Naipaul derides novels of Forster,
'a nasty homosexual'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/aug/02/books.classics
visited in November, 2008
Paul
Kelso
The
Guardian
Thursday August 2 2001
EM Forster has long been considered a
master of
modern English fiction with his sentimental view of India
and gentle satires on
the pretensions of the colonial classes.
But according to Sir Vidia (VS) Naipaul, novelist and
mischievous chronicler
of the Caribbean colonial experience, Forster was a sexual
predator more
interested in seducing garden boys than revealing the
truth about India.
Naipaul, who has a new novel out next month, also
labelled Forster's most
famous work, A Passage to India, "utter rubbish" in an
interview with
the Literary Review, published today.
In it he derides Forster and his friend, the economist
John Maynard Keynes,
as homosexuals who exploited the poor and those in their
power for sexual
gratification. He said the pair set their work against a
background of
"mystery and lies", and that Forster's book was "a lying
mystery".
Asked about the three religions of India by interviewer
Farrukh Dondy,
Naipaul launched into an assault on Forster's "pretence of
poetry".
"People write such rubbish about the three religions of
India," he
said. "People like EM Forster make a pretence of making
poetry of the
three religions. It's false. It's a pretence. It's utter
rubbish.
"I don't think Forster ... knew what it means. It [A
Passage to India]
has only one real scene, and that's the foolish little tea
party at the
beginning.
"Forster, of course, has his own purposes in India. He is
a homosexual
and he has his time in India, exploiting poor people,
which his friend Keynes
also did.
"Keynes didn't exploit poor people, he exploited people
in the
university; he sodomised them and they were too frightened
to do anything about
it. Forster belonged to that kind of nastiness really.
"I know it might be liberally wonderful now to say it's
OK but I think
it's awful. That's the background to all the mystery and
lies. It is a lying
mystery."
Asked whether Forster had contributed anything to the
understanding of
India, Naipaul was withering. "He encouraged people to
lie. He was
somebody who didn't know Indian people. He just knew the
court and a few middle
class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to
seduce."
Naipaul's assault on the content and morality of
Forster's work comes on the
eve of publication of his new novel, Half a Life.
Last year Naipaul, 68, was equally savage about Tony
Blair, describing him
as a pirate at the head of a socialist revolution
"destroying the idea of
civilisation in this country" and responsible for "a
plebeian culture
that celebrates itself".
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