V.S. NAIPAUL : Wanderer Of Endless Curiosity

(3 of 4)

On the road, Naipaul operates largely through honed instinct, avoiding official sources and searching for the obscure informant and off-center incident. Asked why he did not interview Reuben Greenberg, the black Jewish police chief of Charleston, S.C., Naipaul grimaces and says simply, "Too obvious." An ironic comment, considering that Naipaul, also a self-made man of many parts, is now widely considered to be England's greatest living writer. His own faceted history parallels the breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples after the war, a great shaking up of the world, a great shaking up of old cultures and old ideas." In his new novel My Secret History, Paul Theroux offers an affectionate and accurate sketch of his friend and mentor. The character's name is S. Prasad, but the facts and mannerisms are V.S. Naipaul's: "He was an unusual alien: he knew everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned his own house, and had published half a shelf of books. He had won five literary prizes . . . Still, he called himself an exile. He said he didn't belong -- he looked it in his winter coat. Seeing me, he frowned with satisfaction."

A similar expression flickers when Naipaul assesses his own career. "I really don't have a success story to tell," he begins. "My story is one of slog and grind and disappointment and overcoming." Growing up in Trinidad "among advertisements for things that were no longer made," Naipaul rebelled against the prevailing backwater mentality. His model was his father, a journalist who tried to bring new ideas to his insular community. Seepersad Naipaul died in 1953, a defeated man of 47. Yet, as his son has written, "he made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble thing."

Naipaul's success story is similar to those of other gifted outsiders who have become part of the tradition of English letters. Coming from backgrounds they found provincial and embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island society.

Later books grew out of the need for fresh subjects. "England is not laid out like Trinidad. Its life goes on behind closed doors," he notes. "To get material, I've had to travel." What Naipaul conveyed in nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in India he observed that poverty was more dehumanizing than any modern machine. Eight years before Salman Rushdie outraged the Imam, Naipaul had pinpointed the problem of true believers: "In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created. The only function of intellect is to assist that re-creation."