Tarun J Tejpal: An Area of Darkness suggested a lot of anger.

Now it's a question

that comes up whenever An Area of Darkness is discussed, especially your journalism
as related to India. Do you think anger works better for a writer than, say,
understanding?

V.S. Naipaul: I don't like to think of it as journalism. Journalism is news. And I

don't do that. I don't write news at all. When I am writing a book, I have to
understand first of all that the book will probably be written in two years,
published in three, and you want it to be around for twenty to thirty years. So you
have to take a particular point of view that will keep this matter important even
in thirty years' time. Journalism is news, it's an event that is important today.
My kind of writing tries to find a spring, the motive of societies and cultures,
especially in India. This is not journalism - let me correct that. It's not
something anybody can do. It's a more profound gift. I'm not running down
journalism. It has its place. But I don't do journalism. I'm not competing with
journalists.

Tarun J Tejpal: But does anger work better, or understanding?

V.S. Naipaul: I think it isn't strictly anger alone. It is deep emotion. Without
that deep emotion there's almost no writing. Then you do journalism, perhaps. If
you don't feel emotion, you go to Uruguay, you cover the elections, you are not
involved. Then your company can fly you to Bogota, something about the drugs. You
are not involved. But when you are deeply churned up by something, first of all you
know you cannot express this naked raw emotion; that is not writing. You have to
come to some resolution about it. So it's that refinement of emotion that really
makes the writing, what you call understanding. The two things are not opposed to
one another. They derive one from the other, or the second one - understanding -
derives from what you called anger. But it's what I would call emotion, deep
emotion. Emotion is necessary.

Tarun J Tejpal: All this seems to suggest that you're incredibly drained at the end
of a book.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, one is drained. Then there's a process of just being nothing. A
process of being utterly vacant for a while. I'm being vacant now, really - for the
last nine months.

Tarun J Tejpal: At the end of nine months is something beginning to agitate you to
get back to writing?

V.S. Naipaul: I actually find myself being agitated now. I want to get back to my
work.

Tarun J Tejpal: What sparked that curious book, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion
[1963], set in England?

V.S. Naipaul: It isn't the only book set in England. In fact The Enigma of Arrival
[1987] is really my main book about England. But that early book - it is the
process of being a writer. I had written Biswas and done this travelogue which I
paid no attention to - The Middle Passage, about the remnants of slavery in the
Caribbean and South America. I had done that. Then I was coming to India to look at
India, and I was very anxious. I also knew that I had to be writing again. I
couldn't let many months pass. I might lose the talent, might lose the gift, might
lose the voice, so I had to get a story. I went back to that building place, where
I worked for ten weeks, and got something from there and got something from the
house in which I had stayed, and fused the two together. But I am dissatisfied with
that book because it's a novel and it's written in the third person. Therefore it
assumes great wisdom. I think it would have been universal and it would have been
much more interesting if the writer had identified himself; had found ways of
describing why he was there, how he got this material, how be entered that house.
It would have given it a greater depth. But there was this slavery at the time to
what I considered the noblest thing in the noble form - that writing is noble, and
the novel is the most important aspect of it - which I no longer think. I think
literary forms come and go. The Shakespearean plays have their brief flaring, ten
years, fifteen years, then it's over. Restoration comedy has to fade away. The
Dickensian novel lasted as long as Dickens. Things have to move. And once things
have been done in any art form, they just can't be repeated. That is death. So it
may well be, as I feel now, that in writing, the highest form is not fiction. That
has been done; that was done in Russia, in England, in France, and in other
countries, in the last century, for the most part. And there are other ways now of
dealing with experience and emotion.

Tarun J Tejpal: Are these the ways you explored in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way
in the World?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I have tried to do that, but not in any self-conscious way by
looking for a new form. I've just tried to find the truest way of dealing with
material. And as I said at the beginning of my talk with you, when you are born in
my kind of place, my kind of background, you're not born to history. You have to
acquire it, and I acquired it through reading, through writing, through travelling,
through exercising my fantasy. So the books, these two books, are ways of dealing
with that emotion, making it really true. Stendhal wrote an autobiography which was
never published in his time. A very strange book. Part of the problem for him was
that all writers say "I was born and I became a child," but when the adult man is
writing he sees things differently. Stendhal writing this autobiography does both
the things. He tries to do the adult view, and the child view, and very quickly in
a paragraph he takes you into his confidence and tells you that that's how the
child saw it but there's another view to it. This is the truer thing to do rather
than write that kind of autobiography, where you assume a fuIl knowledge of the
world. I was born there, I went to that school ... These books combine the
experience of learning with a knowledge of one's deepening experience.

