V.S. Naipaul, Second Edition

V. S. Naipaul Second Edition

Bruce King

V. S. NAIPAUL

Other books by the author Modern Indian Poetry in English (second edition) Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama/ ‘Not Only a Playwright But a Company’/ The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 1959–1993 Three Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Ramanujan and Moraes Coriolanus Modern Indian Poetry in English History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World Marvell’s Allegorical Poetry Dryden’s Major Plays Books edited New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction West Indian Literature (second edition) The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer Post-Colonial English Drama: Commonwealth Drama since 1960 The Commonwealth Novel since 1960 Contemporary American Theatre West Indian Literature A Celebration of Black and African Writing Literatures of the World in English Introduction to Nigerian Literature Dryden’s Mind and Art Twentieth-Century Interpretations of All for Love: A Collection of Critical Essays

V. S. Naipaul Second Edition

Bruce King

© Bruce King 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published 1993 Second edition published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0455–3 hardback ISBN 1–4039–0456–1 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data King, Bruce Alvin. V.S. Naipaul / Bruce King. – 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–0455–3 – ISBN 1–4039–0456–1 (pbk.) 1. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Travel writing – History – 20th century. 3. Trinidad and Tobago – In literature. 4. Caribbean Area – In literature. 5. East Indians in literature. 6. Islam in literature. I. Title. PR9272.9.N32Z749 2003 823⬘.914–dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in China

2003049833

To Adele and in memory of Nicole

Contents Preface

ix

1

Introduction

2

Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira

23

3

A House for Mr Biswas and The Middle Passage

41

4

Mr Stone and the Knights Companion and An Area of Darkness

58

A Flag on the Island, The Mimic Men and The Loss of El Dorado

69

6

In a Free State

86

7

The Overcrowded Barracoon, ‘Michael X’, Guerrillas and India: A Wounded Civilization

100

8

‘A New King for the Congo’ and A Bend in the River

118

9

Finding the Centre, The Enigma of Arrival, A Turn in the South and India: A Million Mutinies Now

136

10

A Way in the World: A Sequence

152

11

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, ‘Our Universal Civilization’ and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples

165

12

‘Two Worlds’, Reading & Writing and Half a Life

179

13

Naipaul’s Critics and Postcolonialism

194

Appendix A: Naipaul’s Family, A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men

207

Appendix B: Naipaul, Trinidad, Guyana and Africa

209

Notes

210

Select Bibliography

217

Index

224

5

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Preface I began reading works by V. S. Naipaul during the 1970s when I was teaching in Nigeria and he was one of the writers from former colonies offering new perspectives on the world. I started writing about him in such books as West Indian Literature (1979, expanded edition 1995) which I edited, and in my New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World (1980). My V. S. Naipaul (1993) was intended for students. When Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature I decided to bring that book up to date and extend the material to include topics not discussed in the first version. The second edition of V. S. Naipaul has four new chapters covering Naipaul’s recent novels, his two books on Islam, a discussion of criticism of Naipaul, along with new biographical, bibliographical and interpretative material. Over a third of the book is new. This is still intended as an introduction, especially for those studying Naipaul in the context of postcolonialism. Many critics thought the first edition of this book of interest; I hope that a new generation will do so along with others who want to know about Naipaul as a writer and what has influenced him. Bruce King

ix

1 Introduction PERSONALITY AND REPUTATION When V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 few readers doubted that he deserved the honour for a lifetime’s achievement as novelist and for his travel writings; there was, however, a highly vocal group of critics who detested Naipaul for what they perceived as his political views. It was said that for decades the Nobel literary awards committee would turn from him to someone less controversial, someone with a less impetuous tongue, someone more progressive in politics. The award of the 1992 Nobel Prize to the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott seemed to seal Naipaul’s fate; the committee was unlikely to award the prize soon to another Caribbean writer in English. As other English language writers, Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney, were given Nobel awards, Naipaul’s case seemed forgotten, but it was not. He continued to be nominated and he continued to write. Recent publications included Half a Life (2001), his first novel since A Way in the World (1994), and the two autobiographical lectures Reading & Writing: A Personal Account (2000). In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted People (1998) he retraced his 1979 travels reported in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), a study of four Islamic societies after the revolution in Iran and how Islamic fundamentalism was developing in response to modernity. ‘Our Universal Civilization’ (1991) consisted of reflections based on his first journey through the non-Arab Muslim world. The two Islamic books and the essay had upset those who regarded the West, and especially the United States, as economic and cultural imperialists responsible for the world’s problems. Naipaul took a different view in which Islam was, according to his first book, enjoying the benefits of a universal secular civilization, while retreating from rationality into faith. The second book was even more controversial as it regarded Islam as an alien religion imposed on other peoples who were being Arabized by the new fundamentalism. For Naipaul, 1

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a Trinidad Indian from a Hindu family, Islam had been in the past and continued to be a worse colonizer than the West. He claimed that the Muslim invasion stupefied India whereas British imperialism made India part of the modern world and led to the renewal of Indian culture and politics. In Reading & Writing he mentioned the destruction of Brahmin cities and culture and the tyrannical rule which followed Muslim invasions of India. Soon after the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature Naipaul perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, stepped on many sensitive toes. Newspapers reported him referring to his two homes as India and England, which made many West Indians angry. Naipaul claimed he had been misquoted. Then the Indian government invited him to a conference of writers at which he had the time of his life. He claimed it was English-language Indian writing, especially writing from abroad, which had allowed India to see and understand itself (upsetting those who wrote in other languages used in India). He interrupted a novelist who was complaining about how difficult it had been earlier in her career because she was a woman. Naipaul said he did not want to waste his time on such banality. He criticized those who were still ‘beating the drum about colonialism’ as feeling sorry for themselves; he said Indians should stop blaming the British who left India over fifty years ago. He insulted the wife of the American Ambassador and angrily left a dinner she was giving. And so it went. He then spent time in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) with Hindu extremists with whose views he reportedly concurred. After years of being irritated, even slandered, by those he felt to be fools, he appeared to be enjoying himself getting his own back, or maybe like many artists he enjoyed the attention, and if it annoyed those who tried to harm him, so much the better. Whereas many postcolonial writers appear mostly concerned with ideas and groups, Naipaul focuses on individuals in societies; like the great nineteenth-century novelists he is interested in how people create themselves and advance in life. His books warn of the need to plan ahead. He has defended snobbery and spoken of his admiration for those who appeared to rise without effort above disheartening situations. Early in life, he learned that to protect himself against the cruelties of others it was best to act superior and incapable of being hurt. In the process he had picked up affectations and a malicious tongue. Many assumed Naipaul was himself an imitation colonialist whereas he is a critic of colonialism as well as of those who replaced imperial order without seeing the dangerous currents into which they were taking their societies.

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He has a history of ill-considered remarks which can not be explained by politics and impatience. The British Council exhibition devoted to Naipaul at the Indian writing festival included posters quoting him as saying ‘No one in his right mind wants to read Hemingway for pleasure, or Galsworthy.’ He has said ‘The New Yorker knows nothing about writing, nothing’ although sections of several of his novels first appeared in the New Yorker which also has published interviews with him.1 Most writers in our time accept that reputation and sales depend on promoting themselves and their work. Naipaul is either destructively careless of how he appears to the public or, as a form of self-defence which has become a habit, he prefers an image of one who is easily irritable and not caring. As artists transform wounds into art some of the hurts behind that mask are sources of Naipaul’s writing.

THE WRITER Naipaul was born in an impoverished rural, Hindi-speaking area of Trinidad. By the time he was fourteen years old he had made up his mind to leave Trinidad as soon as he could. His father, a local journalist, introduced him to serious literature and instilled in him the notion that he should become a writer. A hard-earned scholarship to Oxford University took him to England where he has lived, written more than twenty-five books, won many literary prizes and was in 1990 knighted for his services to English literature. His career and achievement can be seen as part of the worldwide political and cultural changes that produced such significant writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie. He is part of a generation that had to face the problems and confusions that resulted from the withdrawal of imperial order. Because of family and Trinidadian circumstances he is an expatriate who, with few other means than his will and the talents that he has developed through hard work, has supported himself as a writer. For his first twenty years in England he never felt at home and is still aware of himself as an outsider. As he is from the Asian Indian minority in black-dominated Trinidad his perspective on decolonization, imperialism, black–white relations and other themes of post-imperial literatures is more complicated than that of nationalists and their foreign sympathizers. He long regarded himself as a former colonial who became a homeless cosmopolitan. As he has revealed more about himself and his past,

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he can be seen as having projected much of his personal experience on his analysis of the contemporary world; while unique his experience is representative of major social, psychological, political and cultural changes in our time. His views often have the effect of paradox and surprise forcing a re-examination of received opinions. He has said that replacing traditional farm life with industrialization can be liberating to a peasant. He objects that describing him as a West Indian writer is patronizing and limiting, like saying someone is a Yorkshire writer. A severe critic of India and the shortcomings of the newly independent nations, he feels humiliated by the weakness and exploitation of the colonized; he blames European imperialism for the horrors of slavery and for the problems it left its former colonies, while praising it for bringing peace and modern thought to areas of the world that remained medieval and debilitated by continual local wars and destructive non-Western invasions. Naipaul has a sense of vocation as a writer. His books are written and revised over many years as he tries to find the right form and selection of events for the idea. He has an unusually precise command of the English language, of its many registers, and is fascinated by regional, technical and amusing uses. He is concerned with the need for continuity, tension and liveliness in his sentences, paragraphs, scenes and chapters. While he is exact and economical in his descriptions, with an eye for details of landscapes, his often otherwise objective prose is poetic in its rich patterns of sound, cadence, rhythm and rhetorical devices. The prose is varied, energetic, filled with ironies, echoes, parodies and allusions. It reads well aloud. His deceptively prosaic, stripped-down manner is supported by alliterations, repeated words and phrases. Many of his central characters are unlikable and narrate their story in a manner that is revealing yet attractive. In the later novels, the dry, but hilariously amusing, comedy of the dialogue and the nuances of what the narrator is saying might be missed by the reader carried away by the movement of the prose. While there are several recognizable periods of Naipaul’s work, characterized by differences in subject matter, manner, technique and complexity, there is a continuity of concerns, themes and certain formal structures in his novels and books of travel. For someone of Asian descent in Trinidad to have decided early in life that he wanted to become a writer and to have kept to such a decision, although there was and still is no market for serious

Introduction

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literature capable of supporting a writer in the West Indies, was quixotic and brave. Few authors from the colonies had previously supported themselves as serious writers. Naipaul lived for many years a hand-to-mouth existence as an aspiring writer in London, where there was a literary market, but before ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ were fashionable. Even after he had become highly regarded by literary critics and a winner of most literary prizes, his royalties from books remained small. He was not widely read in the United States until the publication of Guerrillas. He found an additional source of income in travelling to and reporting on the social and cultural problems of other parts of the world, especially the newly independent nations. Such travel corresponded with his need for new subject matter beyond his memories of Trinidad and provided him with a more interesting life than the solitary existence of a novelist; it contributed to his awareness of the wider world. His own experience first in Trinidad, then as an expatriate in England and later as someone always on the move between countries, replicates the restlessness, dissatisfactions, migrations of people and rapid social and cultural changes of the present world. The more he wrote about the modern world and tried to analyse it the more significant he regarded his travel books and essays, with the result that literary genres began to blur, mix and blend; he created new forms in such books as In a Free State, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, that combined autobiography, travel writing, analysis and fiction. Although he dislikes experimental writing and avant-gardism and is often said to be a nineteenthcentury realist writing in an era of postmodernism, he created his own, original, blend of fiction, reportage and autobiography – new literary forms for our time. While critics contrast his realism with Salman Rushdie’s Magic Realism, he was at the forefront of those bringing together various kinds of writing in fiction. Naipaul understands the novel as an investigation of society which reports back to society how it is changing. The societies which were the subject of the great nineteenth-century novels have passed; novels which reproduce such forms and retrace such materials are likely to be minor. The great subjects of our time are political decolonization and its consequences, the migration of peoples, the universally shared desire for the goods and comforts of modern society, the resentments of those sharing such desires but whose cultures are threatened by modernity. His books are concerned with such topics, but they are also about writing and the relationship of art to reality

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and how in prose we create a narrative which gives form and order to life. His fiction often has subtexts: the novels can be understood as autobiographical in the sense that they are projections of his own life and anxieties of homelessness, of living in more than one culture, of needing to find a narrative order for experience, of needing to achieve, of having to build a monument to his own existence through his writing. His fiction is also often based on models to which he alludes. Such intertextuality provides a sense of historical continuity, revision and renewal.2 His books are filled with characters who write, want to write or pretend to write; they are filled with parodies of bad writing, people who out of ignorance confuse serious literature with letter writing, bad journalism, pamphlets, unedited diaries, pornographic fantasies. There are characters who mistake prominence in the cultural industry, broadcasting or occasional book reviewing, with being a writer. Because he is interested in historical writing and sees himself as an historian of his time, someone inquiring into the condition of society and culture in the late colonial and post-imperial era, there are many bad, foolish or mistaken historians in Naipaul’s novels. He has been writing a history of our time, a record and analysis of many of the main events, such as decolonization in India, Africa and the Caribbean, the growing conflict between Islamic religious fundamentalism and Western enlightenment, or racial relations in the southern United States after the victory of the civil rights movement. He has often returned to the same places, India, Africa, the Caribbean, England, noting changes, re-examining society, revising his analysis. His novels are usually based on fact, known people and events.3 The travel books are filled with characters, voices, representative documents, places. Naipaul has created a portrait of our era. He has made conscious decisions about his subject matter or the direction his writing should take. They were decisions made from analysing his own situation as an expatriate West Indian writing for the British and American literary markets. He has also made decisions that can be explained by his own obsessions and by the high seriousness with which he invests being a writer. Much effort went into research for The Loss of El Dorado, an attempt to understand the historical causes that led to the creation and problems of modern Trinidad. Although he has published on an average of one book every eighteen months, his novels and many of his non-fictional works are

Introduction

7

often, over a period of years, written, revised, left unfinished and then started again from the beginning. There is the need to find the right ‘idea’, a story – selected from some larger experience – which will embody the themes; the ‘idea’ includes such methods of presentation and embodiment of the idea as the structure of the book, the kind and treatment of the narrator, the voice and language of narration, the recurring images, the tonalities. Each novel is a discovery; they have different ways of presenting material, even different sentence patterns. The continuity and liveliness that Naipaul desires in his writing comes only after the descent of the muse is followed by hard work. Certain conscious formal structures recur, such as the division of a story or novel into two equal halves, the importance of the centre of the book, the choice between prologues and beginning in the middle of the action, the use of epilogues; but writings not blessed by the muse must be put aside for another time or discarded.

BIOGRAPHY AND WRITINGS Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in rural Chaguanas, Trinidad, on 17 August 1932, the second of seven children. His father was long dependent on his wife’s family with whom he quarrelled and he often lived separate from his wife. Naipaul’s early years were that of an almost fatherless poor relative vulnerable in a squabbling large extended family. Even when he moved with his family from Chaguanas to Port of Spain in 1938, the family remained unsettled, lived among relatives, kept needing to move, and did not have a house of their own until 1947. The constant shifting from house to house with his sisters and younger brother and being at the mercy of others resulted in Naipaul, by the time he was fourteen, creating for himself a mask of superior aloofness and left him with a lasting preference for order, style, achievement and solitude. He has questioned how anyone can bring children into this cruel world. His mother’s side of the family, the Capildeos, were important orthodox Hindus and include leading Indian Trinidadian politicians. By contrast Naipaul’s father was modernizing and critical; at times he received death threats from within the family and once was forced into publicly performing an ancient Indian sacrificial ritual. While Naipaul is a rationalist, secular, a strong believer in Western individualism and scepticism, he is emotionally attracted towards

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Indian fatalism, passivity and philosophical notions of the world as illusion. Both world views vie with each other in his writings. He hated the narrow, circumscribed, brutal life which surrounded him in colonial Trinidad with its limited possibilities, small range of professions, notorious political corruption and racial and religious conflicts. He felt that traditional Indian culture was decaying, its rituals incongruous in Trinidad, and bound for extinction. The Indians among whom he lived had a social world of their own uninvolved with the other races. The Trinidadians of African descent appeared to have no traditional culture of their own and modelled themselves on the English, their centuries of humiliation resulting in resentment, a brotherhood of skin colour, and fantasies of deliverance. The local whites had produced nothing of lasting value, were often drunkards, uneducated and privileged. They had the best jobs. There was, however, a bond between the descendants of former slaves and slave-owners from which the Indians were excluded and which resulted in the blacks replacing the whites as the dominant group as Trinidad moved towards self-government. Naipaul wanted to escape and had his own fantasies of being one of the early Aryan horsemen who conquered India and created its great Sanskritic culture. During Naipaul’s youth opportunities for education beyond primary schooling were scarce in Trinidad. The only good secondary schools were in Port of Spain; they were expensive and there were only a few scholarships available through a national competitive examination. There was no local university until 1970; there were four scholarships to foreign universities that could be gained through a national examination. In 1942, Naipaul won a scholarship to Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, where he studied French and Spanish and played cricket. In the autobiographical Reading & Writing he says that his success in the examination resulted from cramming, mindlessly grinding away at material he never understood as it was foreign to the circumstances in which he lived. Until he left Trinidad he lived mostly within the psychological confines of his family and the enclosed world of the Hindu community. After graduation he worked for periods as a teacher at the College and as a temporary clerk in the Registrar-General’s Department (the basis of the story ‘History: A Smell of Fish Glue’ in A Way in the World). He went to Oxford University in 1950 on a Trinidadian government scholarship and received a BA Honours in English in 1953.

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His university days are the subject of Between Father and Son: Family Letters (2000), edited by Gillon Aitken.4 The letters are mostly between V. S. Naipaul, his older sister Kamla, and their father Seepersad Naipaul. The mother seldom writes and seems an outsider to their interests in writing, culture and becoming independent from her wealthy but insulting family. In one of the last letters before his death Seepersad remarks that he and his wife had never grown close. The other five children are younger and a theme of the letters is the conflict between devoting oneself to a future career, especially as a writer, and helping others in the family gain an education. When the volume begins Vidia has left for Oxford University where he will study English and Kamla is in India at Benares Hindu University taking courses in Indian culture. They are both brilliant scholarship students but lonely, isolated, unused to life outside of their extended family, a loneliness that will become worse as Vidia falls into a deep depression that lasts most of his time at Oxford, while Kamla becomes highly emotional, even unstable. They are often ill (Vidia suffers from asthma) and along with their father usually in financial trouble. They keep sending each other small sums that they cannot afford. They are also similar in that they spend money to cheer themselves up. Vidia laments his thin coat in which he freezes and his old shoes which leak in the rain, and he never has money to repair his typewriter, but he brags of having tea every day at the most expensive hotel in Oxford. Those quirks of Naipaul’s personality that have amused or angered others were already there and their causes are obvious, as is their model in his father who while always in debt becomes obsessed with raising expensive orchids and who keeps asking for novels from England. While the outlines of the Naipaul family story are implied in his novels and autobiographical essays, the details in the letters are unexpected. There is Vido (the name he used until the British dubbed him Vidia) who was a good bowler at cricket, who enjoyed doing hard, day long physical labour on farms during his university vacations, who arrived at Oxford unfamiliar with European three course meals, which he describes to his family the way an American tourist might describe the conventions of traditional Indian eating, who was learning that in England one says ‘raincoat’ instead of ‘cloak’, and who wanted to prove that he can write English better than the English. There is Seepersad who while his son was at Oxford was himself having his first short stories read on the BBC Caribbean Voices Programme and who felt that if only he did not

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have a family to support he could become a writer, his main ambition in life; and there is Kamla who is the one to return home to support the family after Seepersad has a stroke and dies, while a tougher Vidia announces that he has taken an English wife and that his first novel has been accepted for publication. After leaving Oxford an impoverished Naipaul lived in a relative’s dark basement room in Paddington trying to write, worked for a short period during 1954 in the National Portrait Gallery in London, then became a freelance writer with the BBC in London. Although he left Trinidad too young and was of the wrong ethnicity to have participated in the black-led cultural developments of the 1950s that accompanied plans for a West Indian Federation, he was an editor on the influential ‘Caribbean Voices’ which broadcast the new West Indian writing to the region.5 He married Patricia Ann Hale and the next year, 1956, returned briefly to Trinidad, found it stifling and in the midst of racial and political conflict; his career as a writer was in London. His first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), an amusing study of the rise of a West Indian politician from humble beginnings in a rural Hindu community, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize. The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) is a comic novel concerning the buying of votes in an isolated, predominantly Hindu community during the second election by universal adult suffrage in Trinidad. Miguel Street (1959), a volume of linked short stories which won the Somerset Maugham Award, was actually the first book he had written, although the third to be published. Between 1957 and 1961 he regularly reviewed books for the New Statesman in London while writing A House for Mr Biswas (1961), his first major novel, an imaginative reconstruction of his father’s life and his own youth in Trinidad. A travel scholarship from the government of Trinidad allowed him to tour the West Indies, at a time when Indian–black tensions were again running high, and resulted in The Middle Passage (1962), the first of his travel books. Afterwards he explored the land of his ancestors, thinking he might live in India. The story of his disillusionment and recognition that he was now a homeless product of colonialism and the new world is told in An Area of Darkness (1964). While in India he wrote Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), his first novel with an English setting. This began the second phase of his work. The manner is more serious, less openly humorous, and more clearly philosophical in its themes. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize.

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During the 1960s African colonies were becoming independent nations and their new universities were self-conscious centres of cultural decolonization. During 1965–66 Naipaul was sent to Makarere University, Uganda, by an American foundation as a visiting professor, writer or intellectual – which it was is not clear as Naipaul refused to teach and used the time for his own writing. He met Paul Theroux, then a young American author of magazine articles who was a lecturer in the English Department and part of a group associated with the influential journal Transition. This was the most rewarding time of their friendship. Eleven years younger, Theroux, who was in love with Africa and an African woman, was Naipaul’s opposite, guide and pupil. Naipaul was already the author of prizewinning novels, famous for Biswas, although apparently unknown to the English Department and unread by those he met with the exception of a cranky Englishman, an old India hand who had retired to Kenya to run a hotel and insulted everyone except Naipaul whose novels he had read and admired. Naipaul finished The Mimic Men at his hotel, and used the hotel keeper and his inn in ‘A Free State’, a novella partly based on a long car ride that Theroux and Naipaul took together at the time when Milton Obote attacked the Kabaka of Buganda, destroying the traditional power structure that had survived British colonialism, so that the new national government would be the only source of authority in Uganda. Naipaul would also write about Uganda in ‘Home Again’ where he mentions how the African government stirred up feelings against Asians. Theroux acknowledges in Sir Vidia’s Shadow6 that Naipaul taught him how to be a writer, made him revise an article ten times, then told him to reduce it by half. The older writer insisted on honesty, transparency, making each word clear, avoiding tricks and mannerisms. Naipaul believed in Theroux, treated him as a younger writer learning how to write. Such faith was important to Theroux; Theroux says that Naipaul looked down on almost everyone else, white or black, as inferior; whites in Africa were second-rate, the men probably homosexuals seeking black youths, the Africans still primitives with a veneer of Western culture which would soon be lost. Naipaul’s concern was with the Indians who were making no plans for the consequence of African rule and seemed unaware that soon they would be expelled, their wealth confiscated. Theroux claims that later in London Naipaul was no different; he ignored British writers as inferior or bores and he mocked but participated in social climbing among the titled.

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Naipaul’s feelings of exile, homelessness and disaffection with England, Trinidad and the solitary life of the writer, along with an awareness that he was becoming a voice of the postcolonial world and its discontents, found expression in his second major novel, The Mimic Men (1967), which gained the W. H. Smith Prize. A Flag on the Island (1967) consists of previously uncollected short stories he wrote at various times, along with the title story concerning the cultural and political changes in Trinidad since the 1940s, especially the new nationalism and black racial assertion which he felt to be fabricated by the politicians and influenced by the United States. The story was originally written for a film; Naipaul withdrew from the project after disagreement with its sponsors. Between September 1966 and November 1968 he wrote The Loss of El Dorado (1969, revised edition 1973), which examines the early history of Trinidad, situating it within such wider events as the European search for gold, and the American, French, Haitian and South American revolutions. The material will recur in such later works as A Way in the World. Feeling he had made a contribution to Trinidadian national selfawareness and that he could now come to terms with and settle in Trinidad, he sold his London house and returned to the West Indies at a time of great political unrest when each of the islands was threatened by black and Cuban-style revolutions. He travelled through the United States and Canada until his money ran low, exploring possible places to settle. The 1970 Black Power demonstrations and the attempted revolution in Trinidad resulted in his return to England where he settled in Wiltshire (the subject of his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival). Although the third period of his writing reveals a sense of despair as he examines the ambiguities of freedom, it includes some of his best work. England became his home from which he travelled to learn and write about other parts of the world. During the next decade he was often abroad in Africa, India and South America as well as, during 1978, teaching at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, in the United States, where he upset students who took his course expecting a raging Third World radical and instead heard him denounce such revolutionaries and utopians as destroyers of societies. He vowed never to teach again. In a Free State (1971), which won the Booker Prize, breaks the boundaries between genres, mixing autobiography and fiction. It consists of short stories, a novella and two excerpts from a travel

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diary (which might be fiction), linked by a concern with the problems of freedom for the individual and the decolonized world. The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972) is a collection of articles, several of which offer a disillusioning analysis of recurring problems of the small former colonies. The novel Guerrillas (1975) has as its background the Black Power demonstrations, in 1970, and the less well known 1973 guerrilla movement in Trinidad. It explores the social and cultural forces that created such movements and led to the founding of a commune in Trinidad by ‘Michael X’ who killed two of his followers. Besides carrying out research in Trinidad, Naipaul knew those in the London literary world who encouraged a light skinned mixed race West Indian hustler to become an imitation black American revolutionary. Naipaul’s investigation of the commune and the murder was originally written for a newspaper and was later republished in ‘The Return of Eva Perón’ with the ‘Killings in Trinidad’ (1980) along with an article discussing Joseph Conrad and ‘A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa’. The reading and travel that went into the latter two essays also bore fruit in a major novel, A Bend in the River (1979) and a limited edition of A Congo Diary (1980). After his first trip to India Naipaul had to re-examine himself and his career as a writer. He had run through his memories of his time in Trinidad and had outgrown the comedies of his first novels. Not having been raised in England, not being a white Englishman, he could not write novels about the British class system. Faced by the problem of what to write, he began an analysis of such problems as the conflict between freedom and security in his own life and in the decolonized world. His need for rationality, achievement and order in an otherwise violent, chaotic, purposeless world contributed to his acceptance, in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), of the need for Mrs Gandhi’s government to impose a State of Emergency. The supposed illogicality at the heart of most recent nationalist movements, of wanting the material benefits of modernization while rejecting the civilization and thought that have made such production possible, animates much of his writing of this period including Among the Believers (1981), a book which begins with him travelling to a still hopeful Iran shortly after the revolution and concludes in an already disillusioned Iran where the clerics have gained power and the Marxists who supported them are dead or in hiding. According to Naipaul there is now a ‘Universal Civilization’, as represented by Europe, the United States and Japan, which offers the

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kind of tolerant society and material comforts most people of the world want.7 To aspire to such freedom and goods while wanting the imagined securities of the past can only result in irrational rage and fantasies. The world has always consisted of change; it is necessary for people and cultures to adapt. This must, however, be done creatively, making use of local resources, and with planning and hard work rather than by mimicry of the former colonial powers. A new phase of Naipaul’s work begins with Finding the Centre (1984) which consists of a travel article about the Ivory Coast and ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’. For a time the focus shifts from discussion of the problems of freedom and irritation with irrationality to a celebration of the various people and places Naipaul discovers through travel and writing; he now wants his readers to understand how he works, what goes into his writing. His own past, and his struggle to be a writer, are now less a time of raw anguish than memories recollected in tranquillity. He had by now become an internationally famous writer awarded honorary doctorates by the University of the West Indies in Trinidad (1975), Columbia University in New York (1981), Cambridge University (1983), University of London (1988), Oxford University (1992) as well as the Jerusalem Prize in Israel (1983) where many of his books were translated into Hebrew, the T. S. Eliot Award (1986), the Trinidad Trinity Cross (1989) and the first David Cohen British Literature Prize (1993), the latter for a lifetime’s achievement as an author. His successful struggle to be a writer and the creation of a world of his own, through travel, settling in a house in England and the transformation of his own experience into literature are celebrated in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), a complex, densely written novel which explores the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. As in his writing since Biswas celebration is balanced by emotions concerning the pains behind the achievements and an awareness of time passing and the deaths of family and friends. Two travel books followed. A Turn in the South (1989) sympathetically regards the American South as a place of cultural continuities and religious faith which has unexpected similarities to Trinidadian history. India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) re-examines his earlier dismissal of Mahatma Gandhi’s nationalism and finds the current fragmentation of Indian society a sign of renewal as formerly marginalized, impoverished, passive communities are now creating modern, purposeful lives.

Introduction

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INDIAN INFLUENCES Although Naipaul is a rationalist he has a Brahmin’s devotion to study, scholarship, philosophical thought, vocation; there is a Brahminian consciousness of cleanliness, purity, food and the various duties expected of a well-regulated life. While criticizing Brahmin ritualism and caste discriminations he reveals an interest in and nostalgia for its rituals, and he is aware of caste. His books are of this world, but his characters and autobiographical passages reveal an attraction towards retreat into the spiritual life. Naipaul satirizes Indian notions of fate, but his novels are usually structured around such Indian notions as the four stages of an ordered life – student, marriage and house owner, retreat into study as a preparation for total withdrawal from worldliness. There is a continuing conflict in his writings between the chaotic freedom of the world and the fulfilment of Brahmin ideals. The novels tend to have a double structure in which events are both seen from a Western perspective – causality, individual will – and allude to a Hindu explanation in which the world of desire and things is an illusion consisting of cycles of creation and destruction. The European perspective dominates, but the Indian world view contests it and has its attractions. He is conscious of himself as an Indian and is well read in Indian history and literature. His seemingly detached understatement (a characteristic found in such Indian writers as R. K. Narayan and A. K. Ramanujan) can be misleading; there is concern. The coolness covers anger at injustice, irresponsibility and irrationality. His criticisms of India are those of a nationalist who feels humiliated by the passivity, factionalism and traditionalism which allowed foreign conquests of India and which contributed to the decay of the great Indian civilizations of the past. India: A Million Mutinies Now reveals a dislike for the Islamic conquerors of India who for many centuries cruelly and brutally killed those who opposed them. Naipaul regards the unification of India under the British during the second half of the nineteenth century as the beginning of a national revival which led India into the modern world with a knowledge of itself and its history and which gave it the concepts that led to independence and growth. By contrast Beyond Belief examines the Arabization of parts of the Islamic world among non-Arabs as a new colonialism leading away from modernity towards medieval ignorance. He has often said that his perspective is not that of a secure white European liberal preoccupied by historical guilt. Although slavery

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and imperialism were terrible crimes, they were not uniquely European. Africa, India and the Arabs practised forms of slavery and continue to do so. Indians have often been the victims of Africans and Muslims. His novels, such as Guerrillas and In a Free State, reveal a dislike of white liberals interfering in, and romanticizing, other societies, about which they know little and from which they can safely flee the consequences of their interference. Family life in Trinidad revealed to Naipaul that the world is cruel, competitive, antagonistic, a war for advantage. Imperialism can even be desirable if it brings order, peace, security and knowledge and raises people to a larger, more tolerant view of the world beyond their petty local conflicts and limited vision. Naipaul’s perspective has been shaped by the humiliations of his youth; it is also influenced by his consciousness of being Indian and the humiliations India and Indians have suffered. India’s weakness led to its people being shipped around the world as indentured labour, to the abandonment of the Indians in black-dominated Trinidad and Guyana, the expulsions of Indians from Africa and Fiji.8 Although he avoids the useless, self-defeating, self-wounding rhetoric of protest and resentment, his writings note the humiliation of Indians whether during the Islamic conquests, the British destruction of the former Indian economy, the fear felt by Trinidadian Indians towards black policemen, or the confiscation of Indian businesses in postcolonial Africa. He writes often about the condition of India and the Indian diaspora, of which he is a part. He sees his travels as analogous to those of the diaspora as displaced Indians journey through the modern world attempting to create a home elsewhere and as they revise their history to explain their own predicament. Brought in the mid-nineteenth century to the West Indies, especially Guyana and Trinidad, to replace the freed black slaves, the Indians were indentured labourers on contracts with few rights. In Trinidad the Indians reformed their societies, even restoring caste distinctions, and purchased land for farming, but they remained isolated from the dominant white and black communities, without education in English and without legal consideration. Hindu marriages, for example, were for many decades unrecognized by law. During Naipaul’s childhood impoverished homeless Indians who spoke only Hindi were still hoping to return some day to Mother India. When talk of independence came to Trinidad the Hindu Indians felt insecure, fearing being left by the British under the dominance

Introduction

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of the black community which had organized itself politically and which, concentrated in the cities and having gained access to English language education, staffed the police and civil service and influenced the government. The British Labour Party wanted decolonization and favoured such black intellectuals as Eric Williams, who had studied in England and wrote books about the relationship of the West Indian sugar plantations to slavery and imperialism to capitalism. Williams’s public lectures on such topics at Woodford Square were the beginning of a movement which resulted in the formation of a disciplined political party that led Trinidad to independence and governed it for decades. But for a Trinidadian Indian the rhetoric of decolonization was filled with black nationalism, pan-Africanism, Judaeo-Christian notions of black racial deliverance and Marxist models of single party states. In such a situation the Hindu was the outsider, the marginal, the opposition to those who felt destined to inherit the apparatus of the state at independence. It was only after Williams’s death that Indians shared in the government; even now tension can run high between the two major ethnic groups in Trinidad with the two major parties still regarded as black and Indian. Arnold Rampersad, who despite his Indian name is a part black Christian and worked for a time for Williams’s PNM remembers ‘the ever-present campaign of humiliation and demoralization and threats of violence aimed at Indians … in the capital, Port of Spain, in the late 1940s …. I do not want to leave the impression that East Indians were not, for their part, hostile to Afro-Trinidadians. However, they were a minority, and their normal hostility took a different, far less physical form, and counted for almost nothing in Port of Spain, where few Indians lived.’ Rampersad says, ‘it is no more possible to understand Naipaul’s mind and art without reference to racism, violence, and intolerance in Trinidad than to understand Richard Wright without reference to the same factors in the South.’9 In A Way in the World Naipaul includes two autobiographical stories, ‘History: A Smell of Fish Glue’ and ‘Home Again’, explaining the effect such events had on him. The violence and accusations of treason against Indians during the period 1946 to 1961 influenced Naipaul’s view of decolonization in unhomogeneous, mixed societies, a view reinforced by the confiscation of the businesses and the expulsions of Indians from newly independent East and Central African nations. Naipaul has taken such knowledge with him on his travels where it has been

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confirmed by the situation of minorities in other parts of the world. His comments on such matters have angered those intellectuals who insist that all postcolonial literature should consist of resistance to imperialist, capitalist, white patriarchy.

REALISM AND INVENTION Much of what Naipaul writes about is based on real people and actual events; they are changed and re-imagined as they become part of fiction. He may also make use of films he has seen, literary texts, even his reading of history as sources of his fiction, but his life and the world he has experienced is at the core of his writing and vision of the world. There is often an autobiographical side to the fiction although it is a mistake to equate the narrator with Naipaul. It is especially his West Indian fiction that is close to real people and events. ‘Man-man’ was a well known character in Port of Spain who has been written about by several Trinidadian authors. The Mystic Masseur is based upon an Indian masseur who became a famous Trinidadian politician. Biswas is modelled on Naipaul’s family history. Although Naipaul is a realist such a description does not do justice to him or to his work. As a writer he has always been conscious of literary models and conventions which he uses, parodies and revises. The British literary tradition seemed foreign to him; his knowledge of the world outside Trinidad first came from American movies rather than books. He had to discover his own literary voice in such models as his father’s writing and in the anonymous sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes. His early fiction with its con men, surprising turns of fortune, and ironic twists of plot, is influenced by Lazarillo de Tormes. Often his models are a subtext providing contrasts to his own subject matter and the societies he portrays. There is a continuous and evolving struggle to find the right shape for his material and vision. This ranges from learning how to write about the East Indian community in Trinidad as its traditions decayed and it entered the national community, to learning how to write about his own attempts to understand himself. His fiction became more psychological, complex, distanced in tone, drier, less amusing, as he attempted to understand the world and his characters. As he became conscious of the private sources of his vision, including his reading, and became willing to reveal them,

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his writing mixed autobiography with the fictional and the observed world. As literary kinds blur together the writing becomes more self-referential. There are more gaps permitted, less causality visible in the narrative. Even his travel writing evolved: recent books appear more filled with the voices of others. As he allows the material to express itself, as he leaves room for contrasting opinions, his conclusions come as a surprise. His evolving complexity as a writer is especially seen in his treatment of sex and women. The early fiction is critical of the brutality with which West Indian men treat women, while seeing sexual desire as a temptation which interferes with a person’s rational decisions. Romantic love in his novels is often self-destructive. In the later novels he shows how male sexual insecurity leads to sadism and hatred of women while women themselves are often masochistically attracted towards brutality. He has alluded to problems of sexual satisfaction in his first marriage and resorting to prostitutes. He often implied that sexual desire was a humiliation which he hoped would pass with age. Then he suddenly found satisfaction in a well publicized passionate international affair with an Argentine woman and in interviews alluded to the awakening of his physical senses.10 When Patricia Hale died in 1996 Naipaul soon after married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a journalist who was raised in East Africa and who attracted his attention when she publicly kissed him at a literary event in Pakistan.

WEST INDIAN LITERATURE When Naipaul was a student in Trinidad and even when he began publishing in England there was little Trinidadian literature. Except for Claude McKay (1889–1948) and Jean Rhys (1894–1979), exiles many decades earlier from Jamaica and Dominica, and a few sporadic minor early figures, West Indian literature of serious interest began to develop only in the 1940s and 1950s with such novels as Edgar Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder (1941), Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952), George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1954), John Hearne’s Voices under the Window (1955) and Naipaul’s own The Mystic Masseur (1957).11 Naipaul was part of the movement during the 1950s towards a distinctly West Indian literature; he was involved in the ‘Caribbean Voices’ radio programme; he used local subject matter and dialect. His analysis of the problems of colonial

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Trinidad is similar to that of other West Indian writers of the time. As they lacked a regional literary market, publishers interested in local writing, and a readership, the writers were expatriates living and publishing in London. There was, however, a small body of Trinidadian literature from the 1930s onwards written by a group that was first associated with two short-lived magazines, Trinidad and The Beacon (1931–33). Albert Gomes, Alfred Mendes and C. L. R. James were nationalists and progressive politicians who wrote fiction during the 1930s about working-class life in the barracks, especially the lives of blacks. Naipaul would later read their work as among the few earlier attempts to write about life in Trinidad. Naipaul’s father, Seepersad (1906–53), was in contact with a related literary circle; in 1947 this group published an anthology, mostly of poetry, that included Seepersad’s ‘They Named him Mohun’, which Naipaul used as the basis of the opening section of Biswas.12 It was Seepersad Naipaul’s own self-published short stories in Gurudeva and other Indian Tales (1943, which his son revised for republication in 1976 as The Adventures of Gurudeva and other Stories) which began Indian writing about their community in Trinidad and which showed Naipaul how he could write about the world he had known as a child. Naipaul’s younger brother Shiva (1945–85) also became a writer as has a nephew, Neil Bissoondath. Seepersad avoided the West Indian middle-class literary tradition of political and racial protest, of sentimentality and anger, with its contrasts between white and black, rich and poor, European and Creole. Instead he wrote about the rural Indian community from within; he wrote about it objectively and with a touch of satire, aware that its traditions were ossifying and becoming sterile as a result of distance from their land of origins. This was the starting point for Naipaul’s own writing, to which he brought a superior education and familiarity with the classics of literature, a heightened sense of structure, a greater dedication to the art of writing, the advantages of exile, distance and opportunities to publish in England. Naipaul’s early fiction brought to West Indian writing the social awareness and comedy characteristic of British fiction, the sense of form and economy found in the early fiction of James Joyce and a Proustian awareness of change, time and memory. He brought a new depth and seriousness to West Indian fiction. While Samuel Selvon (1923–94), another Trinidadian Indian novelist who began publishing before Naipaul, had a similar sense of humour, he was

Introduction

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a less accomplished writer. Although Selvon’s London novels created a model for black British speech in literature, his Trinidadian novels are somewhat limited to racial relations, vague philosophizing, and discontent about the limitations of West Indian middle-class life. Naipaul brought the West Indian novel into the mainstream of contemporary fiction at a time when Derek Walcott was establishing West Indian poetry and drama as worthy of international attention. They were part of a generation of writers who decolonized English literature. The literary market for West Indian writers was also changing. Writing about his father’s lack of opportunities Naipaul has said: 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 … My father was a purely local writer, and writers like that ran the risk of ridicule. Attitudes began to change when Derek Walcott of St Lucia gained attention by publishing locally his first volume of poems in 1949 – it was soon republished in Barbados – and when Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel about Trinidad, A Morning at the Office, was published in England. And then there at least appeared a market. The BBC Caribbean Voices took local writing seriously, had standards and paid well enough to spread a new idea of the value of writing.13 Naipaul was part of this change both as an editor for ‘Caribbean Voices’ and through his own success as a writer.

POST-IMPERIAL LITERATURE Besides being one of the small group who put West Indian literature on the international literary map, Naipaul was one of the Commonwealth writers who made the English aware that the new immigrant communities consisted of more than labourers, musicians and politicians. His writings include a history of the problems of coming to terms with life as an immigrant. Towards the conclusion of Biswas there are allusions to his unhappiness as a student in England, Mimic Men portrays life in a London bedsitter and the lives of

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political exiles, Guerrillas examines the ways British women use black men for sexual excitement, A Bend in the River notes the new Arab presence in England, while The Enigma of Arrival tells of the slow process in understanding a new land and settling. Two stories in A Flag on the Island and his short novel Mr Stone show him trying to write about British society; ‘Tell me who to kill’ in In a Free State is a marvellous portrait of the frustrations of an immigrant. Naipaul would write about London during the 1950s in part of Half a Life. The difficulty in making the transition from writing about the Trinidad he knew to writing about an England in which he felt alien forced Naipaul into becoming the first of the new international novelists from former colonies who find their material in the postcolonial world. He discovered what was to become the most significant literary subject of the past half century. It is necessary to remember that Naipaul sees himself as part of the Indian diaspora and not as black. If he does not have Selvon’s interest in and seeming easy ability at creating a black London, Naipaul begins the new great tradition of writers from the former colonies telling of the post-imperial world. It is clear from statements made by such writers and critics as Farrukh Dhondy and Homi Bhabha that his early fiction showed others that it was possible to write significant fiction about the former colonies without resorting to the clichés of European writing, and that it was possible to see the interest and problems of local life without nationalist stereotypes. Along with such writers as Soyinka and Achebe he was examining the problems of decolonization and why national independence rapidly led to political corruption, political violence, various forms of tribalism and tyranny. Rushdie, Gurnah and others follow from their example. Naipaul is the only writer to have taken on a broad perspective of the contemporary world and its discontents. His subject matter and travel books range from the Caribbean through India, Africa, South America to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia. Naipaul has been influenced by his youth in Trinidad, discrimination against Indians in many parts of the world, his struggle to earn a living as a writer, his vision of life as being brief, insecure, without purpose, a jungle of warring groups, unless it is given purpose through achievement, continuity, an ideal of order backed by real power. He has also been attracted to giving up the struggle, accepting nothingness, withdrawing into inactivity, Indian fatalism. As a writer he knows it is important to get facts right and not confuse them with ideas. He knows that writing creates the narrative order that the world lacks: through it we can understand and celebrate ourselves.

2 Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira While Naipaul’s first three books of fiction are extraordinarily popular because of their comedy, implicit are such themes as the way impoverished, hopeless lives and the chaotic mixing of cultures result in fantasy, brutality, violence and corruption. The three books are also social history showing the start of protest politics during the late 1930s and how Trinidad began to change during and after the Second World War. The infusion of American money and the beginnings of local self-government created new possibilities where few existed before; but such social change is treated amusingly, without the analytical perspective found in later novels. The origins of Miguel Street (1959), a volume of linked short stories, can be found in ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ (1982) where Naipaul recalls thirty years earlier, in a room of the BBC in London, writing the first sentence of ‘Bogart’ from his memories of Trinidad. It was one of those gifts from the muse that writers need to get started: The first sentence was true. The second was invention. But together – to me, the writer – they had done something extraordinary. Though they had left out everything – the setting, the historical time, the racial and social complexities of the people concerned – they had suggested it all; they had created the world of the street. And together, as sentences, words, they had set up a rhythm, a speed, which dictated all that was to follow. (Finding the Centre, p. 19) The antiphonal refrain, ‘What’s happening there, Bogart?’, ‘What’s happening there, Hat?’, brought to the surface memories of people and the life he had known in Port of Spain and soon a small world, 23

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full of its own life and ways, having its own unique manners and morals, was sketched in. Naipaul’s subject was an impoverished area of Port of Spain with its cultural diversity, fantasies, chaotic and changing standards, its fashions and imitation of style, its mistaken notions of masculinity and mistreatment of women, its self-defeating excuses, its limitations and the improbability of achievement from those living in such an environment. The tales reflect a time when Naipaul’s family had moved from the enclosed Indian world of the countryside to the more ethnically varied Port of Spain. Miguel Street is a racially mixed community predominantly black, brown and Indian but with some Spanish, Portuguese and ‘whites’. Although to the boy who narrates the stories the men lounging on the streets represent community standards, the people seem in transit and houses rapidly change owners. Miguel Street is not exactly a slum as its inhabitants look down on those areas where the people are dirtier, poorer or rougher. Style is important to the men as it is a way of asserting visibility in an impoverished colonial society which offers few opportunities for riches, fame or achievement. Style may be a matter of imitating a current movie star like Bogart, noticeable eccentric behaviour, mystification about the past, or an apparently careless disregard for social conventions (Laura has eight children by seven fathers). Status may be gained by having, like Eddoes, a night job as a garbageman, allowing freedom from work during the day and the display of a uniform along with the pickings of the trash of the wealthy in other parts of Port of Spain. Style is the underdog’s way of being unique, a way to assert identity, a mask for failure. Many of the stories evolve from the boy’s admiration of the pretences of those around him to a revelation of failure. B. Wordsworth claims to be writing a great poem and tells of a tragic love affair, but he is an unemployed calypso singer who has never written poetry; his romantic love story is a lie. Popo busies himself with carpentry, supposedly making some ideal Thing Without a Name, but he makes nothing; the furnishings of his house are found to be stolen. In many stories the entrance or exit of a woman from a man’s life leads to some major change in behaviour and the central character is arrested by the police. In Miguel Street nothing is made, no business succeeds, no art work is finished, no love or marriage lasts. Miguel Street differs from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Joyce’s Dubliners in its social comedy and seeming lightness of tone, the impression of business and activity. Bogart may be ‘the most bored

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man I know’ (p. 9) and the boy when he grows up and leaves school may turn to drinking and whoring because ‘What else anybody can do here except drink?’ (p. 167) but the narration does not romanticize, sentimentalize or protest; rather there is a Trinidadian world of the carnivalesque in the public displays of imitated and assumed character. Everyone appears to be play acting in public, creating small dramas. There is a tolerance, even an appreciation, of eccentric self-display. Incongruity between pretence and reality is characteristic of Miguel Street. Gestures, words and ideas do not have the same meaning in an impoverished colonial society as elsewhere. What appears self-expressive turns out to be masks for failure and is the result of Trinidad being a colonial backwater, a place without the means to enable a better life. Even leaving is difficult. There is worse poverty elsewhere in the West Indies as is shown by the Grenadians coming to Trinidad. Qualifications for better jobs can only be gained by taking British examinations. In a colony which then had no university and few secondary schools, further education means going abroad, and that requires money or one of the few government scholarships. It also means a break with the past and facing an alien world without the support of family, friends and excuses. When the narrator does leave at the conclusion he is ‘looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac’ (p. 172). ‘Man-man’, an often anthologized story from Miguel Street, shows that Naipaul had already devised the methods and structures he would often use in his books. An analysis will be useful towards understanding what is consistent as his fiction evolves. Like many of Naipaul’s narratives, ‘Man-man’ is based on fact; there was a well-known person like him in Port of Spain.14 The selectivity of presentation means that there is a subtext of implied explanations to be inferred; the larger significances are understated. Naipaul binds together the narrative and the prose by repetition of sounds, words, phrases, sentence patterns, images, parallel and analogous events. What seems simple and easy, almost natural story telling, will be found to be highly crafted towards continuity, movement and the symbolic. While the prose is economical, straightforward, rapid in movement and clear in its presentation, its sound patterns are richly textured, creating a sense of organic flow. There are, for instance, the ‘m’ sounds in the first paragraph: Miguel, Man-man, mad, him, am, mad, many, much, madder, Man-man. The second paragraph picks up the ‘m’s: ‘He didn’t look mad. He was a man of medium height’

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(p. 38). The continuity and movement are built from repetitions and variations. The method of organization of sound and connectives is a model for the story and the book, which move rapidly while being tightly woven and organized. Like many of the novels Naipaul will write ‘Man-man’ is organized by two contrasting halves. In the first half there are a number of seemingly discontinuous episodes, which reveal character, circumstances, desires and context, but which suggest a lack of direction, an aimless shuffling around, and which end in a failure requiring a new start. The second half shows the character driven by some new prospect, rises in excitement, develops and expands the possibilities, has continuity, but instead of a climax there is a burst bubble, a rapid descent. Within this scheme there are other clearly articulated sections, especially in the first half; the second half is more continuous as the story gathers together its themes for what at first appears a new start. During the following discussion it would be useful to look at the text, the sections of which I will number from I.1 onwards. After the introduction (I.1) to character and theme – ‘Everyone in Miguel Street said that Man-man was mad’ (p. 38) – there is a small character sketch (‘He was a man of medium height, thin’) and the raising of the question of whether Man-man is really so different from everybody on Miguel Street (‘I can think of many people much madder than Man-man ever was’). The use of the past tense creates a double perspective, the narrator as a child when he saw the events he is narrating and the mature speaker with his sense of judgement and distance. From the very first sentence a contrast is created between the community, ‘Everybody’, and the lonely, eccentric Manman. As the story develops we see that his fantasy life is not unlike that of the rest of the community. Each section is clearly articulated with a conclusion, transitional sentence or introduction: ‘But he did have some curious habits.’ I.2 concerns Man-man’s eccentric political life. The absurdity of his campaign parodies politics in Trinidad at that time, when candidates were independent personalities without a party. ‘They just had the word “Vote” and below that, Man-man’s picture.’ Yet at every election two others always vote for Man-man. Hat provides another perspective and focus besides that of the narrator, the community and Man-man. Hat is the voice of adult sanity and experience: ‘they must be funny sort of jokers if they do the same thing so many times. They must be mad just like he.’

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Hat’s speech with its West Indian grammar contrasts to the standard English of the narrator and creates a sense of the culture and society in which the story takes place. The lack of grammatical coordination implies a society with different, fractured norms and values. Section I.3 begins ‘Man-man never worked’; he passes the time scrolling a single word on the sidewalk. The parallel is to the boy’s education at school. The status symbols and educational system in colonial Trinidad are inappropriate; its Britishness is mimicry: ‘If you shut your eyes while he spoke, you would believe an Englishman – a good-class Englishman who wasn’t particular about grammar – was talking to you’ (p. 39). Man-man is another of Naipaul’s characters who is a failed writer or artist. In Man-man’s madness there is cunning, aggressiveness and a kind of rationality. After he barks like a dog in a café and is ejected (I.4) he manages to enter the café after it has closed and leaves ‘little blobs of excrement’ (p. 40) on every stool and table and at regular intervals along the counter. People laugh at the owner of the café. Humiliation of others is admirable by local values. Hat says ‘These people are really bad-mind.’ The character-sketch of the dog, I.5, is an amusing parallel to the previous description of Man-man, even echoing some of the same words (‘curious’, ‘never’), and suggests a similar sense of isolation: ‘It never made friends with any other dog’; but there is affection between Man-man and his dog. ‘They were made for each other.’ Man-man has trained his dog to defecate on command (I.6), and it soils clothes left by others to bleach overnight; people then give the clothes to Man-man who sells them. Man-man becomes a local hero, similar to the con men and tricksters who in The Middle Passage Trinidadians are said to admire: ‘all the people who had suffered from Man-man’s dog were anxious to get other people to suffer the same thing’ (p. 41). The story until now illustrates what in The Middle Passage Naipaul describes as a picaroon society with its lack of responsibility, its animosity, aggression, taste for corruption, lack of respect for the person, lack of rigid social conventions, its natural anarchy, cynicism and eccentricity (pp. 80–3). The story has evolved from a character sketch to an indirect sketch of a community and its unusual values. While Man-man is alone the story feels populated by lots of ‘Everybody’ and how they respond to what he does. The first half of ‘Man-man’ evolves from snippets to longer episodes. The second half, which is more unified, has continuity and concerns Man-man’s religious conversion and his attempted

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self-crucifixion. The second half begins with a clear transition when Man-man turns ‘good’ (which is, like ‘curious’ or ‘men of mystery’, ironic; it directs attention to further implications beyond Man-man’s conversion). The death of the dog (‘it gave, Hat said, one short squeak’) foreshadows the end of the story, while providing an explanation of Man-man’s change in behaviour, caused by the need to find some new source of income, a new business to replace selling dog-soiled clothes. Man-man’s conversion to preaching, like much of Naipaul’s humour, depends on incongruity: ‘he said he had seen God after having a bath’ (p. 41). After the character sketch (‘He began talking to himself, clasping his hands’), Naipaul immediately expands the relevance of the story from Miguel Street to all of Trinidad, by alluding to its factual basis (a spiritualism masseur was an important local politician and member of the legislature). Section II.1 concludes amusingly, ‘I suppose it was natural that since God was in the area Man-man should see Him’ (p. 41). Man-man (II.2) preaches against political independence, does well financially in his collections and begs for food, claiming he is following the ways of Jesus (II.3). Having found a successful career that does not require a trained dog, Man-man becomes carried away and announces he is the ‘new Messiah’ who is going to ‘crucify hisself’ (p. 43). He writes notices saying that he will ‘tie hisself to a cross and let people stone him’ (p. 43). Man-man is a con man, fantasist, half-mad and, like the other characters in the stories, driven by an inner need to find a social role through creating an imposing identity to compensate for the limitations of his life. There is a frightening if amusing contrast between the facts and the seriousness with which the community regards Man-man’s imitation of Christ (II.4). When Hat tells of a rumour that the cross is made of matchwood and is light, Edward snaps, ‘That matter? Is the heart and the spirit that matter’ (p. 43). A truck takes the cross, instead of Man-man carrying it (II.5), and as soon as people begin throwing large stones at Man-man on his cross he looks ‘hurt and surprised’ (p. 44), demands to be untied and threatens to ‘go settle with that son of a bitch who pelt a stone at me’. But the crowd continues to throw stones while he shouts ‘I finish with this arseness, you hear’. Man-man is for once normal, while it is the crowd that is mad; the community has become violent. Only after his fantasy life collapses is Man-man removed from the community, to an insane asylum. The last words of the story, ‘Then for good’, echo the ‘to turn good’ with which the second half begins.

