V. S. Naipaul

Naipaul was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago.[3] He was the second child of Droapatie Capildeo and Seepersad Naipaul and had a Hindu upbringing. His younger brother was the writer Shiva Naipaul.[4] In the 1880s, his grandparents had migrated from India to work as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations.[5][6] In the Indian immigrant community in Trinidad, Naipaul's father became an English-language journalist, and in 1929 began contributing articles to the Trinidad Guardian.[7] In 1932, the year Naipaul was born, his father joined the staff as the Chaguanas correspondent.[8] In "A Prologue to an Autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how his father's reverence for writers and for the writing life spawned his own dreams and aspirations to become a writer.[9]

In 1939, when he was six years old,[5] Naipaul's family moved in with them in a big house in Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain.[10][11] There, Naipaul enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College, a well-regarded school that was modelled after a British public school.[12] Upon graduation, Naipaul won a Trinidad Government scholarship that allowed him to study at any institution of higher learning in the British Commonwealth; he chose Oxford.

At University College, Oxford, Naipaul's early attempts at writing, he felt, were contrived. Lonely and unsure of his ability and calling, he became depressed.[13] In April 1952, he took an impulsive trip to Spain, where he quickly spent all he had saved.[14] He called his impulsive trip "a nervous breakdown".[15] Thirty years later, he called it "something like a mental illness".[16]

In 1952, before visiting Spain, Naipaul met Patricia Ann Hale, his future wife, at a college play. With Hale's support, he began to recover and gradually to write. She became a partner in planning his career. Her family was hostile to the relationship; his was unenthusiastic. In June 1953, Naipaul and Hale graduated from Oxford. Naipaul graduated with a second-class degree. Peter Bayley, his Oxford tutor, would later comment that Naipaul "had not quite forgiven us for giving him a second-class degree".

In 1953, Naipaul's father died.[17] He worked at odd jobs and borrowed money from Hale and his family in Trinidad.

Naipaul moved to London in 1954. In January 1955, he and Pat were married. In December 1954, he began appearing on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices once a week. Sitting in the BBC freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel, he wrote "Bogart", the first story of Miguel Street, which was inspired by a neighbour he knew as a child in Port of Spain. Naipaul wrote Miguel Street in five weeks. The New York Times said about the book: "The sketches are written lightly, so that tragedy is understated and comedy is overstated, yet the ring of truth always prevails."[19]

Diana Athill, an editor at the publishing company André Deutsch, read Miguel Street and liked it, but publisher André Deutsch thought a book of short stories by an unknown Caribbean writer unlikely to sell profitably in Britain.[20] He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel.[20] Naipaul quickly wrote The Mystic Masseur [20] and it was published in 1955.

In 1956, Naipaul returned to Trinidad and Tobago for a two-month stay with his family. Travelling by ship there, he sent humorous sketches of the ship's West Indian passengers to Pat.[21] These sketches became the inspiration for The Suffrage of Elvira, a comic novella about a rural election in Trinidad.[22] In 1957, Naipaul became an editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association (C&CA), his only full-time job.[23] The C&CA was to be the setting for Naipaul's later novel, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963).[23] At this time the New Statesman's Kingsley Martin gave Naipaul a part-time job reviewing books, a job he did from 1957 to 1961.[24]

The Mystic Masseur was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958, and Miguel Street the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961 with W. Somerset Maugham himself approving the first-ever selection of a non-European for the prize.[25]

Seepersad Naipaul, father of V. S. Naipaul, and the inspiration for the protagonist of the novel, Mr Biswas, with his Ford Prefect.

For his next novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Naipaul took for inspiration childhood memories of his father (later he wrote that the novel "destroyed memory" in some respects).[26] In the novel the title character Mohun Biswas takes a succession of vocations (apprentice to a Hindu priest, signboard painter, grocery store proprietor, and reporter for The Trinidad Sentinel).[27] What ambition and resourcefulness Mr Biswas has are inevitably undermined by his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of the colonial society in which he lives.[27]

The book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he wrote:

The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, towards the end of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labour ended; the book began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to re-enter the world I had created, unwilling to expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I haven't read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.

