Only Disconnect

Unedited version of an interview (conducted via conference call) with V.S. Naipaul that ran in Harper's Magazine, courtesy www.akashkapur.com

Warning: not for the faint of heart


Akash Kapur (Pondicherry, India): "Can you hear me?

V. S. Naipaul (The Surrey Hotel in New York): "Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me?"

AK: "Yes. Were you able to look at the questions? Did they fax them to you?"

VN: "Yes. Some of them we are going to skip."

AK: "OK, that's fine. Just let know..."

VN: "They're.... If a man says
'I am walking down the street,' you will say, you will say, 'why do
you say you are walking down the street?' They have quality of
obviousness. You know?

AK: Okay --

VN: You should --

AK: Okay --

VN: Yes, yes --

AK: Okay, let me know whichever --

VN: Yes, yes --

AK: Ones you want to ignore --

VN: Yes --

AK: Can we start with the first one?

VN: No. I think we can ignore all these, these early ones--yes.
Because they really shouldn't be asked, the questions -- the answers
are all contained in what you've been reading. I can't- -

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: I musn't repeat my books. There'd be no --

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: end to this kind of thing, you know --

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: I write the books five times over.

AK: Mmhmm--

VN: You must ask questions --

AK: So ah --

VN: which genuinely interest you. You know, you musn't just ask
things which you think sound nice.

AK: Mmhmm. I think that the, I mean, the first one in particular, I
thi --

VN: I don't want to deal with that, I've told you, it's already
contained in the text you've been reading --

AK: Okay --

VN: And it's up to you -- to -- to, um, to make that clear.

AK: Okay. Ah, which -- are there any of them that you would like to
start with?

VN: (Grunt. Long pause. Sigh.) I don't know. I really don't know.
The first page I think is pretty awful actually.

AK: Really?

VN: Ah, yes.

AK: How about the um, the one about the ah, I think it should be
listed as number three or four, about your knowledge, the security of
your knowledge as a writer. How often have you had that feeling?

VN: Um. I've written about it. It's contained in so many sources.
Please don't ask me to talk again about these things. That's a fact
about me. It's very well known, so don't ask me to do it again.

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: Do you see?

AK: No, I know. The -- the security of knowledge. But, but, ah,
whether you've -- you've --how often you've wondered about "the job,
the wife, the family."

VN: Don't um -- please, please don't ah -- please don't. Ah. Let's
leave that out. Let's talk about something serious.

AK: Okay.

VN: Yes.

AK: (Beat) Do you have any suggestions?

VN: (sigh) Ah -- Well, I want to know, I want to know. You see the
thing about questions is they should reveal the interviewer's
interests. You know --

AK: Mmhmm --

VN: And I don't -- I can't pick your interests out in anything. I
can't understand why you want to know anything apart from the sake of
doing an interview. You know? Which -- I don't play that kind of
game. I send people away.

AK: Mmhmm. But --

VN: They wish to waste my time. Or just get me to repeat things
they've read elsewhere and things like that. So I wish, in a way,
this was more original. I could get a true mind making a genuine
inquiry.

AK: Mmhmm. I think, um -- Would you like me to tell you what I --

(At this point the line starts to break and the connection is cut off.)

Editor2: Hello?

VN: Yes?

Editor2: Did you get disconnected?

VN: Yes, we got disconnected.

Editor2: Okay. Hang on. Let me just try -- I'll reconnect you.

(Editor2 runs down the hallway in search of Editor1 who returns to
make the second attempt.)



Attempt Two

VN: Hello?

Editor1: Hello. Okay. This is [Magazine Name] again. Are you ready to be
connected?

VN: All right. Let's see. Yes. Let's see if the questions are ah
-- have improved.

Editor1: Okay. Okay. Akash?

VN: Yes?

AK: Hello? Yes. Sorry about that disconnecting. It wasn't done on
purpose. I didn't. It --

VN: Are you there? I mean -- can you hear me?

(The line is very crackly)

AK: Yeah -- I can hear you. I'm in India. That's why --

VN: The line is a bit -- um, a bit crackly.

AK: Yeah.

VN: I think you --

AK: Well, I thought we were talking about --

VN: I think you -- The line is so bad.

