Literary Occasions: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  The book, when it was published, drew one or two letters of abuse from people who thought that my father had written damagingly of our Indian community. There also came a letter many pages long, closely written in inks of different colours, the handwriting sloping this way and that, from a religion-crazed Muslim. This man later bought space in the Trinidad Guardian to print his photograph, with the query: Who is this [here he gave his name]? And so, at the age of eleven, with the publication of my father’s book, I was given the beginnings of the main character of my own first novel.

  Financially, the publication of Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales was a success. A thousand copies were printed and they sold at a dollar, four shillings, high for Trinidad in those days. But the copies went. Of the thousand copies—which at one time seemed so many, occupying so much space in a bedroom—only three or four now survive, in libraries; even my mother has no copy.

  Shortly after the publication of Gurudeva my father left the Guardian for a government job that paid almost twice as well; and during the four or five years he worked for the government he wrote little for himself. He was, at first, “surveying” rural conditions for a government report. He was, therefore, surveying what he knew, his own background, the background of his early stories. But as a social surveyor compiling facts and figures and tables, no longer a writer concerned with the rituals and manners and what he had seen as the romantic essence of his community, my father was unsettled by what he saw. Out of this unsettlement, and with no thought of publication, he wrote a sketch, “In the Village,” a personal response to the dereliction and despair by which we were surrounded and which we had all—even my father, in his early stories—taken for granted.

  Later, out of a similar deep emotion, perhaps grief for his mother, who had died in great, Trinidad poverty in 1942, he wrote an autobiographical sketch. It was the only piece of autobiography my father permitted himself, if autobiography can be used of a story which more or less ends with the birth of the writer. But my father was obsessed by the circumstances of his birth and the cruelty of his father. I remember the passion that preceded the writing; I heard again and again the forty-year-old stories of meanness and of the expulsion of his pregnant mother from his father’s house; and I remember taking down, at my father’s dictation, a page or two of a version of this sketch.

  A version: there were several versions of everything my father wrote. He always began to write suddenly, after a day or two of silence. He wrote very slowly; and there always came a moment when the emotion with which he had started seemed to have worked itself out and to my surprise—because I felt I had been landed with his emotion—something like literary mischief took over.

  The autobiographical piece was read, long after it had been written, to a Port of Spain literary group which included Edgar Mittelholzer and, I believe, the young George Lamming. There was objection to the biblical language and especially to the use of “ere” for “before”; but my father ignored the objection and I, who was very much under the spell of the story, supported him. “In the Village” was printed in a Jamaican magazine edited by Philip Sherlock.

  A reading to a small group, publication in a magazine soon lost to view: writing in Trinidad was an amateur activity, and this was all the encouragement a writer could expect. There were no magazines that paid; there were no established magazines; there was only the Guardian. A writer like Alfred Mendes, who in the 1930s had had two novels published by Duckworth in London (one with an introduction by Aldous Huxley and a blurb by Anthony Powell), was said to get as much as twenty dollars, four guineas, for a story in the Guardian Sunday supplement; my father only got five dollars, a guinea. My father was a purely local writer, and writers like that ran the risk of ridicule; one of the criticisms of my father’s book that I heard at school was that it had been done only for the money.

  But attitudes were soon to change. In 1949, the Hogarth Press published Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel, A Morning at the Office; Mittelholzer had for some time been regarded as another local writer. And then there at last appeared a market. Henry Swanzy was editing Caribbean Voices for the BBC Caribbean Service. He had standards and enthusiasm. He took local writing seriously and lifted it above the local. And the BBC paid; not quite at their celebrated guinea-a-minute rate, but sufficiently well—fifty dollars a story, sixty dollars, eighty dollars—to spread a new idea of the value of writing.

