On Vidia

V.S. Naipaul is a favorite writer of mine.

I get into an acquisition-mode whenever I read something on Sir Vidia and his intellectual-Quasimotoisms.

Here's novelist Teju Cole's reflection on an evening spent in the company of Vidia Naipaul. The setting is an elegant apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the hostess is filthy rich (yet culturally fake, if you read in between Cole's lines).

There is a gentle flow of the best quality claret, and one could conclude that the softer observations that Cole, an African/Nigerian intellectual who isn't bowled over by Naipaul's often anti-African pinpricks, makes are made under the influence of madeira.

Here's a moment:

Dinner was over. We were in conversation, Vidia, our host, and me. He was in a good mood, flattered by the attention. Our host brought some rare books from her collection to show us. They were special editions of Mark Twain’s works, and on the flyleaf of each was an epigram written by Twain and, below each, his signature. The epigrams were typical Twain: ironic, dark. And so we leaned over the old volumes, and Vidia and I squinted and tried to make out the words from Twain’s elegant but occasionally illegible hand. We were sitting side by side, and Vidia, unsteady, had placed a hand on my knee for support, unselfconsciously. I read: “By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.” Laughter. “To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.” More laughter. Vidia began, “You know, these remind me very much of…” Ever the eager student, I blurted out, “La Rochefoucauld.” “Yes!” he said, “Yes! La Rochefoucauld.” And with wonder in his eyes, the weight from his hand and arm bearing down on me, he turned his head up to our host, who stood just behind, and said, “He’s very good. He speaks so well, he speaks well.” And, turning back to me, “You speak very well.” In any other context, it would have felt like faint praise. But we’d drunk claret, we were laughing along to long-dead Twain, and I had managed to surprise the wily old master.

Sharper yet is Cole's observation on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel that Naipaul attributes the germination of his ambition/desire to write about an emergent world order (post colonial) to:

“Heart of Darkness” was written when rapacious extraction of African resources by European adventure was gospel truth—as it still is. The book helped create the questions that occupy us till this day. What does it mean to write about others? Who are these others? More pressingly, who are the articulate “we”? In the “Heart of Darkness,” the natives—the niggers, as they are called in the book, the word falling each time like a lance—speak only twice, once to express enthusiasm for cannibalism, then, later, to bring the inarticulate report, “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” Otherwise, these niggers, these savages, are little more than shadows and violence, either in dumb service on the boat, or in dumb, grieved, uncomprehending and deadly attacks on it from the shore. Not only is this primitive, sub-human Africa incoherent to any African, it is incoherent to any right-thinking non-African too. A hundred years ago, it was taken as the commonplace truth; it wasn’t outside the mainstream of European opinions about Africans. But we have all moved on. Those things are in past, are they not?