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‘Man-man’ is similar to the stories in the first half of Miguel Street in its two-part structure, its reversal of tonality and the expansion of themes in its second half, the role of someone who is depended upon (wife, dog), in the transformation of the character’s behaviour, of the way the character becomes carried away by a fantasy which he or she is unable to keep up when faced by an increase in the pressures of reality, the centrality of acting as opposed to a real character, and the way the story rapidly ends in an anticlimax, humiliation, defeat and the coming of the police. The madness of Man-man’s preaching, which becomes part of his crucifixion fantasy, is frightening. Man-man became a leader, an example of West Indian politics rooted in personalities and the desire for deliverance and salvation, the combining of the political and the religious that has so often been characteristic of political leadership in the New World and which was noticeable in Eric Williams and other black nationalist leaders during the late colonial and early independence periods. Oxaal says both lower- and middleclass blacks saw Williams as ‘a Messiah come to lead the black children into the Promised Land’.15 ‘Man-man’ is more than an amusing tale of eccentricity. It shows how distress and lack of accepted social standards bring about fantasy and violence, and produce leaders without any clear programme but who provide public drama. The story looks forward to Naipaul’s study of Black Power movements, and especially the events in Trinidad in 1970 and 1973, in Guerrillas. The structure of Miguel Street as a book is similar to that of ‘Manman’. The various stories are linked subsections of a larger story concerning the narrator and his relationship to Hat, which comes to a conclusion in the next-to-last story of the volume and which is followed by the narrator’s disillusionment and departure for England. The first half of the book has two sections. ‘Bogart’ to ‘The Coward’ are tales of failure which follow a pattern of amusing fantasy followed by deflation. Each central character is a mockery of some ideal: Popo is a philosopher, Morgan is a comedian. There is often a clear break, loss of wife, temporary disappearance or loss of direction by the main character, then a change as the story becomes more serious, reality is found to be more dangerous and violent than it first appeared, often the police come and the fantasy collapses; the character is defeated or found to be a fake. As the volume proceeds the stories become more complex, as humiliations are shown to be the basis of the eccentricities which produce local heroes, heroes who are fraudulent and dangerous. Big Foot compensates for

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childhood humiliations by acting like a dangerous bully; he wins boxing matches until he is defeated by a supposed, but fake, RAF champion and begins crying in the boxing ring. After these early stories ending in defeat are two transitional tales, ‘The Pyrotechnicist’ and ‘Titus Hoyt, I.A.’, in which the central character seemingly overcomes a personal history of failure to triumph, but the triumph itself is pathetic. Morgan finally gets recognition as a maker of fireworks when he burns down his house and runs away. While this is Naipaul the ironist, it shows the personal and social consequences of distress. The early stories portray a world of men without purpose. While the men treat their women as inferiors, their world is held together by women; the failure of the men is typified by their relation to, or lack of, women. This is anticipated in Bogart with his humiliation at not being able to have children and his deserting his wives to: ‘Be a man, among we men’ (p. 14). These men are illustrations of the weakness of the West Indian male, his inability and unwillingness to be responsible for a family and a woman. It is the women who are strong. Morgan tries to act like a patriarch, but wanting the approval of other men he carries on supposedly comic public trials of his children and when this backfires he gets drunk and bellows: ‘You people think I am not a man, eh? My father had eight children. I his son. I have ten. I better than all of you put together’ (p. 69). Morgan tries to prove his manliness by an affair with Teresa Blake, is caught by his wife and publicly humiliated: ‘Mrs Morgan was holding up Morgan by his waist. He was practically naked, and he looked so thin, he was like a boy with an old man’s face’ (p. 71). In reading these stories and Biswas it might be remembered that the duties of a Brahmin include education and having a house and family. The stories in Miguel Street usually take place in public. Naipaul has commented that in the West Indies life is public, unlike in England where life takes place indoors behind shut doors and curtained windows. But the Trinidadian camaraderie of the street is seen as hollow, something the boy outgrows as he learns it is a world of failure, of talk rather than achievement. The characters are adrift, aimless, culturally, socially, politically, economically and ethically impoverished, without realizable ideals. Thus the humiliations, eccentricity, play-acting, brutality and failure. After ‘Titus Hoyt’ there is a deepening of emotion, the characters become more complex or there is a recognition of tragedy. Laura may be heroic as the archetypical West Indian matriarch, having

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children by different men, surviving on her wits and what she can get from her men, but when her own unmarried daughter has a child and starts to repeat the cycle of West Indian womanhood she feels it would be better for her daughters to die than to be like herself. Contrasted to the women of Miguel Street is Mrs Hereira who descends from the rich secure white world, leaving her almost perfect husband, for a drunk who violently beats her. A story concerning the relationship of sexual desire to sadism, masochism and love, it also anticipates Naipaul’s later novels, such as Guerrillas, where well-off whites, bored with their security, look for emotional excitement by playing at being unconventional and idealistic, expecting that when life becomes dangerous they can return to the safe world from which they came. Mrs Hereira is a forerunner of Jane in Guerrillas and Yvette in Bend. Romantic love is a luxury of the rich white. The boy’s mother, an Indian, says: ‘If somebody did marry you off when you was fifteen, we wouldnta been hearing all this nonsense, you hear. Making all this damn fuss about your heart and love and all that rubbish’ (p. 111). Naipaul’s novels differ from most European and American fiction in portraying romantic love and sexual freedom as destructive, a dereliction of one’s real duties. The perspective is Indian rather than European. Indian attitudes are often playfully present in the stories. Uncle Bhakcu, ‘The Mechanical Genius’, reads the Ramayana every day and succeeds as a pundit, although a West Indian one crawling under cars trying to be a Western mechanic while ‘Hindus waited for him to attend to their souls’ (p. 127). In ‘His Chosen Calling’ Eddoes, from a low Hindu caste, is a sweeper and proud of his inheritance. British social comedy is tinged by Hindu notions of caste and fate. Some stories have allusions to or quotations from the calypsos. Originally from Trinidad, the calypso is brutal in its comments on topical events. The difference between the calypso and the newer Soca (a mixture of calypso and black American soul music) is that the former gives priority to the words and is satiric, the latter to music and is for dancing. While Naipaul’s use of the calypso adds to the colour and realism of his stories, it also shows the likely Trinidadian response in contrast to the innocence of the boy narrator; the calypso represents the harsh actualities of the society in contrast to the humanism and sympathy for characters inherent to the conventions of European fiction. Naipaul has often written with approval of the direct honesty of Trinidadian discussion of such matters as race

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when he was younger. Like the Calypsonian he observes and comments without sentimental illusions. The calypsos are also social history and are used, along with references to films, cricket matches and well-known events to create a record of Trinidad for a decade from the late 1930s until after the war. Approximately twelve years pass; the boy narrator is eight years old at the start and over eighteen at the conclusion. At the start Trinidad is a colony dependent on England, then the war brings the Americans with their money, new kinds of social relations, attitudes, jobs; next come elections and talk of independence. There are two frames of reference: history as seen locally and local history in relationship to the wider world. Such use of an outside, European historical frame of reference was common to many works of fiction of the late colonial and early independence period when writers had both to put local society on the literary map and to relate its chronology to what foreign readers would know. Later writers would no longer feel that such a broad perspective was necessary. They had become more confident that readers were interested in fiction told from a Trinidadian, Indian or African angle; the former colonies had become less marginal to modern history. When Titus Hoyt takes the unwilling boys to Fort George and tells them that the fort was built in 1803 when the French were planning to invade Trinidad, and ‘we was fighting Napoleon’, the boys are stunned as: ‘We had never realized that anyone considered us so important’ (p. 81). The stories allude to a time when Trinidad was important for its plantations, a former economy which is recalled by the remains of decaying buildings. There is a history here, a possible, ‘usable past’, when Trinidad was a significant place in the Empire and part of world trade and worth fighting over in contrast to the impoverished, neglected Trinidad of the 1930s and 1940s in which the outside world seems distant and incomprehensible to Bolo and others. Miguel Street consists of memories of a lost childhood homeland. Nostalgia is the usual subject matter of the first book of an expatriate colonial writer. Unlike such books there is in Miguel Street little sentimentality for paradise lost, none of the expatriate’s usual yearning for the protection of family, tribe, friends, unquestioned customs and obligations. Naipaul may have felt such emotions, and from his comments in ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ and The Enigma of Arrival there is reason to think that Trinidad remains emotionally ‘home’ in contrast to the alienation of exile, but the short stories are astringent in their ironies. They are his Dubliners and A Portrait of the

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Artist as a Young Man. They show why it was necessary to leave and remain away from home. The developing perspective of the boy narrator as he grows up shows his understanding that a period of his life has ended, the secure world he knew has fragmented; Hat, his adult mentor (the substitute father figure in the stories), has aged, become crazed for a woman, been jailed and broken. If the narrator does not leave Trinidad he will become another failure like those he admired. Even the Americans have departed, packed up their base and left, taking with them the money, attitudes and new opportunities which became available during the war years. Under the comedy is criticism of ‘home’ and its acceptance of its fate and habits of accepting defeat. Bolo, in ‘Caution’, fails so often at everything he does that when he wins some money on the sweepstake he refuses to believe it, as it would destroy his sense of being a victim; he tears up the ticket and withdraws into himself. It is easier to blame the imperial powers or racial discrimination or Trinidadian corruption than to accept past foolishness and failures of character. Naipaul’s concern with the decay of traditional Hindu Trinidad and the incongruities of its existence within a predominantly black, Westernized, national community of various cultures results in irony, comedy, absurdity, when English words and ideals do not apply to what actually happens. Particularly in politics, there is a misfit between liberal notions of representation and decolonization and the realities of society in a late colonial or newly independent state. In The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira politics are a vehicle for Trinidadian Hindus to become part of a larger national society; but the politics are for personal gain and advancement rather than those of social justice, ethnic dignity and independence. In The Mystic Masseur Pundit Ganesh moves easily through various roles and careers as is fitting to someone who is part of, and representative of, a larger cultural change which the Indians share with the other Trinidadians as the island evolves towards independence. But there are the resulting incongruities as an unsuccessful Hindu masseur becomes, through the study of modern psychology, a rich successful medicine man for the black Trinidadians and then a leading national politician who is eventually knighted by the British. Throughout the novel we are made aware of the contrast between the Hindu notion of karma or fate which Ganesh claims to follow and the stubbornness and cunning of his personality. The cultural confusion he represents is echoed in the various ways his tale could

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be told – as an illustration of fate or as a New World version of the European novel of personal will, ambition and success. The Mystic Masseur (1957) is like early Evelyn Waugh or R. K. Narayan in its speed, economy, understated satiric ironies, incongruities, comedy, undeveloped characterization, and unexpected changes in the direction of the plot, contrasts between what is said and done, parody and the ironic placing of characters by a few details of the scene or by habits of speech. The narration is tinged with small as well as larger ironies. As we follow the evolution of Ganesh’s life, the descriptions, scenes and events are often in contrast to what we understand. At the Government Training College for teachers in Port of Spain, Ganesh ‘was taught many important subjects and from time to time he practised on little classes from schools near by. He learned to write on a blackboard …’ (p. 23). Within a few words three topics are quietly ridiculed, the courses taken in colleges of education, blackboard training and the improbability that practising on small select classes will prepare teachers. A few pages later we see the reality of local education: ‘If you leave the boys alone, they leave you alone’ (p. 25). While the characters in The Mystic Masseur are often grotesques, Dickens’s caricatures, much of the comedy comes from the economical insertion of ironies (‘the stimulating peace and quiet of the country’ [p. 31]) or absurdities (‘Is his father dead, you know. His only father’ [p. 30]). In spite of the seemingly ironic claim to be a story of ‘a hero of the people’ (p. 11) and ‘the history of our times’ (p. 18), The Mystic Masseur is both. Those familiar with Trinidadian history may recognize how Naipaul has used local events, characters and such politicians as Uriah Butler, Albert Gomes, Arthur Cipriani and Naipaul’s two uncles, Rudranath and Simbhoonath Capildeo, in his novel.16 A mystic masseur was an independent member of the legislative council; the masseur’s practice of getting headlines by walking out, or having to be carried out, from the legislature was Albert Gomes’ method; the last stages of Naipaul’s masseur’s political career (the misjudging of the mood of strikers, the conservative turn, the international conferences) seemingly are based on Cipriani and Gomes. Naipaul’s early fiction is based on memories of Trinidadian cultural and political life before he left for England in 1950. He brings together characteristics of various political leaders. Ganesh’s rise to political prominence took place at a time, immediately after the Second World War, when the British were rapidly trying to unburden themselves of their colonies, but before real political parties had

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been formed in the colonies. It was a transitional period of flamboyant personalities rather than party organization and ideologies. These were the first elections to the legislature by universal adult suffrage, in contrast to appointed representatives. It was also a period when Trinidadian politics were notably corrupt and when some of the politicians were intellectuals who had studied in England: [Indarsingh’s] speeches were long, carefully thought-out things – later published by the author in book form with the title Colonialism: Four Essays – about The Economics of Colonialism, Colonialism in Perspective, The Anatomy of Oppression, The Approach to Freedom. Indarsingh travelled about with his own blackboard and a box of coloured chalks, illustrating his arguments with diagrams. Children liked him. (p. 201) Indarsingh is a version of a character who will reappear in Naipaul’s novels, the Indian who attends a famous British university and returns to Trinidad with superior but inappropriate and ineffectual attitudes. British political culture is seen as absurd in Trinidad when at the time, 1946, there was no strong sense of nationhood, little education, little political discussion, no political ideals or policies. Ganesh is an Indian version of Man-man, the unemployed, apparently untalented, marginal man who finds a career and employment first in religion and then as a leader of the people. Naipaul’s depiction of Trinidadian politics is amusing, but his laughter is defensive. His method is to invert and treat ironically what influences and concerns him. If The Mystic Masseur is a parody bildungsroman and a mock autobiography of a hero of the people, behind it is a sense of hurt. Trinidad is an impoverished colony where Hinduism decayed to a crude sense of ethnicity without any understanding of its philosophy and rituals. The black community, as represented by Mr Primrose, mimics white British behaviour to absurd extremes and seeks signs of racial prejudice.17 The materials for personal and national advancement are not available. This is a marooned, impoverished, disorganized, neglected colonial society which has been given a gift of elections. There is in Naipaul’s irony both brutality and amused admiration. Ganesh may be laughed at as he becomes G. Ramsay Muir but he is offered sympathetic interest, and his ability to remain independent and rise above circumstances is admirable. By contrast Indarsingh is treated with scorn. Naipaul admires those who manage to succeed,

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those who seize the time and make use of opportunities. Better that than fail and make excuses. Ganesh is the self-made hero of the classic nineteenth-century novel treated in terms of a backward society which offers few chances for advancement. Ganesh breaks all the rules, refuses to marry the woman his father chooses, quits his job as schoolteacher, and has a strong sense of himself as different and ordained for something larger than what is available in contemporary Trinidad. While it takes years for him to find a role, first as mystic masseur, then as politician, he is shrewd. He humiliates Ramlogan into paying for his survival until he can find a way to advance himself. Later, as a famous mystic he will control a fleet of taxis and a restaurant and receive part of the profits from materials sold to be used in rituals. He instinctively realizes that books and a general education will enable him to fulfil his ambitions.18 He is a modernizer. He uses his reading in psychology and self-salesmanship to cure his patients. He not only makes himself, continually rewriting his history and taking new names and careers, he brings together the symbols and knowledge of the various cultures of Trinidad – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, modern, traditional. He even uses, according to circumstance, English, dialect, Hindi and a bit of Spanish. He offers an ironic, Trinidadian version of a rags-to-riches story. He is a hero of the people, an example of a people, especially Trinidadians of the Indian diaspora, remaking themselves, in ways that are necessarily crude, brutal, comic. The tone of the novel mixes attitudes of distaste, understanding, enjoyment, wonder and acceptance along with amusement. Throughout the novel there are allusions to writing, books, book reviews and printing. If the novel shows how little understanding there is in Trinidad of literature, its genres and levels, the literary marketplace and the writer’s career – and by implication why Naipaul had to leave Trinidad to become a writer – it also shows the need for self-definition through writing. Ganesh’s writing is not only of poor quality and imitative, it is self-serving. No sooner does he write an autobiography than he suppresses it and abandons writing to pursue his political career. While at various stages in his life he uses narrative to make sense of himself and history, the lack of vocation and dedication leads him elsewhere. Several of Naipaul’s later characters, such as Willie Chandran in Half a Life, will write one book and turn to something else. The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) begins where The Mystic Masseur leaves off. The first novel sketches in the social history of Trinidad

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through the 1930s and 1940s until the first election in 1946 under universal adult franchise. Ganesh is representative of the first generation of politicians, flamboyant individuals lacking political parties and organizations. The Suffrage of Elvira concerns 1950 and the second general election under universal adult franchise when ‘people began to see the possibilities’ (p. 13). ‘Possibilities’ is ironic for the many ways people can gain, financially and socially, from politics. The buying of blocks of votes from leaders of ethnic communities, the paying for funerals, food and drinks, was common practice in Trinidad at the time when Port of Spain was known as the Sodom and Gomorrah of West Indian politics.19 But this is not the usual novel about postcolonial corruption; it has none of the open anger, disillusionment and harsh satire of the novels of Chinua Achebe, Kwei Armah or Wole Soyinka about the betrayal of ideals by politicians and society fighting over the spoils of independence. Naipaul treats similar themes and portrays a similar process but his manner is amusement at the social comedy. On the basis of what he had learned about human nature within his large Indian family he did not expect anything better to come from the political process, and he has learned to hide his personal wounds. It is this scepticism that distinguishes The Suffrage of Elvira from such a work as V. S. Reid’s New Day (1949). New Day is a nationalist novel told in Jamaican English which views elections as a step towards independence. Naipaul treats the granting of political power as something the British wanted. Contrasted to the lack of issues and open bribery for votes there is the ‘Colonial Office documentary film about political progress in the colonies, the script of which was to be written, poetically, in London, by a minor British poet’ (p. 180). The Suffrage of Elvira is set in an isolated, neglected region, with a large Indian population, rather than the more politically active black community of urban Port of Spain. Blacks are not central to the novel and the politics are between individuals who are supposedly leaders of the Hindu and Muslim-Indian communities. There is no criticism of British rule by the narrator or his characters, no overt ideological position; although there is the implicit one that British electoral processes are a mimicry of alien practices in such a community. The novel shows what Naipaul in A Middle Passage describes as a picaroon society, a society without fixed rules in which humiliations and advancement are often rapid and seemingly arbitrary, in which life can be brutal and in which there are no ethical standards and cunning and conning are accepted and admired.

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‘Is my top. I thief it from a boy at school’ (p. 74); ‘… you don’t have to bribe them twice’ (p. 132). It is assumed that bribery and seeking personal advantage is an accepted way of life. At the school polling station the clerk subjects the voters to long delays until Harbans gives him ten dollars. ‘They visited warden, returning officer, poll clerks, policemen: a pertinacious but delicate generosity rendered these officials impartial’ (p. 155). To prevent tampering with the ballot results you need ‘men of tried criminality’ (p. 186). At the conclusion the winners and losers are what individuals have gained and lost in relation to each other in the course of events connected to the election: ‘Chittaranjan lost a son-in-law and Dhaniram lost a daughter-in-law. Elvira lost Lorkhoor and Lorkhoor won a reputation’ (p. 207). The novel portrays a people uninterested in ideas. Harbans is told early that if he does not purchase a van and loudspeaker for Baksh, ‘you ain’t got no Muslim vote’ (p. 18). Similar sentiments are repeated, ‘if you want my vote, you want my printery’ (p. 73). We see a population so uneducated and ignorant that they need to be taught how to make an X on their ballot papers. Many changes in voting are influenced by superstition. Trinidad in the novel is not yet a nation or people with demands and common assumptions beyond bribery and ‘possibilities’. Candidates have no policies, represent no ideologies or classes. The incongruities of applying foreign notions to such a society can be seen in various incongruities of speech and action. The ‘Epilogue: The Case of Whisky’ offers a democratizing of the earlier ‘possibilities’ that Chittaranjan, Ramlogan and others saw in the electoral campaign. Now that Harbans is benefiting from his position on the Council, as shown by his double-breasted grey suit and new Jaguar, everyone wants some immediate personal benefit, some reward. People see the election as a chance for Harbans to get ‘Five years’ regular pay’ and they want their share of the ‘possibilities’: ‘they waste their good good time and they go and mark X on the vote-paper for your sake’ (p. 200). ‘… Can’t just come to a place and collect people good good vote and walk away’ (p. 205). In The Suffrage of Elvira people are types and seen from the outside with an emphasis on clothing and physical features (‘He flashed his false teeth’ [p. 16]) rather than psychology. Character is fixed. Even at the end of the novel Baksh (whose name represents a bribelike gift) finds new ways to get money from Harbans. By contrast, Chittaranjan, the one character to have dignity, is so true to his

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old-fashioned Hinduism that he gains nothing from the election and accepts without question that his daughter being seen briefly one night with a Muslim has sullied her reputation, which allows Harbans to get out of the agreement that his son will marry the daughter. So much for the promises of elected politicians! But that, Naipaul accepts, is the way of the world, especially in Trinidad. Much of the novel is amusing social or literary comedy. There is Naipaul’s concern with language in its various forms, whether Trinidadian expressions (‘bacchanal’) and grammar, Lorkhoor’s inflated display of educated English (‘begging you and imploring you and entreating you and beseeching you’ [pp. 18–19]) which is imitated by Baksh (pp. 178, 191), misuse, amusing vulgarity (‘Not only pee … He shake it’ [p. 49]), insults (‘piss-in-tail boy’ [p. 81]), curses and threats (‘I beat you till you pee’ [p. 81]), or in various forms of play, ‘down-couraged’ (p. 37), and parody. Ramlogan is given a parody West Indian version of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man: ‘When girl child small, they does crawl …’ (p. 109). At the exact centre of the novel, a section which Naipaul uses to give emphasis, there is the humorous description of ‘Dangerous’ (p. 102) Tiger’s walk through Elvira, a tongue-in-cheek parody by the author of the usual scene in the Hollywood Western where a tough gun slinger walks down the main street and is commented upon by frightened onlookers. ‘Tiger came on, indifferent as sea or sky’ (p. 103). Many scenes and speeches in the novel allude to, parody or seem based on films, as the cinema was the main cultural reference in Trinidad during Naipaul’s youth. The Suffrage of Elvira has a complicated plot, cluttered with incidents and many intertwined stories. While this is characteristic of the community plot developed around a specific situation, such as an election, that is common to novels in the early stages of decolonization, Naipaul is not at ease with the form. Such novels are usually an affirmation of communal values, a subculture or a colonized people – and their portrayal of a people is a political assertion. But Naipaul’s point is rather the opposite. Here is an unhomogeneous assortment of peoples and cultures with nothing more in common than getting what they can out of a situation. Naipaul’s later novels will have a smaller cast of characters, focus on a few, have fewer events and will be less complicated in the action. They will be more Shakespearean in examining character within a society than a Ben Jonson Carnival with its whirl of many characters and multiplying plots. The Suffrage of Elvira is the last of Naipaul’s social comedies of

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the incongruities of colonial Trinidad: ‘Things were crazily mixed up in Elvira. Everybody, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, owned a Bible; the Hindus and Muslims looking on it, if anything, with greater awe’ (p. 66). With Biswas the comedy will be touched by anger, involvement, remembered scars. There will be less distance and pretence of amused detachment.

3 A House for Mr Biswas and The Middle Passage A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Naipaul’s first major novel, belongs with those classics in which through the portrayal of an individual the complexities and aspirations of a previously ignored culture are articulated, given epic, mythic stature. While it is an imaginative, fictional recreation of the past, the main characters, places and events are based on Naipaul’s father, Naipaul’s own youth and the larger family of which they were a part (see Appendix A). Although the manner remains comic, Naipaul develops some of the major themes that will recur in his fiction and which might be described as his vision of life. Towards the middle of Biswas, Anand, Mr Biswas’s son and second child, surprisingly decides to remain at his father’s incompletely built house at Green Vale although his pregnant mother, after brutality by her husband, flees to Hanuman House with her other children. Biswas has become mentally unstable through undernourishment, solitude and the harshness of his life. Abandoned by his family, trapped in a loveless marriage, poor and unable to get a foot up the ladder of life, Biswas fears being murdered by the resentful estate workers he supervises; his angry, irrational behaviour towards his wife is the start of a nervous breakdown. When he asks his son, who has lived until now at Hanuman House, why he stays with him, Anand replies ‘Because they was going to leave you alone’ (p. 279). After Biswas’s dog is horribly murdered, Anand wants to leave but is delayed by his father, who can no longer face solitude. Besides being threatened by the workers Biswas is also threatened by the natural world. A terrible storm begins. Winged ants invade the house, bite Anand and soon die. A column of fire ants appears and soon captures and carts off the winged ants. Anand hears human voices outside the house which he and his father think are those of the dismissed workers planning to harm them. The wind and torrential rain worsen; the roof shakes; some of the corrugated 41

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sheets are torn off or flap dangerously. The house seems likely to collapse. There is thunder, lightning, the wind blows out the lamp and ‘when the lightning went out the room was part of the black void’ (p. 292). Anand screams and screams as the wind sweeps through the now floorless, wall-less house until he sees a man carrying a hurricane lamp and a cutlass. He is a labourer from the barracks looking for a lost calf. The lamp illuminates a ‘wet chaos’ (p. 293); but Anand and Biswas are now saved, although the latter has temporarily lost his mind and does not know where he is or what has happened. The biblical echoes are less of the rainbow after the flood than a return to the beginning of time before the creation, an unmaking, a decreation, of the protection, comforts and order offered by civilization and society. In the Green Vale chapter the protections of society are removed until Biswas and Anand are isolated, helpless against the violence of others and the natural world. They are reduced to the condition of the insects who are defenceless against the attack of organized groups of other insects. Nature is uncaring, dangerous; life is short; creatures are naturally at war with each other and protected only by being part of a community. Biswas’s fear of harm and death is also a fear of extinction, annihilation, the void. The void is in his mind, a kind of insanity in which his selfhood and individuality are lost. The stripping away of the physical comforts and protections of civilization results in a loss of rationality, humanity, other kinds of consciousness than fear. He is metamorphosed into something primitive, subhuman. Although supposedly a rationalist he chants a mantra for protection. The chaos of Biswas’s life has brought mental disorder. Such fears have now been transmitted to his son. Here is the central vision that finds expression in Naipaul’s language of order, disorder, extinction, void, and which influences the way he looks at society, politics and culture. The world is without purpose, violent, dangerous; in the natural world life is fearful, comfortless, irrational and brutal. Creatures organize societies for self-protection, they cooperate to assure essentials such as food and to build homes for comfort and refuge. While the effectiveness of societies to provide for their members differs, anyone outside society is likely to become a victim of the void. Well-organized societies with large resources and the ability to use their resources are most likely to resist extinction and to provide superior opportunities for their citizens. Achievement, whether through writing, building

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or empire, is a way of leaving a mark on history, a way of avoiding annihilation and the void; it is a way of becoming more than the short-lived flying ant carried away for food by the fire ants. Behind the scene of Biswas’s mental collapse during the hurricane are events in Naipaul’s own life, events to which he has often alluded. There is his father’s mental breakdown, symbolized by looking into a mirror and not seeing his own reflection, which led to a withdrawal from the family. His father’s mental condition affected Naipaul; he suffered from a similar breakdown at Oxford and there are suggestions in his writings of other periods of depression. The unsettled period of Naipaul’s own childhood, moving houses, living among relatives, is reflected in Biswas’s story as are fears for the future of the Indians in Trinidad and the insecurities of his early period as a writer in London. Houses, gardens and family gatherings are often symbols in Naipaul’s novels because they represent order, society, civilization, achievement or at least their potential or ideal even when actually disillusioning. But to see the storm scene at the centre of Biswas only in regard to its themes, metaphysics, symbols and autobiographical significances ignores its clear relationship to the tempest in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Biswas brings to mind Lear, unhoused, rejected by his family, alone with the Fool, unprotected from the violence of nature. Lear’s madness is not only the result of the storm; it has a history in his foolishness and self-destructive anger as well as the harsh behaviour of others. Both the novel and the play are about individuals who thought they could stand on their own and find that once they are unhoused, powerless, outside society, madness follows. Both the novel and the play are concerned with angry, selfdestructive fathers, the father’s preference for one child (Biswas’s for his eldest daughter Savi) over others, the tearing of family bonds, the surprising love of a rejected child for the father and the father’s eventual recognition of that affection. The way Biswas’s emotional turmoil is reflected in the symbolism of tempestuous nature as well as a response to the harsh reality of nature is indebted to Shakespeare’s technique in King Lear. Throughout the novel there are literary echoes which foreshadow the parallels of the storm scene. The prologue concludes: ‘How terrible it would have been … to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated’ (pp. 13–14).20 Biswas is Shakespeare’s poor ‘unaccommodated man’. His often repeated chant from schooldays that ‘ought oughts are ought’ is a version of ‘nothing will come of nothing’.

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Naipaul builds his fiction on models and the Lear model helps him to universalize his story and contributes to the metaphysical dimension of the novel in which nature is treated as alien, uncaring, and in which people must existentially create their own significance by their actions. The parallels recall in King Lear the importance of society, of nurture as opposed to raw nature. This provides a perspective on such themes in the novel as the need for education, civilization, achievement, rationality and charity (love of others; helping others). The family drama is also universalized. History becomes a story of blind, self-destructive, angry fathers, misjudged children and the need for love, for emotional as well as material protection. Just as an individual cannot prosper without a supporting society, so art needs foundations in earlier art. Just as it is impossible for Biswas to find the resources to build a house in his circumstances in Trinidad, so he lacks suitable literary models. He reads books on self-improvement that have no relevance to his life, he hears avant garde poetry of a complexity that he cannot master and which is foreign to his circumstances. The only model mentioned which seems appropriate to Biswas’s society is Dickens, the Dickens of grotesques and the Dickens of those who struggle to survive and to find a place in their world while needing emotional satisfaction. Anand’s liking for Dickens points to the Dickenesque characteristics of Biswas. There is a radical difference between King Lear and Mr Biswas. Rather than a king foolishly giving away his power and possessions, Biswas is poor, without social position and has no possessions. He cannot even ‘claim’ his children. Such inversions of the situations in his literary models are common to Naipaul’s writings. They are part of his allusive ironies. The ironies insist upon the differences between societies he writes about and the societies of his literary models. Lear disorders his society; Biswas is born into a disorderly society, has temporary places of refuge, such as with Pundit Jairam, Bhandat’s rum shop and Hanuman House, but must create his own order, symbolized by having his own house. That he dies unemployed, with the badly built house mortgaged and two of his children in foreign lands, shows that his world is still only partly ordered, and that the disorder that began with the immigration of indentured Indian labour to Trinidad is still in process, the journey still unfinished, the diaspora still unsettled. With such differences between Lear’s world and Biswas’s their narratives cannot be similar. King Lear ends with the restoration of

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order through a new order. Biswas begins on an upbeat mood of celebration but concludes with ‘empty house’. Just the way Biswas’s Sikkim Street house has been built from various materials which the contractors found here and there, so Naipaul mixes Trinidadian social history with a large variety of European and American literary models and allusions ranging from the Bible to books by James Joyce and Marcel Proust to create a novel unlike those of Europe.21 Just as Trinidadian society is unlike English society, and a West Indian house will be dissimilar to a British house, so Biswas cannot be like Mansfield Park or Howards End. The material conditions are different, there is no house or national cultural tradition to inherit. Biswas could be read as an allegory of the painful progress of the major group among the Trinidadian Indians, Hindu northern Indians, to build a house on an island which still feels alien, unwelcoming and without the likely materials for a home. Each house Biswas inhabits, builds or owns is figurative of the condition of his situation and that of the Trinidadian Indians of the time. They range from the enclosed security of Hanuman House, the village shops in which the owners live, the unfinished attempts to build simple houses in the country to the half-modern, partly owned house of Sikkim Street. Biswas provides a social history of the community. Brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers to replace the freed black slaves, the Indians were isolated, worked on the sugar cane estates, reformed their traditional culture, even reconstituting castes, pinched pennies to purchase small plots of farming land and became owners of rum shops and small general stores. Later, some invested in taxicabs, became merchants or became wealthy when oil deposits were found on their land. It was not until the Second World War, when Americans built a national highway, that there were sufficient new opportunities, new money and modern roads for the Indians to move from the country to Port of Spain and begin their still uneasy accommodation with the urban, predominantly black and mixed creole population. As Trinidad moved towards selfgovernment, education became important; there were new, if limited, opportunities for employment. At first there was little education available to Indians. Rural schools could not prepare pupils for the entrance examination to the secondary schools in Port of Spain. Only Port of Spain offered proper tuition for the examinations. Urban whites and blacks were better placed to use education for advancement.

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Biswas’s story is both representative and a special case. The history of the Trinidadian Asian Indian could be put together from aspects of his life and the lives of those to whom he was related by birth and marriage. Yet no one single character in the novel can be said to be typical of the Trinidadian Indian; Naipaul avoids the simplifications, falsifications and dishonest sentimentality of protest fiction with its typical characters and illustrative plots supposedly representative of a community. Lives, situations and people differ. Some have luck, others do not. Some destroy their chances, others seize the day. Biswas’s older brothers as children become workers on the cane fields and never have the opportunity to learn to read or write; after his father dies and the family is dispersed, Biswas is sent to school by his aunt. Biswas foolishly marries and becomes a Tulsi, losing the favour of his rich aunt Tara; this becomes an opportunity for the children of another relative. Biswas, like most of Naipaul’s fiction, is both an investigation of society and a story of discrete, differing, individual lives. Impoverished, living in rural Trinidad, Biswas could never be an inventor; there would not be the materials, the books, the supporting culture and opportunities. He could not be a writer. He would not be familiar with contemporary models, have other writers to help him or have access to a market. Biswas lives in an impoverished colonial society in which most people do not read, education is not easily available, English is not always used for conversations, literary models come from abroad and are inappropriate for local society. Literature, therefore, seems dead, part of the European past. There is little literary culture in which to learn, develop or operate. Biswas learns to write clear prose as a reporter and for a time there is a market for lively journalism; when the newspaper’s policy changes, even that tiny literary marketplace wilts. When Biswas attempts to write fiction he cannot imagine using his own life as material, unlike Anand who, ignoring the British examples of what a day at the seashore should be like, writes an excellent composition at school describing the time he almost drowned at the beach. Instead Biswas writes and rewrites a fantasy about not being married and loving a young, thin woman who is unable to have children; literature for him is the opposite of his actual life. Significantly he writes two versions of the story, one with a white handsome hero, the other with an unattractive brown or Indian male character. Since the novels he reads are often romances about white handsome Englishmen and since he lives in a culture in

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which to be white and English is to be superior, his imagination follows such conventions. When he writes of Indians he sees ugliness, his own condition; there is as yet no local literary tradition which will show him how to write realistically about someone like himself. Biswas’s need for a house and family is partly psychological, as a result of early homelessness, lack of a father and the need for mothering. (When Biswas is expelled from Pundit Jairam’s house and returns to his mother expecting welcome and comfort ‘instead of being pleased to see him … her manner was harsh … she shouted at him’ [p. 57].) But he is also the equivalent of the orphan or fatherless hero of the European novel who comes to the capital city to conquer. Biswas wants to impress, to achieve, to make his mark on the world, to rise above his birth and circumstances. And he does so, although in a limited way, by going to Port of Spain, by becoming a locally famous journalist, by working for the government, by bringing together his family and asserting himself as head of the family, by contributing to Anand’s education, by gaining his wife’s trust, by owning a car and purchasing a house. For someone of his background and lack of opportunities Biswas’s progress is epic. Through will, chance and changing circumstances his life has evolved from homelessness, dependency on others, poverty, lack of a recognized place in the world (his birth was not even officially recorded) to a homeowner, head of a family, a father with two children who are studying abroad. He has created a place for himself in the new world in contrast to the futile poverty to which he appeared destined as a child. The novel is a celebration of his achievement (and the achievement of the Trinidadian Indian). Biswas’s struggle to establish a home is a journey from the world of the rural Indian peasant to a semblance of New World middle-class success. It is an amusing diminuation of the epic, similar to what Joseph Fielding understood when he justified the novel, then a new literary kind, as a comic epic in prose. At times Biswas has luck. Ramkhilawan, searching for his calf, discovers Biswas and Anand during the storm; Ramchand allows Biswas to stay with him in Port of Spain; Mr Burnett, amused by Biswas’s personality, is willing to give him a trial period as a reporter. Such chance encounters are important to Biswas and more likely in the city than the country. If Biswas is a celebration of Biswas’s success (a half-success since this is a half-made society which cannot offer more opportunity), and the immense pains such an achievement required in the circumstances, it is also a story of individual will. Lives are limited by

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circumstance, they are also willed. Naipaul claims that the European novel is about will and achievement in contrast to traditional Indian fatalism and passivity. Biswas’s parents are fatalistic, passive, repressive of desire and ambition. Their traditional Indian philosophy is suitable for the bare survival offered by the rural impoverished life they know. But when the family falls apart and Biswas is on his own, except for the help of his aunt Tara, he must strive to survive, unlike his mother who depressively comments that perhaps it would be better if he killed himself. The Tulsi family into which he marries appears to offer protection. Hanuman House is initially described as looking like a fortress; but Hanuman House is not a solid society. It is a temporary refuge for those by circumstances or personality unable to find a place in Trinidad. Rather than Hanuman House typifying Indian traditional culture, the Tulsi children go to Christian missionary schools, the husbands of Tulsi’s daughters live with the wife’s family (instead of bringing the daughters to their own family as is customary in India) and there is an absurd mixture of Westernization and ritualism. The makeshift, temporary nature of this small enclosed, self-protective community is revealed by its rapid disintegration, when the war brought more opportunities for Indians to acquire the skills and means to enter the wider community. It was for Biswas a longdrawn-out time of futile rebellion, of not knowing what to do, before his journey to Port of Spain, a place where there were better opportunities for employment, a chance to make his mark on the world and save money to buy a house. Naipaul associates rural life with poverty and the city with opportunity. Biswas’s rebellion against the Tulsis and his circumstances was bound to fail while he was limited by Hanuman House, The Chase or Green Vale. Without money, power, skills or available employment for which he could develop skills, his Westernized sense of self, of individuality, was bound to be frustrated. He can only be an absurd rebel, someone who attempts to paddle his own canoe without a canoe or water. And, of course, he is partly to blame. He becomes intoxicated by love and foolishly marries. When he does not demand a dowry for his marriage and does not have the strength of character to demand that the Tulsis provide him with a future career, he ruins his chances with his aunt Tara. Fearing humiliation, not knowing where to turn for guidance, he trusts appearances, even buying the Sikkim Street house without properly examining it or comparing it with what else he could purchase for the same price.

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Biswas is, like many of Naipaul’s central characters, a rebel, an outsider, even, when he has some money, a bit of a dandy. He is an impoverished West Indian version of the modern rebel. The first part of the novel shows such rebellion is futile for those still in the condition of near slavery without means of self-support. Biswas can only taunt and insult those upon whom he is dependent. In contrast to Biswas’s rebellion his wife Shama remains closely attached to the Tulsi family, accepting pressures to conform. Tulsi House is a hierarchical feudal society with Mrs Tulsi and her two sons, the royalty. Although suitable roles are found for those who conform, such as Hari who becomes family priest and pundit, everyone except the mother and her two sons are treated as dependants. Just the way the Indians of Trinidad tried to reconstruct a social order of caste and such customs as the thread ceremony and arranged marriages in the New World only to find them challenged (as, for example, by the way Ramchand goes to Port of Spain and prospers) or incongruous, so Hanuman House is an attempt at preserving orthodoxy built on unorthodox foundations. It provides temporary security at the cost of denying Western individuality and will. Afterwards everyone will be part of the individualistic, competitive new world in which advancement often depends upon educational qualifications, personal will and the willingness to take chances. The fragmentation of the Tulsis into nuclear families, each with its own house, is also, as shown in the novel, the beginning of a process of social transformation in which there will be more intermarriages between Hindus and Christians, friendships will be based on class and occupation rather than family, and children will go abroad for education and sometimes not return. The temporary reconstructed rural traditional Indian Hindu world represented by the Tulsis has largely disappeared by the end of the novel but not been replaced with another ordered society. While Indians and creoles now live and work together there is little evidence from the novel of assimilation. Biswas portrays an impoverished, disorganized Trinidad and implicitly criticizes imperialism for having created such a mess in which those of African and Indian descent have been brought together without the resources to live or make better lives. Naipaul is one of many writers from the former colonies who have criticized colonialism and who see their lands and people as victims of the Empire; he is not a simpleminded nationalist who believes that local

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cultural assertion and cries of victimization will provide a solution to the problems left by history. Trinidad in Biswas lacks the resources required for authentic independence. As Biswas discovers when he attempts to find employment or build his house, freedom can be dangerous, humiliating and self-defeating. Biswas’s situation is that of the colony, his own attempts at independence are limited by the condition of the society into which he is born; frustrated selfassertion turns into self-destructive rage, the tempest that temporarily disorders Biswas’s mind. While Biswas is a study of West Indian society, a record of the Asian Indians in Trinidad and an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Naipaul’s father, it is also in part an autobiographical novel about the relationship between father and son and about how the author of the novel became what he is. It is a version of the many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels offering a fictionalized autobiography, a portrait of the artist as a young man, a remembrance of things past. Its originality is its use of a modern European literary genre for totally different circumstances – in which the developing awareness of a young person’s moral growth is replaced by Anand’s increasing consciousness of the harsh conditions which made his father and himself. The novel has a double focus beginning with Biswas but is from the middle onwards increasingly split between father and son. There is a remark by the narrator after Myna is born which anticipates the author’s later involvement with Anand’s perspective: ‘Anand (asleep on the bed: no more rubbing for him, for the rest of his life)’ (p. 195). While this is an example of the theme of the loss of protection and motherly care that is part of growing up, a theme found in Naipaul’s novels, it also looks forward to the ways Anand will respond to the harshness and insecurities of his life. ‘Anand had a moment of alarm when he got up. His pillowcase, lying at the foot of his bedding on the floor, looked empty’ (p. 214). Such narration either sees the world through Anand’s eyes or is more sympathetic to him than to other characters. ‘He cleaned the tub, and it was such a perfectly made thing he would have liked to keep it’ (p. 335). There is an obvious joke when Anand’s enemy during the time he is preparing for the scholarship examinations is a pampered ‘simpering, lip-licking’ (p. 471) fool named Vidiadhar, Naipaul’s own first name. Whenever Vidiadhar appears the narrator drops his distance: ‘The little thug’ (p. 474); ‘his crapaud-foot handwriting’ (p. 491); ‘This was a lie. Vidiadhar didn’t even know the meaning of the words. He just liked their sound’ (p. 543).

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Biswas is, among its varied themes, about becoming a writer and how the book itself came into being. Biswas’s sense of humour and parody makes him into an excellent, if limited, popular feature writer for his newspaper, but he cannot find the distance from his own experience to turn it into art. He keeps leaving unfinished a story which is about the life he wished he had. Anand, however, after he almost drowns, writes directly from his own experience: ‘But in this last composition there were no dashes and repetitions; no hampers, no motorcars, no golden arcs of sand …. The composition ended with a denunciation of the sea’ (p. 357). Naipaul, like Derek Walcott, often associates the sea with disorder, danger, the violence of nature and death. His Caribbean is not an exotic paradise for tourists. Throughout the novel the reader is aware of the author as literary critic: ‘once [Biswas] had got a slant and an opening sentence everything followed. Sentence generated sentence, paragraph led to paragraph, and his articles had a flow and a unity’ (p. 375). ‘He had no words to say what he wanted to say, the poet’s words, which held more than the sum of their meaning …. He did not think of rhythm; he used no cheating abstract words’ (p. 484). In contrast to the bad writers, most of whom imitate British subject matter and attitudes inappropriate to Trinidad, while not knowing how to transform their models into local art, Anand both writes from his own experience and adapts Dickens’s London to his own world. He writes in his diary: ‘This is the worst Christmas Day I have ever spent; … I feel like Oliver Twist in the workhouse’ (p. 394). Here is the explanation of Naipaul’s inner world and his ironic manner. When the Tulsi children ‘spent so much time away from the house, they formed a community of their own, outside family laws. No one ruled; there were only the weak and the strong’ (pp. 411–12). ‘Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof … satire led to contempt, and … contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable’ (pp. 412–13). Earlier we are told that while ‘political books’ left Mr Biswas ‘feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever’ (p. 374) he found ‘solace’ in the novels of Dickens. ‘In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary.’ ‘He shared his discovery with Anand.’ ‘Anand understood. Father and son, each saw the other as weak and vulnerable’ (p. 374).

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The descriptions of Anand help towards an understanding of Naipaul’s distanced manner in his writing, his sense of irony, his judgements of falsity and pretence, his lack of sentimentality, his instinct for picong (attack), his attitude of superiority, his appreciation of success, his love of paradox and of acting out an extreme version of whatever he is accused of by his critics. Naipaul has said that his view of the world was formed while young, living in a large family. Naipaul’s literary and public personality has characteristics other than those given to Anand, but anyone wanting to understand what made Naipaul what he is might keep Anand in mind. Biswas needing to keep his job during the Sentinel’s new policy of sobriety finds himself ‘on the side of the grotesque’ (p. 375). Naipaul usually keeps himself on the other side whether the dominating ‘grotesques’ are on the political right or left, whether of the First or the decolonizing world. Several times in the novel we are told how Anand learns about his parents’ past. Naipaul is concerned to establish for the reader how this text came into existence, its basis in reality, and how Anand, the implied author, came into possession of the facts he recounts. Just as the early eighteenth-century novel must establish its credentials as fictionalized truth (rather than pure invention, lies) so a novel about a previously unmapped social territory and people such as the Trinidad Indians must justify its authenticity. Naipaul needs to establish such confidence and seems to be uncomfortable with the distance between fiction and the reality of personal experience upon which it is based. In his novels we are often aware of his conscious insertion of the narrator into the story, of his need to justify why what we are reading is there and how it came into being. Naipaul interpolates such information as Biswas telling the children about himself or Anand accidentally finding some old letters written to his mother. Events in Biswas’s life and the acquisition of property are often dated by the mention of events in Europe. In such an unsettled society, where the family has no records and lacks associations with the land, buildings, important events, achievements or a rooted community, history is a mystery which must be imagined from the little that is known, discovered or felt to be representative. Narrative creates an order where there was previously only disorder and the loss of the past; the novel rescues from the void Naipaul’s family history and that of the Trinidadian Hindu community. Art, as narrative and as achievement, provides a voice for the previously unvoiced, creates a place in the world for those

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unaccommodated, as did Naipaul’s Sikkim Street house. Biswas’s house, even Hanuman House, now belongs to the same order as Mansfield Park, Howards End, Brideshead, Pembroke House. It has become part of the new literary and cultural tradition of English and world literature. There is an explicit analogy between the order provided by houses and art. ‘Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent’ (p. 581). The past is soon forgotten, but Anand, homesick, troubled and lonely at university in England sometimes recalls the past and ‘later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past’ (p. 581). While Anand is imagined writing the novel as a means of regaining the past, the reader understands Anand as figurative of Naipaul. Although many novelists have used a similar convention to distance their life from their fiction, Naipaul’s clear identification with Anand keeps collapsing the distance, allowing the autobiographical to emerge more than is usual in such writing. ‘And now Mr Biswas needed his son’s interest and anger. In all the world there was no one else to whom he could complain … Anand said he wanted to come home …. But the plan fell through; Anand changed his mind’ (p. 588). The story will be continued years later in Enigma which might be considered the second half of Biswas, although from the perspective of autobiographical fiction, if one allows for its greater inventiveness, The Mimic Men is the middle volume of the trilogy, three novels which would need to be supplemented with An Area of Darkness and ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ to fill in the story. Biswas can be seen as layered upon an autobiographical foundation over which are the stories of Mr Biswas, the Tulsis, the Trinidadian Indians and even a record of change in Trinidad over the past fifty years, changes which are placed in the context of modern history. Rather than ‘a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world’ (p. 237), Green Vale and the other places in the novel are given a thereness and put on the map of modern history, a history seen, however, in the context of the Indian diaspora rather than the slave trade. The need for literary models to build upon is seen in that sentence about ‘a dot on the map of the island’ which inverts a passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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Biswas is a carefully constructed novel. I have written in detail elsewhere about how artistic order is imposed through such techniques as a tightly controlled formal structure, parallel events, recurring images and phrases, even tightly knit rhetorical and sound patterns.22 The book is consciously interwoven with such motifs as houses, gardens, Christmas, jobs, possessions, attempts at writing, historical allusions, dates, clothes, records of the past, money, education and literature. The novel has fifteen sections consisting of a prologue, an epilogue and a chronology which is divided into two parts of equal length, the first part of six sections, the second of seven sections. The first half of the novel is set in rural areas and is concerned with Biswas’s futile attempts in such circumstances to better his condition and gain the material foundations for a modern life of individualism, personal possessions, intimacy and the nuclear family. The second half is mostly set in Port of Spain and shows the more exciting life and opportunities of the city; better jobs are available, the various races and cultures begin to mix, people are more in touch with and affected by the world outside Trinidad. Time speeds up. This two-part structure, which Naipaul will use again in other works, is an expansion of his methods in ‘Man-man’ where the first half of the story seemed a group of rather pointless events as Manman scratched around for means to support himself and pass the time; then the death of Man-man’s dog brings this period to an end as it forces him to find other means of survival. The second half of that story has more continuity and development and involves the community when Man-man becomes a preacher and begins his imitation of Christ. In both the story and the novel Naipaul makes use of parallel events and phrases between the two halves. Just as the epilogue recalls the prologue in scene, phrases and events, so many sections of the novel recall earlier pages. For example the father’s funeral in the first chapter, which results in Biswas losing his home and the break up of his immediate family, is recalled with a difference by the book’s conclusion when Biswas, now a homeowner and head of a family, is buried. The first half of the novel is itself circular with the scene of Biswas’s mental breakdown during the storm at Green Vale bringing to mind such events in section I as the threatening men outside the family hut looking for money and the drowned calf. Outside Hanuman House Biswas’s life at The Chase and Green Vale recalls the village and life at the estate at the start of the novel. Indeed Biswas is, at the end of Part I, no better off than when he left his mother and started to seek employment.

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He is jobless, without money, without a home, without a family he can call his own. When he goes to Port of Spain at the beginning of Part II Biswas brings to mind his earlier innocent attempts to find employment and the role of sign-painting in his life; sign-painting brought him to the Tulsis and marriage, later it helps him towards a chance to become a reporter. Some other obvious parallels in the novel are the way Anand’s humiliation about his bowel movements at school recalls Biswas’s disgrace at Pundit Jairam’s house; Govind’s beating of Biswas (p. 135) is recalled in the description of his reconciliation with Biswas (p. 557). The fifteen years of Biswas’s life and the rapid social changes in Port of Spain usually reverse similar events during the thirty-one years in the countryside in Part I. When Biswas and his children are humiliated at Hanuman House there is no one to protect them, no place worthwhile to which they can go. When in Part II Anand is humiliated and Mrs Tulsi tells Biswas to leave, there seems, because of the housing shortage, no place they can go, but a house is found and purchased. Whereas in Part I (I.3) Hanuman House seems an ordered, protective Indian fortress, although aesthetically ugly and suffocating for individual aspirations, the lovely French estate house at Shorthills (which in section II.2 is structurally parallel to Hanuman House) reveals the collapse of the Tulsi order; it is unable to protect its inhabitants and is plundered for individual gain. At Shorthills the Tulsis have no social position and are exotic outsiders in a creolized community; symbolically they have moved from the rural Indian world to the outskirts of the urbanized part African, part French, part Spanish nation. And their destruction of the house and its gardens could be seen as an allegory of how the new society that was coming into being during the war will in its ignorance, opportunism and ruthless ways destroy the few graces left from the colonial past. Both Indian and creolized French traditions will crumble before the rush to be part of the Americanized world which followed the Second World War. After writing Biswas Naipaul was offered a grant to return to Trinidad where the head of the government, Eric Williams, suggested that he write a book about the Caribbean. The Middle Passage (1962) is the first of his travel books. Naipaul’s books, especially his early books, are based upon literary models and his model was that of a European traveller to the colonies. Only after more experience could Naipaul create his own form and manner for such books. He adopts the manner of a Victorian travel writer to examine Trinidad,

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British Guiana, Surinam, Martinique and Jamaica. His specific model is James Anthony Froude, a writer intensely critical both of the crude philistinism of the British settlers and the culture of other peoples. The model strengthens the claims that the basic situation in the region has not changed since the last century; the Europeans created no worthwhile society or culture, established no lasting economic foundations, had no vision, but imported as slaves and labourers large numbers of people from different cultures whom they discriminated against and then abandoned to their mutual antagonism without providing means of improving their situation. Mimicry of the colonizer, racial resentment, envy, political fantasy and violence are the result and can be expected to intensify with self-government unless the region can overcome ethnic differences in a positive nationalism and develop cultural pride. I had seen how deep in nearly every West Indian, high and low, were the prejudices of race; how often these prejudices were rooted in self contempt …. Everyone spoke of nation and nationalism but no one was willing to surrender the privileges or even the separateness of his group. Nowhere … was there any binding philosophy …. With an absence of a feeling of community, there was an absence of pride, and there was even cynicism … the race conflicts of every territory were growing sharper. (pp. 253–4) The nationalism of The Middle Passage seems the usual fare of the independence era of the early 1960s and should have been unexceptional. But Naipaul hurt feelings in bringing attention to racial conflicts and prejudices, offering dismissive summaries of the region’s history, and criticizing the existing culture. Some found offensive such remarks as ‘For nothing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies’ (p. 27). The essays are influenced by Naipaul’s anxieties in returning to the Caribbean, his place of origins which he had fled and rejected. ‘I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical … Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We live in a society which denied itself heroes’ (p. 43). Many of the problems raised by Naipaul are still relevant; but as they were expressed without the usual rhetoric of black–white conflict, victimization and cultural assertion, they

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became uncomfortable: ‘Colonialism distorts the identity of the subject people, and the Negro in particular is bewildered and irritable. Racial equality and assimilation are attractive but only underline the loss, since to accept assimilation is in a way to accept permanent inferiority’ (p. 181). The increasing racial conflict between blacks and Indians in British Guiana, and the example of the Martinique Indians who had lost knowledge of their culture, heightened his feelings about the insecure place of the Asian Indians in the West Indies. In the West Indies ‘nationalism is the only revitalizing force’ (p. 153), but British Guiana instead of having ‘an ordered and overdue social revolution’ had split into its ‘component parts’, a dangerous situation brought about by ‘racial rivalry’ and fear. As Naipaul became more analytical, better informed, and more experienced of the wider world, he came to see that such notions were simplistic; he added a note prefacing later editions of The Middle Passage saying that if he had understood that he was writing about the ‘problems of a client culture and a client economy’ he would have been ‘less romantic about the healing power, in such a culture, of political or racial assertion’.