— From the Foreword to A House for Mr. Biswas[28]

After completing A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul and Pat spent the next five months in British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica,[30][31] where Naipaul took notes for The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America, his first travel book.[30][32] He wrote, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies."[33]

In 1962, Naipaul and Pat went to India, the land of Naipaul's ancestors, where Naipaul wrote An Area of Darkness.[34][35] For the first time in his life, he felt anonymous, even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, with a special ethnic group as he had been in Trinidad and England; it made him anxious.[36][37] He was upset by what he saw as the resigned or evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering.[38][39]

While in India, Naipaul wrote Mr Stone and the Knights Companion. He accepted an invitation to write a monthly "Letter from London" for The Illustrated Weekly of India.[40]

Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India.[42] Back in London, after An Area of Darkness was completed, he felt creatively drained.[42] He felt he had used up his Trinidad material.[43] Neither India nor the writing of Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing.[43] His finances too were low, and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them.[42] Naipaul's books had received much critical acclaim, but they were not yet money makers.[42] Socially, he was now breaking away from the Caribbean Voices circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.[44]

That changed when Naipaul was introduced to Antonia Fraser, at the time the wife of conservative politician Hugh Fraser.[45] Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British politicians, writers, and performing artists.[45] In this circle was the wealthy second Baron Glenconner, father of novelist Emma Tennant and owner of estates in Trinidad, who arranged for an unsecured loan of £7,200 for Naipaul.[46] Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on Stockwell Park Crescent.[47]

In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie.[48] He spent the next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named "A Flag on the Island", later published in the collection A Flag on the Island. The finished version was not to the director's liking and the movie was never made.[48] The story is set in 1964, in a Caribbean island that is not named.[49] The main character is an American named Frankie who affects the mannerisms of Frank Sinatra.[48] Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II.[50] He revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors during a hurricane.[50] Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and the dialogue confusing.[50][48] Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though comfortless, memory of 20 years before.[51] Then he had become a part of a community on the island.[51] He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample U.S. Army supplies he had.[51] Not everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited.[51] Frankie was left chastened about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems.[51] This theme, indirectly developed in the story, is one to which Naipaul would return.

Not long after finishing A Flag on the Island, Naipaul began work on the novel The Mimic Men, though for almost a year he did not make significant progress.[52] At the end of this period, he was offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.[53] There, in early 1966, he began to rewrite his material, and went on to complete the novel quickly.[54] The finished novel broke new ground for him.[54] Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic.[55] It did not unfold chronologically.[56] Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical.[57] It had strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels.[58] It was intermittently dense, even obscure,[56] but it also had beautiful passages, especially descriptive ones of the fictional tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appeared explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work.[59] The plot, to the extent there is one, centres on a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an East Indian-West Indian politician from Isabella.[57] Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political memoirs.[57] Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in a number of British colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh had shared political power with a more powerful African-Caribbean politician. Soon, the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether during his childhood, married life, or political career, he appears to abandon engagement and enterprise.[57] These, he rationalizes later, belong only to fully made European societies. When The Mimic Men was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean politicians, such as Michael Manley and Eric Williams weighed in, the latter writing: "V. S. Naipaul's description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..."[60]

Back in London in October 1966, Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher Little, Brown and Company to write a book on Port-of-Spain.[61] The book took two years to write, its scope widening with time. The Loss of El Dorado (1969) eventually became a narrative history of Trinidad based on primary sources. Pat spent many months in the archives of the British Library reading those sources.[61] In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, who were expecting a guidebook.[61] Alfred A. Knopf agreed to publish it instead in the United States, as did André Deutsch later in Britain.[61]

The Loss of El Dorado is an attempt to ferret out an older, deeper history of Trinidad, one preceding its commonly taught history as a British-run plantation economy of slaves and indentured workers.[62] Central to Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for El Dorado, a Spanish obsession, in turn pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America.[62] Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda would become the human faces of these stories.[62] Although slavery is eventually abolished, the sought for social order slips away in the face of uncertainties created by changeable populations, languages, and governments and by the cruelties inflicted by the island's inhabitants on each other.[62]

Before Naipaul began writing The Loss of El Dorado, he had been unhappy with the political climate in Britain.[63] He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s, towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies.[63] During the writing of the book, he and Pat sold their house in London, and led a transient life, living in the homes of friends, sometimes for rent, sometimes not. After the book was completed, they travelled to Trinidad and Canada with a view to finding a location in which to settle.[64] Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of future money anxieties. As it turned out, The Loss of El Dorado sold only 3,000 copies in the US, where major sales were expected; Naipaul also missed England more than he had calculated. It was thus in a depleted state, both financial and emotional, that he returned to Britain.[64]

Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying a month in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast.[65] They had travelled in rural Uganda to the Kisoro District on the south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo.[65] Naipaul showed interest in the great culture, history and traditions of the Baganda people.[65] When Uganda's prime minister Milton Obote deposed, militarily, the President of Uganda, who was also the Kabaka of Buganda, Naipaul was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough.[66] Naipaul also travelled to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux.[66] It was upon this African experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, In a Free State, published in 1971.[67]

In the title novella, "In a Free State", two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African country, which remains nameless but which offers clues of Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.[68] The novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves.[68] Political chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonized countries.[68] Young, idealistic, expatriate whites are attracted to these countries, seeking expanded moral and sexual freedoms. They are rootless, their bonds with the land tenuous; at the slightest danger they leave.[69] The older, conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger.[69] The young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced.[69] The old settlers, unsentimental, sometimes brutal, can show compassion.[70] The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them.[69] The old are knowledgeable, armed, and ready to defend themselves.[70] The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it become the means of exploring these themes.[69] In a Free State received the 1971 Booker Prize and was effectvely Naipaul's critical and commercial breakthrough.

In 1974, Naipaul wrote the novel Guerrillas, following a creative slump that lasted several years.[71] A Bend in the River, published in 1979, marks the beginning of his exploration of native historical traditions, deviating from his usual "New World" examinations.[72] Naipaul also covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at the behest of Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans",[73] an anthropological study of a "white tribe in the United States".[74]

In 1987, The Enigma of Arrival, a novel in five sections, was published.

Naipaul continued to write non-fiction works, his last being The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010), written following the author's trips to Africa in 2008–09. The book explores indigenous religious beliefs and rituals, where Naipaul portrays the countries he visited in real life as bleak, and the people primitive.[75]

In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."[74] The Committee added: "Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony."[74] The Committee also noted Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:

Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.[74]

Naipaul's fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called Naipaul's portrayal of Africa racist and "repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism.[76] Edward Said argued that Naipaul "allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what Said classified as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies".[77] Said believed that Naipaul's worldview may be most salient in his book-length essay The Middle Passage (1962), composed following Naipaul's return to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the work An Area of Darkness (1964).

Naipaul was accused of misogyny, and of having committed acts of "chronic physical abuse" against his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who wrote in a letter to The New York Review of Books: "Vidia says I didn't mind the abuse. I certainly did mind."[78]

Writing in The New York Review of Books about Naipaul in 1980, Joan Didion offered the following portrayal of the writer:[79]

The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical fact, the dust itself. ... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual human endeavour. ... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact ...

Nissim Ezekiel wrote the 1984 essay "Naipaul's India and Mine" as a reply to Naipaul's An Area of Darkness.[80]

During his first trip to Argentina, in 1972, Naipaul met and began an affair with Margaret Murray Gooding, a married Anglo-Argentine mother of three. He revealed his affair to his wife one year after it began, telling her that he had never been sexually satisfied in their relationship. In Patrick French's biography, Naipaul recounts his domestic abuse towards Margaret: "I was very violent with her for two days with my hand...She thought of it in terms of my passion for her...My hand was swollen."[81] French writes that the "cruelty [for Naipaul] was part of the attraction".[82] He moved between both women for the next 24 years.[83]

In 1995, as he was traveling through Indonesia with Gooding, his wife Patricia was hospitalized with cancer. She died the following year. Within two months of her death, Naipaul ended his affair with Gooding and married Nadira Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist more than 20 years his junior.[83] He had met her at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore.[84] In 2003, he adopted Nadira's daughter, Maleeha, who was then 25.[85]

Naipaul was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State in 1971. He was awarded the Trinity Cross in 1990.[86] He was also made a knight bachelor at the 1990 New Year Honours. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.[87]

Naipaul died at his home in London at the age of 85 on 11 August 2018, less than a week short of his 86th birthday.[85] His widow, Lady Nadira Naipaul, confirmed her husband's death, saying "[H]e died surrounded by those he loved".[88] The Mail on Sunday editor and friend Geordie Greig informed BBC Radio 4 he was one of those at Naipaul's bedside upon his death, saying: "Nadira talked about a poem by Lord Tennyson, 'Crossing the Bar', which had great resonance and meaning to him and I just turned on my phone and found it and we read it."[88] Sir Salman Rushdie paid the following tribute: "We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia."[88]

Naipaul's funeral took place at Kensal Green Cemetery.

