Writers, who are also fathers, are always aware of the shade thrown by Cicero &, for Anglophones, Lord Chesterfield, over what they write in their letters to their sons- more particularly if the sons have travelled abroad for higher education.
Naipaul's only poem was broadcast in 1950 to the West Indies. He had just turned 18 and was paid a guinea. But the poem must have alarmed his family
defying the soulless moon . . .
and mourning”.
Fortunately, the stories which followed it had touches of humour. One of them 'A Family Reunion', broadcast in March 1954, a few months after Shivprasad's death, tells the story of a powerful Indian grandmother, like Mrs Tulsi in Biswas. But Biswas has a happier ending. Interestingly, one story he did for the Beeb featured a Chinese family who were admirers of Mao but stuck in colonial Trinidad. My guess is that Shivprasad would have wanted Naipaul to broaden his canvas. After all, Hindu Trinidad was of little interest to the wider world.
Some 25 years ago, James Wood- surely the best reviewer of recent times?- published the following. I think it would be worthwhile to point out things he'd have missed because of his very different culture & upbringing.
Tell me what you talked
Letters between a Father and Son
by V.S. Naipaul.
In his essay on laughter, Bergson argues that comedy is chastening, not charitable. Laughter is defined by a certain absence of sympathy, a distance and disinterestedness, the philosopher tells us. A world that contained only pure intelligences would probably still include laughter; a world made up of pure emotionalists probably would not.
The Indian view is the opposite. Hasya is based on rasabhasa- Comedy is based on inappropriate affect or confusion of genres- & thus can contain all of them. This gives rise to the notion that all that is is Divine play (lila) or comedy.
Bergson appears to have been universalising from the example of Molière, and in so doing produces a description of comedy that is mightily contradicted at almost every station of literature.
People get angry if you crack a joke when tragedy strikes. 'Too soon?' the comedian ruefully inquires. But Baubo exposing her vagina caused Demeter to laugh & restore fertility to the world.
For literature’s greatest category might be precisely one of sympathetic comedy: in particular, that paradoxical shuffle of condescension and affiliation we are made to feel by Bottom the weaver, or Don Quixote, or Uncle Toby, or Zeno, or Pnin.
They belong in the literary category whose technical name is 'Weak as piss'. True a great literary artist can make something of them but it is one thing to wish to read a book and another to wish you had already done so. The safer thing is to say 'you know, I never could read Quixote- even in Shelton's translation. On the other hand, I relish Quevedo even when translated into Telugu' .
Such characters have busy souls.
They are stupid.
They are congested by aspiration, an aspiration that outstrips their insight.
Or the other way around. Nobody cares.
They claim to know themselves, but their selves are too dispersed to be known. It is we who know them, because we know at least something about them: that they are self-ignorant.
High achievers can have that quality. We don't greatly care if a loser knows he is a loser.
They are rich cavities, into which we pour a kindly offering: if we are the only ones who can provide the knowledge they lack about themselves, then we ourselves have become that lack, have become a part of them.
How is any of this relevant to the Naipauls? The dad did well for himself. The son did well for himself. The other son was doing well for himself till alcoholism took its toll. Sad.
V.S. Naipaul’s Mr Biswas belongs to this company.
No. He is a poor Brahmin from the boondocks who rises in life thanks to his literary gifts. From sign-painter to journalist to Civil Servant (Government jobs are highly prized by Indians)- what's more one who owns his own house & car- that's a big fucking deal.
Generous,
Not particularly. He isn't rich
combustible,
He calms down quickly enough. Rural Trinidadian Hindus who were 'combustible' tended to run amok with a machete.
nobly hysterical,
he comes from the village. People do run amok with machetes there. You have to find a way to stand up for yourself without getting your head chopped off.
facetious when he would like to be solemn,
because he isn't a Pundit. Had he learned to chant Sanskrit mantras, he would have been solemn enough. It was difficult not to be facetious in Trinidadian English- or Hindi for that matter. Calypso was the country's great export. Lord Invader's Rum & Coca Cola had been a hit for the Andrews sisters during the War. Interestingly, the music for the theme song for the projected musical version of 'House for Mr. Biswas' was repurposed for Dr. No.
stoical in resolve but crumbling in practice,
He does get his own house & a good position in society. Sadly, he died before he could cash in on the post-war interest in lovely Caribbean islands.
free in spirit but actually tied to the train of his destiny by the modesty of his ticket,
he got upgraded because of his talent.
he is a very affecting comic creation,
There are comic aspects to him but there is also what McClelland called 'need for achievement'. Biswas represents the progress Port of Spain had made since CLR James's 'Minty Alley' came out.
one of the few enduring characters in postwar British fiction.
Not really. The milieu is too alien. Biswas is part of Indian literature because rural life in Trinidad was like rural life in Bihar. When a man dies, his brothers may scare his widow into abandoning his share of the land.
We watch Biswas become a sign-writer (his first work, for a neighbour, is ‘Idlers Keep Out by Order’), and then a journalist at the Trinidad Sentinel.
What is important is his Arya Samaji proclivities. Sadly, he is coerced into paying for an animal sacrifice (which Aryas fiercely oppose). He has a nervous breakdown. He looks into the mirror & can't see his own face.
Can he make good with a village shop? No. Like Nehru, he protests feebly against the 'Baniafication' of Hindu society. The merchants had taken the lead. We must re-Brahminize society, Nehru says in his Autobiography.
I may mention that the success of Dhan Gopal's autobiography in the US in the early Twenties inspired other Hindus who had grown up in rural areas.
A dreamer, he likes to read fictional descriptions of bad weather in foreign countries.
So would you, if you lived in the tropics.
Eager to write his own stories, he corresponds with the ‘Ideal School of Journalism, Edgware Road, London’, which advises him to write about ‘the Romance of Place-Names (your vicar is likely to prove a mine of colourful information)’.
Nothing wrong in that. There were Catholic & Anglican priests in Trinidad. They knew the history of the place better than the Hindus who had arrived a couple of generations ago.
Biswas has a kind of anxious serenity; he is a neurotic stoic:
No. He is in a weak position but finds ways to improve himself and, more importantly, ensure all his children will rise in the world.
