Literary Occasions: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  Here were printed records. Here, in the sequence in which they had fallen in the mornings on the front steps of the Port of Spain house, were the Guardians of 1938 and 1939, once looked at without being understood: the photographs of scholarship winners (such lucky men), the sports pages (with the same, often-used photographs of great cricketers), the cinema advertisements that had awakened such longing (Bobby Breen in Rainbow on the River).

  And then, going back, I rediscovered parts of my father’s ledger. I found that the ledger I had grown up with was not complete. My father had left out some things. The clipping Shenker had sent me told a true story. It was a bigger story than I had imagined, and it was not comic at all. It was the story of a great humiliation. It had occurred just when my father was winning through to a kind of independence, and had got started in his vocation. The independence was to go within months. The vocation—in a colonial Trinidad, without MacGowan—was to become meaningless; the vacancy was to be with my father for the rest of his life.

  I had known about my father’s long nervous illness. I hadn’t know about its origins. My own ambitions had been seeded in something less than half knowledge of my father’s early writing life.

  6

  MY FATHER, when I got to know him, was full of rages against my mother’s family. But his early writings for the Guardian show that shortly after his marriage he was glamoured by the family.

  They were a large brahmin family of landowners and pundits. Nearly all the sons-in-law were the sons of pundits, men with big names in our own private world, our island India. Caste had won my father admittance to the family, and for some time he seemed quite ready, in his Guardian reports, to act as a kind of family herald. “Popular Hindu Engagement—Chaguanas Link with Arouca”: MacGowan couldn’t have known, but this item of “Indian” news was really a family circular, court news: it was about the engagement of my grandmother’s eldest granddaughter.

  With the departure of my mother’s father for India, and his subsequent death, the direction of the family had passed to the two eldest sons-in-law. They were brothers. They were ambitious and energetic men. They were concerned with the establishing of the local Hindu-Muslim school; with the affairs of the Local Road Board; and—in those days of the property franchise—with the higher politics connected with the island Legislative Council. They were also, as brahmins of the Tiwari clan, defenders of the orthodox Hindu faith—against Presbyterianism, then making converts among Hindus; and also against those reforming Hindu movements that had sent out missionaries from India. The brothers sought to be leaders; and they liked a fight. They were engaged in constant power games, which sometimes took a violent turn, with other families who also presumed to lead.

  To belong to the family was to be in touch with much that was important in Indian life; or so my father made it. And in MacGowan’s Guardian Indian news became mainly Chaguanas news, and Chaguanas news was often family news. “600 at Mass Meeting to Protest the Attitude of Cipriani.” That was news, but it was also a family occasion: the meeting had been convened by the two senior sons-in-law. And when three days later the Chaguanas correspondent reported that feeling against Cipriani (a local politician) was still so strong that an eleven-year-old boy had been moved to speak “pathetically” at another public gathering, MacGowan couldn’t have known that the boy in question was my mother’s younger brother. (He became a Reader in mathematics at London University; and thirty years after his “pathetic” speech he also became the first leader of the opposition in independent Trinidad.)

  My father might begin a political item like this: “At a surprise meeting last night …” And the chances were that the meeting had taken place in the “hall,” the big downstairs room in the wooden house at the back of the main family house in Chaguanas.

  But this closeness to the news-makers of Chaguanas had its strains. The family was a totalitarian organization. Decisions—about politics, about religious matters and, most importantly, about other families—were taken by a closed circle at the top—my grandmother and her two eldest sons-in-law. Everyone in the family was expected to fall into line; and most people did. There was something like a family propaganda machine constantly at work. It strengthened approved attitudes; it could also turn inwards, to discredit and humiliate dissidents. There was no plan; it simply happened like that, from the nature of our family organization. (When the two senior sons-in-law were eventually expelled from the family, the machine was easily turned against them.) And even today, when I meet descendants of families who were once “blacked” by my mother’s family, I can feel I am in the presence of the enemy. To grow up in a family or clan like ours was to accept the ethos of the feud.

