‘I’ll read it with great interest,’ V.S. Naipaul said, as he took the bound proof of my first novel in his hands and peered up at me with a mixture of alarm and fatigue.
Then Naipaul’s wife, Nadira, ushered me out the door of their Wiltshire cottage, suggesting that we take a walk. I was acutely aware that I was moving through the landscape of one of my favourite Naipaul books, The Enigma of Arrival – hills and downs, and ‘flat wet fields, with the ditches as water meadows’. Beyond lay a narrow river, the Avon (not Shakespeare’s Avon), on whose swirling glassy surface, a black swan would occasionally glide by.
Naipaul’s life there was hard won. He had grown up in colonial Trinidad, where his north Indian family had been sent as indentured labourers by the British, a practice that continued long after the abolition of slavery in 1834. He had come from that ‘dot on the map’ to Oxford on a scholarship in 1950. The twenty years that lay between what he described as ‘the blackness’ of his time at Oxford, which included the death of his father, and when he came to feel at home in Wiltshire were years of tremendous intellectual growth, travel and the creation of a dazzling body of work; but they were marred, in his mind, by feelings of homelessness, financial precarity (his income through the 1970s averaged £7,600 a year) and what he described as a ‘fear of extinction’. Having tried and failed to emigrate to Canada, it was not until the early 1980s, when he was fifty, that his life in England acquired the stability I witnessed then.
When Nadira and I returned an hour or so later, soaked to the bone from an October shower, I glanced into Naipaul’s drawing room, with its two rose-coloured armchairs and facing shelves, full of Penguin classics in black and orange – and saw that my novel, which I had called The Temple-goers (a Naipaulian formulation for Hindu India), was gone.
‘I’ve read thirty pages,’ Naipaul said when we reconvened for drinks (Bushmills and soda). ‘We’ll talk about it later.’ But then we began to talk about it. He asked me what I thought about ‘it’, his fingers working rhythmically against the suede arm of his chair. ‘It feels slow and laboured,’ he said, sounding agitated. ‘You are doing the details and jazzing it up with the sex, I presume, but there is no sense of the narrative. You need to give a line, a line.’ He rose very quickly and went around the room. He was looking for Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. ‘I don’t want you to write like Maugham,’ he said, ‘but read him for narrative.’
The ‘narrative line’, he explained, is something that ‘cuts through the fiction, small things attach themselves to it, but don’t worry about the small things’. He gave the example of Wuthering Heights: ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ Great Expectations was another example. ‘There’s the Pip, Pirrip business,’ he said, referring to how Pip gets his name. ‘Then there’s the scene with the convict. It is an arresting beginning,’ he said, with yet greater urgency.
I was twenty-eight. I had published one book, a memoir called Stranger to History, in which I had gone in search of my Pakistani father from whom I had been estranged for most of my life, and who was, at the time, serving as the Governor of Punjab. Naipaul, at seventy-seven, was in the twilight of a glittering career spanning half a century, in which he had received practically every accolade the republic of English letters had to offer, including what he only ever called ‘the Swedish Prize’. I should have felt grateful that one of my literary heroes was reading my work, but all I could think of was my poor novel, which six months away from publication, already typeset and in print, was receiving its first savaging – from a Nobel laureate, no less.
‘I suppose you can’t do any significant rewriting at this stage,’ he said, seeming to come back to himself. I admitted that I couldn’t. ‘Well, leave it as it is. Take this as advice for the future. I hope you know that this is not about your talent. You know I have a great feeling for your work, for your mind. This is why I want you to learn about the importance of direct narrative.’
He spoke then about what would be his last book – The Masque of Africa (2010). ‘I spent eight to nine months in East Africa in 1966 . . .’ he said, reciting the opening from memory. ‘Then a quick round-up of the other times I came. That gives rhythm,’ he explained. ‘But let’s not speak more about it. I think you will be able to detect what I mean. I’ll read some more.’
But he could not let it go. Moments later, he asked me again what the novel was about and where it was headed. The tension in his voice seemed to come from a place other than my novel, as if he were reliving his own fear of falling, his own missteps getting started as a writer in 1950s Britain. ‘There’s the trainer,’ he said. ‘You were quite obsessed with that trainer,’ he added pointedly, alluding to something we had never openly discussed. I was not out yet, but in the words of my mother, ‘This book could only have been written by someone who was gay.’
