/ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT / LITERATURE: In search of V.S. Naipaul

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Fitzroy Nation

Jan 30 2000 (IPS) - Last year a book portraying the writer V.S. Naipaul as snobbish, mean, and dismissive of the prospects of peoples and nations south of the equator, created a major stir.

Written by Paul Theroux, the author’s erstwhile friend and confidante, ‘Sir Vidia’s Shadow” was a vindication of sorts for those whose admiration of Naipaul’s writing skills and literary achievements is tempered by annoyance at what they perceive to be a lack of compassion and humanity in his works.

Now, with Naipaul’s permission, but not his participation, another friend – literary agent Gillon Aitken – has gathered and published the correspondence exchanged between the writer and his family in the period 1950- 1954.

‘Letters Between a Father and Son’, (Little, Brown and Company; 1999) can be seen as a image-burnishing exercise, down to the sympathetic picture of Naipaul on the inside back cover, wearing a smile rather than his normal scowl, and cuddling his pet cat.

Nonetheless, the book represents an important account of the moods and feelings of an important writer during a formative period. This is a different Naipaul – quick to insult yes, and carping; but also considerate, affectionate, caring, and funny.

V.S. (Vidia) Naipaul was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad in 1932. He is part of a writing dynasty. His father, Seepersad, and brother, Shiva, are also published authors.

Indeed the backbone of this book is about the writing process: Seepersad’s ambition to be a novelist, his son’s shared passion for words. (Shiva Naipaul, a small boy during the period covered, would develop his writing later. He died in 1985, of a heart attack, after publishing seven books.)

The correspondence begins at the time Naipaul left Trinidad in 1950 to study at Oxford University on an Island Scholarship.

Much of the focus is on Seepersad, ” Pa”. Naipaul’s father is a man torn between commitment to family and devotion to art. Every deadline at the Trinidad Guardian newspaper, for which he works, is an imposition. Yet without the paycheck from the newspaper, the family cannot eat.

“This is the time I should be writing the things I so long to write,” he laments in a letter to “Vido”. “This is the time for me to be myself. When shall I get a chance? I don’t know. I come from work, dead tired. The Guardian is taking all out of me – writing tosh.”

At Oxford, Naipaul encounters his own difficulties. “A feeling of emptiness is nearly always on me,” he writes to his sister, Kamla, who is studying in India. “I see myself struggling in a sort of tunnel blocked up at both ends. My past – Trinidad and the necessity of our parents – lies behind me and I am powerless to help anyone.”

As the financial pressure builds, and his father becomes more desperate, Vidia admonishes him. The son becomes the mentor. “You have enough material for a hundred stories. For heaven’s sake start writing them. You can write and you know it.”

Father responds with a plaintive plea. “Can I write at least two stories a week for the TG (Trinidad Guardian), plus a novel? àThe fact is I feel trapped.”

A year later, he’s still musing about the process. “Literary work is a matter of single devotion,” he offers. Then Seepersad makes an offer to his son: That he should come home to Trinidad and do nothing but write. “Do what I am longing to do now: just write; and read and do the things you like to do.”

In a subsequent letter, Pa laments: “I am too tired to attempt any sustained work on my own; there is always some story or the otheràI feel just hemmed in byàforces.”

What comes across is the fragility of this family’s existence, how much hangs on Naipaul’s academic success: not only economic support for the family, but fulfillment of his father’s dream. It is too much. Naipaul suffers a nervous breakdown. He becomes withdrawn, then, with the help of his girlfriend, Pat, begins to focus anew.

That illness is a turning point, a coming of age for the writer. Thereafter he becomes more comfortable with himself and his worth.

A meeting with an old school friend from the Caribbean reminds him of why he will never return. Encounters with relatives in London reinforce his feeling of disconnection.

“Trinidadàhas nothing to offer me.” He writes that matter-of- factly, without malice or anger, but you can tell his father’s experience weighs heavily on this conclusion. “I hope I never come back to Trinidad, not to live, that is.”

When Seepersad becomes ill, the Guardian sends the man home. He’s in his late forties then. He thinks time is running out: the literary flame is in danger of being extinguished.

The family sends an urgent letter to Vido. Get Pa’s short stories published. It’s important to his health. “I have been trying to get a job,” Pa writes to Vido, “but for the same reason that the Guardian no longer wants me, nobody wants me.”

V.S. Naipaul’s last letter to his father is dated October 8, 1953. Two days later, he is forced to send a telegram. “HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME VIDO.” Seepersad Naipaul died of a heart attack.

Vidia Naipaul, the son, would reap his father’s legacy of ambition, quest for learning and love for words, and desire to become a great writer.

But this is not the son who left the Caribbean in 1950. He has been transformed by education and learning. Enamoured by the world of European ideas and high culture, he is scornful of what he left behind.

The loneliness and pressure that drove Naipaul to a mental breakdown, compounded by the circumstances of his father’s death, left deep scars, as did the heartless treatment meted out to him by relatives he encountered in England.

These experiences, feelings chronicled in the book, help explain the bitter cynicism and hardness – the sense of not belonging – familiar to those who have read the 23 books published under his name over the last 40 years.