V S Naipaul

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 10:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1980, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:29

On our desert island this week is the writer V. S. Naipol. Mr. Naipol, how important to you is music?

Presenter0:37

Well, it isn't really important. Largely because of my

Presenter0:42

My background. I was born in Trinidad, very musical place, but I was born in an Indian family, and to me music was something outside my family.

Presenter0:53

I've I've come to to it.

Presenter0:56

in the way that I have come to it.

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Only very, very recently.

Presenter1:01

And although it is true that at times I want to play the odd record, I really can do without it. Did you find it very difficult to choose this eight?

Presenter1:10

I found it difficult to choose eight because I would have been happier choosing six

V S Naipaul1:16

What's the usual answer?

Presenter1:19

Well, I'm afraid you're contracted to choose eight. So let's get on with it. What's the first? I spent some time in Indonesia last year and this. And on the way back, I rested in a neutral place. I rested in Madras and Bombay, largely because of the hotels there. And on the hotel tape system, the recording thing they have beside your bed, I heard this particular piece by Bismillah Khan.

V S Naipaul2:07

Okay.

Presenter2:21

A section from A Late Night Rager called

Presenter2:24

Poorbi played by Bismillah Khan.

Presenter2:28

Are there many Indians in Trinidad, and and when and why did they go there?

Presenter2:34

When I was born, I suppose we were a community of about a hundred thousand.

Presenter2:39

Now it's grown considerably in in fifty years.

Presenter2:43

They went there to work on the on the sugar estates after the abolition of slavery. So they've been there for a long time. I think the first migrants went over in eighteen forty five. We're a very old community. I think that my own ancestors went over there about a hundred years ago.

Presenter2:58

So I can really claim a grandfather who's come from India on one side, but for the rest I am very much a man of the New World.

Presenter3:07

Your father was a journalist? Yes. On a daily paper? Yes, the the local paper. I believe he had ambitions to write. Yes, I don't know where my father

Presenter3:18

would have got the the literary urge from, or how a man who would have heard only Hindi when he was a child would have wished to learn to

Presenter3:29

learn English and then try to write in English. But he did and having become a journalist he also began to write and

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From the sight of him trying to write and writing and

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The memory of him reading to me I myself developed.

Presenter3:45

It said that you swore an oath at the age of twelve that you would leave Trinidad within five years. That is true.

Presenter3:52

That is true. And you wrote that oath in a school book. Yes.

Presenter3:56

Because I was aware that I was born in

Presenter3:59

a place that was very far from civilization. By civilization I meant a way of life where the mind and the activities of the mind would be given due regard, because I myself thought that unless I got to a place where the mind was regarded, I would be crushed and extinguished. And this fear of extinction

Presenter4:24

Was

Presenter4:25

The great driving force in my early my early life. In fact, you won a scholarship to Oxford to read English. What was the first impact of Oxford? Was it as wonderful as you thought it was going to be, or was it a disappointment? I had come from this curious background. I was among strange people with strange social manners. I was in no position to appreciate their manners. I was in no position to appreciate the complexity of English society. It is bizarre because I so much wanted to go to Oxford and then having got there, one really felt let down. I suppose not by the place, but I suppose one had expected something that didn't really exist. What happened to you when you graduated? What was your first move? I had to make a living, and I also had to be a writer. It was very hard to be a writer because of the age of 21 or 22.

Presenter5:23

One wasn't very good.

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I had no talent I had no money I literally had just a few pounds.

Presenter5:31

And a

Presenter5:33

I couldn't get a job anywhere in the world.

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And I just spent about six months with the cousin in in London.

Presenter5:41

who was studying law and at the end of that time I got a little job at the BBC.

Presenter5:48

At which point will break for second record? What's that to be?

Presenter5:52

Well, it's going to be something I suppose I have heard more of than any other piece of music in my life. It's Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings. And this record was the record I heard every morning as I was going to school on the local rediffusion service. And it meant that one was a little late. It was the signature tune of a morning programme called Morning Melody, if I remember rightly. And I'd like to use it on the island.

Presenter6:23

To mark the passing of time, to keep the calendar, very important.

Presenter7:27

Tchaikovsky setonade for strings played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrier.

Presenter7:33

So you joined the B B C doing what?

Presenter7:36

Well, joining is a very grand word. I had a contract to edit a little programme for the the Caribbean Service. It was a literary programme.

