SOURCE: "The Novelist V. S. Naipaul Talks about His Work to Ronald Bryden," in The Listener, Vol. 89, March 22, 1973, pp. 367-70.

[In the following interview, Naipaul discusses various aspects of his work, including the development of his book, The Loss of El Dorado.]

I wrote in one of my early articles that London was for me a good place to work in. I suppose one was always aware of other minds. London was a place where one encountered a generous reaction—from publishers, critics, newspapers—and so one had constant stimulus, minds brushing against minds. But fairly early on I felt that I had to get out and look at the world, otherwise I was just going to shrivel up as a writer and have nothing more to say. One of the difficulties about coming from a background like my own, a fairly simple, barbarous and limited background, was that I found that I couldn't do the kind of novel which I'd set out to do. I wanted to be a writer because I had read a certain kind of writer. I assumed that I, too, had the kind of society that those writers had. You know, Balzac paints a picture of an entire society, Maupassaint a picture of a great peasant society, and of Paris as well. I quickly found that I didn't have that kind of society. This was one of my first halts. It occurred quite early on, the decision to look much more closely at the narrow world I had, to see what I could do with it and to abandon all previous patterns.

But one of the things that you seem to have decided, looking at the society of Trinidad, of the West Indies and of many of the other places that you have visited and described in The Overcrowded Barracoon, is that a society has got to have sufficient coherence and authenticity of its own. It doesn't derive from elsewhere. It has to be sufficiently settled and traditional to provide the people in it with some sense of purpose and value, it has to be a culture in order to produce a culture. But there you are, producing, as your publishers have said, a kind of autobiography—because a writer's autobiography is all he has written—with no settled place. You seem to be saying one can't write without roots, and yet you've uprooted yourself to find somewhere to write and you've chosen the whole world.

I don't know whether I've got the figures absolutely right, but they say that in a place like Mauritius, there are, shall we say, eighty types of job, and in a place like England or France you have perhaps about ten thousand kinds of job. I feel that the simple society cannot lend itself to extended imaginative treatment. The possibility of adventure is always limited, and this brings about a kind of limitation as well in one's imaginative handling of the material. Again and again, as a writer trying to devise a story which is a symbol for what one feels, one has to decide what to do with the main character. What kind of job will you give him? How will he go through this particular passage of time? What will he do? How will he occupy himself? And again and again, with simple societies, you're landed with the same thing. A man becomes a teacher or a professional man, or he becomes a lorry-driver. I had to face the barrenness of this, I also had to face—and this is why my career, which appears from the outside to have a kind of inevitability about it, has really been full of stops and starts—I had to face the fact that I was heir to a type of education which came from a much more developed world, that I was practising my career as a writer in a city like London, and I had to do something to reconcile these two worlds. I couldn't pretend the one world excluded the other. All my work is really one. I'm really writing one big book. I came to the conclusion that, considering the nature of the society I come from, considering the world I have stepped into and the world which I have to look at, I could not be a professional novelist in the old sense. I realised then that my response to the world could be expressed equally imaginatively in nonfiction, in journalism: and I take my journalism extremely seriously because I think it's a very fair response to my world. It's very personal and very particular. It's something that can't be converted into fiction. It is almost too private. I went to India for a year in 1962 just to have a look, and I was so full of this thing of being the novelist, the man who invented, the man who converted experience into something else, that when I came back from India I tried to convert my experience into a novel and actually spent about six or seven weeks pretending to write a novel. It failed because the experience was far too particular. Someone like myself, coming from Trinidad, living in England, being a writer, then going to India to have a look—that was too particular an experience, and the correct form for that was non-fiction.

Yes, I can see that your journalism has become more and more important to you, and it does all interlock with the novels. The curious thing to me is that although you've written one novel about England and English characters, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, there's very little English journalism. Do you find England not a culture that you are a journalist in?

I've been living in England, but really I think it's truer to say that I've been attached to London, these few square miles which make an international city, a great metropolis. As soon as I move out of that little enchanted area, I'm in a foreign country in which I'm not terribly interested.

Is it that London is a synthetic society almost as much as any other now?