At dinner that evening, in a long room with a Japanese screen of a red-breasted bird picking its way through the snow, Naipaul consoled me. ‘I don’t want you to be cast down,’ he said. ‘We all need people to guide us. My father would have been a better writer than me,’ he said, ‘if someone had been there to guide him. He was writing in the 1930s and thought it was his duty to write about Hindu ritual because it was this strange, odd thing in our lives. But really, he should have been writing about his own life – his childhood, the people he grew up with.’
The table was lit with candles. Nadira came in and out of the room as we talked, serving the delicious scallop risotto she had made. ‘This is not about your talent,’ Naipaul continued. ‘You have a feeling for the natural world, for language, but I want to tell you something about narrative. All writing is about narrative.’
He wanted to know if I had understood. I was not sure I had. I was so full of grief at having let him down. ‘It’s terrible to disappoint Vidia,’ a woman at a book launch in London had once told me, and now I knew what she meant. I mumbled something about wanting the narrative to mirror the protagonist’s own confusions. He seized on this. ‘Blur the narrative to correspond with the narrator’s blurred state?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, hoping not to damn the novel completely. He searched my face. ‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘to create the feeling of a character adrift without needing to have the narrative be adrift.’
After dinner, he was suddenly tired. When he had gone upstairs, Nadira tried to comfort me. He had read with great interest, she said, with her uncanny ability to ventriloquise him. ‘He got us out of the house so he could read. He is tired because he has been reading. He reads with great concentration.’
–
I first met Naipaul on a late-summer evening in London in 1999. I was eighteen, and about to set off for college in America. My mother asked me to join her for dinner with Nadira and Naipaul at the writer’s flat on Cranley Gardens. Through slanted windows, the lights of Harrods were visible. ‘You know what Vidia calls it?’ Nadira asked, as she brought salmon and wild rice to the table. ‘Harrabs!’ she said, and everyone laughed. It was my first taste of Naipaul’s humour, with its slight courting of danger. Over dinner, conversation turned to my going to college. Naipaul told me not to go. ‘Except in the case of the “exact sciences”,’ Nadira filled in, ‘Vidia is against it.’ When my mother looked to him for further explanation. ‘Indians, Tavleen,’ he said, turning to her, ‘they go to these places, they get dazzled by the institution and they come away having learnt nothing but the babble.’ My mother looked somewhat taken aback. ‘What should he do instead?’ she asked. ‘He should go boldly into the world,’ Naipaul said, looking at me, his eyes brimming with mischief.
Nadira and my mother were friends and colleagues, who had known each other since covering the Afghan jihad in the 1980s. At the time, she was dating a newspaper owner called Rehmat Shah Afridi, who had been a close personal friend of Osama bin Laden during the jihad. She wrote a regular column in a Pakistani daily called ‘Letter from Bahawalpur’. Having drifted apart, they reconnected in 1998, when Nadira Khannum Alvi turned up in Mumbai, reborn as the new Lady Naipaul.
I met Naipaul a couple more times in my early twenties. Once, in 2002, in New Delhi. I was at Amherst College writing a thesis on Gandhi, and while teaching a bartender at the Maurya Sheraton Hotel how to make a martini, he blew a hole through the core of my thesis statement. When I mentioned how Gandhi, through a programme of celibacy and dietetics had overcome the body and therefore the British, Naipaul pointed out that the British could still have simply killed him, ‘And what kind of victory would that have been?’ He was fascinated by Gandhi’s flaws, but would always say, ‘It is of a great man that we speak.’ We crossed paths again in 2006, at Antonia Fraser’s book party in London, when I was preparing to sell my first book on proposal. But it wasn’t until 2007, during his trip to New Delhi to participate in a BBC film about his life called The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul, that our relationship ceased to be an adjunct of my mother’s friendship with Nadira.
