Journeys

By Paul Gray

FINDING THE CENTER: TWO NARRATIVES

by V.S. Naipaul Knopf; 176 pages; $13.95

In Among the Believers (1981), his most recent book of nonfiction, V.S. Naipaul displayed a few early symptoms of self-parody. The Muslim fundamentalists he met on his travels through Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia sorely tried his patience. They did not seem impressed by his example of success: an Indian born and raised in Trinidad, then a British colony, who had won a scholarship to Oxford and afterward, as an admirable writer, earned much favor in Western eyes. All that those mullahs and ayatullahs seemed to want was to make trouble and pray. Naipaul's report on this journey was written more in anger than sorrow, and the formula that he had earlier used to criticize Argentina (The Return of Eva Peron) or his ancestral homeland (India: A Wounded Civilization) began to seem a trifle predictable: the author regrets to find yet another swatch of the Third World behaving in veddy bad taste.

Finding the Center moves away from the invective of the Muslim book and restores to his nonfiction the considerable sympathy and understanding for characters that Naipaul has shown in his ten novels. Indeed, Naipaul calls the two prose works that make up this new vol ume "personal narrative pieces" rather than essays, and the term seems correct. His emphasis in both falls not on report age but on the process of shaping experiences into a coherent story, of creating a tale, in essence, in order to get at a truth.

In Prologue to an Autobiography, Nai paul circles carefully around his beginnings as a writer. The first sentence of what would prove to be his first published novel (Miguel Street) spontaneously occurred to him while he was doing freelance work for the British Broadcasting Corp. in London, not long after coming down from Oxford. Using BBC typewriter and paper, the young Naipaul wrote: "Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, 'What happening there, Bogart?' " This small scene came from Trinidad and Port of Spain and the crowded, colorful street where Naipaul spent part of his childhood. In later years, with an established and growing reputation, Naipaul returned several times to Trinidad and environs. He looked up Bogart, the man who had inspired his first successful fiction, but his travels home chiefly brought him his own late father, reconstructed from family reminiscences and old newspaper clippings. This discovery, movingly recreated, gives the mature son something of the heritage and tradition he thought he had been denied.

After finishing this sentimental journey in prose, an apparently mellowed Naipaul went to the Ivory Coast. At the beginning of the second narrative, he explains his chosen itinerary: "I wanted to be in West Africa, where I had never been; I wanted to be in a former French territory in Africa; and I wanted to be in an African country which, in the mess of black Africa, was generally held to be a political and economic success." The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro displays his idiosyncratic methods of assessing a strange place: serendipitous encounters with local people, from college professors to taxi drivers; intuitive pursuits of whatever his Western intellect perceives as bizarre. Naipaul is most unsettled by a visit to Yamoussoukro, a stupefying modern city being constructed in the remote jungle around the tribal village of the country's President Felix Houphouet-Boigny. An artificial lake has been dug beside the walls of the leader's imposing palace, and crocodiles have been introduced; every afternoon, presidential assistants feed these creatures raw meat and a live chicken. Why? Naipaul wonders over and over again. His informants cannot enlighten him. But he seems to learn something from them all the same. Black Africa does not operate according to rules that will submit to logic. Naipaul is appalled by the dirt and degradation he observes, as any foreign tourist might be, but he also senses, well beneath the chaotic surface, "a beautifully organized society." Coming from someone else, this perception might seem dopey or romantic. Naipaul's authority, which this book reinforces, makes the judgment inescapable. He not only tells the West what it wants to hear, he is uniquely born, trained and qualified to convey information that everyone needs to know. --By Paul Gray