Presenter7:45

And uh it was singular that while I was editing a programme and rejecting people's manuscripts and making really rather grim comments on people's work in public on the radio,

Presenter7:57

I was writing absolute rubbish in my in my cousin's basement flat in in Paddington. This went on for a little while, and then I asked Arthur Calder Marshall, who had appeared on the programme once or twice, to look at what I had written, which was now a great pile of manuscript.

Presenter8:16

And he very kindly

Presenter8:18

read what I I had written and wrote me a two-page letter. uh beginning you should

Presenter8:26

abandon this, it's very bad, and went on to give me a little advice. I was very distressed for a couple of months.

Presenter8:36

But then one day in the B B C in the freelancers' room which they gave us

Presenter8:43

Out of a

Presenter8:44

I wish to turn my back on this profound rubbish I had been writing and which mister Caldermarshall had told me to give up.

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I began writing quite differently, simply, directly.

Presenter8:55

and very nice people in the room with me.

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Looked over my shoulder as I wrote this because they knew I wanted to be a writer. People are very kind.

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And uh they say that's good.

Presenter9:08

And then I wrote another the next day and the next day and it went on and so I wrote my first book with people looking over my shoulder.

Presenter9:15

In fact, you wrote three novels, which you said were your apprentice novels. Yes. In fact, two of them won very distinguished literary prizes. They were picked up. They were picked up.

Presenter9:26

You were playing safe at the start by writing about a background you knew about Trinidad.

Presenter9:32

When you are young you can't write.

Presenter9:35

You have the material that you will write about, but you haven't been able to put sufficient distance between it, the experience, and yourself you're too much part of it.

Presenter9:47

So all this early experience, which was meaningless to me at the age of eighteen or nineteen, when I had tried to write, well, at the age of twenty two, twenty-three, had a lot more meaning.

Presenter9:57

Uh so I wasn't playing safe. I was using what I had.

Presenter10:01

You went on to write A House for mister Biswas, another Caribbean book. From now on I don't think any two of your novels have the same background.

Presenter10:10

You spent a year here, a year there? Yes.

Presenter10:15

nineteen sixty I was um I was then twenty eight.

Presenter10:19

And I was asked by the Trinidad Government to

Presenter10:22

to go back to Trinidad. And when I got there

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I was asked by the Prime Minister, Doctor Williams, whether I'd like to travel.

Presenter10:31

and write a book about Caribbean and colonies.

Presenter10:35

I with a lot of diffidence, really. It was so outside my experience writing this kind of work, because I never had any views. If you come from

Presenter10:46

My kind of background. You don't have views as a young man.

Presenter10:50

You accept and you just experience when you when you meet people of your own age and they don't like eggs for breakfast, or they don't like that newspaper, or they don't like to be disturbed when they're working. I never had any of these emotions. I was very neutral, very easy. So this business about writing as though I had views was new to me.

Presenter11:15

And it was a great strain, but I was very glad I did it in the end because it.

Presenter11:20

It uh released uh another side of

Presenter11:23

of one's talent.

Presenter11:25

Record number three. What will that be?

Presenter11:28

Well, I've talked about the BBC and uh rescuing me in 1954.

Presenter11:35

But it's so hard for me to remember now that during the war when I tried to listen to the BBC news on the radio.

Presenter11:43

The British accent or the English accent was to me almost impossible. I I I couldn't get on with it at all. I could scarcely follow English films, and for a long time even after coming to England I had trouble with the stage accents.

Presenter11:59

And a lot of my background then was American cinema.

Presenter12:02

They fed me. That was easier. The American accent was easier. Infinitely easier. And of course, Hollywood, the films of the Fortes, were prodigious.

Speaker 112:03

That was

Presenter12:11

You know, I look at them again and again, the ones that really affected me.

Presenter12:15

and uh moved me.

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And in addition to that, there were

Presenter12:19

They were the musicals, and I'm choosing something

Presenter12:22

To sum up that that side.

V S Naipaul12:25

They asked me how I knew.

V S Naipaul12:31

My true love was

V S Naipaul12:40

Of course we're find something here inside.

Speaker 112:45

Yeah.

V S Naipaul12:46

I know it in love

V S Naipaul12:57

They said Someday you're fine. All who love our blood.

V S Naipaul13:10

When your heart's on fire

V S Naipaul13:14

You must realize Smoke it in your eyes.