I suppose it draws people together from many parts of the world and many parts of the country, for all kinds of reasons: in a way, it's artificial, and one isn't violating anybody's society by being in London, whereas to try to impose myself on a smaller society—in the provinces, say—would be really quite ridiculous. I couldn't even do it in an Indian village or town.

I was astonished, reading The Overcrowded Barracoon, at the extent to which the whole world seemed to fit this analysis. The whole world is in a state of flux. Your characters are 'in a free state'; the old novel, the novel about the chambered organic society, just isn't possible any more. Your one great book is turning into the novel of the new synthetic world.

I don't think it is possible any longer for people to write those novels where you could say, 'They lived happily ever afterwards,' because we no longer have this assurance of the world going on. Societies everywhere have been fractured by all kinds of change: technological, social, political. We can no longer regard the action of a novel as covering a little crisis, a little curve on the graph which will then revert to the nice, flat, straight, ordered life: and I think this is one reason why, as you say, the traditional novel is just no longer possible. It is also one reason why people find it very hard nowadays to read fiction, and why people go back to what they call the old masters. I think there's an element of nostalgia in reading Hardy, and even in reading Dickens or George Eliot. There is narrative there, the slow development of character, and people are longing for this vanished, ordered world. Today, every man's experience of dislocation is so private that unless a writer absolutely matches that particular man's experience the writer seems very private and obscure. So I think the art of fiction is becoming a curious, shattered thing. It's one reason why there are so few young writers about. The complaint of publishers and literary agents is that the talent that should be going into the writing of fiction is going elsewhere. People say it's television that's taken it away. I think it may be that the whole world now requires another kind of imaginative interpretation.

When you think of it, there can't have been a generation of European writers that wasn't interrupted by war.

The war's always been such a blessing to older writers in this country: six years of rest in which they were able to recover and look at themselves again. Writers today, those who are in my position, are compelled to go on, and it's very daunting for young persons who say: 'I'm going to be a writer.' You know, I'm only 40, but I'm at another curious stage, one of those stop periods in my career. I have committed myself to the profession. There's nothing else I can do or want to do, and yet the years stretch ahead of me and I wonder how I'm going to fill them. The world abrades one, one comes to certain resolutions and then one devises by instinct and through dreams and all kinds of senses a story that is a symbol for all this. But one can't do it all the time.

But isn't it possible that because of this pattern of peace and war—with the writer having his subject given him on a plate in that way—that a kind of artificial division has grown up? I mean, the archetypal novel is War and Peace. Novels seem to divide themselves into the great peaceful 19th-century ones and 20th-century masterpieces like Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms: you seem to have found the territory between the two because there hasn't been an overt war in quite the same sense. You seem to have been able to look more closely at societies and see that there never was, in many of them, this organic ordered peacefulness, that the violence was there, the disorder, the wrong patterning which produces contradiction, Perhaps this is the new career?

Well, I don't know. I think all my writing has issued from a kind of personal panic, panic to do with what I've just been talking about, the sense of having come to a stop—and then political panic, perhaps, at one's position in the world. One has always tried to reach some kind of personal balance, so you don't go quite unhinged.

It seemed to me that you reached the turning-point with The Loss of El Dorado, your book about the history of Trinidad, where you looked below the surface of that society we both came out of and dug up things that were certainly new to me. Were they as new to you when you found them?

Absolutely. I'll tell you about that book. That book was to be a simple bit of journalism which I was going to write for the Americans and make a lot of money. I was going to make 10,000 dollars. I thought the place had no history. I thought I would swiftly look at the records and produce something, and then I discovered this appalling history that hadn't been ignored but had just somehow dropped out because the place itself had ceased to be important, so that all the history books were wrong. The discovery, the colonisation, the extermination of the Indians, the emptiness then, the use of that island as a base for South American revolution—this recurring dream of Europe—then the revolution going wrong, the base of the revolution becoming a slave island, the further corruption, the slaves that were abandoned, desolation, the colonial past which we knew: I thought this was an immense story. It was especially alarming to me to see that if you were unimportant all that had happened to you could be ignored. I still feel so about some of the subjects I write on, that perhaps unimportant people are profoundly unimportant and what happens to them is, really, of no great moment in the world. When I went to Mauritius and wrote the article which is the title-piece of the new book, it was a terrible experience for me. I actually fell ill on the way back from Mauritius, and I think that the two things were linked. I wrote that piece in illness and the illness was partly made up of my distress at what I'd seen, that lost, abandoned people, and so I wrote this article out of great pain, and offered it to the magazine which had sent me out there as news which I thought would be very moving. But it was about ten months before the piece was printed in the paper, because the place is not an important place.

