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Two great pieces on two superb books.

Richard Price has long been my favourite American novelist. He published his first work, The Wanderers when he was 24 and has only gotten better. Check out Ladies Man if you get the chance. His genre is urban fiction; he wrote the screenplay to The Color of Money and the novels Clockers, Freedomland, and Blood Brothers. This review, talks about his book Samaritan

This piece, published in The New York Review of Books by Joan Didion, herself a first-rate writer of non-fiction, deals with V.S. Naipauls' The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad. Highly recomended.

Striking passage from this piece made me think of several recent discussions here:

Argentina is a place where "jargon ends by competing with jargon," where the guerrillas have imported Paris dreams of revolution and remain trapped in a sinister mimicry of "the social-intellectual diversions of the north." Uruguay was wasted by a European idea, the dream of a welfare state imposed early in the century by José Batlle y Ordóñez "after a visit to Switzerland." Even Michael Abdul Malik, the Trinidadian hustler deranged by the cons he worked in London, is or was a victim: "At every stage of his career he was supported by some kind of jargon and could refer his actions to some kind of revolutionary ideal."

The story of Michael Abdul Malik, or Michael X, born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad in 1933, was for Naipaul one of those dense situations in which a writer finds his every concern refracted. Malik spent the years between 1957 and 1971 in London, first pimping and dealing and getting by as best he could and finally chancing into the Sixties role of black leader, black poet, black writer; "the authentic voice of black bitterness," according to Colin McGlashan in The Observer in 1965. In 1967 he was jailed for an anti-white speech he made at Reading. In 1969 he was given money for a commune in Islington, which failed. In 1971 he came home to Trinidad and managed to float another such commune.

By early 1972, three people associated with the commune were dead, two of them Trinidadian lieutenants in Malik's Black Liberation Army and one of them a twenty-seven-year-old English divorcee named Gale Benson, and, in May of 1975, Malik was hanged for murder in Port of Spain. He left incoherent fragments of a "novel" in which a romantic black hero wins the abject admiration of the narrator, a young English woman named Lena Boyd-Richardson. (Inspecting the hero's bookshelf, Lena Boyd-Richardson is impressed at finding "Salammbo that masterpiece of Flaubert's" free of dust. "I discover that he not only have the books but actually reads and understands them I was absolutely bowld, litteraly. I took a seat, and gazed upon this marvel, Mike.") He also left the many interviews in which he had explained his political philosophy. "The only politics I ever understand is the politics of revolution," as he had told the Trinidad Express. "The politics of change, the politics of a completely new system."

In view of Malik's derangement the words "revolution, change, system" are of course seen by Naipaul as "London words, London abstractions," and in his account of the killings in Trinidad it is ultimately these London words that kill not only Gale Benson and the other casualties of Malik's fantasy but Malik himself. "Malik thought he shared the security of his supporters," Naipaul observes of Malik's London career. "He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with 'revolution' as with the theater…the people for whom Malik's kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel."

It is toward precisely this section of the secure middle class, toward the exporters rather than the importers of the rhetoric, that Naipaul directs the profound disgust that he is sometimes accused of feeling for the victims of the words, for the casualties of the abstractions, for the Maliks of the "emerging" world. He keeps a kind of terrible track. He lets no one off. He does not forget Jill Tweedie, in The Guardian, quoting with approval the American Black Muslim whose lunacy came to fuel Malik's own on the killing-ground that was the compound in Trinidad: " 'They call me a nigger but I've invented my own kind of nigger. My nigger is me, excruciatingly handsome, tantalizingly brown, fiercely articulate.' " He does not overlook John Lennon visiting the Trinidad commune as Malik's guest in 1971. He details the literary advice Malik received from someone in England to whom he had shown a draft of his autobiography: "Use South Africa, Rhodesia, England, Portugal and America to speak of the heartlessness of white society. Use slavery, use the recent massacre of the Jews at Auschwitz and Belsen…. Chapter 15 You ought to close powerfully, frighteningly perhaps, on 'This I Believe.' Your own true statement of one displaced black man in this particular context of history…."

He will not exempt even Gale Benson, the English woman who got herself knifed and shoved in her shallow grave before she was completely dead: "Everything that is remembered of Benson in Trinidad suggests the great uneducated vanity of the middle-class dropout…. Perhaps the motive for the killing lay only in that: the surprise, a secure life ending in an extended moment of terror." This entire narrative about the killings in Trinidad, the situation Naipaul later rendered into fiction as Guerrillas, exists as a way of wishing bad cess not to Malik but to "all those who helped to make Malik…those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men—not only the Negro—to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centers of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.

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