Presenter13:21

Dinosaur smoke gets in your eyes. Now let's stay with your novels, mister Nightpole. Um mister Stone and the Night's Companion was about an Englishman. That was set in England, was it not? Yes. Yes. Did you write it in England?

Presenter13:35

No, I I wrote it when I was in India, largely because I had to write another book.

Presenter13:40

I went to India to spend a year.

Presenter13:43

But I had to write another book.

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To

Presenter13:46

prove to myself that I could write, that

Presenter13:51

It wasn't all over.

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That one had a talent. It wasn't written out of anything else but that, and the subject.

Presenter13:59

did present itself to me. Is it generally your rule that you write against your surroundings? If you wanted to write a book about France, would you write it in France or go elsewhere?

Presenter14:09

Until recently I always moved out, so that memory would do the selection.

Presenter14:15

But on my recent travels I've I've actually done the writing on the spot.

Presenter14:21

I don't take notes. I think memory heightens and selects. So I've always preferred to that distance.

Presenter14:29

Three of your recent novels, although the settings are are very different, seem to have something in common in theme. The three I'm talking about are

Presenter14:37

In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize, Guerrillas and Abendon the River, about rather ruthless people who are caught up with violence or political turmoil.

Presenter14:50

Yes. You see, one is writing in all these books about people who inhabit entirely separate cultural worlds.

Presenter14:59

And they then come together and they misunderstand one another and they lie to one another.

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And that

Presenter15:07

some kind of

Presenter15:09

Unhappiness ensues.

Presenter15:12

Are they always different? So the books might seem to be alike, but actually the material and the people are

Presenter15:20

are different, and to me they're all entirely different books.

Presenter15:25

That's why I needed four years between between each to get um to get the energy.

Presenter15:31

Your younger brother is also a professional writer, of course, and it would have delighted your father that his ambitions had been fulfilled by both his sons.

Presenter15:39

I hope so. I've oft thought, you know, that perhaps if my father had lived it might have damaged me.

Presenter15:46

I would have felt

Presenter15:47

Here was another person.

Presenter15:50

As it was, when he died I I was I was free. So probably all family relations have an element of oddity. Malice, reverence, all these things come together. You were still at Oxford when he died?

Speaker 116:01

Yeah.

Presenter16:03

Yes, yes, yes. It was part of the um the blackness of uh those years at Oxford.

Presenter16:11

We've got an audio fourth record.

Presenter16:14

Well, I first came in touch with this song.

Presenter16:18

with a British film made about the war, the El Alamein Victory. It's called Desert Victory. And I heard Lala Anderson there, I think, singing Lily Marlane. She was the sweetheart of the German forces, of course. Absolutely, and all that's very moving to me.

Speaker 216:56

Marley

Presenter17:02

Lala Anderson singing Lilly Marlene.

Presenter17:06

Now you talked about the gap that you leave between your

Presenter17:09

novels. This, of course, is the time when you write your travel books. Now one was about India, an area of darkness, and you sought out the village from which your grandfather set out for Trinidad.

Presenter17:22

Did you find relations there?

Presenter17:24

Yes, the whole village is really the man. The whole village. Yes, the village has the name of the caste and the group and uh it's that kind of village. Could you relate to the way of life?

Presenter17:36

I was very touched and found it very attractive, but um I I you know, I I couldn't be there. They're physically very attractive. The women were pretty.

Presenter17:46

But my life is much more consciously the life of uh the individual, the intellect.

Presenter17:54

Learning history. Yes.

Presenter17:57

Appreciation. You wrote a history of the early days of Trinidad, the loss of El Dorado.

Presenter18:04

And you have a new book out, The Return of Eva Peron, another factual book, which also includes the hideous story of the Michael X. murders and two or three other short pieces. These are uh a sort of by products. No, they were very serious. In fact,

Presenter18:22

When I thought I wanted to be a writer,

Presenter18:24

I saw a newsreel about Eva Peron nineteen fifty one, I think when I was in Oxford.

Presenter18:31

and I saw a picture of this lady.

Presenter18:34

And I saw shots of Argentina and I read about her then, nineteen. I can read Spanish. They were the subjects I won Spanish and French subjects I won my scholarship to to go to Oxford.

Presenter18:45

and I decided to write about her. So twenty years later

Presenter18:50

The New York paper, the New York Review of Books, did did send me there.

Presenter18:55

So they're not byproducts because one goes, one travels, it's a difficult situation. It was a an ill-advised expression. I meant the short pieces.