Tarun J Tejpal: There are some people who don't see these books as your best,
perhaps because they are so subtle.

V.S. Naipaul: It doesn't worry me. People are free to say that. When Biswas came
out, a woman in the BBC, an Indian woman, disapproved of it. You know why? Because
it was written in improper English. The characters spoke in bad English. Can you
imagine? This was said in 1961. You have to live through that initial scepticism.
The point is: serious writing is in trouble in America and in England. There's no
literature in England now. It's died away. People aren't aware that it's died away.

Tarun J Tejpal: Do you think A Way in the World and The Enigma of Arrival are a
hint of the new forms of writing to come?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, I wouldn't think like that, you know, because every writer has
to find his own way of dealing with his material and experience. What they mustn't
do is copy one another and do mimic novels. Mimic someone else's form. That's not
interesting. That kind of form falsifies. If you pour your very special experience
into a borrowed form, into somebody else's form, something they teach at art school
or night school or something, then of course it's falsified. My experience is like
this. Let's go just a little bit into A Way in the World. I began writing about
that street in the first book, Miguel Street; that was one view of the street. Now
that was one truth. But I also knew even when I was a child in school that the land
on which we were living was the land where, 200 years before, aboriginal people had
lived, and had then been wiped out. They don't exist. Not a single one of them. Not
one of them is surviving. It was a terrible thing to understand, to come to terms
with. Then I did some work about this, going back into the papers. So that's
another way of seeing the same land. Then I travelled - Guyana, South America,
other places, saw surviving Indians in their villages. That was another way. So
when I went back to the documents, I saw the land I had travelled in yet another
way. So the same land, because I had to learn about it, appeared in different ways
right through my writing life, as it were, and the hook is an attempt to do that,
to write narratives at different stages of understanding about the land. To me it's
a perfectly simple thing to do, although I couldn't express it at the time in the
way I've expressed it now. For this reason I think one is just moved to write, to
deal with a certain amount of material, and then it is only much later, years
later, that one understands exactly what one has done. That is the great beauty
about writing, in fact. The writer knows at one or two levels what he is attempting
to do. But while writing there are a million things that happen in it, of which a
writer is not absolutely aware.

Tarun J Tejpal: Which are then discovered by the readers?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, the reader picks up various things. In A Way in the World there
are references to food, clothes, to people ending up as parodies of themselves -
any number of themes in the book which I'm not aware of. Many people have pointed
out themes, and I've said, "Yes, that's there." That's the way you are writing, you
see - if you write very fair, very squarely then these things do happen, this awe
of mystery.

Tarun J Tejpal: The narrative style of A Way in the World and The Enigma of Arrival
is infinitely subtle and complex, far more challenging and fulfilling when compared
to India: A Million Mutinies Now. How do the books fall out? How is it that Enigma
and A Way in the World, written ten years apart, get the new form you are moving
towards, while A Turn in the South [1989] and A Million Mutinies Now, which come in
the middle, during that ten year hiatus, get a completely different, far simpler
form?

V.S. Naipaul: A Turn in the South and the India book are different. They are
inquiries, they are ways of venturing, venturing into other people's countries,
other people's territories. And it's a way of making a pattern of other people's
experiences. So the nature of experience is different. The personal experience
finds this other form, the one of Enigma and A Way in the World. Whereas the
external inquires find this form of external narrative. The writer travels and
finds stories and the stories make a pattern.

Tarun J Tejpal: Have you ever thought of giving a name to this new form, of Enigma
and A Way in the World?

V.S. Naipaul: No. Things will make their own way. You mustn't forget, you know,
that just the other day the Bengali essay was considered a very vibrant form, and
then someone as recent as Virginia Woolf would write essays about the essay. So
forms do change. History in the last century in England was a great literary form.
Scientific inquiry with Darwin a great literary form. History today, of course, is
an academic jargon impossible for the layman to read. Scientific inquiry is
impenetrable to the layman. Forms do alter. They must find their own way. You
mustn't categorise fiction, travel, nonfiction. That is limiting and foolish.

