by Diana Athill
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 m
onkeys, 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 necessarily have to write badly to do it: it is true that some bestselling 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.
He was, therefore, displeased with the results of publication, which filled him always with despair, sometimes with anger as well. Once he descended on me like a thunderbolt to announce that he had just been into Foyles of Charing Cross Road and they didn’t have a single copy of his latest book, published only two weeks earlier, in stock: not one! Reason told me this was impossible, but I have a lurking tendency to accept guilt if faced with accusation, and this tendency went into spasm: suppose the sales department really had made some unthinkable blunder? Well, if they had I was not going to face the ensuing mayhem single-handed, so I said: ‘We must go and tell André at once.’ Which we did; and André Deutsch said calmly: ‘What nonsense, Vidia – come on, we’ll go to Foyles straight away and I’ll show you.’ So all three of us stumped down the street to Foyles, only two minutes away, Vidia still thunderous, I twittering with nerves, André serene. Once we were in the shop he cornered the manager and explained: ‘Mr Naipaul couldn’t find his book: will you please show him where it is displayed.’ – ‘Certainly, Mr Deutsch’: and there it was, two piles of six copies each, on the table for ‘Recent Publications’. André said afterwards that Vidia looked even more thunderous at being done out of his grievance, but if he did I was too dizzy with relief to notice.
Vidia’s anxiety and despair were real: you need only compare a photograph of his face in his twenties with one taken in his forties to see how it has been shaped by pain. It was my job to listen to his unhappiness and do what I could to ease it – which would not have been too bad if there had been anything I could do. But there was not: and exposure to someone else’s depression is draining, even if only for an hour or so at a time and not very often. I felt genuinely sorry for him, but the routine was repeated so often … The truth is that as the years went by, during these post-publication glooms I had increasingly to force myself into feeling genuinely sorry for him, in order to endure him.
Self-brainwashing sometimes has to be a part of an editor’s job. You are no use to the writers on your list if you cannot bring imaginative sympathy to working with them, and if you cease to be of use to them you cease to be of use to your firm. Imaginative sympathy cannot issue from a cold heart so you have to like your writers. Usually this is easy; but occasionally it happens that in spite of admiring someone’s work you are – or gradually become – unable to like the person.
I thought so highly of Vidia’s writing and felt his presence on our list to be so important that I simply could not allow myself not to like him. I was helped by a foundation of affection laid down during the early days of knowing him, and I was able to believe that his depressions hurt him far more than they hurt me – that he could not prevent them – that I ought to be better at bearing them than I was. And as I became more aware of other things that grated – his attitude to Pat and to his brother Shiva (whom he bullied like an enraged mother hen in charge of a particularly feckless chick) – I called upon a tactic often employed in families: Aunt Emily may have infuriating mannerisms or disconcerting habits, but they are forgiven, even enjoyed, because they are so typically her. The offending person is put into the position of a fictional, almost a cartoon, character, whose quirks can be laughed or marvelled at as though they existed only on a page. For quite a long time seeing him as a perpetrator of ‘Vidia-isms’ worked rather well.
In 1975 we received the thirteenth of his books – his eighth work of fiction – Guerrillas. For the first time I was slightly apprehensive because he had spoken to me about the experience of writing it in an unprecedented way: usually he kept the process private, but this time he said that it was extraordinary, something that had never happened before: it was as though the book had been given to him. Such a feeling about writing does not necessarily bode well. And as it turned out, I could not like the book.
It was about a Trinidad-like island sliding into a state of decadence, and there was a tinge of hysteria in the picture’s dreadfulness, powerfully imagined though it was. A central part of the story came from something that had recently happened in Trinidad: the murder of an Englishwoman called Gail Benson who had changed her name to Halé Kimga, by a Trinidadian who called himself Michael X and who had set up a so-called ‘commune’. Gail had been brought to Trinidad by her lover, a black American known as Hakim Jamal (she had changed her name at his bidding). Both of the men hovered between being mad and being con-men, and their linking-up had been Gail’s undoing. I knew all three, Gail and Hakim well, Michael very slightly: indeed, I had written a book about them (which I had put away – it would be published sixteen years later) called Make Believe.
This disturbed my focus on large parts of Guerrillas. The people in the book were not meant to be portraits of those I had known (Vidia had met none of them). They were characters created by Vidia to express his view of post-colonial history in places like Trinidad. But the situation in the novel was so close to the situation in life that I often found it hard to repress the reaction ‘But that’s not true!’ This did not apply to the novel’s Michael X character, who was called Jimmy Ahmed: Jimmy and the half-squalid half-pathetic ruins of his ‘commune’ are a brilliant and wholly convincing creation. Nor did it apply to Roche, Vidia’s substitute for Hakim Jamal. Roche is a liberal white South African refugee working for a big commercial firm, whose job has involved giving cynical support to Jimmy. Roche was so evidently not Hakim that the question did not arise. But it certainly did apply to Jane, who stood in for Gail in being the murdered woman.
The novel’s Jane, who comes to the island as Roche’s mistress, is supposed to be an idle, arid creature who tries to find the vitality she lacks by having affairs with men. Obtuse in her innate sense of her superiority as a
white woman, she drifts into such an attempt with Jimmy: an irresponsible fool playing a dangerous game for kicks with a ruined black man. Earlier, Vidia had written an account for a newspaper of Gail’s murder which made it clear that he saw Gail as that kind of woman.
She was not. She was idle and empty, but she had no sense of her own superiority as a white woman or as anything else. Far from playing dangerous games for kicks, she was clinging on to illusions for dear life. The people she had most in common with were not the kind of secure Englishwomen who had it off with black men to demonstrate their own liberal attitudes, but those poor wretches who followed the American ‘guru’ Jones to Guyana in 1977, and ended by committing mass suicide at his bidding. She was so lacking in a sense of her own worth that it bordered on insanity.
It was therefore about Jane that I kept saying to myself ‘But that’s not true!’ Then I pulled myself together and saw that there was no reason why Jane should be like Gail: an Englishwoman going into such an affair for kicks was far from impossible and would be a perfectly fair example of fraudulence of motive in white liberals, which was what Vidia was bent on showing.
So I read the book again – and this time Jane simply fell to pieces. Roche came out of it badly, too: a dim character, hard to envisage, in spite of revealing wide-apart molars with black roots whenever he smiled (a touch of ‘clever characterization’ which should have been beneath Vidia). But although he doesn’t quite convince, he almost does; you keep expecting him to emerge from the mist. While Jane becomes more and more like a series of bits and pieces that don’t add up, so that finally her murder is without significance. I came to the conclusion that the trouble must lie with Vidia’s having cut his cloth to fit a pattern he had laid down in advance: these characters existed in order to exemplify his argument, he had not been discovering them. So they did not live; and the woman lived less than the man because that is true of all Vidia’s women.