It began with Nadira asking that I accompany Naipaul the next day as the BBC crew filmed him riding the newly built Delhi metro. Over the next ten days, now at the National Museum, now drinking Jack Daniel’s at his suite in the Maurya Sheraton, we became friends in our own right. I had by then read all his work and it was a joy for me to be able to talk to him about the more technical aspects of writing. In its intensity, and because the air always crackled a little when he was around, those early days of my friendship with Naipaul resembled the friendships one forms in eighth grade, when all you want to do is spend every waking moment with your new friend.
One evening, after the crew had left, Nadira and Naipaul came to my flat for dinner. I had never had him over on my own before and was a little daunted. She said he wished to tell me something. Filing away small spoonfuls of the yellow dal he specifically requested, he looked gravely up at me and told me not to obsess about my father, who I had been estranged from for most of my life. He was in part the subject of my first book. ‘You’ve done it now,’ Naipaul said. ‘You’ve looked at it from every angle. You have to move on.’ That need to keep moving both as a writer and a human being and, above all, to never allow yourself to be bogged down by corrosive people or situations, was the paramount Naipaulian lesson.
He ran like a thread through the defining moments of my life. He was there after I made the journey to Lahore to rediscover my father; and he was there again, in 2011, when my father was assassinated by his own bodyguard. His killing was on the front page of every major newspaper in the world, lamented by the likes of the Pope and Hillary Clinton. He had died a hero, fighting for a poor Christian woman, accused of blasphemy. To me, though, he had been a distant, and later domineering figure, with violent prejudices against Jews, Hindus and homosexuals. A man I once heard tell my younger brother, ‘I don’t care if you’re a rapist, or a murderer, but if you’re a fag, I’ll fucking kill you.’
Nadira, who knew my father from Lahore, was among the first to message me when he was assassinated: ‘Your father has been shot. He was killed by his gunman. We are here. Nadira.’ Shortly after, I was with Naipaul in Wiltshire. He asked me how I was doing. I must have begun to speak of my father in a way that struck Naipaul as false, channelling what others were saying about him, because he stopped me short. ‘But your father,’ he said, ‘was your great enemy, so you must also be relieved that he’s dead.’ It was the kind of absolution only Naipaul, who loved the human heart, with all its capacity for malice and generosity, could offer. And it freed me from the guilt I felt at being released from the heaviness of my father’s presence.
Naipaul brought a heaviness of his own. When I married a man from Tennessee at a small ceremony on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Naipaul didn’t come. He was in New York at the time, but his aversion to homosexuality prevented him from attending the wedding (‘Vidia is busy,’ came the terse email from Nadira). It did not prevent me from attending his funeral a few years later. I watched his body disappear on a conveyor belt into the maw of an electric oven. I took notes, ‘kept the record’, as he often liked to say.
He wanted to be judged solely by ‘the work’, and in a sense he was. ‘Nasty man, great writer,’ they said at his funeral. Even when I fell out with Naipaul, I never fell out with the work. And even when he was monstrous, he was far more interesting than most. He taught me about Japanese painting and Chola bronzes, about the plants and trees in the garden in Wiltshire, which he had planted himself, and how to read history laterally, always making sure to judge a period or event in one part of the world against what was happening elsewhere. From reading the annotations in his books – the single note in blue ink at the back of Troyat’s biography of Pushkin: ‘Pushkin had read so much that he couldn’t see with his own eyes’ – I learnt to read with a pen in hand. Following his example, I began to use Garamond size sixteen when I worked, which only the house style of this magazine prevents you from seeing.
Our relationship contained the same admixture of cruelty and tenderness that defined all his close relationships. It was as if he could only rest after reconciling himself, and those around him, to the severest version of the truth. There was something clarifying in surviving Vidia, just as it was clarifying to see ‘the work’ survive the man. ‘The trouble with Vidia,’ Nadira wrote, when the business about my novel got ugly, is that ‘he does not give anything of himself, but when he does, then it is 100 per cent, and it can be unnerving.’ He had a Brahminical adherence to the idea of vocation, and it gave our relationship its edge.
Why – you might ask – would I actively seek out the opinion of someone I knew could be so unkind? I was young and full of hubris. A part of me wanted to subject myself to the severest critic I knew and see where I came out. A part of me felt that what Naipaul had to teach me was more important than the passing damage he could do me. I have never met anyone as exacting as him, so much the real thing. He redefined the meaning of what it is to be a writer for me as one who cannot lie, even as I wondered what inadvertent violence he did the truth by only ever looking at it in so harsh a light.
