Returning to Centre

It is a familiar scene for Naipaul’s readers. He is sitting in the BBC office in London, having found work on the Caribbean service after leaving Oxford. Trying to get started as a writer, a Port of Spain street scene from his Trinidad childhood comes to mind, and a remembered voice sets him off on a semi-autobiographical novel, Miguel Street.

That moment of beginning is captured in an introductory paragraph that lays the basis of this collection: “It was a ‘flat’ view of the street: in what I had written I went right up close to it, as close as I had been as a child, shutting out what lay outside. I knew even then that there were other ways of looking; that if, so to speak, I took a step or two or three back and saw more of the setting, it would require another kind of writing. And if, in a greater complication, I wished to explore who I was and who the people in the street were (we were a small immigrant island, culturally and racially varied), that would require yet another kind of writing. It was to that complication that my writing, in fact, took me. I had lived all my writing life in England, that had to be acknowledged, had to be part of my worldview. I had been a serious traveller; that had to be acknowledged as well. I couldn’t pretend as a writer I knew only one place. There were pressures to do that, but for me such a worldview would have been false.
“All my life I have had to think about ways of looking and how they alter the configuration of the world.”
As Naipaul takes yet another step back to see more of the setting of his writing, he does so by looking through many of the writers he has read carefully. Writers of the Caribbean islands like Derek Walcott, Samuel Selvon, his own father Seepersad Naipaul and Edgar Mittelholzer to inquire how “every writer of the region has to find a way of going on, of not drying up, of overcoming the limitations of the place”.

Walcott got around it by fitting “his island material to older, foreign work”. Selvon, after exhausting his Trinidad material, turned to the West Indian immigrant in London, but still could not get beyond the limitations of his material. Seepersad Naipaul, “possibly the first writer of the Indian diaspora”, “damaged his material when he tried to fit it to what he thought of as ‘story’: the trick ending, say”. Possibly, Naipaul says, taking that step back to consider his material would have brought too much pain.

In later essays, Naipaul considers Anthony Powell’s work (‘An English Way of Looking’) and writings of Mahatma Gandhi and an Indian immigrant in Surinam (‘Looking and not seeing: the Indian way’).
Read this book to go back some of the paces with Naipaul to appreciate some more his place in literature.