‘When he got home he mixed and drank some McLean’s Brand Stomach Powder,
rather than Eno's salts. This was a subtle protest against the policies of Sir Stafford Cripps whose wife was an Eno heiress. I may mention that the Cripps Mission had an effect similar to a dose of salts. Sadly, it was Congress which shat itself. The Viceroy's trousers remained unsoiled.
undressed, got into bed, and began to read Epictetus.’ This delicate sentence is characteristic of Naipaul’s early comic writing: there is the lovely syncromesh of registers, Stomach Powder ennobled by Epictetus (and how nicely the sentence docks at its final, rising word);
McLean's stomach powder was supposed to reduce flatulence. The Stoics wouldn't have been such a miserable bunch if they had been able to lighten the mood with a well timed fart.
there is the mock-heroic absurdity of it, and a gentleness which is balanced between rebellion and fatalism: the Stomach Powder, like Biswas’s soul, will keep fizzing even as Epictetus sedates.
Unless it is used as a suppository- which is what Gandhi would have done.
Above all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating the story.
No. We know how Biswas writes and how he talks. As a Trinidadian writing & talking to Trinidadians, he needs to do more than establish a bathetic mise en scene. Naipaul, on the other hand, invokes Pooter & an English comic tradition which culminates in Victoria Wood. His problem is that Trinidad was an Eden without a snake. Still- Et in Arcadia ego- even in Arcadia there is death. By dying, Shivprasad brought Naipaul's one good novel to life.
Here Naipaul has become Biswas, as we have, too.
No. This is where Shivprasad's sampratti misfires. Naipaul does not become a bonus pater familias. One might say 'aut libri, aut liberi'- one can either have books or children. But only kids can teach blokes to tell good stories.
Comedy is not distance but proximity.
Biswas doesn't quite rise to the level of comedy, but it reads well enough.
One of the reasons, doubtless, for Naipaul’s penetration into Biswas’s happy chaos is that the young author, at the novel’s deepest moments, was describing the essence of his father.
No. He was showing that the Hindu Trinidadian- like his relatives the Kapildeos- were 'legible' & intent on catching up with the urban Afro-Caribbeans. Would they take the lead politically? Dr. Eric Williams had precedence over Dr. Kapildeo despite the latter's claim that his knowledge of Einstein's theory would enable him to speed up time.
Letters between a Father and Son, a very moving book, shows us that Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, was less naive, much less unlettered, and more worldly than Mr Biswas;
He had become so. His son shows him as he may well have been at an earlier period.
but the two men share an ungoverned delightfulness,
spontaneity is not ungovernability.
and are, at the same time, stalked by an ungoverned anxiety.
I don't suppose a lot of poorer folk were without anxiety during the Depression. The War, however, was a bonanza, for the islands.
Both are overflowing spirits,
Shivprasad might have been if he had written a novel about the pirate Boysie Singh which was taken up by Hollywood.
breathing the germs of vicarious aspiration over their clever and dutiful sons.
Shared, not vicarious. Then, it turned out, everybody in their extended family was a budding novelist.
This is often a hope, however unwitting, that the son may not resemble the father.
He was urban & thus had a far better start in life. Then, some rural Trinidadians started getting very rich off petroleum. Life can be very fucking unfair.
Seepersad Naipaul, who had published his stories privately,
as had RK Narayan, also a journalist, during the war. Nothing wrong with that. They knew what would sell in the local market.
writes several times to his son that he believes the son will become a great writer;
why else study Eng Lit?
for himself, all he hopes is that he might one day be reputably published by an English firm.
Fuck that! America was richer. Put in gangsters & Calypso songs & Voodoo & inter-racial sex and you have a best seller on your hands.
The spirit is not unlike that described in A House for Mr Biswas, when Biswas tells his son, Anand: ‘I don’t want you to be like me.’
Pass your exams. Become a barrister.
Anand, Naipaul writes, ‘understood’: ‘Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable, and each felt a responsibility for the other, a responsibility which, in times of particular pain, was disguised by exaggerated authority on the one side, exaggerated respect on the other.’
The context is the father's ambiguous position as a ghar-jamai- a son-in-law dependent on his wife's family. Timothy Mo's 'Monkey King' is similar.
Seepersad so dominates this collection of letters that the book rather resembles a double bed of which only one side has been slept in.
Naipaul was Tolkein's student. Daddy didn't want to be told about Elves & Orcs.
Seepersad rises off these pages as powerfully as, perhaps more powerfully than, Mr Biswas rises off his;
the man was at the height of his powers. But his heart was weak.
the young Vidia Naipaul, who is a student during the exchange of letters that comprises the book, emerges more intermittently.
He was studying boring shit. Would he become a Commie or a fag or a Commie, alcoholic, fag? No. He was too boring.
The letters sent between father and son begin in 1950, when Vidiadhar Naipaul – called Vido by his family – leaves Trinidad for Oxford, and they end in October 1953, when Seepersad dies at the age of 47, from a heart attack. Seepersad Naipaul, called ‘Pa’ in these letters, was a reporter on the Trinidad Guardian when his 17-year-old son left.
He'd been a Civil Servant. That gave him prestige.
It was a gravely exciting time for both of them.
It was the period when VS turned into Eeyore. England is as depressing as fuck. The boy should have gone to Harlem & taken courses in Journalism & Creative Writing.
Seepersad was frustrated in his job, and desperate to find the time to write fiction.
He had a bad ticker. He was tired all the time.
As he explains to his son in an early letter,
This is the time I should be writing the things I so long to write. This is the time for me to be myself. When shall I get the chance? I don’t know. I come from work, dead tired. The Guardian is taking all out of me – writing tosh. What price salted fish and things of that sort. Actually that is my assignment for tomorrow! It hurts. Now keep your chin up, and far more important: keep yourself out of mischief.
Being a Commie is okay. Don't be an alcoholic fag even if you are a Commie.
Love from Ma and all, Pa.
So in his liberated and intelligent
Educated. The guy wasn't Einstein.
son, Seepersad grounds his own dreams.
Learn Latin & Greek & French & Spanish. At the very least, eat your dinners & become a barrister.
‘I have no doubt whatever that you will be a great writer,’ he writes to Vidia, during his first term at Oxford; ‘but do not spoil yourself: beware of undue dissipation of any kind ... You keep your centre.’ Later, he writes: ‘I am often tired after work, and must be in a good mood to get back to work’ – i.e. to writing fiction – ‘after work. It takes all the juice out of a fellow.’ He tells his son that he scribbles down stories at night, in bed. ‘The fact is I feel trapped.’
He was dying. Marcus Aurelius was all very well. What he needed was good old fashioned Sanatan Dharma. He needed to start breaking the ties of 'Moh-Maya' (Love-Delusion) if only for the sake of his son.
It is the varieties of Seepersad’s vicariousness that make him so full of comedy and pathos.