Presenter19:04

Yes, but I went many times.

Presenter19:06

And it takes a lot of energy, a lot of looking, and I looked at it over many years.

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A b

Presenter19:14

So

Presenter19:15

One probably wouldn't do these little pieces now.

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Because the little piece takes

Presenter19:22

Far too much out of one.

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Because I'm not the easy writer.

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And out of the effort that makes one little ten thousand word article.

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I probably can easily have created half a book, so that that period is gone.

Presenter19:45

I will now not do these things anymore. They are my last little flings.

Presenter19:51

Well, we've got now to record number five.

Presenter19:55

Well

Presenter19:56

This is where my music education began a few years ago. I had just finished a novel and was vegetating. And uh my wife both were cut price Brandenburg concertos.

Presenter20:11

And in my vacancy I I just listened. I I think I listened for days to the to the Brandenburg concertos until I actually could distinguish the line or the tune, you know, if that doesn't offend too many people.

Speaker 120:24

This is the fan to

Presenter20:28

I thought, well, really, this is good writing.

Presenter20:32

It's immediately acceptable on the surface, and then you can listen to lots of things below, at different times, different things. And good writing should be like that.

Presenter20:42

And so Brandenburg 5.

Presenter21:40

The opening of Bach's fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Jehovah Emanduin, with the Bath Festival Chamber Orchestra, a record that was a present to you from your wife. And of course you married a fellow graduate at Oxford, an English girl. Yes, nineteen fifty five, yes. What is your writing discipline? Do you set yourself so many hours a day, so many words a day?

Presenter22:02

How do you operate? It's become a very messy process of late, with age and with insomnia. When I was young I had the gift of uh of sleeping. I would go to sleep at about eleven and sleep for nine hours and get up at eight and work right through and and the morning and then work in the afternoon. And if I was really pushed I could also work in the evening. I divided my day into three parts. Usually worked for two.

Presenter22:25

But most effectively in the morning. You write in long hand or on a typewriter.

Presenter22:29

Long hand now, but I began on the typewriter.

Presenter22:33

Uh now

Presenter22:35

I really, after thinking about what I have to do, and getting up very late and drugged, I can start writing at about four thirty, and write till about seven thirty, perhaps on some occasions, eight.

Presenter22:50

And then I if I've written well, if I've written about

Presenter22:55

seven hundred words or a thousand words, my mind becomes very, very active and I just stay awake.

Presenter23:02

And so this good day of writing is followed by a period of stupefaction.

Presenter23:08

But I am entirely involved and uh consumed.

Presenter23:13

By whatever I'm doing, however small and however short, I live with the whole thing, I carry the whole thing in my head, and I am restless until it's all on paper. What is your next project? Is it is it a travel book, another novel? What are you what are you starting to do? No, well um

Speaker 123:29

No, I

Presenter23:31

I have nothing in mind, but my rhythm dictates that at some time

Presenter23:37

in the summer next year.

Presenter23:40

I would become very restless.

Presenter23:42

and I will start scribbling in the mornings.

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and I'll probably scribble for two or three months.

Presenter23:49

And uh something will probably happen.

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And then I'll have to give up a year of my life to to a new a new work of the imagination.

Presenter23:58

That is the pattern. That is the pattern. I'd like it to happen. I'd consider myself very blessed if I could do two more novels.

Presenter24:07

Not more. I I think it's unlikely that I'll do more. mister Naipaul, you are a young man. You are in your forties. Now, why are you speaking of two more novels? Well, forty eight this year.

Presenter24:17

And uh probably if one finishes a book by fifty, then one'll finish another by about fifty four, fifty five. Here you're getting into experience and wisdom and and the advantages a a writer acquires with age.

Presenter24:31

Yes, but then you have this wish not to have experience any longer. You need to be at peace. You don't look adventures no longer happen to you.

Presenter24:41

Let's have another record.

Presenter24:43

Well, out of this musical education.

Presenter24:47

Period.

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Mahler's fourth symphony.

Presenter24:52

I must say why I am not having any nice things like Mozart and Haydn on the desert island. I am not having them, because they will stimulate my wish to listen to more.

Presenter25:06

And I think I'll be tormented by that, since it would not be possible to listen to more, and I you know, I'm very ignorant of these matters. Whereas the the Mala is something which is complete in itself and it satisfies.

Presenter25:21

The expectation it arouses, and it doesn't stimulate the wish for more.

Presenter25:26

And it I like it because it also it's very, very long.