  But what could be asked of a member of the family couldn’t be asked of the reporter. The family had been strong supporters of the sitting member for the county in the Legislative Council. This man was a Hindu, and he was as good a legislator as the colonial constitution of the time permitted. Suddenly, perhaps for some Hindu sectarian reason, or because of a squabble over the running of the Hindu-Muslim school, our family decided to drop this man. They decided that at the next election, in 1933, they would support Mr. Robinson, who was a white man and the owner of large sugar estates in the area.

  Mr. Robinson believed in child labour and his election speeches were invariably on this subject. He thought that any law that raised the school-leaving age to fourteen would be “inhuman.” He was ready to be prosecuted “a thousand times,” he was ready to go to jail, rather than stop giving work to the children of the poor. One of our family’s ruling sons-in-law made a similar speech. Mr. Robinson, he said, was keeping young people out of jail.

  It would not have been easy for my father, whose brother had gone to work as a child in the fields for eight cents a day, to be wholeheartedly on the family’s side. But he tried; he gave a lot of attention to Mr. Robinson. Then my father had to report that the two sons-in-law had been charged with uttering menaces (allegedly, a “death threat”) against someone on the other side.

  Mr. Robinson lost the election. This was more than political news. This was a family defeat which, because it was at the hands of another Hindu family, was like a family humiliation; and my father had to report it in the jaunty Guardian style. The day after the election there was a riot in Chaguanas. A Robinson crowd of about a thousand attacked a bus carrying exultant supporters of the other side. The bus drove through the attacking crowd; a man in the crowd was killed; a man in the bus had his arm torn off; the police issued seventy summonses. That also had to be reported. And it would not have been at all easy for my father to report that—after another violent incident—the two senior sons-in-law of the family had appeared in court and had been fined. The family house was on the main road. Only a few hundred yards away, in a cluster, were the official buildings: the railway station, the warden’s office, the police station and the court-house. The reporter would have had no trouble getting his story and returning, as it were, to base.

  So my father’s position in the family changed. From being the reporter who could act as family herald, he became the reporter who got people into the paper whether they wanted it or not; he became a man on the other side.

  And, in fact, in one important way my father had always been on the other side. The family, with all its pundits, were defenders of the orthodox Hindu faith. My father wasn’t. Later—just ten years later—when we were living in Port of Spain and our Hindu world was breaking up, my father was to write lyrically about Hindu rituals and Indian village life. But when he was a young man this Indian life was all he knew; it seemed stagnant and enduring; and he was critical. He was not alone. He belonged, or was sympathetic, to the reforming movement known as the Arya Samaj, which sought to make of Hinduism a pure philosophical faith. The Arya Samaj was against caste, pundits, animistic ritual. They were against child marriage; they were for the education of girls. On both these issues they clashed with the orthodox. And even smaller issues, in Trinidad, could lead to fam
ily feuds. What was the correct form of Hindu greeting? Could marriage ceremonies take place in daylight? Or did they, as the orthodox insisted, have to take place at night?

  It was as reformer that my father had presented himself to MacGowan. And he had been encouraged by MacGowan: a “controversial” reporter was better for the paper, and MacGowan’s attitude to Indians was one of paternal concern. And it was as a reformer that my father tackled the Indian side of the paralytic rabies story.

  There had been a recrudescence of the disease in the weeks following the election, and Hindus were still not having their cattle vaccinated. One reason was that the government charge was too high—twenty-four cents a shot, at a time when a labourer earned thirty cents a day. But there was also a strong religious objection. And in some villages, as a charm against the disease, there was a ceremony of sacrifice to Kali, the black mother-goddess. Women went in procession through five villages, singing, and asking for alms for Kali. With the money they got they bought a goat. On the appointed day the goat was garlanded, its head cut off, and its blood sprinkled on the altar before the image of the goddess.