  Henry Swanzy used two of my father’s early stories on Caribbean Voices. And from 1950, when he left the government to go back to the Guardian, to 1953, when he died, it was for Caribbean Voices that my father wrote. In these three years, in circumstances deteriorating month by month—the low Guardian pay, debt, a heart attack and subsequent physical incapacity, the hopeless, wounded longing to publish a real book and become in his own eyes a writer—in these three years, with the stimulus of that weekly radio programme from London, my father, I believe, found his voice as a writer, developed his own comic gift, and wrote his best stories.

  I didn’t participate in the writing of these stories: I didn’t watch them grow, or give advice, as I had done with the others. In 1949 I had won a Trinidad government scholarship, and in 1950 I left home to come to England to take up the scholarship. I left my father at the beginning of a story called “The Engagement”; and it was two years before I read the finished story.

  My father wrote me once and sometimes twice a week. His letters, like mine to him, were mainly about money and writing. When Henry Swanzy, in his half-yearly review of Caribbean Voices, praised “The Engagement,” my father, who had never been praised like that before, wrote me: “I am beginning to feel I could have been a writer.” But we both felt ourselves in our different ways stalled, he almost at the end of his life, I at the beginning of mine; and our correspondence, as time went on, as he became more broken, and I became more separate from him and Trinidad, more adrift in England, became one of half-despairing mutual encouragement. I had sent him some books by R. K. Narayan, the Indian writer. In March 1952 he wrote: “You were right about R. K. Narayan. I like his short stories … he seems gifted and has made a go of his talent, which in my own case I haven’t even spotted.”

  In that month he sent me two versions of a story called “My Uncle Dalloo.” He was uncertain about this story, which he thought long-winded, and wanted me to send what I thought was the better version to Henry Swanzy. I like the story now, for its detail and the drama of its detail; in a small space it creates and peoples a landscape, and the vision is personal. My father hadn’t done anything like that before, anything with that amount of historical detail, and I can see the care with which the story is written. I can imagine how those details which he was worried about, and yet was unwilling to lose, were worked over. But at the time—I was nineteen—I took the quality of the vision for granted and saw only the incompleteness of the narrative: my father, working in isolation, had, it might be said, outgrown me.

  Henry Swanzy didn’t use “My Uncle Dalloo.” But his judgement of my father’s later work was sounder than mine, and he used nearly everything else my father sent him. In June 1953, four months before my father died, Henry Swanzy, at my father’s request, asked me to read “Ramdas and the Cow” for Caribbean Voices. The reading fee was four guineas. With the money I bought the Parker pen which I still have and with which I am writing this foreword.

  2

  NAIPAUL (or Naipal or Nypal, in earlier transliterations: the transliteration of Hindi names can seldom be exact) was the name of my father’s father; birth certificates and other legal requirements have now made it our family name. He was brought to Trinidad as a baby from eastern Uttar Pradesh at some time in the 1880s, as I work it out.

  He received no English education but, in the immemorial Hindu way, as though Trinidad were India, he was sent—as a brahmin boy of the Panday clan (or the Parray clan: again, the transliteration is difficult)—to the house of a brahmin to be trained as a pundit. This was what he became; he also, as I have heard, became a
small dealer in those things needed for Hindu rituals. He married and had three children; but he died when he was still quite young and his family, unprotected, was soon destitute. My father once told me that at times there wasn’t oil for a lamp.

  There was some talk, among other branches of the family, of sending the mother and the children back to India; but that plan fell through, and the dependent family was scattered among various relations. My father’s elder brother, still only a child, was sent out to work in the fields at fourpence a day; but it was decided that my father, as the youngest of the children, should be educated and perhaps made a pundit, like his father. And that family fracture shows to this day in their descendants. My father’s brother, by immense labour, became a small cane-farmer. When I went to see him in 1972, not long before he died, I found him enraged, crying for his childhood and that fourpence a day. My father’s sister made two unhappy marriages; she remained, as it were, dazed by Trinidad; until her death in 1972—more cheerful than her brother, though in a house not her own—she spoke only Hindi and could hardly understand English.

