'Naipaul and C.L.R. James were educated at the same colonial school. The high quality of teaching in classics and English literature left its mark on both men. Both of them came to England. There the similarity ends. James moved to Marxism and became a great historian in that tradition. Naipaul put politics on the back-burner, joined the lesser ranks of vassalage (the BBC) and cultivated a cultural conservatism that later became his hallmark both politically and socially. The classical heritage of the European bourgeoisie had completely bewitched him. He saw it as the dominant pillar of Western civilisation and this led him to underplay, ignore and sometimes to justify its barbaric sides both at home and abroad.'
It is worth focusing more closely on the trajectory of Naipaul's political views:
'VS Naipaul’s career developed at a time when Western reactionary intellectuals could still be formidable, dynamic, and unpredictable.
'...I’ve often wondered why the American right has been so quiet about V. S. Naipaul. He’s easily the most talented reactionary writer in the English language — maybe the only living talent left in the right-wing zombiesphere. The American right devotes an insane amount of resources into manufacturing hagiographies on anyone whom they believe makes them look good ... glorifying their pantheon of degenerate cretins like Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlafly, and Friedrich von Hayek.
'But I found a few passages that I think explain why they never liked Naipaul much. Basically, it comes down to this: The American right only needs “team players” — shameless, cynical hacks who can be counted on to churn out whatever rank propaganda [is] ordered up by the Heritage Foundation. ...
'I was just reading Patrick French’s brilliant biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, and came across this interesting scene from Naipaul’s visit to America in 1969. Naipaul had already started developing a reputation at that point as one of the rare examples of a dark-skinned reactionary Tory from a Third World colony, making him one of the most despised literary figures among the trendy-left.
'His first impressions of America weren’t good: “They [Americans] are really now a group of immigrants who have picked up English but whose mental disciplines are diluted-European,” he wrote in one letter home...
'In another letter, he confessed:
'I now dread meeting Americans, especially their alleged intellectuals. Because here the intellect, too, is only a form of display; of all the chatter about problems (very, very remote if you live in an “apartment” in Manhattan...) you feel that there is really no concern, that there is only a competition in concern . . . The level of thought is so low that only extreme positions can be identified: Mary McCarthy, Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver and so on. Ideas have to be simple . . . The quandary is this. This country is the most powerful in the world; what happens here will affect the restructuring of the world. It is therefore of interest and should be studied. But how can one overcome one’s distaste?'
'Although a reactionary, Naipaul was never a lackey like today’s right-wing “intellectuals”; he never shied away from describing the brutality of colonialism (unlike bootlicking scum like Dinesh D’Souza, who never missed an opportunity to glorify his white right-wing masters for colonizing India, despite the tens of millions of Indians who died of famine in the Raj)....
....
'If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American right-wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front lines of the ideological battle of the 1970s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself...
'Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American right by doing what he was always best at: describing exactly what he saw at the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering. Here is Naipaul describing the effect of the climactic speech by Ronald Reagan:
'So that at the climax of the great occasion, as at the center of so many of the speeches, there was nothing. It was as if, in summation, the sentimentality, about religion and Americanism, had betrayed only an intellectual vacancy; as if the computer language of the convention had revealed the imaginative poverty of these political lives. It was ... “as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more.”'
Many decades later we have a last picture of V. S. Naipaul, in this article: Nobel-winning author VS Naipaul is no more:
'Naipaul shared his book-filled cottage with his first wife and later his second, and with a black-and-white cat named Augustus.'
'I now dread meeting Americans, especially their alleged intellectuals. Because here the intellect, too, is only a form of display; of all the chatter about problems (very, very remote if you live in an “apartment” in Manhattan...) you feel that there is really no concern, that there is only a competition in concern . . . The level of thought is so low that only extreme positions can be identified: Mary McCarthy, Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver and so on. Ideas have to be simple . . . The quandary is this. This country is the most powerful in the world; what happens here will affect the restructuring of the world. It is therefore of interest and should be studied. But how can one overcome one’s distaste?'
'Although a reactionary, Naipaul was never a lackey like today’s right-wing “intellectuals”; he never shied away from describing the brutality of colonialism (unlike bootlicking scum like Dinesh D’Souza, who never missed an opportunity to glorify his white right-wing masters for colonizing India, despite the tens of millions of Indians who died of famine in the Raj)....
....
'If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American right-wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front lines of the ideological battle of the 1970s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself...
'Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American right by doing what he was always best at: describing exactly what he saw at the 1984 Convention, without artifice, without pandering. Here is Naipaul describing the effect of the climactic speech by Ronald Reagan:
'So that at the climax of the great occasion, as at the center of so many of the speeches, there was nothing. It was as if, in summation, the sentimentality, about religion and Americanism, had betrayed only an intellectual vacancy; as if the computer language of the convention had revealed the imaginative poverty of these political lives. It was ... “as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more.”'
Many decades later we have a last picture of V. S. Naipaul, in this article: Nobel-winning author VS Naipaul is no more:
'Naipaul shared his book-filled cottage with his first wife and later his second, and with a black-and-white cat named Augustus.'
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