'The Honesty Which Is Part of His Difficulty'

“For every kind of experience there is a proper form.”

V.S. Naipaul’s observation in Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000) recalls the thinking of a very different sort of writer, Guy Davenport, who titled a 1987 essay collection Every Force Evolves a Form. In his foreword, Davenport explains that the phrase originates with Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers. Then he elaborates: “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.” For Naipaul, those forms were novels and nonfiction narratives that transcend mere reportage. The forces were colonialism’s legacy, the vagaries of history and human nature. If Naipaul had a homeland, it was the English language, not India, Trinidad or England. On Aug. 11, he died, six days before his eighty-sixth birthday.

There are writers whose prime years coincide with one’s awakening as a reader. I started reading Naipaul’s books as they were published beginning in the early nineteen-seventies. I had to catch up with A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) but read In a Free State (1971) when it came out, and the subsequent middle-period masterpieces, Guerillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979). Elsewhere in Reading & Writing, Naipaul describes the nineteenth-century novel as “an extraordinary tool”:

“It did what no other literary form—essay, poem, drama, history—could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn’t been shown before; and it altered vision.”

Naipaul began writing novels as though that were still the case, as though the world and its literatures had not fractured in the twentieth century. By the time of The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his confidence was flagging. Was it a novel or autobiography? In Reading & Writing, he confesses that novels had begun to “distort the unaccommodating new reality” and “encourage a multitude of little narcissisms.”

The quality of Naipaul’s nonfiction remained high. My favorites are An Area of Darkness (1964), The Loss of El Dorado (1969) and Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984). Also, the essay “Conrad’s Darkness”(The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad, 1980), in which he writes: “Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty or seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize even today. I feel this about no other writer of the century. His achievement derives from the honesty which is part of his difficulty, that ‘scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations.’”    

Naipaul was our Conrad, forever a grim outsider. The best introduction I know remains Joseph Epstein’s “A Cottage for Mr. Naipaul,” an essay that serves as both a review of The Enigma of Arrival and an overview of Naipaul’s work up to 1987:

“Whatever his appropriate political label, Naipaul is certainly a conservative by temperament. He has a love for order of an intensity that can be held only by a man repelled by the disorder to which he was born. Naipaul’s natural refinement comes through in all his writing—his hatred of crudity, his contempt for the blatant and the coarse. He has a keen, an almost excruciating sense of the perilousness of civilization. He cannot resist underscoring that nearby a golf course laid out in the administrative city of Yamoussoukro in the Ivory Coast crocodiles are kept and fed live chickens [a reference to “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro” in Finding the Center.]”