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

and just a few years after, places that had been on the periphery, Latin America and India, at one time too far away and too unimportant, were better known. The very novelty of their material now ensured their welcome, and they were seen as sources of a kind of vigour that had gone out of English writing (which only meant that English material was now stale).
    When I had started, in the mid-1950s, I had felt left out of things. It was lucky for me that in 1955 I had found André Deutsch and Diana Athill as publishers. Without them I might have languished; perhaps never got started. My material knocked me out of court; it took me years to get into Penguin. As late as 1961 the great American firm of Knopf was sending back my work unread; my foolish English agent, the chairman of Curtis Brown, had made me take my book by hand to Blanche Knopf at Claridges. It was all of eighteen years later that I established a more or less steady relationship with the house of Knopf. In the twenty-five years since I had started the world had altered its shape.
    But I also feel—only now: it takes time to assess thesethings—that what was good for me wasn’t good for Tony. When he had begun his big autobiographical novel his material, an English middle-class upbringing, was, it might be said, of an approved kind. When, twenty-five years later, he had got to the end, the world had changed and England had changed. He was seen as old-fashioned, his material dead, belonging to a world that had been superseded.
    He didn’t really know what had happened. His generosity of spirit, his habit of people-collecting, and his own freedom from money worries made him blind to the changed situation. He went among his old friends as the old writer; he had no idea now what was said behind his back. Somebody told Sonia Orwell one day that in Tony’s big book people were driven by the will. She made a face and seemed about to snort. And yet Tony and his wife Violet adored George Orwell; and I remember Sonia talking to Tony in her house on the Gloucester Road about the collected edition of Orwell’s letters and journalism she was helping prepare for Penguin.
    Malcolm Muggeridge, the journalist, was a close friend; or so I thought, from the stories Tony told about him. He had been editor of
Punch
in the early 1950s and Tony had perhaps met him there. I thought he was one of the people Tony had “collected.” He used to come to stay at the Powells’ in Somerset. A story was that he got up early and, writing in bed with pencil and paper, got through two or three of the week’s articles before breakfast. Tony did not look down on this facility. He thought it was a distinct talent, to write intelligent and appetising and popular copy. It was shocking to me, after hearing so much in admiration from Tony about Malcolm, to findMalcolm writing an unfriendly and ironical review of one of the later novels. Muggeridge had his finger on the pulse of things. This review would have been a sure sign that in the eyes of some Tony had, especially with the skittish later novels of the series, outstayed his literary welcome. Tony didn’t immediately show his hurt; that came out a long while later.
    Ziman, Tony’s Z, was no longer literary editor of the
Telegraph
. His place had been taken by David Holloway, formerly of the
News Chronicle
. One morning when I went to the
Telegraph
office to collect books or deliver copy Holloway said to me, “You’re a friend of Powell’s, aren’t you?” Holloway had a squint; it could make him look shy or malevolent. He wasn’t looking shy now. When I said I was a friend he said, “What do you think of his writing?” Before I said anything he said, with something like rage, his bad eye working hard, “I would pay him to stop writing.” Just like that; and yet week by week he ran Tony’s lead review at the top of the page.
    Those reviews were actually very good,