  This was the story my father wrote, a descriptive piece, naming no names. But the reformer could not stay his hand: he spoke of “superstitious remedies” and “amazing superstitious practices,” and that was how MacGowan played it up. Ten days later—what deliberations took place in those ten days?—my father received an anonymous threatening letter in Hindi. The letter said he was to perform the very ceremony he had criticised, or he was going to die in a week.

  There is an indication, from my father’s reporting of the incident, that the threat came from within the ruling circle of the family, perhaps from one of the senior sons-in-law. This man, at any rate, when approached, offered no help and seemed anxious only to confirm the contents of the letter. And, in the abasement that was demanded of my father, there is something that suggests family cruelty: as though the reporter, the errant family member, was to be punished this time for all his previous misdemeanours and disloyalties.

  In the week that followed my father existed on three planes. He was the reporter who had become his own very big front-page story: “Next Sunday I am doomed to die.” He was the reformer who wasn’t going to yield to “ju-jus”: “I won’t sacrifice a goat.” At the same time, as a man of feud-ridden Chaguanas, he was terrified of what he saw as a murder threat, and he was preparing to submit. Each role made nonsense of the other. And my father must have known it.

  He wasn’t going to sacrifice a goat to Kali. But then the readers of the Guardian discovered that he had made the sacrifice—not in Chaguanas, but in a little town a safe distance away.

  A young English reporter, Sidney Rodin, who had been brought out recently by MacGowan to work on the Guardian, wrote the main story. It was a good piece of writing (and Rodin was to go back to London, to a long career in Fleet Street). Rodin’s report, full of emotion, catches all the details that must have horrified my father: the goat anointed and garlanded with hibiscus; red powder on its neck to symbolize its own blood, its own life; the cutlass on the tree stump; the flowers and fruit on the sacrificial altar.

  My father, in Rodin’s account, is, it might be said, a little to one side: a man who (unknown to Rodin) had been intended by his grandmother and mother to be a pundit, now for the first time going through priestly rites: a man in white, garlanded like the goat with hibiscus, offering sacrificial clove-scented fire to the image of the goddess, to the still living goat, to the onlookers, and then offering the severed goat’s head on a brass plate.

  My father, in his own report accompanying Rodin’s story, has very little to say. He has no means of recording what he felt. He goes back to the reformist literature he had read; he plagiarizes some paragraphs. And he blusters. He will never sacrifice again, he says; he knows his faith now. And he records it as a little triumph that he didn’t wear a loincloth: he went through the ceremony in trousers and shirt. The odd, illogical bluster continues the next day, on the front page of the Sunday paper. “Mr Naipaul Greets You!—No Poison Last Night.” “Good morning, everybody! As you behold, Kali has not got me yet …”

  It was his last piece of jauntiness from Chaguanas. Two months later he worked on a big hurricane story, but that was in the south of the island. His reports from Chaguanas became intermittent, and then he faded away from the paper.

  A few months later MacGowan left Trinidad. There was an idea that my father might go with MacGowan to the United States; and he took out a passport. But my father didn’t go. Dread of the unknown overcame him, as it had overcome him when he was a child, waiting on Nelson Island for the ship to take him to India. The passport remained crisp and unused in his desk, with his incomplete ledger.

  He must have become unbalanced. It was no help when the new editor of the Guardian took him off the staff and reduced him to a stringer. And soon he was quite ill.

  I said to my mother one day when I came back from the Port of Spain newspaper library, “Why didn’t you tell me about the sacrifice?”

  She said, simply, “I didn’t remember.” She added, “Some things you will yourself to forget.”

  “What form did my father’s madness take?”

  “He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.”

  The house where this terror befell him became unendurable to him. He left it. He became a wanderer, living in many different places, doing a variety of little jobs, dependent now on my mother’s family, now on the family of his wealthy uncle by marriage. For thirteen years he had no house of his own.