But, good heavens, it symbolises two-thirds of the earth, all the abandoned places, just as it seemed to me The Loss of El Dorado symbolised the whole imperial process: what had been done to places by having the imperial idea imposed on them from outside. It seems to me that there and in the pieces you've written since then you have discovered the great new subject.

I think one reason why the world is not interested in these places is that the world has got too many received ideas. I think that this whole thing about Right and Left gives such a distorted view of the world, and so many people now have rather settled ideas about the way it's all going, that investigation seems to have become unnecessary. I think that one reason why my journalism can last is because I never had any such ideas about Left and Right. One just looked at what had happened. There are no principles involved in one's vision. One doesn't try to fit what one sees into the kind of pattern which would suit some political dogma, but, with all these received ideas floating about, it seems to people that the world has really been settled, organised. There is nothing more to do, so they have ideas of racial apocalypse, which I think is nonsense, or Communist apocalypse which is equally nonsense—and the people who are the victims, and are deficient because of their past, themselves contribute to this simplification of their problems.

As you say in The Overcrowded Barracoon, politics are the opium of the people because the problems are not those that politics try to deal with.

They're the problems of people who are powerless. They're the politics of people who have no power, and it has become a kind of game. It is an opium for them.

You've become a kind of unstitcher of systems for yourself and for your readers. Do you find that this unstitches you as a novelist?

Put like that, it sounds as though I've decided to look after myself and to try to preserve my own calm and happiness—as though I'm shutting out the distress. To some extent, this may be so, but I also think I have an understanding of what is possible in our world: that the oppressed or depressed cultures of the world have really to look after themselves. I'm comforted by two people. There's Josephus, who was able to retire from Jerusalem to Rome to write his history of the Jewish war which the Romans conducted in AD 70, if I get the facts right. And there's that marvellous story which is told about the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega. Garcilaso was the son of a Peruvian princess and a Spanish Conquistador. He decided when he was quite a young man that history was flowing in the direction of Europe and Spain, so he went to Spain. One day, when he was very old, Bartolomé de Las Casas, the apostle of the Indians, a great friend of the Indians, saw a man across a room who was clearly an Indian from the New World, and went across to him and said very friendlily: 'You're from Mexico, aren't you?' Garcilaso, recognising Las Casas, said, 'No, I'm from Peru,' and both men at once knew that in a most ridiculous and grotesque way they were on opposite sides. I'm comforted by that because I think that Garcilaso made the correct decision—understanding that, the way the current was flowing, it was very silly for one man to try to pretend it wasn't flowing in that direction.

Do you still think that there's a current flowing in the direction of the 'important' world?

I think so. Let us take a very highly industrialised country of the poor world. India, which has a very considerable industrial base now, and where there's an awful lot of talent. I think the gap between a country like India and, shall we say, Europe is not only a money gap or a technological gap now: I think it is also an intellectual gap. It's a gap of sensibility. I think that men, responding to all the terrible changes that technology brings about in the world, do, in some ways, become sharper and more acute. They're always responding to new challenges, and the mind is always at work: they're feeding the world, intellectually, in a way that I think that India will never feed the world. To try to be a writer in Argentina, for example, is extremely difficult. The only thing you can do is to be like Borges. You can delude yourself that you have a country that's already been created, a fatherland that has fought its battles and has built its great city and whose culture is flourishing: but that is delusion. The point about the future synthetic cultures, and people like ourselves who come from them, seems to be that we still need the support of the others.

I suppose South America is the oldest of the synthetic societies. No hope there either?

