Read Online A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: V. S. Naipaul
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glad.
I thought that was the end of the
New Statesman
and me. But there was a benevolent spiritâit must have been Tonyâwatching over me at Great Turnstile, urging the assistant literary editor to give me another chance. I was sent other things, an academic book about John Lyly and euphuism (which I liked), some books about Jamaica which gave me the matter for a few jokes. I began to be published, the
New Statesman
even printing some jokes I made about Jamaica (âA banana a day will keep the Jamaican awayâ) which wouldnât pass today. Then I was moved to fiction-reviewing, once a month, for ten guineas a thousand-word column. Each column was a weekâs work. I did that for three years.
I was living at the time in an over-furnished, neglected attic flat in Muswell Hill. My elderly landlord and landlady had both been married before and the attic was full of their surplus furniture. A partitioned corner space in the sitting room, which was quite large, was for coal; it also had mice, bright-eyed and startled when you came upon them. The dormer window at the back overlooked a bowling green. From a house on the other side of the green there came onsome evenings the sound of someone practising âWhen the Saints Go Marching In.â Blackbirds raided the gardens all around and brought back their booty to the dormer roof. Sometimes a cherry escaped their beaks and rolled down slowly from tile to tile, and the disappointed birds squawked and scratched on the tiles with apparent rage.
I had given up a job I had taken principally to send money to my mother (her letters were only about money). I was trying in a hopeless kind of way to get going on a new book and for some reasonâperhaps I felt the book was still only provisionalâwas writing by hand on unlined paper. It was a depressing time in that attic. Only the monthly
New Statesman
review gave me a lift. I used to go to the Muswell Hill public library on Friday, publication day, to see whether they had used my piece. There was always a slender dark-suited man in his twenties or thirties at a table in the reading room ahead of me, with the new issue of the
Statesman
, smiling with pure joy, cracking his long fingers over the opened magazine. When my turn came I looked first to see whether my piece was in. I was intensely ashamed if it was. And I took good care then not to read it or to look at the pages where it was. I held those pages together when I read the magazine. I have never got over this shyness or vanity at seeing my name in print.
After some time I began to travel, and that connection with the
New Statesman
couldnât be kept up. When after some years I settled down again I needed more than the ten guineas the
Statesman
paid. Tony got me a fiction-reviewing job on the
Daily Telegraph
. They paid thirty pounds, almost a living wage. But they had bureaucratic rules: a certain number ofbooks had to be reviewed and the title of the book had to be mentioned in the first sentence of the section devoted to it. These rules made it hard to do a proper article, as I used to on the
Statesman
. It made novel-reviewing more like hackwork, and no one seemed to read what I wrote. The
Telegraph
didnât add to oneâs reputation. But thirty pounds was thirty pounds.
T ONY HAD BEEN GOING ON all this time in his way, publishing a book every two or three years, doing his reviews. The
Punch
business had ended badly, but then Tony began to do the lead reviews for the
Telegraph
. The literary editor there was H. D. Ziman. He was an unremarkable writer, and he used to dictate his reviews walking up and down in the
Telegraph
office, greeting new arrivals and going on. I seem to remember a pipe as one of his props, but I am not sure and now there is no one to ask. He came from New Zealand, I believe, but apart from this he was perfectly ordinary. Tony, in his generous, people-collecting way, became fascinated by Ziman. I donât know why. He
I thought that was the end of the
New Statesman
and me. But there was a benevolent spiritâit must have been Tonyâwatching over me at Great Turnstile, urging the assistant literary editor to give me another chance. I was sent other things, an academic book about John Lyly and euphuism (which I liked), some books about Jamaica which gave me the matter for a few jokes. I began to be published, the
New Statesman
even printing some jokes I made about Jamaica (âA banana a day will keep the Jamaican awayâ) which wouldnât pass today. Then I was moved to fiction-reviewing, once a month, for ten guineas a thousand-word column. Each column was a weekâs work. I did that for three years.
I was living at the time in an over-furnished, neglected attic flat in Muswell Hill. My elderly landlord and landlady had both been married before and the attic was full of their surplus furniture. A partitioned corner space in the sitting room, which was quite large, was for coal; it also had mice, bright-eyed and startled when you came upon them. The dormer window at the back overlooked a bowling green. From a house on the other side of the green there came onsome evenings the sound of someone practising âWhen the Saints Go Marching In.â Blackbirds raided the gardens all around and brought back their booty to the dormer roof. Sometimes a cherry escaped their beaks and rolled down slowly from tile to tile, and the disappointed birds squawked and scratched on the tiles with apparent rage.
I had given up a job I had taken principally to send money to my mother (her letters were only about money). I was trying in a hopeless kind of way to get going on a new book and for some reasonâperhaps I felt the book was still only provisionalâwas writing by hand on unlined paper. It was a depressing time in that attic. Only the monthly
New Statesman
review gave me a lift. I used to go to the Muswell Hill public library on Friday, publication day, to see whether they had used my piece. There was always a slender dark-suited man in his twenties or thirties at a table in the reading room ahead of me, with the new issue of the
Statesman
, smiling with pure joy, cracking his long fingers over the opened magazine. When my turn came I looked first to see whether my piece was in. I was intensely ashamed if it was. And I took good care then not to read it or to look at the pages where it was. I held those pages together when I read the magazine. I have never got over this shyness or vanity at seeing my name in print.
After some time I began to travel, and that connection with the
New Statesman
couldnât be kept up. When after some years I settled down again I needed more than the ten guineas the
Statesman
paid. Tony got me a fiction-reviewing job on the
Daily Telegraph
. They paid thirty pounds, almost a living wage. But they had bureaucratic rules: a certain number ofbooks had to be reviewed and the title of the book had to be mentioned in the first sentence of the section devoted to it. These rules made it hard to do a proper article, as I used to on the
Statesman
. It made novel-reviewing more like hackwork, and no one seemed to read what I wrote. The
Telegraph
didnât add to oneâs reputation. But thirty pounds was thirty pounds.
T ONY HAD BEEN GOING ON all this time in his way, publishing a book every two or three years, doing his reviews. The
Punch
business had ended badly, but then Tony began to do the lead reviews for the
Telegraph
. The literary editor there was H. D. Ziman. He was an unremarkable writer, and he used to dictate his reviews walking up and down in the
Telegraph
office, greeting new arrivals and going on. I seem to remember a pipe as one of his props, but I am not sure and now there is no one to ask. He came from New Zealand, I believe, but apart from this he was perfectly ordinary. Tony, in his generous, people-collecting way, became fascinated by Ziman. I donât know why. He
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