Benjamin Moser: commitment

Transcript context

…I don’t know where I saw that, but you mentioned it somewhere. Oh, I mentioned him in the book as well. V.S. Naipaul — he’s probably the most symbolic figure in my head. He’s the person that occupies the most space of all the people I’ve known. He is an almost oedipal figure for me, a father figure, someone that I knew very well when I was younger. I venerated him, and I think I became a writer because of him. I also stopped reading him because I wanted to be a writer, because his influence was so overwhelming on me. The sense of never being able to measure up to him was so depressing that I had to find my own way in the world to use the title of one of his novels. Having that as an example, that integrity and that self-immolating, self-sacrificing belief in the importance of literature and writing — I had to go away from it. I started reading him again about four or five years ago. Actually, when I won the Pulitzer Prize — that’s when I thought, “Now I can read him again.” Rather than diminishing him in a sense — sometimes, like the writers that make a huge impression on you in adolescence or as a young person — you come back to them 20 years later, and it’s just not as much. It’s just not as important. He was in fact, even better than I remembered. Again, I had to stop reading him because the impression that he makes on an impressionable young person is too overwhelming. When I read A Turn in the South, I greatly enjoyed it, but over time, I somehow grew not to like the book, especially after I spent more time in the South. What’s the correct stance on that one? He strikes me in part — he was just a grump, but in a way that infected his writing. He disliked groups. Same about [India:] A Million Mutinies [Now] — quite an interesting book, but ultimately not willing to understand what makes India work.…

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