Naipaul targets literary icons

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, AUG. 2. The novelist, Mr. V.S. Naipaul, who accused the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, of destroying the ``idea of civilisation'' in this country, has waded into yet another controversy - this time by attacking an assortment of Britain's sacred literary cows.

With politicians away on their summer holidays and the silly season in full cry, Sir Vidia has grabbed headlines by simply playing his curmudgeon self all over again.

On the eve of the publication of his new novel Half a Life, he has torn into E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Charles Dickens and James Joyce besides lashing out at the doyen of 20th century economists John Maynard Keynes.

Even R.K. Narayan gets a gentle ticking-off for believing that India is ``eternal'' while the fact, according to Mr. Naipaul, is that it is ``a ruin.'' His most acerbic remarks however are targetted at Forster who, he says, wrote ``rubbish'' and had no idea of India.

In an interview in the latest issue of Literary Review, Mr. Naipaul attacks the author of A Passage to India both for his literary ``pretence'' and his homosexuality. Forster's sole interest in India, he suggests, was to ``seduce'' garden boys.

``He was somebody who didn't know Indian people. He just knew the (royal) court and a few middle-class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce,'' he tells the interviewer, Mr. Farrukh Dhondy.

A Passage to India, he declares, was ``utter rubbish'' and Forster's views on India's three religions were a mere ``pretence''. ``It's false. It's a pretence. It's utter rubbish,'' he says rubbishing Forster's sentimental impressions of India. He was simply a homosexual who had ``his time in India, exploiting poor people...'' And his friend Keynes was no better, Mr. Naipaul alleges.

``Keynes didn't exploit poor people; he exploited people in the university; he sodomised them and they were too frightened to do anything about it,'' he says accusing Forster and Keynes of setting their work against a background of ``mystery and lies''.

Mr. Naipaul's remarks, widely quoted in today's newspapers, brought a strong reaction from gay writers who accused him of demonising homosexuality.

The literary editor of Gay Times, Mr. Peter Burton, called them ``ludicrous'' and said Mr. Naipaul failed to appreciate the prevailing attitudes to homosexuality at the turn of the last century.

Mr. Naipaul also ridiculed Maugham saying he was now ``part of the dust, part of the imperial dust''. And Dickens ``died from self-parody''.

As for Joyce and Ulysses, he didn't make sense. ``I can't read it...he is not interested in the world''.

The 69-year-old Trinidad-born writer, who became controversial in India with his An Area of Darkness, has earned a reputation in recent years for his withering in-your-face comments which some believe reflects a deep personality complex, while others say that it is simply a shock tactic, a ploy to get into the headlines.

Last year, he criticised Mr. Blair for promoting ``a plebeian culture that celebrates itself''. Some of his observations on the rise of Hindutva India, which he sees as a legitimate assertion of Hindu identity, have been attacked by progressive historians.

Two years ago, he caused a sensation in literary circles saying that novel as a genre was dead, and contemporary novelists were doing nothing but reheating old themes. Two years later, he has written one himself.

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