The Guardian has a piece by V.S. Naipaul looking back more than fifty years when, as a young Caribbean writer, he discovered the success of another writer who was only a few years older than him. The story of the discovery is affecting, as are the cutting remarks at the article’s end, about Walcott but also the desires and fantasies of people in American universities:

And now, when I went to the Walcott, I was overwhelmed. The poems I could enter most easily were the shorter poems in the collection. They were the ones whose argument I could manage. I lost my way in the longer poems; I thought what was being said prosy and difficult and I stumbled over the poetic diction. I left those poems to one side and concentrated on the ones I liked; the poet and his book, short as it was, did not suffer.

It seemed to me quite wonderful that in 1949 and 1948 and doubtless for some years before there had been, in what I had thought of as the barrenness of the islands, this talent among us, this eye, this sensitivity, this gift of language, ennobling many of the ordinary things we knew. The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk are not aware of the stillness through which they move. We lived in Trinidad on the all but shut-in Gulf of Paria, between the island and Venezuela; that sight of fishermen, silhouettes in the fast-fading dusk, so precisely done, detail added to detail, was something we all knew. Reading these poems in London in 1955, I thought I could understand how important Pushkin was to the Russians, doing for them what hadn’t been done before. I put the Walcott as high as that.

(Thanks, Tunku)

The image above is a painting by Walcott, “Gauguin in Martinique”

v.s.naipaul-derek-walcott-guardian