  My father received an elementary-school education; he learned English and Hindi. But the attempt to make him a pundit failed. Instead, he began doing odd jobs, attached to the household of a relative (later a millionaire) in that very village of El Dorado which he was to survey more than twenty years later for the government and write about in “In the Village.”

  I do not know how, in such a setting, in those circumstances of dependence and uncertainty, and with no example, the wish to be a writer came to my father. But I feel now, reading the stories after a long time and seeing so clearly (what was once hidden from me) the brahmin standpoint from which they are written, that it might have been the caste-sense, the Hindu reverence for learning and the word, awakened by the beginnings of an English education and a Hindu religious training. In one letter to me he seems to say that he was trying to write when he was fourteen.

  He was concerned from the start with Hinduism and the practices of Hinduism. His acquaintance with pundits had given him something of the puritan brahmin prejudice against pundits, professional priests, stage-managers of ritual, as “tradesmen.” But he had also been given some knowledge of Hindu thought, which he valued; and on this knowledge, evident in the stories, he continued to build throughout his life; as late as 1951 he was writing me ecstatically about Aurobindo’s commentaries on the Gita.

  The Indian immigrants in Trinidad, and especially the Hindus among them, belonged in the main to the peasantry of the Gangetic plain. They were part of an old and perhaps an ancient India. (It was entrancing to me, when I read Fustel de Coulange’s The Ancient City, to discover that many of the customs, which with us in Trinidad, even in my childhood, were still like instincts, had survived from the pre-classical world.) This peasantry, transported to Trinidad, hadn’t been touched by the great Indian reform movements of the nineteenth century. Reform became an issue only with the arrival of reformist missionaries from India in the 1920s, at a time when in India itself religious reform was merging into political rebellion.

  In the great and sometimes violent debates that followed in Trinidad—debates that remained unknown outside the Indian community and are today forgotten by everybody—my father was on the side of reform. The broad satire of the latter part of Gurudeva—written in the last year of his life, but not sent to Henry Swanzy—shouldn’t be misinterpreted: there my father fights the old battles again, with the passion that in the 1930s had made him spend scarce money on a satirical reform pamphlet, Religion and the Trinidad East Indians, one of the books of my childhood, but now lost.

  It was on Indian or Hindu topics that my father began writing for the Trinidad Guardian, in 1929. The paper had a new editor, Gault MacGowan. He had come from The Times and in Trinidad was like a man unleashed. The Trinidad Guardian, before MacGowan, was a half-dead colonial newspaper: a large border of advertisements on its front page, a small central patch of closely printed cables. MacGowan’s brief was to modernize the Guardian. He scrapped that front page. But his taste for drama went beyond the typographical and he began to unsettle some people. Voodoo in backyards, obeah, prisoners escaping from Devil’s Island, vampire bats: when the editor of the rival Port of Spain Gazette said that MacGowan was killing the tourist trade, MacGowan sued and won. But MacGowan was more than a sensationalist. He was new to Trinidad, discovering Trinidad, and he took nothing for granted. He saw stories everywhere; he could make stories out of nothing; his paper was like a daily celebration of the varied life of the island. But sometimes his wit could run away with him; and the end came when he became involved in a lawsuit with his own employers (which the Trinidad Guardian, MacGowan still the editor, reported at length, day after day, so that, in a perfection of the kind of journalism his employers were objecting to, the paper became its own news).

  My father had written to MacGowan; and MacGowan, who had been to India and was interested in Indian matters, thought that my father should be encouraged. My father’s iconoclastic views, and their journalistic possibilities, must have appealed to him. He became my father’s teacher—beginning no doubt with English which, it must be remembered, was for my father an acquired language—and my father never lost his admiration and affection for the man who, as he often said, had taught him how to write. More than twenty years later, in 1951, my father wrote me: “And as to a writer being hated or liked—I think it’s the other way to what you think: a man is doing his work well when people begin liking him. I have never forgotten what Gault MacGowan told me years ago: ‘Write sympathetically’; and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully, even brightly.”

