TRIBUTE: Sir Vidia belittled every possible literary giant

Celebrated writer Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who reigned the literary world for almost half-a-decade, has passed away yesterday at the age of 85. During his lifetime, he attacked, in fact dismissed almost every classic writer he once cherished reading. It might sound a bit irreverent but every time Naipaul opened his mouth he quickly put his foot into it. A stickler for principles, he was always at his best in flagrantly breaching them. Years before in a conversation with the Literary Review, he went on to deride Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway calling them "vapid", "repetitive", "worst" and "doesn't know where he was" respectively.

However it was not the first time, not possibly the last either that the Trinidad-born UK writer with Indian roots lashed out at such literary heavyweights. In 2001, Naipaul lambasted EM Forster, RK Narayan, John Maynard Keynes, Wole Soyinka and James Joyce in the same literary journal sitting in his home in Wiltshire. A year later he targeted Nirad C Chaudhuri, whom he once hailed in the Encounter as one of the best writers to come out of the Indo-British encounter. Of course, Chaudhuri did not need Naipaul to heap accolades on him.

No one denies Naipaul's literary genius, nor can one ever discount the beauty of A House for Mr Biswas. But so is the case with other distinguished writers whom he underrated every now and then.

The trouble with Naipaul was that he got too personal – non-literary – in his denunciation of his peers, and that in fact letf a bitter aftertaste. No writer of some repute has ever indulged in hitting below the belt. With few exceptions like Henry Broughman (on Byron), Joseph Conrad (on DH Lawrence) and Wordsworth, Pepys and Shaw (on Shakespeare), others have strictly desisted from attacking their fellow writers at least on a personal level.

No doubt, George Bernard Shaw disparaged Shakespeare (as "disillusioned idealist!", "a pessimist"... ), but he also acknowledged: "Nothing can extinguish my interest in Shakespeare."

Not so with Naipaul. Besides, lambasting those whom he once read and admired - for instance Narayan or Chaudhuri - he stoop well below his dignity in calling Forster a "homosexual", Keynes "sodomised" in the university. Though one is not ignorant about his early days as a writer, and later his (mis)adventures with prostitutes no one discusses them in public.

Naipaul was less harsh on biographer Patrick French's profoundly clinical work of art, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul. Yet, with all his imperfections this last man of letters of the last century will be remembered for the literary corpus

Naipaulian Weltanschauung

* Jane Austen "I thought halfway through the book (Northanger Abbey), 'Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life.' I said to myself, 'What am I doing with this material? This is for somebody else, really.'"

* Ernest Hemingway was "so busy being an American" that "he didn't know where he was".

* Henry James "The worst writer in the world."

* Thomas Hardy "an unbearable writer" who "doesn't know how to compose a paragraph".

* EM Forster "He encouraged people to lie. He was somebody who didn't know Indian people. He just knew the court and a few middle-class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce."

* James Joyce "I can't read it. Joyce was going blind and I can't understand the work of a blind writer. Where did he live? In Trieste. In the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But he is not interested in the world. He writes about Dublin and his own convolutions, Catholic guilt. He is not interested in the world."

* Charles Dickens "The element of self-parody becomes overwhelming in Dickens after a time. He died from the self-parody... I know the academics love the dreary ones, like Bleak House and Dombey and Son, etc., but they can be pushed to one side. And terrible books like Hard Times - a terrible book.