4 Mr Stone and the Knights Companion and An Area of Darkness Naipaul’s first phase consisted of four works of fiction and a travel book about the Caribbean in which his manner is amused or satiric. His second phase comprises two novels set in England, a travel book about India and a history of early Trinidad. His manner is more serious and there is an increasing attraction to and resistance against traditional Indian passivity and fatalism. His year in India marked a major crisis in his life by revealing there could be no return to his origins, but in England he continued to feel a colonial outsider in exile from the political disorder of the decolonizing Third World. Feeling unsettled, unrooted, he began questioning his life and the life of being a writer. What was to be his subject matter and his relationship to English literature? What was he really writing about – society, his past, himself, the artist, the world, the relationship of art to what? Now that England and India had failed as homes could he return to Trinidad despite its preoccupation with race? Because of such concerns the novels became more densely layered, with a variety of significances, many levels of meaning, ranging from the autobiographical to the philosophical. Naipaul carries his obsessions with him and they reappear unexpectedly. The same concerns recur, usually enriched with further insight and complications, but are seldom settled. From early on until the present he will feel the need for freedom, activity, achievement, will and individuality and this will often start in some act of rebellion, some departure from routine and security. A novel will tell the story of a struggle for self-assertion, its excitements, rages, passion, problems, irritations, defeats and conclude, sometimes triumphantly, sometimes with frustration, with ambivalence towards the worth of the struggle. This may seem strange from an author who sees the novel as celebrating Western man’s assertion of will 58

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within society, an existential making of one’s self and one’s place in an otherwise meaningless world, but throughout the novels there are other attitudes and philosophical positions. One is deterministic. Individuals are limited in their possibilities by their society and their material circumstances. Naipaul keeps questioning the worth of the struggle to achieve and leave a mark on the world. Is it worth the pain of separation from the security of group and routine, especially as desires and hopes are seldom realized in the way expected? This notion of the vanity of human wishes may be the result of personal experience, but it is expressed in ways which suggest a traditional Indian view in which desire, activity and change are the world of illusion, of unnecessary pain. Whereas the Hindu can hope to be released from the world of illusion through contemplation, acceptance and eventual return to the One, Naipaul’s world is secular, his cosmos that of Western science, and death is final, an annihilation of the self, not a stage in a history of reincarnations, not some ultimate peace of non-being. If death is tempting as withdrawal from pain, it is also the end of feeling, of consciousness, of the self. History teaches one form of transcendence in achievements, the monuments of empire, the buildings of the past, great works of literature, but an examination of history shows it is subject to change, that it is replaced by other histories. Worse is the distance between the idea and the reality. People need an idea of themselves and their goals; but what is achieved and how it is achieved always turn out to be disillusioning. One of Naipaul’s new themes is the way an achievement does not in itself embody the emotions that went into it. After each burst of fantasy, energy, work and achievement we return to reality. (This is especially true of the writer.) By the time Naipaul had published Biswas and The Middle Passage he had won various literary awards but England itself had not become his home. He felt he did not know what went on among the British, could not write about British society, especially the private lives that took place behind closed doors and drawn curtains. Despite having married an Englishwoman, he felt isolated and cut off, another foreigner. Having used the memories of his youth in Trinidad he needed alternative sources of fiction. His year in India, told in An Area of Darkness, might be regarded as similar to a black West Indian’s attempted return to Africa. It might seem curious that during 1962, while in Kashmir, he wrote his first English novel, Mr Stone (1963), but he has often written his fiction in a different

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country from the one portrayed. Whereas the travel books depend on first-hand impressions and immediacy, novels require reflection on and distance from the experience. Memories become enriched by obsessions, analysis and the place in which they are shaped into fiction. Mr Stone epitomizes well-known aspects of English life, especially the dreariness, routine, security and resignation of the poorly paid, somewhat lower middle-class staff in an organization, whether business or government. At the same time it is infused with Indian fatalism and notions of activity as futile illusion, a view which it struggles against, and instead offers an existential alternative of life as intensity and a struggle against annihilation. But in this most British of novels (in subject matter, quiet straight-faced comedy, social placing of characters, witty ironies, snobberies, even taking as its protagonist someone so unheroically respectable as a librarian) there is a West Indian subtext. It is as if Naipaul were imagining Biswas in England, a Biswas who owned a house, had a pension, was very very English, but still found life unsatisfactory and rebelled, started afresh at just the time when he should be enjoying the calmness and security of long years of work in a settled society. This is another portrait of the rebel, this time the insider who suddenly sees the void, experiences a sense of nothingness, turns a corner and feels a wind which changes his life. The vocabulary Naipaul uses and several significant phrases suggest the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and, especially, of Albert Camus, although as usual with Naipaul the echoes and parallels are light, passing suggestions of what has touched his imagination. ‘It was like an experience of nothingness, an experience of death’ (p. 50). Before Mr Stone is touched by the winds of change he is the ultimate anti-existentialist. In a typical Naipaulian inversion Mr Stone, unlike Camus’ Meursault, is disturbed by his mother’s death (forty-five years ago!): His life, since his recovery from that disturbance, he saw as a period of protracted calm which, by reference to what had gone before, he had never ceased to savour in his special way. Life was something to be moved through. Experiences were not to be enjoyed at the actual moment; pleasure in them came only when they had been, as it were, docketed and put away in the file of the past. (p. 15)

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Mr Stone branches off from L’Etranger in the importance of art and creation. Naipaul compares such a way of experiencing to the relationship of art to the natural world: It was then that they acquired colour, just as colour came truly to Nature only in a coloured snapshot or painting, which annihilated colourless, distorting space. He was in the habit in odd moments of solitude of writing out neatly tabulated accounts of his career such as might have been submitted to a prospective employer. (p. 15) Such also would be the relationship of literature to life; literature would be that which has passed or is dying. Art would not be actual experience; it would be careful analysis and colouring of the past. Mr Stone is another of Naipaul’s writers, the writing reflecting some failure in his way of experiencing and perceiving. It is this flavourlessness of ‘solidity, continuity and flow’ (p. 17) that is soon challenged as he becomes aware of a feeling of unhappiness. Mr Stone’s views are those that Naipaul has at various times expressed. The direct brutal presentation of fact and experience in modern art is a kind of violence which he rejects. But the life of the careful, meditative artist is isolated, without intensity, a source of crankiness. So the experience which went into the book is distant from the book produced. (The contrast between reportage and fiction, between self and art, first comes close to being solved in Enigma.) Mr Stone’s situation is figurative of the writer. And there is the need to summon the energy to begin again after each book is finished. Naipaul alludes to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ in suggesting how the first stirrings of renewal are frightening. Those who doubt the coming of the Spring: the words magnified and gave a focus to his uneasiness. They recalled a moment – then, memory and fear quickening, he saw that they recalled several moments, which had multiplied during the last year – of unease, unsettlement. (p. 20) This is different prose than Naipaul’s first four novels. The texture is denser, richer, the mood more reflective and serious, the tones sombre. It is more appropriate for the age and complexity of the character and his society; but Naipaul is also aiming at a more

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nuanced observation of personality, desire, psychology than in his earlier novels. The comedy and humour similarly deepen and become quieter. Literary allusions are foregrounded and employed as part of the conflict within the character. The literary subtext has become part of the text. Characters are identified by their taste, appearance, furniture, house. Mr Stone in dress is ‘a complete Simpson’s man’ (p. 48) in a ‘black city overcoat’. He is recognizable as one of the many minor clerks who have been the subject of English fiction and of the greyness, stories about small lives, that was an aspect of the English novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Although he may reflect Naipaul’s own sense of the smallness of his life in London, this is social comedy about a ‘complete’ society that Naipaul despaired of writing about in the West Indies, with its supposed lack of standards. Characters are social types, placed in terms of manners and appearance; Gwen’s early fatness and willingness to give into the temptations of chocolates foretell her moving in with Whymper. Whymper’s lack of neat appearance, his whims for fashions in clothing, his absurd posturing about how to tap out a cigarette are part of the same superficiality that makes him an ideas man who packages Mr Stone’s Knights Companions into a public relations scheme. He lives off the passion and dreams of others; the freewheeling fantasy he employs to find the right packaging is shown in his love and moral life, bragging about and baying for an ageing actress, then becoming Gwen’s lover. He is morally untidy, yet someone who knows the ways of the world in terms of his own career. As in Jane Austen’s world, manners are morals. Except for a few details, there is little that is specifically of London about the novel. A librarian who works for a large firm, lives on his own except for a housekeeper, owns a dingy, war-damaged house, has a garden which he dislikes, is surrounded by neighbours he does not know and dislikes, is obsessed with the neighbour’s cat. It sounds like a story we have come to associate with the English provinces after the war, when English writing turned inward from larger issues and was fascinated by the manners, morals and lives of the drab rather than the sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Because of his own financial and social condition, as well as his career as a serious novelist, Naipaul found himself living the life of the drab in London. In Mr Stone he uses the character of a Mr Polly to explore the contradictions between the life and work of the writer, the glamour of the art world and the work that has gone into it, as well as the

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contradictions between his desire for an ordered existence and his desire for a life of intensity and creativity.23 While it is a novel about British manners and morals, the main themes are philosophical and about the relationship between ideas, the created and the creator. Within this small, tightly controlled world of the petty, Naipaul has portrayed an existential drama of someone awakening to selfdefinition. That it comes to someone so old, near retirement – the prospect of retirement sets off the drama – is why we might not realize that Mr Stone is a brother to Camus’s rebel, although in the many references to Stone’s solitude and loneliness, and in his lack of close relationships, we can see the alienation, the significant toneless voice, of Camus’s Outsider. The events are few, the narrative imprecise about what actually happens, the story simple and the space filled with details of scenes and conversation rather than actions. Although the narrator is always in control – characters here do not come alive and offer alternative visions, alternative perspectives – there is a polyphony of a kind, of conflicting attitudes, even world views, within the main character and the author. Mr Stone begins by seeing himself as part of the slow, steady continuity of nature. The tree he watches with its seasonal changes is seen by him as symbolic of himself. This is surprising since the seasonal image of change usually suggests sexual renewal, vitality, not a steady decay into old age and retirement. Within the symbol itself there is a contradiction, especially as its use by Mr Stone is the opposite of the expected. But there are early hints of change. Mr Stone has more physical energy than is in keeping with his restricting vision of the world. His garden is a way to work off the energy. Soon the vitality will find expression in a marriage, then in his scheme for a plan to keep retired company employees engaged in visiting each other, then in the developing of the idea into a workable package and programme. Finally he will be left dissatisfied, realizing that his one idea cannot support him emotionally further. Once it is achieved there is nothing new for him to do with it and it has become something that others will administer. Whymper, who deals in ideas, moves on to a better job, whereas Mr Stone has only his retirement and wife to look forward to. Mr Stone has learned that such frustration and depression pass; symbolically there is a sign of renewal in his looking forward to seeing the young black cat, whereas at the novel’s opening he regarded that black cat as his enemy. Whatever happens to Mr Stone now he will have an interest in life. Even Margaret, his wife, has

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become part of his world; he no longer feels such isolation and loneliness. The obvious analogy is to a writer who, having completed a novel and passed it on to the publisher and his publicity department, returns to his desk, solitude and family, awaiting the creative pain of starting again. If in the opening of the novel ‘nature’ might be seen as a kind of Indian fatalism, a withdrawal from the life of desire, the ending of the novel includes an Indian subtext. The conclusion picks up many motifs from earlier chapters. Mr Stone ‘had a vision of the city such as he had once before, at the first dinner party he and Margaret had given’ (p. 125; see p. 42 for the parallel). ‘He stripped the city of all that was enduring and saw that all that was not flesh was of no importance to man. All that mattered was man’s own frailty and corruptibility. The order of the universe, to which he had sought to ally himself, was not his order’ (p. 125). This existential view of man alone in an alien, changing, uncaring universe is qualified by: ‘but now he saw, too, that it was not by creation that man demonstrated his power and defied this hostile order, but by destruction. By damming the river, by destroying the mountain, by so scarring the face of the earth that Nature’s attempt to reassert herself became a mockery’ (p. 125). This destruction seen in the houses and gardens of his street might remind us of the three aspects of the divine in Indian philosophy – creation, being, destruction. Mr Stone embodies the creative: ‘He was no destroyer’ (p. 126). These are the three faces of Shiva as creator, preserver, destroyer. Mr Stone might be seen in relation to Biswas. It has many of the elements of the other novel. It follows a similar structure of the first half consisting of aimless discontent, the new start at the middle (chapter 4), the return to the motifs of the opening at the conclusion. In the first half of both novels the main character makes a rapid and unsatisfying marriage; in the second half he gradually accepts his wife until at the conclusion he depends on her companionship. (This is similar to the Indian model which results from arranged marriages in contrast to Western love marriages.) In both novels the triumphs of the second half are deflated as the main character finds that his own expansion in the outside world is dependent on others, especially institutions, and he is eventually defeated as he no longer is of use to others. At the end of the novel his previous triumphs have made life worthwhile. Biswas retires (for medical reasons) and dies. Stone is awaiting retirement and hopes for renewal.

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Many of the symbols occur in both novels, such as the use of Christmas to mark the passing of the years, and, of course, there is the significance of the house. Mr Stone’s life is what Biswas’s life might have been like in England, and what V. S. Naipaul’s is like as a writer. Security, a homogeneous society, a pension, cultural roots, a home, all these are attractive, but the energies of life, the desire for stimulus, the need for change, the need to conquer, to achieve, for what Hobbes termed glorification, even the need for new companionship, create the uprooted rebel, the artist, the modern individual, and put us in the existential situation of self-creation – a self-creation limited however by our circumstances and society. At the end of the novel Mr Stone has returned to a wasteland-like mood, but now he knows it will change; such renewal is part of nature. It is also the condition of the artist’s imagination; this is the period of depression before the return of the muse. Love occupies a large proportion of many European and American novels. In this sober but amusing novel Mr Stone’s courtship of Margaret is rapidly disposed of at the end of chapter 1 in a single sentence in which sexuality and seasonal renewal are figured in the buds of a tree: ‘In the second week of March Mr Stone and Mrs Springer were married when on the tree in the school grounds the buds had swollen and in sunshine were like points of white’ (p. 27). Then in chapter 2 Mr Stone (a bit like Biswas) tries to avoid the consequences of being married, pretending it never really happened and nothing much has changed. But at the novel’s end he is waiting ‘alone’ in ‘the empty house’ (like Biswas) for Margaret. Mr Stone was written in Kashmir in 1962, a year when Naipaul was examining his relationship to India. At the end of the year Naipaul acknowledged in An Area of Darkness (1964) that while he was familiar with Indian customs he remained an outsider, a product of the New World, someone with Western instincts concerning the worth of the individual, social justice, activity, accomplishment, the present. Indian habits of passivity, fatalism and otherworldliness, even self-centredness, are attractive and a recognizable part of himself, but he is not part of the society and sees it from outside as someone with Western-educated eyes and values. Looking for signs of a great culture and history from which he has been displaced by the Indian version of the Middle Passage, he finds instead shrunken bodies, feudal, social and economic relations which dehumanize, incompetence, political bluster, general corruption, a lack of concern with others and the continuing importance of

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ritual and habit at the expense of human relations and efficiency. Worse, he finds Indians unable or unwilling to see their problems and act rationally. The excrement that he often mentions is real and representative of decay. What was once part of personal health has become ritualized into custom and no longer noticed. Instead of building latrines, being concerned with communal health and public appearances, there is the self-centred concern with evacuating impurities regardless of the consequences to society. This assumes the continuation of a caste system in which part of the population is considered subhuman, beneath notice and enslaved to such tasks as sweeping and taking away the excrement of others. If the excrement and untouchables in An Area of Darkness represent a decayed older India which coexists with the modern state and remains at its core, preventing India from being whatever Naipaul hoped to find, Indian history and monuments prove also to be disillusioning. Typical is the pilgrimage to the Cave of Amarnath, the Eternal Lord, in chapter 7. There is an elaborate and costly preparation, during which Indian petty corruption and untruthfulness are revealed. What ensues is an exhausting trip, communal hysteria, overcrowding, forced chanting and ritualistic praise of the God, but the massive ice phallus either has not formed or has melted and there is nothing there to see or even to regard as a symbol. Only if you belong to the culture and can accept it totally is the pilgrimage meaningful. Otherwise to an outsider it is a sham, an example of how Indians lose themselves in absurdities and foolish mysteries.24 Therefore Naipaul’s attention instead shifts to the human, to manners and morals, to relations between people – the usual interests of the Western novel. He considers how Aziz manipulates himself and others for his own advantage. Naipaul’s surprisingly sentimental hope that he has Aziz’s affection and loyalty replays the conventions of the European travel book about exotic places and the loyalties and disloyalties of servants in order to interrogate such conventions. He tries to see Aziz clearly, yet as with so much of India, he is unable to do so. It remains an area of darkness for him; no matter how much of himself he recognizes in it, he remains an outsider. Another story concerns an American girl and her wild, destructive love affair with an Indian musician. As so often in Naipaul’s writing sexual desire and romantic love are destructive. This is another East–West encounter, in which a Westerner is found destroying herself in search of some illusionary India, except that

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here she has the will and means to escape, whereas love destroys the young Indian musician who has fallen hopelessly in love. Throughout An Area of Darkness there is a sense of humiliation, of a personal frustration that the India of his imagination and longings, of his imagined origins, is just another oriental Third World country despite its size and ancient history. He is angry at the dirt, decay, incompetence, corruption, passivity, the humiliation by the threatening Chinese army, by the way Gandhi has been turned into another saint and his Western rationality ignored. Like many other nationalists, Naipaul wants a modern, Western, efficient industrialized state, and he wants a revitalized native, traditional, authentic culture.25 This is a much less analytical book than Naipaul’s studies of other societies, more, under its careful construction and organization, a cry of conflict and pain concluding with the recognition that the India of his dreams did not exist and what he had lived through during the past year was a partial discovery of an India which was both more varied and less ideal. It also brought to an end, for a time, his recurring quest for a home, a land in which he could merge, settle, be. ‘It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had broken my life in two’ (p. 265). He returns to London ‘trying, in vain, to summon up a positive response to this city where I had lived and worked; facing my own emptiness, my feeling of being physically lost’ (p. 266). It was only now, as my experience of India defined itself more properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had been to the total Indian negation, how much it had become the basis of thought and feeling. And already, with this awareness, in a world where illusion can only be a concept and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping away from me. (p. 266) In An Area of Darkness Naipaul often uses words like mimic and mimicry to suggest imitation or copying of American or European civilization. This appears similar to the usual nationalist complaint that the elite and bourgeoisie have cut themselves off from local or national traditions supposedly still practised by the people or folk. Naipaul regards sentimentalizing of the past as reactionary, selfdefeating, and contrary to the need for modernization; yet the

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modernization he wants must be different from the aping of the West. What he wants is a will to change, an idea of the self, a purpose, an existential being which is authentic in evolving from the past and the culture. Although his next novel, The Mimic Men, is concerned with West Indian mimicry of the British it will question whether the ideal he seeks is possible and whether the solution he seeks for his feelings of alienation is in writing rather than being part of a larger, grander civilization.

5 A Flag on the Island, The Mimic Men and The Loss of El Dorado A Flag on the Island (1967) brings together short fiction written at various times. ‘My Aunt Gold Teeth’ (dated 1954) the earliest of Naipaul’s collected writings, is set in Hindu rural Trinidad. Its amusing illustration of the way the community was changing through contact with other cultures reveals the antagonisms at the heart of social relations; the comedy of deceptions, feelings of guilt and family recriminations results from giving in to the temptation to try the ways of others. An orthodox Hindu’s wife resorts to Roman Catholic prayers to overcome her barrenness; when her husband, a pundit, dies her prayers are said to have caused his death and she is told that she does not deserve to have children to care for her in old age. The aunt’s ignorance of the significance of both the Hindu and Catholic rituals she practises, as well as the various ethnic animosities within the community, foreshadow the title story ‘A Flag on the Island’, written (1965) during the time Naipaul was working at The Mimic Men. The two stories and the novel are in part about communal antagonisms and the cultural confusions and mimicry of cultural behaviour that occur when different groups are brought together and society is in a period of change. The title story is also concerned with commitment and the dangers of the Americanization of the West Indies. ‘A Flag on the Island’ contrasts an East Caribbean island before and after independence. The contrast was suggested by one of Naipaul’s visits home. At first there seems a contrast; where there were rum shops there are now modern American buildings, the wartime American soldiers have been replaced by tourists. But just as it could be said that there is no real difference between an island depending on soldiers and one depending on tourists, so a new mimicry has replaced the old. Formerly, Mr Blackwhite, humiliated 69

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by English civilization, wanted to prove that black people can write; he imitated English fiction about such nobles as ‘Lady Theresa Phillips … the most sought-after girl in all the county of Shropshire. Beautiful, an heiress to boot …’ (p. 160). The irony of ‘sought-after girl’ and ‘to boot’ catches the distance between the foreign fantasy and the reality of the writer’s own English and world. Later, Mr Blackwhite, representative of the West Indian artist and culture, will reject such novels about lords and ladies, but influenced by the model of African decolonization he will fall into a phoney cultural nationalism. ‘What we want is our own language’ (p. 182). ‘On the board outside Blackwhite’s house there appeared this additional line: PATOIS TAUGHT HERE’ (p. 183). Next, mimicking black Americans, he writes ‘I Hate You, subtitled One Man’s Search for Identity’ (p. 129) which is purchased by tourists and makes him the favoured West Indian writer of American foundations which lavish money on him, until he wants to write a more realistic novel about a black man falling in love with a black woman, marrying and having black children instead of the stories about a ‘black man rescued from a bad white woman’ or a ‘black woman rescued from a bad white man’ (p. 198) which they want for liberal Americans. The narrator, an American, realizes that he cannot act disinterestedly in the society and must leave. The novel Naipaul was writing at this time is also concerned with questions of authenticity, commitment and creativity. A Flag on the Island includes several stories that appear to be rejects from Miguel Street and include the character Hat and some linking information not found in that book. ‘The Enemy’ (1955) begins with a different version of the Green Vale episode in Biswas. When the mother leaves, the boy stays on, bribed by the father’s offer of a box of crayons. After the father, during a storm, loses his mind and dies of fright the boy returns to the mother who now resents, distrusts, and whips him until one day he is hurt and knocked unconscious in an accident. When he regains consciousness his mother is there crying. ‘I wished I were a Hindu god at that moment, with two hundred arms, so that all two hundred could be broken, just to enjoy that moment, and to see again my mother’s tears’ (p. 73). While the sentimentality would be out of place in the understated, ironic Miguel Street, ‘The Enemy’ offers insight into Naipaul’s vision of the world. People are often cruel, threatening and can wound or kill. They seldom show affection, need to bribe others for company, as a result of which they act and become hardened while secretly wanting protection, love and comfort.

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There are also two stories set in England – ‘Greenie and Yellow’ (1957) and ‘The Perfect Tenants’ (1957), products of Naipaul’s experience of boarding houses, which reveal problems he had writing about British society. ‘Greenie and Yellow’ has a landlady whose dialect and personality could be copied from many British films, plays, or radio programmes. She is a character type who has barely emerged from the working class. Unlike the characters of Naipaul’s Trinidadian fiction we have too often seen and heard Mrs Cooksey. The story itself concerns a struggle for domination, space, and survival by pet budgerigars, and is an example of how the strong destroy each other while the dominated try to survive, although they will be crippled, by keeping a low profile. It is satiric about romantic illusions like those of the landlady who mistakes a war about room and survival between the female and the stronger of the two male birds as a love story which will result in future little budgerigars. This is another tale about a cruel world and the dangers of freedom. The cages save the budgerigars from the sparrows. The Mimic Men (1967) consists of the supposed memoirs of a Caribbean Indian politician now exiled in London because of racial strife on his island, Isabella. As he examines notions of decolonization, freedom, achievement, self-definition and how they are limited by the history and resources of a society, the focus shifts from his original intention to look at the causes of the instability of newly independent nations to his own past and then to awareness that writing the book has itself become a way of life and an achievement. The public mimicry of European forms of government and taste is said to have originated in a private void now transcended through writing. I say ‘is said to’ because Naipaul’s writing has become more complex, ironic, allusive, symbolic and self-conscious. Works like The Mystic Masseur and Biswas followed the life of one, then two characters, in chronological sequence; The Mimic Men is baroque in structure, fugal in treatment of time, and filled with characters whose lives double, reflect or invert that of the narrator. The discourses on such topics as freedom, politics, self-creation, psychology, writing, autobiography, history, mimicry, race and origins have multiplied to suggest many, often conflicting, significances. Such a novel cannot be reduced to a statement or position. Everything the reader identifies as Naipaul’s ideas, psychology or desires is questioned or presented ironically. The self-questioning irony is figured in the narrator’s name which, like that of the Mystic Masseur,

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is transformed and adapted to circumstance, becomes fractured and anglicized, as does the narrator. Ranjit Kripalsingh, R. R. K. Singh, Ralph Singh is also a writer, a Singh R. (p. 93) who builds a Crippleville. Because of such irony, complexity and multidimensionality the novel feels full, dense, more lengthy than it is. The Mimic Men at first appears to be another of Naipaul’s pessimistic essays on the difficulties of the colonized in becoming truly independent. Isabella is too small and lacks the economic resources, skills and knowledge to be free of domination by others. It lacks the homogeneity of population, culture and traditions that might provide unity of purpose. Its history of slavery and white domination has resulted in a politics of protest and the symbolic revenging of past wounds rather than the cool, rational appraisal of what needs to and what can be done within the possibilities available. Because the nationalist movement has been driven by racial hurt, nation and race have become confused, and those who do not share in the dominant vision are treated as enemies. While the whites move to safety elsewhere the Asians, especially the Indians, are left as victims of the new black rulers. While the violence done to Indians in Isabella is mentioned by Singh (‘women and children assaulted, of hackings, of families burnt alive’ [p. 241]) the story is not one-sided. Singh feels uncomfortable around blacks and is accused of racial exclusiveness in developing Crippleville (p. 238). His mother even refuses to accept his marriage to a white Englishwoman. The Indian world is racially enclosed, exclusive. Besides the violence against the Indians there is their fear of becoming culturally and ethnically extinct, like the Amerindians or like some of the Africanized poor whites, in the black-dominated Caribbean, or the Martinique Indians as described in The Middle Passage. The process of losing one’s Indianness started with leaving India. After that Indian traditions could only either decay into deadening ritual or become diluted, degraded and eventually lost through outside influences and intermarriage with others. While in An Area of Darkness Naipaul favourably regards the Caribbean Indians as revitalized, energetic, a modernizing people, a product of the New World in contrast to the feudalist, passive, fatalist Indians of India, in The Mimic Men Ralph Singh is haunted by the notion of the extinction of the Caribbean Indian. Singh in school in Isabella, reading and dreaming about India and its history as his lost home, and Singh in London, disappointed at

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the poverty of his surroundings and the lack of quality of his life, have similarities to what Naipaul tells about himself in An Area of Darkness. When younger he was an Indian nationalist (AOD, p. 41) ‘whose map I committed to memory’, but not knowing Hindi, not being religious, finding Indian films tedious, wanting to escape what seemed the narrow asphyxiating enclosed world of Trinidad Indians, he went to London. It had become the centre of my world and I worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world. I had been misled … I became no more than an inhabitant of a big city, robbed of loyalties, time passing, taking me away from what I was … to a smaller world than I had ever known. I became my flat, my desk, my name. (AOD, p. 42) Sandra, Singh’s English wife, has a similar experience. Rejecting her family, she aspires to fame in London, fails her university examinations and with no hope for the future attaches herself to Singh and finds herself adrift and without purpose on Isabella, where everything and everyone seem third rate to her. She is herself a forerunner of Linda, Bobby and Jane, expatriates in Naipaul’s novels who were unsuccessful in their own country. After the failed attempt to reconnect himself to India and the return to England, Naipaul had become like Singh an uprooted colonial, a permanent homeless exile, wedded to his writing and his desk, seemingly writing about the upheavals and turmoils of the colonial and postcolonial world, but in actuality giving order to his own life through writing. Singh continually refers to disorder and the need to find order. He claims that colonial societies lack the cultural, racial and historical homogeneity, and the resources to satisfy expectations. The disorder that Singh finds inherent to decolonization has other, deeper roots. As in Mr Stone there is an existential vision of an absurd, meaningless universe, a world populated by mankind without any god or purpose. Shipwreck, the Caribbean commonplace found in the works of many West Indian writers, has a metaphysical dimension in The Mimic Men. Singh feels abandoned personally, culturally, racially, and by the universe, ‘this feeling of abandonment at the end of the empty world’ (p. 106). The trees washed up on the beach are images both of shipwreck and of the bleak horror of the cruel universe. The image of shipwreck is one of Naipaul’s recurring

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images and will be taken up again in The Enigma of Arrival. Singh’s fear of death, reinforced by the drownings he witnesses at the beach, his sense of futility, his feeling that only what is seen exists, and that ‘A man was only what he saw of himself in others’ (p. 100) are themes familiar from Sartrean existentialist philosophy. Also existentialist is Singh’s desire to be part of something larger, his concern with how he appears to others, and his attempt to transcend personal solitude through political action. Such existentialist, Sartrean, themes are introduced early in the novel: ‘It was up to me to choose my character’ (p. 20); ‘We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others’ (p. 20). He is not certain whether his character has been created by others or whether it is ‘one and indivisible’. In contrast to the intellectual understanding of the need to act to define oneself and give significance to life are Singh’s continual withdrawals from decisive action, his failure to do. His confessions of sexual failures are similar to his inability to be part of or to lose himself in someone or some group beyond himself. When he does become involved it is superficial, brought about by the will of others, and he will eventually withdraw into himself or be pushed aside by those with more energy and purpose. The pattern is clear. Lieni attempts to seduce him and fails. Sandra proposes marriage to him. He does not tell his mother he has married a foreign white woman. Sandra drifts away without Singh preventing it. He watches, but does not help, the fishermen and others at the beach pull in the nets with the drowned bodies. He is seen as a nationalist leader because of what his father did. Browne proposes they start a political journal, form a political party, but Browne takes command. When Indians come to Singh for help from violence he refuses to lead them: ‘Think about this as something in a book’ (p. 241). As a youth Singh had fantasies of being a leader of the Aryan tribes that conquered India and became the dominant castes. This myth of origins is similar to African-American and West Indian dreams of being descended from African royalty. But when faced by a situation in which he could be a leader Singh withdraws into passivity, generalities, distancing the actual world ‘as something in a book’. The failure is analogous to his sexual failures as a student in England and his despair at his life in England. Seeking the ideal, he rejects the actual and is incapacitated from actions that might lead to any self-surrender and involvement. His performances are play-acting. He courts Sandra in front of others at a party, but nothing comes of it and they sleep apart. He practises for a race

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at school, but once he sees the crowds he will not compete. ‘I knew I would never join them, not for that race or the others’ (p. 117). The confessional model is Clamence in Albert Camus’s La Chute, which mixes autobiographical self-examination with a parody of Sartre’s criticism of Camus’s supposed lack of engagement. Works of fiction in which the central character is the narrator present a problem as to what such characters knowingly reveal about themselves and what is implanted as an irony by the author. In such a layered, richly textured, complexly organized, allusive novel as The Mimic Men the problem of conscious self-revelation by Singh or even Naipaul is impossible to untangle, especially as the focus keeps rapidly, subtly shifting from the story to allusions to well-known events which occurred in Africa and the Caribbean, generalizations about politics and the world, literary allusions and even suggestions that this is in some way Naipaul’s own spiritual and emotional autobiography. A Trinidadian reader should recognize the many allusions to local political events between 1930 and 1960 and to local politicians; the racial riots are from Guyana and Trinidad. The Mimic Men is a novel about how the personal, including awareness of why one has not chosen the active, worldly life, is transformed into a book. It is in the modernist literary convention of writing a book about which the reader is reading. It is a Caribbean East Indian rewriting of A Portrait of the Artist and A la recherche du temps perdu. It is also, as in A Bend in the River, another novel in which Naipaul blends the writing of history, autobiography and fiction, as if he were saying that in our time only the novelist is likely to make sense of the chaos in which we live. Yet at the same time it subverts itself. ‘For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research; and on the subject of empire there is only the pamphleteering of churls’ (p. 32). The Mimic Men continually alludes to one of its models, and in alluding to it warns the reader not to take it too far as the explanation of the novel. Singh’s many echoes of and allusions to T. S. Eliot’s poems – especially ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’, ‘The Hollow Men’ and ‘Gerontion’ – comment on and ironize his behaviour. He is self-aware; he, as well as those he criticizes, is a Mimic Man – he is given his character of a West Indian dandy by Lieni. Such allusions imply that like Eliot’s poems the significances of the novel are both personal and cultural, while showing an awareness that the discontents and feelings are absurd, literary mimicry; the opinions offered are both a serious analysis of cultural

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politics and the projection of a personal unhappiness, an unhappiness which may result as much from the solitary task of writing and reading as from experience. The novel avoids the stereotypical simplifications of nationalism and of anti-nationalism. It asks whether most political actions and rhetoric are not disguises for personal wounds. There is no way to get a firm handle on The Mimic Men, no way the novel can be reduced to a meaning or a set of meanings. There are too many discourses, often of a contradictory, mutually cancelling nature, going at once; the work is constructed as a labyrinth which, while seeming to take the reader in one direction and then another, circles around on itself while each step is loaded with ambiguity and ironies. The novel is concerned metaphysically about the lack of purpose in the universe, the need to act to create purpose, the ways in which the illusion of significance may be given by cultural traditions, history, seemingly homogeneous and powerful societies, famous cities. If the novel looks critically at the contemporary fashion for decolonization and nationalist assertion, finding threats of disorder, it also looks critically at myths of order. There is no ideal city, whether it be Rome, London or the City of God. There are only ideas of such an ideal. The only order is that given to the chaos of individual lives by writing about them, by creating narratives. The novel questions itself, in the sense of continually undermining the narrator, both through the Eliotic ironies and also in Singh’s self-awareness that his own sense of disorder may be psychological, a projection of his own distress, written on to the world wherever he goes. Most of the novel treats of his life, not the life of politics. To read The Mimic Men primarily for its politics is to distort its emphasis and what is given space. A father’s insecurity and distress is passed on to a son who is shamed by his father’s incompetence and abandonment of the family for a futile political gesture. The son attaches himself to a wealthy branch of the family which can provide him with a solid, seemingly secure house. But he learns that this security is threatened by the unwillingness of the poor to accept authority. The son is also troubled by his Indianness in the New World, both attempting to Anglicize himself and dreaming of an idealized Indian past to which he will return. He also fears the extinction of his racial and cultural self. His fears are linked to a selfdefensive pride, a dandyism (not dissimilar to the self-protective irony of Anand in Biswas and Naipaul in Letters) which is expressed

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in an unwillingness to compete or fight, attitudes of superiority, concern with how he appears to others, the cultivation of disdain for that which is flawed and imperfect. Such defensiveness makes him withdraw from active life, except when leadership or roles are thrust upon him, whether in politics or sex. He retreats into poses of indifference, negativity and an implied Hindu spirituality. If Singh in his Eliotic hollow men postures confesses that ‘in that period intensity of emotion was the thing I never achieved’ (p. 32), elsewhere he absurdly insists on having freed himself from attachment and having fulfilled the four stages of life prescribed by ‘our Aryan ancestors’ (pp. 250–1). Singh and Naipaul offer the reader various explanations for such hollowness and mimicry beyond fear of being hurt, insecurity and apathy. One theme which is foregrounded is that Singh has never grown up, never emotionally matured. There is his low sexual energy and his repeated desire to return to suckling breasts. This is similar to his dream of a homogeneous, organic traditional life and is parallel to his fear of living in a purposeless, disorderly universe. In The Mimic Men Naipaul alludes to and disguises events in his father’s life and to events from his own life. But perhaps most important are Naipaul’s own conflicting feelings about being a writer. He has often spoken of writing as a vocation and as the best means of investigating and making sense of life. He has also complained of its solitary nature, of the long labours without much profit, of the crankiness of writers. Singh is a parody of the writer, someone who thinks writing is easy, but he is also a Naipaul-like figure who has made writing his life and who in writing about the world really is writing about himself and his discontents. As usual Naipaul has been there long before his critics, examining himself, criticizing, even exaggerating his possible faults. Although he correctly has a reputation as a realist, he can be a Nabokov creating multilayered labyrinths filled with private jokes, allusions, paradoxes, parodies, false clues, literary games and possible interpretations. If The Mimic Men is in parts about the newly decolonized nations it is also about exiles who claim to be writing about the world when they are writing about themselves. Naipaul has moved beyond the realism of colonial fiction to a manner which in its lack of straightforward narrative and its various convolutions, shifts in time, changes of explanations, sense of defeat and withdrawal, appears to reflect the disorder of the postcolonial world. It is never clear what Singh intends by writing

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his book, his purpose keeps changing until the act of writing itself becomes his existence, a mimicry of a life, a mimicry of the writer’s life. Among the many literary allusions and echoes in the novel, Singh in his hotel basking in approval from his Lord and Lady recalls Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, Proust in his cork-lined room and V. S. Naipaul seated at a similar desk in his Kashmiri hotel. Gordon Rohlehr has noticed how The Mimic Men is an inversion of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, except that Naipaul progressively withdraws attributes from his main character and leaves him invisible, an Indian alone in an English hotel room in which he writes the novel. Both books are figurative of the history of a minority, but rather than racial assertion there is withdrawal to the world of books.26 Singh’s many comments about his active life being parenthetical allude to the structure of the novel which is constructed as a series of parentheses.27 The first section of the novel consists mostly of memories of Singh’s days as a student in London alternating with memories of his return to London as an exile and, in chapters 4 to 6, his marriage to Sandra and return to Isabella. In the second section of the book the story moves further back in time to his childhood and education. In the third section memories of exile alternate with his life as a politician in Isabella. The narrative is purposefully made to seem jumbled, convoluted, parenthetical and circular. Although the novel is as carefully structured as Biswas, it is made to seem disorderly, unchronological, a product of capricious memories over a period of time with various explanations offered and shifts in focus. The appearance of disorder is furthered by the way the alternations of time in sections I and III cut across rather than correspond to chapter divisions, so that changes in the focus of Singh’s memories seem arbitrary or associational rather than planned. In a novel supposedly about politics but in fact about parenthesis, it is not surprising that section II, treating of childhood and schooling, is the longest part of the book, although, if the readers believed Singh’s announced purpose in writing the book, childhood would be irrelevant to the politics of decolonization. Then there are such structural parallels as beginning and ending the novel in the rented rooms in England, the sexual failures with Lieni and Stella being followed by seeing the women with other men, the respect for landlords, the railroad voyages. The opening and closing allusions to Shylock imply an analogy between the wandering, displaced Aryan and the homeless Jew, both cosmopolitans rejected by the societies in which they attempt to settle.

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At the centre of the novel, in terms of pagination or length, is the desertion of Singh’s father who both becomes a leader of the poor and absurdly imitates the behaviour of a Hindu holy man. He combines the politically active with the attraction of Indian withdrawal. Such role playing foreshadows Singh’s political activity and his withdrawal. The psychological, rather than thematic, reason for such centrality can be imagined from ‘that was to be our last contact, that afterwards we were both to follow our separate destinies and that mine, for all my unwillingness, was to be linked to his’ (p. 124). Naipaul the writer in England? Two intertwined themes of The Mimic Men are the relation of freedom to origins and the conflict between freedom and engagement. Singh attempts to be free, to construct his own identity, but keeps returning to the question of whether he is a product of his racial, colonial, educational and family past. At the centre of the book there are even references to Christopher Columbus as if his voyages were the origins of Singh’s problems. He is haunted by his father’s desertion of the family to lead a mass, predominantly black working-class movement. (The movement is similar to the various strikes in the Caribbean during the 1930s in which Indians cooperated with blacks politically for the first time and which led to the appointment of the Moyne Commission and the first steps towards Trinidad’s eventual independence.) Singh is wounded by his father’s desertion and humiliated by the failure of his movement, which achieves nothing but temporary drama and disorder. But, ironically, because of his father’s movement Singh is assumed to be one of the natural founders of the new political party which will demand Isabella’s independence. History repeats itself with independence leading to disappointed expectations, disorder, violence, and Singh fleeing to England. While the events in the novel have recognizable historical sources there is an erasure. What exactly happened after independence in Isabella that caused Singh to flee? Naipaul has argued against ‘documentary’ novels as having simplistic, naive politics,28 but the vagueness and generality with which Singh passes over the events and his failure to act on behalf of his people are so striking that it calls attention to itself and no doubt is meant to be understood as criticism. But if so of what? The Indian plans to nationalize the sugar industry, the British refusal, the racial riots and collapse of a multiracial nationalist movement are based on Guyana. Another source is Naipaul’s uncle’s failure as head of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) to resist Eric Williams. Considering

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the way Naipaul’s own autobiography is woven into the novel might not the criticism be applicable to himself? As an Oxford-educated, Trinidad Indian, already famous for having made a success as a writer abroad, the son of the well-known local journalist Seepersad Naipaul and the nephew of the leader of the DLP opposition, V. S. Naipaul might have become an important political figure in Trinidad if he had settled there when he returned in 1956 or 1960. He would, of course, have had to confront the same People’s National Movement (PNM) violence that made his uncle and Albert Gomes flee. Instead he remained true to his vocation as a writer where the violence and political disorder become fiction. ‘Think about this as something in a book.’ The Mimic Men is about a road not taken. Action would have required passion, commitment and the acceptance of the reality of blemishes. But if in Sartrean terms such engagement would have been self-definition through commitment to a larger group, it would also have been a loss of individual freedom, the freedom to write. And, the novel suggests, it would probably have led to repetition of the past. Naipaul has said that the futile Black Power uprisings repeat the Uriah Butler riots of 1937 and earlier slave revolts which led to nothing. The creation of true power is complex, slow, painful; it depends on hard work and quietly practising many new skills.29 The formal centre of the novel is section II, chapter 4. Here Singh, a schoolboy, is offered the friendship of (the symbolically named) Browne, who insists on his racial past and hurt. Browne is his double, his opposite, his friend and eventually his enemy. Both are products of colonialism, ashamed of their families and homes, but with different senses of cultural and racial history. They will bring the island to independence – Browne being emotionally driven towards it, Singh uncommittedly – and find themselves enemies as only through racial violence can Browne satisfy his followers. Singh fears Browne’s ‘interior life. It was not my past. It was not my personality’ (p. 144). This corresponds to the separate social and cultural lives led by the Indians and blacks in Trinidad. But it is also similar to Singh’s unwillingness to share in the lives of the women he meets in London. He and Stella find their sexual satisfaction separately. Both sexual and political involvement require self-violation and mingling. As Browne forces on him an awareness of racial distress Singh urgently wants to withdraw. Before it had been part of fantasy, part of the urge to escape shipwreck and to return to lands I had fashioned in my imagination,

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lands of horsemen, high plains, mountains and snow; … Now I felt the need only to get away, to a place unknown, among people whose lives and even language I need never enter. (p. 145) He begins to think of other places as ‘the true, pure world’ (p. 146). The chapter ends with ‘the disappointment of someone who had been denied the chance of making a fresh start, alone’ (p. 153). So at the centre of The Mimic Men the main character is concerned about his father’s humiliating withdrawal from the family and his own need to escape the emerging racial pressures which are likely to engulf him if he remains on the island. The Mimic Men is about more than these two themes, but his father and the racial turmoil in Trinidad are major influences on Naipaul’s life and writing. Naipaul is aware that his education in European languages and literatures influences how he writes and sees the world. It shapes his values and the literary forms he uses. At school Naipaul had studied French and Spanish alongside English and Latin. At the centre of The Mimic Men it is at school that Singh learns of the Laurentians, Liège and ‘la circulation, not circulation but traffic’ (p. 146), instead of his own history and culture. At school the children are prepared to be Mimic Men. Singh’s adolescent fantasies and restlessness are redirected through language and reading to idealized lands and landscapes elsewhere. If the first exile is from the mother’s breast and progressively from the father and family (including the possibility of re-establishing wholeness through incest with Sally), the second exile is through education and reading. Singh’s lack of wholeness, of identity and authenticity, leads to his posturing, dandyism and flights into exile. No place is home. Everywhere he is shipwrecked, washed up. Education in mimicry is the start of literary mimicry. When in An Area of Darkness Naipaul remarks about Indians, ‘they defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets’ (p. 70) we catch the Churchillian allusion with its comic, ironic parallel to England defending itself against Nazi Germany. In The Mimic Men such echoes, parodies and allusions are foregrounded, with the novel itself becoming an act of mimicry, even self-mimicry. Space does not permit a demonstration of the many literary echoes to the works of Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene, and the many allusions to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. The great house to which Singh hoped to return in Isabella is modelled upon seventeenth-century poems in praise of the aristocratic great houses

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with their hierarchical order. Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ and Ben Jonson’s Penshurst are as much constructions of nostalgia for a supposed past order as is the Horatian dream of retirement to an old cocoa estate (p. 32) in The Mimic Men. The modernized classical Roman house Singh has built is an imitation of Inigo Jones’s creation of a neo-classical architecture in England from the plans of sixteenth-century Italian architects using classical models. All history from the Greeks through the Romans to Singh’s house is mimicry. In Isabella the house is first neglected by Singh and Sandra and then, ironically, becomes the headquarters for a political party.30 So, paradoxically, it is used and does become a place of power and authority, but as the circumstances are not ideal it is abandoned, the way Singh broke off his relationships with women who showed some imperfection. This novel is a house of mirrors. Naipaul shows his awareness of being part of a tradition of English literature which praises the order represented by houses; he questions the applicability of such a tradition to the decolonized West Indies, wonders whether his lamentation of the passing of order is similar to and influenced by his reading of T. S. Eliot. There is both recognition of and criticism of influence. As all art is built on convention what else can a writer do but mimic? One mimics, like R. K. Narayan, a classical Hindu vision of withdrawal from desire, but according to Naipaul’s comments on the novels of Narayan, what pretends to be ancient piety is an angry response to the modern world.31 One absurdly longs for an ordered hierarchical ideal society but in fact the vision is the product of an early twentieth-century American poet similarly self-exiled in England, seeking an ideal order in contrast to the United States and the effects of mass education, mass culture and democracy. Eliot, like Singh, carried his discontents to England and projected them on Europe the way Naipaul has on the world. Eliot, like Singh and Naipaul, found England disillusioning, a landscape of a lost supposed order and grandeur. Ironically, many literary works which Singh echoes are those of the seventeenth-century poets, canonized by Eliot, who asserted an ideal order during a time of social upheaval and revolution. But the echo of Thomas Hobbes, ‘The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally’ (p. 8), recalls both the political chaos of the past and that the authority of an ordered society is itself based on the fear of violence. Life has always been a jungle ruled by the strongest.

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Words and phrases such as ‘fantasy’, ‘play-acting’, ‘secret’, ‘secret life’, ‘dreams’, ‘self-love’, as well as Singh’s self-analysis suggest ironically that his writing of his past is influenced by psychoanalytical literature, which has provided him with a model.32 This is another instance of Naipaul laying a trail to a possible interpretation and, by foregrounding it, pulling the rug out from under it. The more Naipaul attempts to write from his experience and analysis, the more his work is complicated by his reading and models which are reflected in his prose through literary allusions and parallels. The more he aims at literary richness, the more he will insert parallels to previous literature. A novel written in English, the language in which he was educated, will be modelled on the European tradition which he adapts and revises to his own personal situation. How to avoid the mimicry inherent to art? Such self-awareness means that every novel becomes a deconstruction of itself. Whether the models are West Indian, European or Indian the problem remains. From birth onward there is the angry cry of frustration, loss of wholeness, fear, desire, and an increasing awareness of having been guided or educated into ways of seeing the world. While Ralph Singh is mocked by Naipaul for his desire to return to a prenatal wholeness, the desire for such security and unity of being is normal. Each of Naipaul’s major works of fiction will increasingly be loaded with conscious literary subtexts; he will explore ways of using the labyrinth of intertextuality for a more direct expression of the self’s experience. The Loss of El Dorado is an attempt at a fresh start. Naipaul had been troubled by the contrast between the history of England and the way for him Trinidad began with the arrival of the indentured East Indians to replace the former black slaves. The island seemed to have no former time of grandeur, no romance; even the sugar plantations were recent and no longer had a purpose after Europe had developed a taste for beet sugar. The Amerindians disappeared, interbred with the black population, leaving a few names. Naipaul hoped to overcome his own alienation from Trinidad by reconnecting the island’s present to the past through studying historical documents. It might not be a noble past, but it would explain the present, create continuity and show that Trinidad was formerly part of the wider world and not merely one of many Caribbean islands. The Loss of El Dorado (1969) is a major book, selective in its use of representative incidents and characters; novelistic in its attention to society, character and detail; epic in historical range and its sense of

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foretelling of the destiny of a nation; romantic tragedy in the way European dreams of discovering the legendary great land of gold are found to be a foolish illusion over which many nations fought, reputations were destroyed and cruelties committed. In his ‘Prologue’ Naipaul explains that ‘This book is made up of two forgotten stories’ which are representatively central to Trinidadian history. There is the search for El Dorado, ‘a Spanish delusion’ taken over by Sir Walter Raleigh and others. The second story concerns: ‘The British-sponsored attempt, from the newly captured island of Trinidad, to set going a revolution of high principles in the Spanish Empire. There was a complication. Trinidad, the base for revolution, was at the same time being established as a British slave colony’ (p. 17). Then Trinidad held an important place in the European imagination as a land from which to explore for the gold of the Incas; later it was affected by the revolutionary movements of Europe and the Americas which eventually led to the abolishing of slavery and the collapse of the plantation economy, and which left the island an impoverished backwater of the British Empire. Even during the days when it had a place on the international stage there was a small cast of characters. Underpopulated, with no stable society, far from European centres of power and law, the island’s supposed governments were a fiction disguising arbitrary rule, inability to rule, misrule. A few foreign sailors would land, the defending soldiers would flee and Trinidad would have a new ruler, another system of law, another language. Refugees would arrive from another island, French landowners fleeing the revolution in Haiti, South American revolutionaries fleeing some new twist in their leader’s personality or ideas. And then there were the conflicts and cruelties between whites, black slaves and free blacks. The Loss of El Dorado is an anti-epic of Empire, of the folly of human ambition and illusions. It shows the attempt of human will to construct a new social and political order which after struggle and expectations of success is found to be tarnished and destroyed by the complexities of life, the limited resources available and the environment – along with human stupidity, pride, weaknesses and bad luck. In The Loss of El Dorado Naipaul attempts to combine scholarship, history and fiction into a form appropriate for his analysis of the colonial world and its aftermath. The two central stories provide a wider panorama of Trinidadian history than the usual story of slavery, while showing how grand hopes for the colony collapsed

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into such a story. The monolithic racial view of the West Indies is shown to be more complex, with European groups fighting each other, with good intentions corrupting, with evil people sometimes being good, and with what was once a significant stage of European history becoming an unimportant colony. Behind this rational, Western account of the causes and effects of early Trinidadian history there is a Hindu sense of the futility of human effort. If for Naipaul, unlike the orthodox Hindu, this world is real and is what counts, his preoccupation with failure suggests that another, less Western sensibility is also present. Naipaul spent several years on the research and writing of The Loss of El Dorado. Expecting to be freed from financial anxieties, he sold his house in England and began a search through Trinidad and eventually Canada for a new place to take root. The American publisher for whom The Loss of El Dorado was intended expected a guide book for tourists and rejected it. Having depleted his savings, an emotionally depressed, homeless Naipaul returned to England to write In a Free State.

6 In a Free State Three of Naipaul’s best works of fiction, In a Free State, Guerrillas and A Bend in the River, were written in England during the ten years when he lived in Wiltshire, interrupted by travels abroad on assignments as a journalist. While offering portraits and analysis of the postcolonial world, their main concerns are the nature of freedom, commitment and authenticity in relation to experience and giving purpose to life. Ideas are questioned by actualities. The focus is usually on individuals, their hopes, desires, fears; lives show the real as opposed to abstract theoretical problems of liberty and human nature. These novels are rich in psychology, in awareness of how insecurity is transformed into violence and tyranny. People are often driven by self-defeating emotions and repeat the same patterns of behaviour. Personal lives illuminate the political. In a world without stability or purpose is there anything more than the law of the jungle, the hunter and the prey? The main characters in the fiction of this period are mostly outsiders, expatriates or alien minorities – those who have become uprooted from their origins, travellers without a home to which they can return, minorities at the mercy of others, those stranded by the withdrawal of protecting governments, former enemies brought together by the artificial boundaries of the new nations, and those who have come to the capitals of the world without the necessary skills and resources to survive. If in the modern world freedom is dangerous, there are also signs of new empires, new orders – the seemingly innocent Americans confidently travelling abroad, the Chinese travelling in tightly controlled groups. Naipaul examines the Europeans who come to former colonies seeking careers or personal salvation, the dangers to the Indian diaspora caused by the withdrawal of the Empire that led them abroad, the effect of metropolitan sentimental ‘third-worldism’ on new nations along with the tyrannical governments and civil wars that have resulted from the withdrawal of imperial order. What kind of governments will replace the Empire? The novels revise the literature, history and 86

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myths of Empire in the light of present realities. For those raised on such writers as Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad, what is the reality of life abroad today? Naipaul is pessimistic about the disorder created by the collapse of Empire, worried about the reappearance of the Arabs and Muslims on the international scene only a century after their expanding empires had been challenged by Europeans in Africa and India. In a world consisting of change, no ideal time or place, in which everything has its cycle of creation, being and decay, all that can be done is to create and leave a mark on history, a record of achievement. Sexual desire, however, often leads people astray from their vocation or best interests. Sexuality in its various forms has become important to Naipaul’s writings. He has observed that sexuality dangerously brings together people of different cultures and races, leads to humiliation, financial ruin and burdensome responsibilities, results in incompatible personal relations and is another cause and source of irrationality and violence. In a Free State (1971) reflects Naipaul’s travels through Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, the wide variety of places in which the stories are set and the focus is on the advantages and dangers to those who travel, become expatriates or who have no home. The variety of places and nations indicates that the state of freedom is universal; it is also universal in that the dangers of freedom exist for most of humankind, whether those in new nations or the outsider in England or America. The settings range from Washington, the new capital of the world; London, the centre of the last universal empire; Egypt, a former centre of civilization which has decayed into an impoverished tourist attraction; and a newly independent East African country in the midst of a civil war as the formerly pacified tribes struggle for dominance under the guise of national political unity. Change and disorder are seen as normal in a world in which danger, alienation, failed ideals, illusions, rapid transformations and the mistreatment of the weak by the strong and cunning are the rules of life. While from a philosophical perspective we are all free, freedom is especially dangerous when individuals are isolated from their own communities, where order has disappeared, or where there are few accepted social and cultural traditions. In such situations people are at the mercy of others, people fight, or a new order is brutally imposed by violence. This is the most ‘existential’ period of Naipaul’s work and for that reason perhaps the most profound, tragic and richest; yet some of

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the stories are also comedies of manners.33 If there is no essence, no settled community, if all great cities and empires are subject to change, if the raising of individual consciousness leads to a heightened sense of isolation and insecurity, why should a person continue to live? If individualism allows Santosh in ‘One out of Many’ to see his face in the mirror, and distinguish it from the crowd, why should he be willing to live a life of pain and anxiety to feed that face, knowing that it is decaying and will die? Unlike Albert Camus, in whose writings Naipaul appears to have recognized a similar vision, there is no attempt to justify living by the intensity of experience and the fulfilment of pleasures. Naipaul’s characters, like Santosh, are left in the prison of freedom with responsibility for themselves. In a Free State explores the nature and illusions of commitment. Naipaul appears critical of the Sartrean strategy of transcending the self in a larger community, in some ideal, whether in interracial marriage, commitment to others or identification with Third World causes. There is no way you can perform the Sartrean philosophical acrobatic feat of being part of some larger cause while retaining your freedom. Naipaul does not try to identify with, explain or understand Africans or African-Americans. They represent another culture, an Other, which he accepts as foreign to himself and which it would be bad faith for him to attempt as a writer. He does not know such societies from the inside. He has, however, closely observed the British abroad and they have become part of his fictional world along with Indians and West Indians. ‘In a Free State’, the title story at the centre of the book, is a marvellously amusing portrait of how the British push and shove each other through language, and of their sexual ‘freedom’, showing how blind they can be to continue such petty infighting and snobberies in the dangerous post-imperial world. Such a story revises the Somerset Maugham tale of ‘abroad’. The British expatriate, including the sympathizer with Third World causes, is seen as second-rate, someone who could not make it at home, and, even if liberal, uncomprehending of the local society and racially prejudiced. But Naipaul is not just a satirist, an observer of manners and morals. There is interest in and compassion for the problems of his characters. Having left their own society they are now adrift, unable to find suitable jobs at home, and face a future of moving from country to country. ‘In a Free State’ portrays the earliest settlers with compassion, showing their toughness, brutality, illusions, hopes to create a better European life abroad and willingness to stay on when times get

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tough. They built for the future whereas the new class of postcolonial experts, advisors and liberal sympathizers are parasites, with no genuine commitment. They are on short-contracts and will move on when they can, whereas the older colonialists have become too old to start again. Naipaul is examining himself through such characters; he is an exile in England, someone who has learned he cannot return to Trinidad or India, someone who had to begin again, after the financial debacle that followed The Loss of El Dorado, now fated to live in England and to roam the world seeking material to support himself as a journalist and novelist. Hence the concern in these stories with age. The Tramp in the prologue, Santosh and the West Indian narrator in ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’, feel too old to start again. The old colonial hotel owner in ‘In a Free State’ can only wait with his gun to be killed and have his property taken by Africans. Bobby, who is on a short contract and can send half his money back to England, sentimentalizes Africans whom, because of his race, position and money, he can exploit sexually. Rather than the progressive he thinks himself, he works for and is part of a new nationalist order which exploits Africa. While Bobby will leave when threatened by the violence of the new disorder, the colonial hotel owner came to Africa to stay, and helped, like the Indians of the diaspora, to build the modern cities and buildings of the continent which the Africans take over at independence. In a Free State explores such varied contradictions of freedom as the opportunities it offers for greater development of the self, the heightened sense of being unique, and the dangers – psychological, physical, economic, political – that result when there is no longer an order to provide security. Anarchy always is just around the corner, the rule of law quickly becomes the rule of the gun, the mob, the army. When people enter a ‘free state’, society often reverts to a Hobbesian jungle-like condition in which everyone is at war with everyone else and the strong are free to hunt and attack the weak. Freedom is suspect as people are limited by the society in which they live. Linda’s husband in ‘In a Free State’ goes to Africa to create better radio programmes than he can in England, but soon finds himself, despite a promotion and higher salary, broadcasting government propaganda as the news. Having left England there is no job to which he can return. The impoverished English traveller eventually becomes an international tramp and victim.

