Never at Home: On V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018)
MOMENTS BEFORE V. S. Naipaul died last August in London, a poem by Alfred Tennyson was read aloud to him. The two writers had more in common than might be apparent. Both had been born British, but away from any center of ambition. Both made their respective journeys to the metropolis, a century apart, and went on to receive imperial titles in their lifetimes. They were connected, as well, in their anguished acceptance of the ways of the world, their lament for wasted lives reinforced by the idea that it is futile to even try recovering what has been lost. “Crossing The Bar,” the poem Naipaul heard as he breathed his last, was written by Tennyson in his final years. The “bar” in the poem is the rim of sand along a beach, but it is also the interface between life and death. The poet imagines himself dying, being carried far out by the currents, but never once does he consider turning back.
To turn back, for Naipaul, was to give up on one’s ambition. “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing”—the narrator of A Bend in the River famously declares that such men have no place in the world. To become a writer is, in a way, to make oneself always vulnerable; but at every stage in his career Naipaul seemed to have operated out of a belief that his worst, his weakest days had just passed him by. Every sentence he wrote enacted this show of strength, but the underlying nervousness, the fear of all things coming to nought, was never far behind. His early comedies are fraught, therefore, with an unsettling tension; his travels through Asia, Africa, South America—he insisted on calling them “books of enquiry”—are tempered, despite the rigidity of his vision, with a need to know how other people apparently get on with their lives. Now, at the end, each book seems to have led inevitably to the next. The need to encompass perhaps grew more and more. He began with a sleepy lane in his first book, Miguel Street, and ended up wanting to fit in an entire continent into his last, The Masque of Africa.
That ambition can seem incongruous when you is important, because the young Naipaul would soon discover that his father didn’t so much read writers as sample them:
