27 August, 2007

The Man Who Stayed Behind

VS Naipaul writes about Derek Walcott:

[I]n 1960, when I was in Trinidad on a visit, he told me that someone had said to him, “Walcott, you’ve been promising for too damn long, you know.” He told it as a joke, but it wouldn’t have been a joke for him. From this situation he was rescued by the American universities; and his reputation there, paradoxically, then and later, was not that of a man whose talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting. He became the man who had stayed behind and found beauty in the emptiness from which other writers had fled: a kind of model, in the eyes of people far away.

Read the full piece here. It’s slightly unsatisfying, because though Naipaul speaks much of Walcott’s poetry, he quotes none of it, so a reader who hasn’t already read Walcott will have merely a description but not an illustration of what his work is all about. Should have been some show with the tell, no?