Tarun J Tejpal: What sparked off the new book on Islam [Beyond Belief], your second
book on the subject, after seventeen years?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, all my work has a kind of relationship, one book to the other.
Everything begins with my own background. I explore or try to explore all the
facets of that background - New World history, Africa, England, a lot about India
and then the Muslim world: the non-Arab Muslim world. This book is prompted by two
things. One, a wish to update or to look at the countries of Among the Believers
[1981]. Look at them sixteen or seventeen years later. So that is one relation. The
other was, as it were, to carry over something from India: A Wounded Civilisation,
because the wound that is described in that book was about the wound of Muslim
invasion, from which India has not really recovered, as I feel; and this led me in
this book, during my travels, to an understanding of the neuroses of conversion.
Islam is in its origins essentially an Arab religion. People who are not Arabs and
who become Muslims are regarded by Arabs as converts, and the special neurosis
attached to it is that Islam is not a religion of private conscience. It isn't just
a matter of meditation; it's a religion of declaration, it's a religion of rules,
of strict adherence to a Prophet who is considered Final. It's unlike anything,
shall we say, in India, in ancient Indian religions or the old Indian religions.
When a person outside the Arab world becomes a Muslim, he is required by the faith
to reject all his past. In a curious way then, it is quite opposed to modern ideas
of, shall we say, heritage - modern ideas of history and inquiry. The past has to
be rejected, and the convert's eyes fixed on Mecca: that is all that concerns him.
The ruins of - not the ruins, the holy places of Mecca are his holy places; there
are no holy places outside. This is a great neurosis, the rejection of all that one
is, all that one stands for. It is a profound kind of colonialism, one has to say,
and profounder for having religious sanction.

Tarun J Tejpal: Is it unique unto Islam, or is it the neurosis of all converts from
one religion to another?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, I have only been able to look at two kinds of conversions. One
is the most important conversion in the ancient world - which is the conversion of
the world from the classical faiths, the classical deities of city and place and
things like that, to Christianity. I would say, yes, that when those so-called
pagans became Christians, they had to abandon their older beliefs and they did so
quite easily, because the new beliefs - be it Islam, Christianity - are full of
social ideas which the old religions never had. The older religions are essentially
about keeping the gods sweet. Trying to ensure that things will move for you as
they should, if you make the correct sacrifices. The ideas of brotherhood and
charity and generosity actually do not occur in a religion like Hinduism, nor do
they occur in any other classical religions, the worship of Jupiter or Isis or
things like that. So there is something radical about conversion, to revealed
religion with its rules. It isn't Islam alone. What I suppose is peculiar to Islam
is this rejection of history, one's own history. This insistence on the sacred
language being Arabic. In Malaysia now you have this group of fanatics who would
like Arabic to become the language of Malaysia. They are a small group but they
represent the way the converts can move.

Tarun J Tejpal: And this sort of disjunction, does it create all kinds of frictions
in society?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes. I think once you start, once you think of being converted like
that, you can never be good enough. You can never be pure enough. And I found, even
in 1979, people in Malaysia, trying to rid themselves of their past, which is an
impossible task, because you cannot make yourself as empty as a bit of glass. They
wanted to be pure, they wanted to be the only tellers of faith. Everything that
rooted them to the land of Malaysia they wished to reject, all the antiquated
customs, some of which were Hindu customs, like marriage customs. So the
requirements are really quite awesome, also tyrannical. And I think if I had to
think about using a word for religion in a place like Pakistan, whenever the word
is used it is used in connection with power, it is also used as a form of threat.
You cannot be good enough if you are a convert; you cannot simply be good enough if
you are a convert from the non-Arab people.

Tarun J Tejpal: I heard you once say that Islam is now in need of a renaissance. In
what ways do you think this can happen, if it is necessary, and why is it
necessary?

V.S. Naipaul: This is where we get into all kinds of trouble immediately with
fundamentalists who believe that what was said by the Prophet, or supposed to be
said by him, remains hard and fast for all time, regardless of the change. So to
say that you need a renaissance now is to get you into lots of trouble with people
who say you are rejecting their religion. But clearly we need to look at the
position of women. Clearly, the idea of tolerance, the other faith, has to become
part of a revivified Islam. This brutal restatement of a faith, I think, is
isolating the Islamic world more and more. And growth and intellectual life can
only come if the mind opens up. As it is, all the answers are given. There is no
room for further discussion. Which makes it unlike almost every other culture which
is alive and living and constantly adapting this and that.