Well, Argentina, to me, was very interesting because it's a colonial society and it's entirely European, so that what one was talking about, what one had discovered about the world, could be seen not to be a purely racial matter. Here, the people who'd come over at the turn of the century to service the great estancias, on land that had been won from the pampas Indians, have become a rather lost people. They have not been able to create an organic society. Few things are more distressing when you're in a small pampas town than to see Italians living in this very desolate landscape, a lost people. One felt about them the way one feels about people in the other territories of the New World. They're people who've been cut of from the source of their culture. They've been cut off from all the things that bound their old culture together. These were individuals like the rest of us, and somehow their society—on a much bigger scale, there are 23 million of them—wasn't working. There were no internal reverences any longer. There were no shared ideals, and the country was just cracking up. One saw it very, very clearly there, and the big thing, as I say, was the discovery that the artificial society perhaps isn't always a product of empire or colonial oppression, but simply, perhaps, of migration. Societies that were doomed to remain half-made.

Do you still think Britain is the country where to be a writer means most?

Well, I come back to England because I have all my friends here now, in London. It's the place where I operate, and my publishers are here, the magazines for which I write are here. But again I must make the point that it's not a place where I can flourish completely. It doesn't feed me.

Which is the place which has fed you most? You said, in The Middle Passage, that nothing was made in the West Indies. You were made in the West Indies.

I wonder how much I was made in Trinidad? I've often thought that if I'd started in another country I would have started from a higher base. I remember how low my sights were when I began to write, how deliberately I restricted myself, and I wonder whether, if I had begun in a more developed place, with my inclinations and tenacity and aptitudes, I really wouldn't have been a much more, as it were, important writer than I am now. A good and rather tragic example is Jean Rhys. Jean Rhys is like us. She's really the pioneer. She came over here at the turn of the century. She was from the West Indies, and had very high principles as a writer. She wouldn't falsify her experiences. Her experiences were those of an uprooted person adrift in the world. Now she has been revived. She does enjoy a reputation, quite justifiably. But she will never become really popular. She'll never feed a culture or alter sensibility, and I think if you're a writer these are the things you want to do. You want to operate at the top. You don't just want to turn your books out and make a living, if you have a respect for your craft.

It seems to me that you yourself are moving toward a readership much wider than any you could hope for in this country, in the West Indies or in America. Because you are writing about the problems of the unimportant, of places like the West Indies, Mauritius, India, you've uncovered something which represents almost everybody. Is a universal audience impossible?

I certainly am aware of my books falling into a kind of void. That I find very heartbreaking. When I was younger it didn't seem to matter. I've often said that when I was younger and thought of being a writer, I thought I was serving a thing called art, and that art was somehow divinely judged, and what was good would be rewarded. I very quickly found that it wasn't so, that I was always being judged politically. It was said that I was looking down on the people I wrote about, on the land of my birth. That is something that would never have been said about Evelyn Waugh, or any other writer from a more developed culture. What a labour it has been to ignore this and break out of it.

But isn't this, perhaps, a writer's fantasy: that once upon a time in ancient Athens Euripides, Aeschylus and the rest of them were as popular as footballers, or the kings of the carnival bends in Trinidad, or their champion cricketers? Browning, I think wrote a couple of poems imagining this kind of life for a poet. In fact, has it ever happened? Shakespeare was always being put down by Ben Jonson.

Perhaps one is asking for the impossible. But one needs to have some kind of conversation with a society. One cannot write in a total vacuum.

That's suggesting a new kind of career, the writer as a culture hero. I suppose Mailer has gone further than anyone in that direction. You accompanied Mailer around New York when he stood for mayor. How did that work out?

I thought it worked out very well. I'm much more sympathetic towards Mailer than many people. I liked the way his mind worked. I liked his gift of language. I liked the way he was always ordering experience and fitting everything that occurred very, very swiftly into experience, making a whole of it, so that any moment he could present you with a very ordered, total philosophy. That was so impressive. I was overwhelmed by Mailer—and I found him a very shy man, oddly enough.

But is it possible for a writer to turn himself and his writing, as one unit, into a product unless he is in some way a source of scandal, like Byron? Mailer, to some extent, has made himself a scandal.

Yes, but probably this is what will happen to writers more and more. It seems to me quite a legitimate thing to happen to writers. I can't do it myself, but to be in conversation with your society seems to me very, very marvellous and desirable for a writer.