Wanderer Of Endless Curiosity

By R.Z. Sheppard

Between Madras and the shore temple town of Mahabalipuram, the Tamil farmers spread their harvest across the road and wait for the traffic. Cars, buses and trucks burst through the sheaves; the rubber meets the rice, and the grains are pinched free from their husks. The vehicles move on, and women, children and Indian crows drop down through the exhaust fumes to gather in their share.

The scene delights the trim, crisply dressed man in the backseat of the Ambassador, India's doughty knockoff of the 1954 Morris Oxford. "Look at them doing their threshing," he says eagerly. "They're so happy threshing, threshing."

Friends say that Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul often talks in bis, a reference to the musical notation for "repeat phrase." But what could be mistaken for an affectation is actually a ritual of concentration that is performed on something as simple as the way a lintel rests on an ancient pillar or as complex as how the past weighs on the present.

The burdens of history are balanced in the pages of Naipaul's many books and published daily on his mobile face. The muscles for consternation, annoyance, mirth, sadness, disappointment and disdain are well developed. A lifetime overcoming obscurity, asthma and anxiety among strangers in strange lands has taught him to expect the worst. His autobiographical writings toll with such gloomy remarks as "To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament." To a visitor who has just blown through 10 1/2 time zones to arrive promptly for a meeting in Madras, he says, "When someone says I'll meet you between 3 and 4 p.m., it means our relationship is finished."

Evelyn Waugh said that punctuality is the virtue of the bored. In Naipaul's case, arrivals and departures constitute the story of his life, and tardiness disrupts the narrative. "If one is not on time, things won't go right," he warns, though one learns quickly not to take the author's fretful comments personally.

Vidia, as he is known to friends, operates at a high level of stress. It may be genetic, he suggests, sadly recalling that his brother Shiva, the novelist and journalist, wrote him shortly before he died of a heart attack three years ago at the age of 40 that "anxiety was his truest feeling." Apprehension also comes with the territory. Naipaul was born an outsider 56 years ago in the British colony of Trinidad. A member of neither the white ruling class nor the black majority, he was part of the island's large, self-contained Indian community. As a child, he lived a Hindu village life in the country. In Port- of-Spain during World War II, he experienced a polyglot street life that included the language of American G.I.s. Later, as a scholarship student at Oxford, the accents were more refined, but the sense of being a colonial was even stronger.

Few writers have made better use of their estrangement than Naipaul. He recently returned to India to gather material for his third book on the subcontinent, and things could be going more smoothly. A recent election in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has been disruptive. Madras' main streets are filled with festive tides of celebrators waving the red-and-black banners of the victorious Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam Party. Naipaul is trying to sort out the issues, which include the historic antagonism of South Indians toward traditional Brahman power. Eventually, he will decipher the complexities of culture and politics on paper, but for the moment, he says pointedly, "it is the old story: the darker-skinned people against the lighter-skinned people."

The sorting out takes time and patience. An interview with a local bureaucrat seems to support Naipaul's contention that "everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two." After much difficulty, he has arranged a chat with two Tamil radicals. The pair are escorted to the writer's hotel room by two plainclothesmen. The luxurious Taj Coromandel is overrun by an international gathering of leather-goods manufacturers, and for all anyone can tell, Naipaul and his group could have just concluded an agreement to turn sacred cows into discount luggage. His reaction to the interview indicates that he would have found such a deal more interesting. "They were criminals with nothing to say," he remarks impatiently. "No patterned narrative, just fanatical belief."

Rumors that V.S. Naipaul has mellowed are somewhat exaggerated. His testiness seems for the moment to be tempered by weariness. "The mind fills up with so many images," he says, and one is suddenly aware how many of our images of the Third World come from his tightly woven books. He once wrote, "I have no attitudes; no views. I have appetites and reactions, violent reactions." Naipaul claims he is now content to be a quiet listener. Readers looking for a verbal lynching by the leading chronicler of modern folly and delusion may have been disappointed by his recently published A Turn in the South. But what they got was far more than the standard tour of the new liberal Dixie. In texture and tone, the work is a departure for Naipaul. "I was not interested in what I thought; I was interested in what the people thought," he says. Working up to 14 hours a day, Naipaul roamed the old Confederacy talking to black intellectuals, redneck philosophers, white-collar workers and auto-factory hands now employed by the Japanese. The result is a book of scenes and voices and, of course, a layering of past and present. The South's agricultural and religious roots, its history of slavery, and the evolution of its race relations and economy are played off against the comments of people trying to understand the small parts of what Naipaul eventually conveys as a whole: a region of America that is like an emerging nation within a nation.

