Naipaul's Darkness: Patrick French's 'The World Is What It Is' (Page 3)

When Naipaul was growing up in Trinidad, India was a resting place of sorts for his imagination, "a country out in the void beyond the dot of Trinidad," an "area of darkness." Yet the physical remnants of India were scattered around him: tattered string beds "never repaired because there was no one with this caste skill in Trinidad"; plaited straw mats; brass vessels; books emblazoned with thick, oily ink; brass bells, gongs and camphor burners; a stick of sandalwood; pictures of Hindu deities. In his teenage imagination, fragments from the void coalesced into something rather sinister. In 1949, in a letter to his older sister Kamla, who was studying in India, Naipaul informed her, "I am planning to write a book about these damned people and the wretched country of theirs, exposing their detestable traits. Grill them on everything." In his late 20s, as he grappled with the West Indies in a systematic way, his rancor toward India melded into curiosity, and in 1962 he and Pat embarked on a yearlong journey through the subcontinent, which took them to Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Benares, Nagpur and Kashmir. An account of that trip, An Area of Darkness, was published in 1964, and French calls it "the most influential study of India published since independence." Like most of Naipaul's nonfiction, his first book about India was, to a considerable extent, a sly provocation: he wanted to dazzle and enlighten his readers but also to shock them with sentences of this sort: "I had seen Indian villages: the narrow, broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the choked back-to-back mud houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet."

French's account of the making of An Area of Darkness is the most stirring chapter in The World Is What It Is. His own journalistic experience in India furnished him with the knowledge, sympathy and contacts to trace Naipaul's footsteps. With brio and wit, he dissects the reportorial methods that Naipaul would employ in nearly all of his subsequent travel books. Prominent friends and acquaintances in Britain and the United States would connect Naipaul with notables on the ground (diplomats, newspaper editors, intellectuals, theater directors, poets, government officials, sophisticated expatriates), some of whom would then be pressed into service as hosts, interlocutors, fixers and guides. A few of his Indian hosts came to despise Naipaul ("he was snobbish...a thoroughly nasty human being," recalled one); others were deeply impressed ("he asked a lot of questions, he was a wonderful listener"). At the end of each working day, Naipaul, with unyielding discipline, would return to his hotel room or guesthouse and write up his notes.

India was a jolting experience for him. One of his guides, Dr. J.P. Singh, recalled that "Naipaul was short with the hotel chaps.... He used to say they are very, very lazy chaps...I thought he was having all this anger and contempt primarily because he wanted the country to develop." Pat, who urged him to modulate and soften his views on India, got an earful as well: "Imagine waiters in the filthiest clothes and with the filthiest hands," Naipaul told her, "serving tea in cups which they arrange in their usual finger-dunking way." Some of his hosts shrewdly perceived that Naipaul felt neglected in India. The esteemed Khushwant Singh told French that he found Naipaul "reserved, pleasant and I think a little disappointed that he hadn't been given the kind of reception he expected as a son of the country who had done well."

When Naipaul finally left India and returned to London, he wasted no time in writing to his Indian friends. He was customarily blunt:

The lavatories at Palam [airport] were literally covered with shit and the aerodrome officer could only speak of the shortage of staff (i.e. sweepers).... So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who tolerate everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious pettiness which permeates that vast country.... Probably I am mad. But it seems to me that everything conspires to keep India down.

As a biographer, French is alive to the nuances, quirks and contradictions in Naipaul's character, and he has an acute sense of his subject's displacement and rootlessness. When Naipaul was traveling in Martinique, he expressed nostalgia "for the good humour, tolerance, amorality and general social chaos of Trinidad." Did he really miss Trinidad, or was his nostalgia a convenient fiction that quelled his sense of being adrift? The land of his ancestors, too, began to exert a pull on him. A few months after returning to London, Naipaul acknowledged to a friend, "I suppose I miss India more than I imagined."

With The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness, Naipaul produced rough-edged journalistic reckonings with his past: he traveled, he saw, he wrote. His distinctive personality marked every page of these two books. In 1966 he commenced the research for a very different kind of book: a full-scale history of Trinidad from 1592 to 1813, based almost entirely on documents in the British Museum and the London Library. Early detractors who viewed Naipaul as a Waugh-like Tory might have been taken aback by The Loss of El Dorado, a stupendous indictment of Spanish and British imperialism. Published in 1969, the book is Naipaul's most abundant canvas, a Diego Rivera mural in words teeming with adventurers, cannibals, pirates, outlaws, slaves, hangmen, tavern owners, mercenaries and Jacobins. The Loss of El Dorado is history written with remarkable skill and poise, and the second half of the book, "The Torture of Luisa Calderon," contains Naipaul's most hypnotic language. Parts of El Dorado call to mind Bernal Díaz's eyewitness account of Cortés's triumph in Mexico, The Conquest of New Spain. With its sinewy prose, its innovative use of primary sources and its serene contempt for the machinery of empire, it also resembles Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, and the account of Luisa Calderon's arrest recalls Gabriel García Márquez's novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Naipaul's editors were impressed: Robert Gottlieb at Knopf felt that it was "a very important as well as very beautiful book, and...it will endure." Indeed, it was one of the six books mentioned in Naipaul's Nobel citation. It sold just 3,000 copies in the United States.

Years ago, in a sparkling reminiscence of Naipaul in Granta, Diana Athill, his editor in London, noted that his books tended to sell poorly. Even so, it is surprising to learn precisely how destitute Naipaul was in the 1960s, a time when Anthony Powell declared him Britain's "most talented and promising younger writer." French reports that between 1960 and 1969, Naipaul's gross income after expenses averaged £1,963 a year. "It was a bad time," Naipaul recalled. "Tears lay just below the surface." For several years, in an echo of A House for Mr. Biswas, the Naipauls had no home of their own and bounced from place to place. Naipaul's fortunes began to improve in 1970, when, through the benevolence of friends, he and Pat found a cottage in rural Wiltshire. The rent was £3 a week; they stayed for a decade.

It was a highly productive period for Naipaul. On assignment for Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, he reported from Trinidad, Argentina and Zaire, and the essays Silvers published--coruscating, relentless and brilliant--would be collected in The Return of Eva Perón, with The Killings in Trinidad. During Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975, Naipaul produced India: A Wounded Civilization, an X-ray of Hinduism and the Indian psyche written in his usual pitiless style. When he wasn't working on nonfiction, he wrote the fiction that would cement his reputation: In a Free State (which won the Booker Prize in 1971), Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. (The opening lines of A Bend in the River gave French the title for his book: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.") These three books are dark, brooding, deeply unsentimental depictions of postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean. A Bend in the River unfolds in a chaotic landscape modeled on Mobutu's Zaire, and like Guerrillas it contains scenes of sexual violence that remain shocking today.

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