Presenter25:30

I like its development. Which part of Marlowe's fourth symphony shall we hear? The beginning.

Presenter26:33

The opening of Mahler's fourth symphony, Claudio Arbado conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Let's go straight on to your next record. What shall that be?

Presenter26:42

It will be Beethoven's thirty second piano piece.

Presenter26:47

By Alfred Brendel. This again is part of one's education. And I'm choosing it.

Presenter26:54

Because it's long, this is very important.

Presenter26:58

I like to be aware of development. I like to work at the music.

Presenter27:03

And uh I worked a lot at this one and listened to it a lot and was able to pick the line out.

Presenter28:09

Part of the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. Thirty two in C minor, played by Alfred Brendel.

Presenter28:16

Having spent your childhood, your school days, on a tropical island, you should be able to look after yourself in a practical sense. You could rig up some sort of shelter. I think that to survive, it's important to do all these things. It will not be a holiday. I'll have to learn how to make fire, and I will learn, because I'm intelligent. I will learn how to cook.

Presenter28:39

I will learn how to fish, I will learn about the fruits, and I will learn how to plant. I think that probably one will spend a great deal of one's time looking after oneself. I'm sure. I think that'll be that'll be very, very important. Would you try to escape?

Presenter28:53

No.

Presenter28:54

I'll tell you why.

Presenter28:56

Growing up on a tropical island I have always been terrified of the sea.

Presenter29:01

I'm frightened of drowning and choking.

Presenter29:03

The other reasons I think that after a little time in solitude

Presenter29:09

existing in conditions like those of a mental illness, one probably will not be fit for human converse again.

Presenter29:18

I'll stay. And because not because I dislike the world. I love the world. I love everything in it.

Presenter29:26

It is just that I feel I'll become very strange away from the world.

Presenter29:31

Now we come to your last record. What's that?

Presenter29:34

I've always had a lot of trouble with Indian classical music and I couldn't follow it. But coming back from Indonesia, where they have an orchestra called the Gamelan, do you know the Gamelan? You've heard about the Gamelan. A series of xylophones, gongs and brass jars of varying thicknesses and sizes, and an orchestra of sixteen. Close to, you can't distinguish it, you need a lot of distance almost physically to hear what is happening.

Speaker 129:46

You heard about the gambler.

Presenter30:04

After listening to this for all the time I was in Indonesia, I passed through India, and Indian classical music was suddenly extraordinarily easy.

Presenter30:14

And I found it beautiful, just as Menuen says it is, that it's it's really wonderful. It's as it's as good to me as Beethoven.

Presenter30:23

And I would like to hear a bit of um this uh Ragh by Ali Akbar Khan.

Presenter30:32

The rainy season rug, the dismal hat.

V S Naipaul30:36

My father and the king.

V S Naipaul30:43

Uh

Presenter31:05

Part of a rainy season raga.

Presenter31:08

Das Malha played by Ali Akbar Khan.

Presenter31:11

If you could take only one record out of the eight you've chosen, which one would you hang on to? Well, it would be a bit of a fight, really, between the rag we've just been listening to and the Beethoven piano piece. But probably I'd take the Beethoven.

Presenter31:24

We allow you one luxury to take to the island, something of no practical use, inanimate.

Presenter31:32

I had no trouble choosing. There is an icon which I think is marvellous.

Presenter31:37

The Enlightened Buddha. I would like to take that with a smile.

Presenter31:41

and meditate on it from time to time. It needn't be a grand piece. Um the one I have I I bought in a Jaipur uh sculptor's shop for fifty rupees, three pounds.

Presenter31:54

I find it very comforting. Have you a religious faith?

Presenter31:58

Ah, no, no, no, no.

Presenter32:03

You're allowed one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are both there already on the island. Yes.

Presenter32:10

I'd like to keep my mind going, and so I'd like to live

Presenter32:13

As far as possible, the other side of the life which I have not lived, I would like to live the the mathematical side. I would like you to get me a book which would take me from A as high as possible as you would allow me in mathematics, so that day by day I can have this intellectual excitement.

Presenter32:34

Right, the best

Presenter32:36

Teach yourself mathematics book with. As far as we can go. Yes. And thank you, Fierce Naipaul, for letting us hear your desert island dissipation. Well, thank you, and I hope that music lovers will forgive the illiteracy. I'm sure they will. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 132:45

So we have

Speaker 132:59

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.