Stet

by Diana Athill

  The book was admired in England and disliked in Trinidad, but it was not addressed to the white audience in order to please it. Its whole point was to show that Caribbean societies are a mess because they were callously created by white men for the white men’s own ends, only to be callously administered and finally callously abandoned. Vidia was trying to write from a point of view above that of white or brown or black; he was trying to look at the people now inhabiting the West Indies with a clear-sighted and impartial intelligence, and to describe what he saw honestly, even if honesty seemed brutal. This he felt, and said, had to be done because a damaged society shuffling along with the help of fantasies and excuses can only become more sick: what it has to do is learn to know itself, and only its writers can teach it that. Caribbean writers had so far, he claimed, failed to do more than plead their own causes. If he expected Trinidadians to welcome this high-minded message he was naive – but I don’t suppose he did. He was pursuing his own understanding of the place, and offering it, because that is what a serious writer can’t help doing. If anyone resented it, too bad.

  Of course they did resent it – who doesn’t resent hearing disagreeable truths told in a manner verging on the arrogant? But I think the label ‘racist’ which they stuck on him was, so to speak, only a local one. I saw him as a man raised in, and frightened by, a somewhat disorderly, inefficient and self-deceiving society, who therefore longed for order, clarity and competence. Having concluded that the lack of these qualities in the place where he was born came from the people’s lack of roots, he over-valued a sense of history and respect for tradition, choosing to romanticize their results rather than to see the complex and far from admirable scenes with which they often co-exist. (His first visit to India, described in An Area of Darkness, left him in a state of distress because it showed him that an ancient civilization in which he had dared to hope that he would find the belonging he hungered for could be just as disorderly and inefficient as the place where he was born.) Although both England and the United States were each in its own way going to fall short of his ideal society, Europe as a whole came more close, more often, to offering a life in which he could feel comfortable. I remember driving, years ago, through a vine-growing region of France and coming on a delightful example of an ancient expertise taking pleasure in itself: a particularly well cultivated vineyard which had a pillar rose – a deep pink pillar rose – planted as an exquisite punctuation at the end of every row. Instantly – although it was weeks since I had seen or thought of him – he popped into my head: ‘How Vidia would like that!’

  But although I cannot see Vidia as racist in the sense of wanting to be white or to propitiate whites, I do think it is impossible to spend the first eighteen years of your life in a given set of circumstances without being shaped by them: and Vidia spent the first eighteen years of his life as a Trinidadian Indian*. Passionate though his determination to escape the limitations imposed by this fate was, and near though it came to achieving the impossible, it could not wholly free him from his conditioning.

  In Chapter One of The Middle Passage, when he has only just boarded the boat-train which will take him to Southampton, there begins the following description. Into the corridor, out of the compartment next to Vidia’s, had stepped ‘a very tall and ill-made Negro. The disproportionate length of his thighs was revealed by his baggy trousers. His shoulders were broad and so unnaturally square that they seemed hunched and gave him an appearance of fragility. His light grey jacket was as long and loose as a short topcoat; his yellow shirt was dirty and the frayed collar undone; his tie was slack and askew. He went to the window, opened the ventilation gap, pushed his face through, turned slightly to his left, and spat. His face was grotesque. It seemed to have been smashed in from one cheek. One eye had narrowed; the thick lips had bunched into a circular swollen protuberance; the enormous nose was twisted. When, slowly, he opened his mouth to spit, his face became even more distorted. He spat in slow, intermittent dribbles.’

  Vidia makes a slight attempt to give this man a role in the story of his journey by saying that he began to imagine that the poor creature was aware of him in a malign way, that at one moment their eyes met, that in the buffet car there he was again . . . but in fact once he has been described the man has no part to play, he is done with; in spite of which Vidia could not resist placing him right at the start of the book and describing him in greater physical detail than anyone else in all its 232 pages. I am not saying that this man was invented or that he may have been less dreadfully unattractive than we are told he was; but by choosing to pick him out and to fix on him, Vidia has given an indelible impression less of the man than of his own reaction: the dismayed recoil of a fastidious Trinidadian Indian from what he sees as an inferior kind of person. And I believe that if I were black I should from time to time, throughout his work, pick up other traces of this flinching presence hidden in the shadow behind one of the best English-language novelists we have. And even as part of the white audience I cannot help noticing the occasional touch of self-importance (increasing with the years) which I suspect to have its roots far back in the Trinidadian Indian’s nervous defiance of disrespect.

