophile with a huge collection of vintage wines. He is of the city--in sensibility and engagement--but lives most of the time in the countryside, in his farmhouse in beautiful Wiltshire, the lawns running down to a flowing stream, the gardens planted with flowers without any colour but white, his well-fed cat, Augustus, stalking the grounds.

As wise as he is, he is also famously waspish. While talking to a stranger he can be supremely inquisitive and gracious; and as easily an idle provocation can bring on his wrath. In shaking fury, I have seen him at a private party mercilessly arraign the husband of an ambassador, who had made a casually foolish remark about Trinidad. "How dare you come and talk to me?" Naipaul raged, "Did I ask you to come and talk to me?" As the victim blubbered, Nadira leapt into the breach. But mostly, Naipaul is wonderfully lofty. That is his true manner. His speech involves the careful deployment of memorable lines and echoing phrases--an almost incantatory effect--which makes his speech as resonant as his prose.

The warmly-timbered voice and Olympian manner can produce singular moments. Some years ago meeting him in Delhi for dinner, hours after a meeting with Salman Rushdie, I told him Rushdie had finally admitted he had been wrong in proclaiming that the only significant writing in India in the last 50 years had been in English. "Good. Good. Good," nodded Naipaul. "I am glad the boy's behaving himself."

But my favourite story is the one told by Paul Theroux. It dates to the time the two writers spent in Uganda in the '60s, Paul being mentored by the older writer. Naipaul was asked to judge a local poetry competition. Announcing the awards to a packed audience, Naipaul gave no first prize, nor a second. Nothing had apparently come up to the mark. Giving away the third prize, he told the eager, thrilled, young black poet, "Promise me one thing." The young boy apparently beamed and nodded happily. "Promise me," said, Vidia, "that you will give up writing poetry."

It is my favorite Naipaul story because it tells us everything we want to know about him as a writer.

For finally it is not the man, but the writing that matters. And here he stands among the very first rank of twentieth century writers. With remarkable artistic integrity--as evinced first in those early letters--he has for nearly 50 years fed his entire life into his writing. Cocooning himself from anything that would distract from his craft, he has worked with a hermetic, white-hot focus, always daring to say it the way he sees it. Anyone who dismisses Naipaul--and it is often faddish to do so--has never read him. Or has read him insufficiently. Or perhaps in precis, some interesting view of his, simplified obscenely for mass consumption.

Original comic capers, his first books--Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, and The Suffrage of Elvira--pioneered the territory now taken for granted by writers from the old colonies. Naipaul wrote them before he was 25, and fifty years on writers are still trying to capture that delightful picaresque tone, and have seldom succeeded in doing so. Naipaul himself was through with that voice by 1959 and has never gone back to it, moving on to an ever more serious engagement with the world.

In the hoopla of today's publishing--quick eclipse following quick fame--it is easy to forget that Naipaul had written a modern classic by the time he was 28. A House for Mr. Biswas has the epic tone and scale of a master not a young man, and is on everyone's list of the 50 greatest books of the twentieth century. Young Vidia wrote the tragicomic epic over a period of 11 months, living in London, and working, as he told me "with complete confidence and stately calm." Appropriately, Vidia's greatest book--about Mohun Biswas, a journalist who fights enslavement at the hands of family and ritual, and triumphs by finally liberating his son and dying in his own house--is a tribute to the man who started it all off, his father.

His tribute paid, with the writing of Biswas, Naipaul was it seems in a way through with the narrow arena of the Caribbean, and free now to be "a loafer," and to fulfil his "longing to see something of life." In 1960 he began to travel, and over the years he has trawled Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even North America, questioning, probing, examining, narrating. Half-made societies, with their easy hypocrisies and lack of human possibility, have suffered particularly under his pitiless gaze. His relationship with India--resulting in three non-fictional works--has gone from ancestral dependency to trenchant criticism to grudging affection, but in it all he has remained scrupulously honest to the witnessing eye.