No. He was actually dying & didn't have the comforts of his ancestral religion. Not breaking 'Moh-Maya's' bondage means that instead of of a complete handing over to the son, there is a holding over of karmic residue which is considered inauspicious and a blemish in the eternal religion.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.5.17 अथातः संप्रत्तिः—यदा प्रैष्यन्मन्यतेऽथ पुत्रमाह, त्वं ब्रह्म, त्वं यज्ञः, त्वं लोक इति; स पुत्रः प्रत्याह, अहं ब्रह्म, अहं यज्ञः, अहं लोक इति; यद्वै किंचानूक्तं तस्य सर्वस्य ब्रह्मेत्येकता । ये वै के च यज्ञस्तेषां सर्वेषां यज्ञ इत्येकता; ये वै के च लोकास्तेषां सर्वेषां लोक इत्येकता; एतावद्वा इदं सर्वम्; एतन्मा सर्वं सन्नयमितोऽभुनजदिति, तस्मात् पुत्रमनुशिष्ठं लोक्यमाहुः, तस्मादेनमनुसशाति; स यदैवंविदस्माल्लोकात्प्रैति, अथैभिरेव प्राणैः सह पुत्रमाविशति । स यद्य् अनेन किंचिदक्ष्णयाऽकृतम् भवति, तस्मादेनं सर्वस्मात्पुत्रो मुञ्चति, तस्मात्पुत्रो नाम; स पुत्रेणैवास्मिंल्लोके प्रतिष्ठति, अथैनमेते दैवाः प्राणा अमृता आविशन्ति ॥ १
Now therefore the entrusting (sampratti) : When a man thinks he will die, he says to his son, ‘You are Brahman, you are the sacrifice, and you are the world.’ The son replies, I am Brahman, I am the sacrifice, and I am the world.’ (The father thinks:) ‘Whatever is studied is all unified in the word “Brahman.” Whatever sacrifices there are, are all unified in the word ” sacrifice.” And whatever worlds there are, are all unified in the word “world.” All this (the duties of a householder) is indeed this much. ‘He, being all this, will protect me from (the ties of) this world.’ Therefore they speak of an educated son as being conducive to the world. Hence (a father) teaches his son. When a father who knows as above departs from this world, he
penetrates his son together with the organ of speech, the mind and the vital force. Should anything be left Undone by him through any slip the son exonerates him from all that. Therefore he is called a son. The father lives in this world through the son. Divine and immortal speech, mind and vital force permeate him.
James Wood can scarcely be blamed for not knowing this bit of Hindu lore. What is odd is that no Brahmin Professor of English has pointed it out.
Though Vidia’s letters are often warm, they are rarely needy; there is never a doubt in our minds that it is this teenaged son, the eldest son, who has the greater power – the power to excite, to impress, and to disappoint his father.
Only if he becomes an alkie, Commie, fag who fails his fucking exams. The fact is, a Brahmin father- however Arya Samaji & 'reformist'- always has 'sampratti' at the back of his mind when writing to his eldest son. Was there some way of expressing this in Latin or ancient Greek? If so, the son should find out since he was studying Eng Lit which is based on Graeco-Roman foundations.
In one sense, then, Vidia outgrew his father before he himself grew up; and if this is the case, then he had always outgrown his father, because his father’s emotional need of him had always been more acute than his of his father.
Emotion is Sanskrit is 'bhava'. Vatsalya is the bhava regulating the relationship between parents & children. Vatsalya or 'pillai' bhakti makes provision for the dissolution of the carnal, contingent, material, aspect of the bond called Moh-Maya (desire-delusion) so that the sampratti transmission from father to son is by and in the supreme soul which is eternal & without blemish.
True, if you want your boy to do well in English Lit, you may substitute Marcus Aurelius for the Bhagvad Gita. Alternatively if you want him to do Math, tell him to read 'Noether's theorem for ninnies'.
Shivprasad did his best with his limited means. VS has filial piety but not the broader eusebia that is dharma.
Seepersad’s letters are fulsome where his son’s are controlled, for which Pa apologises: ‘Sometimes in my letter you’ll find me spouting a lot of talk; if you should find them absurd, forget them as so many banalities.’
The fluent writer is often facile.
Commenting ruefully on Vidia’s successes as a student writer, Pa exclaims: ‘My God! At your age I could hardly manage to write a good letter.’
Naipaul had talent. He had diligence. But, what would he write about? Not the price of fish. Aim for something more universal. The problem was that nothing is universal even if there is something which is eternal.
This outgrowing of his father
James Hilton, one of whose books had been praised by Freud, published his final book 'Time & Time Again' in 1953. It is asks how the gulf between fathers and sons can be bridged? Should it be bridged? Perhaps not. Let the younger generation make mistakes- provided they are different mistakes.
naturally produces at times a stiff loneliness,
because the world had changed. What would happen to the Hindu Trinidadian? Would they be absorbed into the Christian Afro-Caribbean or Creole community? Would second generation Arya Samajis like him & his sister (who had a scholarship to study at Benares Hindu University) be regarded as anachronisms? Would a return to Trinidad entail a solitary, solipsistic, existence?
What about India? Naipaul himself was eligible to join the Indian Civil Service or its Foreign Service. Oddly, the exams were still held in London as well as in Indian cities. Naipaul did at one time think of working for the Indian High Commission.
as when Vidia writes to his sister that his parents’ devotion to him makes him feel both loved and sad: ‘One feels too weak to be caring about such a big responsibility
you have to be strong for 'sampratti' to take effect
– the responsibility of deserving affection.’
On his father's death, he becomes the head of the family. The love owed to the father is transferred to him. But so is the responsibility. As Yuddhishtra says in the Mahabharata, the hardest dharma to know is that concerned with duties to dependents. This is what triggers his 'vishada' (depression).
At other times, that loneliness – or perhaps ‘singleness’ is the better word – erupts into a slightly grotesque hypertrophy of authority, in which the teenager feels impelled to instruct his father: ‘By the way, let Pa know that I don’t like his I’d’s and we’ve’s. Use the apostrophe as sparingly as possible,’ the 18-year-old writes to his mother.
This is good. The son is showing the mother that he is strong & understands the subject he is studying.
More often, Vidia’s letters contain both warm respect for his father and the beginning of a necessary objectification of Pa, a novelist’s weaning, in which the young man begins to see his father as others might – as a character.
Sadly, if you grow up as the son of a 'ghar-jamai' in a joint family, you are constantly forced to do so.