  My father began on the Guardian as the freelance contributor of a “controversial” weekly column. The column—in which I think MacGowan’s improving hand can often be detected—was, provocatively, signed “The Pundit”; and my father remembered the Pundit’s words well enough to give blocks of them, years later, to Mr. Sohun, the Presbyterian Indian schoolmaster, in the latter part of Gurudeva. Gurudeva has other echoes of my father’s early journalism: Gurudeva’s beating up of the drunken old stick-fighter must, I feel, have its origin in the news story my father, now a regular country correspondent for the Guardian, wrote in 1930: “Fight Challenge Accepted—Jerningham Junction ‘Bully’ Badly Injured—Six Men Arrested.” A country brawl dramatized, the personalities brought close to the reader, made more than names in a court report: this was MacGowan’s style, and it became my father’s.

  It was through his journalism on MacGowan’s Guardian that my father arrived at that vision of the countryside and its people which he later transferred to his stories. And the stories have something of the integrity of the journalism: they are written from within a community and seem to be addressed to that community: a Hindu community essentially, which, because the writer sees it as whole, he can at times make romantic and at other times satirize. There is reformist passion; but even when there is shock there is nothing of the protest—common in early colonial writing—that implies an outside audience; the barbs are all turned inwards. This is part of the distinctiveness of the stories. I stress it because this way of looking, from being my father’s, became mine: my father’s early stories created my background for me.

  But it was a partial vision. A story called “Panchayat,” about a family quarrel, reads like a pastoral romance: the people in that story exist completely within a Hindu culture and recognize no other. The wronged wife does not take her husband to the alien law courts; she calls a panchayat against him. The respected village elders assemble; the wife and the husband state their cases without rancour; everyone is wise and dignified and acknowledges dharma, the Hindu right way, the way of piety, the old way. But Trinidad, and not India, is in the background. These people have been transported; old ways and old allegiances are being eroded fast. The setting, which is not described because it is taken for granted, is one of big estates, workers’ barracks, huts. It is like the setting of “I
n the Village”; but that vision of material and cultural dereliction comes later, and it is some time before it can be accommodated in the stories.

  Romance simplified; but it was a way of looking. And it was more than a seeking out of the picturesque; it was also, as I have since grown to understand, a way of concealing personal pain. My father once wrote me: “I have hardly written a story in which the principal characters have not been members of my own family.” And the wronged wife of “Panchayat”—as I understood only the other day—was really my father’s sister; the details in that story are all true. Her marriage to a Punjabi brahmin (a learned man, who could read Persian, as she told me with pride on her deathbed) was a disaster. My father suffered for her. In the story ritual blurs the pain and, fittingly, all ends well; in life the disaster continued. My father hated his father for his cruelty and meanness; yet when, in his autobiographical sketch, he came to write about his father, he wrote a tale of pure romance, in which again old ritual, lovingly described, can only lead to reconciliation. And my father, in spite of my encouragement, could never take that story any further.

  He often spoke of doing an autobiographical novel. Sometimes he said it would be easy; but once he wrote that parts of it would be difficult; he would have trouble selecting the incidents. When in 1952 he sent me “My Uncle Dalloo”—which he described in another letter, apologetically, as a sketch—he wrote: “I’d like you to read it carefully, and if you think it good enough, send it to Mr Swanzy, with a note that it’s from me; and that it is part of a chapter of a novel I’m doing. Indeed, this is what I aim to do with it. As soon as you can, get working on a novel. Write of things as they are happening now, be realistic, humorous when this comes in pat, but don’t make it deliberately so. If you are at a loss for a theme, take me for it. Begin: ‘He sat before the little table writing down the animal counterparts of all his wife’s family. He was very analytical about it. He wanted to be correct; went to work like a scientist. He wrote, “The She-Fox,” then “The Scorpion”; at the end of five minutes he produced a list which read as follows: …’ All this is just a jest, but you can really do it.”