The shattering honesty of VS Naipaul

VS Naipaul, who died on Saturday at the age of 85, was sustained most of all by self-belief. The society in which he launched himself as a writer was not created to support a man like him. It was designed to degrade him. His career was without precedent. When he arrived in England as a teenager armed with a scholarship to Oxford, he was a man apart, the descendant of Indians shipped out by the British Empire to toil as indentured labour in the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean. Against his ambition, self-worth and dignity were arrayed the stifling prejudices of a conservative and hierarchical nation long accustomed to stamping on people of his appearance. The racism Naipaul was subjected to was of a vicious and crippling variety. When he attended an interview for a trainee position at the BBC, the interviewers erupted in sniggers. Naipaul did not complain. He could not.