The Writer and the World Read Free

crisis, and then in 1971, to cover a parliamentary election in Rajasthan—only confirmed his perception of a “profoundly dependent” country ruled by “slogans, gestures and potent names,” still in thrall to its ancient decaying civilization, and far from the inevitable and many-sided reckoning with the modern world that Naipaul later described in
India: A Million Mutinies Now
(1990).
    I N 1969, N AIPAUL also travelled to the United States; and although these essays covering Norman Mailer’s mayoral campaign in New York City and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in California describe a society much more organized and secure than the one found in the Caribbean and India, the writer’s restless moral intelligence continues to insist on standards of clarity and rationality.
    The Monterey peninsula in California, just a few miles away from the “endless lettuce level fields of Salinas, the bitter landscape of stoop-labour,” has been turned into “fairyland”: a fantasy in which Naipaul sees Steinbeck, despite his social concerns, as having played a part. The existentialist pose of Mailer and the “glamour and ambiguity” of his campaign are not very different from the “equivocations of Black Power” that offer “something to everybody”: in both cases drama and style become a substitute for practical politics.
    Later, in 1984, at a time of right-wing ascendancy in America, Naipaul would describe the “tribal-religious” nature of the Republican party convention in Dallas. If a great intellectual tension seems to have produced the short sentences, the swift paragraphs, and the briskly summarized arguments of Naipaul’s early writings, the wit, intimacy and insight of the later essays are of a writer possessed of greater knowledge and experience. At Dallas, the celebrations of Americanism and Bible-Belt Christianity remind Naipaul of a Muslim missionary gathering in Pakistan: “I felt it would not have been surprising, in Dallas, to see busy, pious helpers going around giving out sweets or some kind of symbolic sacramental food.”
    In oil-rich Texas, Naipaul saw the “consciousness of power and money and rightness” as leading to an “intellectual vacancy.” In Argentina, which Naipaul repeatedly visited in the 1970s and travelled to again in 1991, somewhat similar assumptions of wealth and grandeur had pushed its quasi-European population into gigantic national self-deceptions. The banality and avarice and ruthlessness of European discoverers and settlers in the New World—the theme of Naipaul’s essay on Christopher Columbus—weren’t things the Argentines were able to face up to in their not so distant past. Even the great Borges was vulnerable to the “ancestor worship” that had replaced history in Argentina—theunillusioned comprehension of the greed and brutality with which settlers from Italy and Spain had exterminated the native Indian population, parcelled out the huge rich land among a few families, and then, while holding down the poor, tried to re-mould themselves, mostly through wholesale imports from the Old World, in the image of the civilized European.
    “The politics of a country”—and this is one of Naipaul’s key perceptions—“can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships.” As he saw it, Peronism, as much as the aimless guerillas and the brutal military dictators of the 1970s, was inevitable in Argentina: far from being a program, it was an expression of rage and despair, an “insurrection” against a heartless materialist society, where the exploiter-exploited relationship had long offered the only model of human association, a revolt that itself fed off, and could only feed, other insurrections.
    Travelling to Mobutu’s Zaire in 1975, Naipaul encountered another kind of cynicism and blindness about the past. Mobutu had carefully preserved the various forms of Belgian despotism. But his rhetoric dealt in African “authenticity”; and he and his