A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online

a certain kind of cigarette or cigar. This method worked in film scripts; it was shoddy in books. And yet it can be said that this in some way was Powell’s method in his big book.
    My feeling at the end was that this man, my friend, might have written books, might have lived the literary life, but wasn’t the kind of writer he wished to be.
    And the feeling was strengthened when I looked at one of the pre-war books,
From a View to a Death
. An artist goes to a country house to paint a portrait. English country manners are carefully described: this might almost be the point of the book. The artist then decides to take the country gentry on at what he sees as their own game. He gets on a horse and falls and is killed. And, as in the later books, everything is over-explained; there are too many words. But what is the point? Isit that artists should stick to what they know best? It is mysterious, and perhaps there is no point apart from the display of social knowledge.
    There is a kind of writing that undermines its subject. Most good writing, I believe, is like that.
A View to a Death
, for all its care in the delineation of county manners, leaves English social life just where the writer found it. And the same is true of
The Music of Time
.
    A COMMON DEVICE OF FICTION is like this. A great man dies, covered in honour. Someone then, usually an admirer, goes into the life to do a biography and discovers all sorts of horrors. Ibsen uses this device a lot, but without the death; every Ibsen great man has near-murder in the background. I felt like a fictional character, but I didn’t know how to do the story. I didn’t know how to present myself to people who knew Powell. I didn’t think anyone would believe that after all the years of friendship I had not read Powell in any serious and connected way, had only just done so, and didn’t now think of him as a writer. It was a piece of Ibsen-like horror. It wasn’t something I could put to the editor who had asked me to write about him. So I did nothing. I said nothing. But somehow the idea got around that I had dishonoured a friendship.
    And it would not have been easy to put to people that the friendship remained of value, was not diminished by the horror. I had met him in 1957 as a great English writer, was flattered by his attention, and through all our friendship I neverceased to think of him as a great writer. It may be that the friendship lasted all this time because I had not examined his work.
    M Y PURPOSE IN THIS BOOK is not literary criticism or biography. People who want to know about Powell or Walcott can turn to the critical works that have been done about these writers. I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.
    Romantic and beautiful though the idea is, there is no such thing as a republic of letters where—as in an antechamber to a fairly judged afterlife of reputation or neglect, and in the presence of a literary St. Peter—all bring their work and all are equal. That idea of equality is of course false. Every kind of writing is the product of a specific historical and cultural vision. The point is uncontentious. National histories of literature make it all the time, and no one minds. But the self-serving “writing schools” of the United States and England think otherwise. They decree that a certain artificial way of writing narrative prose (which is a general way now and in twenty or thirty years will almost certainly appear old-fashioned) is the correct way.
    Let me see whether I can give a short guide. You begin (at the risk of using too many words, like Hemingway) with language of extreme simplicity (like Hemingway), enough to draw attention to your style. From time to time, to remind people,you can do a very simple, verbose paragraph. In between you can relax. When the going gets