He writes home: ‘If I didn’t know the man, I would have said: what a delightful father to have.’
Delight is one thing. Love is another. It is the other's frailties which capture the heart.
It is because Pa’s warmth is so large and universal that it burns off all family chills.
He was a 'character' even if he was 'ghar-jamai'. People liked him even when they were irritated with him.
When Vidia intimates that he has become close to an Englishwoman, his father, after warning against mixed marriages, concludes his letter: ‘the only thing that matters to me – and to all of us at home – is your happiness.’
Back then, Indian families feared their son's would return with an LLD (i.e. they would marry the Land Lady's daughter). But Naipaul married a fellow Oxford grad. Nothing wrong with that at all.
In some respects Seepersad Naipaul must have been an ideal father:
ideal Dads are as rich as fuck
on the one hand, he existed to be outgrown, and knew it;
Did VS outgrow him? No. The father had to be informative or entertaining. The son could focus on being a great big misery-guts. A Hindu might say 'there was failure of sampraitti. That is why VS has a flawed understanding of purush-artha (which the Stoics would call oikeiosis). He was alienated from the socio-economic forces reshaping the world. His vocation was ontologically dysphoric. He was called to what could not exist save as scolding.
and yet on the other, his support of his seven children was absolute, and could never be outgrown, or even rivalled.
He helped his two eldest children but the youngsters were raised by their mother- a very capable woman as Diana Athill records. Naipaul wasn't close to his mother. A Muslim journalist who helped him when he was writing 'Million Mutinies' records his bafflement that the son wasn't aware that his mother had visited the same city a couple of years previously.
His love was greater than his authority: thus he was never paternally ex officio, but always instead a kind of civilian in fatherhood, an amateur at paternity.
Actually, he did well enough given that he was a poor, uneducated, ghar-jamai. His brilliant brothers-in-law didn't take over the education of his two eldest kids. They won scholarships and did well for themselves. Much of the interest, for Hindus, in 'House' is to trace the various methods by which the ghar-jamai asserts his independence. We may compare Naipaul to Niradh Chaudhuri whose father had not been able to get a degree and thus was relegated to the lowest type of legal work in a small town. Like Chaudhuri's father, Shivprasad invested a lot in books & education so that all his children rose in life.
Like most parents who give their children opportunities they have never had, Pa lives through his son’s experiences, urging him to write long, detailed letters about daily life at Oxford, and especially about his encounters with ‘big-shots’ (Pa’s characteristic word, a word equally characteristically eschewed by Vidia).
Shivprasad was aware that Indians at Oxbridge could get books published simply on the basis of interviewing 'big-shots'. Mulk Raj Anand had done so in the Thirties. There is a priceless chapter on Clive Bell's futile attempts to get the fuck away from the pesky Punjabi. One of Naipaul's contemporaries, at Cambridge rather than Oxford, was earning good money interviewing the likes of E.M Forster. Perhaps, Naipaul would have been happier at Cambridge which took pride in having produced Nehru.
What is delightful about the father who lives in these pages, however, is that unlike most ambitious parents, he does not squeeze his son for guilt.
Many, at the time, said India was a 'shame society'. Guilt was for Catholics & Calvinists.
Quite the opposite. He does not envy his son his experiences, or reproach him for them, but instead identifies with them so strongly that he shares them, takes them over.
The boy wasn't writing home to boast about all the prostitutes he had fucked.
It is Pa who is really in Oxford, arranging meetings with prominent people.
He really isn't. Naipaul didn't want to be like Mulk Raj Anand who had written an unreadable book about Untouchables.
Thus, one of the greatest comic elements in Pa’s personality is that he lives vicariously through his son’s experiences while giving plentiful advice about the very experiences he has never had.
This is foolish. Pa had made himself a man of letters in a manner similar to, albeit much smaller in scale, than Jerome K Jerome or Hall Caine. Had he lived, he might have produced something substantial.
‘Don’t be scared of being an artist.
Journalists have to know the price of fish. Artists get paid for any old shite they pull out of their arses.
D.H. Lawrence was an artist through and through,’ he cheers his son on. When Vidia tells him that he has not succeeded in meeting Professor Radhakrishnan,
who returned to India to become vice-president in 1952. But, because he was the Indian Ambassador in Moscow from '49-'52, he was seldom in Oxford.
who taught Eastern Religions at Oxford, Pa
Shivprasad doesn't say 'mention that you work for the Beeb.' Why? I suppose it was because Pa was aware that some Indians felt its coverage of India was biased.
replies with a bustle of recommendations:
I do hope you did succeed in meeting Radhakrishnan again. To get the notice of such men a ‘rebuff’ or two is a cheap price for the privilege of an interview. And it is always the best to be quite frank about your position with such people.
Overseas Indians were of great interest to the Congress party & to Nehru personally who saw them as an anti-Imperialist force. This was what they young Naipaul needed to 'communicate'- more particularly because he was a Hindi speaker. Telugus understood that the cow-belt now ruled the roost. Piss off a young Trinidadian & some Bihari bullock will stand up in Parliament and name & shame you.
You could have said, in order to make conversation: ‘My father has always looked upon you as one of the greatest minds of modern India. He has often said he never understood Hinduism so well as when he read your book, The Heart of Hindustan.’ And you would have broken the ice, as they say.
What does your father do? He is the leading Hindu journalist in Trinidad. Like me, he is a contributor to the BBC Caribbean Service. Oh! Well, in that case, please join me for lunch.
Contacts, Vido, contacts all the time.
Radhakrishnan tells Krishna Menon to give the young Trinidadian some remunerative work at India House. Us Southies need to cultivate the rising generation of Hindi speaking intellectuals.
Let me go on. Suppose you had a fairly good chat with this great scholar, you could have described the experience of the incident to me in a letter – in a long letter, if that was necessary. I’d have delighted in the reading of such a letter, and I’d have kept it with other letters of yours. Write me weekly of the men you meet; tell me what you talked; how they talked.
Daddy could write up the details of such encounters while supplying background information. These could be published. The clippings would be sent back to India by the Consul General. The External Publicity Dept. would take note. Naipaul would have been invited to the London High Commission. Some remunerative work would be found for him.
More importantly, the Indians might invite Shivprasad to tour the country. His knowledge of Trinidadian politics & the fact that Hindi was his mother tongue would mean that he'd very quickly come up to speed. His collected articles could be published as a book. The Americans might employ him in their Embassy on a fat salary.
It is hard to imagine that Pa could seriously be advising his proud, anxious, precocious son to ‘break the ice’ in this absurdly voluble manner.