–
I thought he had said all that he wanted to say to me that day in Wiltshire, and so I remember feeling distinctly unnerved by the email I received a few days later, after I had returned to New Delhi, where I was living at the time: ‘Darling, Vidia wants to talk to you. We tried ringing your Indian number. Please call Wiltshire. Love you and MISS YOU, your aunt.’
I called and Nadira answered. ‘Vidia has finished the book and is very agitated,’ she said.
There was some shuffling about on the other end, a picking up and putting down of receivers – Naipaul wanted to take the call in his office. ‘What I’m going to say now,’ he began, after enquiring briefly about my journey home, ‘is in the context of your great talent. I say it not to cast you down but to draw out that talent. I’ve finished the book now. You began writing non-fiction and made a transition to fiction. But fiction is very different, I want you to learn about narrative, about changing the pace of the narrative, about tone. The subject you’ve tackled is immensely ambitious, which is nice, but I wish you’d tried something simpler.’
The narrative didn’t change, he explained, even after the murder in the novel. There was something still about it. The main character didn’t change. There was no development. ‘I don’t want you to be subtle,’ he said. ‘I want you to be direct. Don’t be so subtle.’
He asked if Andrew Kidd – his former publisher at Picador and now my agent at Aitken Alexander – had helped me with any of this. Naipaul was distressed that he had not. He wanted me to go back to Pushkin’s stories for narrative and economy. ‘With Pushkin, there’s a coat hanging in the room, and the scene is there,’ Naipaul said. ‘See what he does. He’s very clear, isn’t he?’
And what was this business about Spain? ‘Was it necessary, or did you just put that in . . . ?’
I tried to explain that it reflected the narrator and his girlfriend’s failed attempt at life in the West.
‘But you must state it simply and directly,’ Naipaul said, and writing the line for me, began, ‘Despite my great love of India, I found myself in Spain, then this happened, then that happened . . .’ You must make things easier for the reader. And don’t feel that by doing this you are being in any way less subtle.’
As I listened to him, I marvelled that this man, known to be so ungenerous – who had implored a young girl who brought him a piece of writing ‘to promise never to write again’; who, when asked to judge a literary competition in Uganda, only awarded a third prize – was so natural a teacher.
Our conversation now turned, in an oblique way, to the homosexual element in the novel. Naipaul had made clear his distaste for homosexuality: ‘I was myself subjected to some sexual abuse by an older cousin,’ he told his biographer, ‘I was corrupted, I was assaulted. I was about six or seven. It was done in a sly, terrible way and it gave me a hatred, a detestation of this homosexual thing.’ I feared his scorn. I had seen it directed at the writer Vikram Seth. When asked by a friend why Seth was spending so much time in Brazil, Naipaul’s eyes gleamed with suppressed amusement. ‘Boys?’ he said with a mock gravity. ‘Yes, yes, yes . . . A lot of boys in Brazil.’ When he asked me what my mother thought of my novel, I sensed he was anticipating her disapproval as a conduit to express his own. I said that she had found the characters unsympathetic and the story dark. ‘But that wouldn’t matter,’ said the author of A Bend in the River, ‘if the narrative line was clear, it wouldn’t matter that it was dark, you see. These new pieces you’re doing . . . is the narrative in them clearer?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Good, good. I want to see them when they’re done, before publication. Have they sold this anywhere else?’
‘No. Only in the UK.’
‘I think they would find it hard.’
He stressed again that I was making a transition from non-fiction to fiction; most people do the opposite, which is easier.
‘Do you think I’ll be able to make the transition?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s a transition you’ll make very well,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be saying all this to you if I didn’t think that.’ But he had also made it clear that it was not a transition I had made yet with this, my first novel.
–
I was worried about Naipaul reading The Temple-goers for reasons other than those he had outlined. There were characters in the novel based on him and Nadira, whom we had not discussed. Moreover, the man who believed fiction could not lie (‘An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally’) was circling around a difficulty that had a deeper origin. The emotional mechanism of the novel – a triangle in which the protagonist, Aatish Taseer, develops a passion for his trainer, Aakash, which weakens and destroys his relationship with his girlfriend, Sanyogita – had been imported wholesale from my life in England.
