Song of a Reformed Headhunter

V.S. Naipaul was climbing out of a cab when I approached the 92Y. He was a small man and leaned heavily on the arm of his bigger, younger wife. At the Y to promote his latest book The Masque of Africa, he read from the Gambon section, in which a French-educated biracial Gambonese lawyer speaks about the forest at the heart of African religions. Ultra-civilized himself, Naipaul read the account of magical rituals and secret rites in the voice of an interested but detached reporter, conveyed through prose at once transparent and artful. The interview segment was less successful, The interviewer asked convoluted questions but gave Naipaul too little time to respond. The questions were also too abstract. Last night tested Naipaul's faltering memory, but did not give the storyteller a chance to mesmerize.

Chinua Achebe was interviewed by K. Anthony Appiah at 92Y last night.  Things Fall Apart , the only Achebe novel I read, is about the coming of the Christian missionaries into Igboland, Nigeria. I read it after reading Ngugi wa Thiongo's The River Between as a teenager, and loving it. The occasion for the 92Y reading was the publication of  The Education of a British-Protected Child,  a collection of personal essays. While Achebe's father converted to Christianity, his father's uncle resisted the missionaries' message. Achebe said last night he himself wants to hold to a "middle way," to see the good and the bad about the brief period of colonialism Nigeria underwent. He said that such a perspective is traditional Igbo. One of the good things was his own schooling at the government college set up by the missionaries. He described his amazement at the number of books in the library. It was a paradise for a story-loving boy. The father of modern Nigerian lit...

Adrienne Rich first read at the 92Y in 1958, at the age of 29. Last night, she returned to open the Center's reading season, at the age of 80. The Kaufman Hall was full. When she walked on stage, the audience applauded warmly, and a group of women gave her a standing ovation. It was tremendously moving to see this slight woman, her head disproportionately big, sink into the armchair, shuffle her papers with trembling hands, and then read in a steady voice. "All of her life she has been in love with the hope of telling the utter truth." What W. S. Merwin wrote of Rich reminds me of the choice between truth and beauty my classmates and I were asked to make and reflect upon in a workshop exercise. I wrote down "truth," but realized afterwards that it was what I felt I should choose, and not what I would choose. Truth seemed to be a nobler, larger, claim than beauty; it still seems so to me. It provides a real resistance, an unmovable rock against which one may pi...