Leaving the Center

LIKE NO OTHERS writer since Conrad, V.S. Naipaul has been able to capture the spirit of the world's less visited places. Throughout his 30 year career, the writer has remained true to a unique vision of the Third World. He understands the intangible clash of cultures that accompanies the application of Western ways to primitive societies. His books, both novels and journalistic travel accounts, offer a melange of modernity and mysticism which captures the cultural dislocation development has brought to the world's more backward corners.

You'd think that Naipaul's rare gift would have earned him a measure of popularity, and they have. But his approach has also made him very controversial, disliked by these who resent his ability to strip away the hope that accompanies development. His dark vision of the prospects for true growth have not won him many fans among those who feel that he condemns the process of national modernization because of its intermediate results.

His latest work, Finding the Center, is unlikely to quell the controversy, but as a work of self-exploration it may help both sides to understand the subject. In Finding the Center, Naipaul explains himself and sad his method through two very different essays. The first, "Prologue to an Autobiography," is an account of Naipaul's background in Trinidad as the son and grandson of Indian immigrants. Growing up in an Indian household in a British colony just off the coast of a Spanish country, it is easy to see where Naipaul developed his interest in the overlay of different lands and different ways of seeing things.

But it is the book's second essay, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," that may reveal the most about Naipaul--more, in fact, than he may have intended. The Naipaul we meet in the first essay is, by his own admission, an innocent. The essay begins with his first moment of artistic creation--a sentence about a family black sheep named Bogart. He wrote the sentence, the first line of his first story, in a BBC staff room in London 30 years ago.

Over the years, however, Naipaul seems to have changed. His earlier works, set mostly in Trinidad, were happier, suffused with an appreciation of the sometimes joyous results of his own cultural mixture. But one could hardly describe Naipaul's recent work as joyous, "The Crocodiles of Yamoussourko," for example, offers a compelling but hopeless view of one of Black Africa's most successful nations. Naipaul echoes in non-fiction a point he made earlier in his novel A Bond in the River. While African development has been successful in building great monuments to itself, it has used what the west has given to it in a way that no colonial administrator or development planner eyer envisioned.

In the Ivory Coast, where the essay is set, the physical manifestations of economic growth have been shrines of a sort to a heritage of backwardness. The tribesmen have been taken out of the country to sit in glass and concrete skyscrapers in Abidjan, the nation's modern capital. But human sacrifice still exists in the villages on the other side of the verdant 18 hole golf course at Yamoussourko.

Then there are the crocodiles. The country's ruler built Yamoussourko his tribal village, into a resort city with broad boulevards and posh hotels. He built a huge palace so he could live amid the town's splendor. Then he put a pool full of crocodiles into a pond in the palace's front yard--crocodiles being the clan's totem. Amid the marble facades and the fountains, they are a reminder of tribal power and tribal superstition.

NAIPAUL COULD have told a very different story about the Ivory Coast. With a relatively high level of national income and one of the continent's best universities, it is one of Black Africa's few economic success stories. But these facts receive scant attention in Naipaul's work. Naipaul is explicit about his choices of subject. He travels to a country to find the interplay of new facades and old structures; his writing is cultural anthropology applied to journalism or fiction.

But in some ways, the choice of subject becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Naipaul wants to find the worm in the apple, he is a good enough investigative reporter to do it. So readers hear about the headhunters and meet the Crocodiles. Naipaul describes his journalistic style as realistic, and he's right. But his realism is selective. There may be something rotten in Abidjan, but there's a lot of good Naipaul isn't telling us about.

The two essays in Finding the Center are drawn from very different periods in Naipaul's writing career, but the contrast is not merely one of youthfulness and experience. Naipaul didn't just become a better writer, he also became more jaded. We first see him as a shy novice, passing the manuscript of his first story around the BBC staff room to get comments from older, wiser associates. By contrast, the Naipaul we meet in the Ivory Coast has become a self-assured world traveler who feels confident attributing poor service at an Abidjan restaurant to his suspicion that the European manager is off for the day, prompting the busboys to return to their "African" ways. Thirty years later, Naipaul is cynical, fazed, pessimistic about the chances that a primitive culture will ever be able to fully join the modern world.

In 1977, 25 years after he became a writer with his story about Bogart, Naipaul went to Venezuela to look up his first character. He leaves his Caracas hotel one morning to visit the old man in his village in the Orinoco delta. They have a pleasant lunch, but when Naipaul returns to Caracas he finds a telegram from Bogart, a note he had missed that morning, which asks him to cancel his visit. Maybe it should have been a signal to Naipaul that the thousands of air-miles and the hundreds of pages which have come between him and the room at the BBC form an unbridgeable gap.