The Writer Must Protect Himself ~ V. S. Naipaul

I find it interesting that I came across this article (of course through Twitter serendipity) just as I was–I am—in the process of editing a personal essay titled “The Soul of the Sea” (to be posted soon) which touches on some points raised below.

If an artist is to truly understand and empathize with another then he or she must also be willing to feel and understand how another judges him or  herself. Something many are too afraid to do for the fear of coming across as judgmental. It is not easy to practice discernment which is not the same as judgment. Moreover, I am not sure if one can write fiction without judgment.

Below is an excerpt from V. S. Naipaul’s January 4, 2011 interview in the Atlantic:  on judgment versus empathy, writers who blog & tweet, the novel’s future, and on the craft of writing becoming “like that hotel coffee shop, another kind of place.”

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Whether or not you admire V.S. Naipaul turns to a great degree on your assessment of his empathic abilities. When I asked Naipaul about empathy, he described it as “a colossal part, a fundamental part” of his enterprise: “I’ve always put myself in the other man’s place. And it’s strange to find that people don’t understand this side of me.”

I asked him to explain this side. He chuckled a little guiltily, perhaps because complaining about being misunderstood is not very Naipaul. “They think I’m very brutal.” he said of his critics, whose criticism he rarely addresses. “They think I’m unkind. And I don’t think that at all. I just think I always try to look at the world through the eyes of the man I’m talking to. Even now, talking to you, I’m half looking at the world through your eyes.”

“And what are you seeing?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said cryptically, and then we all began to laugh.

What brought the criticism, I suggested, was the pungent judgment that Naipaul bundles with his empathy. He reconstructs so well the experience of being another human. But wrapped up with that empathy can be a bald contempt for the insecurities, customs and beliefs of his subjects. I asked about the relationship between empathy and judgment, and whether he thought it possible to do both.

He thought for a moment. “Yes, I think one is contained in the other,” he said. “Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.” I suggested to him that many who “misunderstood” him, in his estimation, maintained the rather different view that genuine empathy precludes being judgmental.

“Well, I understand that point of view, too,” he said. “But I think if you try to look at the world through other people’s eyes, that act of looking contains a kind of judgment as well.” His editor offered this elaboration, with which Naipaul confirmed his agreement: because humans are self-critical, judging themselves as harshly as others judge them, the art of putting yourself in another’s shoes involves not just saccharine sensitivity, but judging a person as she might, or should, judge herself.

This idea of the duality of judgment and empathy, as Naipaul conceives of it, may be essential to making sense of his life’s work and his legacy. It is a reflection of the self-image he has vigorously cultivated: a man unattached to tribe or country or ideology, to any other source of income but writing, to any other professional deployment of his mind and time. “I’m a pure writer,” he told me. “By that I mean I could have been nothing else but, and I understand that about myself.”

He seems especially to loathe the notion of writer as all-purpose pundit. Today the writer expects, and is expected, not only to write but also to blog about the writing, bloviate about it on television and the radio, tweet about it, personally market it—and, most treacherously, to stretch out opinions formed from the examination of particular things to subjects far afield. Naipaul strenuously resists such pontification. It is frustrating for the interviewer; but there is also something remarkable about his restraint. “There are two ways of talking,” he told me. “One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.” Much of a writer’s life is spent in making considered thoughts out of easy ones, he added—in “refining coarse thought.”

When our conversation veered toward his oft-quoted claim that the novel has no future, Naipaul at first just repeated several times that the novel has “done its work.” But then Andreou spoke for him, and he readily assented to the idea: a new form is born when original people have something burning to say and no established mode of saying it. But then a form becomes entrenched, and anyone can take it off the shelf. The result, in Andreou’s Naipaul-inspired phrase, is an onslaught of “mimicry.” When a form has “done its work,” it becomes too easy for others to mimic it.

Naipaul’s is the frustration of a man who has gambled his entire life on the idea that writing is difficult, that it is a vocation unlike any other, that it is a kind of nirvanic quest whose unattainability is the very point. It is the mission he was preparing for, unknowingly, when as a boy in Trinidad he would come home from social events, sit by himself and seek to reconstruct the conversation—”to see whether I had said what I really meant.” And now, late in his life, he watches as the pressures against this idea of craft mount; he senses the writing life on the cusp of becoming, like that hotel coffee shop, another kind of place.

So taken is he by this notion of the writer-as-island that he refuses to be part of the literary culture—refuses, for example, to cite writers he admires or dislikes, who stand for what he seeks or resists in writing. When I mentioned some other prominent writers and their books, he seemed not to have heard of them. He continues to read the Roman classics that have always brought him joy, using the Loeb editions with Latin on one side and English on the other. He varies his starting language depending on his level of fatigue. He reveres the Romans, and in this, too, is a hint of his special idea of writing. Rome matters to him, above all, as a towering “writing civilization” that recorded life in vivid detail. “I can’t read enough of it, actually,” he said. (Some moments later, he belied this classical image of himself by showing great fascination for my iPad. He seemed particularly taken with the ability to flip through book pages with the flick of a finger. “Wonderful,” he said softly.)

My time expired. As I left, I thanked him. And now he chose to make himself understood in yet one more way. A day earlier, when I had first met him, I had told him how much his work had meant to me. He gruffly dismissed my praise. Now, a day later, he explained himself. Writers are vulnerable, he told me. Everyone descends on them offering praise, much of it meaningless and unconsidered. He has no tribe or community to protect him. The writer must protect himself.

“The writer is all alone,” Sir Vidia said. “He has only himself—just like a little kitten.”

The original two page article can be found here.

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