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In a Free State is Naipaul’s attempt to adapt his fiction to reflect his acceptance that he has become a man of the world without a home, whose subject matter and themes will be concerned with the problems and disorders of the post-imperial world. The writing of a sequence of stories and diary extracts set in different countries and mixing autobiography with fiction shows his awareness that in his exile and travels he has become representative of a modern human condition. This requires finding new literary forms or re-examining the basis of English fiction, especially writing about foreign lands. In the five-part form of In a Free State, with its seeming autobiographical Prologue and Epilogue sandwiching two distinctly different short stories and a novella, there are not the continuities of place, events, sequence and characters found in volumes of linked short stories. The ‘free state’ is a matter of structure as well as theme. While it is probable that Naipaul was responding to the loosening of fictional form in recent decades, he remains within the realist tradition with its focus on people and society rather than the creative process itself. The text is allowed to speak itself without much authorial intervention, although literary allusions and models have become a rich subtext of echoes counterpointed against the realism of the story. For example, Ralph Ellison’s classic black American novel The Invisible Man (1952) appears to be a model for and is alluded to in ‘One out of Many’. Besides the obvious parallels, echoes and similar themes, there is the comedy of using a novel about black – white relationships in America as a source of Asian Indian– black relationships in America. (Ellison’s novel is also possibly an influence on ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’.) Naipaul’s prose is increasingly understated, dry and objective on the surface, its ironies more quiet, the tonal direction and comedy or compassion, although present, less obvious. The five stories focus on uprooted individuals within situations where society has become disorganized or ‘free’ and, like most of Naipaul’s fiction, the narrative easily lends itself to being allegorized as representative of the nation, the post-imperial and the contemporary world. The various possible significances of the title include an independent nation or condition, something that is not part of something else (like free oxygen) or (as in the American civil war) without slavery. Puns in English are considered a debased literary currency, despite the demonstrated importance of what William Empson termed The Structure of Complex Words in the way authors will use different

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significances of a term as contrasting themes within a text. In Indian poetics, however, puns are regarded as serious and may generate literary works which exist to explore or develop the multiple meanings of a concept. In U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Kannada language religious novella, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (1965: English translation 1976), the story is shaped by the various, contradictory meanings of the Sanskrit word ‘Samskara’.34 Something similar occurs in In a Free State which explores the various meanings of freedom. There is the freedom of the natural world which has no divine purpose but which, paradoxically, reveals cycles of creation and decay. If there is no essential good or evil, no divine purpose, then we are existentially free to give life what meaning we wish, to pursue, or not pursue, what goals we wish. But this creates terrifying responsibilities as our freedom is limited by circumstances, possibilities and fears. Socially to be in a ‘free-state’ is to be isolated, alienated, not part of a group and therefore a prey for others. Freedom not only creates a crisis of purpose and responsibility but also brings dangers of insecurity and ruin. Sexual freedom has its dangers as Bobby learns in attempting to seduce African men. Freedom from established manners produces such absurdities as Santosh’s purchase of a green suit. A free or independent state can be a chaotic, disordered, violent nation, in the midst of civil or tribal wars. Freedom can result in tyranny. The various stories in In a Free State probe such contradictions, beginning with the threatened situation of the tramp (on a ship between territorial boundaries with only the captain in charge), the financial and emotional insecurity of Santosh and the West Indian narrator in ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’, a civil war in the independent African state or Naipaul’s own exercise of moral choice in protesting against the humiliation of Egyptian children and himself being humiliated by it. Naipaul is using ‘freedom’ with the complexity that Anantha Murthy uses ‘Samskara’ or the way that in India: A Wounded Civilization Naipaul discusses dharma: The difficulty, the contradiction, lies in that very concept of dharma … dharma … is a complex word; it can mean the faith, pietas, everything which is felt to be right and religious and sanctioned: Law must serve dharma … Yet dharma as expressed in the Indian social system, is so shot through with injustice and cruelty … It can accommodate bonded labour as, once, it accommodated widowburning. Dharma can resist the idea of equity. (p. 132)

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In the Prologue and Epilogue Naipaul travels to Egypt as part of a life continually on the move, being in a free state. He is also travelling to a now supposedly free state. He travels among various casualties of freedom, people displaced as a consequence of national independence, the withdrawal of the former imperial order or by the demands of individual ambition. There is an older impoverished Englishman, who travels alone and is immediately seen as weak, a potential victim, prey to be hunted by others for amusement. Naipaul watches but fearing for himself avoids involvement with the weak. In the Epilogue Naipaul, for once, intervenes in what he sees as injustice and humiliation; but he soon learns the futility of what he has done and withdraws. The strong continue to dominate the weak. Naipaul also observes a touring Chinese circus which unlike himself travels as a protected, well-led, organized, disciplined group. They may represent another international empire, the possible new order to replace the confusing freedom of the West. Between the two autobiographical episodes there are three stories. At the centre of the book the title story, ‘In a Free State’, offers another, more wry, contemporary version of The Heart of Darkness. Here two Europeans travel in a car across a large African country (Uganda with touches of Kenya and Rwanda), while the government is crushing a secessionist movement. There is a parallel between the political chaos following national independence and the moral and psychological chaos of the two whites. If Africa has given them the freedom to follow their sexual desires and other privileges, it is also a place of violence where Europeans are losing their dominance, where they are now often humiliated; the expatriate British white has joined the unprotected, rootless, homeless population of the contemporary world and will need to keep moving. In a Free State reveals Naipaul working within a variety of kinds of English. His control of British tonalities and idioms allows the dialogue between British characters in ‘In a Free State’ to carry most of the weight and fill the space of a long narrative with an economy of means. Each of the three stories is a display of entering other minds, accommodating to other subjectivities and uses of English. ‘One out of Many’ is told directly by a former Bombay servant and part of the comedy is the discrepancy between what he says, which is naive, and what we understand. At first he mistakes American hippies for strange Indians long lost in America. He does not understand the connection between the Indian herb he smokes and why the African-Americans are interested in him. ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’,

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in its jagged, fragmented, sentences and narrative is the monologue of an emotionally disturbed, uneducated West Indian immigrant in England. Continual rereading does not explain exactly what has happened in parts of the story. The references to American movies, part of Naipaul’s repertoire of symbolism, show how the speaker’s thought has been influenced by foreign images. They give him wrong ambitions for his brother, excite him to notions of murder and seep into his descriptions of what he has experienced. This is the first time Naipaul has tried to write about near-insanity from the inside. Typical of Naipaul is the social concern, the linking of the psychological to cultural, social and economic causes. While In a Free State has among its characters a variety of the world’s peoples a continuing interest is Indians abroad. Even in ‘In a Free State’, where there are no Indian characters, we are reminded of the Indian presence in East Africa through the description of the national capital as a city built by whites and Indians, by allusions to Indian shops and mentions of Indian truck drivers and lower level supervisors. The ruling elite is African and Africans head government departments and the army; below them are the new international experts, British and American, who continue to profit financially from Africa; on the bottom are the uneducated African masses who are often uncomprehending of the jobs they barely perform. Between the white expatriates and the African masses are the Indians who do the less interesting, less well-paid modern jobs and keep the country functioning, although resented by both Africans and whites. In a Free State is in part a book about the modern Indian diaspora. The Indian servant who comes to America in ‘One out of Many’ becomes an illegal immigrant and, except for some Indians who exploit him, finds no community except among the AfricanAmericans, who his Hindu culture has taught him are unclean and inferior. He has become free but in terms of his inner self trapped and debased. The story is comic and Naipaul has fun with the cultural and social incongruities that result in the unlikely case of one of India’s impoverished servants suddenly being given the opportunity of living in Washington, DC. If part of the comedy is the humorous reversal of someone usually considered one of the earth’s downtrodden being less happy as an American wage-earner, another comedy is the servant’s social awareness. In India he avoids riff-raff, judges others socially and has a sense of status and security. In America he has more material comforts and money, but socially,

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spiritually and emotionally he is uncomfortable; his life is more restricted; and in terms of his own culture he can be said to have fallen among a people considered lower than himself. In America he has become a soul brother to the black Americans. An allusion to the fallen Adam in Paradise Lost points to the paradox: ‘You will be a free man … You will have the whole world before you’ (p. 57). In ‘One out of Many’ Naipaul uses the convention of the novel of manners where the servant given security and status by working for someone rich or titled becomes a snob, the one person in such fiction who usually upholds class and other status distinctions. In having an Indian servant as his central character, Naipaul gets at the underlying assumptions behind a middle- and upper-class joke. The working classes are usually happier with the security of job and position than the financially well off and highly qualified who have more to gain from mobility and who are therefore more likely to be ‘liberal’. Freedom assumes security. It also assumes a consensus of values and therefore of culture. Santosh’s transfer to Washington and expectation of a green card through marrying an African-American may seem like paradise to some, and his memories of life in Bombay may seem the immigrant’s usual idealized nostalgia for a lost home, but his life in America is impoverished, lonely and filled with anxieties. As Santosh becomes increasingly more conscious of his freedom and responsible for himself, without the knowledge and qualifications to make much use of such liberty, his situation seems tragic. Naipaul balances the comedy and tragedy, allowing his themes to deepen without totally moving out of comedy until the conclusion: Soul Brother. I understand the words; but I feel, brother to what or to whom? I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over. (p. 58) Santosh mixes Indian fatalism and passivity which considers this world an illusion, with the rebel, the Western striving individualist, the self-willed, in which this life is the only reality. The two opposing views blend together into a distinctive pessimism, an existential despair. That Santosh can see no achievement in his remarkable life is part of the comedy. But another interpretation might be that the

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Asian Indian is another Invisible Man in the United States, someone whose own culture is mistakenly assumed to be similar to that of African-Americans, Africans and black West Indians. ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’ concerns the ways ambition, education, illusions and travel fracture family bonds and how personal faults and lack of self-knowledge can be as destructive as the difficulties presented by the world. The speaker, an Indian, brought up among the sugar cane fields of the West Indies, is obsessed with his younger brother who he decides will not have the ugly, brutal life he himself has known. Like an affectionate parent he spoils his brother, who lacks the abilities and will to better himself. The younger brother blames others for his failures, is lazy, lies and keeps pretending he needs money for further study. The narrator borrows money so his brother can go to England and study there, eventually follows him, himself finds a job in a factory, and besides paying for his brother, who long ago has stopped enrolling for courses of study, saves up enough to open a small roti shop which he eventually loses along with his savings. While he suffers from racially prejudiced young British toughs, he seems unequipped to operate a shop in England. He has no friends, no society, no one to give him advice or help. The only person he trusts is his younger brother, who refuses to have anything to do with the shop. For decades the speaker has shown bad judgement about his brother and an unwillingness to take advice from others who warned him. Too much pride is involved. There are suggestions that the elder brother’s love for the younger is tinged with suppressed homosexual urges. The occasion for the story is the marriage of the younger brother to a white Englishwoman. The speaker sees this as a final betrayal. While he alludes to the breaking of Hindu customs the story implies that sexual jealousy contributes to his rage. It is ironic that once the younger brother is no longer subsidized he finds a job and becomes presentable enough to marry the Englishwoman. The elder brother’s continuing support may have held back the younger brother from becoming independent. This is also ironic as it is the elder brother who had the puritan virtues of hard work, savings, investment, whereas the younger one appeared a layabout with expensive pretences and no hope in life. But he has been subsidized long enough to have some education, a gift for words, and would be more assimilable than the speaker with his peasant’s broken English. This is a complex tale in presentation, insight, psychology and compassion, told in fragmented, broken English, using a jagged

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polyphonic form for its themes. There is a complexity and ambiguity that defies simplistic interpretations. The speaker’s ambitions for his brother are shaped, as is most of his view of life, by the many, especially American, films he watched. He is another Mimic Man, another West Indian whose standards of beauty, style and achievement have been formed by movie-going. Frank tries to make the speaker understand his failures as the result of racial prejudice, but the speaker has badly invested in his brother, in his brother’s love and in his own business. Freedom includes the freedom to fail. Educating family is a way to lose them. The speaker has already heard stories about that and he foolishly imitates a wealthy relative who had sent his son abroad and is likely to lose him. The prologue, ‘The Tramp at Piraeus’, appears to be an episode from one of the journals Naipaul regularly keeps when travelling, although it might be an invented incident. Here Naipaul is travelling from Greece to Egypt and the ship (as with many ships in literature) is a microcosm of mankind, a ship of fools, an epitome of how the world works and what drives society. The first paragraph immediately establishes themes and perspective. ‘There wasn’t enough room for everybody’ introduces a feeling of people in competition, of irritability and struggle. There are the understated tonalities increasingly found in Naipaul’s later writings (‘I ought to have made other arrangements’), the extreme understatement, the sparing use of comparisons (‘like a refugee ship’) and the short description of the scene which rapidly establishes atmosphere (‘dingy little Greek steamer’). The second paragraph emphasizes the smallness of the space, the limited resources and the role of groups in the competition for comforts: ‘Many of the chairs in the small smoking-room and a good deal of the floor space had been seized by overnight passengers from Italy.’ Soon we are introduced to the ‘casualties of … freedom’ including Egyptian Greeks expelled from Egypt and ‘the tramp’, an Englishman who from a distance looks like ‘a romantic wanderer of an earlier generation’ but who is in reality an impoverished, old man, alone and afraid of the others. He is representative of the loss of European, especially British, privileges (including wandering freely, securely around the world) after the withdrawal of imperial power, the end of generations of romantic travel as the world once more becomes dangerous for those without protection. He is also in his potential for being a victim typical of those alone, those without wealth, status or a group to protect them. He begins looking for

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company and brags that he has been travelling for thirty-eight years. ‘But what’s nationality these days? I think of myself as a citizen of the world’ (p. 9). Such reporting of conversation is common to Naipaul’s journalism and increasingly to his fiction as is the author’s intervention to offer an interpretation: ‘He hadn’t wanted company; he wanted only the camouflage and protection of company. The tramp knew he was odd.’ He is also rather vain, another of Naipaul’s pathetic rebels who, lacking the means to be truly free, need to assert themselves against others and thus attract victimization. Naipaul with his sense of self-protection ‘feared to be involved with him’ (p. 12). Next we are introduced to a group which consists of Lebanese, Egyptians and Germans, which ‘had its own cohesion’. It is unclear exactly what the tramp did (possibly he was seasick or had trouble with his bowels), but soon a Lebanese who shared his cabin threatens to kill the tramp. In this supposedly international world people are still associated with their nationality: ‘the man from Beirut’, ‘the Egyptian student’, ‘the English pig’. Only Hans, ‘the Austrian boy’, has a name. The prologue itself is ordered into distinct parts marked by additional space on the page after each part. The first section concludes: ‘The tramp knew he was odd.’ The second ends ‘I feared to be involved with him. Far below, the Greek refugees sat or lay in the sun’ (p. 12). Each section is rounded or breaks off, a short story in itself, with a striking phrase or description: ‘looking like a man who had been made very angry’. The fourth section opens with the striking abrupt ‘I will kill him’ (p. 13) and concludes ‘he was finished’. The final eight paragraphs of the fourth section begin with ‘The’. They gain their cinema-like force from a series of abrupt shots in which the focus shifts back and forth between ‘The Egyptian’ and ‘The Tramp’, the latter apparently undisturbed by the former’s annoyance at his presence. ‘The Egyptian shrieked … The Tramp had come in … The Egyptian shrieked again … The furniture-maker said … The Tramp didn’t see … The fascination of the furnituremaker … The Austrian boy … The Tramp …’ (pp. 14–15). ‘It was to be like a tiger-hunt, where bait is laid out and the hunter and spectators watch from the security of a platform.’ The notion and metaphor of life as hunting is central to Naipaul’s view of the world, where the strong detect weakness and a stray cut off from the herd is a victim, someone to rob, enslave, coerce, play with as a cat plays with a mouse. The theme of the better off being spectators of such a sport is repeated in the ‘Epilogue’ where Naipaul sickens at

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the rich Italian tourists enjoying themselves throwing food into the sand for the impoverished Egyptian children who are then whipped as they come too close to the tourist restaurant. In the Prologue Naipaul is a watcher, the writer as uncommitted observer of the lives of others, someone who regardless of how he feels will not become involved. When in the Epilogue he risks commitment, grabs the whip, upbraids the Egyptian whose job it is to use the whip to keep the restaurant free from beggars, he is seen as a foolish foreigner, someone emotionally disturbed, who can do nothing to change society, the tourists, the ways of the world. Naipaul when younger wanted to be a ‘sophisticated’ writer, a world traveller, like Somerset Maugham, writing about exotic foreign places and the shocking ways of the rich. Such fiction was the product of imperialism. He has become a different writer who travels, often using uncomfortable transport and worrying about his expenses, through a world of troubled, economically dependent independent nations, the new ‘exotic’ places for the West, observing the way those in power treat each other. The Tramp, Bobby, Linda, are the descendants of Maugham’s characters, the British abroad, and Bobby and Linda in ‘In a Free State’ have the sexual hunger, the class attitudes of the past, but the world has changed, they are no longer part of an empire, they are no longer superior, no longer free from dangers. People from the newly independent states come into the picture as more than servants, noble savages, bearers, comic native clerks, cannibals or wealthy aristocratic princes. Now the British are part of those hunted and the eccentric vagabond, the sensitive university-educated homosexual, the wife of the secondrate expatriate, the rich Englishwomen seeking excitement and lovers abroad, are threatened by those who are no longer subservient. The old roles have become dangerous as power has changed. The ship in the prologue is an example of this new disorder in which relationships, identity, dignity, depend on what one achieves by one’s own means or by the group to which one belongs. No one really governs, the law is the law of the jungle. The tramp, however, refuses to accept being victimized; he becomes a dangerous trapped tiger and salvages victory and a kind of dignity from the situation. He is humiliated and in danger, but he makes it too dangerous for his hunters to make the kill and they are the ones who suffer most. He is mishandled, brutally thrown to the ground and no one helps him. But then he locks himself into the cabin he shares with his tormentors and threatens to set it ablaze if

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they try to enter. The hunters back off and have to spend the night sleeping in the dining room. The ship docks and the groups and power relations that had temporarily formed break up. Now the Egyptian officials at the dock are those with power and authority: ‘As soon as the officials came aboard the refugees began to push and fight their way towards them. It was a factitious frenzy, the deference of the persecuted to authority’ (p. 19). The tramp reappears, and while there is ‘no nervousness in his movements … his eyes were quick with fear’ (p. 20). But no one is now interested in hunting him. The tramp represents the dangers of being in a free state and could be said to show the consequences of rebellion, both its dangers – dangers which will continue in future – and the way cunning, preparation, ruthlessness, enable survival. The events on the ship show how groups form and change, how people use others (the Lebanese and Egyptian use the Austrian Hans, he became their muscle man, he physically attacked the tramp for them), and how people are cruel to each other, just for amusement, even when there is no actual gain involved. Such violence may have repressed sexual sources, be caused by earlier humiliations or be part of an instinct to dominate and prey upon others. Societies repress and organize such violence to communal purposes and are naturally in a state of war with each other. Individuals who find fuller realization of themselves in a state of freedom are potential victims. Naipaul’s childhood world of a large extended family in which each person or group shoved, pushed, and in which family rules disguised shifting power relationships remained a model for his view of the world.

7 The Overcrowded Barracoon, ‘Michael X’, Guerrillas and India: A Wounded Civilization I write from the deepest sympathy for all my characters.35 The novel, you know, hangs between two sexual scenes. The first explains the second. I was very nervous before I wrote the first one. And I was appalled by the second … it’s a moralistic book. It has very hard things to say about people who play at serious things, who think they can always escape, run back to their safe world.36 Naipaul published a selection of his essays and journalism as The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972) which includes, along with some autobiography and comments on India, studies of small, economically unviable, islands caught up in the drama, rhetoric and delusions of independence. Anguilla, a Caribbean island with a population of six thousand, wants to go it alone, but has not the economic means, is unable to defend itself and is vulnerable to every sweet-talking hustler or crook. If only for its own protection it needs to belong to a larger economic and political body. Mauritius, the Indian Ocean island where ‘the dodo forgot how to fly, because it had no enemies’ (p. 277), was once uninhabited. Since the seventeenth century there have been various attempts to settle the land, grow sugar cane, import slaves and use indentured Indian immigrants for labour. After malaria was eradicated in the late 1940s the population increased rapidly and keeps growing. Sugar remains the sole export, there is massive unemployment, society is racially divided (‘rural labour is Indian; mulattos are civil servants; Blacks are artisans, dockworkers and fishermen; Chinese are in trade’), the country is independent, a ‘paradise’ to tourists, and ‘part of the great human engineering of 100

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recent empires, the shifting about of leaderless groups of conquered peoples’. The politicians talk about Black Power, idealize Mao and Castro, complain about colonialism and think of themselves as victims. But nothing is likely to change the fact that it is: ‘an agricultural colony, created by empire in an empty land and always meant to be part of something larger, now given a thing called independence and set adrift, an abandoned imperial barracoon, incapable of economic or cultural autonomy’ (p. 292). During 1973 Naipaul wrote ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ which was republished with a Postscript in The Return of Eva Perón (1980). Along with the failed 1970 Black Power Revolution in Trinidad, the background of Naipaul’s next novel, Guerrillas, is the story of the rise of the ‘red’ (Trinidadian for a lightskinned black) Michael de Freitas from London pimp, drug pusher and muscleman for racketeers to a hustling Black Power leader, known, according to the changing fashions of protest, as Michael X or Michael Abdul Malik, who insanely murdered his own followers in his commune in Trinidad.37 The Trinidad Black Power movement and killings were among the excesses of the 1960s when words often seemed real and fantasies were built on top of other fantasies: an attempted Black Power Revolution in an independent black-governed island and a lightcomplexioned West Indian hustler increasingly aping, mostly for the entertainment of admiring whites, the slogans and organizational trappings of American Black Power until he believes his own posturing that he is a revolutionary Messiah with the right to kill his followers. The dangers of freedom are complicated by mimicry of new metropolitan cultural fashions and by whites who find moral drama and sexual excitement in supporting supposed Third World revolutions. Guerrillas (1975) brings together many of Naipaul’s themes – the inability of small, underdeveloped nations to be truly independent; mimicry; the relationship between whites and blacks in which assertions of black authenticity so often are part of dependency; the ways in which Christianity blending with black protest turns into an invitation to Black Messianism (‘Redemption requires a redeemer; and a redeemer in these circumstances, cannot but end like the Emperor Jones: contemptuous of the people he leads’ [REP, p. 73]). Black Power outside the United States ‘perpetuates the negative, colonial politics of protest. It is … a deep corruption: a wish to be granted a dispensation from the pains of development, an almost

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religious conviction that oppression can be turned into an asset, race into money’ (REP, p. 73). Naipaul’s analysis of the ways in which claims of victimization perpetuate dependency, self-contempt, irresponsibility and fantasy is part of a larger vision in which success requires hard work, practicality, a rational plan to work within the limitations of circumstances. Guerrillas takes place on a composite English-speaking Caribbean island resembling Trinidad and Jamaica. The Reggae, gangs, Rastafarians, Bauxite, and racial composition of the island (no Indians are mentioned in the novel) could be Jamaica. The way the killing of a black radical leader by the police turns into a Black Power uprising and the government begins to crumble until strengthened by foreign support recalls Trinidad’s Black Power revolt of 1970. Naipaul has taken details and events from the region to create a representative place and situation in which his characters, themselves representative, act upon each other and find themselves trapped. The 1970 attempted revolution in Trinidad began with the banning of the Trinidad-born American Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, which was followed by protest groups and violence at the February Carnival and, later that month, student protest. A Black Power demonstration in March supposedly of 10 000 people was followed by throwing Molotov cocktail bombs at shops and banks, further demonstrations, the use of tear gas on a crowd, and the police shooting dead Basil Davis, on 6th April. On 9th April Davis’s funeral turned into a mass procession. (This is the basis of the police shoot-out with Stephens in Guerrillas [pp. 166–7] and Jimmy Ahmed’s carrying of the body [p. 177] to create a demonstration which he hopes to turn into a revolutionary movement.) Four days later the Minister of External Affairs resigned (no one in the novel knows if there is still a government), on 21st April a State of Emergency (p. 176) was declared, a curfew imposed, fires were started and a section of the Trinidad Defence Force revolted and tried to join the demonstrators in Port of Spain. They were prevented by the Coast Guard, some American ships showed up and Venezuelan airplanes flew over the island. During May order was restored.38 Several years later, in 1973, there was a mysterious guerrilla movement in the hills outside Port of Spain, supposedly led by university intellectuals and students imitating Ché and Castro. After some people had been killed by the guerrillas and the police killed some of the guerrillas the movement vanished.

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Guerrillas does not treat the political events. They are considered a kind of communal frenzy predictable on a small, politically independent island with a history of racial humiliations and without the means to provide a better life for its populace, who turn to quasireligious notions of racial deliverance. Except for Jimmy’s attempt to become leader of the demonstrations, the events surround the personal dramas of the three main characters, Jimmy, Jane and Roche. Their stories show how personal rebellions are mistaken for revolutionary idealism and how history has determined behaviour. The subjective illuminates the historical drama. Naipaul is especially critical of whites who want to be involved in Third World distress. What really motivates them? Why do they assume that they are welcome to interfere in the affairs of other nations? They are to him the heirs of the colonial whites and expatriates of the literature of Empire; now dissatisfied with their own shrunken societies they carry their emotional needs to the former colonies in search of drama, sexual excitement and access to power. Roche, a white South African ex-revolutionary, wants to be the conscience of his race, but, ineffectual as a revolutionary and a reformer, he assumes that others should welcome him, give him a job and something useful to do. Roche seems a parasite who has lost whatever convictions he had but who uses his reputation as someone jailed and tortured for his beliefs to obtain money and resources for causes and people in which he disbelieves. The portrait of Roche (the name is a pointer) and his politics are part of Naipaul’s examination of white camp followers of world revolution and follow on from the portrait of Bobby in ‘In a Free State’. As the imperial centre has lost its glamour, Europeans have sought excitement among the decolonized. Rather than coming to a centre of the world’s activity by leaving London, Jane has become just another displaced person, an outsider without contacts, activity or society. Uninterested in a career or job, dependent on men to give her purpose, ideas, a place, but financially secure and without the normal pressure to make a place in the world to survive, Jane seeks drama abroad. Her own society no longer offers those like her an ideal such as imperialism or the mission of Western civilization. That Jane was born in Ottawa, has an insured house in London and that her passport gives her the right to live and work in London makes clear her privileged position (unlike that of Jimmy or other West Indians), a position deriving from the former imperial order, an order which no longer exists as shown by the riots on the island and

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by her murder. The new order is represented by the Americans who fly in, who own the Bauxite company and restore order after the riots. Gale Benson was the historical source for Jane. Gale, a British divorcee in her late twenties, was a white woman who dressed in African clothes and worshipped as God Hakim Jamal, the ‘Muslim’ name of a black American hustler. Gale was one of the commune murdered on Michael X’s orders. Naipaul regards Benson as showing ‘the great uneducated vanity of the middle-class dropout’ (p. 14), and ‘those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men – not only the Negro – to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own’ (REP, p. 74). Jane belongs to a tradition of novels in which socially and financially secure women are attracted to supposed revolutionaries. There is sexual excitement in such a relationship. Jane picks up Roche because she thinks of him as a doer, defining herself through her man – a common role for a woman. When the men discuss what would be a perfect day, Meredith says such a game would not apply to a woman as she is formed by her relationship with men. Meredith and others regard Jane as one of many wealthy white women who have paid for Jimmy’s sexual services by supporting his causes. She is Jane to his Tarzan, the white woman who seeks sexual satisfaction in the violent, primitive man. Meredith asks Jane whether she looked into Jimmy’s eyes and understood ‘the meaning of hate?’ ‘I was just quoting from an interview in one of the English papers. An interview by some woman. When she wrote about Jimmy she became all cunt’ (p. 140). In ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ Naipaul reports on an interview by Jill Tweedie with two black Americans, in the Guardian of 9th August 1971. One was a female school counsellor who wanted to discuss her work and who disappointed Tweedie by not talking enough about race and black militancy. The other was Hakim Jamal, an American Black Muslim, supposedly a follower of Malcolm X, who talked about killing, and described himself as ‘excruciatingly handsome, tantalizingly brown, fiercely articulate’. Tweedie wrote: ‘This black man is a handsome man, a brigand with a gold ring in his ear … tall and spare and stoned on agro. … With a woman the agro comes masked, translated into sexual terms.’ Tweedie much preferred

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Jamal’s anger to the school counsellor’s comparative passivity (REP, pp. 39–40). It was Jamal who brought Gale Benson, the woman who became the model for Jane, to Michael X and he was involved in the plan to kill her. Both Michael X and Hakim Jamal were often supported by women who found excitement in their macho image, threat of violence and display of black aggression. Gale Benson claimed she was Jamal’s white-woman slave and would beg for him. Many of the motifs concerning Jimmy and white–black relations are transposed borrowings from parts of the Michael X story. When Jimmy fantasizes that Jane is a secret agent sent to spy on him, it is because Jamal and Michael X said that about Gale before killing her. Jane’s masochism adds to her danger and it is implied that other women, such as an English newspaper reporter who interviewed Jimmy, may also find sexual satisfaction in masochism. Jane’s discovery of her masochism was awakened by an earlier lover, ‘a left-wing journalist’ (p. 48) who when she grew cold on him slapped her twice and left her. ‘He didn’t come back; and then she discovered to her dismay and disgust that she was moist’ (p. 48). It is after unsatisfactory love making that she becomes moist (‘the stained sheet had patches of damp’ [p. 240]). After her first sexual encounter with Jimmy, when he prematurely ejaculates, she is moist, thinks she is playing with fire and wants to sleep with Roche that night. When Jimmy spits in her mouth and forces her to swallow she says ‘that was lovely’ (p. 236) and ‘Love, love’ (p. 237). When Jimmy forcibly sodomizes her Jane screams but ‘Her body went soft’ (p. 238) and although Jimmy insults her by calling her ‘rotten meat’ and threatens to force himself on her mouth she reacts with uncertainty, ‘I’m thinking I have to go back. I think I have to go’ (p. 239). Her masochistic passivity is shown by the way she accepts being murdered. There is no sign in the text that she fights for her life. Novels of the post-imperial world written by those from former colonies are no longer concerned with sympathetic whites acting out their own personal dramas against an exotic backdrop. By contrast, Jimmy Ahmed part Chinese, part-black, who acts as a black radical for whites, is treated by the novelist with sympathy. He is a victim both of colonialism and of liberal whites. Jimmy was made into a Black Power leader in England and used – sexually and for excitement – by whites. In the Caribbean he is used by Roche to justify his place in liberal causes and used sexually by Jane. Although Jimmy has always been violent – he fled a rape charge in

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England – his attraction to the Janes of the white world is his potential for violence, the thrill of, as Jane says, playing with fire. While Jimmy is predictable in the way that Meredith’s game shows everyone is predictable and will repeat what they have done in the past, there is also Jimmy the writer. Jimmy uses writing almost like pornography as a means of working up and relieving his troubling but otherwise frustrated feelings. This is a Jimmy, who the more he is found foolish and self-deceiving the more sympathetic he becomes. And then there is Jimmy the half-breed who belongs to no group, who learns to act the part of the Black Power revolutionary for whites, but who knows he is not black, is not considered black by the islanders, and who, as Jane keeps reminding Roche, will be left on his own after Roche moves on. The irony of the novel is that Jane and Roche, those supposedly protected by their whiteness, are not secure. Jane plays with fire too long. Naipaul’s writings warn that Amin, Fanon, Castro, Mao, Mobutu, Perón and Michael X are not what the counter culture, postcolonialists, and other radical sympathizers have treated them as in their own rage against Western society. They or their followers kill; and those killed are often the very peasants, Third World people or idealists the revolution is supposed to represent. Their Western supporters justify or ignore such evils until they can no longer do so and then move on, forgetting what has happened. Roche does not report Jane’s murder or the possibility of other killings at the commune; he covers himself from possible blame by trying to destroy Jane’s passport and other documents. Jane is symbolic of whiteness, the ‘white lady’ Bryant calls her, the dominant otherness that has haunted many blacks since the days of slavery. In the well known mythology of white–black relations, as seen in Derek Walcott’s play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), the writing of Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison or the various black revolutionary autobiographies of the 1960s, the white woman is the white man’s most guarded possession, that which must be possessed, loved, defiled, killed, in the love–hate psychodrama of the black man’s relationship to whiteness and his own self-hatred. Jimmy’s fantasy of raping and then saving a white woman, of violating her and gaining her love, is an expression of white–black relationships (social, economic, political, cultural, historical) symbolized through sexual relations. In the novel the relationship is expressed in Jimmy’s premature ejaculation when Jane is dominant in their first sexual encounter, and his remaining

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erect after humiliating her by sodomizing her in their second encounter. Although Jimmy appears to become insane, the sodomizing and killing of Jane has its logic and is predictable. Roche even asks Jane if Jimmy had sodomized her. (Naipaul’s writings on Argentina, as seen in ‘The Return of Eva Perón’, note how the insecure try to prove themselves by humiliating women through sodomizing them. The mimicry and incompleteness of the culture which results in Perónism and military rule is expressed sexually in sodomy: ‘his conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her’ [REP, p. 150]). While the killing of Jane is predictable in terms of the conventions of literature about white–black relations it has its twists. Naipaul is interested in the psychology of homosexuality, especially, as can be seen from Bobby in ‘In a Free State’, where race is involved; Jimmy’s giving Jane to Bryant to kill is a version of such a relationship since Jimmy is golden, half-Chinese, and has his own love–hate relationship with blackness, seeing in Bryant that deformed part of himself. Just as Jane and the white female reporter seek sexual excitement through the fantasy of violence Jimmy offers as an angry black militant, so Jimmy finds satisfaction in Bryant’s blackness, ugliness, aggressiveness and image of violence. Bryant is Jimmy’s black. Yet, in a further irony, Bryant is himself insecure and admires Stephens’s violence and easy dominance. Stephens is the gangster or leader of the guerrillas (in a further irony it is never clear from the novel whether there really are any guerrillas), who has left Jimmy’s commune and whose death sparks off the riots Jimmy unsuccessfully attempts to lead. Jimmy, we are told, is bound to be unsuccessful since he is Chinese, really an outsider – despite his London reputation. It is another of the novel’s ironies that the man regarded by the British as a black leader is not black and not a leader. Jimmy is another of Naipaul’s outsiders who belong to and are protected by no group. He is, like Metty and Ferdinand in A Bend in the River, a half-breed, a product of the mixing of races as a result of imperialism. He attempts to attach himself to societies – England, the island’s blacks – but this is a more serious version of Miguel Street play-acting, an assumption of inauthentic identities, a mimicry of the imagined black, a culturally fashionable version of Bogart and other fantasies. He is a Trinidadian con man, similar to those whom Naipaul wrote about in The Middle Passage. The islanders have no belief or interest in Jimmy’s supposed revolution by return to the land (another imported slogan).

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His revolution is limited to his Mao shirt. His credentials are his reputation in England and his being supported by foreign firms. His Black Power slogans, rural commune and hippie message of return to the land are as much part of the new imperialism as the American Bauxite company that effectively owns the island. Sex in this novel is seldom satisfactory. Jane’s first husband masturbates on their honeymoon while lying alongside her. Jimmy tells Jane he is no good at making love. Naipaul has said ‘most people are terribly inept in sex and passion’.39 In Guerrillas sex is an expression of, power, fear and dominance. The American businessman, significantly, reads hard core pornography, Easy Lay. Sex is a commodity, a service within an economy. The English pay Jimmy for the excitement and sexual services he provides. Jane sleeps with men as long as they offer her a sense of excitement, of being near revolutions, of being near powerful events. She needs the excitement that Jimmy Ahmed’s danger offers. She gives Bryant a dollar because he calls her ‘white lady’ and she fears him. Roche tells Jane that she must not give money to Bryant because once ‘you allow them to blackmail you it’s hard to have any authority with them’ (p. 28). Bryant spends the money on his own fantasy, a film in which a famous black actor overcomes racial prejudices to marry a white woman. This dollar is symbolic to Jimmy. He imagines himself inviting Jane to a hotel and throwing it back to her in front of everyone. He does in fact invite Jane to the hotel, saying that he wants to return Bryant’s dollar, but instead he takes her home to bed. After he has murdered Jane he feels a ‘void’, perhaps sexual, perhaps a loss of tension in crossing a boundary and removing a symbol of hatred; this is followed by a strange nightmarish vision arising from his deepest self in which a white whore, remembered from a pornographic photograph seen when young, demands ‘Nigger, give me a dollar’ (p. 244). He feels ‘betrayed, his secret known’. So underneath the contempt for the white women he services, Jimmy Ahmed feels humiliated by being part black and fears white women for their sexuality which represents power. Why does Bryant kill Jane? Earlier, after she has gone to bed with Jimmy, Bryant calls her a white rat and Jimmy promises to give her to him. Presumably he means he will share her sexually, a means of male bonding. Bryant’s own sexuality is not clear. He is used homosexually by Jimmy, but he seems passively to accept his use. It is clear that he wants sex with white women, that is his forbidden fruit. After Stephens dies Bryant loses his sanity and wants to kill Jimmy.

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Jimmy leads Jane to see Bryant, claiming ‘he has something for you’, ‘Bryant and I are not friends now, Jane. You’ll help to make us friends’ (p. 240), and when he sees Bryant with a cutlass in his hand he locks his right arm around Jane’s neck and says ‘Kill the rat!’ and as Bryant ‘faltered’ he urges ‘Your rat, Bryant! Your rat!’(p. 242). After Bryant strikes, the narrator comments ‘The first cut; the rest would follow’ (p. 243). Killing Jane is Jimmy’s idea of how to bind Bryant to himself and is an intensification of the aggression against Jane which would have been involved in sharing her with Bryant. They now share her in murder. Naipaul assumes a hatred by the black revolutionary of his white female patrons. (The black radical autobiographies of the 1960s with their ideological defence of raping white women, and Fanon’s works would be source enough for this. Jimmy has read Fanon.) There is also the assumption that homosexuals or bisexual men secretly hate women. Jimmy and the other islanders feel contempt for Jane once she becomes sexually available. In his diary novel Jimmy says that Clarissa (the Jane surrogate) will never be able to walk freely at night without fear now that her reputation is known. Jimmy hates Jane as ‘a dirty cunt’ (p. 241). Jimmy does not merely use Jane as a shield against Bryant’s insane aggression; when Bryant absurdly cries out ‘Help me, Jimmy!’ Jimmy tightens his grip on Jane. There is an analogy between the South African torturing of Roche and the killing of Jane. Roche told Jane: You only have to start. It’s the first kick in the groin that matters. It takes a lot to do that. After that you can do anything. You can find yourself kicking a man in the groin until he bleeds. Then you find you’ve stopped tormenting. You’ve destroyed a human being. You can’t put him together again, all you can do is throw the bleeding meat out of the window. At that stage it’s so easy. (p. 221) Once the order and restraint of civilization are broken life becomes violent. Many situations and themes echo, mirror or are inversions of each other. Jimmy, after being admired for a time by progressives as a black militant, flees England, where he is an alien, because he is charged with rape. Roche, also an alien, is admired by the Left for a time as a hero of South African resistance, but flees England when

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threatened by a South African agent. In fact neither is a serious revolutionary with an ideology or plan. Both Jimmy and Roche attract women through their reputations. Both go to the island where they are involved in a sham commune in which neither believes. They share Jane. Neither is at home on the island, Roche because he is a foreign white, Jimmy because he is part Chinese and seen as a product of England. Both employ London ideas about how to rescue blacks. Complexity, irony and ambiguity are created by such doubling or mirroring. Harry’s wife leaves him, Jane is planning to leave Roche, Harry will leave for Canada, Roche presumably will return to London. Roche flees England after the South African threatens him, he will flee the island after being threatened by Jimmy. Jimmy tried to lead the rioters, Meredith tried to lead the rioters. Roche wrote an autobiographical book, Jimmy tries to write a book. Such effects complicate, provide ironies through juxtaposition, while suggesting similarities between the characters and their situations. The complexity is furthered by the split narration and point of view. Each of the sixteen chapters is focused on one location or narrative sequence. We move from Ridge to Grange, with occasional digressions such as to the house of Stephens’s mother or the radio studio. This creates a sense of alienation, fragmentation, bubbles of enclosure, lack of contact, lack of a community. Each character, along with the author, is sceptical of and disenchanted with the other characters. There is no love, passion or hopeful illusion. As each person, including Meredith, is analysed by others and analyses them, we become aware of deep flaws in their characters; they lack judgement, vision, and knowledge. Unlike the usual bourgeois novel – which Naipaul is too often assumed to write but which he has radically transformed for his own purposes – there is no character with whom we empathize, no happy or redeeming ending. If the nineteenth-century British novel fitted a time of national expansion, imperial grandeur and cultural security, Naipaul, far more than any postmodern fabulist, has written a novel for our times, a novel involving the decay of the culture of the empire, the break up of a unified vision. The former underdogs prey upon their former masters along with the still impoverished of their own society. Guerrillas has little plot movement or action and at times gives an impression of immobility, a stasis expressive of the central characters’ own lack of decisiveness. People say they must leave the island before it is too late but they do little but talk or argue among

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themselves. There are continual, repetitive car rides from the Ridge through the city to Jimmy’s commune, Thrushcross Grange, and back; outside the houses in which the characters are usually shown there is violence and activity. The narrative perspective keeps shifting so the point of view is seldom stable. Except for Harry de Tunja none of the characters appear pleasant or to like each other. Jane finds Roche ineffectual, cynical and physically unattractive. Like Gale Benson, whose murder was not suspected because she had so little role in Trinidad that she was not missed after her death, Jane knows few people on the island and does nothing. She shows her contempt of Roche by bragging that Jimmy was her lover. An important chapter occurs at the middle of the book (in terms of length). We are at a Sunday drinks party at Harry’s and the novel slows down for a bit, temporarily moves from the intense focus on Jimmy, Jane and Roche. We are reminded that the Aboriginal Indians once used the site, then the seafarers from Europe, and now vacationers and those celebrating religious rites. Even the new world is old, history moves on in ‘ever-changing channels’ (p. 119). This is the Indian side of Naipaul, the side which sees this world as recurring cycles of repeated actions, whether the rise and fall of peoples or the coming together and breaking up of marriages. The history of Harry’s family is a continuing exodus from some place in the Middle East (he seems to be of Jewish descent), to Spain to South America, to the Caribbean island and probably next to Canada. Harry represents those from diaspora minorities who are homeless and always on the run. By contrast there are those who are part of established social relations, such as Mrs Grandlieu, from a family of former slaveowners, who insults the blacks and yet who is accepted in the society in a way that Harry, Roche, Jane, and Jimmy never will be. She is part of the history of the island, understands its nuances, and is part of what the blacks revolt against. Her house is lovely, lasting, a heritage. The chapter moves on to Meredith’s game, the point of which is that we cannot imagine another life than that we know and we are doomed to repeat what we have done. Jane will always choose the wrong man, Jimmy will rape and be violent, Roche will run away. Guerrillas’ revisionary relationship to the English literary tradition can be seen in the allusions to novels by Richardson, the Brontës, Hardy, Jean Rhys and others. The allusions are ironic in their implied parallels or for their satiric suggestions; but here, unlike the earlier novels, the literary echoes and allusions seem more free

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floating, less anchored to a specifically recognizable irony, and the effect is more disturbing. That we should be conscious of the allusions is made clear by the second page of the novel: ‘T’rush-cross. That’s how you pronounce it. It’s from Wurthering Heights. “Like furthering”.’ Jane (Eyre) and Roche(ster) have names suggestive of Jane Eyre, a novel in which Rochester has an insane West Indian wife in the attic who dies while setting fire to the house, thus enabling Jane and Rochester to marry. Jane Eyre, like many nineteenth-century British novels, could be regarded as ignoring the colonial exploitation upon which the wealth of the characters is based. Romantic love, as the boy’s mother in Miguel Street reminds us, requires financial security and bourgeois freedom. Naipaul’s novel inverts the situation. It is Jimmy who has an ex-wife and family in England, who talks of burning down the island, who keeps insane Bryant as a lover and a reminder of what he might himself have been. Jimmy’s killing of Jane is ironic in relation to the Brontë novel; even more ironic is Roche’s pretence that he and Jane are going away together. In former colonies racial and economic dominance and humiliation are foregrounded, romance does not conquer all and there are few happy endings. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights run together both in Jimmy’s imagination and in the pattern of allusions. Jimmy’s bookcase with the Best Books of the World is a recognizable Naipaul joke – all his aspiring writers collect such series of books; but it also shows how Jimmy Ahmed’s mind has been formed by his reading. In his novel Jimmy thinks of himself as Heathcliff. The direct application of such an analogy is that Heathcliff is a slum boy who is told that he should not be ashamed of his past; his unknown parents might be foreign royalty. While Jimmy attributes the quotation from Wuthering Heights to the wrong character (Catherine rather than Nelly Dean), he projects his fantasies about Jane, and other white women, on situations in the novel. Jimmy’s deepest urge, as shown in his diary novel and in the nightmarish vision he has after killing Jane, is to distinguish himself from, and be superior to, the other ‘black’ characters. He wants to be accepted by whites as equal and as a leader or messiah of blacks. But his confusion of details is also typical of a hustler’s way of picking up bits of information from conversation, miscellaneous sources and partly read books. It is mimicry of an education. Jimmy often gets his literary facts wrong, even misquoting the title of a Fanon book. Yet Jimmy (like Michael X who had a woman called Richardson as the ‘Jane’ of his manuscript novel)

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seems to know a bit about Richardson’s place in the history of the novel as he at one point (typically such fantasies change characters without any consistency) has the white woman called Clarissa. There is an inverse analogy between the social, economic, sexual and power relationships in Richardson’s novel and between the rich white women and the poor black male, although in Jimmy’s fantasy it becomes again reversed and confused; he is one moment the seduced and the next the violator. This confusion is itself part of the larger pattern of contradictions in which he sees himself as rapist and rescuer, victim and aggressor, black and non-black. Jimmy’s language is often literary in the worst sense of that term. His Communique No. 1 Classified (itself mimicry of revolutionary gestures) begins with the Fanonite-Maoist ‘All revolutions begin with the land’ and rapidly descends to the farcical, ‘In this spirit we came an intrepid band to virgin forest, it is the life style and philosophy of Thrushcross Grange’ (p. 17). ‘Communique’, ‘Classified’, ‘intrepid band’, ‘virgin forest’, ‘life style’ – every word and phrase is borrowed, a mimicry of wildly diverse attitudes and times. In actuality Jimmy’s commune has already turned into ‘urban slum’ (p. 19). That Jane was before her death reading Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders is ironic, but like many of Naipaul’s allusions the possibilities are varied. Besides the simple contrast between Jimmy’s commune and Hardy’s England – Jimmy and his band are urban criminals, not a merry Robin Hood band of endangered country folk – there is the more profound comparison possible between those destroyed without fulfilling their hopes and the tragic effect of change on people. If Jimmy is a victim of colonial history he is, as shown by his language and writing, also a victim of metropolitan culture, especially its contemporary fashions. He is another mimic man produced by the Empire. The forest, of course, is not virgin; rather it is on the fringes of ‘an industrial estate, one of the failed projects of the earliest days of independence’ (p. 11). Throughout the novel we are aware that this is a ‘wasteland’ and its symbols (drought, decay, ruins, urban squalor) and methods (literary allusions, juxtapositions of images, unfavourable contrast to a past that is itself of questionable value) are often those of T. S. Eliot’s modern anti-epic. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh had already applied Eliot’s techniques and vision to the novel. Surprisingly (although perhaps it is obvious once the literary and ritualist sides of the Michael X murders are kept in mind) Naipaul makes use of the religious, mythic side of the Wasteland

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vision. Once more people are awaiting a messiah and redeemer (‘after Israel’) and renewal through violence and blood. If Naipaul shows a modern urban wasteland of ‘junked vehicles’, and postcolonial disillusionment, there is also the contrast to older civilizations: ‘Paved areas of concrete and asphalt could be seen; and sometimes there were rows of red-brick pillars, hung with dried-out vines, that suggested antique excavations: the pillars might have supported the floor of a Roman bath’ (p. 11). But there never was a great civilization here. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) already offered a West Indian revision of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It shares with Guerrillas a shifting narrative perspective, the centrality of two unrooted whites in the black West Indies, an analogy between the effects of emancipation and decolonization, and such themes as dominance, sexual humiliation and the role of money in personal relations. It deconstructed the nineteenth-century British novel in showing how through the relationship of Antoinette (the future Mrs Rochester) and her English husband the British used the islands and colonialism for their own economic interests. But even more significant for Naipaul’s purpose is that Antoinette is a victim of colonial history. As the child of a part-French, white former slaveowner in Jamaica, she is an outcast rejected as inferior by the British, regarded as alien by the white Jamaicans and hated by the now emancipated blacks among whom she was raised. Her position, created and abandoned by imperialism, might be regarded as similar to the Asian Indians in the Eastern Caribbean and is analogous to Jimmy’s insecure place both in Trinidad and in England. Roche’s name recalls that Antoinette is often called a white cockroach by the freed slaves. Jane is called a white rat. Similarities between the Jean Rhys character and Jane or Jimmy include her always choosing the wrong man (a supposed doer), her masochistic passivity and her autobiographical diary novels. Naipaul has elsewhere commented on the way Jean Rhys anticipated the themes of modern homelessness.40 Words are a vision of reality; words and writing reveal their author. Words and the narrative they make are also revelations of character. Language and writing, even more than clothing, manners, physical appearance and other visible signs, are, in a Naipaul novel, visible symbols of an inner emotional and moral reality. Jane is a ‘chaos of words and attitudes’ (p. 25), Jimmy confuses being a plaything with playboy, misuses the word Haji (p. 12). Many characters in the novel are writers. Roche’s autobiography shows his lack of

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any clear political programme or even a genuine anger; it also shows him, at the suggestion of his publisher, casually misusing analogies to the Holocaust. Meredith was a reporter who wrote the kind of story that was expected. When sent to interview Jimmy Ahmed in London he knows that Jimmy is a fake and that the real story should be about the rich white woman who is backing Jimmy, but his job (unlike that of the novelist) is to report the news that people expect. Jimmy is a bad novelist, with no discipline, no care for words or structure, who uses writing to relieve his frustrations in fantasies where he gets his own back on the world. These reveal himself. Such revelations, even in their absurdities, irrationalities and portrayal of a mind filled with clichés, are sympathetic in their humiliations, desires, ambitions, inconsistencies and failures of intelligence. But such writing is of limited value without discipline, labour and thought. Naipaul is concerned with the aesthetics and purpose of the modern novel. In an obituary for his brother, the novelist Shiva Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul has commented on ‘a way currently in vogue of writing about degraded and corrupt countries. This is the way of fantasy and extravagance. It dodges all the issues; it is safe. I find the way empty, morally and intellectually.’41 Where or who are the guerrillas of the novel’s title? Jimmy is accused by Roche of providing a hideout for them and it is probably because Jane thinks Jimmy is a guerrilla leader that she is attracted to him. But the novel offers no evidence for such a view. Jimmy is alone, a fake leader, dependent on Roche who, despite the island’s independence, is in fact still another of Jimmy’s white ‘Massas’ (an ironic allusion to Eric Williams’s famous speech about ‘Massa’s Day Done’).42 Stephens could be a guerrilla leader and Fanon imagined such petty criminals turning into revolutionaries, but the novel offers no reason to assume he is more than a gang leader. Roche, who assumes that the commune was a cover for a gang (in which case why did he pretend it was part of the reformation of society?), is perhaps the only character in the novel with any claim to be a guerrilla; he risked his life for political action. But he is found to be a fraud with no clearly thought out objectives or plans. His politics of white guilt are not much better than the white women who pay Jimmy for sexual excitement and services. The novel shows a society without the long established inner structures that promote stability during change; since it has become independent it totters on the edge of chaos. There is no redeeming movement, no plan, no ideas, just fantasies, whether it is Jimmy’s

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fraudulent claims of back to the land, the messianic ‘after Israel’, black consciousness (‘Don’t Vote, Birth Control is a Plot Against the Negro Race’), or the white liberal’s mistaken notions of redemption through involvement in a supposed Third World. Rather than a worldwide revolutionary movement imagined by the Left and Right there are merely leaderless individuals, each of whom has his or her own obsessions, or as Jimmy writes (in the novel’s opening epigraph he is cited as the author James Ahmed): ‘When everybody wants to fight there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla’ (p. 87). Guerrillas offers a demythification, a look behind the cant and rhetoric of revolution, a sympathetic but critical examination of the people involved, what motivates them, what happens to some of them. It is a novel of social inquiry, the novel as a rational examination of individuals in relation to society. And yet, because such novels have been challenged by the metafictional, and because Naipaul has had to work at transforming such social inquiry into an examination of the post-imperial world, Naipaul is highly conscious of his aesthetic choices, thus bringing self-referentiality to the novel. Jane and others are at times described as ‘unreadable’ (p. 14), reminding us of the interpretive function of the novel. ‘Third World’ revolutionary movements, like Jane’s signs – her clothes, skin colour, cigarette lighter, speech, progressive politics and sexuality – will be read differently on a Caribbean island than in London. After examining in Guerrillas the dangerous relationship between metropolitan notions of Third World black revolution and their reality, in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) Naipaul returned to the problem of why Indian independence proved disillusioning. It is usually assumed that nationalist movements are modernizers who create a usable past to mobilize people politically. While he is himself attracted to the greatness of India before the Muslim invasions, Naipaul sees that the idealization of the past is dangerous and can become a way of avoiding necessary social changes. He locates the problem in Mahatma Gandhi who in leading the Indians to mass resistance against the British appealed to the perfect rule of Rama as a model, with the implication that once India was independent its Hindu culture and rule would be restored, an impossibility in a modern secular nation and a recipe for continuing poverty and social injustice. Naipaul claims that India over many centuries adopted passivity and fatalism as a way of adapting to foreign conquest and that

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Gandhi reinforced the habit of retreating from reality into spiritualism with its assumption that the individual finds freedom by withdrawing from illusions of the world. Although Gandhi wanted to rescue the untouchables from their role as near slaves to the upper castes and make them part of a modern India, his appeal to traditionalism strengthened reactionary politics in which the Brahmins and feudal landlords remained natural superiors. In India: A Wounded Civilization Naipaul regards the declaration of an Emergency by the government as resulting from a more significant struggle within India between various groups. There are the romantic middle-class university students and intellectuals who foolishly have destroyed their future and ability to help India by joining a hopeless peasant Communist movement. There are the dangerous reactionary Brahmins who are using violence to enforce what they consider their natural privileged role within Hinduism and the nation. Naipaul looks with more sympathy towards the Shiva Sena, who, although xenophobic extremists, are utilitarians, bringing community awareness, political consciousness, and such amenities as water and latrines to the otherwise unrepresented shanty dwellers and labourers of Bombay. This is Naipaul’s first announcement of what would become a controversial political position. Although many have considered Shiva Sena as dangerous, Naipaul sees in it the possibility of national rejuvenation through local pride, new forms of community action, organization of the unrepresented and focus on the practical in contrast to the feudalistic discourse of an eternal, never changing India proclaimed by those trying to restore a supposed Brahmin pre-Islamic golden age. While Naipaul’s own attraction to such nostalgia can be seen in A Bend in the River, where it is implicitly criticized, he will satirize such Brahmin do-nothingism more explicitly in Half a Life.