(More cracks)

VN: The line is so bad. Something has to be done to make it better.

(More cracks. No Akash.)

Editor2: We are going to try to connect this line again. I'm really
sorry.

VN: You want me to put the telephone down?

Editor2: Um. Yes. We'll try one more time.

VN: Okay fine. Right. Good.

Editor2: Thank you.

VN: Right.

(Editor2, again, runs down the hallway to get Editor1. Editor1 returns to
the office and connects the line again.)


Attempt Three


VN: Yes?

AK: Um. So Picking up on --

VN: Now let me know what interests you --

AK: -- where we were --

VN: -- what truly interest you --

AK: -- particularly with the lack of inquiring minds --

VN: -- and what you'd like me to --

AK: -- in the questions. Um.

VN: Which is this?

AK: What -- what would you say to me. Um. I mean, as someone who
obviously does have an inquiring mind and who has been a unique
writer. What would you say to me? Where would I begin with looking
for an inquiring mind?

VN: Repeat it again. The, the -- repeat the -- the query again.
What would I say to you?

(No answer)

AK: Hello?

VN: Have I lost you?

AK: I think we have just been disconnected again.

VN: Yes. Now tell me. Now tell me. What was the question?

(long Pause)

Editor2: Can you hear each other?

VN: I don't know. I think there is a kind of -- a lack of --

Editor2: Akash? Hello?

VN: I think -- I can't hear him.

Editor2: I am terribly sorry about this.

VN: Yes.

Editor2: Akash? All right we will try --

(Dial tone.)

Editor2: Hello? We will try one more time. Okay.

(Running down hallway. Geting Editor1. Editor1 returns.)


Attempt Four


VN: Hello?

Editor1: Hi. Okay. Could we try this one more time?

VN: Let's try it. Let's try it one more... one more time.

AK: Yeah. We'll try one last time, I think.

Editor1: Okay. All right.

VN: Have you got -- you have the questions now, the questions that
truly interest you? Can you hear me?

(No answer.)

VN: I think he's --

Editor1: Akash?

VN: I think we've lost it.

AK: Hello?

VN: I think we've lost it.

Editor1: Akash, can you hear Naipaul?

AK: (sigh) I don't. I don't think that this is a problem
with the line to India. I think this is something weird with your
conference call -- problem.

(Someone hangs up. Silence.)

Feelings

FEELINGS
by ANTHONY LANE

Here is something that we never thought to see. Something that exists beyond the bounds of logic: a scary Elijah Wood. Presumably, the actor looked around, seeking a film that would dispel the ripe aroma of Frodo Baggins, happened upon “Sin City,” and found the role of Kevin—a mute, bespectacled type who removes the heads of young women and dines upon the rest of them. Wood is ominously good at the stillness of this maniac, which only doubles the shock. It’s like discovering that Gandalf used to lure young hobbits into a shed and show them his special wand.

From The New Yorker, of 04-11-2005

Words

WORDS

By Salman Rushdie

Does writing change anything? A butterfly flaps its wings in India, and we feel the breeze on our cheeks here in New York. A throat is cleared somewhere in Africa and in California there's an answering cough. Everything that happens affects something else, so to answer "yes" to the question before us is not to make a large claim. Books come into the world, and the world is not what it was before those books came into it. The same can be said of babies or diseases.

Books, since we are speaking of books, come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill, and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one's guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.

Love does this, hate does not. To hate a book is only to confirm to oneself what one already knows, or thinks one knows. But the power of books to inspire both love and hate is an indication of their ability to make alterations in the fabric of what is.

Writing names the world, and the power of description should not be underestimated. Literature remembers its religious origins, and some of those first stories of sky gods and sea gods not only became the source of an ocean of stories that flowed from them but also served as the foundations of the world into which they, the myths, were born. There would have been little blood sacrifice in Latin America or ancient Greece if it had not been for the gods. Iphigenia would have lived, and Clytemnestra would have had no need to murder Agamemnon, and the entire story of the House of Atreus would have been different; bad for the history of the theater, no doubt, but good in many ways for the family concerned.