Fiction

• The Mystic Masseur  (1957)[89] – film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001)
• The Suffrage of Elvira  (1958)[90]
• Miguel Street  (1959)[89]
• A House for Mr Biswas  (1961)[89]
• Mr Stone and the Knights Companion  (1963)[89]
• The Mimic Men  (1967)[89]
• A Flag on the Island  (1967)
• In a Free State  (1971)[89] – Booker Prize Winner
• Guerrillas  (1975)[89]
• A Bend in the River  (1979)[89]
• The Enigma of Arrival  (1987)[89]
• A Way in the World  (1994)[89]
• Half a Life  (2001)[89]
• The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (Stories) (2002: collection comprising The Suffrage of Elvira, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion and A Flag on the Island)[91]
• Magic Seeds  (2004)[91]

Non-fiction

• The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962)[89]
• An Area of Darkness (1964)[92]
• The Loss of El Dorado  (1969)[89]
• The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)[89]
• India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)[89]
• A Congo Diary (1980), published by Sylvester & Orphanos[89]
• The Return of Eva Perón and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)[93]
• Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)[89]
• Finding the Centre: Two Narratives  (1984)[94]
• A Turn in the South (1989)[91]
• India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)[89]
• Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)[89]
• Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)[91]
• The Writer and the World: Essays (2002)[89]
• A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007)[89]
• The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010)[89]

• Capildeo family

Notes

Citations

Sources

• Bayley, John (9 April 1987). "Country Life". The New York Review of Books.
• Boxill, Anthony (1976). "The Little Bastard Worlds of VS Naipaul's The Mimic Men and A Flag on the Island". International Fiction Review. 3 (1).
• Buruma, Ian (20 November 2008). "Lessons of the Master". The New York Review of Books.
• Chaubey, Ajay Kumar, ed. (2015). V. S. Naipaul: An Anthology of 21st Century Criticism. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors.
• Chotiner, Isaac (7 December 2012). "V.S. Naipaul on the Arab Spring, Authors He Loathes, and the Books He Will Never Write". The New Republic.
• Fraser, Peter D. (2010). "Review of V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer by Gillian Dooley". Caribbean Studies. Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus. 38 (1): 212–215. doi:10.1353/crb.2010.0027. JSTOR 27944592.
• Gorra, Michael (2008). After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-30476-2. Retrieved 19 September 2013.
• Greenberg, Robert M. (Summer 2000). "Anger and the Alchemy of Literary Method in V. S. Naipaul's Political Fiction: The Case of The Mimic Men". Twentieth Century Literature. 46 (2): 214–237. doi:10.2307/441958. JSTOR 441958.
• Marnham, Patrick (April 1994). "An Interview with VS Naipaul". Literary Review.
• Mustafa, Fawzia (1995). V. S. Naipaul: Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-48359-9. Retrieved 19 September 2013.
• Naipaul, V. S. (17 October 1974). "Conrad's Darkness". The New York Review of Books.
• Miller, Karl (November 1967). "V. S. Naipaul and the New Order, The Mimic Men". The Kenyon Review. 29 (5): 685–698. JSTOR 4334777.
• Naipaul, Shiva (1986). "Brothers". An Unfinished Journey. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 978-0-241-11943-3.
• Naipaul, V. S. (1986). "A prologue to an autobiography". Finding the Center: Two Narratives. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-394-74090-4. Retrieved 19 September 2013.
• Naipaul, V. S. (12 February 1987). "The Ceremony of Farewell". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (23 April 1987). "On Being a Writer". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (31 January 1991). "Our Universal Civilization". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (12 May 1994). "A Way in the World". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (18 February 1999). "Reading and Writing". The New York Review of Books.
• Naipaul, V. S. (4 March 1999). "The Writer in India". The New York Review of Books.
• Pritchard, William H. (2008). "Naipaul Unveiled: Review of The World Is What It Is, The authorized biography of V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French". The Hudson Review. 61 (3): 431–440. JSTOR 20464886.
• Robertson, Jean; Connell, P. J. (rev) (2004). "Wilson, Frank Percy (1889–1963)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 27 September 2013.
• Rosen, Jonathan; Tejpal, Tarun, eds. (1998). "V. S. Naipaul, The Art of Fiction No. 154". The Paris Review.
• Singh, Bijender, ed. (2018). V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Evaluation. New Delhi: Pacific Books International.
• Visaria, Pravin; Visaria, Leela (1983). "Population (1757–1947)". In Dharma Kumar, Meghnad Desai (ed.). The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, c.1757–c.1970. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-22802-2.

• V. S. Naipaul on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture 7 December 2001 Two Worlds
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• V. S. Naipaul on Charlie Rose
• V. S. Naipaul on IMDb
• Works by or about V. S. Naipaul in libraries (WorldCat catalog)