It was good advise. But Naipaul was right to be cautious. Why meet a dude who is an Ambassador in Moscow? There were still plenty of Intelligence people in Britain who believed in some vast Bolshevik conspiracy. Take that Nehru fellow. His real name is Nathanson. Russian Jew of the worst sort. As for Meyer Goldsmith (that was the real name of the so called 'Mahatma Gandhi') he was a Lesbian anarchist from Odessa.
But Pa is serious, and that is his comedy, and his poignancy.
Really not. Pa gave good advise. The son couldn't be sure de-colonization would proceed in the West Indies- or, if it did, whether the Hindu would be relegated to second class status. Moreover, to establish anti-Imperialist credentials, you would have to produce a great big book like Eric Williams' Capitalism & Slavery.
Nothing in A House for Mr Biswas is quite as fine as this letter. Pa’s advice is hopelessly misguided;
How? It was practical. There's nothing wrong or inherently difficult with meeting a famous man (Robert Graves & Alan Hodges had written about the cult of Radhakrishnan in their history of the inter-war period (the Long Weekend) which was published in 1940.)
but he acts with the busy authority of one who has already been in this situation himself.
No he doesn't. Still, as a journalist, he had been able to get interviews from visiting celebrities.
He burrows his way into that Oxford room, and sets himself up in place of his son.
Frank Moraes would have given similar advise to his son. Why? It was feasible & profitable for an undergrad to interview famous professors. They might complain they hadn't the time for such fripperies but were secretly delighted.
And there is nothing especially oppressive about this, because his identification with his son has such a fantastic quality.
It is familial oikeiosis. Woods has got it into his head that Shivprasad was a coolie cane-cutter. Absurdly, he advised his son at Oxford to interview Merlin the Magician.
It is as if Pa, in dispensing advice so freely and confidently, has already lived, in a previous incarnation, the experiences he so longs to hear about; his son is his avatar.
Which is precisely what the Brhadaranyaka says. As a matter of fact, Naipaul's travelogues have some value only because of his habit of interviewing people on one day and then, after writing down his notes, checking with them again. I suppose Woods thinks there is a hiatus valde deflendus between the journalist and the novelist. This is not the Indian view. Kipling got his start as a journalist. So did Dickens & Defoe & so forth.
And, of course, Pa has really lived these experiences, because he has imagined them so many times.
He had interviewed people and thus made himself an expert on Hindu Trinidad. This enabled him to rise.
There is a nobility in this, a mental triumph. Pa is the victor of systems, because his fantasy is an army, running on a thousand legs.
Where is the fantasy? If you can't get an interview with Radhakrishnan, talk to some of his students. You can still get paid a few guineas for writing about the Oxford don who had become Stalin's pal.
So Pa may be ‘trapped’, but he is also free, because he is most himself when travelling out of himself. His cry to Vidia – ‘This is the time for me to be myself’ – is anguishing.
Because he had a weak ticker. Still, there was a partial 'sampratti'. His son immortalised him as Biswas.
Yet such a man could probably never discover himself, or merge with himself, or ‘find’ himself, as if his singleness were a mislaid object.
This is garbage. Shivprasad made something of himself. He believed he could write a best-seller. He was probably right.
His self is a traffic of identifications and imaginings.
No. It is a karmic agent- i.e. it acts and by its actions accumulates merit and demerit. There were plenty of aristocrats whose lives were but a tissue of 'identifications and imaginings'. Shivprasad rose by his own efforts. So did his son.
He does not know himself because his intelligence is poured not into self-scrutiny but into self-fantasy,
Where? 'Gurudeva' does not contain some Mahatma type of personality who can melt the heart of the miser or gain justice for the widow and the orphan. Shivprasad reads Epictetus- who was born a slave- and Samuel Smiles whose mother ran a small grocery store so as to enable him to complete his studies.
not into self-gathering but into self-dispersing.
No. Shivprasad started off as a Sanatani- he was to train as a priest- but acquired some education & became a sympathiser of the Arya Samaj. He believed that 'Viveka' (concentration) is immortality. 'Vikshepa' (distraction) is death. The centre is the Hṛdguhāyām (हृद्गुहायाम्) secret cave of the heart.
If you know nothing about Hinduism- or harbour hatred for it- Shivprasad's life might well look like 'vikshepa'. Why didn't he become a Presbyterian or a Marxist Trade Union leader or an Algebraic Topologist?
His identity is identification – identification with possibility.
No. His identity is 'Atma' the immortal soul which is falsely identified with the body because of the working of Moh-Maya (Love delusion). This does not mean purushartha or oikeiosis is of no consequence. It just means that both are transcended by Stoic Sage & the Hindu Yogi. But for Shivprasad & his son, 'karma-yoga' (work as worship) rather than mystic contemplation or ritual performance is the path forward.
With great tenderness, Naipaul caught this aspect of his father in A House for Mr Biswas, in which Biswas daydreams while reading the novels of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli,
both of whom had rather humble beginnings.
and tries to use the word ‘bower’ because he found it in Wordsworth (by way of the Royal Reader).
Nothing wrong in that at all. JC Squire (who loved Niradh's 'Autobiography') was a dominant figure in the inter-war period. He liked words like 'bower'. Woods forgets that Shivprasad's first language was Hindi.
The sadness clouding that novel is that
Biswas dies. He doesn't live to see how well his children have done for themselves.
one is always oneself even when one does not know it;
No. If you are suffering from mental illness or amnesia you are literally 'alien' to yourself.
freedom is always qualified, a shout between two murmurs.
No. Freedom is a set of immunities under a vinculum juris. True, one may speak metaphorically of one's freedom to interview Merlin the Magician but that is merely a manner of speaking.
This is literally evidenced by a habit of Pa’s which Vidia fondly recalls in a letter to his ‘darling Ma’. In it, her son reflects on his growing likeness to his father: ‘Perhaps you know Pa’s habit of getting up at 5 or so in the morning, making a row to get everybody else up, and then going back to sleep. Well, I have no one to make a row with, but I get up sometimes at 5, and then go back to sleep too.’
Why is this important? The answer is that Brahmin households retain a memory of performing 'Sandhyavandhanam' at dawn & dusk (niyogis omit the noon ritual). It is fine to pray to Ganapati or do Surya Namaskar instead. What is important is waking early and bathing- even if you go back to sleep.
