The Writer as Politician: The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul

October 24, 2006

There is an essential difference between being a writer and being a politician. The writer is involved with the particular, and works upward toward the general. The politician starts with the general and tries to pass that off as a solution to the many particulars of our world. We pay writers to give us a new and unsuspected window onto the world; we vote for politicians that mirror our own values and worldview. It stands to reason: the writer makes a poor politician. This is exactly the point of interest in V.S. Naipaul's essay "New York with Norman Mailer".. a description of a writer running for local office in New York City.

The opening tells us something about the pressure of being a politician:

Norman Mailer always campaigned in a correct dark-blue suit. Towards the end he cut his hair short. A week or so before election day the Mailer campaign staff lost some hair as well. [315]

It reads like a throw-away opening, yet it also signals the conflict between particularity and generality that will mark a writer's attempt to cross-over into the political world.

Naipaul points out the continuing color and edge in Mailer's pronouncements: "Crime will be on the increase as long as it's the most interesting activity" (316). The writer remains. But the stance of the politician appears to dull certain aspects of the writer's sensibility. Naipaul witnesses Mailer at a rally in front of the Old Treasury Building. He is struck by the cacophany.. "the famous street in the famous city, the buildings, the flags, the rhetoric and history in the Washington statue." But then:

When I talked to Mailer a week after the election I found that his own memories of the Wall Street rally were vague; the details of the campaign, of particular scenes and particular words, had blurred. [325]

If Mailer ever wanted to go back and recover some of these particularities, there could be no better source than this essay, which is built out of these very things.. scenes and workers and conversations rendered in detail. The essay itself is an enactment of the distance between Naipaul and a politician. These are the scenes that a politician could not get down in words.. even if that politician were a writer!

In the end Mailer loses. There was never any question of him winning. Mailer contemplates whether becoming a politician had made him duller.. and whether a duller candidate would possibly have done better. In the last paragraph Naipaul picks up on that word:

Dull: it was the recurring word. It was as though, during the campaign, Mailer had redefined his writer's role by negatives. He couldn't assess the value of the campaign. "If you don't win, you change very little." [333]

Which is just another way of laying out the difference between a writer and politician. Writers win our approval by being interesting; politicians gain our trust by being predictable. Mailer's attempt at being a politician brought out a curious negative quality.. the writer turns himseld inside-out for the voters. In losing Mailer became again much like a writer: who by definition, it seems, is someone who changes very little in the world. Mailer can go back to writing. But one wonders whether a winning politician could ever really see the world again, in all its individual scenes and characters.