A Writer's People Ways of Looking and Feeling: An Essay in Five Parts. By V. S. Naipaul. 189 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95. ALL my life,” V. S. Naipaul writes in the introduction to “A Writer's People,” his dense, dry, frustrating new memoir, “I have had to think about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world.” Why this point is so crucial to Naipaul — indeed, why he seems to construe it as one of the great challenges of his long and distinguished career — is anything but evident. Surely almost every serious writer would make an identical claim. On what other basis can a novelist invent convincing characters, or a nonfiction writer fairly represent divergent opinions and points of view? Then again, Naipaul does not consider himself just a writer, but something grander and more ambitious. His stated project is “fitting one civilization to another.” And he ranges far. The subjects in his new book include Flaubert's relation to antiquity in his historical novel “Salammbô,” the classical Roman historians, Buddhism, and the history of the British empire, as well as memoirs of writers who influenced him, like his fellow Trinidadian (and fellow Nobel Prize winner) Derek Walcott; the British novelist Anthony Powell, who befriended Naipaul a few years after what he sardonically refers to as “my bright boy's scholarship” got him to Oxford, and whom Naipaul repays with an extremely unflattering portrait; and the great Indian memoirist Nirad Chaudhuri. The result is a bracing, erudite ride, but also a bumpy one. Grandiloquence has always been the Achilles' heel of Naipaul's writing, his fiction and nonfiction alike, for all its myriad strengths. But despite Naipaul's rather grandiose claims about his book's purpose, “A Writer's People” is actually better understood as the chronicle of the young Naipaul's arriving in London and discovering, as he puts it, that “romantic and beautiful though the idea is, there is no such thing as a republic of letters where ... all bring their work and all are equal.” His surprise at this, all these years later, is, well, surprising. Although Naipaul does not often confront the topic directly, he says enough to give the impression that the lack of interest that greeted his early work in Britain still rankles. In his telling, the main English writers did not understand him, and he had little appreciation for them (the book is crammed with dismissive comments about Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and many others). “It is amazing to me,” he writes, “how often I was baffled by famous novels of the time.” His estrangement was all but complete. “I was trying to make my way,” he notes, “as a writer in a place which really had no room for me, which had its own ideas of what writing was.” This is wonderfully written, and no doubt Naipaul felt this way. But is what he's saying true? Is there really an essentially English way of seeing and an altogether different Indian way of seeing, as Naipaul asserts in “Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way,” the first of the book's two chapters on India, part reminiscence about his family's roots, part portrait of Gandhi? And are there also, as Naipaul suggests in pages on his native Trinidad, still other ways, one black, the other immigrant Indian? Fertile mistake One may question Naipaul's premise, but it in no way negates that he is a very great writer. And even if, in this book, his oddly skewed and more than a little self-referential views take up too much space, his work over the past half-century entitles him to those views, especially since they may have been the fertile mistake from which his best writing has emerged. Still, “A Writer's People” is as much an argument as it is a memoir. And the argument seems extremely dubious. To begin with, British literary life in the 1950s was far richer and more varied than the closed establishment world Naipaul describes. Greene, Waugh, Anthony Powell and others situated along the narrow band that stretched from realistic social commentary to realistic social satire were one element in this literary “conversation,” but by no means the only or even the most interesting element. One looks in vain for any mention in Naipaul's account of the angry working-class plays of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker and the theatrical experimentation of Pinter and N. F. Simpson. And he says nothing about the avant-garde fiction of Flann O'Brien, B. S. Johnson or the young J. G. Ballard. It's a reminder that Naipaul has always been an “essentialist.” The salient facts of his life — leaving Trinidad for Britain, exchanging a provincial life for a metropolitan one, and, subsequently, becoming an inveterate traveler — made him something of a professional outsider, with the result that he is more rather than less convinced of the existence of fixed identities; he remains unpersuaded by the idea that cultural and national identity might be contingencies. This, in turn, leads him to sweeping generalizations that, again, may serve him well as an artist (though probably less well as a travel writer), but are difficult to take seriously. Thus, the basis of meaning in modern literature is that “its assessment of the world brings all the senses into play and does so within a frame of reason.” (Really? What about Beckett?) A poet like Walcott, with black Trinidad “deep in his head and heart, will look at the rest of the world in his own way,” Naipaul asserts. “He will not (to give an extreme example) be interested in Tony Powell's England, or feel sufficiently connected to it, to be able to judge the writing that comes out of it.” (But why? Walcott's interests range from Broadway musicals to the poetry of Joseph Brodsky.) In sum, there is far too much of Naipaul the Lawgiver in “A Writer's People.” But what remains impressive, even in this disappointing book, is Naipaul's sense of wonder at the worlds he has discovered. For all his haughtiness, something fresh and innocent infuses his early memories and his recollections of the alienation and loneliness he felt in his early years in London. Few writers have traveled as far from their origins as Naipaul has, and done it so willingly and with such single-mindedness, and few have regretted that estrangement quite so much. – The New York Times __
