V.S. Naipaul’s latest statements, offered in an interview with Farrukh Dhondy in the pages of Literary Review, have been met with a storm of protest. I’m not sure what the fuss is about. I’m always surprised that academics who are able to discern all kinds of subversive possibilities in anything from Mansfield Park to South Park receive and judge Naipaul’s pronouncements in singular, fixed ways. (But what could be immediately offensive about Naipaul’s comment regarding Henry James? “He never risked anything. He never exposed himself to anything. He traveled always as a gentleman.”) I should confess, however, that I don’t come to Naipaul to be granted sight of a radical vision. There are others who do a fairly good job of serving that interest. I also can’t pretend that Naipaul is in dialogue with anyone, although I have made that mistake in the past. What I look for in Naipaul, far beyond the familiar kinds of provocation, is the ability to cut through all manner of received wisdom and give a sense of an original literary encounter. Let’s go back to the recent interview with Dhondy. Media accounts, from different countries, have noted his comments on Hardy, Austen, James, and others. No mention is made of what he says about Maupassant, but it is precisely his account about the Frenchman that gives us any real sense of one writer’s sharp, intimate exchange with another:

[W]hen I began to read Maupassant I was too ignorant to appreciate him fully. Some wisdom is needed, some experience is needed before you see a culture and you see the writers more clearly. If you were talking to me twenty-five years ago I would have said Balzac was the greatest French writer. Now I say Maupassant - a very great man. I began to reread Balzac and had a certain amount of trouble with it. I was disappointed - with myself really. I came across the Maupassant stories, all the stories - 1,100 pages. They were in chronological order and quite well translated. It was an education. In the beginning he writes very carefully, not wishing to put a foot wrong. In the middle he is more secure. He does things instinctively and well, and then, near the end of his life, his thoughts are about death, and the pieces get shorter and they are very, very affecting. There is a character in a Chekhov play who talks about Maupassant and says his talent is almost supernatural, and I have to agree with that, because in nearly every story there is a complete life that is being displayed. And there are so many stories. You wonder where he got the material and it seems so natural and easy. When you read, you can analyse it and see his method. It’s very precise geographically and he always gives people a name - very important. There is a line of emotion in his writing, which varies as he writes so you follow the emotion of the writer rather than the banality of how the narrative is going to end. There’s no one like him, I think. There is the brutality of his short life. He began writing when he was thirty, and then in ten years it was almost all over. He was in pain, then mad, so everything he did was done in ten years. He must have worked all the time and yet with a kind of ease. It is a supernatural talent. And when you read, you ask yourself what is the country that’s giving him all this wonderful material and you have to see, after a while, that it isn’t a country that’s giving him the material. He, by his vision, is creating a country. It’s strange. When we read Maupassant at school he seemed very provincial, very French. That is still true, but the work is for everybody. This can’t be said of English writers. (We can leave Dickens out of that consideration.) English writing is very much of England, for the people of England, and is not meant to travel too far.

v.s. naipaul-literary-review