Tarun J Tejpal: Do you anticipate, with this new book, any trouble from the
prickliness of Islam's defenders?

V.S. Naipaul: I don't think so. I think people might criticise me, but I am very
careful never to criticise a faith or articles of a faith. I am just talking now
about the historical and social effects. There will be criticism. I mean, all one's
books are criticised, and that's how it should be. But this book, remember, is not
a book of opinion. This goes back to the earlier point I made about all one's works
standing together. In the books of exploration I've been doing, I've been evolving
or working towards a form, where instead of the traveller being more important than
the people he travels among, the people are important. I write about the people I
meet, I write about their experiences, and I define the civilisation by their
experiences. So this is a book of personal experience, and it will be very hard to
fault it in that way. You can't say it's maligning anything. I looked at personal
experiences and made a pattern of personal experience. In one way, you might simply
say it's a book of stories, a book of tales.

Tarun J Tejpal: Much in the way of A Turn in the South and A Million Mutinies Now?

V.S. Naipaul: Absolutely, absolutely yes. This one is a different challenge.

Everything develops; I try to make it do so. I am very particular about not
repeating a form, and here there were thirty narratives and I tried to do them
differently, each one differently, so that the reader would not quite understand
the violation that was being done him. I didn't want the stories to read alike.

Tarun J Tejpal: Some years ago you saw some merit in the resurgence of Hinduism in
India, now it's brought a fundamentalist party to power. What do you think of this
trend now?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, Hindu resurgence, fundamentalism - my thoughts on this matter

are very complicated. They can't be simplified. It must go back to A Wounded
Civilisation. In A Wounded Civilisation the point is made that old India was really
rather destroyed by the Muslim invasion and what has happened now, since the coming
of the British followed on by Independence, has been only, not a resurgence, just a
kind of Hindu life. And the renaissance is not really a renaissance which has been
due to Hinduism and its tenets, it's a renaissance - here we are sitting, doing,
using these tools, talking in this way - the renaissance has really come to us
indirectly from Europe. We're an aspect of the European renaissance, if only we can
face it. The old world is dead. It doesn't mean I have no regard for it. It means I
want it studied; it means I want it approached with great awe, with great
reverence. I think the idea of continuity is very dangerous in India, and it's also
false.

Tarun J Tejpal: In your opinion is India still a wounded and decaying civilisation,
or is this renaissance on for real now?

V.S. Naipaul: I think it's actually moving now. I think all the anxieties about the
election, all the problems, all the little revolts here and there, all the little
small parties, all these little things speak of movement.

Tarun J Tejpal: Can you tell me in brief - because it is important to the new form
that you have been developing in Enigma and A Way in the World - how you arrived at
the episodic structure of your Booker Prize-winning In a Free State [1971], for in
many ways it's a precursor to novelistic innovations by other writers later.

V.S. Naipaul: In a Free State is a series of narratives about people outside their
own country. Indians in Washington, I believe, Indians in London, West Indian
Indians in London, Indians in Trinidad, and then Englishmen in Africa. I thought it
was important, since writing is so much a matter of association, for the writer to
be known. If you are writing something about English people in Africa - and writing
this in 1969 - it was important to say who was writing this book and I thought I
must find a way of making that a part of my narrative. You just can't do a third
person narrative about English people in Africa because there have been many books
like that by English people and other people about Europeans in Africa. I wished to
make clear where I was standing with relation to this material. I felt the need
very much really to identify myself. I think today it wouldn't be so necessary for
an Indian writer to say, "This is my stand, I'm doing this," because times have
changed. Indian writing is known. So there isn't that need.

Tarun J Tejpal: In your Africa books, the characters always seem to live on the
edge of being consumed and obliterated by the continent. For example, Salim in A
Bend in the River [1979] has a deep panic attack about his future after a wonderful
afternoon making love to Yvette. What is this peculiar neurosis of Africa?

V.S. Naipaul: I think the neurosis is fear. Really, those of us who have been there
as foreigners and spent time there, we can easily get ourselves very frightened. We
can easily think, What if we can't get back to the airport, what if at night the
roads close down? When I was in Kampala in Uganda - I was in East Africa for about
nine months in 1966 - I knew there was going to be trouble because it was an open
secret. And at night at times I'd hear the lorries moving, and I'd always wonder
whether they were army lorries moving commandos to the palace. I was worried
because we were far away from being safe.

Tarun J Tejpal: So there is this edginess in the characters?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, it has not ended well in either Congo or Uganda or...

Tarun J Tejpal: What happened at the end of A Bend in the River? Did you then reach
some sort of crystallisation that this is the last novel I'm going to write?

V.S. Naipaul: No, I don't think one does that. It isn't as though I'm going to
write this and this will be the last thing. Though it's true in quite a different
way. I always write a book as though it's the last one I'll be allowed to write.
The world is full of accidents. Human affairs cannot be predicted. So I like every
book I do to be something that can be presented as the last one. But that's one
thing separate from the question. No, I don't think it is prudent to say that I'd
written A Bend in the River as the last novel I'll do. It is that, when I examined
myself later, I found I had to do other things.

Tarun J Tejpal: You have always steered away from writing sex except in Guerrillas
[1975], and even when you have mentioned sex, it has a violence about it. Why?

V.S. Naipaul: I don't know.

Tarun J Tejpal: Are you uncomfortable writing about sex?

V.S. Naipaul: What I loathe, what I never read, is pornography. I have never seen a
pornographic film in my life. I was introduced to the pornographic magazine, or the
soft porn magazine, really very late in my life. I just saw them and I was quite
shocked really, quite shocked. But the violence about sex, I don't know. I made a
rule when I was writing Guerrillas - that book which is an account of a murder and
hangs between sexual scenes: Writing is a matter of tone and association. It was
important to suggest that what was being written about was not going to be another
kind of pornographic scene in a hundred or a thousand other novels. It was
important for it to be written about in a different way. So the actual physical
details interact elusively. In A Bend in the River there is only one word
consciously used by me which can be said to be related to the act of sex, and the
word is "naked," and it's the only word used.

Tarun J Tejpal: Critics have often remarked that writers as characters occupy a
pivotal position in your early books but seem to have lost this privileged position
later...

V.S. Naipaul: Writers?

Tarun J Tejpal: Several of your characters are writers.

V.S. Naipaul: The very first novel, Masseur, the man becomes a writer. I am afraid
the writer is me: Kailash is me. Yes, the writer occurs in Biswas again. That's
very personal. And the later characters, they are seen from a distance, it is true.

Tarun J Tejpal: For example Roche in Guerrillas. He is not in a position of power

and privilege. So in some ways there is a shift.

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, he is slightly a bogus figure, a man who fought a revolution,
heaven knows for what reason. Then later characters, writers in A Way in the World,
they are all slightly bogus, they are all false.

Tarun J Tejpal: Why this shift?

V.S. Naipaul: I think it's a part of one's understanding of the world outside. I
began with this very glorious idea, writing as a very noble calling, and discovered
later it was a great commercial exercise and could have great political complicity
too.

Tarun J Tejpal: Is there a hint of contempt for men consumed by passion for their
women? One example perhaps is Salim in A Bend in the River. What is the source of
this kind of a reading?

V.S. Naipaul: I didn't feel any contempt for him at all. I felt immense sympathy
and understanding. I thought he made the right decision to stay with it as long as
possible, to stay with the passion as long as possible.

Tarun J Tejpal: So you don't think a man may be diminished by his obsession for a
woman?

V.S. Naipaul: I don't think like that at all. Passion is so rare we should grasp it
as it comes.

Tarun J Tejpal: Should readers search for clues in your books to find out about
you, or will you write an autobiography?
V.S. Naipaul: I think the readers should pick their own way through the books. Yes,
those clues are enough. However you never can tell. If someone comes to me saying,
"Write an autobiography, we'll give you this and do that," I might weaken. But it's
not in the cards.

Tarun J Tejpal: You said you might weaken. Have you ever as a writer weakened at
any blandishment?

V.S. Naipaul: No. I remember when things were very hard; I was asked to do a series
of radio talks for, I think, British Council, and they were going to pay me quite a
large sum of money. This was about thirty years ago. They were meant to be sent
overseas to tell students coming to England how to behave when they came to
England. I tried very hard to write them, but I couldn't do it. I didn't like the
sponsorship, the official writing. I can't do it. It isn't a moral quality in me.
It's just the writer really, the writer minds the interference. I don't like people
telling me anything when I'm thinking or getting near a work. I don't like that
interference in my mind. During the draft of a book I can be very, very
suggestible. I'm open to suggestions. In the old days I actually hid away from
people. I wouldn't even go to the barber when I was at critical points. I don't
like the interference with the mind. So that is why the writer rejects it. I
couldn't ever live under such pressure.

