Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Nobel '01, is a
man whose personality may have its unlovely side, and he isn't alone in that,
but whose perspicacity and genius are beyond question, notably (I find) in The
Enigma of Arrival and A Bend in the River. I've always thought of
him as being, like Updike, a pure writer--that is, a man who is first and
foremost a writer, not a man, or an Indian, or a Trinidadian, or an agnostic, or
British. Or whatever (as they say). I was pleased to discover that his long-time
editor Diana Athill had the same opinion (this is from her memoir, Stet).
"I had no conception
of how someone who feels he doesn't belong to his 'home' and cannot belong
anywhere else is forced to exist only in himself; nor of how exhausting and
precarious such a condition (blithely seen by the young and ignorant as
desirable) can be. Vidia's self—his very being—was his writing: a great gift,
but all he had. He was to report that ten years later in his career, when he
had earned what seemed to others an obvious security, he was still tormented by
anxiety about finding the matter for his next book, and for the one after
that...an anxiety not merely about earning his living, but about existing as the
person he wanted to be. No wonder that while he was still finding his way into
his writing he was in danger; and how extraordinary that he could nevertheless
strike an outsider as a solidly impressive man . . ."
And Sir Vidia himself echoed
this in his Nobel speech:
"I have always moved
by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding
political idea. I think that probably lies with my ancestry . . . My father,
who wrote his stories in a very dark time, and for no reward, had no political
idea. Perhaps it is because we have been far from authority for many centuries.
It gives us a special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humor
and pity of things."
Well, maybe. But I feel that way, too. Maybe it's a condition of being,
if you're a scrivener, or a scribbler.
