In the wake of the Trinidadian-born British writer, V.S. Naipaul’s achievement, as the winner of the 2001 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, on October 11^th, Edgar O. Lake’s column (below) appeared in the VI Daily News, on October 26, 2001. 

                Lake’s article features a number of Naipaul’s titles, lending personal insight to his encounters with the writer in New York city, and how those mentioned books chart Naipaul’s odyssey as a contemporary writer.

                For further access to Naipaul’s titles and recent book reviews, one can visit primary websites, to include www.nytimes.com   and  www.nobelprize.com   for access to V.S. Naipaul's archive logon to: www.lib.utulsa.edu/Speccoll/VSNaipaul.htm                                                            

V.S. Naipaul, a true visionary...
 Edgar O. Lake

                 When the Trinidad-born British writer V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for 2001, this month, many impressions came to mind. I had walked passed the Law Center at NYU this past September  8^th, its Georgian red brick facade laced with ivy, a fitting backdrop to the timeless chess players in Washington Square Park. It was there that I had, in 1972, first seen V.S. Naipaul, late in arriving, for a public reading to the university’s law faculty and students. What was noticeable then, and exquisitely memorable now - for I remember little else – was not that he arrived unrepentantly late, or was ceremoniously escorted; instead, it was that he was painstakingly introduced and was left – with great deliberation – to puncture the silence reluctantly, with a single word: “Perhaps.”

Naipaul’s haunting 1981 book, Among the Believers, did not prophetically come to mind, this past September morning. Instead, I thought of The Middle Passage, a caustic profile of five societies across the Caribbean Basin. For it had seemed to match his world-weariness on that autumnal afternoon, so long ago, in his brown twede jacket, and gray slacks, as he had read from his new novel, A Bend in the River. Settling in between the New York intelligentsia, I overheard disgruntled remarks, as Naipaul dismissed exotic questions about Idi Amin, Jomo Kenyatta and Mobutu Sese Seko.

That late mid-summer afternoon, his guests wanted to hear political commentary about Big Man, the novel’s protagonist, and a composite of the three African leaders, mentioned above. Instead Naipaul’s evocations were of fear and uncertainty – commodities I was to experience these twenty-two years later, and merely three days after I had again passed the NYU Law Center.

                When next I had seen Naipaul at the 92nd Street Y, on Lexington Avenue, it was a cold January evening in 1991, with a decidedly more wizened European audience, curious survivors of many holocausts – with an affinity for Naipaul’s  terse warnings about inescapable anarchy, settling everywhere.

                There, he read from India: A Million Mutinies Now.  Revisiting India had done him well. It had been twenty-seven years since he had  first visited his father’s homeland in 1962, and written An Area of Darkness.  The 58 year-old Naipaul’s  new book was more reflective – at least towards India. These million mutinies, he intoned, were sown “in the extraordinary differences in education, economics and society;” mutinies that were, as he put it,  “sectarian, religious and regional.”

 But in 1962,  Naipaul had first sharpened his dispassionate tones on The Middle Passage. Now, I sat among the many Caribbean detractors to this first - and curiously - never re-visited  non-fiction book. We, who had migrated with Naipaul  – many from the self-same Trinidad “where his father thought of original literary composition,” and transmitted the burning ambition to his son, Naipaul – we sat waiting.

                Naipaul had written words to that effect in a 1991 address, Our Universal Civilization, delivered at the Manhattan Institute in New York. When I heard of his award, I re-searched this document he had spoken, for a salve to the years of waiting; a balm for my inner pride. Despite his maturing vision of the dispossessed in The Enigma of Arrival, and most recently, Half a Life, I reached for his 1991 epiphany. I had kept a copy of it, stained through these last hurricane years.

In that speech, I discovered Naipaul had long saluted our vigil and our modern citizenship. His tribute the universal civilization bears quoting: “the civilization that both gave the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfil that prompting; the civilization that enabled me to make that journey from the periphery to the center; the civilization that links me not only to his audience but also to that now not-so-young man  in Java whose background was as ritualized as my own, and on whom – as on me – the outer world had worked, and given the ambition to write.”

                That young Javanese poet is Naipaul’s elusive alter-ego; a symbolic bridge to us.  He seeks poets out in his return trips to India, and throughout his Islamic journeys. He writes of Cheddi Jagan, the former Prime Minister of Guyana, with the words of the Guyanese poet, Martin Carter. There is even  the poet Apollinaire’s allusion of Girogio de Chirico’s painting, displayed  in the title of his book, The Enigma of Arrival.

                He says something else of this civilization, to which we may all belong, which is worth celebrating, albeit quietly:

“Are we only as strong as our beliefs? Is it sufficient merely to hold a world- view, an ethical view, intensely?  The questions are loaded; they contain their own answers…Because my movement within this civilization has been from the periphery to the center, I may have seen or felt certain things more freshly than people to whom these things were [experienced] everyday…This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery…It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit…So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”               

It may be easily perceived that Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul embodies the West Indian as Exile; but this exile is the main ingredient in West Indian life: the exile within, as well as the continuous exclusion from the dominant metropolitan cultures. Naipaul has refined the Self as a work of Art: By not accepting a place, anywhere, he has become a voice everywhere. In doing so, he honors the West Indian life as a product striving towards perfectibility; the result of its swells and gravities, its racial tensions and political trajectories – is the universal life.

                 Naipaul is the region’s third recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature – although English-speaking Caribbean nationals think, primarily, of two: He, and Derek Walcott. Few remember the Martinique-born poet, St. John Perse, who like  Naipaul, migrated to Europe. In the haze of the Sixties,

with Caribbean nationals migrating North sought to negotiate the racial politics of the Civil Rights Struggle, and Identity, the French writer, Perse, was not a ready Caribbean symbol. His early poetry  embraced his Caribbean past – as well as his African Caribbean heritage. Some may consider it a stretch, but I have read, repeatedly, that the first Latin American Nobel recipient, and Bogata City resident, Garbiel Marquez , considers the Caribbean Basin culture an equal source of his literary imagination. Wilson Harris, a Guyanese writer, and inimitable fabulist, might well be our next Nobelist.

                How will Naipaul gild his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature?  Would he accept the prize, at least symbolically, in the name of those long-waiting Caribbean citizens – as had Walcott? Or, are we forced to rightfully embrace his real achievement –  Naipaul’s odyssey, Our Universal Civilization - as our very own?

Naipaul’s opening salvo, “Perhaps” echoes, once again. 

Edgar O. Lake is a resident of St. Croix, and an employee at the VI Department of Education.                            

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