V.S. Naipaul in his younger days

NAIPAUL

I’m unusual in that I have had a long career. Most people from limited backgrounds write one book. I’m a prose writer. A prose book contains many thousands of sentiments, observations, thoughts — it is a lot of work. The pattern for most people is to do a little thing about their own lives. My career has been other. I found more and more to write. If I had the strength, I probably would do more; there is always more to write about. I just don’t have the energy, the physical capacity. You know, one can spend so many days now being physically wretched. I’m aging badly. I’ve given so much to this career for so long. I spend so much time trying to feel well. One becomes worn out by living, by writing, by thinking.

Have you got enough now?

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

NAIPAUL

Do you think I’ve wasted a bit of myself talking to you?

INTERVIEWER

Not, of course, how I’d put it.

NAIPAUL

You’ll cherish it?

INTERVIEWER

You don’t like interviews.

NAIPAUL

I don’t like them because I think that thoughts are so precious you can talk them away. You can lose them.

— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed by Jonathan Rosen and Tarun Tejpal for the Fall 1998 Paris Review.

It’s often said the Paris Review invented the modern literary interview; the magazine’s famous interview archive, stretching from 1953 to the present, is now fully available online. Other Caribbean writers included: Jean Rhys, 1979; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1983; and Derek Walcott, 1986.

Jean Rhys

Today is the one hundred and twentieth birthday of Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, better known to literature and posterity as Jean Rhys. A good opportunity to dip into the archive and read Marlon James’s essay on Rhys and the women in her fiction, published three years ago in the August 2007 CRB.

“It would be too easy to dismiss Rhys as a fatalist,” James writes,

but almost all of her women are doomed from the outset, as if Sophocles orchestrated their lives. Were they (and she) male, critics would have lauded her for capturing the existential despair of the post–First World War male anti-hero, the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did. Rhys’s women are as much of the Parisian jazz age as Fitzgerald’s men, except they don’t have money or class or big suitcases filled with clothes, like Gatsby, and whenever people of that sort appear they are, more often than not, vampires. Her women do unforgivable things, including drinking themselves silly, having sex with married men, and going into relationships with endings written in their beginnings.

Were her women as beautifully depressed and doomed as [Virginia] Woolf’s — women who nonetheless were of the right class for such epic demises — they would have become drama-queen archetypes, inspiring gay fiction as we speak. But Rhys’s women are a little too blood-and-gutsy for that. They are not rich or refined or well educated or well spoken. They scratch and bleed and scream and burn houses down.

Read the full essay here.

Jean Rhys

. . . then there is the usual problem of fragmentation . . . which raises the question of whether a group of individuals linked to the same geographical area who nevertheless write independently of each other and without each other’s work in mind really form a common tradition. Which reminds me of that famous interview with Jean Rhys after she had been rediscovered — brought back from the dead, practically — and quite literally forced into the West Indian literary canon with Wide Sargasso Sea. She was asked if she considered herself to be a West Indian writer, to which she shrugged; English? No! French? Yet another shrug. . .

— Reacting to Jeremy Taylor’s review of Conversations with Caryl Phillips in the May 2010 CRB, Montague Kobbe muses over “Literary Caribbeanness: Fact or Fiction?” in Latineos.