It is a fitting vision of freedom’s chink,
No. The son is saying 'I have Brahmin genes. True, religion is currently out of favour but I wake before dawn as if by instinct.' One might say this is part of 'sampratti'.
opened and shared with everyone else in the family, whether they want it or not.
Daddy wakes up the kids. He is a noisy fellow. But we love him.
Pa reminds one here not only of Biswas, but of another great fictional fantasist, optimist and father, Sam Pollit in Christina Stead’s The Man who Loved Children, who ‘was always anxious for morning’.
Biswas wasn't anxious for the morning. His work was hard. His health was poor. Unlike Pollit, he succeeded in saving a bit of money and buying a house and a car. His kids did very well. So did his wife who had an entrepreneurial streak.
Pa is a seething optimist,
if your kids get scholarships, you too will be optimistic.
and he practises a corrective kind of vicariousness, in which he tells his somewhat depressive son to maintain postures and emotions that he himself has never mastered.
He had mastered them. They guy hadn't turned into an alcoholic.
‘Do not allow depression to have too much of a hold on you.
The first chapter of the Bhagvad Gita is titled 'Vishad-yoga'. But it applies to agents, not principals. VS would be a principal- i.e. be a self-employed writer. The vishad (abulia or depression) of the principal (e.g. Yuddhishtra) is overcome by learning statistical game theory (Nalopkhyanam) & the honeyed wisdom of the Butcher (Vyadha Gita). Admittedly, this sort of stuff would have been beyond the Naipaul's ken. Sadly, it also appears to be beyond the ken of Brahmin Game Theorists holding Ivy league Professorial chairs. The truth is, Hindus cherish stupidity as the summum bonum.
If this mood visits you at times regard it as a passing phase and never give way to it.’
Since the nature of Vishad is 'Vikshepa' or distraction, mutability, etc, it is bound to pass. Hinduism is a happy religion.
Pa himself was clearly given to depression and anxiety, like his son. But for a father writing to a son, there are always two chins to keep up: he consoles Vidia in July 1952, when he learns that Vidia’s novel has been rejected.
Not necessarily a bad thing. Shivprasad probably knew that GV Desani's 'H.Hatter' had been a flash in the pan.
‘People like us are like corks thrown on water: we may go down momentarily; but we simply must pop up again.’
Creative people are going to have their ups and downs precisely because they don't follow the usual formula for success.
And he urges Vidia to do what he himself lacks time or discipline to do, which is to keep writing. Alluding to the author of numerous how-to-write books (one can imagine Vidia’s youthful shudders),
One can imagine a Public School educated Oxbridge undergrad shuddering in this manner. But Vidia was from Port of Spain. He was aware of the enormous American market. Creative writing was taught by professionals at leading American Universities.
he implores: ‘Do you recollect what Cecil Hunt has said on the importance of note-taking? – of jotting down your impressions of people and things (and I’d add of capturing a mood)? It would be a God-send to you if you adopted this as a habit.’
Naipaul did do so to very good effect. I recall meeting a South Indian Archaeology PhD student at SOAS. I'd just read 'million mutinies' and within a few minutes of talking to her I said 'I think your father is mentioned by Naipaul. There is a very moving description of the struggles he had to overcome to attain such eminence'. She was surprised. She read the passage and found things there which her very successful father had never mentioned. This is where Naipaul 'adds value'. He may be a stupid bigot but he was a scrupulous enough note-taker.
The son who caught these balloons of aspiration and advice in Oxford seems at first unrelated to his emotionally ragged Pa.
Pa had risen. He had published a readable book. Sonny boy might end up teaching Beowulf while his first story collection gets remaindered.
He tends to hoard himself where his father spreads himself. While his father is animally generous to all,
Why 'animally'? Shivprasad lived in a society where being open handed was considered a virtue. People help a man of that sort.
Vidia can be royally haughty to others. ‘I met Ruth,’ he writes in September 1950. ‘She gave me a very unpleasant afternoon. I think she is a stupid, self-pitying shrew. A most detestable woman.’
When you are 18, you want women to either feed or fuck you. As you age, your appetite wanes. You are willing to be charitable even to the unfair sex.
While Pa is uncertain, burying his fragility in a muff of warm advice,
He is frank enough about the family's fragile finances. The war-time boom had ended. The Yankees had gone home and taken their dollars with them.
Vidia seems adamantine, extraordinarily confident and penetrating for his years.
An 18 year old whose poems has been broadcast by the BBC has every reason to be confident.
While his father is lavish with banality, Vidia’s letters are defined by the thrift of their omissions. One has a sense of a young man reserving the self for his work, and sharing only his dilutions with his family. (Naipaul wrote several novels while at Oxford.)
More to the point, he was getting paid for stories broadcast by 'Caribbean Voices'.
But Vidia does reveal himself in time, and the reader is able to discern an anxiety and pride that seem reminiscent of his father’s.
I think the 'Windrush' generation needed to let the folks back home know that 'the mother country' wasn't at all keen on darkies. Naipaul felt he had been placed inside a ghetto within a ghetto- Hindu Trinidad as the most backward part of an island with a vibrant Creole/Calypso culture which was connected to Harlem & Ghana & Pan Africanism.
Gillon Aitken’s skilful editing and placing of these letters allow us to trace a journey from the rim of things to the uncomfortable centre. Vidia set out from Trinidad in August 1950, by way of New York. ‘For the first time in my life people are calling me sir at every min.,’ he reports to his family. ‘It quite took my breath away. I was free and I was honoured.’ This young man already has an incipient aristocratic liberty of mind, while his father has laboured all his life for his small supplement of liberty.
Sheer nonsense! His father had a wider literary culture because he was a Hindi speaker & knew the Itihasas & Upanishads & so forth. But he was also self-educated in English literature & was a good enough writer to have his material broadcast by the Beeb in London.
The difference derives in part from the fact that Vidia, unlike his father, is able to feel free on so little freedom.
Undergrads are in statu pupillari. They have less freedom than those of their peers who gained paid employment in journalism.
The passing respect of a black porter suffices, because such gestures are essential to Vidia’s sense of life, but not to his sense of self.
Did Vidia really think life was about African Americans having to abase themselves before the White majority?
Pa’s political metabolism is, by comparison, inefficient; his sense of freedom too clumsy and massive to be nourishing.