Writing invented the gods and was a game the gods themselves played, and the consequences of that writing, holy writ, are still working themselves out today, which just shows that the demonstrable fictionality of fiction does nothing to lessen its power, especially if you call it the truth. But writing broke away from the gods, and in that rupture much of its power was lost. Prophecy is no longer the game, except for futurologists, but then futurology is fiction too. It can be defined as the art of being wrong about the future. For the rest of us, the proper study of mankind is Man. We have no priests; we can appeal to no ultimate arbiter, though there are critics among us who would claim such a role for themselves.

In spite of this, fiction does retain the occasional surprising ability to initiate social change. Here is the fugitive slave Eliza running from Simon Legree. Here is Wackford Squeers, savage head of Dotheboys Hall. Here is Oliver Twist asking for more. Here is a boy wizard with a lightning scar on his forehead, bringing books back into the lives of a generation that was forgetting how to read. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" changed attitudes toward slavery, and Charles Dickens' portraits of child poverty inspired legal reforms, and J.K. Rowling changed the culture of childhood, making millions of boys and girls look forward to 800-page novels, and improbably popularizing vibrating broomsticks and boarding schools. On the opening night of "Death of a Salesman," the head of Gimbel's department store rushed from the theater vowing not to fire his own aging Willy Lomans.

In this age of information overkill, literature can still bring the human news, the hearts-and-minds news. The poetry of Milosz and Herbert and Szymborska and Zagajewski has done much to create the consciousness, to say nothing of the conscience, of those great poets' time and place. The same may be said of Heaney, Brodsky, Walcott. Nuruddin Farah, so long an exile from Somalia, has carried Somalia in his heart these many years and written it into being, brought into the world's sight that Somalia to which the world might otherwise have remained blind. From China, from Japan, from Cuba, from Iran, literature brings information, the base metal of information, transmuted into the gold of art, and our knowledge of the world is forever altered by such transformational alchemy.

[Last week we honored] the memory of Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller, great writers, intellectuals and truth-tellers. The old idea of the intellectual as the one who speaks truth to power is still an idea worth holding on to. Tyrants fear the truth of books because it's a truth that's in hock to nobody; it's a single artist's unfettered vision of the world. They fear it even more because it's incomplete, because the act of reading completes it, so that the book's truth is slightly different in each reader's different inner world, and these are the true revolutions of literature, these invisible, intimate communions of strangers, these tiny revolutions inside each reader's imagination; and the enemies of the imagination, politburos, ayatollahs, all the different goon squads of gods and power, want to shut these revolutions down, and can't. Not even the author of a book can know exactly what effect his book will have, but good books do have effects, and some of these effects are powerful, and all of them, thank goodness, are impossible to predict in advance.

Literature is a loose cannon. This is a very good thing.

Salman Rushdie, the author of nine novels, including the forthcoming "Shalimar the Clown," is president of PEN American Center. He gave this speech April 18 at the PEN World Voices Conference: "The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?"

Interview with Sir Vidia

V.S. NAIPAUL

March 3, 2000

I've been taking snapshots of cultures in difficult stages, or civilizations in difficult stages. I'm doing it purely in human terms, seeing the pressures worked out in people's lives. That's what I've been doing a lot of since I began traveling, especially those Islamic books and the books about India, exploring that side of one's inheritance, because although I come from the Caribbean-- Trinidad-- I'm of Indian origin, and the Indian experience has always been interesting to me and necessary for me to explore and to come to terms with. You see, my interest begins with my community and my place of birth. My community commits me to an exploration of India and the Islamic world. My place of birth commits me to an understanding of the new world, the Spanish invasion, slavery, revolution in the new world. It also commits me to an attempt to understand Africa. So from that starting point, I have looked at the world, or tried to look at the world, and this is the venture I've been engaged in. It's lasted a long time.

The thing about the novel is that you carry only so much experience in yourself, so you quickly come to an end of the material because to write imaginatively, you do a kind of intimate processing of your own experience, if you're a serious writer. But the person who, as it were, converts experience into imaginative adventure, he can only do a limited amount of work. I did my own background. I did about people moving around the world. Then I was interested in the world. I have a great interest in the world and I had to find ways of expressing my interest in the world, so that's why I turned to doing these travel books. It didn't... they were not strictly about me traveling. They were about the people I was among. And they weren't about great characters, they were about cultures, civilizations.