8 ‘A New King for the Congo’ and A Bend in the River Naipaul, who had spent a large part of 1965–66 in East Africa and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), returned to East Africa in 1971 and Zaire in 1975. His report on ‘A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa’ (1975) was republished in the collection of essays The Return of Eva Perón (1980) along with ‘Conrad’s Darkness’, the latter a slightly revised version of an essay written in July 1974. The novel A Bend in the River (1979) was followed by a limited edition of A Congo Diary (1980). At a conference Naipaul said, ‘You’ll find in the Congo all the nice ideas of Fanon ridiculously caricatured by the present ruler … Mobutu says …that he doesn’t have a borrowed soul any longer; his particular black thing is “authenticity”. Authenticity … is rejection of the strange, the difficult, the taxing; it is despair.’43 Many details from ‘A New King for the Congo’ are in A Bend in the River which is set in a newly independent Francophonic central African state resembling Zaire, governed by a dictatorial former army officer, the Big Man. Like Mobutu, the Big Man has brought a kind of peace – always threatened by violently destructive insurrections – and claims to offer an African Socialism combining the black nationalist demand for cultural authenticity with the taking over of property belonging to such powerless foreigners as Indians, Greeks and Syrians. Both Mobutu and the Big Man carry an impressive staff, carved with a symbolic fetish, representative of the power of an African chief, have their thoughts collected in a little Maoist green book which is sold to the general populace, and have a national youth brigade which marches shouting slogans. Colonial mimicry has moved on to mimicry of Maoist China. Mobutu’s international conference centre, Nsele, with its model farm and polytechnical college, is the basis of The New Domain in Naipaul’s novel. 118

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The European-designed capital, like Kinshasa, is connected to a former European trading post, now a town (Stanleyville, Kisangai), 1000 miles north by steamship on an immensely long river (the Congo). The novel covers a decade from, roughly, 1965, to Naipaul’s 1975 visit. Mobutu’s nationalization of foreign business took place in November 1973, the new radicalization at the end of the novel occurred a year later. Various events mentioned in the novel, the slaughter of Arabs (Zanzibar), the killing of the tall warriors by the tribes they formerly ruled (Rwanda), occurred in East Africa after 1960. While the setting and portrayal of a radically unstable society in A Bend in the River is based on Naipaul’s observation of Zaire and East Africa, many episodes in the novel are suggested by previous writing about Africa, especially what Naipaul has termed the Literature of Imperialism where Africa is a backdrop for the crisis of some European or American character. In Naipaul’s novel the central characters are not protected by imperial power and their lives are endangered by the rapid changes and instabilities of postcolonial Africa. Like the new nations they struggle for their independence and individuality and they are often defeated by their own limitations, bad choices, illusions; their lives are partly determined by their circumstances and the society in which they exist. Although Naipaul does not attempt to create black African characters in depth – Salim says he does not know what is going on in the mind of Ferdinand and has no acquaintance with village life – the Africa of corruption, a new insecure bourgeois, tribal conflict, food shortages and tyrannical governments is present. The notation of Africa in Bend is not dissimilar from that found in the disillusioned postcolonial novels of Achebe, Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Soyinka and others. Unlike the African novelists, however, Naipaul does not have a commitment to Africa. His deepest sympathies are with the Indians threatened by African nationalism and political disorder. But such disorder is found to be universal, partly the result of the withdrawal of the older imperial order, partly a continuing process throughout history. Is the instability really African if all history consists of change, of peoples struggling against peoples, tribes against tribes, individuals against individuals? Salim learns from reading an encyclopaedia that the universe may be nothing more than fragments of the Big Bang that created it. This then is Naipaul’s big bang novel, although the immediate focus is on the Africa that resulted from the collapse of imperial order.

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Tyranny is the consequence as the new rulers attempt to impose order on nation-states in which tribal and traditional village life still is the norm and in which the old animosities of tribes, and the cultural and economic insecurities of the new elite, are likely to cause conflict. The modern state, like the technology and the Big Man’s ideas, his -ism, is imported, a mimicry. The political and social disorder is reflected in the novel with its short, episodic, hurried movement. Nothing feels settled, nothing complete, final, reflected upon. Sentences are joined by and start with ‘and’ and ‘but’.44 Stories are taken up and dropped, characters die early or disappear, homes and businesses change hands, motivation is not fully developed or explained, everything is in movement. People keep coming, going and disappearing. Father Huismans (representative of those with a humanistic, larger, optimistic view of African history and traditional culture) looks down on the other foreigners; but he is killed and beheaded on a trip and no one knows who killed him or why. Salim comments that the Father’s idea of civilization was his ‘vanity’ and he ‘paid for it’ (p. 87). Salim suddenly returns to using prostitutes; Yvette – the only woman about whom he was passionate – betrays him, he becomes engaged to the daughter of an older Indian friend in London. There are possible explanations, but the significance is not clear and the facts are open to multiple interpretations. Naipaul is aiming for complexity, ambiguity, and richness of text. Even the narration is a problem as there is no clear explanation, such as in The Mimic Men, of how the novel has come into being. Salim, like one of Conrad’s narrators, appears to be speaking it but to whom and where? Bend concerns the dangers to those – especially the Indian diaspora – made homeless in former colonies by the withdrawal of the imperial order and the resulting threat of chaos; the need for ruthlessness to survive; the dangers of involvement – especially through romantic love and interbreeding; the universality of suffering; the effect of modern transportation in bringing into close contact such former enemies as various African tribes and the British and Arabs; the threat of the modern African state to the traditional ways of Africa. It is perhaps Naipaul’s most pessimistic novel, filled with a sense of apocalypse, of the futility and vanity of life, of an impending worldwide disaster – it is suggested there is a parallel between the decline of the West and the invasion and fall of the Roman Empire. Yet it is also about the need to struggle to survive and to be lucid and rational. Sentiments, whether of the past, race,

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religion, place, home, family or others, are dangerous. It is a book in which the small lives of individuals in an obscure part of Africa become a metaphor for the modern condition of living in a free state. It is necessary to act on the realities of changing situations, not on illusions. Raymond and Yvette at the Domain are first seen at a party, that nineteenth-century symbol of social order, as glamorous, but soon Salim sees their house by daylight at a luncheon as unimpressive and with its former sophistication manufactured for the party. Raymond, a locally famous historian and the Big Man’s advisor, has in reality been exiled from the centre of power and is struggling to keep his job and house. His fame as an historian is already overtaken by a new generation of experts, while research about Africa is no longer of international interest; Raymond’s publications turn out to be few and of questionable value. A former schoolteacher who was, by the rapid change of recent African history, for a time brought close to those in power as an advisor, he is no longer needed and is trapped in Africa, unable to obtain a job abroad. Yvette, his young wife, has lost interest in him as he loses his glamour and she goes from affair to affair seeking someone to whom she can attach herself and find purpose in her life. Raymond and Yvette are second-rate Europeans who for a time find excitement and the possibility of being near power in Africa. Yvette is one of Naipaul’s European women, like Jane and Linda, who follow a man expecting to find excitement and a better life but who are disappointed and, lacking talent, unable to escape. Yvette fades out of the novel, her whereabouts unknown as the house she and Raymond inhabited is given to an African (like Salim’s business). In one of the many parallels which give the novel its larger, universal, dimensions, we hear of a party Indar attended in New York in which a famous journalist, advisor to a statesman, lost the affection of his young wife to a younger lover. Love, like politics and careers, is always in a state of change. But apparently not all such experiences are disillusioning. Kareisha, Salim’s new fiancée, had a ‘romance’ in London, which left her with affection for men. That is all we are told. Perhaps this is another Salim illusion, part of his dream of a new life in London. Why did the romance come to an end? Indar makes a magnificent speech towards the centre of the novel (Part II.9) about the need for self-creation and trampling on the past; but he is soon stymied by the unpredictability of the local airlines and is forced to leave the African town for the capital in

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uncomfortable, humiliating circumstances on the steamer (a foreshadowing of Salim’s own departure) and when we hear of him again he has, like King Lear and Mr Biswas, through an inflated notion of self-importance, become crushed, dispossessed, dreaming of a lost past, a lost home to which he can never return. In a further irony it is Salim who takes up Indar’s credo of trampling on the past and remaking oneself. But his attempts to become economically independent so that he can leave Africa soon lead to imprisonment and his becoming victim of the African police. Salim might be regarded as a Camusian rebel, an alienated outsider who, unwilling to accept fate, attempts to live fully. His rebellion begins with consciousness of the weakness and unprotectedness of the Asians of Africa in the face of the struggles for power which will follow the withdrawal of the imperial order. Ironically, however, like Naipaul’s early years in London, his life in central Africa is even more narrow and endangered than the small, restricted society he has fled; his only contacts are with a few other aliens, Indians living enclosed, self-centred lives of their own, cut off from the African world which surrounds them. He is friends with an Indian couple who, having made a love match across caste lines, fear family retaliation and live only for themselves, obsessed with the romance of their marriage and the woman’s beauty. Zabeth, an African trader from one of the villages along the river, wants her son Ferdinand to become educated and part of the modern African state. Ferdinand, whose father is from another tribe, represents the new African elite upon which the resources of the state are lavished to provide higher education enabling them to assume upper-level positions in the bureaucracy. But without the secure community life of the bush, and because of his tribally mixed parentage, Ferdinand is at the mercy of the new political order as well as being confused by notions of authenticity no longer valid for himself. Although the story is told by Salim about his life, the novel keeps shifting to the lives of others, through dialogue, conversations, long speeches (understood to be pieced together from various times), and reports about others. After the massacres of Arabs in East Africa, Salim is joined by Ali, soon called Metty for Metis, one of the slaves attached to his family. This reminds us that English colonialism interrupted Arab expansion into Africa, that slavery was nothing new to Africa or the Arab world, and that Africa has a long history of contacts with the outside world. The novel feels fully populated and is filled with detail and historical background.

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Salim is not likable and seems too knowing, too educated for the narrator, although we are told that he reads widely, especially encyclopaedias. Naipaul wants to combine an Indian, representative of those who came to work in Africa during this century, with the long established Arabs of East Africa. Salim is an East African Muslim who is from a family which has come from northern India in the distant past and who identifies with Indian culture and peoples although, like the Arabs, having family slaves from the past. As India has a thousand years of trade with East Africa such a combination is possible. There is a European lineage of literature about Africa, history and imperialism. Salim says: All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans. If I say that our Arabs in their time were great adventurers and writers … if I say these things it is because I have got them from European books. They formed no part of our knowledge or pride. Without Europeans, I feel all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff-marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town. (p. 18) Like many statements in Naipaul’s novels this is ambiguous in its politics. It could point to the Eurocentric basis of colonial education, to the failure of non-Europeans to write realistic history or to the way the decolonized learned to become conscious of themselves through Western knowledge – analogous to the way nineteenthcentury Indian and African nationalists learned their Indianness or Africanness from European scholarship. Naipaul is also concerned with the role of writing and the writer to give coherence to, by making a narrative of, life. He sees this as a Western rather than an Islamic trait.45 Writing preserves and shapes. It is a defence against the waves of chaos, of extinction, the void or nothingness which haunted Seepersad Naipaul and which haunts his son. But it is also a clue or directional pointer as to how this novel might be read. Bend creates a space in literature and therefore in history for the East African Asiatics, primarily the Indians, who were driven from Africa in the aftermath of African independence and who have, once more uprooted, sought refuge in such foreign lands as England and Canada. How are they to be seen and to see themselves? The novel is another meditation on the problems and fate of Naipaul and the Indian diaspora in relation to the rapid social and

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political changes that have followed decolonization. Those Indians who live by old ways and fail to change are left at the mercy of the African desire to purify the land of others and avenge themselves for the humiliation of the past. Some, such as Ali, a symbolic mulatto, are no longer either Asiatic or a member of any African tribe, but a symbol of those who belong to no group that will protect them. Naipaul’s imagination displaces his concern with the Indian diaspora through various characters. Indar in London is told by the Indian High Commission that his group has enjoyed the benefits of working in Africa and now must accept its fate from the natives of Africa. Bend is perhaps the last modernist epic, using Africa as a symbolic wasteland for the collapse of a universal European order. The many echoes of European classics are not only a form of metaphor or analogy, they are part of a cultural order, a way of seeing which Naipaul at times admires. Pliny’s Semper Aliquid Novi, the lycée’s motto (a reference to Pliny’s Natural History 8.16) is a common Greek saying claiming that something new always comes from Africa.46 The meaning, however, is not that Africa changes but that there is always something happening in Africa which is a topic of conversation. The consequences of decolonization and African independence may make this week’s newspaper headlines but Africa has always been there, in contact with other peoples and the scene of other empires. A quotation from Virgil reminds us that Africa has long been part of European consciousness, part of some imperialism and the literature of imperialism. From the opening sentences of the novel, with its anti-evolutionary ‘The World is what it is’, to the concluding scene of the passenger barge adrift, there is a vision of history as cyclical, of pointless repetitions, of empire being replaced by empire, of the strong conquering the weak and then themselves becoming weak and conquered by fresh blood, of a world of experience and suffering without purpose. The historical vision of meaningless change and decay rather than actual newness and improvement is made specific in the symbolism of the water hyacinths, the new thing which has appeared on the river and which could eventually bring transportation on the river to a halt, returning the villages to their former isolation. The Virgilian allusion is to Aeneid (IV.122) where Venus says Jupiter would not approve of the mingling of races if Aeneas married Dido. Salim says that it was tempting fate for the town’s European colonial settlers to reverse the meaning to approval for the

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mingling of races. This serves several functions in the novel. Besides putting European and Arab involvement with Africa into a negative perspective, it also casts disapproval on the sexual relationships involving various races, peoples, castes or tribes – Salim and Yvette, Mahesh and Shoba, the Arab men with their African women, and such children of mixed parentage as Metty and Ferdinand, as well as Metty’s own marriage to an African. Mixed marriages offer hostages to fortune as the resulting children belong to no protective group and may become outcastes. Involvement with women of other communities prevents a man from following his own destiny. After marrying an African woman Metty must now stay with her and provide. Salim’s involvement with Yvette prevents him from seeing the developing political crisis; he fails to protect himself against the nationalization of his business. In this sense Yvette is a little Eve, her name as symbolic as Metty’s. In Naipaul’s novels sex tempts people from their own best interests and disorders their lives. There is a clear linkage between sexual and political fantasies of destruction, dominance, brutality, humiliation. The violence of Salim’s attack on Yvette when he discovers she has other lovers is analogous to the destructive rage of the Africans elsewhere in the novel and is not shown in a favourable light. Naipaul makes this clear by its sadistic brutality and by the irony of Salim’s self-pity afterwards for the pain he feels in his hand. The scene ends in comedy, with Salim’s self-pity and with Yvette masochistically telephoning to console him. Yvette tempts Salim from his goals, but she is, like Jane in Guerrillas, an example of female masochism. From Miguel Street onwards Naipaul has been examining the causes of masochism and women-beating; one of the major themes of his novels is the way male impotence and insecurity turn into sadistic rage against women. ‘The Return of Eva Perón’ shows how male insecurity turns into aggression towards women, and the way national impotence is reflected in Perónist politics. What makes Naipaul’s scenes of sexual brutality so disturbing is his puritanism. He carefully removes any trace of sensuality, of the pornographic, of fantasy. There is no pleasure from reading of sexual violence in Naipaul’s writing. The parallel to Aeneas’s temptation to dereliction of duty also calls upon other associations connected with the Roman epic. Along with Raymond’s comments on the writing of Roman history, the allusion suggests a parallel between the order and grandeur of the former

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British and Roman empires. Naipaul’s own novel by implication is a modern epic, a twentieth-century anti-epic of the last stages of an historical period. His subject is rather loss of the imperial order than its achievement and celebration. (When Salim criticizes Raymond for using only printed documents and not talking to tradesmen and other living people about recent past history, we remember that Naipaul’s own journalism and travel books are based on interviews with people during his journeys.) Just as the voyage of Aeneas symbolizes the founding of the Roman order (and in Christian allegorizations the bringing of universal peace to the world so Christ may be born), Salim’s journey to central Africa symbolizes the coming reign of disorder, or the mixing of peoples, the fall of imperial order with the Arabs and other formerly defeated peoples invading London. Just as Aeneas is blown off course and tempted by Dido, so Salim travels the wrong direction from where a threatened African East Indian should go and journeys to central Africa and has a love affair with Yvette instead of going to London and marrying Kareisha, to whom he is promised. His journey has taken him to an African hell. The conclusion of the novel has analogies to Aeneas’s descent into the Underworld, except instead of Anchises’s prophecy of the future glory of Rome and universal peace there is a Fanonian apocalyptic vision of violence. At first they were going to have people’s courts and shoot people in the squares. Now they say they have to do a lot more killing, and everybody will have to dip their hands in the blood. They’re going to kill everybody who can read and write, everybody who ever put on a jacket and tie, everybody who put on a jacket de boy. They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. (p. 284) As Michael Neill has shown, this is the language of Fanon’s revolution.47 This ritual of destruction, a revolutionary black mass, is based on the movement led by Pierre Mulele, who wanted to kill everyone in Zaire who could read, write or who wore a necktie. It is discussed by Naipaul in ‘A New King of the Congo’ (REP, p. 187). It also, as the title ‘Battle’ of the novel’s fourth book shows, represents an inversion of the Christian historical scheme, since the narrative moves from a ‘beginning’ to a promised apocalyptic war between, ironically, the forces of Fanonite violence and the Big Man and his

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African Madonna mother. When Naipaul was at Wesleyan University48 he told his students that it was absurd to proclaim any total rebellion or complete overthrow of society as men cannot make themselves unlike what they are. Naipaul spoke of Marxists as ‘religious fanatics urging people to destroy what little they have for a dream, a fantasy’. Bend revises Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The places, river, steamer, country, juxtapositions, and many details echo the earlier novel, except that Naipaul’s perspective and that of his narrator are different. The journey is from the east African coast to the heart of Africa. Salim’s comments on the ‘tides’ of history are analogous to Conrad’s imagining the Roman invaders of England. Naipaul usually transforms characters and details from Conrad’s novel in significant ways, dividing them between his characters. Kurtz becomes Father Huismans, the collector of African masks who is killed by the Africans and whose head is ‘spiked’, an echo of the spiked heads around Kurtz’s hut. It is a young American, part of the next wave of imperialism, who ships the masks to the United States. Salim is forced by his need for money to begin trading in ivory and gold. And Salim, like Kurtz, has a fiancée waiting for him in London. Naipaul’s rewriting of the imperial novel rejects the English literary tradition, yet acknowledges a precursor and implies a relationship which modifies that tradition. In recalling the relationship of ancient Greece and Rome, of Indians, Arabs and Belgians to Africa, Naipaul’s own vision, in which the bush, forests, rivers and tribal life are the natural Africa as opposed to the cities of the new African state, becomes part of a universal, timeless perspective of the rise and fall of human achievements. That Bend was written in Wiltshire where Naipaul was among the ancient Druid and Roman ruins of England contributed to his feeling of history as cycles of the rise of cultures and empires which will end in decay. One of the themes of the novel is the contradiction between wanting a traditional culture rooted in the village life of the past and wanting a modern Europeanized state, European technology and comforts. This conflict, which is inherent to most nationalist movements, is a theme of Naipaul’s writings and he will examine it more fully in the Islamic world of Among the Believers. Some Virgilian and Dantean echoes may have come to Naipaul by way of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. (Conrad’s novel makes conscious use of both Virgil’s epic and Dante’s Inferno, while Dante’s poem is based on Virgil’s.) There is probably an ironic allusion to

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Dante’s La Vita Nuova, with its celebration of the poet’s love for Beatrice, in the many times Salim refers to his ‘new life’; the irony would be the physicality of Salim’s love of Yvette and perhaps the Big Man’s cult of the African madonna. Just as Virgil leads Dante through the inferno, Salim many times refers to others as his guide: Indar is his ‘guide’ through The New Domain, Nazruddin becomes his ‘guide’ to food and wine in London, and others guide him through the symbolic hell of Africa. As in Canto Nine of The Inferno the worst sin is betrayal, betrayal of host, nation or lord, as that destroys the contract between men and between men and God upon which justice, society and all else is based. It is in this contractual idea of society that Naipaul found the basis of Rome and which Dante assumes is, along with love or Christian charity, the basis of divine order. Paradoxically this is connected with Naipaul’s Hobbesian view of society in which obedience results from protection. The Big Man’s radicalization of businesses belonging to foreigners destroys property rights and introduces further disorder and injustice beyond the simple corruptions and violence earlier in the novel. This is conscious corruption and perversion of truth and order. Africans are given businesses they do not own and the owners become managers and everyone becomes frantic to amass wealth before the coming chaos as the country slides quickly towards another rebellion. After his business is given to Théotime (another symbolic name), for whom he now works, Salim increasingly becomes aware that he is vulnerable. As he needs illegally to amass money to escape, Salim stops being able to help Metty: ‘I could no longer offer him the simple protection he had asked for – Théotime made that plain during the course of the day. So the old contract between Metty and myself, which was the contract between his family and mine came to an end … our special contract was over. He seemed to understand this, and it made him unbalanced’ (pp. 273–4). Metty betrays his host and master by informing on Salim’s smuggling and showing the police where Salim keeps the ivory. Salim, arrested and jailed, comments: ‘There were many stages in my progress through the building, and I began to look upon Prosper as my guide to this particular hell.’ As in hell the inversion of law, justice and order becomes another form of order in which Satan rules. Rather than Satan we have pictures of the Big Man (p. 276). Seeing the President’s slogan ‘DISCIPLINE AVANT TOUT, I felt damned and mocked by the words. But that was how I was expected to feel’ (p. 277).

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The description of those being tortured in the prison could easily be a scene from The Inferno: The instructors were warders with big boots and sticks; the poems were hymns of praise to the President and the African madonna; the people being compelled to repeat the lines were those young men and boys from the villages, many of whom had been trussed up and dumped in the courtyard and were being maltreated in ways I don’t want to describe. These were the dreadful sounds of the early morning. Those poor people had also been trapped and damned by the words on the white jail wall. (p. 278) While the tortures, common to such regimes as those of Idi Amin and Sekou Touré, have their reality in recent African politics, the final pages of the novel are reminiscent of the last stages of Dante’s Hell and even seem an ironic inversion of the final vision of Dante’s Paradise: ‘I heard that an important execution was to take place; that the President himself was going to attend it when he came to town; and that he would listen then to the hymns sung by his enemies. For that visit the town had burst into bright colour’ (p. 279). Ferdinand says ‘We’re all going to hell’ (p. 281) but only Salim, like Dante, can escape from his hell. Another work of imperial literature that Bend revises is Graham Greene’s Sierra Leonean novel The Heart of the Matter (1948) in which the central character, an English police officer named Scobie, is corrupted by the circumstances in which he finds himself in Africa and like Salim slips from honesty into minor crimes, adultery, bribery, betrayal (of his servant Ali, his wife and nation) and eventually damns himself in suicide.49 Metty’s real name is Ali, Metty being a corruption of metis. The relationship between Scobie and Helen is analogous to that between Salim and Yvette; Scobie helps smuggle diamonds, Salim smuggles ivory. But whereas the tempter and devil in Greene’s novel of a just man’s descent into Hell is a Syrian shopkeeper, here the central character is an Indian shopkeeper. Whereas Greene sentimentalizes African corruption as innocent, Naipaul sees it historically as part of the general political and social disorder which results from the mixing of culture and the imposition of a European notion of the state on African tribes. Chinua Achebe also blames the widespread corruption found in Nigeria on the coming together of various cultures and the effect of foreign rule on previously self-contained tribal societies in which the people of the

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community would prevent any excess of injustice or illegality. If in Naipaul’s novels there is at times a view that corruption, moral and political chaos, comes from the mixing of peoples, we might remember that Trinidad was notorious for corruption. Such corruption is not only African. When Nazruddin moves to Canada he is swindled; and when he says that society cannot exist if people do not keep to their word he is told to go back to Africa. But (as shown by the allusions to Dido and the references to slavery and illegal trade in the past) there are suggestions that Africa has a long history of moral temptation. These notions also exist alongside a vision of all history and all cultures being no more than the conquest and exploitation of the weak by the strong, the slow by the cunning. The notion of Africa as a new land, the wave of the future, the start of a postcolonial order, is thus treated with scepticism and irony. Little is found to be new. Whereas slavery has come to be the symbol of European injustice to Africa, an injustice so great as to explain all the subsequent problems of Africa and of the descendants of the Africans in the Americas, Bend recalls the long history of slavery within Africa, the history of Arabs using African slaves, the privileged position of house slaves, the way slaves might feel more secure with a foreign master than freed among Africans of other tribes, the way as people interbred with their slaves they became indistinguishable from the slaves, until the former masters now indigenized became prey for the next strong conqueror who entered the scene. This vision, an essentially amoral concept of life as achievement and of the strong and weak, runs throughout Naipaul’s work where it is often in contrast to the classical Indian – Hindu and Buddhist – notion of life as illusion, a place of suffering and experience. After his disillusionment with Yvette, Salim has an epiphany which seems the reverse of Camus’s notion of life as intensity of experience. It, significantly, occurs ‘with the coming of the light’ at dawn, when ‘the night had become part of the past’: It seemed to me that men were born only to grow old, to live out their span, to acquire experience. Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain – and above all, pain – had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure. And even when the illumination vanished, became as thin and half nonsensical as a dream, I remembered that I had had it, that knowledge about the illusion of pain. (p. 229)

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Before leaving London, Salim recalls this vision which now becomes an ‘illumination’ of ‘men lost in space and time, but dreadfully, pointlessly busy’ (p. 248). Later, however, he compares ‘That illumination I held on to, about the unity of experience and the illusion of pain’ to Indar’s sudden nostalgia for a ‘home’ that no longer exists and calls it an Indian or Asiatic way of feeling, the basis of an older way of life which they supposedly rejected, to which there was no way of going back. Instead he vows to trample on the past: ‘We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed’ (p. 252). If Indar and Salim learn to seize the day, and if, in the Hobbesian world of social contracts, man makes himself through power, ruthlessness and achievement, there is always the possibility that this too is an illusion and all activity is needless vanity. The three rebellions in the novel may not be solely examples of an African rage to return to an imagined former racial and tribal purity, they may be part of an endless process of meaningless, illusory history. In contrast to this there is also the human instinct to achieve, to leave a mark in history, to be, in the vocabulary of the novel, a man. Yet, as Indar learns by comparing himself to the wealthy American, and as is shown by the contrast between London and the capital of the African state, or as is shown by the limitations reality imposes on Mr Biswas’s attempted rebellion, a person’s ability to accomplish and leave a mark on history is limited by environment, the past and the culture. The existential is circumscribed by the material. Besides the three rebellions and such recurring symbols as dark and light, houses and the water hyacinth, the contrasts between the two national capitals, there are numerous parallels, analogies, contrasts and structured ironies. In the parallels Naipaul’s imagination can be seen as not only finding ironies but also attempting to examine the major themes and problems from different perspectives. Indar (like Naipaul himself) flees from a threatened Indian community to a famous university in England and attempts to become a self-made man, a cosmopolitan, international expert and advisor on the problems of emerging nations, an intellectual independent of others. This is contrasted to Salim’s quest for self-creation as a businessman, ironically the traditional role of Asiatics in the diaspora, in the heart of Africa. But Indar is found to be dependent on American foundations and wealth, and nostalgic for the now vanished home he fled. At the point Indar seems defeated by his awareness of his dependency, Salim’s quest for independence and security takes him

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to London in another attempt to create a new life. There he finds many people like himself, aliens from former colonies, including Indians selling cigarettes on street corners (as the poor do in India and Africa). How are we to ‘read’ Salim’s engagement in London to Kareisha, Nazruddin’s daughter? While this fits into the Virgilian parallel, the foreordained marriage at the conclusion of the voyage upon which Rome will be built, it is the kind of pre-arranged marriage within the East African Indian community from which Salim had originally fled. A third quester is Nazruddin, a successful businessman, who knew when to flee central Africa for Uganda and when to flee Uganda for Canada, but who finds himself in an equally ruthless world where he is cheated by other immigrants. His London apartments are filled with Arabs, East Europeans and small town English girls who do not pay him rent. London seems to consist of Arabs and other aliens on the streets seeking the jobs, opportunities, goods and safety not found in the places from which they come. Every place seems the same place. A similar orchestration of themes can be found in the parallel between Salim’s affair with Yvette and the tight enclosed love marriage of Mahesh and Shoba (yet Mahesh, for all his obsession with his relation to his wife, foresees the nationalization and has sold his Bigburger – sign of the new American liberal imperialism – to an African employee). Naipaul has always been conscious of the difficulty of writing about societies he does not know from the inside. Bend is a book about Africa in which the lives, hopes and fears of foreigners are central. It is as much about expatriates and diasporas after decolonization as about national independence. That Naipaul is of Indian descent and from the West Indies gives the novel a different perspective from a book by Conrad or Greene, but it is not a novel by a black African and its perspective must be different. Bend, like Guerrillas, is partly an attempt to understand the problems that have followed from decolonization and partly a response to unthinking slogans of the counterculture, New Left and other fashions of the 1960s and early 1970s. That leaflet distributed by the Liberation Army is a jumble of Marxist clichés, Fanonite calls to violence, black nationalism and black consciousness – the representative confusion of several decades of anti-colonial and postcolonial rhetoric of half-digested ideas often from outside Africa: face the ENEMY with armed confrontation. Otherwise we all die forever. The ancestors are shrieking. If we are not deaf we can hear

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them. By ENEMY we mean the powers of imperialism, the multinationals and the puppet powers that be, the false gods, the capitalists, the priests and teachers who give false interpretations. The law encourages crime. The schools teach ignorance and people practise ignorance in preference to their true culture. (p. 219) That could have been written in London, San Francisco or Paris at the time. A source was Argentina where Naipaul spent considerable time between 1972 and 1977 examining how a formerly rich nation had degenerated into the destructive populist national-socialism of Perónism, political instability and the military government’s dirty war against the guerrillas. He interviewed guerrilla sympathizers and one of the movement’s founders. Mimicry of the then fashionable foreign notions of revolution had been grafted on to the problems left by European colonialism, the mysticism of Perónist nationalist cultural assertion and an attempted radical decolonization. In an isolated area of northern Argentina, after having seen police with machine guns in unmarked cars searching for supposed guerrillas, he was a few days later taken from a bus, detained, accused of being a guerrilla and threatened. He was told that he had escaped torture and death only because the senior police officer, fascinated by an African pipe Naipaul smoked, decided that he was a foreigner. His experience of the violent, irrational, guerrilla movement and the equally violent, irrational lawlessness of the government’s war against the guerrillas found its way into Bend. ‘I transferred … the emotion of Argentina, and even the isolated police building in the bush of Jujuy, to my Central African setting.’50 As often in Naipaul’s writing there is an Indian subtext. The title, A Bend in the River, suggests an analogy to the Indian classical epic, the Ramayana. Manohar Malgonkar’s novel A Bend in the Ganges (1964), a love story set in the context of the Indian independence movement, independence and the horror of partition, probably gave Naipaul the idea of applying the Rama story to the problems resulting from decolonization. Malgonkar’s novel begins with an epigraph from the Ramayana: ‘At a bend in the Ganges, they paused to look at the land they were leaving.’51 Long before the epics of Europe the Ramayana offers a story of voyage, quest, exile, testing and return which is also a history of a people. It might also be considered an early example of the literature of imperialism as, according to some interpretations, it tells figuratively the Aryan expansion through the subcontinent, especially through southern India and the fusion of the Aryans with

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the Dravidians. Thus it would recall that imperialism has a much longer history there than in the West, that life repeats cycles of similar events, that long ago a light-skinned people conquered a darkskinned people and from it formed India (with its continuing wheat–black colour distinctions). Naipaul could also have in mind the grandeur of the Aryan conquest with its supposedly ideal rule or the argument that the Aryans were seduced by India and then degenerated. Both visions – a view of imperial order and that the conquering people degenerates through interbreeding – are at times suggested by A Bend in the River. Naipaul’s novels have shown an evolving complexity as his vision has deepened and his imagination has become more powerful. Allusions and parallels are increasingly used to bring together associations he has in mind and as he has come to see his own experience as universal and not solely the result of colonial Trinidad. Such deepening and universalizing is common to writers as they mature and is especially characteristic of writers in self-exile. But Naipaul also belongs to a generation of writers who received their university education during a time when the use of myth and literary allusions by Joyce, Eliot and Yeats was in fashion. The Ramayana allows him to make use of his Indian heritage by rewriting the Rama story to fit an existential world without purpose. Yet this existential world is also an expression of the three aspects of Shiva as creation, continuity and destruction, the cyclical Indian view of history and reality. In The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul says that because he dreaded change he ‘cultivated old, possibly ancestral ways of feeling … and held on to the idea of a world in flux: the drum of creation in the god’s right hand, the flame of destruction in his left’ (EA, p. 53). Central to the Ramayana are Rama’s fourteen years in exile from home. Along with his wife Sita and his half-brother Lakshmana (who acts as his servant), Rama crosses the Ganges and lives in a forest, symbolic of the world, populated by monkeys (usually understood to be a less advanced people who were allies of the Aryans). After Sita is kidnapped by demons and taken to Sri Lanka where she is imprisoned, Hanuman, the monkey god, discovers her for Rama, who must go to Lanka and fight and kill Ravana, leader of the demons. Fearing his wife has been dishonoured, Rama rejects Sita until she can prove her purity by a trial of fire; then Rama returns home from his exile to claim his throne and institutes a perfect reign.

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Naipaul uses various motifs from and alludes to the structure of the epic. The relevant allusions or ironies are the meetings of peoples (Europeans, Asians, Africans), Rama’s exile in the forest (Salim and Indar in central Africa and London), a servant (Lakshmana, Metty), wife and purity (Kareisha and, ironically, Yvette), Rama’s years in the forest (Salim’s ten years in central Africa), the monkeys (which in this novel are smoked and eaten by the Africans), Lanka (the Big Man’s capital), Hanuman’s voyage to Lanka to find Sita (Salim goes to London to become engaged), the battle between good and evil as represented by Rama and Ravana (ironically the apocalyptical battle breaking out at the end of the novel between the Big Man and the ‘Fanonites’, itself analogous to the Book of Revelation), the trial of Sita’s purity (Salim would have formerly been concerned that Kareisha may no longer be virgin). But whereas Rama goes home again and institutes a perfect reign, Salim knows, unlike Indar, that in the modern world there is no going back, there is no home. There is also no battle between Good and Evil, only between the Big Man’s mimicry of European order and those wanting to return to the purity of the African past. There is no seat of imperial order, only the disorder of contemporary London. This is the only world we have, a world in which to create, experience and leave our mark. A Bend in the River was one of the major works written after Naipaul had settled in Wiltshire. The autobiographical dimension, including the ways in which he incorporated into the novel his English surroundings and his awareness of the way life changes and people need to create their identity, can be found in The Enigma of Arrival.

9 Finding the Centre, The Enigma of Arrival, A Turn in the South and India: A Million Mutinies Now Naipaul’s writing began to change again in the early 1980s. This new mood first appeared in the ‘two narratives’ of Finding the Centre (1984), ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ and ‘The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro’. The relation of the writer’s self to his work is now accepted as the answer to the problems of marginality, exile and insecurity that characterized Naipaul’s earlier books. The centre is now the creation and discovery of the self rather than external in an ideal society. Recognition that the problems of Trinidad, India and England are similar and that all life is subject to change was followed by a new mellowness. There are still moments of irritability, but such eruptions are brief and followed by what may seem a too tolerant interest. At times Naipaul may be letting those he interviews convict themselves rather than openly judging them. Women also begin to appear in the books as enjoyable friends rather than as dangers who mislead men from their work. The ‘Author’s Foreword’ to Finding the Centre is reminiscent of the prefaces by Henry James. Naipaul tells us that both narratives are ‘about the process of writing’, discusses how the idea of the pieces came about and what constitutes ‘the centre of the narrative’ (p. 10). The long complex train of thought and movement of the prose, especially in the fourth paragraph of the ‘Foreword’, feels Jamesian. The centre of the narrative (the core idea rather than the story) is intertwined with the author in middle age coming to understand his beginnings and, with others he meets, and to whom he is attracted, ‘trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre’ (p. 10). Many of Naipaul’s previous books, such as Among the Believers (1981), were concerned with people seeking or claiming to have 136

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found centres, but the results were disappointing, disillusioning, a new disorder. Usually the centre was an idealized past, a rejection of the Enlightenment, tolerance and rationality. From now on Naipaul’s books will be more populated with sympathetic characters, and the disillusionments of the past will be recognized as at least in part a projection of his own inner world, a using of previous experience as a guide to other minds and lands: A writer after a time carries his world with him, his own burden of experience, human experience and literary experience (one deepening the other); and I do believe – especially after writing ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ – that I would have found equivalent connections with my past and myself wherever I had gone. (p. 10) The writer carries his world (including in Naipaul’s case a sense of disorder and a need for order) within himself, but only finds the truth about himself in the process of writing. There has always been such an autobiographical, confessional layer in Naipaul’s work, along with the need to build upon, order and analyse facts and experience. There has always been the temptation to merge literary genres, to mix autobiography, self-analysis, fiction, facts, reportage, social and cultural analysis, to create a meta-narrative which would explain the various influences on how it came into being. A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men are as much steps in this direction as the diary entries in In a Free State. Naipaul has moved into a new phase when the pains and insecurities of the past, such as the need to travel to find subject matter about which to write, are admitted to be a source of discovery and pleasure, an opening of a world of experience and insight, a process that he now celebrates, a history which in itself is to be ordered into narrative and through which he discovers and creates a new self. ‘However creatively one travels, however deep an experience in childhood or middle age, it takes thought (a shifting of impulses, ideas and references that become more multifarious as one grows older) to understand what one has lived through or where one has been’ (p. 12). While ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ offers more information about Naipaul’s early life than was previously available, the narrative has a complicated structure, moving back and forth in time, its chronological tale being revealed through circles of memories.

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Naipaul has previously used such unusual, seemingly free, but highly organized narratives – in The Mimic Men for example – and the influences can equally be Proust or the complex organization of Indian story-telling as contemporary literary fashion. This, as well as realism, seems Naipaul’s natural mode. The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is another of Naipaul’s controversial novels. A theme of the novel is that each person has a different perspective, a unique vision, as a result of individual experience. Each person has his or her own story. The narrator arrives on a rainy day in a village in Wiltshire and meticulously describes what he sees and discovers as he eventually begins to feel at ease in his rented cottage and its surroundings. From the start we are aware that the narrator, originally from Trinidad, has been unrooted, wandering, for many years, without feeling at home and is disillusioned and depressed. As he begins to understand where he is, he also realizes that his notions of and associations with his new home have been wrongly influenced by his colonial education and readings in English literature. He must learn to see anew, to understand what he is actually seeing rather than what he expects to see. Again and again his perceptions are found to be wrong. No sooner has he corrected one mistake than the correction needs to be corrected by further information or someone else’s point of view. People and places need to be seen in context and studied to get at the truth; but the people, places and contexts keep changing. Understanding is a continual process of correction; narrative is made from giving order to the attempt to understand. There is a double focus throughout the novel – what is being described and the self-conscious awareness of the act of trying to see correctly. Very early the narrator speaks of his tropical island and of Trinidad, thus making us aware that he is both a fictional character and autobiographical. Increasingly we become aware that the narrator is Naipaul and that the life in Trinidad and London, the books and trips abroad, are his own. This is not clear at first because the narrator refers to the personal in a distancing manner as if his past were fiction, something imagined by an author as background. By the last section of the book the distance between narrator and author collapses as we are told how the book came to be written. Still the question remains, are all the people and events described real, are some derived from real people, or imagined? What is the relationship of the people Naipaul describes to actual people? As the characters have figurative significances, they are at least partly imagined.

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In The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul has revised a well-known form of early modernist fiction, the autobiographical novel. The relationship of the autobiographical to the fictional is given aesthetic distance and the origins of the novel are explained by the autobiographical. Characteristics shared by Enigma with modernist autobiographical novels by Proust, Mann and Joyce include the developing sensitivity and awareness of the artist, the alienation of the artist, the circularity of the form (so that the conclusion leads back to the beginning), the role of memory in recovering the past, the multiple time scheme that memory imposes on the narrative, the continual revealing of realities to be illusions, the unusual position of the narrator in relationship to the story, the privileging of art as a means of arresting the flux of the world and giving life significance, and the originality of the novel in comparison to its models. Naipaul is writing during an era when the artist and art are no longer considered sacred and when the continuing relevance of the novel form itself has been questioned by Naipaul among others. Moreover Naipaul’s writing has always had an unusual relationship to the traditions of the European novel, both building upon its models and critically revising them in terms of his own experience of the colonial and postcolonial world. Like Biswas or A Bend in the River, Enigma replies to earlier European literary forms. While retaining some of the ambiguity of the relationship of the story to the autobiographical, it makes the relationship much clearer than in most novels of this kind and could be said to be a demonstration of how such a novel comes into existence, while at the same time occupying an ambiguous space between autobiography and fiction. The early fiction of Jean Rhys has a similar blurring of diary and fiction. The closeness of personal experience to what the writer writes about is a central theme of Enigma and of Naipaul’s later poetics. The novel is, even more than the two narratives of Finding the Centre, a selfconscious demonstration of the various sources of his writings. Naipaul draws attention to how his books came to be written. There is the psychological need to be a writer, a desire given him by his father’s ambitions and strengthened by his British West Indian colonial education and by a preference for solitude in reaction to the disorderly extended family of Naipaul’s youth. There was the basic fracture, uprooting from the family and the Indian Trinidadian community and the life of expatriation, necessary to pursue a career as a writer. This includes the impoverished struggle of his early days in London, subsequent financial disillusionments and insecurities

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as well as the basic insecurity of being exotic in England – a foreigner of different skin colour, from an alien culture, someone who could not easily blend into society. For the expatriate there is always a feeling of disillusionment, of not being at home, of no longer having a home. There is always awareness of difference, of being seen and treated differently. Such feelings remained with Naipaul until the time of Enigma. Besides feeling a foreigner in Wiltshire, there is his feeling that he is an accident of imperial history – an Indian earning a living as a writer in English in England – and his view that his own life is part of a larger historical process which began with the sending of indentured Indian labourers to Trinidad. Enigma differs from earlier models in that the world the narrator describes in the fictional sections is a society he enters in middle age. From internal evidence he is forty years old when he first comes to the cottage. He is about fifty when he leaves for the house he has built by reconditioning two other cottages. In such novels or sequences of novels the illusions of youth and young adulthood are deflated or seen in a new perspective as the narrator matures and can look back on the past. But, as Naipaul has said, he has no mature social experience he can write about; his first four novels were based on his early life in Trinidad; his later novels were the result of bringing his Trinidadian experience to observations of foreign places. He could not write about English society without inventing a world of which he was not part. Enigma uses the conventions of the novel of social discriminations, with its disillusionments with former appearances, to learn to understand an alien society which is figurative of learning how to see life correctly instead of with the distorted perspectives of a colonial youth or a disillusioned writer in mid-career. Throughout the novel there is emphasis on seeing and understanding. On the first page: ‘I could hardly see’, ‘I saw’, ‘all that I saw’, ‘This idea of winter’, ‘as I had imagined’, ‘was a blur to me’, ‘hard for me to distinguish’, ‘I didn’t associate’, ‘I liked to look’, ‘I noticed’, ‘I remembered’. Naipaul explains how he brought emotions he felt in Wiltshire to books he was writing at the time, such as In a Free State and A Bend in the River. In a Free State, for example, can now be seen as not only based on Naipaul’s earlier experiences in east and central Africa; it also reflects the disillusionment and insecurity which followed the writing of The Loss of El Dorado. Naipaul, homeless, feeling trapped by the need to earn his living as a writer in alien England, projected the ironies of freedom and expatriation on to his Europeans in Africa.

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Their disillusioning exile and frightened journey was influenced by his own since leaving Trinidad. Enigma is not only about its own creation but, along with ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’, concerns the origins of Naipaul’s other works. The general movement of his writing can be seen to have progressed from memories of Trinidad, an unsettling period of discontent and attempts to flee England (An Area of Darkness to The Loss of El Dorado), a decade of taking root in Wiltshire while writing about foreign lands, followed by books concerned with the sources and act of writing. Naipaul early felt he had been born into a period of decay when the world had passed its peak; Trinidad, England and India lacked the grandeur he had idealized and had come to expect of the world from his reading and education. Then to avoid disappointment and further mental hurt he trained himself to see the world as a place of change and flux with decay being part of recurring cycles. His model was Indian philosophy in which creation and destruction are different aspects of the same god. The vision of history consisting of conquests and the rise and fall of empires in Bend is infused by Indian thought and by the existential assertion of man making himself. This existential theme recurs in his later writing. Enigma is both about Naipaul making himself as a writer and a celebration of the Indian diaspora. ‘Every generation now was to take us further away from those sanctities. But we remade the world for ourselves.’ He sees ‘life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory’ (p. 318). Enigma can be seen as a rewriting and fulfilment of Biswas. Like the earlier novel it is a record of the Indian diaspora as exemplified by the life of the Naipauls and their family relations. Again we return to the father–son, Biswas–Anand, relationship and allusions are made to Naipaul’s own past in Trinidad and to such events mentioned in the ‘epilogue’ to Biswas as his father’s debts and Naipaul’s failure to return home from England for his father’s illness and death. Enigma is structurally similar to Biswas. The first half of the book is similarly a record of seeming failure. Naipaul, like Biswas, has moved from house to house without taking root, has failed to gain the independence and security he wants, has invested his hopes in a major project which ends in disaster and mental distress. He unwillingly returns to England beaten by life, just as Biswas, suffering from a mental breakdown, returned to the Tulsi house he had tried to escape. He, like Biswas, must start again; and like Biswas in Port of Spain the narrator’s life in Wiltshire is a healing

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process leading to success. Biswas’s story concludes when he obtains a house of his own; the narrator’s story also leads to the building of his own house. Both novels end with family deaths and in Biswas with a celebration of the father’s painful achievement, in Enigma with a celebration of the son’s achievement. Both novels have circular structures with the conclusion explaining how each book was written by the narrator from personal or family events. Both novels can be seen as structured in two equal halves with an epilogue. Enigma concludes the story of Biswas. The son acts out a similar drama of attempting to make a mark on history, is for a time bewildered and defeated by the challenges of freedom, is mentally hurt, but eventually finds a suitable place where he experiences renewal, a second life, flourishes and after a time purchases his own house. While the first novel is primarily of pain and small victories, the later novel is more fully a celebration of how: ‘We had made ourselves anew. The world we had found ourselves in … was one we had partly made ourselves, and had longed for’ (p. 317). Enigma is described on the title page as ‘A novel in five sections’. The formal structure consists of forty-one subsections or chapters divided almost equally between the book’s two halves with the fifth section as an epilogue. The organization of sections and chapters is I.12, II.7; III.12, IV.9; V.1. The two halves of the novel are almost equal in length, sections I and II consisting of 152 pages while sections III, IV and V take 151 pages. The centre of the novel in terms of length is: ‘With me, everything started from writing. Writing had brought me to England, had sent me away from England; had given me a vision of romance; had nearly broken me with disappointment. Now it was writing, the book, that gave savour, possibility to each day …’ (p. 154). The narrator recounts leaving Gloucester for Wiltshire and alludes to the opening of the novel: ‘For the first four days it rained and was misty; I could hardly see where I was’ (p. 154). The novel starts over again with many of the original scenes recalled in what might be described as a musical recapitulation. While Enigma has several intertwined formal structures, including the gradual pulling together of selective fragmentary allusions into an autobiographical chronology and a discussion of the author’s previous writings, its basic structural principles are musical – the development and echoing of various recurring motifs and themes within and across formal structures – and perspectivism, the retelling or revisioning in new ways and contexts of what was earlier described. The landscape, weather, characters, gardens, houses

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and the narrator keep being re-described as they change or are seen in a new light. Such themes as death, time, change, freedom, dependency, seeing, knowing, illness, age, continuity, building, order, chaos and migration keep recurring. Each of the five sections has its own musical key, a symbol such as the ambiguous nature of Jack’s garden or the destructive effect of the attractive ivy, around which the themes, descriptions and events circle, depart and return. Memory and association allow transformations of motifs and modulations of key. Brief allusions allow motifs to be gradually introduced or to recur. There is counterpoint or fugal development when different stories, characters and themes are taken up, dropped, recur or are juxtaposed with other stories, characters and themes. Section I concludes with a celebration of Jack: He was not exactly a remnant; he had created his own life, his own world, almost his own continent. … he had created a garden on the edge of a swamp and a ruined farmyard: had responded to and found glory in the seasons. All around him was ruin; and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation. But he had sensed that life and man were the true mysteries; and he had asserted the primacy of these with something like religion. The bravest and most religious thing about his life was his way of dying. (p. 87) This is the vision with which Naipaul concludes the novel; it also anticipates the very words and themes of section V (‘we remade the world for ourselves …death … showed me life and man as the mystery and true religion of men’ [p. 318]). The recurrence of themes and symbols is musical – in the return of words, phrases, symbols – and felt to be part of a rich patterning of sounds, images, allusions and associations: it is also seen in the way the novel keeps returning to the rainy days of Naipaul’s first arrival in Wiltshire and the foregrounded symbolism of its title, ‘The Enigma of Arrival’. At first we are told that the title refers to a painting by Chirico about which Naipaul had thought to write a short story (pp. 91–2). Naipaul’s original dismissive description of Chirico’s other paintings might indeed be the casual reader’s first hasty impression of Enigma as a novel: ‘arbitrary assemblages, in semi-classical, semi-modern settings, of unrelated motifs – aqueducts, trains, arcades, gloves, fruit, statues – with an occasional

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touch of easy mystery’ (p. 91). We are told that this one painting, ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, kept changing in Naipaul’s memory. But even before Naipaul begins to offer his first version of the story it is associated with the opening of his novel and his arrival in Wiltshire: ‘And in the winter grey of the manor grounds in Wiltshire, in those first four days of mist and rain, when so little was clear to me an idea – floating lightly above the book I was working on – came to me of a story I might one day write about that scene in the Chirico picture’ (p. 92). While the first version of the story might be interpreted as based on Naipaul’s trip to India in Area of Darkness (‘something like an Indian bazaar scene’) it is also obviously applicable to ‘In a Free State’ (‘… that Mediterranean story was really no more than a version of the story I was already writing’ [p. 93]). Soon, however, the journey motif gathers to itself a wide body of associations such as the description of the basic themes of The Loss of El Dorado (‘discovery, the New World …’ [p. 94]) and of Naipaul’s life since leaving Trinidad (pp. 95–7). Within a few pages the theme of a journey to a foreign land from which one cannot return becomes symbolic of Naipaul’s life and life itself, both for the migrant (Naipaul’s return to Trinidad in 1970, after writing the ‘romance’ of The Loss of El Dorado coincides with Black Power demonstrations) and for anyone faced by change, the passing of time and death: ‘his life’s journey – had been made’ (p. 157). Still later, at the novel’s conclusion, the journey motif is applied to the Indian diaspora and his family: ‘There was no ship of antique shape now to take us back. We had come out of the nightmare; and there was nowhere else to go’ (p. 317). The shipwrecked image of The Mimic Men has been revised with a happier ending. In its rich musicality and formal complexity Enigma continues the modernist tradition of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but it revises such forms for the concerns of the post-imperial world and for the more open, autobiographical manner of postmodernism. There are two interwoven themes in Enigma suggesting that Naipaul’s time in Wiltshire on the estate has an allegorical dimension. The landlord and his estate are associated with imperial England. Their history is the history of modern England. The landlord’s sloth and preoccupation with his past have led to decay, the loss of order in his estate and the emergence of new people, including Naipaul, as significant. Naipaul’s presence on the estate and reconversion of a property into his own house reverses the imperial story of the indentured Indian labourer on the Trinidadian sugar

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plantation, yet ironically the situation of Naipaul working at his writing on an English estate has its parallels to the past. Like the sugar plantation owner who was absent from Trinidad, living in England, and like the imperial government which has withdrawn to its own local problems, the local estate owner has withdrawn into his memories. He has let the estate (state – Trinidad, Empire, England’s historical culture) become an economic burden and is eventually displaced by an energetic, new post-war lower- and middle-class order that includes foreigners and former colonials. Jack is part of a new order, a new England which pretends to carry on older traditions. The estate and the lands near it are also symbolic of English literature, bringing to the narrator’s mind a range of English writing from medieval English literature to the present. It seems from the landlord and Alan that English literature has also decayed – only a novelist friend of the narrator who scrupulously observes society is to be trusted – and the implications are that Naipaul is now, ironically, the heir of the imperial language and literature. Like the Rooks (an old-fashioned image of blacks) Naipaul and other former colonials have taken over part of England and English literature. It is the figurative representation of the decay of the imperial order and the rise of the post-imperial that makes it unlikely that the people and world observed by the narrator are always factually real. The disruption of the fictional and distanced with the factual and undisguised personal is what makes Enigma postmodern. Throughout Enigma Naipaul touches upon his relationship to European cultural traditions, especially in the arts. They, as well as Indian culture, made him, but such an education was mimicry, learning without understanding or, because alien to his experience, distorting and the source of fantasies. The narrator sees the shearing of sheep and it is ‘like something out of an old novel, perhaps by Hardy, or out of a Victorian country diary’ (p. 18). Jack at first appears ‘as in a version of a Book of Hours’ (p. 20). ‘Jack’s father-inlaw … seemed a Wordsworthian figure … going gravely about his peasant tasks, as if in an immense Lake District solitude’ (p. 20). In Trinidad Naipaul had imagined Dickens’ novels to be populated with a cast of multiracial characters similar to the society he knew. Often the world he read about in English literature was baffling, words did not correspond to their use in Trinidad. The English countryside became the pastoral scenes of cows on a tin of milk or some idealized landscape reproduced on a painting. When he first went to

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England as a student and aspiring writer he was baffled and depressed by the actuality; there was no grand imperial land of continuous traditions awaiting him with open arms, his life was pinched, among other immigrants, and he was surrounded by what appeared to be decay and ruin. Like many other colonial students he felt humiliated, a perpetual outsider, but unlike most others he had cut his ties with the past and felt he had a vocation to be a writer, a career he could undertake only in England. He could not write the smart sophisticated novel of an experienced man of the world or the novel of refined inner sensibility which he admired and which was a product of the security and wealth of imperial England. He had to discover that only his own life and experience could be the basis of his subject matter and themes. Which Enigma is. Towards the conclusion of Section II, ‘The Journey’, Naipaul returns to a subject he has treated in previous books, especially in The Mimic Men, the months he spent in an Earls Court boarding house when he first arrived in England, before going to Oxford. Naipaul’s sexual and social innocence do not appear abnormal for someone of his age at that time. Nor does his inability to have appreciated, when he was eighteen years old, that the ‘true material of the boarding house’ was the ‘flotsam of Europe not long after the end of the terrible war’ or that he himself ‘was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century – a movement and cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States’ (p. 130). What is, however, striking about his discussion of the past is the clarity, economy and precision with which he turns this particular enigma of arrival into a statement about his methods as an artist. ‘Unwilling as a writer ever to fabricate, to invent where I had no starting-point of knowledge’ (p. 129). ‘[I]f I had noted down simply what I had seen’ (p. 131), if he had the ‘security’ to take an interest in people, talk to them and ask questions (p. 131). Writing requires material, an idea, a story, a setting, dialogue, themes, a model, interest in others, a sense of inquiry, an ability to see, practice. Enigma has its share of false writers. There is Alan, who does some newspaper reviews and talks on cultural topics on the radio and whose very brightness and trendiness confuses received ideas of cultural stylishness with being an artist. He dies without writing a book. More interesting is the landlord of the manor, who is a minor artist and poet in an older style deriving from late nineteenthcentury aestheticism. He might be regarded as an embodiment of

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England’s Edwardian imperial power and security which allowed its artists to turn inward from external realities to refinements of feeling, eroticism and playfulness. The wealth that built the manor allows him to withdraw into himself as the estate decays. The ivy that he loves eventually overruns and destroys the buildings. He has published a book at his own expense. He is the opposite of Naipaul and might be understood as figurative of the decay and eventual end of a formerly influential British literary tradition which Naipaul at first tried to imitate and found to be unsuitable for himself and his times. Naipaul living and writing on the estate represents the start of a new direction in English literature, the former colonial who will build his own house by radically redesigning and converting the buildings of the past to his own uses. Enigma is less a story of Naipaul’s becoming English and assimilating to English literary traditions than a claim to have come, eventually taken root, and in his own way, conquered. It is not really a story of acculturation and assimilation; rather it implies that Naipaul and other former colonials are now part of, and inheritors of, the English literary tradition. It continues a history that started with the English conquest of India. It is a daring claim. To have set his story in London would have been less daring. Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes …. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arabs, Africans, Malays. (p. 130) But to have set his story in rural England, the England of Hardy’s novels, of Constable’s paintings, of Cowper’s verses and Victorian diaries, of Stonehenge, and to have contrasted his successful career as a writer and his conversion of local houses to his own design with the decay and disorder of the manor and the failure of Alan and his landlord as writers, with their notions of a literature of sensibility, is in a way to declare oneself the inheritor, someone who has not only earned his place but who is part of the new order, the new literary tradition of the migration of the world’s people. From a British or American perspective, that much overused word ‘postcolonial’ means the collapse of a tradition and cultural fragmentation as a result of internationalism, cultural relativism and cultural pluralism.