No. Trinidad had its first election in 1925. Shivprasad's 'emic' understanding of the rural Hindus is what enabled him to rise as a journalist. What he didn't know about Trinidad politics wasn't worth knowing. His ire was aroused by Teelucksingh who, though an Anglican, appointed himself head of a rival Sanatan Dharm Association to the one headed by his brother-in-law. Because Teelucksingh had his own newspaper, he could keep getting elected till universal suffrage was introduced. Shivprasad maintained his independence of his wife's family by being a bit Arya Samaji. This was popular enough because the Arya Samaj was doing shuddhi for Christian converts in the mid-Thirties.
Naipaul liked Mrs. Thatcher but wasn't really political. Nothing wrong in that. He was an artist after all.
There are too many wants to please. Vidia’s wants are superbly narrow: he wants to be respectfully left alone, so that he can concentrate his self-originated freedom, and convert it into fiction.
Woods thinks being an undergrad is 'self-originated freedom' rather than a forcible neoteny or infantilization.
In other words, Vidia is a much more efficient fantasist than his father, which is one definition of a novelist as opposed to a daydreamer.
Where is the fantasy? As far as I can see, he tried to stick with verisimilitude. A widow decides to go into the grocery business. She buys a couple hundred pounds of potatoes but at the wrong price. They go bad. She loses her money. This may be bleak, but it isn't a fantasy. Some people have business in their blood. Others don't.
In July 1951, after he has been a year at Oxford, Vidia asks his father not to send money, because the discipline, you know, of not having anyone but yourself to depend on is quite good, especially for a man like me.
Vidia could earn more by getting more published. But would the Brits allow him out of his ghetto?
I discover in myself all types of aristocratic traits, without, you know too well, the means to keep them alive. Whenever I go into a new town, I go into the best hotel, just to feel comfortable, sit in the lounge, read all the newspapers ... and drink coffee. I like comfort.
This is good. The boy is acquiring polish.
And whereas in Trinidad, I was tremendously shy of going even into a Civil Service Office, now I go everywhere, firmly believing that I have as much right to be there as anybody else. That is the one good thing Oxford has done for me.
That's what Daddy wants to hear.
He needed only a year at Oxford to set himself up.
Vidia’s descriptions are always precise, concrete, often evocative. In December 1950, he sees his first snow, and writing home, says: ‘The closest thing I have seen to it in Trinidad is the stuff that gathers in a refrigerator.’
A poet would have mentioned the White Poui tree which sheds its flowers to create a soft white carpet.
Naipaul is always relevant.
Prosaic.
T.S. Eliot refers to the necessity of ‘relevant intensity’ in good style. Pa, of course, has the trick of irrelevant intensity down to a tee.
Most days in Trinidad were slow news days. Irrelevant intensity was a work skill.
He has a reverence for useless details, which hang off his letters like sloths. He thus has the mind of a writer – a willingness to take pains with detail – but the eye of a solipsist: he sees only what is relevant to himself. He is always itemising costs, especially those involving the car (‘Battery is giving way after 18 months’ use and I need a tyre and tube,’ he writes to his son).
A family's first car is petted and prized. Every little detail about it is enthralling.
He tells Vidia that he has recently lost his glasses ‘at Forest Reserve oilfield, and replacing them has meant $34’.
Kids need to know the price of glasses. Otherwise, they get married & start having kids who will grow up cross-eyed coz Daddy couldn't afford to buy them spectacles.
When Vidia sends him a copy of Isis with one of his pieces in it, Pa praises him, but quickly gets absorbed in questions of subediting: ‘the by-line to the article “Literary Schizophrenia” might have given the page a better appearance if it had been placed, say, midway into the middle column – and boxed.’
That's useful. Maybe if Naipaul mentions it, he will be given charge of lay-out. That's a recommendation to Fleet Street where the big money is made.
Pa is helplessly theatrical, but Vidia learns to perform at Oxford, to act a part.
that of a student of Eng Lit whose work is getting broadcast on the Beeb.
Again, one has the impression of a true self, a writing self, kept in the wings. About a social occasion, Vidia writes: ‘I performed (that’s the way I usually do things) no blunders.’ His letters are streaked with anxiety and pride, but one has to search for the stains of vulnerability.
They were obvious enough. Oxford was where rich men sent their sons. Shivprasad wasn't rich. But Naipaul wasn't treated as a sizar or non-Collegiate student. Who knows? He might be a future Prime Minister of Trinidad or else some grey eminence at the UN.
In his first few weeks, he writes: ‘The people here accept me.’ But the ghost of a rather harder assimilation appears four months later, in a letter to his sister, Kamla: ‘my English pronunciation is improving by the humiliating process of error and snigger.’
Nothing wrong with that at all. English wasn't his mother tongue.
When the dean of his college generalises about ‘Indians’, Naipaul tells his father: ‘I took this all in good humour.’
Because the Brits had lost India. Also, Nehru had fucked Edwina. The Indian Majlis at Cambridge put on a pageant to celebrate this accomplishment.
Vacations were often difficult for Naipaul. He was very poor (‘literally penniless ... the man at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford bought me regular teas’), and very lonely. One can only scrape the crust of desolation that is hinted at in this sentence: ‘I spent Christmas Day at my boarding house. There was a little party given by the housekeeper. Terribly dull.’
Rationing in England only ended in July of 1954. Still, it is odd that no College chum invited him home for Xmas. Perhaps, if he had been Christian, suitable provision would have been made.
Both father and son, then, were keeping brave faces, but Vidia was under the greater pressure, because while Pa believed in his own optimism, Vidia did not.
Vidia's worry was whether he could break out of the Caribbean Voices ghetto. Shivprasad was happy he had gotten into it.
Pa’s brave face was a face; Vidia’s was a mask, and a desperately important one.
Not really. He needed to find something bleak and frozen in the musical comedy which was sunny Trinidad's social life.
At times, the young Naipaul can seem hard on his less educated family, but that is because he has been so hard on himself.
No. It was his job to correct their solecisms. Joint families pool information. There is no question of anybody's nose being put out of joint because English was not their mother tongue.
When a cousin writes to him as ‘Mr Vido Naipaul, Oxford University, London, England’, Naipaul sounds a tone that is familiar to his later readers: ‘It is very flattering to be addressed Mr Naipaul, Oxford University, and have letters reach you. But think of the colossal ignorance.’
There's an Oxford Street in London. Surely the famous University is squeezed in between Debenhams & Marks & Spencer? I recall buying myself a PhD in Socioproctology from Oxford Street in the mid-Eighties.
The arc of his development and escape from Trinidad,
the fucker got a scholarship. He did not stow away on a banana boat.
so fought for, will not become the casual doorway of some idle relative.
Unless they too get scholarships.