  Vidia’s mother, handsome and benignly matronly, welcomed his publishers very kindly when they visited Trinidad, and gave the impression of being the beloved linchpin of her family. When I first met them, long before they had been stricken by the close-together deaths of one of the daughters and of Shiva, Vidia’s younger and only brother, they impressed me as a flourishing lot: good-looking, intelligent, charming, successful. A married daughter told me that Mrs Naipaul ‘divides her time between the Temple and the quarry’ – the latter being a business belonging to her side of the family, in which she was a partner. That she was not simply a comfortable mother-figure became apparent when she told me that she had just got home from attending a seminar on welding and was very glad that she hadn’t missed it because she had learnt enough at it to be able to cut the number of welders they employed at the quarry by half. Soon afterwards she threw more light on her own character by making a little speech to me, after noticing my surprise when she had appeared to be indifferent to some news about Vidia. She had been, she said, a well-brought-up Hindu girl of her generation, so she had been given no education and was expected to obey her parents in everything, and that was what she did. Then she was married (‘And there was no nonsense about falling in love in those days’), whereupon it was her husband she had to obey in everything, and that was what she did. Then she had her children, so of course it was her job to devote herself entirely to them and bring them up as well as possible, and that was what she did (‘and I think I can say I made a good job of it’). ‘But then I said to myself, when I am fifty – FINISH. I will begin to live for myself. And that is what I am doing now and they must get on with their own lives.’

  It was an impressive little thumbnail autobiography, but it left questions in my mind. I had, after all, read A House for Mr Biswas, the novel Vidia had based on his father’s life, and had gained a vivid picture of how humiliated Mr Biswas had been after his marriage into the much richer and more influential Tulsi family – although I don’t think I knew at that stage that Seepersad Naipaul, Vidia’s father, had once had a mental breakdown and had vanished from his home for months. Clearly this attractive and – I was now beginning to think – slightly formidable woman was greatly over-simplifying her story, but I liked her; as I told Vidia when, soon after this, he asked me if I did. ‘Yes, very much,’ I said; to which he replied: ‘Everyone seems to. I hate her.’

  I wish I had asked him what he meant by that. It was not the first time that I heard him, in a fit of irritation, strike out at someone with a fierce word, so I didn’t think it was necessarily true (and anyway, dislike of a mother usually indicates damaged love). But uncertain though I remained about his feelings towards his mother, I knew that he loved his father, who had died soon after Vidia left Trinidad to come to Oxford. He wrote a moving introduction
to the little volume of his father’s stories which he gave us to publish in 1976, and he spoke about the way his father had introduced him to books. Seepersad Naipaul had possessed a remarkably strong and true instinct for writing which had overcome his circumstances to the point of giving him a passion for such English classics as had come his way, and steering him into a writing job on the local newspaper. He had passed his passion on by reading aloud to Vidia and Kamla, the sister nearest to him, making the children stand up as he read to keep them from falling asleep – which seems to have impressed the importance of the ritual on them rather than to have put them off. Seepersad’s own few stories were about Trinidadian village life, and the most important lesson he gave his son was ‘Write about what you know’, thus curing him of the young colonial’s feeling that ‘literature’ had to be exotic – something belonging to the faraway world out of which came the books he found in the library. And I know of another piece of advice Seepersad gave his son which speaks for the truth of his instinct. Vidia had shown him a piece of would-be comic writing, and he told him not to strive for comedy but to let it arise naturally out of the story. It is sad to think of this man hobbled by the circumstances of his life (see A House for Mr Biswas) and dying before he could see his son break free. The mother was part of the ‘circumstances’ and the child sided with his father against her, of that I feel sure.

  I cannot remember how long it was – certainly several months, perhaps even a year – before I learnt that Vidia was married. ‘I have found a new flat’, he would say; ‘I saw such-and-such a film last week’; ‘My landlady says’: not once had he used the words ‘we’ or ‘our’. I had taken it for granted that he lived in industrious loneliness, which had seemed sad. So when at a party I glimpsed him at the far end of a room with a young woman – an inconspicuously, even mousily pretty young woman – and soon afterwards saw him leaving with her, I was pleased that he had found a girlfriend. The next time he came to the office I asked who she was – and was astounded when he answered, in a rather cross voice, ‘My wife, of course.’

  After that Pat was allowed to creep out of the shadows, but only a little: and one day she said something that shocked me so much that I know for certain that I am remembering it word-for-word. I must have remarked on our not meeting earlier, and she replied: ‘Vidia doesn’t like me to come to parties because I’m such a bore.’

  From that moment on, whenever I needed to cheer myself up by counting my blessings, I used to tell myself ‘At least I’m not married to Vidia’.

  It did not exactly turn me against him, I suppose because from the beginning I had thought of him as an interesting person to watch rather than as a friend. The flow of interest between us had always been one-way – I can’t remember ever telling him anything about my own affairs, or wanting to – so this odd business of his marriage was something extra to watch rather than something repellent. Had he ever loved her – or did he still love her in some twisted way? They had married while he was at Oxford: had he done it out of loneliness, to enlarge the minuscule territory he could call his own now that he was out in the world? Or was it because she could keep him? She was working as a teacher and continued to do so well into their marriage. Or was it to shelter him from other women? He had once asked a man of my acquaintance: ‘Do you know any fast women?’, which my friend found funny (particularly as he was gay) but which seemed touching to me. As did Vidia’s only attempt to make a pass at me. Pat was away and I had asked him to supper. Without warning he got to his feet, came across the room and tried to kiss me as I was coming through the door carrying a tray loaded with glasses. It hardly seemed necessary to put into words the rebuff which most of him was clearly anxious for, but to be on the safe side I did. Our friendship, I said gently, was too valuable to complicate in any way – and his face brightened with relief. That someone so lacking in sexual experience and so puritanical should have to resort to prostitutes (as he told The New Yorker in 1994, and as a passage in The Mimic Men suggests) is natural; though I guess he did so infrequently, and with distaste.