On the road, Naipaul operates largely through honed instinct, avoiding official sources and searching for the obscure informant and off-center incident. Asked why he did not interview Reuben Greenberg, the black Jewish police chief of Charleston, S.C., Naipaul grimaces and says simply, "Too obvious." An ironic comment, considering that Naipaul, also a self-made man of many parts, is now widely considered to be England's greatest living writer. His own faceted history parallels the breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples after the war, a great shaking up of the world, a great shaking up of old cultures and old ideas." In his new novel My Secret History, Paul Theroux offers an affectionate and accurate sketch of his friend and mentor. The character's name is S. Prasad, but the facts and mannerisms are V.S. Naipaul's: "He was an unusual alien: he knew everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned his own house, and had published half a shelf of books. He had won five literary prizes . . . Still, he called himself an exile. He said he didn't belong -- he looked it in his winter coat. Seeing me, he frowned with satisfaction."

A similar expression flickers when Naipaul assesses his own career. "I really don't have a success story to tell," he begins. "My story is one of slog and grind and disappointment and overcoming." Growing up in Trinidad "among advertisements for things that were no longer made," Naipaul rebelled against the prevailing backwater mentality. His model was his father, a journalist who tried to bring new ideas to his insular community. Seepersad Naipaul died in 1953, a defeated man of 47. Yet, as his son has written, "he made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble thing."

Naipaul's success story is similar to those of other gifted outsiders who have become part of the tradition of English letters. Coming from backgrounds they found provincial and embarrassing, they offered themselves to high culture, only to discover that they had shut the door on their best material. "I was a man who had no idea of what to write about," says Naipaul of his early literary efforts in London. Turning his imagination back to Trinidad released his gift and led to his first successes, lighthearted novels and stories about his island society.

Later books grew out of the need for fresh subjects. "England is not laid out like Trinidad. Its life goes on behind closed doors," he notes. "To get material, I've had to travel." What Naipaul conveyed in nonfiction such as An Area of Darkness and The Loss of El Dorado and in his novels Guerrillas and A Bend in the River changed Western perceptions of the underdeveloped world. Free of their colonial keepers, new nations had to confront their own hearts of darkness. In Africa the author found tribalism overgrowing hopes of progress; in India he observed that poverty was more dehumanizing than any modern machine. Eight years before Salman Rushdie outraged the Imam, Naipaul had pinpointed the problem of true believers: "In the fundamentalist scheme the world constantly decays and has constantly to be re-created. The only function of intellect is to assist that re-creation."

Such declarations give Naipaul the appearance of a political curmudgeon. But, he says with some surprise, "I don't think that way. People turn things around. I'm for individual rights and for law." It is a long view that includes his fascination with ancient Rome ("I can barely express my admiration for it") and the imperial record of the English. Their achievement calls forth some of his best bis: "Pretty terrific. It would be churlish to say otherwise. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It would be unhistorical to say otherwise."

Naipaul is English not so much by an accident of history as by personal acts ^ of intelligence and will. Thirty-eight years in Britain have given him a proper accent, a direct way with service staff and an impatience with romantic abstraction. He has a British wife, Patricia, with whom he shares a house in Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge and a military training area from which distracting gunfire can frequently be heard.

England is where he writes -- slowly. A good day at a recently acquired computer is 400 words. If he produces more, he notes with a laugh, he invariably writes less the following day. On average it takes Naipaul about a year to compose a book. "I'm with it all the time, anxious to get to the end," he says with a hint of dread. "When I'm finished, I do nothing. It takes a week before I even begin to feel tired." To keep in shape, he performs a daily exercise taught to him years ago by a family pundit in Trinidad. It is a difficult yoga bend that leaves the writer arched backward with his head on the floor.

Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night. Among his favorites are the Henry plays, with their themes of chaos and shifting fortunes.

Critics generally agree that Naipaul's fortunes are on a permanent foundation. Irving Howe, no pushover, says, "There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him." Alfred Kazin calls Naipaul the "most compelling master of social truth that I know." The writer himself is not overly responsive to praise. He claims to dislike interviews and awards and describes himself simply as a "maker of books." Though England is his base and spiritual home, he prefers the convenience and anonymity of large hotels and jetliners where, 30,000 ft. above the chaos, he can clasp a pillow to his stomach, insist that "reading is too important to do on airplanes" and begin once again to turn high anxiety into high art.