The character of the trainer came to me when I moved back to India in 2006. It was a time when I read seriously – as Naipaul would say, ‘in a gobbling way’ – worked on my book, and went to the neighbourhood gym in Sundar Nagar. There I met Ashish, the man who would become the model for my trainer. I was intrigued by his restlessness, by an unevenness that made him in one context an adherent Brahmin to his family, full of caste prejudices, and, in another, a man of hookah bars and nightclubs, conducting a secret affair with a rich girl. I was intrigued by how the different characters within him remained distinct, never speaking to one another. To me, it represented how we lived in India then – how I lived too – on multiple moral planes, never seeking a unified self, never seeking to be, as Naipaul was, the same man everywhere and to everyone. ‘Your main character, this gym trainer,’ Naipaul said, his voice trembling with anger, in a second phone call, a week on from the first. ‘You make him do so many things. He’s a bisexual, he’s a religious man, he’s a trainer, but the problem is that he’s uninteresting. He comes
across as someone who eats a lot and talks a lot. Is he really like this in real life?’
I think he was. Ashish must have caught me looking at him one day, when we were both changing in the gym, his chest hair thick between his pecs, the outline of his cock visible through the cheap cotton of the bronze-coloured VIP underwear he wore. He asked me if I knew a trainer at the gym called Sunil. ‘I think he comes after you leave,’ Ashish said. ‘Anyway, he was called for a personal training to the house of a gay. They took him there blindfolded and brought him into the gay’s office. The gay puts sixty thousand down on the table and says, “Sucking.” Sunil ran out from there, but they had bodyguards and Alsatians and Dobermanns, and they say, “If you don’t sucking, we’ll let them out and they’ll make keema out of you.”’
‘What did he do?’ I said, thinking to myself that he was trying out a new persona for my benefit. ‘He’s sucking, man,’ Ashish said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s sucking, sucking, for one hour, sucking . . .’
He screwed up his dark lips so that their pink interior was more visible.
It was this country, with new kinds of people in new environments, feeling its way to a new way of being, old unintegrated selves existing alongside adopted selves, that I felt was my natural material. I never fully knew if Naipaul’s objection was against that material itself, or whether truly it was technical. Had my novel revealed something about me that made Naipaul recoil on some deeper level? I couldn’t say. What I do know is that I had had about as much direct contact with the man, not the writer, as I wanted. Any more, I felt, would harm my own development, my voice, the distinct way of looking that comes to every writer from his distinct set of circumstances.
–
Once I got off the phone with Naipaul, I tried to distil something optimistic from his reaction. ‘So this is what I’ll do for the next few months,’ I wrote in a note to myself. ‘Read huge amounts and work on narrative. On smaller, simpler pieces and subjects. I will treat what he said as my first review and console myself in the knowledge that not everyone has V.S. Naipaul as their first reviewer.’
But Naipaul was not content to leave things there. Ten days after we spoke, another email from Nadira arrived.
18 October 2009
Dearest Aatish,
Vidia has been brooding a lot ever since he finished your book. He is at a crossroad himself on what should he do that would not offend you in any way. First of all I must tell you that he has never read a book through, but for you he did. He saw many narrative flaws and a lot of little hiccups that Shruti or Andrew should have spotted and made you go over them, but he says again that you do have the talent to be a very good writer and to be that you have to be ready to learn.
I told him that you would not hold this against him, but that you will in time remember him with kindness. Aatish, Vidia is willing to teach you narrative structure personally if you are willing to work with him.
He learned the hard way by himself and your book reminded him of his very early work when he was twenty and trying to write. So what do you say?
Are you willing to come and be taught?
He has never done this and if you say no you must never tell anyone.
He will teach you in complete secrecy because you are an upcoming writer and he feels that he will teach you to walk and then run.
I am nervous sending you this, but you may find it hard to understand but we do love you like a son.
