Free A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul

called him Z, and more than once he told me stories about Z, which he thought extraordinary but which did not stay with me. For Tony this fascination with Ziman would have cast a glamour on his association with the
Telegraph
. The books for review could have been posted to him in Somerset, but he preferred to come up to London to look at the books himself and also, I believe, to have a little of the office atmosphere.
    And then an enormous piece of luck changed his life. His father died and left a fortune. It is probable that this late pieceof luck, and the consequent absence of tension in his life, a new lightness, affected his writing and gave a certain skittishness to the final volumes of his autobiographical novel. His father was a military man whose prime had fallen between the two wars, when promotions were scarce; and Tony had thought all along that his father had very little money. Tony said he used to feel it was wrong when he visited his father to accept a gin at the old man’s expense. Now Tony could forget people like Hollow Wood and all the Hollow Woods who had come later. He and his wife went on cultural cruises.
    It was pleasant for his friends to be with this new relaxed man, to see the old melancholy drop away. Because I felt that though the English writing life had given Tony his special style, it had also made him melancholy. His contemporaries or near-contemporaries had done so much better—Waugh, Greene, Orwell, Connolly (though perhaps Connolly hadn’t done so well), Betjeman, Amis. All of these people (with the exception of Greene) Tony loved in his way, loved as characters. He especially loved the wicked Waugh; and this relish for the character of each did away with whatever jealousy there might have been. In this way, too, I found him exemplary, setting me an example, preparing me for the hard road ahead.
    Sometimes when he came up to London he asked me to lunch at the Travellers. He would talk about the difficulty of his book and ask for advice, without really wanting it; and often then—this was before the luck struck—I would see him grow abstracted, slightly hunched, deeply melancholy, his colour almost grey, the short hair or down on his old man’s face standing upright.
    I used to wonder why he wrote, why he had got started on the writing life, why he had stayed (many start, few stay), whether there was a true need. His writing didn’t seem to come out of need. He seemed to have risked nothing. After the university he went into publishing; then there was the war; and after the undemanding war he returned to the world of books. Unlike Greene and Orwell and Waugh at no stage did he go to meet the world. His conviction was that his world was enough.
    He might have said, though I am putting words in his mouth here, that the expatriate novel, in the hands of someone like Greene, was meretricious, the seedy foreign setting giving an easy drama to the characters. He would have said, if asked (he had thought profoundly about writing), that many great writers in the past had stayed with their society; and that was true. The Dickens who mattered had stayed in England. Tolstoy was at his best in Russia, and Balzac was at his best in France. But these writers were all pioneers, writing about what hadn’t been written before. By 1930, when Tony was beginning, very little about these great European societies had been left unsaid. The societies themselves had been diminished for various reasons—war, revolution; and the world around these once unchallenged societies had grown steadily larger. A society’s unspoken theme is always itself; it has an idea where it stands in the world. A diminished society couldn’t be written about in the old way, of social comment.
    About this society, at once diminished and over-written-about, it was proper for Waugh to do a wicked fairytale (
Decline and Fall
) and later a romance (
Brideshead Revisited
), a bookof almost feminine