Magic realism, the great literary wave of the '70s and '80s that swept the world, including India, has left him untouched. He finds it a lazy and unquestioning form, one that allows you to wallow in complacence, to duck the difficult issues. The world has to be faced up to and understood, not evaded. It perhaps has something to do with the claustrophobic irrationalities that surrounded his childhood: joint family, blind rituals, caste and religious pieties. As with Mohun Biswas, he has traveled the road from irrationalism to rationalism, and knows that it has been an escape. Rationality, analysis, perspective, ambition: he knows these are the guides you need to find a way in the world.

Naipaul has many provocative views, and it's possible to disagree with them, but it's impossible to question his intent and his seriousness. Seriousness, not as in the absence of the comic, but as in the avoidance of the false and the contrived. There are no cheap shots in Naipaul's writing. He approaches his craft with a monastic rigour, and no blandishments, commercial or other, cast a shadow on his long writing career. His writing is always shorn of needless adornment: amid contradictions, chaos and complexity, clarity is what he seeks. He may have lost some of the black humour of his early years--he will never admit to it--but his terrific insight into people, events, politics and literature has only grown.

Writing is the most important and painful part of his metabolism. While working on a book, so wound up does he get that by the time he finishes, he is both emotionally and physically drained. A layoff follows; and then the cycle re-asserts itself. Unlike most modern writers he has not allowed himself to become a production, an item, for purposes of vogue or marketing. He is the rare writer who has steadfastly refused to be browbeaten by intellectual fashion or political correctness. He never feels the need to play to any gallery, or to write to any brief. He protects his writer's core, is always honest, and almost always profound. He is also always seeking: a classicist, true to himself, and constantly on the move, ever in search of new ways of dealing with his material--"this amusing and tragic world," that the teenager first intuited.

Though the superficially unchanging poise of his prose suggests he does not experiment, the truth is Naipaul has been pushing the form for years. As far back as 1971, he used a series of different narratives to construct a novel, In a Free State. It won the Booker Prize. In 1977, he wrote India: A Wounded Civilisation, an unusual travel book that was hugely analytical. And then in 1980, after A Bend in the River, he announced his retirement from the novel, declaring "true serious fiction is really a very limited part of one's material, of what is inside one." The fact is that by the '80s--enriched by 20 years of continual traveling--Naipaul had begun to feel that the novel was incapable anymore of processing the world, that it had lived out its high tide.

Consequent upon this, he has looked for other ways of telling stories. Not all the experiments have worked equally well. In my opinion the narrative style of A Turn in the South, India: A Million Mutinies Now, and Beyond Belief disappoints. It consists of creating a tapestry of understanding through the scrupulous recording of first-person voices. It is not easy work for the writer--it means choosing and recording with great accuracy and care. The problem is you hear not Naipaul's voice but that of other people. And when you go to read Naipaul it is Naipaul you wish to hear and none other.

And this, his distinct voice, we get in two other stunning books that have emerged from this away-from-fiction phase. The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are ground-breaking books that are part memoir, part fiction, part reportage, and brilliant in the way they render highly complex ways of seeing. These two books, more than any other, confirm him in the epithet of "a writer's writer."

VI

Anxiety and neurosis. More than any other, these are the two words that inform the vocabulary of Naipaul's keenest readers and friends. And tied in there somewhere is, melancholy. To meet him--or read him--is to be aware of a certain nervous energy surrounding him, a peculiar unease, a hair-trigger temperament. At its most trivial, in conduct, it becomes an eccentricity, the occasional bout of rudeness or a tantrum; but at its most powerful, at the deep end, it is the invaluable pool from which all the great writing flows.

