V.S. NAIPAUL : Wanderer Of Endless Curiosity

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Such declarations give Naipaul the appearance of a political curmudgeon. But, he says with some surprise, "I don't think that way. People turn things around. I'm for individual rights and for law." It is a long view that includes his fascination with ancient Rome ("I can barely express my admiration for it") and the imperial record of the English. Their achievement calls forth some of his best bis: "Pretty terrific. It would be churlish to say otherwise. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It would be unhistorical to say otherwise."

Naipaul is English not so much by an accident of history as by personal acts ^ of intelligence and will. Thirty-eight years in Britain have given him a proper accent, a direct way with service staff and an impatience with romantic abstraction. He has a British wife, Patricia, with whom he shares a house in Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge and a military training area from which distracting gunfire can frequently be heard.

England is where he writes -- slowly. A good day at a recently acquired computer is 400 words. If he produces more, he notes with a laugh, he invariably writes less the following day. On average it takes Naipaul about a year to compose a book. "I'm with it all the time, anxious to get to the end," he says with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family pundit in Trinidad. It is a difficult yoga bend that leaves the writer arched backward with his head on the floor.

Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night. Among his favorites are the Henry plays, with their themes of chaos and shifting fortunes.

Critics generally agree that Naipaul's fortunes are on a permanent foundation. Irving Howe, no pushover, says, "There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him." Alfred Kazin calls Naipaul the "most compelling master of social truth that I know." The writer himself is not overly responsive to praise. He claims to dislike interviews and awards and describes himself simply as a "maker of books." Though England is his base and spiritual home, he prefers the convenience and anonymity of large hotels and jetliners where, 30,000 ft. above the chaos, he can clasp a pillow to his stomach, insist that "reading is too important to do on airplanes" and begin once again to turn high anxiety into high art.