Making of a Writer and his Identity
By Rajnish Wattas

Literary Occasions: Essays
By V.S.Naipaul Picador. India Rs 395. Pages 195

"NOT formally educated, a nibbler of books rather than a reader, my father worshipped writing and writers. He made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble thing" --- prophetic words written in 1983 by the son, Sir V.S.Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

For any die-hard Naipaul fan, even a warmed-up anthology of his old essays is a literary treat and, for the uninitiated, it is an elegant entry into the legendary writer’s world. The compilation truly fulfils the promise made in the blurb on the book jacket that Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal enquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particular.

Much of Naipaul’s writings, as Pankaj Mishra notes in the introduction to Literary Occasions, are about self-reflection. "To recognise the fragmented aspects of your identity; to see how they enable you to become who you are; to understand what was necessary about a painful and awkward past and to accept it as part of your being... is what much of Naipaul’s work has been compulsively engaged in."

The book comprises eleven essays broadly structured into two parts. The first section consists of writings that explain and dilate on Naipaul’s personal journey into the discovery of himself as a writer. In his essay on Reading and Writing as a prologue to the book, he says, "I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition." Such gumption, determination and the stamina to persevere in a precocious, childhood fantasy perhaps gave Naipaul the will to realise his calling in life.

This essay also reveals his life-long search for identity and the concerns of a diaspora writer. It was the genesis of the writer feeling disconnected with both ‘home’ and ‘away’ — his childhood Trinidadian Hindu society and his ‘Mother Civilisations’ in faraway India and farther away in Britain. "Naipaul remembers understanding and feeling more watching a Ramlila than by watching The Prince and the Pauper, despite also strongly feeling "two worlds away" from all things India."

After tracing his early influences and impressions as a child of the written word in Trinidad through his father’s poignant journalistic career and the Caribbean school days, he reminiscences about his struggles in London to get published. In the essay, Prologue To An Autobiography, which first appeared in the book Finding The Centre, he brings alive his grit and determination to make his mark as a writer in the big, developed world in spite of all the hardships, financial deprivation and setbacks. With the Trinidad government scholarship gone, and no other financial support, Naipaul soldiered on to write and make a living out of it. What a stark contrast to our present-day one-book, million-dollar- advance wonders!

He emotionally – and it’s rare to see the notoriously crusty and acerbic writer in such a mode – writes with great feeling about his father who sowed the first seeds of ambition to be a writer. In the foreword to The adventures of Gurudeva, he recalls the lessons he learned from his father’s work, "I valued them less for what they were (or the memory of what they were) than for what, long before, they had given me: a way of looking, an example of labour, a knowledge of the literary process, a sense of the order and special reality (at once simpler and sharper than life) that written words could be seen to create."

The pleasures of reading or rather re-reading these essays is that they give you an opportunity to soak in Naipaul’s insightful analysis of other writer’s works juxtaposed along with his own methods and apparatus of inspiration, craft and value of words that goes into his writings. He, perhaps, more than any other writer, has shared with the reader the writerly process. One can call it self-love or glorification; but it is great education, too! In the foreword to his masterpiece, A House for Mr.Biswas, he writes, "Nothing had prepared me for the liberation and absorption of this extended literary labour, the joy of allowing fantasy to play on stored experience, the joy of the comedy that so naturally offered itself, the joy of language. The right words seemed to dance above my head; I plucked them down at will."

He also places the writer’s material -- his subject-- in the larger context of society and the world around him. "The writer begins with his talent, finds confidence in his talent, but then discovers that it isn’t enough, that, in a society as deformed as ours, by the exercise of his talent he has set himself adrift"

This, of course, took on a greater significance when he took to writing travel narratives than in his works of fiction; enquiring into half-made societies, lives and civilisations. One may quarrel with Naipaul’s condescending, all-knowing plenipotentiary views but one can never fail to admire the crystal-clear prose, immaculate style, and memorable turn of phrase. He describes it beautifully: "Style in the novel, and perhaps in all prose, is more than an ‘arrangement of words’: it is an arrangement, even an orchestration, of perceptions, it is a matter of knowing where to put what."

Naipaul is unsparing in his analysis of other writer’s works, especially when he goes on his frequent prickly, wart-finding missions. Dubbing Rudyard Kipling’s prose as mere "club writing" and dismissing Gandhi’s autobiography as mere indulgence in self-love is not only hurtful but also quite absurd. It is obvious to anyone that these writers were writing for different audiences and purposes, especially Gandhi, who wrote mainly to share his ‘experiments with truth’ to inspire others and test his own faith and philosophy. Similarly, when he faults R.K.Narayan for writing in the frozen and insulated cocoon of Malgudi, it is obvious that the Sir Vidia is quite missing the essence of Narayan’s work and its charm – the tragic-comic portrayal of human nature. His admiration for Nirad Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is not surprising for he was the original India-hater in sync with Naipaul’s An Area of darkness.

Perhaps no writer has analysed his own identity, writerly ambition and its eventual blooming as much as Naipaul has. One may call it self-love, writerly neurosis or just the desire of a maestro to share his route map to the world of writing with others taking the same path. Whatever, he remains a literary light; as one who not only creates literature but also practices the serious art of literary criticism. And both are noble callings. For these reasons alone this book is of great value.

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