Literary Occasions (14 page)

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 family 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

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.

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.

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).