Tarun J Tejpal: Do you have any bouncing board while you are writing your books?

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, people have listened. I've read my work out to people. Its very
valuable to me. Very valuable. My work is really made to be read. That's partly the
radio background, and helps clarity of thought and expression.

Tarun J Tejpal: Do you think language should only convey, and not dance and dazzle,
as, for example, with, say, John Updike?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, people have to do what they want to do. I just wish my prose to
be very transparent. I don't want the reader to stumble over me. I just want him to
look through what I'm saying, and to look at what I'm describing. I don't want him
ever to say, "Oh goodness, how nicely written this is." That would be a failure.

Tarun J Tejpal: So even as the ideas remain complex, the prose stays uncluttered,
right?

V.S. Naipaul: Simple, simple, yes. And
surrounded by jargon. Jargon is in the
is in the stuff on the radio, and as a
start using words lazily. I don't want
to use them in this very valuable way.
I mustn't use jargon. You see, one is
newspapers, in friends' conversation; jargon
writer you can become very lazy. You can
that to happen. Words are valuable. I like

Tarun J Tejpal: Do you despair for English literature?

V.S. Naipaul: No, I don't despair for it. It does not exist now. I think for many
reasons. Partly because it's very hard to do again what's been done before. There's
perhaps no way of dealing with modern life. It's probably very hard to deal with
restricted modern life. Possibly too, commercialisation has destroyed publishing,
as will appear very soon. Partly too, the prizes which treat literature as though
it were a series of horse races. The prizes have damaged both would-be writers and
would-be publishers, and have made them ask for a particular kind of thing. I think
it's in a bad, bad way in England. Perhaps it has ceased to exist. But so much has
existed in the past, perhaps there's no cause for grief there.

Tarun J Tejpal: So you think publishing hype and hoopla is detrimental to great
writing?
V.S. Naipaul: I think it's awful. I think it is the death of it. Fortunately in
England, possibly the new form might be - probably they are doing very fine
documentaries. I don't know. Probably an immense amount of talent goes into making
films. So probably the talent is there, rather than in this dreadful writing that's
being done.

Tarun J Tejpal: What about writers emerging from India? Do you feel similarly about
them?

V.S. Naipaul: No, I haven't examined that. But I think that India will have a lot
of writing. India for a long time, in fact for many centuries, has had no
intellectual life at all. Not worth talking about. It's been a ritualised society
that doesn't require writing. But when such societies emerge from this purely
ritualistic life, and they begin to expand industrially, economically, and in
education, then people begin to need to understand what's happening. They turn to
writers, and writers are there to guide them, to provoke them, to stimulate them. I
think there's going to be a lot of writing in India. The situation will draw it out
now.

Tarun J Tejpal: Have you read any of the writers who have emerged post Rushdie, and
Rushdie himself?

V.S. Naipaul: No, I don't know these writers. You see, I am so involved in my own
world of work. I actually read very little of contemporary writing. I do my own
reading of history and ...

Tarun J Tejpal: What about writers of your own vintage and earlier, R.K. Narayan,
Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao. What do you think of their writing?

V.S. Naipaul: I think that Narayan is actually very important. I think his
influence should not be underestimated. I can see so many people who've been
influenced by some thing small, but important, the first line of the Bachelor of
Arts, and who'd wish to write books like that. I think it begins with the line
"Chandran was just leaving the classroom when someone stopped him and said...." You
know Narayan's touch, his comedy, these are marvellous things. I think he should be
treated with honour.

Tarun J Tejpal: You have often decried poetry as a literary form. But curiously,
you also accept Shakespeare as the greatest writer ever. How do you reconcile these
two?

V.S. Naipaul: Shakespeare is a dramatist and he deals with very, very large
emotions. Modern poets - my illustration is this: If you're going to the post
office to post a parcel and an old lady comes out who's just posted a parcel, you
write a poem about that: The old lady who has posted her last parcel. You write,
you hold the door open for her, let her pass, some absurdity like that. You know
these little tiny moments people write about. It is like the sound of the violin.
Often sounds so affected. People trying to scratch themselves to see whether they
can feel.

Tarun J Tejpal: You said contemporary poetry is like that. Are there earlier poets
you admire? Twentieth- or nineteenth-century? Or is all poetry bad?