  My mother blamed MacGowan for the disaster. It gave her no pleasure to hear the name my father spoke so often or to follow MacGowan’s later adventures. In 1942 we read in Time magazine that MacGowan, then nearly fifty, had gone as a war correspondent on the Dieppe raid and had written his story immediately afterwards, keeping himself awake (a MacGowan touch) on Benzedrine. And the Guardian, relenting towards its former editor, reported in 1944 that MacGowan had been taken prisoner by the Germans in France but had managed to escape, jumping off a train.

  I understand my mother’s attitude, but it isn’t mine. It was no fault of MacGowan’s that he had the bigger world to return to, and my father had only Trinidad. MacGowan transmitted his own idea of the journalist’s or writer’s vocation to my father. From no other source in colonial Trinidad could my father have got that. No other editor of the Guardian gave my father any sense of the worth of his calling. It was the idea of the vocation that exalted my father in the MacGowan days. It was in the day’s story, and its reception by a sympathetic editor, that the day’s struggle and the day’s triumph lay. He wrote about Chaguanas, but the daily exercise of an admired craft would, in his own mind, have raised him above the constrictions of Chaguanas: he would have grown to feel protected by the word, and the quality of his calling. Then the props went. And he had only Chaguanas and Trinidad.

  Admiration of the craft stayed with him. In 1936, in the middle of his illness—when I would have been staying in Chaguanas at my mother’s family house—he sent me a little book, The School of Poetry, an anthology, really a decorated keepsake, edited by Alice Meynell. It had been marked down by the shop from forty-eight cents to twenty-four cents. It was his gift to his son of something noble, something connected with the word. Somehow the book survived all our moves. It is inscribed: “To Vidyadhar, from his father. Today you have reached the span of 3 years, 10 months and 15 days. And I make this present to you with this counsel in addition. Live up to the estate of man, follow truth, be kind and gentle and trust God.”

  Two years later, when my father got his Guardian job back, we moved to the house in Port of Spain. It was for me the serenest time of my childhood. I didn’t know then how close my father was to his mental illness; and I didn’t understand how much that job with the Guardian was for him a daily humiliation. He had had to plead for the job. In the desk were the many brusque replies, which I handled lovingly and
often for the sake of the raised letter-heads.

  Among the books in the bookcase were the books of comfort my father had picked up during his lost years: not only Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, but also many mystical or quasi-religious books. One healing incantation from the time of his illness I got to know, because he taught it to me. It was a line he had adapted from Ella Wheeler Wilcox: “Even this shall pass away.” It was an elastic consolation. It could deal with the pain of a moment, a day, life itself.

  He never talked about the nature of his illness. And what is astonishing to me is that, with the vocation, he so accurately transmitted to me—without saying anything about it—his hysteria from the time when I didn’t know him: his fear of extinction. That was his subsidiary gift to me. That fear became mine as well. It was linked with the idea of the vocation: the fear could be combated only by the exercise of the vocation.

  And it was that fear, a panic about failing to be what I should be, rather than simple ambition, that was with me when I came down from Oxford in 1954 and began trying to write in London. My father had died the previous year. Our family was in distress. I should have done something for them, gone back to them. But, without having become a writer, I couldn’t go back. In my eleventh month in London I wrote about Bogart. I wrote my book; I wrote another. I began to go back.

  July–October 1982

  Foreword to The Adventures of Gurudeva

  1

  MY FATHER, Seepersad Naipaul, who was a journalist on the Trinidad Guardian for most of his working life, published a small collection of his short stories in Trinidad in 1943. He was thirty-seven; he had been a journalist off and on for fourteen years and had been writing stories for five. The booklet he put together, some seventy pages long, was called Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales; and it was my introduction to book-making. The printing was done, slowly, by the Guardian Commercial Printery; my father brought the proofs home bit by bit in his jacket pocket; and I shared his hysteria when the linotypists, falling into everyday ways, set—permanently, as it turned out—two of the stories in narrow newspaper-style columns.