  The little I saw of Vidia and Pat together was depressing: there was no sign of their enjoying each other, and the one whole weekend I spent with them they bickered ceaselessly, Pat’s tetchiness as sharp as his (developed as a defence, I thought). When he was abroad she was scrupulously careful of his interests; she did research for him; sometimes he referred to showing her work in progress: he trusted her completely, and with reason, because he was evidently her raison d’être. And she made it unthinkable to speak critically of him in her presence. But always her talk was full of how tiresome it was for him that she was sick in aeroplanes, or fainted in crowds, or couldn’t eat curries . . . and when I tried to introduce a subject other than him that would interest us both, such as West Indian politics or her work as a teacher, she never failed to run us aground yet again on some reference to her own inadequacy. At first I took it for granted that he had shattered her self-confidence, and I am still sure he did it no good. But later I suspected that there had always been something in her which accepted – perhaps even welcomed – being squashed.

  In A Way in the World, writing (as usual) as though he were a single man, Vidia described himself as ‘incomplete’ in ‘physical attractiveness, love, sexual fulfilment’. How terrible for a wife to be publicly wiped out in this way! Everyone who knew the Naipauls said how sorry they were for Pat, and I was sorry for her, too. But whatever Vidia’s reason for marrying, he cannot have foreseen what their marriage, for whatever reason, was going to be like. He, too, probably deserved commiseration.

  When his Argentinian friend Margaret first came to London he brought her to lunch with me. She was a lively, elegant woman who, though English by descent, was ‘feminine’ in the Latin-American style, sexy and teasing, with the appearance of having got him just where she wanted him. And he glowed with pride and pleasure. Afterwards he said he was thinking of leaving Pat, and when I was dismayed (could she exist without him?) said that the thought of giving up ‘carnal pleasure’ just when he’d discovered it was too painful to bear. Why not stay married and have an affair, I asked; which he appeared to think an unseemly suggestion, although it was what he then did for many years. What happened later I don’t know, but in the early years of their relationship there was no sign of his squashing Margaret. He did, however, make one disconcerting remark. Did I not find it interesting, he asked, that there was so much cruelty in sex?

  *

  What began to wear me down in my dealings with Vidia (it was a long time before I allowed myself to acknowledge it) was his depression.

  With every one of his books – and we published eighteen of them – there was a three-part pattern. First came a long period of peace while he was writing, during which we saw little of him and I would often have liked to see more, because I would be full of curiosity about the new book. Then, when it was delivered, there would be a short burst of euphoria during which we would have enjoyable meetings and my role would be to appreciate the work, to write the blurb, to hit on a jacket that pleased both him and us, and to see that the script was free of typist’s errors (he was such a perfectionist that no editing, properly speaking, was necessary). Then came part three: post-publication gloom, during which his voice on the telephone would make my heart sink – just a little during the first few years, deeper and deeper with the passing of time. His voice became charged with tragedy, his face became haggard, his theme became the atrocious exhaustion and damage (the word damage always occurred) this book had inflicted on him, and all to what end? Reviewers were ignorant monkeys, publishers (this would be implied in a sinister fashion rather than said) were lazy and useless: what was the point of it all? Why did he go on?

  It is natural that a writer who knows himself to be good and who is regularly confirmed in that opinion by critical comment should expect to become a best-seller, but every publisher knows that you don’t necessarily become a best-seller by writing well. Of course you don’t necessaril
y have to write badly to do it: it is true that some best-selling books are written astonishingly badly, and equally true that some are written very well. The quality of the writing – even the quality of the thinking – is irrelevant. It is a matter of whether or not a nerve is hit in the wider reading public as opposed to the serious one which is composed of people who are interested in writing as an art. Vidia has sold well in the latter, and has pushed a good way beyond its fringes by becoming famous – at a certain point many people in the wider reading public start to feel that they ought to read a writer – but it was always obvious that he was not going to make big money. An old friend of mine who reads a great deal once said to me apologetically: ‘I’m sure he’s very good, but I don’t feel he’s for me’ – and she spoke for a large number of reading people.

  Partly this is because of his subject matter, which is broadly speaking the consequences of imperialism: people whose countries once ruled empires relish that subject only if it is flavoured, however subtly, with nostalgia. Partly it is because he is not interested in writing about women, and when he does so usually does it with dislike: more women than men read novels. And partly it is because of his temperament. Once, when he was particularly low, we talked about surviving the horribleness of life and I said that I did it by relying on simple pleasures such as the taste of fruit, the delicious sensations of a hot bath or clean sheets, the way flowers tremble very slightly with life, the lilt of a bird’s flight: if I were stripped of those pleasures . . . better not to imagine it! He asked if I could really depend on them and I said yes. I have a clear memory of the sad, puzzled voice in which he replied: ‘You’re very lucky, I can’t.’ And his books, especially his novels (after the humour which filled the first three drained away) are coloured – or perhaps I should say ‘discoloured’ – by this lack of what used to be called animal spirits. They impress, but they do not charm.