Author:
Publication: BBC News
Date: September 23, 2004
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/09_september/23/naipaul.shtml
VS Naipaul today talks to the BBC
World Service about his new book, the threat to Britain from "council estate
culture" and why writing has become harder with age.
Interviewed by Harriett Gilbert
for BBC World Service's The Word, V S Naipaul criticises "vain" middle-class
revolutionaries; British council estates, "a slave growth, they're parasitic
growths on the main body" and council estate culture, "it's a threat".
The Word is broadcast on the BBC
World Service at 10.30am, 3.30pm and 8.30pm today (23 September 2004),
UK time.
VS Naipaul talks about his new
book, Magic Seeds, in which Willie Chandran - the main character of Naipaul's
previous book Half a Life - joins a revolutionary underground movement
in India.
VS Naipaul: "They (guerrilla groups
in India) believe revolution is the answer. They have no idea what would
follow revolution, and in fact where they liberate these areas they become
centres of tyranny. They blow up the bridges, they cut the telephone wires
to the world outside. So the peasants who should have been liberated are
really imprisoned as in the old feudal days. It is an intellectual folly
these guerrilla movements, they have nothing to offer."
Harriett Gilbert: "What was it
that people told you about these guerrilla movements that made you think,
'I would like to bring Willie Chandran together with one such movement'
as you have in this novel?"
VS Naipaul: "I met some of the
middle class people who'd gone out to join the revolution and I wasn't
impressed by them at all. I thought they were vain, I thought they were
intellectually not a quarter as bright as they thought they were. That
was my lead into this and then I actually went myself. Not to the guerrilla
area but to a town in an area. And I really thought at that stage after
about three visits, this is so shallow, these people are so dull, there's
no grandeur here, nothing that can support a book. Then as I was thinking
about things, I saw how the very shallowness and the very triviality could
be part of the narrative."
Harriett Gilbert: "One of the nice
ironies in this book is that Willie Chandran, who has been throughout his
life, worried that he isn't authentic, that he's not living his own life
- when his sister persuades him that he ought to go out and fight with
the guerrillas - he feels as though he's finally become a whole man that
he's entered history, that he's taken control of his destiny and of course
he hasn't at all has he?"
VS Naipaul: "It's a calamity, it's
a great period of boredom and nothing happening and life being eaten away
and mind being eaten away. And probably people like Willy are always in
that position because they have no idea of history - very few Indians have
an idea of history, the history of India."
Harriett Gilbert: "What you said
just now is implying that Willie's inability to write the story of his
life to simply be a passive actor who kind of drifts from one play to another
is a particularly Indian condition. Do you not think it is in fact the
human condition, I mean most of us when we look back at old diaries or
a photograph of ourselves think who on earth was that person how did I
get to be the person I am now?"
VS Naipaul: "I don't feel I can
speak with authority for many other people. I was limiting it to what I
know of India and making what some people would consider a provocative
point about India. But you see one gets so tired here, in London and elsewhere,
of meeting people from the subcontinent who've completely remade themselves,
who've manufactured stories for themselves to keep their end up. It's like
a national illness actually. And I think that India will not have full
mental health - and that means full political health - unless people truly
possess their history."
Harriett Gilbert: "In some ways
you do parallel India and England. In the sense that through the lawyer
friend of Willie, Roger - you present this vision of an England that is
suffering a kind of informal guerrilla warfare by the lower classes, not
the lower castes, who he refers to as the council estate people. And in
his eyes these people are uniformly semi- criminal, violent, prone to violent
sex, dishonest, deceiving the government and so on. This is a pretty gloomy,
and many would say rather exaggerated picture of the poor in England, Do
you share Roger's view to any extent or are you satirising him in some
way?"
VS Naipaul: "No I'm not satirising
him. It's actually based on observation that idea, council estate culture.
The ancillary aspect of every British city now is the council estate. Something
said in the book that ancilla, means a maid, means a slave girl, and so
these ancillary housing estates are a slave growth, they're parasitic growths
on the main body, the active body. I am willing to defend that I think.
That's what I've seen."
Harriett Gilbert: "Clearly council
estates have a fair share of violence of drug dealing and violence and
so on. But it's absolutely not the case that it's uniformly so that people
who live on council estates are criminal. In fact the majority undoubtedly
aren't and don't beat their women up at night or beat their blokes up."
VS Naipaul: "Well not everybody
would, but let's say one has to notice the council estate life, one has
to pay attention to it, one can't just ignore it. It is taking up more
and more of the country's wealth, it will take up more and more and more
and there is nothing coming back in return."
Harriett Gilbert: "You do indeed
present it in this novel as a threat to Britain."
VS Naipaul: "It's a threat, yes."
Harriett Gilbert: "You've spoken
recently about how, as you get older and you're now over 70, writing becomes
harder for you and that's in some way counter-intuitive because you're
more skilled, you're more practiced, you've had more life to write about.
Could you describe what it is that becomes harder as you get older?"
VS Naipaul: "To be a writer you
have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you
have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This
becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are
shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself
in the world outside. One depends more and more then on observation and
remoteness. I suppose I mean that, just that. Even Tolstoy, when he was
doing Resurrection, I think he was probably about my age, or might have
been even a little younger, he didn't go out and walk the prisoners' route
to Siberia. What he did, he had people, officials who delighted to come
to Yasnya and chat to him about it. And he would have lawyers come and
talk about legal process. So he did his research like that, staying at
home and having the world come to you. But not all of us can do that."
Harriett Gilbert: "Last time we
spoke about your previous novel, Half a Life. We were talking about whether
Willie Chandran was in some way a kind of horror version of yourself, what
you didn't want to become, and you were talking about your lifelong terror
of failure. Now that you have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,
the highest award that a writer can get, has this finally put to rest your
fear of failure?"
VS Naipaul: "The fear of failure
went a little while ago, a little while ago. The thing is it's an act of
weakness to say, 'I'm 72, I've gained recognition, I don't have to do any
more'. It's rather terrible, it's rather terrible, very hard to live with
that terror, that idea. But you know you can't simply write beautifully
if there's nothing to write about. You know you can't just exercise a discipline,
or technique. There is a relationship between the material and the way
you deal with it. Material becomes thin, then I think probably you wouldn't
write about it. Because you, I mean I, I wouldn't finish anything unless
I felt its great importance."