The gifts and the anxiety, and a lifetime of writing and traveling through the wretched swathes of the world--coupled with the extreme slowness of commercial reward and the absence of a more mass popularity--have given him a slightly dark and gloomy bent. In the coda to The Enigma of Arrival, he writes: In my late thirties the dream of disappointment and exhaustion had been the dream of the exploding head ... now, in my early fifties ... I began to be awakened by thoughts of death, the end of things; and sometimes not even by thoughts so specific, not even by fear rational or fantastic, but by a great melancholy. This melancholy penetrated my mind while I slept; and then, when I awakened in response to its prompting, I was poisoned by it, made so much not a doer (as men must be, every day of their lives), that it took the best part of the day to shake it off. And that wasted or dark day added to the gloom preparing for the night. (Naipaul 247)

The truth is Naipaul's early years were so difficult--the trauma of the pioneer making a large claim--that he has been permanently marked by them. In an interview with me he once said of those early years, "I was made really to suffer. It all seems very easy now. The books coming out one after another, but they were created with great anxiety, much suffering. I could have been given a much easier ride, but I wasn't because of the time" ("Arrivals and Other Enigmas").

It has also left him with an unstated bitterness at the ease of contemporary success, where lightweight writers with a book or two occupy the space it took him years to carve. Movingly, he once told me that his insecurities as a writer--as one who could earn his own keep--did not begin to vanish till he was in his mid-forties.

It is an astonishing admission from someone who would have written close to 15 books by then, among them a couple of modern classics; and who, by then, would have won virtually every major award of the English literary world, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W.H. Smith Award, and the Booker Prize. It is also the clue to his remarkable longevity and fecundity as a writer. Writers who lose that certain personal edge--that maddening continual mix of doubt and curiosity and certainty--lose their vocation. They go quickly and gently into the good night.

For me, the most impressive thing, by far, about Naipaul is that he never stops writing. That is, literally, all waking hours of the day. He has trained himself for so long and so assiduously that he never ever switches off. It is an amazing thing to witness. I have known dozens of writers; and they are also other people at other times. But Naipaul is always and only the writer. Always observing. Always analyzing. Always arriving at conclusions. The mind never sinks into a flabby relaxation, into a power-off mode. The writer can never stop doing the only thing he has taught himself to do all his life.

Inevitably then, he is a splendid listener, infinitely curious, absorbing everything with great fixity and concentration. Spend a social evening with him, and by the end of it, he will have a quality fix on everyone he has met, and everything he has seen. Right or wrong, an entire process of imbibing, understanding, and ordering would have played itself out.

The off-handed, baiting remarks are meant to be just that--off-handed, baiting remarks. Some sneer, some acid, some iconoclasm, some levity. A kind of subversive poke at mass culture which wants every complex reality served up in a one-gulp pill, in the right political colouring. The truth is that when it comes to the serious stuff, the writing, none of his opinions--whether about Islam, Africa, or India--are easily arrived at. Unlike the rest of us who buy our views cheaply from mass media, through television channels, newspapers and magazines, Naipaul lives and experiences the world to arrive at his own conclusions.

He always looks at his own life and its lessons to extrapolate the big political positions. There is seldom ever any abstract posturing. No fashionable causes, no bleeding heart prose, no blinkers about the oppressor, or the oppressed. When he proclaims that he is all for individual rights and law, he extols the virtues of western nations versus tribal and closed societies. But it is done on the basis of personal experience: few other societies, as he says, would have allowed him the writer's life, with all its incredible freedoms, satisfactions, and commercial sustainability.

Those who criticize him for railing against Islam or Africa (in the case of Africa time has already proven him to be chillingly right, a seer), forget that he also rails against the increasing shallowness of western civilization, from Tony Blair, to popular culture, to the swank universities. In fact he has utter contempt for western academics--who refuse to look at the world squarely, choosing to cloister themselves in sanitized luxury to propound specious theories that perpetuate themselves. He calls them puppies jumping for biscuits. It is the contempt of the soldier for the accountant, of the working class man for the clerk. Of the real for the fabricated. Inevitably with his impossible standards he despairs for serious writing. Though he has pursued his "noble calling" with the purity it deserves (being proud of having never followed any other vocation), he no longer thinks the best talent gravitates to serious writing. In his reckoning it is cinema that now attracts the best people.