Nadira Khala
Reading it on my Blackberry, I felt a chill. The enclosed world of Wiltshire, with its strange intensities heightened by solitude, was so distant from the complexities of Delhi, where Indian writing in English was itself a rarefied sphere, soon to be the locus of class wars, cultural revival and Hindu nationalism. To be taught by Naipaul would be an honour, but it also seemed to contain the risk of annihilation. And I did not like the hush in Nadira’s tone, the whispered secrecy of ‘if you say no you must never tell anyone.’ It was meant to be generous, but it felt vaguely threatening.
For the sake of perspective, and to open a window on the close air of Wiltshire, I decided to confide in a friend who was translating my first book from English into Hindi. Amitosh had grown up in a small town near Delhi, full of Hindi and Punjabi literature and theatre, before moving to Bombay to pursue a career as a Bollywood actor. We had been friends for only a couple of years, but he struck me as someone who understood the practice of apprenticeship, both in its historical context, and in the way it worked within the Hindi film industry.
‘This guru-shishya (preceptor-student) idea is a bad one,’ he said. ‘If you were fifteen, it would be one thing, but you’re not at the age where you can go and sit at his feet. And, besides,’ he added, ‘there’s no mantra, no ucharana (recitation) that he can teach you. You have to make your own way, Aatish.’ Moreover, he said, confirming my worst fears, Naipaul will look for what you have learnt from him in your next work. If you defy him, you’re the ungrateful student; if you follow him, he takes the credit. ‘Either way,’ Amitosh said, ‘Naipaul plants his flag. And who knows,’ he added, speaking from his experience of the malice Bollywood reserves for newcomers, ‘he might even be wanting to stifle you.’
I laughed, and said that surely Naipaul, with his life’s work behind him, would have no desire to do that.
‘This particular desire,’ Amitosh said, ‘never leaves you, no matter how old or successful, you get.’
Listening to him, I was reminded of a story Naipaul liked to tell. An older writer goes to see his longtime editor and asks him if he’s publishing any promising new writers. ‘Oh, yes,’ the editor says, and rattles off some names he’s excited about. ‘Oh good,’ the writer says, after listening a while, ‘I want you to stamp on them very hard.’
–
I answered Nadira as tactfully as I could. I said that I loved those moments in Naipaul’s writing, where he evaluates his own missteps and mistakes. ‘I want very much to make my own mistakes,’ I wrote. ‘Those moments of slipping and falling, understanding why, and working through to a better model are among the most powerful moments in writing. A writer is made by those moments.’ I also said that I was forced to ask myself a question that had become part of my reckoning. What would Naipaul do? Would he go and learn at the feet of another writer? ‘And my feeling – though, of course, I could be wrong – was that even if there had been someone to learn from, he would not have gone.’
I was about to hit send, but then, out of what must have been my growing fear of Naipaul, and the fear that perhaps I was throwing away a remarkable opportunity, I drafted a new email, one that was at once more equivocating and, inadvertently, more offensive: ‘I am overwhelmed by the generosity of his offer. But tell me, what do you have in mind when you say come here and learn? Do you mean Wiltshire? And for a few days or weeks? Or would he prefer I sent him writing? I ask both for practical reasons but also because there is a kind of influence I don’t want to expose myself to . . .’
The reply came in the form of a phone call. Nadira cooing on the phone about how I should not take it badly. Vidia, she explained, was just worried about how brutal publishing culture was these days and how people wouldn’t give me a second chance. I realised that the latter formulation was a reworking of one of Naipaul’s own sacred rules when it came to people: ‘No second chances.’
Then he came on the phone. I could tell from the thickness of his voice that he was enraged. The same mixture of insight and humour that I had heard him use against any number of subjects, from Arabs (‘they’re very wicked people; a little war won’t hurt them’), Africans (‘the African story is a very short one’), and Indians (‘they live for the pleasure of lying’), to the welfare state, was now turned on me.
‘I’ve been brooding about your book,’ he began. ‘I feel it’s a kind of journal that could have gone on and on. You had this ambition to write a novel, but you just loaded it with experiences that happened to you. You haven’t understood the fictional form. You haven’t understood that it must present a complete experience to the reader. The comprehension of that experience cannot be going on through the book. You have no natural talent for fiction,’ he added, ‘but you felt you must do this thing anyway.’
It hurt to hear this, but some part of me stepped back and felt a kind of appreciation for how, in a world where everyone wanted to be liked, here was a man who seemed almost incapable of lying, especially when it came to writing.
