Derek Walcott vs VS Naipaul
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/06/wallcott_of_silence.htmlThe distraction of Walcott vs Naipaul
With his poem, The Mongoose, Derek Walcott attacked his literary contemporary and nemesis - and overshadowed some great new work
June 5, 2008 3:30 PM
Derek Walcott
Poetic jutice ... Derek Walcott has taken on his rival in verse.
The day before the start of the Calabash Literary Festival, the sky above Treasure Beach, Jamaica, was rent by the blades of a descending helicopter. Which writer merited a whisking-in by air, avoiding the hours-long drive from Kingston? Perhaps a Nobel laureate? Later one of the organisers crisply denied the rumour: "We did not fly in Derek Walcott by chopper"
Walcott was the headline act at Calabash 2008. The festival had wooed him for years, and the crowd was abuzz with anticipation. He can be prickly at public appearances. Would Walcott behave himself? Would he say something rude? At high noon on a sweltering Saturday, hundreds packed the Calabash tent. Not a whisper of breeze came off the sea behind the stage as Walcott eased himself into an armchair to be interviewed by the Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes. As you can hear in this podcast, Walcott was at first only mildly prickly, speaking about art, film, Paul Simon's music. He read a handful of new poems. So far so good.
Then he came to his final selection, a poem called The Mongoose. "I debated whether to read this here," Walcott said. "You'll recognise Mr Naipaul." Uh-oh. As Daniel Trilling reported , there followed "a fast-paced, savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul's work and personality", composed in rhyming couplets and spiced with vitriol of the highest proof. Walcott touched on Naipaul's sexual peccadilloes and his supposed racism; he even mocked a photo once circulated by Naipaul's publishers: "to show its kindness it clutches a kitten / that looks as though it's scared of being bitten".
"How long before this makes the headlines?" a friend asked afterwards. The press was scooped by the Jamaican writer Annie Paul, who blogged about the event next day. As she noted, The Mongoose was surely "payback" for Naipaul's latest book, A Writer's People, the opening chapter of which praises Walcott's earliest poems, only to condemn him in tones of deceptive gentleness as "a man whose talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting".
Walcott and Naipaul have long been considered the opposing poles of West Indian literature. Near contemporaries, born on islands a few hundred miles apart, they both decided early - influenced by fathers who died young - on literary careers. Walcott was the prompter prodigy, self-publishing his first book of poems at 18, encouraged by mentors like the Barbadian poet Frank Collymore. But Naipaul, leaving Trinidad on a scholarship to Oxford, was the first to enjoy a London publisher and an international reputation. Their paths crossed over the years, and in 1965 Walcott even interviewed Naipaul for the Trinidad Guardian - an awkward encounter. But they were never quite friends, and at a glance the thrusts of their writing could not look more different.
Walcott celebrates the landscape and people of the Caribbean, imagining new metaphors for the "green world" of the islands; Naipaul exposes the absurdities and hypocrisies of post-colonial societies with an honesty that can feel cruel. Walcott charts the sunlit "New Aegean" of the Antilles; Naipaul gropes through Third World "areas of darkness". Walcott the hopeful lyricist; Naipaul the harsh satirist. (Never mind that Walcott's poems of the 70s can sound a despair as dark as anything in Naipaul; or that the nickname he invented for his opposite, "V S Nightfall", harks back to the title of "What the Twilight Says", Walcott's bittersweet essay on the plight of the Caribbean artist.)
In the fame-and-fortune race, Naipaul long ran ahead. Not until Walcott moved to the US in the 1980s did he have a truly international profile. It must have been a blow to Naipaul when his rival won the Nobel prize first, in 1992. But the cold war between them was already escalated in 1987 by Walcott's review of Naipaul's book The Enigma of Arrival. "The myth of Naipaul ... has long been a farce," he wrote. "That self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity is only that." (Readers may notice how "The Mongoose" echoes the language of this earlier piece.) Naipaul waited 20 years to strike back in A Writer's People - who knew mongooses were so patient? At 78, Walcott clearly did not wish to delay the next round.
The pity is that The Mongoose has overshadowed the rest of Calabash 08, which included top-notch Jamaican writers such as Lorna Goodison, Erna Brodber, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson reading to an avid home audience. Thomas Glave opened the programme with a forceful and moving denunciation of Jamaican homophobia (hear an interview with him here), and the poets Aracelis Girmay, Jackie Kay and Kei Miller electrified their audience at a reading that brought tears to the eyes of many (myself included). The Mongoose may end up as a footnote in literary history, in the chapter titled Feuds, but it's those three poets reading like incandescent angels on a hot Sunday afternoon that are burned in my memory. I'll take angels over mongooses any day.
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