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For critics who take that view there are no more novels, only voices, voices from the margin demanding to be heard. But if I understand Enigma, Biswas’s children, after much hard work and learning to adapt what they have found on their journeys, do have a house, and it is in the very heart of the English literary tradition which has been reconverted and redesigned to tell and celebrate their story. This novel is about such changes and their causes. Naipaul’s struggle to create order, as a writer and for his own emotional needs, from historical change and the chaotic freedom of the present is continually in conflict with a longing for stability, rootedness and continuity. His love of landscape, noticeable especially in his recent books, is in part a desire for harmony with his surroundings, while his awareness of the seasons could be understood as a way of transforming the flux of the actual world into orderly, continuous cycles of change. A Turn in the South compassionately examines people with a similar desire for wholeness and harmony. Naipaul had previously shown a reserve towards the United States, which he associated with racial discrimination, cultural crudeness and imperialism. Americans replace the departing Europeans in Guerrillas and A Bend in the River as the new world order of junk food, big business and the world’s police when local disorder threatens Western interests. As happens with many people from the Commonwealth, England is the country and culture towards which he has had ambivalent feelings while the United States, especially the South, was the land of racial discrimination (of a radical kind not found in England), of lynching and of the Ku Klux Klan. Naipaul has always made a clear distinction between the condition of black Americans, a powerless, victimized minority, and the selfgoverning black African or West Indian. This is especially true of Trinidad where slavery lasted less than fifty years and where the Indians were brought in to work the sugar plantations. Yet the American South was in the past linked to the West Indies. Such islands as Barbados and Antigua had rich sugar plantation economies, and were places of opportunities, at a time when much of the South was still frontier. In A Turn in the South (1989) Naipaul re-examines his former prejudice towards the southern United States. As in Enigma he tries to see and understand a place that he had previously understood through received ideas. He wants to understand the South’s resistance to modernization and its pride in its culture when the culture was built upon the horror of slavery. How had the black southerner

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learned to survive and adapt? Naipaul is impressed by the role of religion in helping people make sense of their lives and in providing a feeling of community and service. People are allowed to speak for themselves and there are conflicting voices usually presented without judgement. At times Naipaul appears starry-eyed, more concerned with finding links between his own past in Trinidad and the ways of the South than with analysis. But that is part of trying to see reality freshly – as when he attempts to see Mississippian history through the eyes of the whites, or when he uncritically accepts someone’s mythology of the redneck – and his recent delight with the world around him. Naipaul, now conscious of death, enjoys other ways of seeing and being than those that had governed his feelings in the past. Increasingly his books are concerned with other people and what their situation has in common with his own. How have they learned to adapt? Just as he uncritically accepts an idealization of the redneck as trying to live the free life of a frontiersman, so almost every black character in the book is admirable except for the few who are obviously emotionally disturbed and unreliable. But then the theme of A Turn in the South is ‘home’. What does it feel like to live in a part of the modern world where people can speak of ‘home’ and what enables the Southerners, white and black, to have such feelings? Naipaul’s third book of Indian travels, India: A Million Mutinies Now (1991), is written with his earlier Indian books in mind and is another revision, another re-seeing of what had been wrongly judged in the past. Even the crowds of Bombay at the start and the Kashmiri hotel recall An Area of Darkness. India: A Million Mutinies Now is populated, filled with the voices of a wide variety of people who are allowed to speak for themselves without much authorial commentary. Opinions, views, possible solutions are allowed to clash. The interest is more in what has created such voices than in imposing an order. Where Naipaul formerly sought a tradition but found decay and chaos, he has come to accept that life consists of change and to find interest in the ways that people strive to change their lives for the better. In the twenty-seven years between his first visit to India and this one, Naipaul and the India he observes have changed in analogous ways. They have changed from the confusions that accompanied independence to the many voices and perspectives of the postcolonial. In 1962 Naipaul was still humiliated by his colonial past in Trinidad, a humiliation that he blamed on India, where notions of

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greatness had been lost among pettiness. For centuries foreigners had conquered and ruled India because of its own internal weaknesses. What had been one of the world’s great civilizations stopped developing, became backward, inward, fragmented, ready for conquest, its people superstitious, passive, impoverished, sent abroad as indentured labour. In 1962, seeking to find his cultural home in India, he discovered he was not part of the family he imagined, he did not belong to the local clans, he did not have the local vision. Instead of national independence bringing renewal he found poverty, feudal caste attitudes, fatalism, lack of rationality and a failure of vision. Returning to India during a time when others fear the collapse of the Indian central state because of regional, caste and religious conflicts, Naipaul finds signs of vitality and renewal. There is now a new wealth, a new national economy controlled by Indians and not by foreigners. Many people are prosperous and others can hope to improve their condition. Notions of freedom and self-assertion have moved from the elite to a broader range of society. A notion of India has been restored, after having been lost for centuries, and it is this sense of identity which is being challenged by further claims for recognition. Naipaul sees such renewal as beginning with the peace the British had imposed on India after the mutiny of 1857. Until then the country was the victim of repeated Muslim invasions and was divided among various groups who, because of local politics, had taken sides with foreign invaders. British rule brought unity and began a period of scholarship which reconstructed a sense of national identity, led to the nationalist movement and independence. Notions of freedom continued to develop and, supported by recent economic changes, created the energy and demands for recognition that characterize the present: ‘To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively … it was to know a kind of rage … every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from rage of other groups’ (p. 420). An older generation of nationalists needed to find a usable past and folk tradition which they asserted against the culture of their colonizers; but such traditionalism became reactionary, even an absurd humiliation, after independence. Naipaul’s continuing exploration of the paradoxes of freedom is both more suitable for the postcolonial world and a further stage in the process of decolonization. In his recognition of how British imperialism made possible the

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creation of a modern India we might find a clue about how to see the role of European imperial history, the Western canon of literature and the place of European ideas in contemporary multicultural societies. Naipaul’s writing has moved with our era from the confusions of decolonization, with its suspicions, humiliations, and continuing dependency, to what is often termed the postcolonial, which for him (unlike some critics I will be discussing in chapter 13) is a joyful acceptance of the energies, cultural achievements, conflicting claims and freedoms that have resulted from independence along with the increased wealth, transportation and communication of recent decades. Although Naipaul’s writings are a record and analysis of such changes there is a subtext – the soil from which they have been nourished is himself: Cruelty, yes it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity, and saved people from the void, was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds, and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood: an early introduction to the ways of the world, and to the nature of cruelty. It had given me … a taste for the other kind of life, the solitary or less crowded life, where one had space around oneself. (I: MM, p. 178)

10 A Way in the World: A Sequence A Way in the World (1994) is a ‘sequence’ of nine narratives including autobiography, fiction, history, scholarship, and imagined versions of actual lives. (The American edition describes the book as ‘a novel’ rather than ‘a sequence’.) It is set in Trinidad or places, such as South America and Africa, which have associations with its history. Many of the characters in the stories are real persons, some are fictionalized or composite versions of well-known people, while still others are invented. Details of Naipaul’s life can be found placed throughout the volume which offers some of the most personal remarks he has made concerning the ways colonialism had limited the possibilities of self-realization in Trinidad, as well as the historical and ethnic reasons for his estrangement from the Port of Spain he loved as a youth. The narrator is Naipaul, a Naipaul talking to the reader about a place he left some forty years earlier, at times has revisited, and about how it has changed. The stories include memories of Naipaul’s youth and family life, his first attempts to become a writer, and how he was influenced by anti-Indian racism on the part of black politicians. In the central story of the sequence where he is introduced to the wealthy Jewish New York friends of a black West Indian Marxist intellectual, a character named Lebrun based on C. L. R. James, Naipaul says he came as close as he ever will in his life to becoming part of a group, a sect of Trotskyites. While it is not clear whether it is the wealth, camaraderie, or intellectual community that attracts him he decides he already has his own life marked out as a writer and he is looking forward to the books he will write. To become part of a movement would sacrifice his freedom and future selffulfillment. The tensions between self and tribe, and the resulting insecurities of individualism in contrast to protection by a community, are central to the book of stories about origins, inheritance, change, reputations and the ironies of history. 152

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The volume’s title refers to the ways people are made by and make their way in the world. Several stories are fanciful versions of the history that Naipaul told in The Loss of El Dorado. Other stories concern revolutionary movements, especially the history of black liberation but also, as in ‘A Parcel of Papers’ and ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’, revolutions in South America. While the results are usually disillusioning, the main focus of such stories is on the character of the leaders, how they were shaped and limited by their historical situation, and the distance between their ideas and reality. At times, as in ‘New Clothes’ and ‘A Parcel of Papers’, history seems to be a repetition of the same promises and failures, the meeting and conquests of people, similar stories with different names and races. History, however, also consists of change – what was once impossible is now common, the dominated of the past are now the rulers, once famous writers are no longer remembered. Revolutions fail, but history is revolutionary and produces people like Manuel Sorzano in ‘A New Man’, a Trinidadian Indian with a Hindi speaking Indian wife yet a Venezuelan name and children with Spanish names. These are stories of diasporic individuals. Sorzano is an illustration of how Indians abroad have changed. Although he has adapted to Venezuela, his children will no longer have any relationship to Hindu culture and their past. Some individuals, such as the British novelist Foster Morris and Lebrun, are embittered towards the end of their lives as, we learn, were Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh. Others, like Phyllis and Manuel Sorzano, make peace with what might be thought unsatisfactory situations. Even more than in Finding the Centre Naipaul takes the reader into the ways his fiction is written, its sources, and his concerns. Writing and its relationship to the author and to previous writing is another theme of the stories. Naipaul as author tells the reader of the effort it took him to learn how to write his books rather than imitate those of others. By way of such explanations we are given the tools to appreciate the art of Naipaul’s fiction, especially A Way in the World. Its stories are complexly imagined and told, moving between various places and times, changing focus from the central character to the narrator and others, containing many events and parallels, influenced by the way Naipaul has learned to offer a variety of themes, people and voices in his travel books. Anyone interested in writing will learn from Naipaul’s comments about problems he faced and had to overcome in finding his own voice and subject matter.

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A Way in the World is an ordered ‘sequence’ in which various themes, places and subject matter are skilfully intertwined, sometimes disappearing, then reappearing to create continuity. Stories are linked by phrases and characters. Blair, a black Trinidadian government employee who becomes a politician, appears in the second and ninth story. Leonard Slide, a dark Indian who works as a dresser of the dead in Parry’s Corner, a funeral parlour, and who is famous in the community as a cake decorator and flower arranger, appears in the first story and is alluded to in the ninth. The brilliant radical black intellectual Lebrun is mentioned in the fourth and becomes the focus of the fifth story. In the third story we learn the origin of the title of the fifth story, ‘On the run’. Several characters, such as the Francisco Miranda of ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’, are always on the run and described in words which allude to the phrase. Within each story there is movement back and forth in time and place, with the focus changing from the narrator to the tale. The links between the stories are often subtle, like musical motifs that unexpectedly reappear transposed and somewhat different. Two examples are when the dead body of Blair in the concluding story is imagined being flown back to Trinidad from Africa to be laid to rest in the same funeral parlour where in the first story Leonard Slide worked, or that both stories concern origins, Blair’s death being in the Africa idealized by the black West Indians, while Slide’s sense of beauty is perhaps an inheritance from an ancestor who was an Indian transvestite. In ‘The New Man’ Naipaul’s thoughts about how the destruction of the Spanish empire led to a century of disorder in Latin America introduces Francisco Miranda, a con-man revolutionary whose life and misadventures as a liberator will be the focus of ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’. Two stories, ‘History’ and ‘Home Again’ reveal how politics alienated Naipaul from Trinidad. While confirming that anti-Indian racism made Naipaul wary of black nationalism and its supporters, the stories record the way those of African descent have come together in a movement of racial and cultural assertion which brought them to power in Africa and the West Indies and gives them influence elsewhere. Blair at first accepts the limitations imposed by white colonialism, then becomes and flourishes as part of the new movement, and eventually, now an international advisor, is murdered in Africa by corrupt African politicians. Although ironic, Blair’s life is a study of a complex person caught up in the ways of the world.

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A Way in the World begins with a ‘Prelude’ titled ‘An Inheritance’ concerning the Trinidadian world into which Naipaul was born and the origins of Leonard Slide. In a society in which many of the men were brutal and had been in jail, Slide stood out for his honesty and for his careful artistry whether in painting the dead or icing a cake. Such obsession with beauty was upsetting to Naipaul in his youth, it was too different, and there are hints of Slide’s homosexuality. Returning to Port of Spain many years later Naipaul thinks Slide might have originally been Sayed, the family might have been Shia Muslims from Lucknow as there is a Lucknow Street in the St James section of Port of Spain. Naipaul assumes there was some inheritance: ‘we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings’ (p. 9). Perhaps Slide had an ancestor who was one of the Lucknow transvestites, dancing ‘lewd men who painted their face and tried to live like women’ (p. 9). The next narrative, ‘History/ A Smell of Fish Glue’, tells of a short period, when he was seventeen, that Naipaul worked as a temporary second-class clerk in the Registrar-General’s Department in Port of Spain before leaving for England. Naipaul describes himself as a ‘country-boy’ who came to Port of Spain in his late teens and ‘loved the town’ as ‘only a country boy could’. The affectionate description of Port of Spain in the late 1930s is unlike the soured images of the West Indies usually found in his fiction. The memories in ‘History’ reveal a youthful affection similar to the wide-eyed innocence of the young boy in Miguel Street. I loved everything about the town that was not like the country. I liked the paved cambered streets and even the open kerbside gutters; every morning, after they had done their sweeping and gathering, the street-cleaners opened the water hydrants and flooded the gutters with fresh, clear water. (p. 11) Such words as ‘loved’, ‘liked’, ‘fresh’ and ‘clear’ are far from the vocabulary of Guerillas. Indeed there is a surprising remark so unlike Naipaul’s usual dismissal of half-made societies. ‘Port of Spain was small, really, with less than a hundred thousand people. But to me it was a big town, and quite complete’ (p. 12). While ‘History’ explains how over time Naipaul living abroad came to see Port of Spain critically when he returned, it also tells how the town changed. As large numbers of black immigrants from

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other islands settled in slums on the outskirts and in the hills while the middle classes moved to suburbs, the formerly clear division of town and country no longer existed; they now flowed into each other. Port of Spain became a city with contrasting slums and wealthy suburbs. It also became primarily a black and part-black city which no longer felt welcoming to Indians. Much of the background concerning Naipaul’s relationship to Trinidad and especially to Trinidadian politics is explained by the story. The first time ‘race’ comes into ‘History’ is when the son of a black lawyer takes him to his father’s chambers and Naipaul is told ‘The race! The race man!’ (p. 15). While he could understand and share in the desire to be part of a group Naipaul wanted ‘to belong to myself’ and thought the notion of ‘a great racial movement forward too sentimental’ (p. 16). His individualism will put Naipaul at odds with all those who want people to be seen in terms of race, sexual orientation or other groups. But there is another ‘text’ here which is Naipaul’s own attraction towards being part of a group, in his case Hindu Indian, which he rejects but which will be found in his writings and which is threatened by black nationalist politics. Working for the colonial government Naipaul became conscious that the government is expected to be benevolent to those it rules. This British view of service was new to him. He had been brought up to think of life as cruel and of those who had power as indifferent and arbitrary. The life he had known was filled with cruelty and violence whether in the language people used, the threats they made, the ways parents treated children, the beatings in school, the fights between boys, the cruelties of the extended family and the awareness of the painful history of African slaves and Indian indentured workers. Woodford Square, in the town centre near the Red House where Naipaul worked, is symbolic of the changes that will overtake colonial Port of Spain as Trinidad becomes independent. Woodford Square is famous as the place where Eric Williams lectured to the populace about colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, slavery and black history. The movement towards Trinidadian independence could be said to have started there. When Naipaul first saw it in the early 1940s with his father there were still Indian immigrants who had worked out their indenture on the plantations and had gravitated to the town where they were stranded, lacking jobs, money, family, and knowledge of English. They were part of the cruelty of the colonial past and symbolic of the displacement of Indian

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peasantry to an island many thousands of miles away where they would die destitute, without rights, and unrepresented. Naipaul’s father had once written an article about them. When six years later Naipaul returns to Trinidad the island is in the grips of a political movement. Although Naipaul does not mention names he is describing Eric Williams’s ‘university’ of Woodford Square. ‘In that square now there were lectures about local history and slavery. People were being told about themselves, and black feeling was high’ (p. 28). Naipaul goes to a meeting and realizes that he had earlier imitations of the emotions shared by many black people and indeed it was part of the private emotions everyone felt, ‘part of the unacknowledged cruelty of our setting’ (p. 29). Everyone was wounded, and their pain was now flowing into a common stream of emotion. So far Naipaul is describing the way nationalist politicians energize the colonized or oppressed by reminders of their shared history, victimization, resentments, religion, culture and ethnicity or race. Naipaul is sympathetic yet surprised it had taken so long for ‘black people’ to feel this way. Too often they had trusted their representation to whites or part-whites. But Naipaul watching a meeting at Woodford Square feels threatened by it. Although resenting his treatment by local whites, he knows there are few whites in Trinidad and they will not be threatened by this new black politics. ‘Much of the hostile feeling released by the sacrament of the square would have focussed on the Indians, who make up the other half of the population’ (pp. 32–3). Port of Spain had been ‘important’ to him, but now ‘I felt it had passed to other hands’ (p. 33). The description of the shared emotion at the meeting as a ‘sacrament’ alludes to the role religion has played in black culture and politics throughout the New World. On other visits Naipaul finds Trinidad now independent but in a ‘state of black exaltation – almost a state of insurrection’ (p. 33) and defined by a division between the Indian countryside and ‘the African town’ (p. 33). Black immigration from the small islands resulted in Port of Spain being partly enclosed on the east by shanty towns on the hills with people living in huts of packing cases and rusty corrugated iron, while the middle classes expanded to the west along the coast. Those left behind, especially in the shanty towns, felt defrauded by national independence. They continued to believe in the original dream of racial ‘redemption’, and added to it ‘the passions of more extreme and more marginal and more publicized black causes from other places’ (p. 36). Naipaul is thinking of

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the racial discrimination formerly found in America, especially in the South, and of apartheid South Africa and how they had produced Black Power and liberation movements. Although Trinidad now had a black leader and government which ruled through a black political party and had come to power through a rhetoric combining black history with Marxist ideas, ‘disaffection grew, feeding on an idea of an impossible racial righteousness; and there was always a threat of an insurrection within the insurrection’ (p. 36). The government is part of a continuing racial ‘insurrection’ which will be challenged by a more radical ‘insurrection’ driven by passionate feelings of ‘racial righteousness’, of compensating for a history of black victimization which it will be impossible to assuage. These are feelings of humiliation and outrage which Naipaul also finds in the Indian community in Trinidad; it is the humiliation and anger below the surface of any society which has a history of cruelty, slavery, indentured service, poverty, racial hierarchies, alien rulers, and which is divided by religions, languages, cultures, and skin colours, as well as by distance from the lands of origins of its inhabitants. He alludes to the Merchant of Venice and the Jews, ‘scratch us and we all bled’ (p. 31). During the early 1970s the West Indies were troubled by imitation Black Power and Cuban revolutionary movements. After Stokely Carmichael was banned from entering Trinidad there were demonstrations during the 1970 Carnival, followed by Black Power street marches starting in March which soon turned into violence and bombings. When people of mixed race tried to join the demonstrations they were insulted and threatened. The Indians refused to join the marchers. Parts of Port of Spain were looted and set on fire. Naipaul mentions the 1970 ‘serious revolt’ against the government which formed the background of his novel Guerrillas. After the government was restored it pretended to be blacker than thou and set aside part of the city as a market for handicrafts sold by the ‘dreadlocked people of the hills and shantytown’. As new shopping centres were built in the suburbs it became possible to avoid the city itself. Meanwhile during the oil boom the government gave away money in ‘doles to everyone who claimed it’ who was of the right colour and had supported the ruling party, and when the boom was over there was increased dissatisfaction – ‘the mood of rejection and righteousness was there again’ (p. 37). Now there were newer influences than Marxism, African decolonization, Black Power, and the Cuban revolution. Some black

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Trinidadians started to dress like Arabs, the men in long gowns with skullcaps, the women in black veils. The new Trinidadian Muslims were in contact with the Arab world, bought expensive properties which they covered with writing in Arabic, and built a settlement and a mosque. Their children went to a school where they studied and read books in Arabic. Then one day after prayers perhaps a hundred of the sect attacked the police headquarters and armoury killing many. The attempted coup d’état of 1990 started on 27 July. Islamist radicals’ for six days’ took over parliament, held many government officials hostage, wiring some with explosives. The Jamaatal-Muslimeen led by Abu Bakar supposedly had Libyan support and hoped to turn Trinidad into a radical Islamic state.52 Although the government stopped functioning the country was kept going by the police and army which fought the looters. The attempted revolution and the looting was a black against black affair. The Indian countryside stayed quiet, as usual its political fate being determined by the blacks of Port of Spain. ‘History’ concludes with a short recapitulation of the cruelties of the past from the time the Spanish claimed Trinidad and scalded with hot bacon fat the five Indian chiefs to sign documents surrendering their lands. While the central theme of Naipaul’s story is the cruelty and humiliations which are central to Trinidad’s history, and which explain black politics, he is also explaining how the Port of Spain he loved when young had been transformed, then physically destroyed. ‘Home Again’, the last story in A Way in the World is partly autobiographical and set during Naipaul’s first visit to Africa, the academic year he spent at the University of Uganda, Makerere, which like his youth in Trinidad and boarding house days when he first arrived in London, was an experience which recurs in his writings. The country is a tyranny ruled by a president, but because now independent and supposedly socialist it is admired although selfrule has brought little liberation. Peasants are not permitted to move to the cities to protect them from urban corruption; this also helps the government make the villagers return to the assumed collectivization of traditional Africa. Blair has been sent to advise the President how to control the flow of money out of Uganda. Naipaul recounts how Blair had been senior to him when he was working as a clerk in Trinidad, how Blair had entered politics and the government, how in the heady early days of national independence and international decolonialization

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had rapidly moved on to ‘ministerial office: travel, ambassadorships, United Nations postings, and now this job for the president, reporting on the outflow of money’ (p. 354). Naipaul recalls that in Trinidad the ‘black movement’ quickly became racial politics. Anti-Indian agitation was the way to gain black votes. Blacks and Indians now felt divided from each other and as a result whenever Naipaul returned to Trinidad he felt ‘more and more cut off from the past’ (p. 355). In a country which aimed at a revolutionary African socialism Blair was bound to stir up trouble for the local Indian community of shopkeepers and traders who already felt threatened. Naipaul mentions the long history of associations between Asia and Africa. An East African showed Vasco da Gama the route to India. A Victorian map displaying the rivers, lakes, and mountains of Uganda was supposedly based on ‘old Hindu texts, giving Sanskrit names’ (p. 348). India had influenced the Swahili culture of the coast, but Indians were now associated with those who settled during British rule and there was a government-directed campaign of hate against them in the press and by politicians. Although the President had been helped financially by the Asians, Indians were harassed and being blackmailed by government officials and politicians as they attempted to get their money out of the country before their businesses and accounts were confiscated (as they later were) and they were expelled. The President has brought Blair in as an advisor so he can claim that laws which rob the Indians of their money while driving them away were done at the suggestion of international experts concerned with the finances of the country. Blair’s role in Uganda was supposedly to arrange ‘things for more important people who wished to keep their noses clean’ (p. 357). Instead of only putting ‘a squeeze’ on the urban Asians he also began to look into the smuggling of ivory and gold by ruling party officials in the interior. This was dangerous as they were connected with the old ruling families and ruled their areas absolutely. They have Blair killed. The title of the story ‘Home’ refers both to Africa where Blair was murdered as the lost ‘home’ of Afro-Caribbeans and to Blair being flown home to Trinidad for burial. It is an ironic return to ‘home’ for someone of a diaspora. The story includes Moses Lubero, a houseboy for an English couple, a sort of mafia-head of the various servants on the estate where Naipaul was lodged. Moses’ getting paid to find jobs for others, his loaning new servants money, and the

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other ways he controls and financially gains epitomizes how power operates. Although a servant he has found his own profitable way in the world, as has Richard, an Englishman on the international circuit who always defends the government and helps spread rumours about Blair. Between ‘History’ and ‘Home Again’ the six other tales concerning the Caribbean and its history include three stories (almost every third one – the third, sixth and eighth – in the book), described in their titles as ‘An Unwritten Story’. ‘New Clothes: An Unwritten Story’ supposedly is based on an idea which occurred to Naipaul during 1961 when he first visited the highland in Guiana, an Amerindian area on the borders of Brazil, Venezuela and the former British Guiana. Here he takes up once more the theme of liberation and imagines a 1970s revolutionary ‘on the run’ who is part of a group trying to enlist the Amerindians into overthrowing the black government which rules the recently independent nation. The ‘descendants of the slaves, have inherited the authority of the old colonial government’, while ‘the Amerindians are culturally what they were two hundred years before’ (p. 46). By the time the revolutionary reaches the highlands, almost a figure from a tale by Conrad, he has lost faith in himself and is thinking of how he can make promises and escape from a place where he now feels trapped. To the Amerindians with their oral culture and unchanging sense of time he is one of many Europeans who have come to them seeking something from them and promising in return to improve their lives, promises which were never fulfilled. The story concludes with his being shown Elizabethan clothing presumably left by Sir Walter Raleigh during his search for the gold of El Dorado as a pledge that he would return from England to improve the Indians’ lives. The clothing is explained in ‘A Parcel of Papers, A Roll of Tobacco, A Tortoise’ the second ‘Unwritten Story’ and Naipaul’s attempt to understand what betrayals and vanity are hidden behind the incoherence of Raleigh’s descriptions of his travels to the New World. Raleigh begins as another hopeful revolutionary with dreams of establishing his own kingdom and foolishly promising the Amerindians freedom if they join his fight against the Spaniards, but his dreams are only fantasies and they will suffer for it. He becomes obsessed with seeking gold and when he no longer believes in El Dorado he is unwilling to admit the truth. His life and writings become a lie which leads to the death of many others. He is an earlier version of the revolutionary who will betray others while seeking his own safety.

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A Way in the World is a counter-history to accepted notions of the past. It is neither history from the established European perspective nor from the usual Left and black counter-perspectives. It is also a book about writing, how Naipaul learned to write and how the history of those formerly colonized should be written in contrast to how it has been written. ‘Passenger’ tells of a British writer from the 1930s, Foster Morris, a composite figure of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others who wrote about exotic places. It is about how other peoples and places are represented in literature. Previous writers about Trinidad treated its society and people as inferior exotica. Foster Morris supposedly arrived during the 1937 oil field strikes and wrote what appeared a serious study of the workers and their leaders, giving the island and people a new dignity in literature, a dignity which was unlike how local people saw themselves. Naipaul says that in such a new world colony people did not have the lengthy family histories Foster Morris gave them, and they had a sense of the absurdity of their condition which Morris lacked. ‘Passenger’ mixes the later life of the fictional Foster Morris with Naipaul’s autobiography. Naipaul supposedly meets Morris in London and learns that the writer was aware he had falsified what he had written, but Morris claims that the opposition to the strikers were white racists and that readers in England at the time wanted noble native leaders. Naipaul thus debunks one of the myths on which the history of West Indian independence has been based and offers in its stead a different truth. He tells of an aunt who in a harsh ugly voice mocked the strikers for their brutality and lack of sensibility while she and others in the family lived in conditions that were as bad. Decades later after moving to Canada the aunt would be elegant and speak well. The poverty and harshness of Trinidad in the late 1930s limited how people could develop, and authors were unlikely to write about this reality. Naipaul only learned how to write honestly after he stripped his prose with its inherited British attitudes to ‘plain concrete statements, adding meaning to meaning in simple stages’ (p. 87). He confesses that the early comedies he wrote masked an hysteria he felt about Trinidad and about his precarious existence as a writer in London. After he learned that his hysteria could be his subject and he found his own personality as a writer in Biswas, Naipaul and the people of Trinidad were attacked in a review by Foster Morris who was bitter at the success of others. This leads Naipaul to think about the dangers of precocious success, and how bitter it was for

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someone like Foster Morris who after a brilliant early start never found his own voice as a writer and watched others pass him. The central story in the volume is ‘On the Run’, based largely on the life of the famous black Trinidadian intellectual and Trotskyite politician C. L. R. James with bits from the life of George Padmore and other black leaders. Naipaul asks what it was like in the past to be brilliant, talented, well read, an excellent speaker, ambitious and black. Lebrun is among the first generation of educated black West Indians. Unlike the easy sympathy found in a protest story, ‘On the Run’ imagines how given the limitations of his situation Lebrun made for himself an international political and literary career, a career with many achievements and disappointments, haunted by racial humiliations. The story calls attention to C. L. R. James’s literary criticism of the new West Indian writers and to his seeing within the comedy of Naipaul’s early fiction the trapped lives created by colonialism. Lebrun’s setting Trinidad within a history of imperialism in which the West Indies colonies were turned into sugar plantations to be exploited for England gave Naipaul a political and economic vision which has remained with him. Lebrun who earlier tried to see racial oppression as part of the class struggle and who proclaimed a universal humanism becomes in old age a race hero, discovered by those blacks tired of the failures of the older nationalist politics. He has new patrons. Although none of his revolutions got beyond ideas he becomes the great black pioneer revolutionary who claims that from the day the first black slave landed the Caribbean ‘became black territory’ (p. 131). In his new role he never criticizes any black regime and advises an African tyrant to kill traditional chiefs as a way of modernizing his nation. Lebrun is, like Foster Morris, embittered in old age. His wealthy white mistress and patron has left him for another man, and he rants against interracial relationships although he is brown and his daughter light skinned. He is annoyed in West Africa that a country ruled by a revolutionary Marxist tyrant has become a ruin while a neighbouring country which has retained its chiefs and rituals is modern and comfortable. Lebrun’s great early book discussed Latin American revolutions in relationship to the French revolution. (Naipaul has in mind C. L. R. James’s book on Haiti, The Black Jacobins.) This continues the theme of revolution found in the earlier stories and introduces three tales in which Latin American revolutions are seen as part of Trinidadian history. ‘A Parcel of Papers, A Roll of Tobacco,

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A Tortoise’ with its ‘Unwritten Story’ about Sir Walter Raleigh is followed by ‘A New Man’ and ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’, the third ‘Unwritten Story’. The revolution against Spain is shown to be unlike the American revolution against England as there are too many different peoples in fear of being ruled by each other and of losing the little security that they have. The result is that society in modern Venezuela is often violent as people challenge each other. Many of the characters in A Way in the World might be thought con men and adventurers who remake themselves and appear in different guises; several of the stories are about the disastrous effects of European expansion on the Amerindians. Behind such concerns as the history of black and Latin American revolutions and their leaders are Naipaul’s earlier themes of the dangers of freedom, the need for people to create their world and the arbitrariness of history.

11 Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, ‘Our Universal Civilization’ and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples Naipaul claims that he differs from previous writers who report from abroad in that he is himself an outsider who can see without European prejudices. That does not mean he sides with the opinions of those he writes about, but he claims to understand the issues, has felt similar emotions and tries to see the world through their eyes, a skill he has been practising since his teens. He feels free to be critical without the sentimentality and guilt of a European. Often his perspective is complicated by the position of Asiatics (his ironic term for Indians) in relation to dominant groups or by the history of Hinduism. His travel books are increasingly novelistic in being filled with individuals, character descriptions, sketched-in landscapes, voices, opinions, life stories and his judgement of the people he meets, as well as filled with the information about the narrator, his autobiography, what has influenced him, along with the expected tales of difficulties travelling abroad. His normal method is to visit a place without a pre-arranged programme; he depends on chance meetings, goes where news or where local people tell him, and he sometimes takes a surprising interest in the people he meets and interviews – they seem to become his friends. He often depends on a translator who offers an equivalent to the society which Naipaul as a visitor lacks but needs personally and as a writer. We see him engaging with a wide variety of situations and people. Naipaul has his opinions and prejudices, but he listens to those he 165

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meets, notes how they appear and what they say. Their lives often become tales, sometimes illustrations of his themes, but more often of how people make or unmake themselves in a changing world. They become characters in a Naipaul narrative; frequently as a result of political or other social upheavals there are changes in direction which might seem improbable in a novel trying to pass for an imitation of reality. When Naipaul strongly disagrees with or dislikes those he meets there still is interest in them, which is a writer’s form of compassion. Even when this proves difficult because of a clash in personalities, Naipaul conveys a sense of the character and the evolution of that person’s views. Naipaul has usually read about the places he visits and his discussion of the works and locale includes their significance historically and in terms of the present. His book implicitly becomes part of a continuing literary history of the place. The most impressive characteristic of the travel books is the fullness of life they convey, the sense of people and places. Naipaul’s travel books are like older novels in which there is constant engagement between the author and his characters. At times he will change his opinion, admit he was wrong, misjudged someone, or misread a situation. When Naipaul revisits a place there is often a progress report comparing it or a person with the previous visit. Those he meets include local writers, reporters, school teachers, clergy or intellectuals who also write. Naipaul is especially aware of, although he seldom draws a parallel between, lives that have similarities to his own or his parents’. He notes the frustrated ambitions of fathers, their mismatched marriages, their mental breakdowns, the ways in which children are abused by wealthier branches of their family and how such childhoods will haunt the future, the importance of education in opening possibilities, the chance encounters and patronage that advance careers, the oppressive effects of religion and how politics impinge on and interfere with the lives of people. Although Naipaul regards himself as offering an analysis of the societies and problems of the postcolonial world, that is his subject but not the main strength of his travel books. The core of the books and the basis of his writing, beyond what he brings from his previous experience and reading, is the people he meets, talks to, sees in their context, and discusses. Their lives in relation to their personality, beliefs and situations, forms the basis of his travel books. He has taken a traditional literary kind with a long history, the travel book, the book of voyages, a kind of literature descended from the epic

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journeys to foreign lands, and reinvented it for the postcolonial era, a time when modern communications and easy transportation demand instant reports from foreign places undergoing social, political and cultural revolutions. His controversial books concerning the effect of Islam on nations outside the Arab world were written as a result of two long journeys, sixteen years separating Among the Believers (1981) from Beyond Belief (1998). The former, a seven-month journey, began in August 1979 in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, but before the seizure of the American embassy and the use of its staff as hostages, an event which gave the fundamentalists control of the Iranian revolution and allowed them to suppress the possibility of a secular democracy. As the book begins the revolution already has taken its toll of lives but there is still hope of a more liberal or perhaps Marxist future. Two contrasting incompatible ideals were at the heart of the revolution against the Shah. There was the widespread desire to overthrow a corrupt tyrannical regime. Excited by getting rid of the Shah the secularists confused their aims with those religious leaders who wanted to erase the modernizing results of the Shah’s policies; they wanted to excise his emphasis on the Persian Aryan pre-Islamic past and instead make Iran into a competitor with Saudi Arabia for leadership of the Muslim world. As Naipaul soon learns, Iran and Saudi Arabia represent two opposing branches of Islam, which trace their histories to events which occurred soon after the death of Mohammed. Iran’s Shia Muslims recognize a different line of succession to the Prophet. Each branch regards the other as a heresy. Naipaul says that Islam from the start was imperialistic, a religion which rapidly became an empire. The Iranian Shia version belongs to the losing side of Islamic history and has made a cult of suffering and martyrdom. It looks forward to a hidden messiah, a ‘Twelfth Iman’, who will return to earth as a political and religious leader. Ayatollah Khomeini took on this role as God’s voice and judge. Fuelled by oil money Iran and Saudi Arabia export competing religious radicalisms, the supposed aim of each being a return to a pure Islamic way of life which existed under the rule of the Prophet. This means rule by the clergy with no distinction between the religious and political. It is a complete way of life, too complete as religious laws intrude on everything and allow no space for disagreements, idiosyncrasies, scepticism and the secular. Instead of

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early Islam’s confident, tolerant, worldly, hybridizing expansiveness there is now an intolerant, backward looking, joyless fundamentalism insisting that everything needed can be found in the Koran, intent on violently suppressing modernization as represented by Western liberal culture. Among the Believers begins in the midst of the action. Naipaul, who is dependent on translators, had planned to visit the holy city of Qom by bus, but his translator wanted to drive there in his own car. He comes to Naipaul’s hotel late, announces the car broke down and wants to put off the journey for another day. Soon Naipaul is pushing the car to start it, then decides he has had enough of this translator and acquires another, but by now the morning bus to Qom has departed. Naipaul describes the first translator as sneering, proud and unhappy working for Naipaul. His kind of resentment had ‘made the Iranian revolution’ (p. 8). Naipaul likes the second translator, Behzad, a Marxist revolutionary university student who is against the religious direction the Iranian revolution is now taking. Behzad and his girl friend will become characters in a story about youthful idealism continuing to misjudge the nature of revolutions. He reappears at the end of the book as a worshipper of Stalin: What he did in Russia we have to do in Iran. We too have to do a lot of killing. A lot … We have to kill all the bourgeoisie. All the oppressor class. (p. 390) The excitement of thinking about killing all ‘the oppressor class’ will reappear in Half a Life where Willie’s sister thinks the notion of killing all those of Spanish and part-Spanish origins in Latin and Central America the logical next step for a liberation movement trying to cleanse society of alien ideas and culture. Behzad’s enemy is not, however, the ‘bourgeoisie’ but the religious fundamentalists who want to cleanse society of everything alien including Marxism and who do not hesitate to execute those who oppose them. Behzad supported the wrong revolution; he is in danger, some of his friends have been killed. The two translators represent important characteristics of Naipaul’s travel writings. He often makes rapid judgements of people, but his information is often incomplete or wrong. He will later admit that he misinterpreted or misjudged a person or situation. His skills in judging others and the ways of the world are less sure than they seem at first. What was a world-class writer and traveller doing

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pushing the car of his translator in the Iranian heat, especially as he claims to have disliked the man? Such failures make Naipaul more human than an omniscient narrator. After Iran Naipaul travelled to Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and then returned to Iran. Although the four nations are subject to similar influences they have different histories. Iran early became part of Islam and has its own version of Muslim history to propagate and which fuels its radicalism. Iran has an ancient Persian civilization which was one of the glories of the world and which influenced India; the Shah’s attempt to modernize Persia tried to renew and make use of this history which the fundamentalists suppress. Pakistan is a new state formed by Indian Muslims who wanted their own country; to justify its existence the state and its people are predisposed towards fundamentalism as the only reason for the existence of Pakistan is that it is Muslim rather than Hindu dominated secular India. Pakistan is a nation of large land owners, feudal and seriously riven by competing regions and ethnicities, and by dislike of those who came from India. Unable to produce a functioning secular democracy Pakistan has fallen under control of the army and clergy. Saudi money funds schools which teach fundamentalism. In Indonesia Islam was long ago brought by traders and replaced Buddhism and Hinduism, but until recently the Asian religions and many local cults lived alongside Islam. One effect of being conquered by others is the loss of history. The ‘Killing History’ section of Among the Believers begins with the Arabs in the seventh century imposing themselves on Spain and ‘the great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Sind’. Such conquests were motivated as much by worldly as religious reasons. The conquerors took the wealth of the conquered and made slaves of many. The history which followed was complex, but as written and taught in present Pakistan it can only be a story of heroes in an ‘appropriate phraseology’; the latter is a phrase which Naipaul quotes from the Chairman of the National Commission on Historical and Cultural Research in Pakistan. Naipaul claims that Islam denies any history previous to itself; ‘History has to serve theology’ (p. 134). A famous archaeological site is Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley which was overrun by the Aryans in 1500 B.C. To prevent its destruction there is need of international aid, but in a Pakistani publication it was suggested that the site should be engraved with verses from the Koran which claim the purpose of travel is to see the consequences of guilty idolatry. As Arab theology replaces local history

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people lose their sense of identity, feel strangers to their own land, and begin inventing Middle-Eastern names and ancestry. ‘It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved’ (p. 135). Naipaul mentions that in Pakistan’s school books history begins with the Prophet and the first four caliphs then jumps to the creation of Pakistan. Although the country is ruled by the military the school books claim Pakistan is a democracy unlike caste-ridden India. Besides Among the Believers showing Naipaul’s concern with history it also is an example of how his reading of a culture makes use of literary criticism. In Qom he purchases The Message of Peace which rants about satanic Western technology, the West and India. It includes an article on Islamic city planning with such details as how the toilets in water closets can not face or have their backs towards Mecca. Often Naipaul will mention some pamphlet, book, journal, or historical text as evidence. ‘Killing History’ offers an analysis of Chachnama, a thirteenth-century Persian account of the conquest of the Sind (a Hindu–Buddhist kingdom covering half of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan) which Naipaul contrasts to the idealized modern versions of Pakistan’s history and politics mandated to conform with the state’s recent origins as a country of Muslims. In the ancient history the purpose of conquest was to gain slaves and plunder. A central tenet of Islam is ‘justice’, the notion that society was ‘just’ under Mohammed, that if people are believers and follow the Koran they will live just lives and be ruled justly, and that if society could be made to return to the ways that supposedly prevailed under the Prophet then justice will return. The basis of much Islamic law consists of what the Prophet said or did or what can be inferred from the Koran. Naipaul can see the attraction of this, but also its absurdity. If Islamic history is examined critically there never really was a time of justice as from the beginning there were problems and contradictions which became worse after the Prophet’s death as others claimed the right to rule. There was always a revolutionary potential within Islam, resentments and the claim to right injustice through the sword. A number of those he interviews inform Naipaul that one of the ways Islam differs from Christianity is that it says do not turn the other cheek, do not accept insults and injustice, but strike those who insult or harm or fail to believe. To this has been added Western notions of socialist utopianism. After Marxism

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failed, Muslim intellectuals were influenced by the 1960s romantic revolt against capitalism and the West. Many of the intellectuals whom Naipaul meets mix fundamentalism with Western slogans of returning to an original innocence and closeness to nature. The final pages of Among the Believers are dispiriting as an irritated Naipaul desires to leave the Islamic world where so much is getting worse. During the months he has been travelling the American embassy has been seized in Iran, the elections in Pakistan were cancelled, there has been an attempt to start a revolt followed by a gun battle at the Great Mosque in Mecca, Russia has moved into Afghanistan, and the lives of many of the people Naipaul met have been disrupted or ruined as a result of increased religious and political oppression. He revisits Nusrat, a hard-working journalist and zealous Muslim whom he met earlier and liked although, as Nusrat had wanted to study in the United States and work for some international organization, Naipaul had regarded him as one of those who wanted to reject while profiting from modern civilization. Now Nusrat is in trouble. He reprinted in his newspaper an Arabian article about a great-granddaughter of the Prophet. There are several versions of her life and this one outraged the Shias who demonstrated against the newspaper which the Pakistani government then closed down. Eventually, after a government inquiry it was allowed to publish again, but now Nusrat and his family are regarded as troublemakers and always in danger. To accept the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim state was not enough; what was allowable in Saudi Arabia and a commonplace of Western scholarship is explosive in a nation driven by the need to purify itself and make greater and greater demands of obedience. On returning to Teheran, Naipaul looks for Mr Parvez, an Indian Urdu poet who was editor of the lively English language Teheran Times; with foreign firms closing and circulation dropping the publication now barely exists and is losing money with every issue. Naipaul asks about Mr Jaffrey, another Shia from India, but the staff have been let go. Jaffrey had been Naipaul’s first introduction to those who claimed that social and political injustices could be cured by an Islamic revival. How Naipaul wondered could political problems be solved through religion? How would faith bring about fair wages and the rule of law? The longing to be part of a ‘society of believers’ had not brought the justice Mr Jaffrey wanted, but it had brought about the empty Teheran Times office and Mr Jaffrey had lost his job.

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After Among the Believers Naipaul wrote ‘Our Universal Civilization’, a widely cited lecture in which he contrasts closed, backward looking with open, modern cultures. In the former culture is dead, poetry belongs to an ancient past, whereas in the latter culture keeps changing, and it is possible to become a writer. Naipaul says that the Arab world has been locked into such a ritualized culture in which everything before or outside Islam is bad. The nonArabic Muslim peoples have been stripped of ‘all that expanding intellectual life, all the varied life of the mind and senses, the expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world’ and were given in exchange faith. That had become their identity. Naipaul could understand Islamic rage to become ‘pure’ when confronted with the need to face modernity, as in Trinidad he was raised in an enclosed Hindu world where there was no Christian concepts such as ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. Hinduism offers no consolations for pain or cruelty. It is painful to realize that your culture is politically helpless in the face of the future. Naipaul sees the future as a universal civilization which resulted from centuries of European expansionism. Such a civilization was less attractive in the past when it was tainted with racism.53 In 1995 Naipaul revisited the places and many of the people in his first book. Beyond Belief reports the results and implications of the radical fundamentalist movement within the Islamic world. The central argument of the first book was that fuelled by oil money and a continuing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran concerning the correct form of Islam, a radical religious view of the world was being propagated which was likely to cause trouble. The countries he visited wanted the benefits of modernization while rejecting Western tolerance, science and scepticism. This was a variation on a central theme in Naipaul’s writings in which the postcolonial world wants the benefits of imperial order and production without realizing that their own countries lack the means to sustain order and progress. The world wants the ‘goods’ the West and such industrialized and modern countries as Japan produce while rejecting the culture and mentality that invents and produces such goods. The Islamic world thinks it can buy the goods and the skills to make their own versions while trying to purify itself from contamination with the modernity they need. Much revolutionary energy is the product of resentment and envy. These are similar themes to Naipaul’s earlier books, and while they provide a useful analytical perspective and might well be correct, they are predictable to those familiar with his work.

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Naipaul’s second book on Islam is more analytical and less autobiographical than the earlier one. A theme of the first book became the central argument of the second, which noted how non-Arab Muslims had been and increasingly are being Arabized under the guise of Islamization. Naipaul sees this as a terrible cultural and spiritual colonization that not only prevents Islamic nations from improving the lives of their people, but in destroying the original cultures of the past makes it likely that those Arabized will be uneasy in their new identity. Many countries were repositories of ancient beliefs and cults that still coexisted into modern times alongside the religions of the book, Christianity and Islam, but the religions of the book demand a total conversion and the uprooting of the original culture of people. While the extinction of local religions by Christianity happened long ago in Europe, in Indonesia, Malaysia and other non-Arab areas of the Islamic world such a process is taking place now where fundamentalism is rooting out whatever does not confirm to the Koran. Perhaps because of his interest in history, perhaps because he was raised to feel that Trinidad had no significant monuments, Naipaul always has been impressed by names and locales with histories, has always been sensitive to associations with the past. He believes in high culture and can be awed when visiting historically famous places. He has at times, as in his first Indian book, been outraged when famous religious events proved disappointing. Especially in Beyond Belief Naipaul is reverent and his prose becomes tender when he is in the presence of places associated with older religions or cults. Naipaul situates the Islamic revival within a longer history of Indonesia than recent colonialism and postcolonialism: Islam and Europe had arrived here almost at the same time as competing imperialisms, and between them they had destroyed the long Buddhist–Hindu past. Islam had moved on here, to this part of Greater India, after its devastation of India proper, turning the religious-cultural light of the subcontinent, so far as this region was concerned, into the light of a dead star. Yet Europe had dominated so quickly here that Islam itself had begun to feel like a colonised culture. (p. 31) Towards the end of his visit to Indonesia in Among the Believers Naipaul meets Mr Imaduddin (‘pillar of the faith’ in Arabic), an electrical engineer who gives a course in Islamic ‘mental-training’ at the

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Bandung Institute of Technology in Java. Imaduddin hopes to train a new generation of Islamic revivalists to replace present society. The mental-training course begins as an exercise in memory and how stories change when retold, but soon becomes a religious meeting in which the students are instructed in the importance of the Islamic community and the unimportance of everything outside it. Imaduddin says he could not be a Socialist as everything good about Socialism can be found in the Koran. He says the land around the village is not owned by the cultivators as it should be in Islam. When Naipaul asks whether any Islamic state has abolished landlords, Imaduddin replies it was in the thirty years before A.D. 661 when Ali died. Naipaul remarks that Imaduddin could travel to Muslim despotisms abroad and not notice injustice, while seeing Indonesia as a land of injustice needing to be reformed by Islam. Imaduddin had visited Pakistan and learned nothing of its martial law, public whippings, censorship and humiliation of its intellectuals. He did not want to know anything which would not serve his cause. Naipaul regards Mr Imaduddin as an example of those who depend on the West while rejecting it. His three years in the United States to study for an advanced degree, his temporary job at Cornell University, the tape recorders, the Western models of the mind-training exercise, have made possible Imaduddin’s teaching middle-class urban Indonesians that all they need is Islamic solidarity. In contrast to this simple idea is the rich variety of Imaduddin’s actual life. Imaduddin had fought against the Dutch in the war of independence, and as a student in Jakarta he had stayed with one of the first nationalist leaders who became prime minister of Indonesia immediately after independence. After his three years in the United States Imaduddin travelled through Europe, visited Mecca, and for several years helped change a polytechnic in Malaysia to a university. As Arab oil money funded students to be educated in the West many young Muslims felt lost in foreign cultures; Imaduddin was sent to Muslim student organizations abroad where he turned the alienated towards fundamentalism. His involvement with Muslim radicalism however led to his being jailed for fourteen months in Indonesia. Mr Imaduddin reappears at the beginning of Beyond Belief. Now wealthy, internationally famous on the Islamic Revival circuit, and living in Jakarta, the national capital, he is valued by President Suharto after the latter decided Islam was the glue needed to keep

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Indonesia together and himself in power. The mental-training course has become a way to co-opt educated Muslims. Imaduddin’s patron B. J. Habibie, a devout Muslim and powerful minister for research and technology (who later became President of Indonesia), wanted Indonesia to create its own airplanes as this would give many thousands experience with technology and could be the start of a national industrial revolution. Billions of dollars were spent importing parts and working in collaboration with foreign companies to build a couple of airplanes which performed briefly at shows. Habibie was also Chairman of the Association of Muslim Intellectuals, which Imaduddin helped found. Imaduddin, now head of a Foundation for the Development of Management of Human Resources, trains intellectuals and scientists to be devout Muslims as part of a plan to make Indonesia an integral part of the Muslim world during the twenty-first century. While Mr Imaduddin exemplifies Naipaul’s main themes – dependency on a modern world which Islam condemns, the effects of Arab oil money on education and the Islamic revival, the conscious destruction of the non-Arab past as part of Islamization – Naipaul’s analysis only occasionally intrudes on the story he tells and when it does it seems an interruption as Imaduddin’s life is fascinating. Contrasted to Mr Imaduddin is Mr Wahid, who believes in Islam as a moral force which should be kept separate from politics. Wahid, who was later to follow Habibie as President of Indonesia, represents a different, more pacific and tolerant tradition within Islam. Naipaul unsympathetically discussed Wahid in Among the Believers, as the simple skills that Wahid’s school taught, made famous by Ivan Illich’s praise as an example of deschooling, exemplified the vacuity of such romantic notions as educating by a return to peasant traditions. The students would have learned similar crafts without the school and their religious education consisted of memorizing the Koran. Now Naipaul is interested in Wahid as someone who has the strength of character to oppose the direction the government, as represented by Habibie and Imaduddin, has taken in trying to Islamize politics and the nation. Wahid’s former patrons have changed camps from supporters of ‘traditional’ methods to those trying to mobilize a national ‘collective’ managing ‘human resources’. The religious boarding school movement that Wahid represents itself has a long history starting with Buddhist monks and later the Islamic Sufis during a time when Indonesia was only half-converted. Naipaul

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assumed that for someone like Mr Wahid history ‘consists only of European colonialism and the recovery of Islam’. The story Naipaul now learns about Wahid’s family history and Wahid himself is of more interest than educational fashions with their political aims. His family originally were peasants influenced by Sufism. For several centuries his family had run religious schools, then with the arrival of the steamship the plantations became a source of wealth and his grandfather and father were sent to Mecca where they stayed for years before returning to the village schools which they used as prayer houses to propagate an Islamic way of life. During the Japanese occupation Wahid’s father joined the Hizbullah militia, a Japanese sponsored organization which had a role in preparing Indonesia for national independence. After the defeat of the Japanese he was a leader in the fight against the Dutch. He was made Minister of Religious Affairs, but when the only Islamic party rejected him he resigned from the Cabinet to form his own party. When, in 1984, Wahid inherited the leadership of the party from his father he took it out of politics as he felt that the mixing of Islam with politics in Pakistan, Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia resulted in violence being used to enforce religion. This was not the Islam he and his family had learned. There are many such narratives in Beyond Belief which concludes in Malaysia with Syed Alwi, a writer who, like Naipaul himself, seems to be living a variation of his father’s life, even like his father (and like Mr Biswas) inhabiting a half-made house. Those who seek only Naipaul’s criticism of Islam might consider the conclusion of Beyond Belief where Naipaul tells how Syed Alwi’s father survived despite having been thought insane: Syed said of his mother, once the thirteen-year-old bride of the seventeen-year-old settlement officer. ‘She was the community. From her Malay upbringing, her Islamic upbringing, she provided him with the support that enabled him to have two worlds. Without her he would have been thrown into the madhouse’ – the place of water-hoses and rice mixed with sand – ‘and he wouldn’t have lasted two years. As it was, he lived in his two worlds for twenty-three years.’ (pp. 436–7) Many of the places and people Naipaul visits bring out Naipaul’s wider range of interests than the politics of religion. In Beyond Belief the details of the economics of Mariman’s life (pp. 75–6), and how he

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managed to support his education, are fascinating like the financial particulars that are the foundations or undoings of a character in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel. The essayist Goenawan Mohamad complains that Indonesians do not speak ‘any language which can be used to express and develop their feelings’ as under successive governments language was made abstract for totalitarian and bureaucratic purposes (p. 81). In Java Naipaul notices the high organization of the villages and speculates that ‘serf labour of the old Javanese kingdoms and the later Dutch agricultural colony’ had required such organization (p. 89). Many of the men he meets are lonely and tell of their father leaving or divorcing their mother; Naipaul speculates that the easiness of divorce in the Islamic world results in men wounded by the lack of a father. Such observations give the books a fullness beyond their main themes. Taken together the two books about Islam offer a powerful collection of stories about the non-Arab Islamic world during our time. The people range from taxi drivers and students up to the leaders of the nation, including a future President and those who have become of international importance in the Islamic revival. We might think of Naipaul’s travel books as a form of sociology through story-telling, another version of how the novel is an investigation of society, except that in the modern world of rapid international change new forms, such as the novelistic travel book, have taken on the function of the novel in investigating societies. Unlike the novel which was addressed to its own society the contemporary travel book is addressed to the modern world which needs to understand what is actually happening in societies beyond such vague generalizations as globalization, postcolonial and culture clash or such totalizing classifications as Third World or Islam. That in Beyond Belief he should come across many Iranian soldiers who have returned from the war against Iraq disillusioned with the Mullahs was to be expected, but Naipaul also reminds the reader of the Dutch colonization of Indonesia, the horrors of Japanese occupation throughout Asia and the Pacific along with ways in which the Japanese prepared colonies for independence, various struggles for independence, Communist expansion, American cultural influence, the mixed effects of Fulbright scholarships, disagreements within Islam between those who see it was a moral force and those who use violence to transform secular to religious nations, Arab expansion and the stimulus given by oil wealth, the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and their two doctrines of Islam, as well as the decades

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of founding Islamic fundamentalist schools and the takeover of other forms of education by those intent on Arabizing the Islamic world. The Islamic books add up to much more than a selective history or critique of modern Islamic fundamentalism outside the Arab world. They tell the lives of a large part of the world which has undergone, and continues to undergo, social, political and cultural change. Specialists and those with commitments might object to this or that, but attention has been paid. Naipaul seems especially sensitive to Indonesia and Malaysia as there is a richness of history and life, a variety of cultures, outside the politics of Islamization. Beyond Belief differs from Among the Believers in its emphasis on narrative, life-stories, moral tales. This is in keeping with a need to find the coherence in what are often incoherent lives, and the way the biographies are meant to be illustrative, but it is also a return in Naipaul’s work to the strong narrative methods of his earlier writings, a development carried further in Half a Life.