‘I was thinking of how I would talk to you about this book,’ he said. ‘I was thinking I might put it to you as a series of questions, but you have all these answers,’ he said, cutting off my attempts to respond. ‘And they’re not enough. You drag us off to Spain. You have reason, you say, but it’s not enough.’ He returned to his original line of attack. He was angry at Andrew and Shruti Debi, my Indian publisher, for letting me down, for not telling me to go back to the work. ‘They’re setting you up for a great disappointment.’ He was convinced, despite the UK proof sitting in his house in Wiltshire, that the book had not sold anywhere but India. When I reminded him that Viking had bought the book in the UK, he returned to his central theme. ‘That’s very good, but they’re setting you up for a great fall. Have Andrew and Shruti not talked to you about the book’s shapelessness?’
I said they hadn’t and that they had liked it very much.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s confused.’
Then he began to use a strategy I had seen him use in his work: targeting the lies we tell ourselves. It was one of his great lines – ‘The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.’
‘But perhaps you know all this,’ he said, ‘perhaps you know what I am talking about.’
I didn’t reply.
‘That is enough for today,’ he said. ‘You must send me some new work, and when you come to see me, we’ll talk about it.’
‘Thank you, Sir Vidia.’
‘You should thank me,’ he snarled. ‘Because I have written books too, you know. And, in 1951, I wrote a book like this one, which I loaded up with experience and, though I knew it wasn’t headed anywhere, I carried on, feeling that I could get by on good writing and style. So I did and hoped for the best. But probably you know what I mean. I could have done an Andrew on you, but I didn’t want to do that. I, out of my concern and love for you, wanted to help.’
I thought we were done, but it continued. He now minded the character of the writer and his wife. What was the point of them? The book was too long. ‘You felt you had to write a long book,’ he said, ‘so it’s nearly 120,000 words . . .’
‘It’s not even ninety . . .’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I must have counted the lines wrong. Leave this book. We’ll speak after you’ve thought a little about why you want to write fiction. There are many other kinds of writing, travel, history, journal writing,’ he added with sarcasm. ‘All very impressive. The novel was a form that became popular very late in the nineteenth century. And I think it’s at its end . . .’ he said, as if I had just dealt it a final fatal blow. He was no longer drawn to the book’s ambition, nor did he believe I could make the transition to fiction. ‘I think you’ll find it very hard,’ he said.
When I got off the phone, I remember feeling my very existence as a writer depended on my ability to weather this dressing-down.
Even then, I valued my time with Naipaul. He had shown me a darkness I always knew was there. Though I don’t know to what extent he himself was aware of it. Once, when we were in Delhi, and a man asked him what his work was about, Naipaul said, ‘It does not have a single unifying theme, but I have tried and not been able to find a philosophical explanation for the problem of cruelty.’ I don’t think he would have thought of himself as capable of cruelty. In the 2008 BBC film that marked the beginning of our friendship, The Strange Luck of V.S. Naipaul, he says, when asked about his reputation, ‘I’m a very gentle person, and, I feel, it’s not in my power to damage other people, or things, whereas other people can, as it were, damage me.’
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Nadira wrote me a letter shortly after, trying to soften the blows, saying that the only other time he had tried to help someone was his brother Shiva, who had sent him ‘a very lazy draft’ of North of South (1978).
‘Vidia literally rewrote the book,’ she said, ‘which ironically is the only book that everyone praises Shiva for doing. It was such an unpleasant exercise that he promised himself that he would never help anyone again.’
Shiva died of alcoholism in 1985 – and now after having had a taste of Vidia’s ‘help’ I confess that a part of me wondered if Vidia, whether inadvertently or deliberately, had crushed him. He had seemed in a kind of nervous fog as we spoke, half blinded by rage. And, later, when we made amends, Nadira said he had no memory of our conversation at all.
The distant past was growing closer as Naipaul got older. The conversation about my novel had always been tinged by the resurgent memory of his own beginnings. When I once asked him how it felt now, towards the end, he said, he would not do it again. ‘It was too hard . . . too hard,’ he repeated bitterly.
Photographs courtesy of the author.
