Naipaul on Walcott

For a long time, I have wondered what the West Indies' two living Nobel Laureates thought of each other’s work and success. Perhaps there exists some recent article somewhere by Derek Walcott about V.S. Naipaul. Walcott, I know, has reviewed Naipaul in the past, and made some passing comments and some insightful comments about the value of Naipaul’s work and its problems, but nothing, recent, as I recall, and no real dialog. And until this week, I had seen no comment on Walcott by Naipaul. For a while, the Calabash International Literary Festival has tried to get these to share a stage in Jamaica: so far, no luck. We will keep trying.
Part of the fascination is with the idea that these two prodigious talents, men of quite frank and uncompromisingly opinionated ways, would represent a remarkably intriguing moment of creative power on a single stage at a time when they have quite little to lose in terms of reputation, and frankly, very little to gain by pot-shots or trite silliness. More than that, their importance to the English-speaking Caribbean cannot be understated. Walcott has given his life and art to offering us a poetic sense of what our landscape looks like and the value of the rich and complex cultures that have been forged on these islands. He declares himself a poet devoted to doing justice to the beauty and force of these small islands, but in his plays and poems, he is not writing postcards. He is helping us to understand that the world in these islands are sophisticated enough to warrant a stunning talent’s attention.

V.S. Naipaul, despite his quite famous dismissal of the island of Trinidad where he was born, as to small and for that reason too inhospitable for a genuine literary talent, would devote the first four or five of his novels to exploring with precision, a sharp eye for detail and an unflinching honesty, the region. Indeed, he has never really left the shaping truths of being a man from Trinidad in all his other works despite the fact that he has written about so many other parts of the world. Their work is important both for its quality and for its unquestionable quality. But it is important because these are complicated writers who have written about home with the conflicted sensibility that makes complete sense in the region. But in this region, they are aware that their heroic status is not assured. None will be a Bob Marley or a Sparrow in the eyes of the larger populace, and this is probably how it ought to be. What we don’t have is a sense of what they now think of each other. Walcott is two years older than Naipaul. They have known each other and know of each other for over fifty years. Walcott, a chronic punster with a deadly wit once nicknamed Naipaul, V.S. Nightfall in a poem. Funny, yes, but enough, in my experience, to start a life-long rift between sensitive writers.
So it was with some interest that I read Naipaul’s reflections on Walcott’s first collection of poems published when the latter was about eighteen years old. Naipaul recalls the occasion as a significant one that he had heard of on another island where he was still in high school. Naipaul’s piece is a lengthy article in the Guardian. It is a curious thing. It is not exactly a praise song, but there is much praise for Walcott in the piece. Yet the praise of the present Walcott is oddly muted, and somewhat underhand. He makes the plainly obvious observation that Walcott’s promise at the time has been met fully by his current fame aided and abetted by the American university system according to Naipaul. It is subtle, this twice repeated credit to the American university system as the entity largely responsible for rescuing Walcott from the frustration of being an unfulfilled and wasted writer in the Caribbean. But Naipaul, one understands, does belong to that generation of post-colonials who would look askance at the industry of the American university system as a somewhat crass welfare system for writers; a system that Naipaul has, most likely, chosen to avoid, perhaps because of his famous commitment to the ethic of being a writer who makes his living entirely from writing. Naipaul has said, with much pride and a smidgen of gratitude, that after is first few years trying to hold small jobs to support his writing he has since then made his entire living as a writer. In the piece, also, Naipaul does ot admit to having an opinion of Walcott’s poetry beyond the work he might have seen in the 1950s, ten years after the 1949 publication of his first slim volume of verse. Of that later work, he speaks of not really understanding it and of finding himself enamored of the older work because of its commitment to the task of beauty—a pure commitment untarnished, he implies, by the vicissitudes of life that would have overtaken the thirty odd year old Walcott, still promising, and still not seeing the fruit of his great promise. It is a fascinating read. Naipaul seems to understand something of the value of Walcott’s early poetry, but he reads poetry in the most intriguing way. And it is this approach to reading poetry that I find most intriguing in the work.
Naipaul admits a grave suspicion of poetry. That is generous. He, at one point, admits that there was a time when poetry was a pleasure for him. Then he was reading rhymes by Palgrave—memorable, witty pieces written, one assumes, for children. Then he was forced to content with poetry that did not offer the kind of accessibility that he felt was useful. He did not enjoy studying literature and says he was grateful for not having done literature in is sixth form exams because he would have had to read poetry and that would just have been a disaster. He does concede that while at university in England (he read at Oxford, but with splendid Oxford modesty, does not mention this fact in the piece) he was forced to read Shakespeare and Marlowe and he found power in quite simple lines. This he found remarkable. But he does not appear to have developed much of a taste for poetry, and if there is a taste, he does not trust it terribly.
As he describes his reading of the early Walcott (who he finally read, not in 1949, but in 1955), he says that he could not get through the longer poems, and so didn’t. He read only, and enjoyed the shorter poems. The longer ones seemed to dense and he just did not understand them. Naipaul does not offer this as a critique of Walcott, but merely as a way of talking about how he reads poetry. He does not have the energy for complex lines, and he is wary of poets who make it hard for him to understand what is going on. But he seemed to enjoy the romantic quality of the early Walcott; a quality he missed in the newer work by Walcott, which he thought was far more derivative and work that experimented greatly with imitating other poets. Naipaul tenders a few guesses about the poets Walcott may have been imitating. He actually says that he understood and appreciated why Walcott felt he needed to write such derivative poems at that time. Despite his ambivalence about Walcott’s work, he admired it enough to broadcast all of it on the Caribbean Voices program with the BBC for which he was an editor.
Naipaul uses the piece to say that despite the portrayal of Walcott by many as the writer who stayed behind and worked in the trenches while others (like Naipaul) left, with no intention of returning, the truth is that Walcott was actually a frustrated writer when he stayed, a bitter man and a man who would have never had the success he had had he not eventually left. At the same time, he seems clear that Walcott, as a young poet, was a genius and that he was already writing with the kind of authority that one would expect from a more senior writer. What he will not help us understand is what he thinks of Walcott’s work now. That may be because he has never quite overcome his uncertainty about poetry to read the later Walcott. But Naipaul decidedly utilitarian reading of poetry should prove reassuring to any. Here is an unquestionable literary giant who barely manages to have some feeling for poetry. He wants the work to be direct and accessible. He is still inclined towards the romantic, on one hand, and the detachment that avoids the messiness of personal confession. He is nostalgic for the past and relishes it. And he understands, one supposes, that greatness is often very apparent early on. Were I Naipaul’s poetry teacher, I would think that I had somehow failed in helping him to engage poetry the more. But the truth may well be that Naipaul is up to his old tricks again, and this bland and flat way of reading Walcott is his way of quietly asking, “so what is the point of poetry, anyway?”
I am left, though, with a greater desire to hear these two men talk about writing with each other. It may never happen, but I wish it could.