12 ‘Two Worlds’, Reading & Writing and Half a Life In ‘Two Worlds’, his Nobel Lecture (2001) in which he retells his career as a writer, Naipaul claims that he is ‘the sum’ of his books: Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.54 Naipaul’s books emerge from and build on each other, so that such different works as A Way in the World, Reading & Writing and Half a Life are autobiographical, allude to his previous writings, and consequently have a significance more than the sum of their parts. They are also increasingly different from each other while having similar preoccupations such as freedom and change versus security and order. The themes are transposed into various keys so, for example, that the problems of personal, political, economic and cultural freedom may also be treated through sexual freedom. The continuing relationship between Naipaul’s self-revelations and his fiction can be seen in Reading & Writing (2000), two lectures published a year before Half a Life. The former recalls how foreign British literature was to Naipaul at school and even university because of its alien assumptions and therefore how absurd was his desire to become a writer and how difficult. He tells of his cramming to pass examinations he did not understand, the role American films had in enlarging his imagination, the poverty in which he lived after Oxford, and his fears after finishing each of his early books that he would never again find a subject and material for another, until he discovered the stimulus of foreign travel. Throughout his youth and for many years as a published novelist Naipaul’s life was impoverished in circumstances, socially, financially and in his lack of awareness of the wider world and its issues. Many of the details 179

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Naipaul offers about himself are also used in his portrait of Willie Chandran. Half a Life (2001) is the story of Willie Chandran, someone like Naipaul but his opposite, a reverse image of what Naipaul might have been and become. Willie is an Indian rather than a Trinidadian, raised in comfort, with a secure future laid out for him, but someone who does not know what he wants to do, who wastes his opportunities, who drifts, and never takes root, never builds a house, or becomes morally or financially independent. He does many things Naipaul does, such as go to England for further education, write for the BBC’s Overseas Service, write a book of short stories, travel to Africa, but each parallel reveals the difference between Naipaul’s will and Willie Chandran’s lack of purpose. Naipaul has described Willie as ‘ignorant’,55 but Willie might be said to continually revert to colonial Hindu habits of passivity, fatalism and withdrawal from problems when challenged by the need to change. Because of the unusual structure of the book its ‘conclusion’ is in the middle when the main character flees Africa, where he lived in his wife’s house, to live with and off his sister in Germany. He becomes one of the many outsiders living in Europe without a commitment to, yet dependent on, it. Towards the middle of the novel, having fled Africa, Willie laments, ‘I am forty-one, in middle life … I have risked nothing. And now the best part of my life is over’ (p. 138); at the conclusion, before leaving for Berlin, Willie tells Ana ‘the best part of my life has gone, and I’ve done nothing.’ He claims to have been hiding from himself and instead has been living in the life she made. She replied ‘Perhaps it wasn’t really my life either’ (p. 228). This then is a book of failures, of, as its title suggests, half lives, those who have risked nothing and done little. Those who live in limbo. Those who never build a house of their own. That is one way to read this subtly complex novel. It is not the only possible reading. Willie always speaks of his lack of will and his failures and it is true that if we expect a story in which the hero emerges triumphant then this is a book about someone who has not changed, not even tried to disturb, the world, an Indian J. Alfred Prufrock still wondering what to make of his life, and contrasting himself to those who know what they want and who are willing to take risks for it. But can we trust Willie’s judgement of himself and others? While it is true that he is filled with complaints, whines, self-reproaches, speaks of his incompetence, seems unable to master anything and

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always flees rather than fights, he does travel to England, Africa and Germany. He is in places at times where historically significant events happen. He is part of the wave of students who came to England from the colonies after the War, part of the now mythic Notting Hill meeting of black immigrants and London upper Bohemia which contributed to the Notting Hill race riots; in Percy he knows one of the West Indians who worked for the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, he writes for the BBC Overseas Services, publishes a book of short stories which is reviewed in the national press, and beds several women. In Africa he sleeps with more women and experiences increasing sensual pleasure. He is in London at the time of the Suez Crisis, he is in Africa at the time of the guerrilla warfare, the collapse of the Portuguese empire, and the subsequent independence of large areas of Africa. He is in Berlin just before the fall of the Wall where, once more sharing in the major events of recent decades, he is one of the many immigrants. While he has not made much of his opportunities, he has been present at Indian and African independence, and the start of contemporary multiracial England. He listens to his sister speak of Cuba and Pol Pot and he sympathizes with the Tamil war for independence from Sri Lanka. By the standards of most people he has had a remarkable life by the age of forty-one. There are enough interesting events and places in his life to fill a novel. There is another question the novel raises. Is a life of action good? Throughout the novel the value of political action is questioned. Willie’s father ruins his future by absurdly applying Gandhi’s principles in a place where they are useless. Percy Cato comes to realize that Che Guevara and his supporters are more Spaniards trying to rule people of colour in Central and South America. The revolutionaries begin to call Percy ‘the negrito’: He thought the Spaniards had raped and looted the continent in the most savage way, and no good could come out of the place until all the Spaniards or part-Spaniards were killed … It is a difficult idea, but actually it’s interesting, and the liberation movements will have to take it on board some day. (p. 139) Ideas of revolutionary justice, liberation and egalitarianism seem inevitably to lead to ‘the Pol Pot position’ of massive killing to cleanse society and culture of aliens, hybridity and their influence. Yet everyone is hybrid. The notion of Percy wanting to cleanse the

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Americas of white blood and culture has its own ironies as he too is a racial outsider to the region, a hybrid part-white, ‘more brown than black’ (p. 61). By Pol Pot logic all those of Indian, African, or European origins in the Americas would be killed except those few pure blooded Amerindians still remaining who live in traditional ways. One would kill all Muslims and Christians in India, all nonEuropeans in Europe, and few would survive in North America. Sarojini as a revolutionary finds such Pol Pottism an ‘interesting’ future stage of liberation. Willie who lives as a refugee in Germany admires those supporting the war for Tamil independence in Sri Lanka, but if such ethnic considerations were applied to himself and his sister they would have fled Germany. Indeed Willie has just fled Africa as it re-Africanizes and it is clear that life there will be more difficult and dangerous than previously for all races. While this is a book in which most of the characters are unlikable, those who talk progressive politics are morally corrupt. Richard, the Marxist publisher, uses his radicalism to seduce rich women from whom he gets money. When Richard insults Serafina about the sources of her family’s wealth, she recognizes it as a way to attract her attention, but she is excited by playing with radical politics and is soon his mistress. Gouveia, the Portuguese architect, speaks favourably of the coming take over of the African colony by the guerrillas. ‘He spoke with relish of the blood to come … he was a white man pretending to be a black man’, one of many ‘playboy figures … who could cut and run or look after themselves if there was any real trouble’ (p. 218). Gouveia has an affair with an African woman, makes her pregnant, talks of remaining in the colony after ‘the revolution’, but flees. It is not surprising that intellectuals who praise revolutionary movements often dislike Naipaul’s writings. Half a Life is in Naipaul’s late manner. The prose rhythms and harmonies of the earlier novels have since Enigma flattened. Such a flat tone is appropriate to someone like Willie Chandran as narrator, an indecisive person, mostly focused on his own feelings of failure and shame. Having lived years in a Portuguese colony and now living in Germany, Willie has lost the tonal range and rhythms of spoken English. His visual world also seems sparse. There are few social details, little physical description, and what there is often seems abstract as it is presented in vague terms that are repeated like symbols with the reality extracted. This focuses attention on the self-conscious awareness of how one perceives, decides, acts and narrates. There is extreme economy and compression in the way the

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story moves rapidly through events, places, characters. Events and background are mentioned in passing rather than filled in. While Half a Life is packed with the social life of India, London and Mozambique, little is explained. Another characteristic of the novel is reliance on dialogue and the telling of the histories of characters through compressed anecdotes. The fiction is influenced by Naipaul’s later reportage in which the author has largely disappeared to be replaced by voices; or the author has become one of the characters, explaining his perspective on events in relationship to his own experiences. There is a similar repetition and patterning of words as in the earlier prose, but the harmonies and rhythms are less foregrounded. Those who notice his art will be conscious of Naipaul’s deviousness and cleverness; like most art Half a Life is both an imitation of reality and about art itself no matter how much the latter is disguised. Like Biswas the novel is a version of a multigenerational family story within a colonial setting and tells of a foolish father, his bad marriage, and his relationship to his son who will eventually go to England for further education, become a writer and tell the reader the story which comprises the novel. As in Biswas the father foolishly stumbles into a marriage he does not want and does not have the strength of character to avoid. Half a Life is, however, a distorted mirror inversion of the earlier book. Here the wife comes from an impoverished background and is modernizing. Here the son loves the mother and hates the father. Here the son is favoured and the daughter neglected. Biswas encourages Anand to write, Willie’s father ignores Willie’s compositions. Whereas Anand does well at school and in his examinations, Willie does not finish school. Anand wins a scholarship to a British university, Willie is granted a place in a College of Education through the whim of a British lord. Distorted echoes of Naipaul’s life are heard throughout the novel. After writing one book Willie stops. After three years in England as a student he does not know what to do in future and flees to Africa with Ana and lives in her house for eighteen years, then flees to his sister in Germany. Willie’s story distorts Naipaul’s determination to be a writer, his struggle to support himself and his wife, his uncertainty about where he should settle, his restless travel, and his homes in England. Even Naipaul’s closeness to his sister is distorted in Willie’s dislike of Sarojini. Although the novel has an epic sweep even alluding to India before the Muslim invasion, its main events cover about a century,

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starting with Willie’s great grandfather in the 1890s, a temple priest who leaves his community for a larger town because of famine. The Brahmin priestly family was wealthy before the Muslim conquest, but afterwards became poor because the patrons of the temple no longer could afford to support it. This supposedly was the original fall from Indian tradition, the destruction of a Brahmin golden age. The great grandfather’s flight from the temple community in the 1890s is diasporic, similar to the Indians including Naipaul’s ancestors who came to the West Indies at that time. The great grandfather is emotionally dazed, noticing nothing, when he takes the train from the temple to the maharaja’s town (such blocking out of reality by those in transition between places will be repeated by Willie when he leaves for England). After reaching the larger town, the great grandfather goes to the local temple for refuge where he is treated as a mendicant, fed, learns to support himself by writing letters for those who are unlettered. He eventually becomes a clerk at the palace, finding high social position and economic security for himself and his family as he advances to become one of the maharaja’s secretaries. The novel then jumps ahead a generation to Willie’s father who, having his grandfather’s story in mind, fears that with the coming of the Indian nationalist movement the security offered by the maharaja will not last and decides to be on the side of the future. This leads to such foolish attempts to be a nationalist as burning his university books and not attending lectures, which go unnoticed – although later he will claim to have sacrificed his degree and career in support of Gandhi. This part of the novel is Naipaul at his most amusing. After Willie’s father fails to take his university examinations, he is still awarded a degree because of his prospective fatherin-law’s influence. Although an academic disgrace he is employed in the maharaja’s Land Tax department and despite incompetence he is promoted to higher positions. He tries to sabotage the corruptions of tax gathering in small ways which go unnoticed, and which seem a product of idleness rather than feeling, until his prospective father-in-law, a school master, hears that he has married a Sudra, one of the ‘backwards’, someone from the lowest of the four Hindu castes, at which point Willie’s father is investigated for corruption. Facing long imprisonment and hard labour he seeks sanctuary at the temple, shaves his head, and fearing being questioned in court takes a vow of silence; he pretends to be continuing in the family tradition repeating his grandfather’s flight to the temple and traditions of

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Brahmin self-sacrifice. The maharaja’s officials plan to pounce on him when something unexpected occurs which while saving will require him to act as a holy man for the remainder of his life. He is pretending to be a holy beggar at the temple when the schoolmaster who is also in charge of tourism is required to guide the famous author Somerset Maugham around the temple. When Maugham asks about the silent man he is told half-truths that make the silent man someone who has renounced the world for pious reasons. Maugham writes of this meeting in The Razor’s Edge (1944) and sends others to see Willie’s father who eventually accepts that there is no escape; his destiny is to live in the family tradition. Besides quietly parodying Maugham’s novel with its gullible mysticism, Naipaul’s ironies continue the criticism of Brahmin fatalism he first made in An Area of Darkness. J. M. Coetzee says that Half a Life is a criticism of Indian asceticism. When faced by the need to take action the Brahmin way has been to sacrifice the senses as an alternative way of surviving. Denial of appetite becomes worthy of veneration, tribute and support.56 It is possible to see in such criticism of Hindu fatalism Naipaul’s complicated relationship to recent Hindu nationalism with its claim to be restoring an older, more authentic India that supposedly existed before the Muslim invasions. Naipaul has found attractive, in such extremism, its energy and its rebirth of Indian pride which he assumes will lead to further social liberation. This contrasts to do-nothing passivity and fatalism which Naipaul earlier found in Hinduism with its notions of karma. Willie’s father and Willie represent the passivity associated with an earlier Hindu spiritualism which is treated by Naipaul with irony. The distinction likely to be missed by Western readers is between a religious, hierarchical, reactionary Brahminism and what Naipaul regards as a modernizing Hindu nationalism which crosses classes and castes. But even here it is necessary to be cautious as Naipaul has warned that Hindu nationalism in the religious sphere can be as oppressive as Muslim fundamentalism. There are many ironies in the return to Brahmin traditions by Willie’s father. He is so ashamed of his wife’s low caste that he never formally marries her although the world assumes he has. He is so caste conscious that he detests the ‘backwards’, the term used to describe the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system to which his wife belongs. He, however, has become a symbol of someone who has supposedly defied his caste to help India become a casteless society.

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The girl’s ‘firebrand’ uncle, a political agitator, leads processions against those officials who want to punish him. Willie’s father, now a defender of caste hierarchies, is in the public’s mind on the progressive side of the caste war. Settled and accepted as a holy man by the community which brings him gifts and seeks advice, a head of an ashram, he becomes comfortable, conservative and hates whatever challenges tradition, especially the modernizing ways his wife has learned at a Christian school: She has these mission-school ambitions. Perhaps after a few hundred rebirths she will be more evolved. But she can’t wait like other decent folk. Like so many backwards nowadays she wants to jump the gun. (p. 41) The farcical twists of plot and expectations have had absurdly ironic results. The story so far resembles the kind of irony found in novels of R. K. Narayan, an author Naipaul has written about in An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. Naipaul sees Narayan’s fiction as having a realistic surface, mildly making fun of provincial Indian ways as traditional life comes into contact with the modern world, but as actually offering moral fables which if read with knowledge of Indian mythology reaffirm tradition while subverting Westernization. According to Naipaul the later novels of Narayan reveal the cracks in India between its nostalgia for an idealized Brahmin order and its present as a modern nation in which many communities are unwilling to accept the passivity of the past. The first part of Half a Life resembles Narayan’s The Guide (1958), another novel in which someone being chased by the law is mistaken for a holy man and as a consequence needs to live the remainder of his life as if he were and may indeed at the conclusion have become one. The Guide is famous for its narrative structure in which the telling of the present is intertwined with narration of the past until the two meet in the concluding events. Through his elaborate use of story telling and the tenses of events, Naipaul seems to show that anything Narayan can do he can do better. It may not be a coincidence that Chandran, Willie’s family name, was that of the main character in Narayan’s The Bachelor of Arts (1937), and the maharaja’s impressive palace and other details of the large town, such as the train station in Half a Life, seem like Narayan’s Mysore. In My Days

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(1974) Narayan mentions not meeting Somerset Maugham when the latter was visiting Mysore. When Willie’s father claims that in doing nothing when faced by problems he is following Gandhi’s way, he has taken refuge in the fatalism, the unwillingness to take responsibility, of which Naipaul in India: A Wounded Society accuses Hindus who are more concerned with their inner life than with their relationships to others in society. Willie significantly writes a story in which a Brahmin father has backwards sacrificed and then sacrifices his children to keep his wealth and position. Half a Life is like The Mimic Men and several other Naipaul novels in disguising its organization. The novel has three parts. ‘One’ is titled ‘A Visit from Somerset Maugham’ and consists of three untitled subdivisions or sections (pp. 1, 1–35, 35–6); ‘Two’ is called ‘The First Chapter’ made from six sections (pp. 36–51, 51–61, 61–76, 77–89, 89–101, 101–13); ‘Three’ or ‘A Second Translation’ consists of nine (pp. 114–32, 132–40, 140–59, 159–68, 168–78, 178–91, 191–6, 196–216, 216–28). The three parts have a simple progression of 3, 6, 9 sections corresponding to India, England, Africa, the latter places being given more space. The three parts are overlaid upon a more basic form; the novel has two halves of equal length, as parts ‘One’ and ‘Two’ taken together balance part ‘Three’, each half of the book consisting of 114 pages and nine sections. Seen in this way, the first half of the book begins with the story Willie’s father tells and explains how Willie went to England and his life there; while the second half consists of Willie’s life in Africa as told to his sister in Berlin. There are many parallels; they are reflected in such smaller details as ‘One’ consisting of two short sections (p. 1 and pp. 35–6) sandwiching a meaty 35 page middle where Willie’s father tells his story. Willie leaves India for England when twenty years old, and leaves Africa for Germany when he is forty-one. Often events and speeches in the first half of the novel are paralleled or mirrored in the second half, the Indian liberation movement, for example, looking forward to the African liberation movement, the caste system in India being paralleled by the racial hierarchy in the Portuguese colony, or Willie’s father’s marriage with a Sudra woman being paralleled by Willie’s sexual involvement with lowclass women. The life of Willie’s father and the life of Willie are both altered through women. Half a Life is another, different, version of that autobiography which continues to exist at a deep level of the imagination behind much of Naipaul’s writing as the one true story which has given

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birth to other narratives. Once more Naipaul’s tale begins with family origins, focuses on a father’s life and his foolish marriage which leads into the life of his son and daughter. Once more the novel begins with a prologue, where Willie Chandran asks his father ‘Why is my middle name Somerset?’ The three pages (pp. 137–9) describing Willie’s time with his sister Sarojini in Berlin have some of the functions of an epilogue in telling what happens after the main story is over. That the section functioning as an epilogue appears just after the middle of the novel and leads into Willie telling of his time in Africa is one of the ways Naipaul has dislocated expected novelistic conventions. It creates a sense of life continuing despite the normal closure represented by a novel’s ending, and it replies to the earlier discussion of the radicalism of Hemingway’s minimalist stories in being all middle without an opening and ending. Here a similar effect is achieved by an inventive use of traditional literary conventions, conventions even older than the novel as Half a Life is largely told as ‘tales’, the kind of story telling found in many of Conrad’s novels, such as Lord Jim. In Half a Life first the father tells his past to Willie, a story which includes the great grandfather’s history, then Willie tells of his African life to Sarojini: ‘And just as once his father had told Willie about his life, so now, over many days of the Berlin winter, in cafés and restaurants and the half-empty flat, Willie began slowly to tell Sarojini of his life in Africa’ (pp. 139–40). Such story telling is one of the basic methods of older fiction before the realism of the nineteenth century and the show-do-not-explain fiction of the twentieth century. There were the picaresque and rogue stories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which led to the creation of the eighteenth-century novel and such inset tales as the moral illustrations of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Many of the people Willie sees and meets will have their lives told through such inset tales. Roger’s initial descriptions of those attending his party, especially of Marcus, Richard and Peter, are tales as is the obituary written about himself by the newspaper editor Henry Arthur Percival Somers (whose story sounds like a version of Seepersad Naipaul’s life filtered through the sentimentalizing generalizing manner of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’). Such tales need a teller, context and audience. Half a Life consists of oral tales within oral tales in which Willie is telling the reader of some story others told him or which he told to others and which at times have other stories embedded within them

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like those Russian dolls which when opened reveal smaller dolls enclosing still smaller dolls. Half a Life is as much a series of tales within tales as any Rushdie novel with the difference that, influenced by his travel books, Naipaul allows the voices of various speakers to be heard whereas, except in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie prefers a monologue. This is one reason why Naipaul’s novels are open to multiple interpretations, although another reason is that Naipaul in his fiction often seems interested in ideas and people that he normally would reject. There are many literary echoes and allusions in Half a Life including echoes of Naipaul’s own writings. When Willie slips on a step, which leads to him leaving Ana and Africa, and the beginning of telling his life to Sarojini he imitates the famous stumble in A la recherche du temps perdu which results in that novel being written. Roger referred to Proust’s novel when explaining his dinner party to Willie. Literary allusions begin with how Willie was named after Somerset Maugham, how his father did not understand Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and thought the poetry of Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth lies. The lower caste scholarship girl thinks Hamlet was set in India. Throughout the novel there is a criticism of the literature taught in colonies in contrast to the actual lives of the people. The composition set in Canada that Willie writes and that his teacher awards full marks is similar to the holiday story taught at school based on British life which is mocked in Biswas where it is contrasted to Anand’s truthful story about how he almost drowned. Half a Life continues Naipaul’s concern with false and true writing. Willie lives what might be thought a dreary version of the romantic international lives portrayed in Maugham’s novels. Such an inversion is ironic especially as when young Naipaul thought Maugham the kind of writer he wished to be, writing about the kind of life he would himself have liked. But literature is a product of its time and place as shown by Richard’s discussion of how Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights reflected the empire and the presence of blacks and Indians in nineteenth-century England. By contrast The Razor’s Edge is said to be based on a false idea of Willie’s father, an idea resulting from a false story about him told to Maugham. When Willie writes a book of short stories the British critics think books about India must resemble John Masters’s Bhowani Junction or Bugles and a Tiger and Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus. Just as colonials have a false idea of England from its literature, so the British have stereotypes about the world created by their writers. Literature is

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too often shaped to meet such expectations whether imperial or postcolonial notions of other peoples and their culture. Like many of Naipaul’s novels Half a Life is filled with writers and would be writers including Roger, the newspaper editor, and the politicians who want books written for them which Richard publishes. Willie’s book of short stories is based on plots and ideas he imitated from films, Hemingway and Maxim Gorky. To invent is not necessarily bad. Some characters and events in Miguel Street and The Suffrage of Elvira are partly imitated from films. Art necessarily is based on art as well as reality. Half a Life is prefaced by Naipaul’s warning ‘This book is an invention. It is not exact about the countries, periods or situations it appears to describe.’ That might be said of all Naipaul’s fiction. Half a Life portrays the social and cultural contexts of sex as well as individual failures, conquests, disillusionments and pleasures. While sexual relations are often comic, they are part of character and culture and a possible area of humiliation. Willie’s father might be thought a parody of sexual inexperience, an amusing example of the shame, lack of knowledge and failure at practical matters, associated in Area of Darkness with modern India. Willie’s father is so foolishly taken by the desire to be part of Gandhi’s nationalist movement that he decides to marry a woman from a lower caste. This is an abstraction, something that he has not thought through. He does not know such a woman until he notices a student in his classes who is from the lowest caste. He begins sitting at her table at a student cafe. He is too blinded by his idea of renunciation to understand that he is ruining the girl’s reputation and must marry her although he has not even spoken to her – when he does he finds he dislikes her. The girl has trapped him into marriage as she is the one with energy and plans. He always takes the easy way out. Fearing her firebrand uncle, he keeps her hidden in a house without marrying or sexually enjoying her. Although he pretends to imitate Gandhi in taking a vow of brahmacharya, he has two children. It is a sign of his shame concerning sex that his children are said to somehow happen and are embarrassments. In Area Naipaul contrasts Indian inarticulateness and shame concerning sex to the way Westerners are aware, even self-critical, of sexual experience during performance. A psychologist, Dr Sudhir Kakar, told him that for Indians the moment of release just happens and is not discussable. Willie has had no sexual experience before going to England where he is shocked and tempted by the way sexuality is displayed.

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His few sexual experiences are rapid and unsatisfying to himself and his partners, one of whom says that is the way it is with Indian men as they are not taught to please women. Willie at first seems to dislike women for what he considers such imperfections as stubble shaved legs, cheap perfumes, heavy make-up and working-class voices and speech. Because of the arranged marriages in traditional Indian culture, and women and men being kept apart, he has no experience of seducing women and knows nothing about sex beyond what he can find in a book. Each time he beds a woman he amusingly thinks they are in ‘love’. Willie’s sexual escapades are, like the rest of his life, aimless and without strong desire; he fears humiliation, is unwilling to face criticism or learn from experience. He subjects everything to minute criticisms while doing little. His instinct is to quit, hide, flee. He complains that Indian culture has lost its former practical and philosophical view of sex, and he blames his father for not teaching him about sex. He contrasts himself to Percy Cato who in the West Indies learned about sex by ‘fingering’ then raping young girls. Percy (slang for the penis) is experienced, potent, aggressive, a stereotyped black who attracts and uses women, and whom Naipaul contrasts with Hindu sexual shame and fear. At first Ana attracts Willie because she looks up to him as a man. She makes him feel ‘complete’. Among the British Willie felt lost, different; because Ana is from Africa she is also ‘different’ and he can make love to her without anxieties. This period of bliss does not last. Willie, like the expatriate whites in In a Free State, finds Africa a place of sexual freedom. He indulges himself with young black prostitutes who teach him the joys of his body, and when that passes he begins an intense affair with a woman who has often deceived her husband. If Willie has progressed from an inexperienced humiliated pre-ejaculator to a libertine obsession with the variousness of sexual pleasures, each stage of his journey ends in disillusionment. As he listens to Graça justify the socialism of the new African government he thinks ‘I was making love to a deranged woman. Can it be true, what I felt I had with her?’ (p. 226). Part of Willie’s attraction towards and lack of ease with English women was their difference. The African prostitutes have more control over their body and ways of giving pleasures than Ana or other women he previously knew, but the excitement also comes from breaking a racial barrier, slumming, and their availability for money. Excitement comes with the transgression. That Graça is

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experienced and married adds to the excitement of adultery. Sexual excitement is partly based on differences of class and race. Willie is not only socially and financially superior to the prostitutes and Graça but he is higher in terms of racial status. He is not regarded as an Indian. Ana objects to his affairs on racial and social grounds. He is humiliating her by going to clubs where her servants go. Graça has too much African blood. The colony is organized around two distinctions. Race and being from Portugal rather than the colony. The finely measured steps in the social hierarchy depend on degrees of nearness to the ideal of being a pure white Portuguese or the hell of being a black colonial. In between there are various degrees of mulattoism, a snakes and ladders of moving up or down socially; possible employment depends on nearness to the ideal. Perfection is to leave the colony for Portugal. The story of the African colony, its economic and social history, the guerrilla movement, national independence and the beginnings of decolonization is representative of one of the great historical subjects of our era, possibly how the second half of the twentieth century will be remembered. It could be Trinidad, the Trinidad of Naipaul’s youth with its racial, social and economic hierarchies, except in the West Indies where at independence those of African descent claimed to be the rightful heirs as the Amerindians had been exterminated. The description of social life in the Portuguese African colony is excellent and calls to mind the local whites, near whites and brown professionals in The Mimic Men, a society which reflected the power structure of the colony and which would end soon after the imperial order ended. A major concern of Half a Life is conquest, colonialism, its establishment by force, its history, its nature, the social and racial orders it produces, and the problems of what replaces it. We are several times told that the Muslim conquest of India destroyed an older social order and as a result of it Brahmin priests were impoverished and died of famine when their patronage ended. Then there is the British conquest of parts of India and the independence movement led by Gandhi. The princely state where Willie lived was not under British control and had little to do with the nationalist movement which when it gained power would rapidly take over such independent territories. Looking at elaborately carved wooden colonial furniture brought to Africa from Portuguese Goa Willie shudders thinking of the labour extracted to produce such work. In London

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the rich Colombian Serafina justifies her marriage to a ‘pederast’ as made necessary by the limited choices available to someone of her elite status. ‘We have been rich and white for generations. We speak classical Spanish … It is hard for us to get husbands. Many of our girls have married Europeans’ (p. 96). When Serafina claims that her sister had to marry an Argentine, Richard accuses her sister of living on land stolen by armed soldiers from the Indians eighty years ago with the opening of the pampas by the railways. But what is to be done about such a situation? Percy Cato (the Cato part of his name has historical associations with the Roman Cato) begins as a Che Guevara revolutionary, but then progresses to ‘the Pol Pot position’ that revolutions are useless unless you kill all those infected by colonial influences. If conquest imposes an alien social order and way of life, decolonization would seem to require total eradication of those associated with colonial ways. This means massive violence, killing and destruction, in a futile attempt to return to a pure authentic past. If it were true that people must seek their authenticity and identity in the past, then the future can only be a series of bloodbaths and a return to reactionary and feudal societies. We need to keep in mind Naipaul’s distinction between the Islamic conquest of India, which he claims destroyed the Brahmin social order, and British conquest which brought India into contact with the ideas of the modern world and gave it the means to reimagine and regain its independence. Behind the concern with imperialism is the more significant theme that life always consists of people desiring more and trying to satisfy and advance themselves by conquering or tricking others. There is always an unfair social hierarchy which is in the process of changing (not necessarily for the better) as people and peoples compete for space, comfort, sex, security. There is always domination, power and the need for protection; those who lack the means, will and energy to advance and protect themselves will become victims of others or they will continue the long human process of flight and migration in search of survival and a better life. People need others as protectors and as guides, especially in new lands. Half a Life suggests that life has always been a series of diasporas, of translations from one place to another, and what seems settled is undergoing a process of change. It shows that although we create stories to give order to and to make sense of our lives, history repeats itself in cycles of themes and variations.

13 Naipaul’s Critics and Postcolonialism The basis of most criticism of Naipaul is epitomized by a disagreement early in the careers of Naipaul, Sam Selvon and George Lamming after they moved to England. The three were among the first of what was to be regarded as the start of a modern West Indian literature and their writing was thought an expression of the politics that had led to decolonization and the formation of newly independent nations. Lamming did write novels pondering racial identity and politics. While Selvon is now best remembered for his amusing novels of black immigrant life in London, most of his novels concern Trinidad where Selvon sees the need for the Indians to accommodate themselves to the creolized Afro-Caribbean society that he regards as the future. Naipaul was sceptical of the political and racial solutions Lamming and Selvon sought and treated such themes with irony. The Mimic Men shows how independence led to racial politics while economic power was still with the colonizers and the Americans. Turning over the government to local people did not change that reality, especially as the local leadership had been trained by the colonizer and still imitated its ways. The Caribbean was a place in which people were divided by race, filled with resentments and lacked shared myths. They had no history of cooperation, or the wealth to provide comfort to losers of office. Politics in such a situation could only be brutal and disillusioning. This was an analysis of neo-colonialism in which handing power to a local elite would lead to violence, more poverty, more resentment and tyranny. At a time when people only wanted to hear of great successes he warned that independence was often painful and a failure. So from the first there was, and would remain, a division between Naipaul and the intellectuals who were committed to the cause of the new nations and their racial affirmations. Naipaul’s view of West Indian independence influenced his perspective on many other regions of the world, especially Africa, in 194

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which initial high hopes would soon be followed by massive corruption, civil war, the fragmentation of the state, chaos, with lives becoming nasty, brutal and short. As Naipaul extended his analysis to other revolutions, such as in the Islamic world, he continued to offer a portrait of actual situations and places that many on the Left were unwilling to hear. Where others saw liberation he saw chaos, where others claimed progress he noticed the fears caused by entering the modern world of freedom and how often people then retreated into a mythic past. Worse, Naipaul did not contribute to the myth that the formerly colonialized are united against a racist West. He has said that the racial violence in Trinidad, Guyana and at partition of India was for greater than the racial discrimination he experienced in England.57 Here is the essence of what has continued to differentiate Naipaul from his critics over the decades. They desire a literature of cultural affirmation which is part of the struggle for decolonization. Naipaul does not ignore the effects of colonialism or fail to see injustice, but his writing treats such themes in a complex way. He does not choose sides, he observes what happens. He has argued that the literature of cultural assertion sometimes selectively ignores the actual horrors of slavery and imperialism. Nationalists in mythologizing a united India conveniently ignored ‘the centuries of Muslim invasions and Muslim rule’. R. K. Narayan writes about an eternal India which continues underneath modernization, but Narayan’s Mysore is only a day’s journey from the great capital city that the Muslims overrun and totally destroyed in 1565: ‘The terrible ruins of the capital – still speaking four centuries later of loot and hate and blood and Hindu defeat, a whole world destroyed’. Naipaul mentions the fourteenthcentury Moroccan Muslim who stayed for seven years as the guest of the ‘Muslim ruler in Delhi’ who ‘liked blood, daily executions (and torture) on the threshold of his hall of audience, with the bodies left lying for three days’.58 Behind most criticism of Naipaul, no matter how qualified by disclaimers, is the tendency to divide the world into such opposing polarities as centre (England, imperialist, Western civilization) and margins (colonies, Third World, black). Such critics are themselves usually nationalists, on the political Left, and tend to read literature as politics. The authors of the influential The Empire Writes Back, although sensitive readers of Naipaul’s work, are critical that he is not part of the celebration of new national cultures and societies that followed political decolonization. They admit he has ‘one of the

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clearest visions of the nexus of power operating in the imperialcolonial world’ but ‘he is paradoxically drawn to that centre even though he sees it constructing the “periphery” as an area of nothingness. He is simultaneously able to see that the “reality”, “the truth”, and order of the centre is also an illusion.’59 This concisely expresses several of Naipaul’s themes, and shows why he has one of the most analytical perspectives on the postcolonial world. But as their aim is to claim cultural equality with the British they assume Naipaul somehow betrayed the West Indies (and indirectly Australia) by moving to England in search of a career as a writer and a superior culture. Naipaul, Selvon and others, however, had little choice. Trinidad is not Australia. It has no well paying magazines and newspapers, no Arts Council funding writers, no large educational market in which writers of books can find a steady income when their work becomes set texts for examinations. Criticism of Naipaul as insufficiently supporting nationalist feelings has been extended by those on the anti-Western Left to his supposed views on what they consider the ‘Third World’ (a term they use to cover everything outside, and even sometimes apply to minorities within, North America and Europe). Edward Said has made many insulting remarks about Naipaul who he claims: exorcises all the 1960s devils – national liberation movements, revolutionary goals, Third Worldish – and shows them to be fraudulent public relations gimmicks, half native impotence, half badly learned ‘Western’ ideas. Most important, Naipaul can now be cited as an exemplary figure from the Third World who can be relied on always to tell the truth about it. What upsets Said and his followers is Naipaul reporting what he has seen and experienced rather than explaining the world in the way they want others to see it: he can be counted on to survey the Third World … its follies, its corruption, its hideous problems … he prefers to render the ruins and derelictions of postcolonial history … to indict guerrillas for their pretensions rather than indict the imperialism and social injustice that drove them to insurrection, he attacks Moslems for the wealth of some of their number and for a vague history of African slave trading ….60 Does Said really believe that there is only ‘a vague history of African slave trading’ by Muslims? He could go to Sudan and many parts of

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Muslim dominated Africa today and purchase a slave, a continuing practice from long before the European slave trade. Said does not want such practices mentioned because it destroys his claim that there is a helpless innocent ‘Third World’ continually victimized by the West. Said depends on his readers’ ignorance of and guilt towards the ‘Third World’. As Said views all Western literature and knowledge about the non-Western world as complicit in imperial conquest, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, his view of Naipaul is less surprising than the readiness of many to accept a world rigidly divided into an imperialist West and victimized Others.61 His criticisms of Naipaul are little more than labelling someone he considers an enemy of the Islamic world that Said defends against criticism. His review of Beyond Belief is typical of those determined to ruin Naipaul’s reputation for objectivity. Said says the book is ‘the kind of demystifying, thorough exposé of Islam for which Western readers seem to have a bottomless appetite’. It is based on an ‘idiotic and insulting theory’. His Naipaul is a hack writing to Western anti-Muslim expectations rather than someone whose books are based on interviews and chance encounters with actual people in four countries. Said is certain ‘Western readers’ are prejudiced against Islam and that Naipaul is a man of the Third World who sends back dispatches from the Third World to the implied audience of disenchanted Western liberals who can never hear bad enough things about all the Third World myths – national liberation movements, revolutionary goals, the evils of colonialism. 62 The assumption that there is a ‘Third World’ and that liberals want to hear bad news about such places is typical of those like Said who claim to speak for most of humanity as is the insistence that to report the truth of what one has seen is a betrayal of the cause. This is the same kind of defence used by many intellectuals of Stalinism and other supposed great revolutionary movements which were the opposite of liberating. The criticism of motives continues when Said accuses Naipaul of writing for money. He asks how Naipaul could ‘write so stupid and so boring a book, full of story after story illustrating the same primitive, rudimentary, unsatisfactory and reductive thesis’. Naipaul ‘can no longer make sense’, but as a result of his book ‘more Muslims will suffer and be insulted’. The only benefit is the publishers will sell many books and Naipaul ‘will make a lot of

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money’. This seems wildly wrong. As a result of tyrannical leaders, religious fundamentalism, terrorism and suicide bombing many more Muslims have been distrusted or harmed than by anything in Naipaul’s book. Even the charge of writing for money seem curious. How else do writers support themselves? Although Said, who comes from a wealthy family and has a well-paid professorship, has other financial means than writing, he and his publishers profit from his books. The market in the West for Said’s views is at least as large as for those he attributes to Naipaul. While Said’s extra-literary arguments, accusations and quibbling could go on forever what is more worrying is the dangerous animosity revealed in his writing and which is continued by his followers. He criticizes Naipaul for not engaging in a direct dialogue with ‘those mad mullahs, vacant Islamic students, cliché-ridden revolutionaries’, for not living among them and risking ‘direct retaliation’, for not ‘writing in their presence so to speak, and does he like Socrates live through the consequences of his criticism?’ Said is unhappy that ‘none of them can ever get back at him’.63 This is chilling. Few within the Islamic world can write critically of it and survive. After what happened to Rushdie and others as a result of The Satanic Verses such remarks appear a call to murder. Socrates did not ‘live through the consequences of his criticism’. He was condemned to death. Yet Said is one of the founders of postcolonial theory taught in universities and schools. Much of the criticism made of Naipaul is no more than saying he is opposed to the politics some intellectuals demand. By now there is a long line of critics citing each other as proof that Naipaul is an offensive reactionary (they never cite those on the Left who feel otherwise or who feel that if this were so it would be irrelevant to evaluation). And there is a history, either in self-defence or because he has a genuinely aggressive streak, of Naipaul’s baiting his critics by making outrageous remarks. Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures criticizes the imprecision of romantic Third Worldism which makes no distinction between rich and poor non-Western nations, their individual cultures and situations, and which treats feudal and tyrannical governments as liberators.64 Aijaz Ahmad, who is an excellent Marxist scholar as well as a creative writer, objects that Third Worldism treats him as separate from and unequal to Western Marxists. He criticizes Said’s assumption that those from supposed Third World nations who live in the West have a better perspective on politics and culture than those who actually live in the nations.

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In her perceptive Naipaul’s Truth Lillian Feder made many penetrating criticisms of books by Selwyn Cudjoe, Rob Nixon and Fawzia Mustafa, representative academics who feel that Naipaul expresses incorrect views for a brown man. I would add to the list Suman Gupta.65 As Feder demonstrates they often use Naipaul’s comments about how his youth has influenced his perception of the world and distrust of groups as evidence that he is a brown reactionary who tries to be British. The best of these books is Cudjoe’s V. S. Naipaul, A Materialist Reading which has useful information about Naipaul’s Trinidad and Hindu contexts. Rob Nixon makes no attempt to disguise his anger at Naipaul being thought an authority on the ‘Third World’. Nixon falsely claims that Naipaul is almost universally condemned by those from the ‘Third World’. The use of the term ‘Third World’ is a warning of Nixon’s aims as the lumping together of all of Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and large areas of the Pacific and Middle East has little to do with political, economic and cultural realities. Nixon’s ‘Third World’ consists of those who share his political opinions. He cites H. B. Singh in Literature and Ideology terming Naipaul a ‘despicable lackey of neo-colonialism’.66 The first person Nixon acknowledges as an influence is Said and it is clear that a version of Said’s politics governs his book. Nixon insultingly writes of Naipaul’s ‘arrogance and bigotry’ (p. 10), ‘a travel writer of Naipaul’s ilk’ (68), someone who ‘begrudges the passing of black servility’ (128). His Naipaul is ‘self-engrossed’ (161), an ‘incompetent’ (173). Nixon’s aim is not literary criticism, but to destroy anyone accepting Naipaul’s reports on the ‘Third World’ as they undermine Nixon’s own politics: Collective action requires binding causes, requires what Naipaul would call obsessions and what others might call commitments. Without causes to galvanize them, without grievances, the struggles for decolonization could never have been launched, nor could formal independence (however inadequate the achievements) have been attained. (p. 173) As Nixon makes clear elsewhere in his book, when faced by such ‘Third World’ inadequate achievements as tyranny, racism, or corruption, blame the West. While this might not be a good way to solve problems and improve the conditions of those governed, it does help keep the ‘authority’ of Nixon and those with similar views. Feder brings the serious charge of unscholarly tampering with evidence against Nixon. The first epitaph in The Middle Passage is

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a quotation from James Anthony Froude’s The English in the West Indies (1887) which claims that the colonies were ‘valued only for the wealth they yielded, and society there has never assumed any particularly noble aspect … There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.’ I and many others have read this as Naipaul criticizing British colonialism and the effect it has had on its colonies. Those who dislike Naipaul usually avoid the fact that it is a criticism of imperialism; they instead focus on such phrases as ‘there is no people there’ to claim that Naipaul accepts Froude’s views of the West Indies, especially towards those of African descent. Where Nixon claims that Naipaul’s quotations from Froude, Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1859) and Charles Kingsley’s At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871) show that the writer concurs with their imperialist assumptions, Feder replies: Nixon should know better. He is a trained scholar, surely aware that quotation serves a variety of purposes. Is it not at least possible that Naipaul introduces a book on the rapaciousness and arrogance of the colonizers with the evidence of their own words? (p. 89) Feder mentions that Peggy Nightingale’s Journey Through Darkness: The Writing of V. S. Naipaul already said that the ironic use of such quotations is ‘hard to miss’ and not intended as ‘corroborating evidence’.67 Feder offers as an example of Nixon being ‘bent on fitting Naipaul to Froude’s procrustean bed’ his omission of introductory remarks which deplore the lasting effect of colonialism, especially the ways in which Indians and blacks have accepted white values and used them against each other. Those who assert Naipaul mimics white racist attitudes have for political reasons of their own offered a reading of the author which depends on using any possible criticism he makes of the Caribbean or so-called Third World as evidence of his acceptance of imperial British ways. It takes a blinkered ideologist to turn an anti-colonialist into a pro-colonialist. No wonder Naipaul has so often responded with disdain towards those he considers Left-Nationalist critics. Third Worldism has become Postcolonialism. Post-Colonial originally signified the historical period of decolonization and the independence of new nations between, say, 1947 and 1970. It avoided the awkward and misleading pre-independence/post-independence

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contrast. At first it applied to the criticisms of post-imperial governments by such writers as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, but as Marxist New Left theorists began to influence the study of literature postcolonial came to mean resistance to the West. Those who criticized the actual results of decolonization and the governments which tyrannized and robbed their people were seen as helping the enemy by undermining the revolution of the Third World against global capitalism. Thus Naipaul became the enemy. In contrast to such critics Victor Ramraj has carefully read what Naipaul has actually written in his novels. Those willing to consider such matters as ‘tone’ and the author’s attitude towards his characters in each novel should read Ramraj’s articles.68 But it is probable that most of Naipaul’s critics would not be interested in finding that he treats most of his black, radical, homosexual, Muslim and Third World characters with sympathy, compassion and insight, and that he reserves his scorn for both white liberals and reactionaries who have fixed ideas about others. While Ramraj has brought to bear on some of Naipaul’s fiction the close attentive reading common to an older tradition of practical criticism, John Thieme has looked in The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction at the use of literary allusions and in Postcolonial Con-Texts at some literary models and their influence.69 Thieme notes the influence of Dickens’s grotesques in Biswas and also Naipaul’s comments on the mixture of Dickens’s comedy and Indian allegory in the writing of R. K. Narayan (a mixture found in Naipaul’s own work). Thieme discusses the influence of Conrad as a predecessor who was an outsider in England while writing of the ‘half-made’ societies of the world. Conrad’s influence was technical as well as in theme; his fragmented narratives, unreliable narrators, and one interiorized centre of consciousness can often be found in Naipaul’s work from The Mimic Men onwards. Thieme shows the complexity of Naipaul’s relationship to previous writing, especially to the English canon, in Guerrillas where the ambivalence of attitude towards Jimmy associates him with characters in earlier novels by the Brontës, Jean Rhys and Thomas Hardy. To say a situation or allusion brings to mind a person or scene in previous fiction does not carry unambiguous values as Naipaul complicates rather than simplifies responses. Although Thieme mentions Naipaul’s negative view of many parts of the world, he, like Ramraj, shows that the fiction has a richness far beyond the simplicities of political

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sides. Besides the complexity of characterization and the mixture of criticism with sympathetic understanding, there is often a profound substrata of literary and cultural associations giving Naipaul’s realism, and social and psychological analysis, roots in history, archetypes, myth and symbol. If he is heir to such universalizing writers as Dickens and Shakespeare, he even more directly acknowledges those two outsiders Jean Rhys and Joseph Conrad. And there is that recurring Indian side to his fiction. Nixon’s evil elitist individualist Naipaul might be contrasted with the views of some Indian writers. Homi Bhabha in India found in Naipaul’s early writings an illustration of the vibrancy and possibilities of people with shattered, seemingly dead end colonial lives. Bhabha’s influential views of hybridity derive from his reading of Naipaul. Farrukh Dhondy in India was strongly influenced by An Area of Darkness: ‘It was a beginning. It was a brown man, albeit from abroad, trying to see India without nationalist spectacles, without guilt, almost without ideology. It was refreshing.’70 Of course not every Indian writer agrees with Bhabha and Dhondy. The influential poet and critic Nissim Ezekiel replied in ‘Naipaul’s India and Mine’ to An Area of Darkness giving possible different interpretations of the same events.71 Area is an expression of disillusion with not finding the home sought in India; it is a book in places tinged, as Naipaul admits, with hysteria, and not likely to find favour with an Ezekiel who had travelled in England in search of enlightenment and disappointed returned home to India. Ezekiel can be very critical of India, but he is also a nationalist although of a much more liberal, rational and less sentimental kind than most cultural nationalists. While it is true that Naipaul’s early travel books can appear written by someone who feels superior, his later journeys reveal someone who talks to people, listens to what they say, and who records what he has experienced. His method of relying on chance meetings, taking local advice, discussing the lives and opinions of the people he meets, following which way the wind blows, and reporting on what he has seen and heard, has a truth to reality. Sometimes he seems to draw too much from a brief encounter, have set views, and waste time on futile visits to meet people who do not turn up or grant him little time, but he describes the situation and the reader can decide on the fairness of Naipaul’s conclusions. The way he returns in books to the same places, the Caribbean, India, the Islamic world, and often visits people and places discussed in earlier

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books, sometimes correcting previous facts and judgements, means that there is by now a body of evidence and a richness of views that makes claims of superficiality themselves rather shallow. Perhaps because of his scepticism, experience of the world, and ability to judge others and their rhetoric he has often turned out to be right in his views. As those who attack Naipaul’s two books about Islam are mostly literary critics and intellectuals who consistently take an antiWestern, or what they imagine to be a pro-Third Worldist position, it is perhaps useful to be reminded that many scholars generally agree with him. Malise Ruthven’s review of Beyond Belief comments ‘The narratives he extrapolates from his travels are persuasive and subtle. Far more acutely than an academic treatise could do, they illuminate a world in which religion and reality conflict and intersect.’ ‘He bends over backwards to let his subjects speak for themselves.’ ‘He brings a sharp intellectual focus to his questionings, one informed by an ex-colonial’s awareness of the limitations of ideologies and nationalisms that serve to curb creativity and expression, and a healthy regard for the opportunities that only complex metropolitan cultures free from dogmatism can offer.’72 Although Ruthven says that Naipaul insufficiently allows for the way some societies, such as India and Indonesia, have in the past syncretized competing cultures, he agrees it is the modernizing, Westernized elites of the Muslim world ‘who are insisting on a reassertion of Islam’s political dimensions, what Naipaul sees as its imperial designs’. For Ruthven traditional Islam is more tolerant than its recent fundamentalists and has allowed itself to be moulded to local cultures whereas Naipaul, with his awareness of Indian history, sees Islam as the worst kind of imperialism which allows those it conquered no past or civilization of their own. Ruthven may be right, but unfortunately a feature of Islam for the past half century has been the growth of fundamentalism and its conscious attempts to become dominant throughout the world. Naipaul’s books show why and how this has come about. Derek Walcott is often offered as an example of an author who remained in the West Indies and made a go of it in contrast to Naipaul, but that was only possible because Walcott from early in his career had American foundation funding, often taught at American universities, and became financially secure when he became a tenured professor at an American university.73 But even if Trinidad had somehow supported Naipaul, should he have spent

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his life writing only about it? Artists like other people leave home in search of something better. Most of the critics who claim to speak for the Third World live in England or America. An influential criticism of Naipaul is Walcott’s ‘The Garden Path’.74 While admiring the poetic prose in parts of Enigma Walcott complains that Naipaul has created a myth of himself as a self-made creature emerging with difficulty from an environment in which there was no cultural support. Walcott offers himself and other West Indians as evidence that Naipaul falsifies what the Caribbean is like. Naipaul and Walcott offer conflicting histories of the West Indies by individuals from different backgrounds. Walcott’s family and social context in St Lucia was part of the near-white English-speaking elite with mastery of European culture and close access to those in power during and after the colonial period. Naipaul’s family life, by contrast, was chaotic, quarrelsome, culturally Hindu, unsupportive of interest in European art and culture, and alienated from the dominant black community and politics of Trinidad. While Walcott has his own myth in which the Caribbean is culturally rich, a great place for an artist, and he is its spokesman, it is clear from Another Life and the essay prefacing Dream on Monkey Mountain that Walcott in his youth wanted to be white-skinned, blue-eyed and marry white. Naipaul did not want to be white. He wanted to be Indian and feared losing his identity by becoming part of the then majority black Caribbean society and its culture. Walcott further complains that Naipaul is prejudiced against Africans and those of African origins, a claim repeated by Caryl Phillips in reviews included in The New World Order.75 It is easy to show that many blacks and Asians in Naipaul’s fiction are strange, dishonourable, intellectually confused, even killers, but it is much easier to show that the whites, especially British whites, are much worse and seldom treated with the insight, compassion and understanding given people of colour. Consider, for example, Guerrillas in which such whites as Jane, Roche and the liberal London journalists are treated as dangerous well-off fools, whereas Jimmy and even Bryant are seen in depth and with interest as wounded products of their society. Naipaul seldom pretends to understand Africans or even black West Indians unless they are of mixed race and he at times foolishly projects on Africa an essential culture of bushes and forests the way he imagines some essential pre-Islamic India, but his Africa is not false, nor are Naipaul’s whites treated with less irony than his non-white characters. Indeed Naipaul’s comments about

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the inferior whites in the colonies who are failures from their own societies should have long ago put an end to claims that he is favourable to whites, colonialism and the British. In Half a Life every white character is placed in such a way as to make him or her seem a stereotypical known quality whereas the Indians and Africans are surprising and given interest. If people are going to complain about Naipaul’s treatment of races then white Britons could make a claim to be at the head of the line. The criticism by Walcott is especially unfortunate as his many reviews of Naipaul’s early books written for the Trinidad Guardian praise Naipaul for his wit, approve of his sense of irony and of the way he refuses to sentimentalize the Caribbean.76 Walcott then claimed the Caribbean needed such a caustic vision. Indeed caustic wit is part of Trinidad’s culture in which calypsonians aggressively mock others. Walcott like Naipaul has praised such crude but amusing truthfulness. Discussion of Naipaul’s work has been most useful when analysing his art and viewing him in the context of Trinidad and India. Landeg White’s V. S. Naipaul gained its strength from placing the early writing in Trinidadian contexts, while Cudjoe, despite his attempts to do down Naipaul politically, has insights into use of Indian mythology and how it is ironized in the early works. Dolly Zulakha Hassan’s Naipaul and the West Indies treats of Naipaul in the context of West Indian politics. Much early criticism, such as Paul Theroux’s (1972) impressionist discussion of themes and settings, and Robert Morris’s Paradoxes of Order: Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul, which saw the work in relationship to freedom, chaos and order, remains useful for describing and examining the writing primarily as literature. The recent The Humour & the Pity, edited by Amitava Kumar, usefully collects a range of views and reviews.77 There is a contradiction between the hybridizing and the originsseeking Naipaul. Although accepting that fear and pain are part of becoming independent,78 he continues to flirt with Brahmin and Hindu revivalism despite warning that religion can become a source of oppression; in Beyond Belief he assumes that there were authentic original cultures. Pankaj Mishra shows that Naipaul has always desired a ‘complete’ traditional society while accepting the necessity of adapting to the painful freedoms of modernity. Naipaul’s work, especially the later books, reveal a continuing nostalgia for an ordered instinctive life, a life he had hoped to find in India.

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Mishra notes that Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilization first advances the idea that centuries of Muslim invasions had destroyed the wholeness of Indian civilization, a notion which had made him sympathetic towards those who claim to repair wounded Hindu dignity and pride. As Naipaul feels it is necessary for people to accept the liberating effects of a modern universal civilization why does he praise Hindu revivalism? ‘Hindu nationalists … are quite unlike religious revivalists in the Muslim world in that they not only do not challenge the West … but are more than eager to ally India, both politically and economically, with the Western world.’79 Mishra rightly says that Naipaul’s books ‘outgrow’ their arguments. When he faces people and places Naipaul is sympathetic, compassionate and interested. In India: A Million Mutinies Now Naipaul visiting a Muslim area of Bombay says that if he lived in their conditions and faced anti-Muslim violence he would feel as they do. His books portray individuals in an inhospitable world. Mishra demonstrates that it is foolish to regard Naipaul, who has described the American Republicans as intellectually vacant, as right-wing. Naipaul’s work expresses a range of feelings including tolerance, compassion and impatience with those who claim to be victims instead of adjusting to the world. Graham Huggan also warns that Naipaul’s work has complexities which confuse ‘eitheror distinctions’.80 Writing often gets its strength from indulging in contradictions, having the best of many worlds. Naipaul has produced an unusual body of literary criticism concerned with the modern novel. He has discussed, among others, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, R. K. Narayan and U. R. Anantha Murthy. He has also written on a number of other literary topics such as the journals of early travellers to the Caribbean. Some of the criticism is brilliant, and the place to start when reading that particular author, while also casting light on Naipaul’s aims. His books and articles are filled with comments about the nature of the novel and how he had to find his own models, voice and methods. Unfortunately, his literary criticism has not been collected in one place; that would be the best introduction to his work.

