Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers by Shashi Tharoor Page B

hollowed by regurgitation. Narayan's words were just what they seemed; there was no hint of meanings lurking behind the surface syllables, no shadow of worlds beyond the words. When asked why he didn't write in an Indian language, Narayan replied that he did, for English was an Indian language. Ironically, though, much of Narayan's prose reads like a translation.
    Some of my friends felt I was wrong to focus on language — a writerly concern, as they saw it — and lose sight of the stories, which in many ways had an appeal that transcended language. But my point was that such pedestrian writing diminished Narayan's stories, undermined the characters, trivialized their concerns. Other serious readers of Narayan disagree with me, and perhaps so many of them can't be wrong. I was perhaps particularly unfair in suggesting that Narayan was merely a chronicler of the ordinary who reflected faithfully the worldview of a self-obsessed and complacent upper caste (and middle class). “I write primarily for myself,” Narayan had said. “And I write about what interests me, human beings and human relationships…. Only the story matters; that's all.” Fair enough: one should not expect Austen to be Orwell. But one does expect an Austen to enrich the possibilities of the language she uses, to illuminate her tools as well as her craft. Narayan's was an impoverished English, limited and conventional, its potential unexplored, its bones bare.
    And yet my case was probably overstated. For there is enchantment in Narayan's world; his tales often captivate, even if they could have been better written. The world that emerges from his stories is one in which the family — or the lack of one — looms as the defining presence in each character's life; in which the ordinary individual comes to terms with the expectations of society; and in which these interactions afford opportunities for wry humor or understated pathos. Because of this, and because of their simplicity, the stories have a universal appeal, and are almost always absorbing. And they are infused with a Hindu humanism thatis ultimately Narayan's most valuable characteristic, making even his most poignant stories comedies of suffering rather than tragedies of laughter.
    So I, too, lament the great man's passing. “The only way to exist in harmony with Annamalai,” Narayan wrote in one of his stories of a troublesome servant, “was to take him as he was; to improve or enlighten him would only exhaust the reformer and disrupt nature's design.” Even the most grudging critic should not deny R. K. Narayan this self-created epitaph.

15
The Enigma of Being V. S. Naipaul
     
    F OR DECADES, THE POTTED BIOGRAPHY of V. S. Naipaul that accompanies each of his more than twenty books has carried the curious sentence, “After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession.” It is a fiercely idiosyncratic formulation, as if Naipaul has defined his commitment to his craft by his unwillingness to pursue any other. And it has stayed in my mind ever since, in my teens, I first read Naipaul, as the biographical hallmark of the True Writer, something that those of us who labor at other employment can never really hope to be.
    And yet it is only with the publication of the remarkable and moving collection of letters sent to and from the adolescent “Vido” at Oxford (
Between Father and Son: Family Letters,
edited by Naipaul's literary agent Gillon Aitken) that I have fully understood the depth of meaning embodied in that sentence. These letters, for the most part between Naipaul and his father (even though many are addressed, with undergraduate casualness, to “Dear Everybody”),profoundly reflect both men's efforts to write successfully — which is to say, to write well enough to be published or broadcast, and above all, to be paid for it. They are full of the pathos and struggle of writing — the creative blocks, the malfunctioning typewriters,