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

pence, at that time a labourer’s daily wage. There was no great fuss made about my father’s book, much less than that made for Walcott’s; even in Trinidad the material was thought to be too far away. But the thousand copies that were printed were sold, mainly to Indians who, I imagine, liked reading about themselves, liked seeing Indian names in print, and liked seeing everyday Indian life given a kind of dignity. So the book was a success in 1943–44. It didn’t have anything like that success later.
    In 1976 André Deutsch did a volume with a long preface by me and enthusiastic jacket copy by Diana Athill. It was remaindered. Heinemann tried again, with a shorter, elegantly produced volume, in 1994. I haven’t heard about it; I suppose there was nothing to report; and I haven’t pressed. It was done ten years later in India. Even by the low standards of Indian publishing this was an awful job, with not a descriptive line about the text; the book might have been a book of magic, a cookbook, or a book of wise Indian sayings; the publisher said he was busy. The stories, if the publisher had had an hour tospare, might have been offered as pioneer work from the diaspora. But materialist India is materialist India, with no idea of its history or literature, and though there is now much talk of the Indian diaspora, the only diaspora Indians care about is the one through which they might get a green card or a son-in-law or daughter-in-law with American citizenship. Every Sunday, in newspapers north and south, you can see the frantic needs advertised in the classified matrimonial columns.
    I have to accept now that the stories are dead and live only for me. Walcott’s island was like mine, but we were worlds apart. Two important facts made for this difference. I was born in Indian Trinidad in 1932; and from about the age of seven I saw my father writing his stories. This meant that from an early age I began to inhabit a distinct mental world—distinct from the rest of the island, and distinct even from the rest of my mother’s extended family. There was this further great difference between Walcott and myself. I could, when my vision grew wider, beyond our small community, comprehend his needs and yearnings (the black children freed from homeless ditties, the brown hair in the aristocracy of sea); but there are parts of me that will be a puzzle to him.
    His vision of the island is not mine; and a man with Walcott’s island deep in his head and heart will look at the rest of the world in his own way. He will not (to give an extreme example) be interested in Tony Powell’s England, or feel sufficiently connected to it, to be able to judge the writing that comes out of it. The artificiality of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie is another matter; these writers, who seem very English, can be assessed by anyone; the books themselves are modern fairytales,a form in which for various reasons the myth-making English excel.
    Tony would have liked, as part of his Englishness, that delicate and special thing, to be taken up into that myth-making scheme. After the war, towards the end of the big novel, there is a tremendous thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s. The narrator attends. He hasn’t actually had much of a war, but at this moment he is like Henry the Fifth after Agincourt. He quotes the whole of the original version of “God Save the King” sung at the service. This is meant, fraudulently, and rather too easily, I feel, to cast a retrospective epic quality on all that has gone before, much of which has been trivial. It was Tony’s play for the English myth. It was what he expected would come to him, some recognition of him as the twentieth-century English myth-maker; and his little American success, when he was deep in the sequence, seemed to point finally in that direction. But his autobiographical novel was just that: autobiographical and private, full of