Appendix A: Naipaul’s Family, A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men Naipaul’s fiction makes imaginative use of actual people. His father Seepersad (1906–53) is the model for Mr Biswas. After Seepersad’s father died when he was six years old, Seepersad and his impoverished mother became dependent on his mother’s sister (Tara of Biswas) and her wealthy husband (Ajodha) who owned rum shops, taxis and other businesses. After some schooling Seepersad became a sign-painter; he painted a sign for the general store connected to Lion House (Hanuman House in Biswas) owned by the Capildeos (the Tulsis) of Chaguanas and married Bropatie Capildeo (Shama). Although his seven children were born in Lion House he usually resided elsewhere. After he had painted advertising signs for the Trinidad Guardian (the Sentinel in Biswas), the editor allowed him to submit articles, then hired him as a reporter. As Seepersad had a highly developed sense of humour his reports and interviews made him well known. After several moves Seepersad became the newspaper’s Chaguanas correspondent but lived by himself in a wooden house away from Lion House until he had a mental collapse – possibly influenced by his resignation from the paper after the editor had been fired and its policy changed, and possibly by a fierce quarrel with the very orthodox Hindu Capildeos about religious reform. After his nervous breakdown he became an overseer on a Capildeo estate (Green Vale) and then a shopkeeper (The Chase). He rejoined the Guardian, and moved to Port of Spain where for ten years he lived in various houses owned by the Capildeos before acquiring his own house (the Sikkim Street house). He spent three years with a new Department of Social Welfare, after which the Department was abolished and he returned again to the Guardian, although he lost his pension rights. He died of a heart attack during 1953 when V. S. Naipaul was studying in England. There is a specific family context to The Mimic Men and to the descriptions of Trinidadian politics in Naipaul’s early fiction from The Mystic Masseur to The Mimic Men. It concerns his mother’s side of the family. The Capildeos were descended from a minor Indian aristocrat and pundit who was kidnapped in Calcutta and sent to Trinidad as an indentured labourer. There he married Rosalie Soogee Gobin (Mrs Tulsi in Biswas) with whom he had nine daughters and two sons before he died (1925). Rudranath, the younger son, attended Queen’s Royal College, where he was (like Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur) for a time, as a rural Indian, a misfit who studied

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hard but did not do well, and after graduation taught. He (like Owad of Biswas) went to university in England where he was elected head of several student organizations, read the Statesman and became an avid supporter of Soviet Communism. He returned to Trinidad where he lived with his mother while he and his elder brother, Sambhoonath (Shekhar of Biswas) became involved in one of the new political parties (various details are used in The Mystic Masseur where Rudranath is a source for Indarsingh). Rudranath returned to England, for postgraduate research, then became the leader of the DLP when the Trinidadian opposition needed a well-known educated Indian to oppose Eric Williams’ PNM. Although predominantly Indian the DLP was multiracial and for a time included Uriah Butler and Albert Gomes among its leadership. Because of its mixed racial leadership, most of whom were the older, flamboyant, independent politicians, it was also unstable and when an Indian quit in 1957 Butler declared that all Indians were traitors. Rudranath Capildeo (Ralph Singh of The Mimic Men) was wealthy, politically ineffective, divided his time between England and Trinidad, wrote spiritualistic autobiographies (like The Mystic Masseur and Singh in The Mimic Men) but won a majority in the 1958 election. As Williams saw his PNM leading Trinidad to independence and hoped to head a Caribbean federation, both of which the Indians opposed as leading to black domination, he accused the Indians of treason, of being a ‘hostile and recalcitrant minority’, the ‘greatest danger facing the country’, and violence followed. The 1961 elections, which the PNM won, were particularly brutal with PNM supporters looting Indian shops and homes while the predominantly black police made house by house searches for arms in Indian areas. Rudranath foolishly declared the Indians would overthrow the government by force but did nothing. Williams declared a state of emergency. Rudranath broke down and returned to England where he lived in Brighton. Gomes also soon fled.81 This is part of the material which has been transformed in The Mimic Men.

Appendix B: Naipaul, Trinidad, Guyana and Africa Trinidad and Guyana are among the new nations whose populations are not native and where the coming of independence created mutual fears of dominance between opposing ethnic groups. In nearby Guyana during the 1950s the nationalist movement split into rival Indian and black parties; the Indian socialists who won the elections were twice deposed, first by the British and later with American help. There were bloody inter-racial riots and the country was long ruled by a tyrannical black nationalist government which led it to economic ruin and refused to hold fair elections. The period between 1946 and 1961 was particularly bad in Trinidad as the black urban population, led by Eric Williams, was pressing for complete independence from England and for a Trinidadian-led Caribbean Federation, while the Indian population opposed both, fearing domination by black majorities. Eric Williams, who led the PNM, was charismatic, tough, unscrupulous and influenced by the Marxist model of a one-party state. Having led Trinidad towards independence he believed opposition was treasonable. Although he spoke of the need for a multiracial Trinidad he used a rhetoric of religious deliverance in which national freedom meant government by those of African descent. When in power he appointed no Hindu Indians to the senior positions and, according to C. L. R. James, some of the leadership of Williams’s PNM were fanatically anti-Hindu Indian (although the PNM did include Muslim Indians).82 Those who in Europe and the United States favoured independence and black rule in Africa and the Caribbean seldom spoke up against the mistreatment of Indians, and sometimes justified it by arguing that the Indians were an alien entrepreneurial class who blocked black advancement into business. (Notice the comments of Linda and Bobby about Indian shopkeepers in ‘In a Free State’.) Naipaul distinguishes between nations, such as the United States and England, where those of African descent are a minority subject to discrimination and nations where they discriminate against others or, as in parts of Africa, among themselves.

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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. ‘n.b’, TLS, 19 July 2002, 16. 2. Many of Naipaul’s sources and allusions are mentioned in John Thieme, The Web of Allusions (London: Hansib, 1988). 3. The factual basis of many of the writings can be found in Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975). 4. V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son/Family Letters, ed. Gillon Aitken (London: Little Brown, 2000). 5. Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Caribbean Voices Programme and the Development of West Indian Short Fiction: 1945–1958’ in The Story Must Be Told: Short Narrative Prose in the New English Literature, Peter O. Stummer ed. (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neuman, 1986), 146–60. 6. Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 7. V. S. Naipaul, ‘Our Universal Civilization’, The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22–5. 8. See Ben Whitaker, ed., The Fourth World. Victims of Group Oppression (New York: Schocken, 1973). The situation for Indians became worse in Uganda, Zaire and Fiji. 9. He regards both as exiles wounded by their ‘homes’, who turned to travel writing. Arnold Rampersad, ‘V. S. Naipaul: Turning in the South’, Raritan, 20:1 (Summer 1990), 24–47; 45–6. 10. Stephen Schiff, ‘The Ultimate Exile’, The New Yorker (23 May 1994), 60–71. 11. See Bruce King, ed., West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979, enlarged 1995); Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber, 1970); Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English (London and New York: Longman, 1999). 12. See Naipaul’s ‘Foreword’ to The Adventures of Gurudeva and other Stories (London: Deutsch, 1976); and Reinhard W. Sander, The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 150. 13. The Adventures, 9–10.

MIGUEL STREET, THE MYSTIC MASSEUR AND THE SUFFRAGE OF ELVIRA 14. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975), 50. Also see Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (Burnt Mill, Harlow: Longman Caribbean Writers Series, 1986; first published 1979), 23.

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15. Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power. The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1968), 100–1. As late as 1961 PNM posters described Eric Williams as Moses II. The use of Messianic rhetoric was earlier associated with Uriah Butler. 16. For the Capildeos see Oxaal’s Black Intellectuals Come to Power, 160–80. 17. George Lamming also regards the West Indian black community as absurdly mimicking the English and as racially sensitive. See Lamming, ‘A Wedding in the Spring’, Commonwealth Short Stories, Anna Rutherford and Donald Hannah, eds (London: Edward Arnold, 1971; Macmillan, 1979), 44–56. 18. The People’s National Movement was led by Dr Eric Williams and the Democratic Labour Party had Dr Rudranath Capildeo as its leader although, unlike Williams, his scholarship and display of knowledge had no political direction. 19. Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Toronto Press, 1972), 146–7, 157.

A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS AND THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 20. ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (King Lear, III.iv). ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ (Lear, I.i). When Anand sees a lamp during the storm the allusion is to Lear, III. 4, when Gloucester enters with a torch: ‘Look, here comes a walking fire’. 21. See the discussion in the books by Thieme and Boxill listed in the Bibliography. Also see Geoffrey Riley, ‘Echoes of Wells in Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas’, Notes and Queries 36 (234): 2 (June 1989), 208–9. 22. Bruce King, ‘Anand’s Recherche du Temps Perdu’, Commonwealth, 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1983), 1–18.

MR STONE AND THE KNIGHTS COMPANION AND AN AREA OF DARKNESS 23. Naipaul’s use of H. G. Wells’ Mr Polly has been discussed by, among others, Anthony Boxill, V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction: In Quest of the Enemy (Fredericton, New Brunswick: York Press, 1983). 24. Richard Cronin, ‘An Area of Darkness’, Imagining India (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 103–13. 25. I discuss this paradox in Bruce King, The New English Literature: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World (London: Macmillan, 1980).

A FLAG ON THE ISLAND, THE MIMIC MEN AND THE LOSS OF EL DORADO 26. Gordon Rohlehr, ‘Talking about Naipaul’, Carib, No. 2 (1981), 39–65, esp. 49–52.

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27. James Pollack, ‘The Parenthetic Destruction of Metaphor in V. S. Naipaul’s ‘The Mimic Men’. Osmania Journal of English Studies (December 1982), 90–9 (V. S. Naipaul Special Number). 28. V. S. Naipaul, ‘The Documentary Heresy’, 20th Century, 173 (Winter 1964–5), 107–8. 29. Eric Roach, ‘Fame a Short-lived Cycle, says Vidia’, Trinidad Guardian (4 January 1972), 1. 30. Singh’s Roman House may ironically allude to Eric Williams’s house on Lady Chancellor’s Road where the founding members of the PNM met. 31. India: A Wounded Civilization, 18–27, 37–43. 32. Vivek Dhareshwar, ‘Self-fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men’, Criticism 31:1 (Winter 1989), 75–102.

IN A FREE STATE 33. Nan Doerksen, ‘In A Free State and Nausea’, World Literature Written in English, 20:1 (Spring 1981), 101–13. 34. U. R. Anantha Murthy, Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, translated by A. K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976). Naipaul discusses this novel in India: A Wounded Civilization, 104–12.

THE OVERCROWDED BARRACOON, ‘MICHAEL X’, GUERRILLAS AND INDIA: A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION 35. M. Banning Eyre, ‘Naipaul at Wesleyan’, The South Carolina Review, 14 (Spring 1982), 34–47, 45. 36. Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, ‘A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul’, Salmagundi, 54 (Fall 1981), 4–22, 16. 37. Harold Barratt, ‘In Defence of Naipaul’s Guerrillas’, World Literature Written in English, 28:1 (1988), 97–103. 38. Ivar Oxaal, Race and Revolutionary Consciousness: A Documentary Interpretation of the 1970 Black Power Revolt in Trinidad (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971). 39. Cathleen Medwick, ‘Life, literature, and politics: an interview with V. S. Naipaul’, Vogue (August 1981), 129–30. 40. V. S. Naipaul, ‘Without a Dog’s Chance’, The New York Review of Books, 18 (18 May 1972), 29–31. 41. Quoted by Farrukh Dhondy in Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds, The Rushdie File (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 184. 42. Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power. The Rise of Creole Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1968), 100–1.

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‘A NEW KING FOR THE CONGO’ AND A BEND IN THE RIVER 43. V. S. Naipaul, ‘A Plea for Rationality’, Indians in the Caribbean, I. J. Bahadur Singh, ed. (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987), 17–30, 27. 44. Fausto Ciompi, ‘The Politics of Fluidity in A Bend in the River’, The Atlantic Literary Review, 3:1 (January–March 2002), 22–36. 45. See Naipaul’s comments about Islamic historiography, ‘Our Universal Civilization’, The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22–5. 46. European classical sources are discussed in Steven Blakemore, ‘An Africa of Words: V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River’, The South Carolina Review, 18:1 (Fall 1985), 15–23. 47. Michael Neill, ‘Guerrillas and Gangs: Frantz Fanon and V. S. Naipaul’, Ariel, 13:4 (1982), 21–62, 43–5. 48. M. Banning Eyre, ‘Naipaul at Wesleyan’, The South Carolina Review (Spring 1982), 34–47, 46. 49. Bruce King, ‘Graham Greene’s Inferno’, Etudes Anglaises, 21:1 (1968), 35–51. 50. V. S. Naipaul, ‘Argentina: Living with Cruelty’, The New York Review of Books, 39, No. 3 (30 January 1992), 13. 51. As there is no bend in the Ganges in Sanskrit texts of Ramayana, I wrote to Naipaul asking if he had a different version in mind. He replied that he was struck by the title of Malgonkar’s novel.

A WAY IN THE WORLD: A SEQUENCE 52. See Bruce King, Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 353.

AMONG THE BELIEVERS: AN ISLAMIC JOURNEY, ‘OUR UNIVERSAL CIVILIZATION’ AND BEYOND BELIEF: ISLAMIC EXCURSIONS AMONG THE CONVERTED PEOPLES 53. V. S. Naipaul, ‘Our Universal Civilization’, The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22–5.

‘TWO WORLDS’, READING & WRITING AND HALF A LIFE 54. V. S. Naipaul,’Two Worlds. Nobel Lecture’ (7 December, 2001): www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture.html. 55. Joe Cuomo, ‘V. S. Naipaul’, The New Yorker (3 December 2001), www.newyorker.com/online/content/?011203on_onlineonly01.

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56. The origins of Maugham’s novel and its relationship to Half a Life is filled in by J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Razor’s Edge’, New York Review of Books, 48.17 (1 November 2001), 8–10, which also discusses the symbolism of sacrifice.

NAIPAUL’S CRITICS AND POSTCOLONIALISM 57. Andrew Robinson, ‘Stranger in Fiction’, The Independent on Sunday (16 August 1992), 13. 58. V. S. Naipaul, ‘The Writer and India’, Reading & Writing (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 54–5. 59. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 88–91. 60. Edward Said, ‘Bitter Dispatches from the Third World’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 98–112, 100. 61. Edward Said’s claim that all writing and scholarship by the West is part of European imperialism is the basis of his Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). Said’s views on the postcolonial intellectual and Naipaul can be found in Salmagundi 70–1 (Spring–Summer, 1986), 44–64, 65–81. 62. For his review of Beyond Belief see Edward Said, ‘Ghost Writer’, Progressive, 62.11 (November, 1998), 40–42, also published as ‘An intellectual catastrophe’, Al-Ahram Weekly, http://www.ahram.org.eg/ weekly/1998/389/cul.htm. 63. Edward Said, ‘Among the Believers’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 113–7, 116. 64. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 65. Lillian Feder, Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Selwyn Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul, A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Press, 1988); Rob Nixon, London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Another book of this kind is Suman Gupta, V. S. Naipaul (Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1999). 66. Nixon 5, 176. 67. Feder 98; Peggy Nightingale, Journey Through Darkness: The Writings of V. S. Naipaul (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987), 59. 68. See, for example, Victor Ramraj, ‘The All-Embracing Christlike Vision: Tone and Attitude in The Mimic Men’ in Anna Rutherford, ed., Common Wealth (Aarhus: Akademisek Boghandel, 1972), 125–34; and ‘Sly Compassion: V. S. Naipaul’s Ambivalence in “A Christmas Story” ’, Commonwealth, 6 (1983), 61–70. 69. John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (Mundelstrup: Dangeroo/London: Hansib, 1987); Postcolonial Con-Texts (London: Continuum, 2001).

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70. ‘Speaking in Tongues’ in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan, eds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 168. 71. ‘Naipaul’s India and Mine’ can be found in New Writing in India, Adil Jussawalla, ed. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), 77–90, the Journal of South Asian Literature XI.3–4 (Spring, Summer 1976), and Nissim Ezekiel Selected Prose (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, 1997). 72. Malise Ruthven, ‘The light of a dead star’, Times Literary Supplement (24 April 1998), 13. 73. For Walcott’s background, finances and his relationship to Naipaul, see Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Naipaul’s financial situation was far worse. 74. Derek Walcott, ‘The Garden Path’, The New Republic (13 April 1987), pp. 27–31. rpt. in Walcott’s ‘What the Twilight Says’: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 121–33. 75. Caryl Phillips, ‘The Enigma of Denial’ The New Republic (29 May 2000), 43–49; ‘V. S. Naipaul’, A New World Order: Selected Essays (London: Secker & Warburgh, 2001), 187–219. 76. In the Trinidad Guardian Walcott during the 1960s regularly reviewed and praised Naipaul’s writing. Derek Walcott, ‘A Great New Novel of the West Indies/ The man who was born unlucky’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (5 November 1961), 17; ‘History and Picong in The Middle Passage’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (30 September 1962), 9; ‘The Achievement of V. S. Naipaul’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (12 April 1964), 15; ‘Mr Naipaul’s Passage to India’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (20 September 1964), 2, 4; ‘Is V. S. Naipaul an Angry Young Man?’, Sunday Guardian Magazine [Trinidad] (6 August 1967), 8–9. 77. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan 1975); Dolly Zulakha Hassan, V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Paul Theroux, V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work (London: André Deutsch, 1972); Robert K. Morris, Paradoxes of Order. Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1975); Amitava Kumar, ed., The Humour & The Pity – On V. S. Naipaul (British Council India and Buffalo Books, 2002). 78. James Wood’s review of Half a Life traces in Naipaul’s work the relationship of pain to freedom and discusses why this annoys his critics. James Wood, ‘Damage’, The New Republic (5 November 2001), 31–5. 79. Pankaj Mishra, ‘A dream of order: Naipaul, India and Islamic fervour’, Times Literary Supplement (2 November 2001), 18–19. 80. Graham Huggan, ‘V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate’, College Literature (October 1994), 200–6, 205.

APPENDIX A 81. See the books by Landeg White, Scott MacDonald and Ivar Oxaal (Black Intellectuals Come to Power) listed in the Bibliography. See MacDonald, 119–20, 135. Also see Brinsley Samaroo, ‘Politics and Afro-Indian

216

Notes Relations in Trinidad’, in Calcutta to Caroni, John La Guerre, ed. (Longman Caribbean, 1974), 84–97.

APPENDIX B 82. See Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago (University of Toronto Press, 1972), 201.

Select Bibliography BOOKS BY V. S. NAIPAUL Dates are of first publication in hard cover. First paperback editions are in parenthesis ( ). Editions used, with page numbers cited in my text, are marked*. The Mystic Masseur, André Deutsch, 1957 (Penguin, 1964*). The Suffrage of Elvira, André Deutsch, 1958 (Penguin, 1969*). Miguel Street, André Deutsch, 1959 (Penguin, 1971*). A House for Mr Biswas, André Deutsch, 1961; with a ‘Foreword’, 1983 (Penguin, 1969*). The Middle Passage. Impressions of Five Societies, André Deutsch, 1962 (Penguin, 1969*). Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, André Deutsch, 1963 (Penguin, 1969*). An Area of Darkness: An Experience of India, André Deutsch, 1964 (Penguin, 1968*). The Mimic Men, André Deutsch, 1967 (Penguin, 1969*). A Flag on the Island, André Deutsch, 1968 (Penguin, 1969*). The Loss of El Dorado: A History, André Deutsch, 1969 revised edition, 1973 (Penguin, 1973*). In a Free State, André Deutsch, 1971 (Penguin, 1973*). The Overcrowded Barracoon and other Articles, André Deutsch, 1972 (Penguin, 1976*). Guerrillas, André Deutsch, 1975 (Penguin, 1976*). India: A Wounded Civilisation, André Deutsch, 1977 (Penguin, 1979*). A Bend in the River, André Deutsch, 1979 (Penguin, 1980*). ‘The Return of Eva Perón’ with ‘The Killings in Trinidad’ André Deutsch, 1980 (Penguin, 1981*). A Congo Diary, Los Angeles: Sylvester & Orphanpos, 1980. Among the Believers/An Islamic Journey, André Deutsch, 1981 (Penguin, 1982*). Finding the Centre. Two Narratives, André Deutsch, 1984 (Penguin, 1985*). The Enigma of Arrival, Viking, 1987 (Penguin, 1988*). A Turn in the South, André Deutsch, 1989 (Penguin, 1989*). India: A Million Mutinies Now, Heinemann, 1990 (Penguin, 1992*). A Way in the World: A Sequence, Heinemann, 1994 (Minerva, 1994*). Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples, Little Brown, 1998 (Abacus, 1999*). Father and Son: Family Letters (Edited by Gillon Aitken), Little Brown, 1999*. Reading & Writing: A Personal Account, New York Review Press, 2000*. Half a Life: A Novel, Picador, 2001 (Picador, 200l*). The Writer and the World: Essays (Introduced and edited by Pankaj Mishra), Knopf, 2002 [Republished essays].

217

218

Select Bibliography SOME OTHER WRITINGS BY NAIPAUL

‘Trollope in the West Indies’, The Listener (15 March 1962), 461. ‘India’s Cast-Off Revolution’, Sunday Times (London) (25 August 1963), 17. ‘Critics and Criticism’, Bim, 10:38 (January–June 1964), 74–7. ‘The Documentary Heresy’, 20th Century, 173 (Winter 1964–65), 107–8. ‘What’s Wrong with Being a Snob?’, Saturday Evening Post (3 June 1967), 12, 18. ‘Power to the Caribbean People’, The New York Review of Books (3 September 1970), 32–4. ‘Without a Dog’s Chance’, The New York Review of Books (18 May 1972), 29–31. ‘The Corpse at the Iron Gate’, The New York Review of Books (10 August 1972), 3–4, 6–8. ‘Conrad’s Darkness’, The New York Review of Books (17 October 1974), 16–21. ‘Foreword’, in The Adventures of Gurudeva and other Stories by Seepersad Naipaul (London: André Deutsch, 1976). ‘An Island Betrayed’, Harper’s (March 1984), 62–72. ‘It’s Out of This Violence I’ve Always Written’, The New York Review of Books (16 September 1984), 45–6. ‘Among the Republicans’, The New York Review of Books (25 October 1984), 5, 8, 10, 12, 14–17. ‘Writing A House for Mr Biswas’, The New York Review of Books (24 November 1983), 22–3. ‘On Being A Writer’, The New York Review of Books (23 April 1987), 7. ‘A Plea for Rationality’, in Indians in the Caribbean, ed. I. J. Bahadur Singh (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987), 17–30. ‘Our Universal Civilization’, The New York Review of Books (31 January 1991), 22–5. ‘A Handful of Dust: Return to Guiana’, The New York Review of Books (11 April 1991), 15–20. ‘Argentina: Living with Cruelty’, The New York Review of Books (30 January 1992), 13–18. ‘The End of Peronism?’, The New York Review of Books (13 February 1992), 47–53. ‘A Million Mutinies’, India Today (18 August 1997), 36–7, 39. ‘Two Worlds. Nobel Lecture’ (7 December 2001), ⬍http://www.nobel.se/ literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture.html⬎.

INTERVIEWS James Applewhite, ‘A Trip with V. S. Naipaul’, Raritan, 10:1 (Summer 1990), 48–54. M. Banning Eyre, ‘Naipaul at Wesleyan’, The South Carolina Review, 14 (Spring 1982), 34–47. Joe Cuomo, ‘V. S. Naipaul’, The New Yorker (3 December 2001), www.newyorker.com/online/content/?011203on_onlineonly01.

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Alex Hamilton, ‘Life on Approval’, The Guardian (4 October 1971), 8. Ian Hamilton, ‘Without a Place’ (30 July 1971), 897. Michael Harris, ‘Naipaul on Campus: Sending out a Plea for Rationality’, Tapia [Trinidad] (29 June 1975), 2. Aamer Hussein, ‘Delivering the Truth, An Interview with V. S. Naipaul’, Times Literary Supplement (2 September 1994), 3–4. Ramin Jahanbegloo, ‘Philosophy and Life: An Interview’, The New York Review of Books (28 May 1992), 46–54. Feroza Jussawallla, ed., Conversations with V. S. Naipaul (University Press of Mississippi 1997) [24 interviews]. Alfred Kazin, ‘V. S. Naipaul, Novelist as Thinker’, The New York Review of Books (1 May 1977), 20–1. Cathleen Medwick, ‘Life, Literature, and Politics: An Interview with V. S. Naipaul’, Vogue (August 1981), 129–30. Charles Michener, ‘The Dark Visions of V. S. Naipaul’, Newsweek (16 November 1981), 104–17. Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, ‘A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul’, Salmagundi, 54 (1981), 4–22. Alastair Niven, ‘V. S. Naipaul Talks to Alastair Niven’, Wasafiri 21 (Spring 1995), 5–6. Eric Roach, ‘Fame a Short-lived Cycle, says Vidia’, Trinidad Guardian (4 January 1972), 1–2. Andrew Robinson, ‘Stranger in Fiction’, The Independent on Sunday (16 August 1992), 23. Adrian Rowe-Evans, ‘The Writer as Colonial’, Transition [Ghana], 40 (1971), 56–62. Stephen Schiff, ‘The Ultimate Exile’, The New Yorker (23 May 1994), 62–71. Derek Walcott, ‘Interview with V. S. Naipaul’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (7 March 1965), 5, 7.

SOME BOOKS ABOUT NAIPAUL Anthony Boxill, V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction: In Quest of the Enemy (Fredericton, New Brunswick: York Press, 1983). Selwyn Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). Lillian Feder, Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer (Lanham, Maryland & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Suman Gupta, V. S. Naipaul (Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1999). Robert Hamner, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Twayne, 1973). Robert Hamner, ed., Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1977). Dolly Zulakha Hassan, V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). Kelvin Jarvis, V. S. Naipaul: A Selective Bibliography with Annotations, 1957–1987 (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1989).

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Amitava Kumar, ed., The Humour & The Pity – On V. S. Naipaul (British Council and Buffalo Books, 2002). Robert K. Morris, Paradoxes of Order. Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1975). Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Peggy Nightingale, Journey Through Darkness: The Writing of V. S. Naipaul (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987). Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Paul Theroux, V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work (London: André Deutsch, 1972). Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (London: Hansib Publishing, 1988). Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1975).

SPECIAL ISSUES OF JOURNALS The Atlantic Literary Review, 3, No. 1 (January–March 2002). Commonwealth, 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1983). Commonwealth, 9, No. 1 (Autumn 1986). Modern Fiction Studies, 30, No. 3 (Autumn 1984). Moving Worlds 2.1 (2002) Osmania Journal of English Studies V. S. Naipaul Special Number (December 1982).

SOME ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS ABOUT NAIPAUL James Applewhite, ‘A Trip with V. S. Naipaul’, Raritan 10.1 (Summer 1990), 48–54. Harold Barratt, ‘In Defence of Naipaul’s’ Guerrillas’, World Literature Written in English, 28.1 (Spring 1988), 97–101. Ben Belitt, ‘A House for Mr Naipaul’, Salmagundi 54 (Fall 1981), 23–42. Steven Blakemore, ‘An Africa of Words: V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River’, South Carolina Review, 18.1 (Fall 1985), 15–23. Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Learning how to write’, Times Literary Supplement (21 September 2001), 22–3. Fausto Ciompi, ‘The Politics of Fluidity in A Bend in the River’, The Atlantic Literary Review, 3.1 (January–March 2002), 22–36. Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Caribbean Voices Programme and the Development of West Indian Short Fiction: 1945–1958’ in The Story Must Be Told: Short Narrative Prose in the New English Literatures, ed. Peter O. Stummer (Würzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1986), 146–60. J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Razor’s Edge’, The New York Review of Books 48.17 (1 November 2001) 8–10.

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221

Joan Dayan, ‘Gothic Naipaul’, Transition 59 (1993), 158–70. Vivek Dhareshwar, ‘Self-fashioning, Colonial Habitus, and Double Exclusion: V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men’, Criticism, 31.1 (Winter 1989), 75–102. Nan Doerksen, ‘In a Free State and Nausea’, World Literature Written in English, 20 (1981), 105–13. Joseph Epstein, ‘A Cottage for Mr Naipaul’, The New Criterion, 6.2 (October 1987), 6–15. Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Naipaul’s India and Mine’, in New Writing in India, ed. Adil Jussawalla (Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), 77–90. Annabelle F. Fersch, ‘V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and the Art of Re-Reading’, Commonwealth Novel in English, 5.2 (1992), 1–8. Glyne A. Griffith, ‘Travel Narrative As Cultural Critique: V. S. Naipaul’s Travelling Theory’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 29.2 (1993), 87–92. Graham Huggan, ‘Anxieties of Influence: Conrad in the Caribbean’, Commonwealth, 11.1 (Autumn 1988), 1–12. Graham Huggan, ‘V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate’, College Literature (October 1994), 200–6. Kelvin Jarvis, ‘V. S. Naipaul: A Bibliographical Update, 1987–1994’, Ariel, 26 (October 1995), 71–85. Tabish Khair, ‘V. S. Naipaul: Narrating from the Empty Centre’, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 243–64. Amitava Kumar, ‘The Bend in Their Rivers’, The Nation (26 November 2001), 32–8. Pankaj Mishra, ‘A Dream of Order: Naipaul, India, and Islamic Fervour’, Times Literary Supplement (2 November 2001), 18–19. Melina Nathan, ‘V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival’, New Voices [Trinidad], 18.35/36 (March–September 1990), 43–67. Michael Neill, ‘Guerrillas and the Gangs: Frantz Fanon and V. S. Naipaul’, Ariel, 13.4 (1982), 21–62. Caryl Phillips, ‘The Enigma of Denial’, The New Republic (29 May 2000), 43–9. Caryl Phillips, ‘V. S. Naipaul’, A New World Order: Selected Essays (London: Secker & Warburgh, 2001), 187–219. Kenneth Ramchand, ‘A House for Mr Biswas’, An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature (Kingston: Nelson Caribbean, 1976), 73–90. Arnold Rampersad, ‘V. S. Naipaul: Turning in the South’, Raritan, 10.1 (Summer 1990), 24–39. Victor Ramraj, ‘The All-Embracing Christlike Vision: Tone and Attitude in The Mimic Men’ in Common Wealth, ed. Anna Rutherford (Aarhus: Akademisek Boghandel, 1972), 125–34. Victor Ramraj, ‘Sly Compassion: V. S. Naipaul’s Ambivalence in “A Christmas Story” ’, Commonwealth 6 (1983), 61–70. Victor J. Ramraj, ‘V. S. Naipaul: The Irrelevance of Nationalism’, World Literature Written in English, 23.1 (Winter 1984), 187–96. Gordon Rohlehr [interviewed by Selwyn Cudjoe], ‘Talking about Naipaul’, Carib, 2 (1981), 39–65. Salman Rushdie, ‘V. S. Naipaul’, Imaginary Homelands – Essays & Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), 148–51.

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Malise Ruthven ‘The light of a dead star’, Times Literary Supplement (24 April 1998), 13. Edward Said, ‘Bitter Dispatches from the Third World’ and ‘Among the Believers’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 98–112, 113–7. Edward Said, ‘Ghost Writer’, Progressive, 62.11 (November 1998), 40–2 [also as ‘An intellectual catastrophe’ Al-Ahram Weekly, http:// www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1998/389/cul.htm]. Richard I. Smyer, ‘Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: Fiction and the Postcolonial Tropics’, The Literary Half Yearly, 25.1 (January 1984), 55–65. Sara Suleri, ‘Naipaul’s Arrival’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2:1 (Fall 1988), 25–50. Thorell Tsomondo, ‘Metaphor, Metonymy and Houses: Figures of Construction in A House for Mr Biswas’, World Literature Written in English, 29.2 (Autumn 1989), 69–82. Derek Walcott, ‘A Great New Novel of the West Indies/The man who was born unlucky’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (5 November 1961), 17. Derek Walcott, ‘History and Picong in The Middle Passage’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (30 September 1962), 9. Derek Walcott, ‘The Achievement of V. S. Naipaul’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (12 April 1964), 15. Derek Walcott, ‘Mr Naipaul’s Passage to India’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (20 September 1964), 2, 4. Derek Walcott, ‘Is V. S. Naipaul an Angry Young Man?’, Sunday Guardian Magazine [Trinidad] (6 August 1967), 8–9. Derek Walcott, ‘The Garden Path’, The New Republic, 13 April 1987, 27–31. rpt. in Walcott’s ‘What the Twilight Says’: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 121–33. James Wood, ‘Damage’, The New Republic (5 November 2001), 31–5.

GENERAL BACKGROUND Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds, India in the Caribbean (London: Hansib Publishing, 1988). Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan, eds, Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000). Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English (London: Longman, 1999). Derek Humphry and David Tindall, False Messiah: The Story of Michael X (London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon, 1997). Bruce King, The New English Literatures Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World (London: Macmillan, 1980). Bruce King, ed., West Indian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1979, enlarged edition 1995).

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223

Morton Klass, East Indians in Trinidad (London: Columbia University Press, 1961). John La Guerre, ed., Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians of Trinidad (London: Longman, 1974). Scott B. MacDonald, Trinidad and Tobago: Democracy and Development in the Caribbean (New York: Praeger, 1986). Michael Abdul Malik, From Michael de Freitas to Michael X (London: André Deutsch, 1968). Yogendra Malik, East Indians in Trinidad: A Study in Minority Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). Vijay Mishra, ‘The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora’, Textual Practice, 10.3 (1996), 421–47. Seepersad Naipaul, Gurudeva and other Indian Tales (Port of Spain: Trinidad Publishers, 1943). Ivar Oxaal, Black Intellectuals Come to Power: The Rise of Creole Nationalism in Trinidad & Tobago (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1968). Ivar Oxaal, Race and Revolutionary Consciousness: A Documentary Interpretation of the 1970 Black Power Revolt in Trinidad (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971). Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Heinemann Educational, 2nd edn, 1984). Selwyn D. Ryan, Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts (London: Continuum, 2001). Ben Whitaker, ed., The Fourth World: Victims of Group Oppression (New York: Schocken Books, 1973).

Index A la recherche du temps perdu 75, 189 Abdul Malik see de Freitas Achebe, Chinua 129 Adventures of Gurudeva, The 20, 210 Aeneid 124 Afghanistan 170, 171 Africa 11, 87, 92, 119, 124, 130, 134, 159, 182, 194–5, 204 Indians in 11, 16, 17 Africans 88 African-Americans 70, 88, 92, 93, 95, 148 African Socialism 118, 159, 160, 191 Ahmad, Aijaz 198, 214 Aitken, Gillon 9 Alvi, Nadira Khannum 19 Alwi, Syed 176 Americans see United States Amerindians 83, 161, 164, 182 Amin, Idi 106, 129 Anguilla 100 antagonism 69 anti-epic 113, 126 Arab conquests 169 Arab imperialism 87, 122, 170, 177 Arabization 15, 172, 173, 178 Arabs 119, 121, 126, 132, 159, 172 and slavery 16, 130, 196–7 Argentina 107, 133, 193 Aryans 8, 74, 77, 78, 81, 133, 134, 167, 169 Australia 196 autobiographical novel 50, 139 autobiography 5, 14, 43, 46, 53, 75, 77, 80, 90, 133, 135, 137, 146, 156, 162, 179, 187 fiction as 6 mixed with fiction 18, 19, 138, 152 mock 35 and non-fiction 8 BBC 10, 23, 180, 181 Barrat, Harold 212 Beacon, The 20 Bend in the Ganges, A 133 Benson, Gale 104, 105, 111 Berlin 181 Bhabha, Homi 22, 202

Bible, The 42, 45 bildungsroman 35 Bissoondath, Neil 20 black nationalism 17, 29, 118, 154, 156, 209 Black Power 12, 13, 29, 101, 144, 158 Black Power, Trinidad 101–2 Blakemore, Steven 213 Boxill, Anthony 211 Brahmin 15 Brahmins 117, 184, 185, 186, 192 duties of 15, 30 Brontë, Charlotte 112, 114 Brontë, Emily 112 Buddhist 130, 169, 170, 175 Butler, Uriah 34, 80, 208, 211 calypsos 31–2, 205 Camus, Albert 60, 63, 75, 88, 122, 130 Canada 130, 162 Capildeo, Rudranath 34, 207, 211 Capildeo, Simbhoonath 34, 208 Capildeos 7, 207–8, 211 ‘Caribbean Voices’ (BBC) 9, 10, 19, 21 Carmichel, Stokely 102, 158 Carnival 102, 158 Castro, Fidel 101, 105 Cave of Amarnath 66 Chachnama 170 Chaguanas 7, 207 change (social and cultural) 14, 23, 53, 69, 145, 148, 178 Chinese 86, 92 Chirico, Giorgio de 143–4 Christianity 126, 186 Christian missionary schools 48, 186 La Chute 75 Cipriani, Arthur 34 Ciompi, Fausto 120, 213 cities 47, 48, 147 civil war 87 Cobham, Rhonda 210 Coetzee, J. M. 185, 214 colonialism 1, 2, 57, 152, 192, 200 Columbus, Christopher 79, 153 con men 28, 37, 107, 154, 164 Conrad, Joseph 13, 87, 120, 161, 188, 201, 202

224

Index Constable, John 147 ‘Conversation with V. S. Naipaul, A’ 100, 212 Cronin, Richard 211 Cuba 158, 181 Cudjoe, Selwyn 199, 205, 214 Cuomo, Joe 213 dandy 49, 75–6, 81 Dante 127–9 Davis, Basil 102 decolonization 3, 6, 72, 76, 132, 150, 151, 193, 195 de Freitas, Michael (Michael X) 101, 104, 105, 112 Democratic Labour Party 79, 208 depressions 9, 43, 63 Dhareshwar, Vivek 212 Dhondy, Farrukh 22, 202, 212 diaspora 36, 140, 141, 193 disaporic individuals 111, 153 Dickens, Charles 34, 44, 51, 81, 145, 201 Doerksen, Nan 212 Dravidians 134 East Africa 118, 119, 121, 123 education, effects of 45, 81, 138, 145, 179 Egypt 87, 92, 96, 97, 98, 99 Eliot, T. S. 61, 75, 81, 82, 113, 134, 144 Ellison, Ralph 78, 81, 90, 106 Empire Writes Back, The 195–6, 214 Empson, William 90 England 12, 21–2, 59, 139–40, 144, 145, 146, 181 Roman ruins 127 epic 41, 47, 83–4, 124, 133, 166, 183 L’Etranger 61 existential 44, 59, 60–1 63, 64, 65, 68, 73–4, 87, 91, 134, 141 extinction 42, 72, 76 Eyre, M. Banning 212, 213 Ezekiel, Nissim 202, 215 Fanon, Frantz 106, 109, 112, 115, 118, 126, 132 fantasy 26, 28, 29, 46, 70, 80, 101, 112, 116, 125, 161 fatalism 22, 48, 59, 60, 64, 72, 180, 185 fathers 33, 43, 44, 51, 76, 79, 81, 141, 166, 176, 177 Feder, Lillian 199–200, 214 Fiji 16

225

freedom 12–13, 50, 71, 87, 89, 91, 96, 150, 164 French 81 Froude, James 56, 200 Galsworthy, John 3 Gandhi, Indira 13 Gandhi, Mahatma 14, 67, 116–17, 181, 190, 192 Germany 180, 182 Goa 192 Godden, Rumer 189 Gomes, Albert 20, 34, 80, 208 Gorky, Maxim 190 Gray, Thomas 188 Greece 96 Greene, Graham 81, 113, 129, 162, 213 Grenadians 25 guerrillas 102, 115 Guevara, Che 181, 193 guides 128, 193 Gulliver’s Travels 78 Gupta, Suman 199, 214 Guyana 16, 56, 75, 79, 161, 195, 209 Habibie, B. J. 175 Haiti 56, 163 Hale, Patricia 10, 11 Hamlet 189 Hardy, Thomas 113, 145, 147, 189 Hassan, Dolly Zulakha 205 Hearne, John 19 Heart of Darkness, The 92, 127 Heart of the Matter, The 129 hell 126, 128–9 Hemingway, Ernest 3, 188, 190 Hindi 3, 16, 36 Hindu 8, 10, 15, 17, 31, 39, 85, 93, 116, 130, 180, 206 dharma 91 extremism 117, 185, 205 karma (fate) 33 spirituality 77, 85, 117, 185, 187 Trinidad 35, 49, 69, 173 history 6, 44, 52, 75, 78, 103, 121, 173 cyclical 80, 111, 124, 141, 193 of Indian-Africa links 160 Islamic 170, 213 loss of 169 as mimicry 82 of Trinidad 23, 32, 36–7, 45, 83–4, Hobbes, Thomas 65, 82, 89, 128 home 149, 160 homeless 3, 43, 86, 90, 120, 140

226

Index

homosexuality 11, 89, 91, 95, 107, 108, 109, 155 Horatian retirement 82 Huggan, Graham 206, 215 human will 34, 47–8, 58–9 Humour & The Pity, The 205, 215 hybridity 181, 182, 200, 205 Illich, Ivan 175 Imaduddin, Mr 173–5 imperialism 4, 113, 134, 150–1, 173, 193, 200, 203 advantages 16, 172 British and Islamic compared 193 criticism of 49, 101 and fiction 98 incest 81 indentured labour 16, 83, 100, 144, 150 independence 192, 194 India 2, 66, 81, 141, 150, 169, 202 and Islam 2, 15, 184, 192, 193 lower castes and untouchables 31, 66, 74, 117, 184, 185, 190 Mutiny (1857) 150 Indian diaspora 11, 16, 22, 45, 53, 72, 86, 93, 120, 123, 141, 144 Indian-black conflicts 10, 57, 72, 157, 160, 208 Indians in Trinidad 16–17, 45, 47, 52, 156–7, 172, 208 Indonesia 169, 173, 174, 175, 203 Invisible Man, The 78, 90, 95 Iran 13, 167–9, 171, 172, 177 Islam 1, 2, 150, 167, 177, 197–8 contrast to Christianity 170 fundamentalism 167–8, 169, 172, 173, 174, 203 Ivory Coast 14 Jamaat-al-Muslimeen 159 Jamaica 56, 102 Jamal, Hakin 104, 105 James, C. L. R. 20, 52, 163, 209 influences Naipaul 163 James, Henry 136 James, Louis 210 Jane Eyre 112, 114 Japan 14, 172 Japanese occupation (WW II) 176, 177 Java 177 Jews 78, 152, 158 Jones, Inigo 82 Jonson, Ben 82 Joyce, James 24, 45, 53, 134, 139, 144

Kakar, Sudhir 190 Kashmir 59, 65, 78, 149 Keats, Jonathan 189 King, Bruce 210, 211, 213, 215 King Lear 43, 211 Kingsley, Charles 200 Koran 169, 170, 174, 175 Kumar, Amitava 205, 215 Lamming, George 19, 194, 211 Lazarillo de Tormes 18 Lebanese 97, 99 London 22, 73, 78, 87, 132, 135 Lord Jim 188 Lovelace, Earl 210 Makarere (University, Uganda) 11, 159 Malaysia 169, 173, 174, 176 Malgonkar, Manohar 133, 213 Mann, Thomas 139 manners as morals 62 Mao ZeDong 101, 106, 108, 118 Martinique 56, 57, 72 Marvell, Andrew 82 Marxism 127, 132, 152, 158, 163, 168, 170–1, 182, 198, 201, 208, 209 masochism 19, 31, 105, 125 Masters, John 189 Maugham, Somerset 87, 88, 98, 185, 187, 189 Mauritius 100–1 Mecca 174, 176 Mendes, Alfred 20 Merchant of Venice, The 158 Michael X see de Freitas mimicry 27, 56, 67, 75, 77, 96, 101, 113 art as 82 of black 107 changing 69–70 and education 81, 145 nation as 120 political 37, 118 writing as 78 Miranda, Francisco 154 Mishra, Pankaj 205–6, 215 Mittelholzer, Edgar 19, 21 Mobutu 13, 106, 118, 119 modernization 36, 67, 72, 116, 148, 167, 168, 172, 186 Mohenjodaro 169 Morris, Robert 205, 214 Moyne Commission 79 Mr Polly see H. G. Wells Mulele, Pierre 126 Murthy, U. R. Anantha 91, 212

Index Mustafa, Fawzia 199, 214 Mysore 186–7, 195 Nabokov, Vladimir 77 ‘Naipaul at Wesleyan’ 100, 212 Naipaul, Kamala 9, 10 Naipaul, Seepersad 3, 7, 9–10, 21, 123, 188, 207 influence 20 Naipaul, Shiva 20, 115 Naipaul, V. S. (life and opinions) and American movies 18, 179 awards (honours, prizes) 1, 3, 4, 10, 12, 14 bowler 9 brahminism 15 characters 4 colonialism 2 compassion 35, 88, 100, 105, 166 crisis in life 58 decolonization (view of) 17 England 3, 59, 140 fatalism 15, 22 fiction (purpose) 5, 48, 215 Hindu extremism 2 India (criticism of) 4, 15 Indian diaspora 22 Indian influences 7–8, 15–16, 131, 133–6 industrialization 4 life 7–14 life of writer 59, 61, 64, 76, 77 literary critic 51, 82, 170, 186, 206 literary market 4–5, 20, 21, 196 literary models 18, 43–4, 47, 51, 55, 75, 83, 145 marriages 10, 19 nationalist 56 outsider 165 periods of writing 12, 14, 58 pessimist 87 Port of Spain 152 Rushdie comparison 5, 189 scepticism 37 snobbery 2, 11, 51, 52, 60, 77, 94 style 4, 7, 18, 19, 25, 52, 61, 90, 96, 120, 136, 162, 182–3 subject matter 5, 6 and translators 166–7 vision of life 42, 70, 87, 97, 99, 123, 124, 130 Walcott comparison 204 white characters 31, 204 white expatriates 11, 73, 88, 89, 92, 121, 205

227

Naipaul’s fiction Bend in the River, A 13, 22, 31, 75, 86, 107, 118–35 ‘Bogart’ 23, 29 ‘Caution’ 33 ‘Coward, The’ 29 ‘Enemy, The’ 70 Enigma of Arrival, The 12, 14, 22, 32, 53, 61, 74, 134, 138–48, 204 ‘Epilogue’ (In a Free State) 92, 97–8 ‘Flag on the Island, A’ 12, 69 Flag on the Island, A 12, 22, 69–71 ‘Greenie and Yellow’ 71 Guerrillas 5, 13, 22, 29, 31, 86, 101–16, 158, 201, 204 Half a Life 22, 36, 117, 168, 180–93, 205 ‘His Chosen Calling’ 31 ‘History’ 8, 17, 154, 155–9 ‘Home Again’ 11, 17, 154, 159–61 House for Mr Biswas, A 10, 18, 20, 21, 40, 44–55, 70, 76, 141–2, 207; and Half a Life 183; and Mr Stone 64–5 ‘In a Free State’ 11, 86, 88–9, 92, 103, 107, 44, 209 In a Free State 12, 87–99, 140 ‘Inheritance, An’ (‘Prelude’) 155 ‘In the Gulf of Desolation’ 153, 154, 164 ‘Man-man’ 18, 25–9, 54 Miguel Street 10, 23–33, 69, 70, 155, 190 Mimic Men, The 11, 12, 21, 53, 68, 71–83, 137, 138, 144, 146, 192, 194, 201, 207, 208 Mr Stone and the Knights Companion 10, 22, 59–65 ‘My Aunt Gold Teeth’ 69 Mystic Masseur, The 10, 18, 19, 33–6, 71, 207 ‘New Clothes’ 153, 161 ‘New Man, A’ 153, 154, 164 ‘On the Run’ 154, 163 ‘One Out of Many’ 88, 90, 92, 93–5 ‘Parcel of Papers’ 153, 161, 163 ‘Passenger’ 162–3 ‘Perfect Tenants, The’ 71 ‘Pyrotechnicist, The’ 30 Suffrage of Elvira, The 10, 33, 36–40, 190 ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’ 22, 89, 90, 91, 95–6 ‘Titus Hoyt, I. A.’ 30 ‘Tramp at Piraeus, The’ 89, 92, 96–9 Way in the World, A 8, 12, 17, 152–64

228

Index

Naipaul’s non-fiction Among the Believers 1, 13, 136, 167–71, 173–4 Area of Darkness, An 10, 53, 59, 65–8, 72, 73, 144, 149, 202 ‘Argentina: Living with Cruelty’ 213 ‘Author’s Forward’ 136 Between Father and Son: Family Letters 9–10, 76 Beyond Belief 1, 15, 172–8, 197, 203, 205 Congo Diary, A 13, 118 ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ 118 ‘Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, The’ 136 ‘Documentary Heresy, The’ 79, 212 Finding the Centre 14, 23, 136–8, 139 India: A Million Mutinies Now 14, 15, 149–51, 206 India: A Wounded Civilization 13, 91, 116–17, 187, 206, 212 ‘Killing History’ 169, 170 Killings in Trinidad 13 Loss of El Dorado, The 6, 12, 83–5, 89, 140, 144, 153 ‘Michael X’ 13, 101, 104 Middle Passage, The 10, 27, 37, 55–7, 72, 107, 199–200 ‘New King of the Congo, A’ 13, 118, 126 ‘Our Universal Civilization’ 1, 13, 172, 210, 213 Overcrowded Barracoon, The 13, 100–1 ‘Plea for Rationality, A’ 118, 213 ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ 14, 23, 32, 53, 136, 137–8, 141 Reading & Writing 1, 2, 8, 179–80, 214 ‘Return of Eva Perón, The’ 107, 125 Return of Eva Perón, The 13, 101, 102, 105, 118 Turn in the South, A 14, 148–9 ‘Two Worlds’ 179, 213 ‘Without a Dog’s Chance’ 212 ‘Writer and India, The’ 214 Naipaul’s writings, aspects allegories 55, 90, 126, 144 allusions, ironic 44, 78, 81, 111, 126, 129, 135, 144–5, 189 betrayals 95, 120, 128, 161 British abroad 88, 92, 98, 204–5 centres of novels 43, 78–9, 80–1, 88, 121, 142, 152, 180 characters 166

character sketches 26, 27, 28, 62, 71, 165 character types 38, 46, 71, 205 cinematic 97, 111 composites 34, 102, 152, 162 conflicting views 59, 60, 149 contradictions 205 doubling 51, 71, 80, 110 epilogues 38, 54, 141, 142, 188 epiphanies 130–1 exiles 73, 77, 81 facts 18, 28, 34, 41, 52, 75, 146, 207–8 films 37, 39, 93, 96, 97, 108, 190 incongruity 25, 28, 33, 34, 38, 40, 48, 49, 91, 93 inversions 31, 44, 53, 60, 78, 93, 109, 112, 113, 128, 183 language 39, 92, 93, 95, 113 motifs 50, 54, 64, 79, 86, 105, 135, 143 musical organization 143, 154 narrator 33, 50, 52, 63, 75, 120, 123, 138, 152 prologues 43, 84, 90, 97, 188 puns 28, 90–1 rebels 36, 48, 49, 60, 63, 94, 97, 122 sequences 90, 152, 154 social comedy 37, 39, 62, 88, 94 structure 7, 26, 27–8, 29, 54–5, 64, 78–9, 97, 110–11, 137–8, 141–3, 180, 186, 187 subtexts 6, 18, 60, 62, 83, 90, 133, 151, 187–8 tales 166, 188–9 time 71, 78, 139, 154 writers in 6, 27, 36, 46, 51, 61, 70, 71, 77, 106, 110, 112–15, 146–7, 162–3, 190 also see con men, sex, symbols Narayan, R. K. 15, 82, 186, 187, 195, 201 Guide, The 186 My Days 186 national independence 116, 192 nationalism 56–7, 67–8, 70, 127, 150, 157, 185, 196 ‘n.b.’ 210 Neill, Michael 126, 213 neo-colonialism 194 New Day 37 New Statesman 10 New Yorker, The 3 Nigeria 129 Nightingale, Peggy 200, 214 Nixon, Rob 199–200, 214 Notting Hill 181 Nsele 118

Index Obote, Milton 11 oil money 158, 167, 172, 174, 175, 177 origins, myth of 74 outsiders 42, 63, 66, 86, 103, 107, 165, 180, 182 Oxaal, Ivar 29, 211, 212 Oxford University 3, 8, 9 Padmore, George 163 Pakistan 169, 170, 171, 174 Paradise Lost 94 passivity 74, 80, 94, 108, 116 People’s National Movement 17, 80, 208, 211 Perón 133 Persia 167, 169 Persian 170 Phillips, Caryl 204, 215 picong 52 plantation economy 84 Pliny 124 politics 26, 29, 33, 35, 37, 72, 154, 194, 198 politics and Islam 176 Pollack, James 212 Pol Pot 181, 182, 183 Port of Spain 7, 8, 17, 23, 24, 45, 49, 54, 102, 152, 155–7, 158, 159, 207 Portrait of the Artist, A 53, 75 Portugal 181, 192 postcolonial 77, 130, 132, 147, 149, 150, 151, 167, 172, 200 postcolonial advisors 89, 93, 154, 161 postcolonial theory 18, 195–9, 200, 201 polarities 195–6 Proust, Marcel 20, 45, 78, 138, 139, 189 Queen’s Royal College Qum 168

8, 207

Rachman, Peter 181 Raleigh, Sir Walter 84, 153, 161 Ramanujan, A. K. 15 Ramayana 36, 133–5, 213 Ramchand, Kenneth 210 Rampersad, Arnold 17, 210 Ramraj, Victor 201, 214 Razor’s Edge, The 185, 189, 214 Reid, V. S. 37 Republican Party, The 206 revolutionaries 104, 161, 163 revolutions 116, 153, 167, 168, 193 Rhys, Jean 19, 111, 114, 139, 202 Richardson, Samuel 113 Riley, Geoffrey 211

229

Roach, Eric 212 Rohlehr, Gordon 78, 211 Roman Empire 120, 125, 127 Rome 114, 128, 147 Rushdie, Salman 189, 198 Ruthven, Malise 203, 215 Rwanda 92, 119 Ryan, Selwyn 211, 216 sadism 19, 125 Said, Edward 196–9, 214 St Lucia 204 Samaroo, Brinsley 215–16 Samskara 91, 212 Sander, Reinhard 210 sanskrit 160 Sartre, Jean-Paul 60, 74, 88 Satanic Verses, The 198 Saudi Arabia 167, 169, 171, 172, 177 Schiff, Stephen 210 Selvon, Samuel 19, 20–1, 194, 196, 204 sex 19, 31, 65, 66, 77, 80, 100, 104, 105, 108, 125, 190–2 and Africa 92, 191 dangers 87 failures 74 Shakespeare, William 39 Shia Muslims 155, 167, 171 Shiva 64, 134 Shiva Sena 117 Sind 169, 170 Singh, H. B. 199 Sir Vidia’s Shadow 11, 210 slavery 16, 17, 122, 130, 148 slaves 122, 169, 170, 196–7 South America 56, 153 Spain 169 Spanish cruelties 159 Spanish empire 154 Sri Lanka 181, 182 Stalin, Joseph 168 Sudan 196 Sufism 175, 176 Surinam 56 Swahili 160 symbols 41–2, 65, 108, 113, 124, 131, 134, 142, 156 black 107 budgerigars 71 estate 3, 55, 144–5 films 93 garden 43, 143 house 43, 44, 45, 48, 53, 82, 121, 144, 147, 148, 212 hunting 97

230

Index

symbols – continued lives 121 mirror 43, 88, 94 names 38, 62, 70, 71–2, 80, 103, 114, 125, 128, 191 parties 121 rooks 145 sex 106–7, 108 ships 96, 98, 144 shipwreck 73–4, 80, 144 trees 63, 65 whiteness 106, 108 words 114–15 Theroux, Paul 11, 205, 210 Thieme, John 201, 210, 211, 214 Third Worldism 12, 101, 103, 116, 196–7, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204 Touré, Sekou 129 Transition 11 translators 165, 168–9 travel 5, 11, 12 travel books 6, 10, 14, 19, 55, 66, 126, 137, 148–51, 153, 165, 166, 177, 202 Trinidad 3, 12, 13, 17, 28, 29, 32, 38, 75, 84, 138, 156, 192, 195, 209 corruption 130 education 25, 45 Muslims 40, 159 writing about 47, 162 Trinidad 20 Trollope, Anthony 200 Tweedie, Jill 104 Uganda 11, 92, 132, 159, 160 United States 61, 82, 94, 102, 108, 132, 164, 194, 203 abroad 86, 104, 127 Indian in 92–3 Southern 14, 148–9, 158

in Trinidad 92–3 utopianism 12, 127 Vanity Fair 189 Venezuela 102, 153, 164 Virgil 124, 127–8, 132 La Vita Nuova 128 Wahid, Mr 175–6 Walcott, Derek 1, 21, 51, 106, 203–5, 215 Washington, D. C. 87, 93 ‘Waste Land, The’ 61, 75 Waugh, Evelyn 113, 162 Wells, H. G. 51, 62, 89, 136, 211 Wesleyan University 12, 127, 212, 213 West Indian Federation 10 West Indian writing 19–21, 194, 210 Whitaker, Ben 210 White, Landeg 205, 210 white liberals 16, 70, 94, 103, 105, 115, 116, 182 Wide Sargasso Sea 114 Williams, Eric 10, 29, 79, 115, 156, 157, 208, 209, 211, 212 and British 17 and Naipaul 55 Wiltshire 12, 86, 127, 133, 138, 141–2, 143, 144 Wood, James 215 Woodford Square 15, 156, 157 Woodlanders, The 113 Wordsworth, William 189 world as illusion 15, 59, 67 Wright, Richard 17 Wuthering Heights 112, 189 Yeats, W. B.

134

Zaire 118, 119 Zanzibar 119