Yet, Naipaul soldiers on. He told me in 2003 that he felt he had only two more books in him (one, Magic Seeds, done since). I doubt that. I suspect he will be writing till his very last day: that is his cross and his redemption. He has already tired of the post-Nobel glory trail taking him around the world. If anything slows the work down, it will be his health. He shares the chronic afflictions of most writers, an anxiety about money and the body. In the last few years it has been less about money more about his failing body: there have been problems with his back and his legs, prompting several medical visits to India (whose doctors he has faith in). This growing physical dereliction, the self-disgust at having grown a belly--he has always harboured a biblical contempt for the fat--have been bringing on a terrible gloom. By an act of will, there is no doubt, he will dispel it--for men must be doers. And his doing is writing. There may not be another great book (he's written enough for three writers), but there will be more books. I would wager when his time is up, he will be found mid-sentence, mid-manuscript.

To date he has already written 26 books--a corpus barely matched by any major writer. Half of them are fiction; the others his peculiar mix of travel, history, analysis and reportage. He frowns on any of it being labeled as journalism. Detractors criticize him for being cussed, but Naipaul is forever open to new information and stimuli. His three books on India are ample evidence of that. And, remember, 22 years after denouncing it as a dead form, he returned to the novel with Half A Life in 2001. And then later still with a kind of sequel, Magic Seeds. The two books, sort of separate pieces of a whole, marry politics, love, and the Naipaulean theme of flawed journeys.

The return to literary fiction can be traced to Nadira, the Pakistani journalist he married ten years ago. The affair it seems started in mythic fashion after Nadira asked him for a kiss on first meeting him, and Naipaul typically replied, "I think we should sit down." Nadira has been a dramatic presence in his life. She represents his polarities. She is the epitome of Punjabi chutzpah--earthy, energetic, optimistic, vital. She has done wonders for his sense of well-being, cosseting him in her love and confidence, as they split their life between Wiltshire, London and their travels through the world.

There is a fine ballet of posture and jurisdiction they have perfected: Nadira is allowed to hector and admonish him--even in public--on all kinds of quotidian issues, but finally they must live their life inside the parameters set by Vidia. It cannot be easy for Nadira, for Vidia is a difficult man. His life is his writing, and the writing purrs on a hair-trigger temperament. But bravely she has taken his life in hand, fiercely defending him against all comers; looking after his books; getting him the deals he deserves; and she has inspired him, once again, to return to the novel. Each time she fills a plate to serve him, each time she leaps into a breach he has angrily opened, each time she puts aside her own needs to defer to his, she knows she is in a position of unique privilege. She curates a literary treasure. She is the keeper of greatness.

Works Cited

French, Patrick. "I'm not here to defend Naipaul's politics." Interview with Nandini Lal. Outlook 10 March 2003.

Naipaul, V.S. "Arrivals and Other Enigmas: V.S. Naipaul's Way in the World." Interview with Tarun Tejpal. July 1998. rpt. <http:// dikigoros.150m.com/naipaultarun.htm>.

--. "The Ceremony of Farewell." Away: The IndianWriter as an Expatriate. Ed. Amitava Kumar. New York: Routledge, 2004. 247-57.

(1) This is the revised version of an essay which first appeared in The Humour and the Pity, edited by Amitava Kumar (New Delhi: Buffalo Book, 2002).

(2) Six years ago, at the end of a short trip, he was at the Maurya Sheraton hotel in Delhi, packing his bags to leave. He wanted to give away his old trousers to the young butler who had been serving them, but Nadira reprimanded him saying it would embarrass the boy. Shamed, Vidia put them back in the suitcase. The boy--puzzled by this quaint bowler-hatted man who carried an aura--missed making the gracious gesture that would have fetched him the trousers. He, perhaps a wearer of jeans outside the hotel, had no need of them. What a miss, I thought, Imagine owning the coat of Dickens. Or the boots of Hardy. I stood by watching--atypically for me, unable to intervene. An enduring sense of piety reined me in. Referring to him as my "abba," Nadira always laughs throatily and says, "You have two fathers--your biological one, and this one." There is no doubt there is some truth in that.