Close to forty years ago, Derek Walcott wrote something scathing about V.S. Naipaul. The two writers—both from the Caribbean, both Nobel laureates—were still alive then. Walcott wrote the following about Naipaul’s “retreat” in the bucolic peacefulness of Wilshire, “far from the Britain of Paki-bashing, or of the race riots of Brixton”:Article continues after advertisement
If the narrator’s only companion was work, the hermitage is made admirable, but only in the way legends are—by a concentrated selfishness, by that self-canonization of the dedicated writer in a hostile world, the misunderstood, the displaced, the exiled, all of whom are becoming as corny as Dickensian orphans, because either every writer is an exile (not only this narrator-Naipaul) or no writer is. (137)
Walcott was not writing about people in general, but about writers of fiction specifically, and about a certain sense of self-aggrandizement that sometimes afflicts us. I write “us” because, after many years of writing academic books and articles, I’ve just written my first novel* in which it happens that “exile” is front and center.
“Exile” carries in its wake a sense of smaller numbers, even a heroically political quality, an aura of unthreatening sparsity.