V.S. Naipaul: I was so damaged at school by the Romantics of the nineteenth

century, I haven't been able to face them with a straight face ever since. And
Auden? People talk about Auden, but I think there is little sense in Auden. Very
wonderful with words. Eliot, I think, is just stating philosophical banalities, and
it's full of exaggeration. "Weeping, weeping multitudes, droop in a thousand ABCs."
ABCs is a little kind of coffee house. It's not true. It's not a vision. It's
false. It's exaggerated.

Tarun J Tejpal: What about Yeats?

V.S. Naipaul: I don't know about Ireland. I think Ireland has just ridden piggyback
on the British empire. Whatever comes out of it is given exaggerated importance.
Ireland is a very small country, and I think its issues are not very important for
me.

Tarun J Tejpal: Does that include Joyce?

V.S. Naipaul: Very much so! What's there in Joyce for me? A blind man living in
Trieste. And talking about Dublin. There's nothing in it for me, it's not
universal. And a man of so little, so little imagination, able to record the life
around him in such a petty way, but depending on an ancient narrative. No, no, no.

Tarun J Tejpal: Would you like to say anything about your younger brother Shiva
Naipaul, both as a writer and as a person?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, his death was the cause of immense grief for me. I grieved for
him for two years. I very much liked his African book. My feeling is that that's
his best work, the book called North of South. It's full of jokes. It has a shape.
It's nicely written. I think it's a good book. I think it will last. I hope it
lasts.

Tarun J Tejpal: Any regrets about your life in terms of writing? Any kind that you
wanted to do and haven't been able to?

V.S. Naipaul: You know I find these questions impossible to answer. You can't
imagine a kind of writing that you haven't done. Do you see what I mean? It doesn't
exist. It's a philosophically flawed statement, "I wish I could do something like
XY," because once you can imagine it, you can do it.

Tarun J Tejpal: I saw you play this party game where you asked people if they had
everything, what would their ideal day consist of? I ask you, if you had everything
- which you actually do - what would your ideal day consist of?

V.S. Naipaul: Well, actually you see this is a trap of a question. It isn't the
ideal day. It is an ordinary, a routine day. Assume you've got everything and don't
give a list of your possessions and how would you spend the day. I used to say at
the time I established this game that I'd be deep in a book that would be very
fulfilling for me, and that I'd be working every day at it. In my good day, my
routine day, after I'd been with my book, I'd have a good lunch, and then I'd be
working towards either a bottle of wine or dinner that'd be there, or I'd be
working towards going out to a dinner party. In those days I thought there were
three things that were very wonderful in the world: Landscape, eternally refreshing
to one's spirit; a dinner party, marvelous, well done, well organised; and meeting
people, new people. So the three things were contained there. One went out not for
the food, but the occasion; but I'm coming back to work at my book, that's part of
what I'd like. I go out to dinner, meet people for two-three hours, then get back
to work. The ideal world. The routine would be that - the good routine. If
everything were granted to me, yes.

Tarun J Tejpal: Are you serious about writing another novel?

V.S. Naipaul: I am being pressed, you know. I'm being pressed. And although I feel
I've moved away from the form, and read very few novels now, and I thought that the
kind of work I have to do should be a little bit in the nature of my last four
books, I might do something. I'm being pressed, and I might do something like a
political fairy tale. I might do something like that. I am being pushed to it.

Tarun J Tejpal: Is there any code of conduct or a set of rules, that a writer
should follow? Do you have any personally?

V.S. Naipaul: What rules do you mean - moral rules, rules about work ...?

Tarun J Tejpal: Both: physical rules of actual operation as well as moral rules ...

V.S. Naipaul: Yes, I think you can't be a bad man or a crooked man and be a writer.
Good writing requires a moral view of the world, and if your own view is not a
moral one, I don't see how you and your work can hang together. There would be no
internal logic in it.

Tarun J Tejpal: No centre?

V.S. Naipaul: Exactly, no centre. And as for the other things, it is also private.
Every writer has to understand what his experience has been, understand what the
best way of dealing with it is, and work with complete honesty - that is, ignoring
all examples, doing it himself, like doing it for the first time, not copying.

Tarun J Tejpal is the editor of India's Outlook magazine.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Tarun J Tejpal, reprinted by special arrangement with Gillon
Aitken Associates, mail@aitkenstone.demon.co.uk

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

V.S. Naipaul
Random House, June 1998
$27.95; 408 pages
ISBN 0-375-50118-5
Order this book

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