Prejudice, Pride, and V. S. Naipaul

Back in the old days, when a lot of the great ripping yarns were written, they were written for a very narrow audience, by writers of very narrow experience.

Case in point: Beau Geste (1924), by Percival Christopher Wren. The thrilling story of life in the French Foreign Legion and the fall of Fort Zinderneuf is marred by a scene in which the Beau stops on his way out of England to visit a pawnshop, where the writer pauses to invent and then insult a stereotypical Jewish pawnbroker. All of the readers were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you see, and if they weren't, they wanted to be, and if they didn't want to be, well, they ought to. So let's bash the Jews.

Nowadays when nearly everybody who reads either has Jewish friends or is Jewish (What! You don't know any Jews?) the scene stands out for the piece of offensive tripe it is. Jewish people aren't like that, if they're like anything in particular. But now that I see that the book came out in 1924, a mere decade before the rise of Hitler, who had lots of admirers in England, I'm thinking that something much more sinister was at work here than simple ignorance.

But what about V.S. Naipaul? He's the one I sat down to write about. He said last week that no woman has ever been his equal in the field of writing. Their heads are full of sentimental feminine tosh, he said.

Nonsense like that would have been accepted without a murmur fifty years ago, the same as slurs against ethnic groups. Today it is greeted with a huge public outcry. My writer friends are mad at him. I'm not mad at him. I feel a vague unease, as if a passing rabbit were taking a crap on my grave. There are men everywhere who want to belittle us and stuff us back in the kitchen. Even now some antifeminist Hitler figure is rising from the bowels of the Tea Party, coming to take away our shoes and strew tacks in the yard.

Is Naipaul the greatest writer since Shakespeare? I couldn't say. I've never read him. Nor have I tried to write manly literary fiction. We in the whodunit game are out to entertain people, not stun them with the size of our packages, though I wouldn't turn down a Nobel prize in the unlikely event that somebody showed up at the door and offered it to me.

Men who do nothing in this world but put words on paper have to puff themselves up somehow. I'm sure he's a better writer than I am; otherwise, why does he keep getting prizes? Still I think you'll agree that people will be reading Jane Austen and Toni Morrison when the name of V.S. Naipaul is forgotten. I've forgotten already what the initials stand for.