If his father’s watchword is the heuristic ‘Contacts, Vido, contacts,’ Vidia’s is the militant ‘Vigilance, Vido, vigilance.’
Be vigilant in making the right contacts. Avoid time-wasters.
His confidence, and what can seem like arrogance, are no more than the units of his desperation, as a letter sent at the end of his first term artlessly reveals. Reviewing some of the essays he has written during the term, he tells his father that ‘they do read quite well.’ But then he adds: ‘I want to come top of my group. I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language.’
Wanting to beat English people at English is, for Woods, a 'unit of desperation' for people who aren't English.
Still, Naipaul’s letters are by no means all carapace and control. His family, and especially his abundant father, provoke his warmth. When Pa develops a passion for growing orchids,
that might make money.
Vidia smiles: ‘Well, it is mad, perhaps, but I like it,’ he writes in September 1951. ‘I approve, if my approval helps at all, that is!’ His family had been sending him food parcels, and had been hiding contraband cigarettes in tins of sugar: ‘What amateur and immature Customs-dodgers you are, my dear people ... there were these incriminating cigarette packets sitting so obviously, so loudly begging to be sent, that I am surprised that you have not been rounded up for questioning.’
We often forget how poor post-War England was.
And when Naipaul is lonely, he softens into homesickness: ‘I feel nostalgia for home. Do you know what I long for? I long for the nights that fall blackly, suddenly, without warning. I long for a violent shower of rain at night. I long to hear the tinny tattoo of heavy raindrops on a roof, or the drops of rain on the broad leaves of that wonderful plant, the wild tannia.’ At such moments, the son is quite the equal in charm of his father.
Not for Hindus. At such moments both are boring shitheads. The type of night that falls 'blackly' is moonless (Amavasya) and inauspicious. No new work should be undertaken at such times. To long for Amavasya Ratri is to wish for stasis.
Incidentally Britain doesn't lack for 'violent showers of rain' by day or night. On the other hand, the wild tannia is indeed wonderful. In Ayurveda it is used to cure constipation. There are times when what you long to hear is turds plopping into the toilet bowl. It is very charming to delicately allude to this consummation devoutly to be wished. It was a frequent theme in the sonnets I wrote for her late Royal Majesty, the Queen-Gor-bless-'er.
Over the Christmas vacation of 1951-52, Naipaul, again lonely and homesick, suffered some sort of nervous collapse.
i.e. he had been working very hard. It's what parents want to hear.
In response, family knots are tightened, and letters become warmer than ever. Pa worries about Vidia’s depressions, and responds characteristically: ‘I’m sending you by sea mail the book You and Your Nerves. I think it will help you resolve a good many of your worries. Most of the things over which we worry are really no true cause of worry at all.’
Premature ejaculation? You will get over it.
But there were true family worries surfacing. Vidia had mentioned his English girlfriend and was making it clear that he could not live in Trinidad. ‘I don’t want to break your heart,’ he writes to his father in September 1952, ‘but I hope I never come back to Trinidad, not to live, that is, though I certainly want to see you and everybody else as often as I can. But Trinidad, as you know, has nothing to offer me.’
If the eldest son returns, the family's finances will improve more particularly if he eats his dinners and qualifies as a barrister.
Then in February 1953, Pa collapsed from a heart attack. Vidia’s elder sister, Kamla, writes to Vidia that the reason for the illness is that Pa has been worrying about her and Vidia: a vicarious heart attack.
No but Hindu families make out that this is so more particularly if there is a danger that a son or daughter will marry out of caste.
She adds that ‘Pa’s greatest worry is that he cannot get his stories published ... Now will you, in the name of Pa’s life, see immediately to his short stories and write him a nice, cheering letter.’
Elder sisters are like that only.
Naipaul’s letter to his father is heartbreaking, so exemplary are its tenderness and concern, and yet so poignant the sense it imparts of the son holding the damaged egg of his father’s soul in his all-powerful hands:
The father's soul is Atma. It is identical with Paramatma- i.e. God. The ego may be damaged. But the Hiranyabarbha is the golden egg from which everything proceeds. Hiranyagarbhah samavartatagre Bhutasya jatah patireka asit. Perhaps, if Naipaul had been able to return to Trinidad in time for his father's funeral, the Pundits would have consoled him by giving him this mantra. The work of mourning could have been properly performed. Sampratti would have been complete.
‘You should not have thought I was uninterested in your writing,’ says Vidia to his father. ‘You ought to know that I am perhaps more keen on your work than anyone else is. And, furthermore, as I have often told you, you have the necessary talent ... Please have courage and try to trust me.’
This was neither here nor there. Still, Dad gets the message. Aubrey Menon & G.V Desani & Niradh Chaudhuri had been able to get published after they had achieved a degree of fame as broadcasters. But they were Indian and India is an important country. Shivprasad had some of his work read out on the West Indies service but it wasn't enough. 'Contacts' wouldn't have made a difference. Nobody greatly cared about a small Caribbean island.
Pa was severely weakened by his attack. He was let go from the newspaper at the end of July 1953. Much of his old buoyancy had absconded. The rush and rattle of his language, the fine hazard of his paternity, the quick sorties of his emotions – all this faded away. He was no longer the man who had once included at the end of a letter to Vidia, this jumble of passions: ‘Next week I might have the outside of the house painted. We never forget you for a day.’
You can't see the house but we want you to think of it as spic and span.
Depleted though he was, however, Pa had not lost his talent for Pyrrhic persistence. In June 1953, he urged Vidia to sell his father’s stories in London, and added: ‘If my own matter is not enough to make a normal-size book, what about adding your own stories? The by-line would thus be – By Seepersad and Vidia Naipaul. I don’t know. It’s up to you.’
This was feasible. Naipaul was in England. He had promise. Something could be done with the 'Fathers & Sons' angle. Turgenev in the Tropics. Karly Marx vs Kali Ma.
Seepersad lived to hear Vidia read one of his father’s stories on the radio,
a strange sort of sampritti! Akashvani- the voice from the sky- is also upashruti or, in Hebrew, 'bat kol'. Is it inauspicious? Not necessarily. Upashruti can triumph over even the King of the Gods! Death is a different matter.
in July. He died in October 1953, and his son sent this telegram home: ‘He Was the Best Man I Knew Stop Everything I Owe to Him Be Brave My Loves Trust Me – Vido.’
This may not have been true but Naipaul made it true. Verum ipsum factum. What is true is what we make. What was not made was a proper 'sampritti' handing over from father to son. Fame was achieved but there was no transcendence of what is but name & form.
