VS Naipaul’s first books and last homecoming

Sunday (August 17) will be VS Naipaul’s birthday. He was born in 1932 and would have been 93 on Sunday. Naipaul died seven years ago on August 11, 2018, just short of 86. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. In the latter part of his life, he was not in the best of health. When he visited the University of the West Indies, on my invitation in 2007 (I was principal and pro vice chancellor then) he was quite frail, but his mind was sharp and he was feisty as ever. Naipaul remains a controversial writer and figure.

Yet, there was a mellowness about him and a reflectiveness, which manifested movingly in a video interview I did with him when he was here. That entire interview was published in Journal of West Indian Literature, and my video interview can be found on YouTube. It is quite revealing. He broke down in tears during that interview.

I judge the week or so that he spent here in 2007 to have been a time for Naipaul, of coming to terms with himself and his birthplace, which he left at the age of 18, with enough richness of recall to summon the imaginative capacity to work with memory, to produce Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, Suffrage of Elvira and House of Mr Biswas, his four books firmly anchored in home country.

Miguel Street displayed a mastery of Trini language, a grasp of semi-urban Trini life and culture and a depiction of boredom and futility, all laced with humour that had never been achieved in West Indian fiction up to that time. The Mystic Masseur, eventually made into a movie filmed in Trinidad by Ismail Merchant (Merchant and Ivory), remains a classic study of the colonial politician alienated from his own people and their aspirations and, himself. Suffrage of Elvira is the unchallenged masterpiece in fiction of the mutual exploitation of leaders and led, in a small multi-ethnic society, and the corruption that took root in colonial politics to become a national pastime under conditions of Independence. House of Mr Biswas has long ago taken its rightful place as one of the great novels of the 20th century.

Of those, the original manuscript of Miguel Street is the only one that survives today. I held that manuscript in the Special Collections section of Macfarlin Library of the University of Tulsa. The other three manuscripts were lost in an old warehouse in London in 1992. That loss may have prompted Naipaul to find a secure place for the rest of his work. The University of Tulsa acquired all his papers in 1993.

Looking through the Naipaul collection of papers at Macfarlin Library, and knowing that these three precious pieces were gone forever, I felt the immense tragedy of this loss.

Naipaul, in his Prologue to An Autobiography wrote: “The ambition to be a writer was given me by my father.”

Two things that I saw among Naipaul’s papers make that real. The first is a book of poems given to “Vidiadhar” when he was just three years and three months old! Amazing. The second was Naipaul’s inscription in an early self-published version of Seepersad Naipaul’s Gurudeva and Other Tales, which said “the start of our writing.” It is an acknowledgement of Seepersad’s originality and courage in writing about local people and local issues which influenced Naipaul, and an acknowledgement as well, of the debt he (VS) owed his father, on whom he drew in life and in writing for the creation of the context as well as the character of Mohun Biswas.

During his 2007 visit, he took time to walk around Woodford Square in Port-of-Spain. It brought back memories, and people on Frederick Street recognised him, spoke to him. He was moved. QRC Old Boys organised a reception for him at the college. He was happy. The president then, Professor Max Richards, hosted a dinner in his honour. He was appreciative. A session involving the presentation of academic papers was held on the UWI Campus, which yielded a book edited by Jennifer Rahim and Barbara Lalla titled Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on VS Naipaul. And, before he left Trinidad, he read from his work to an overflowing, appreciative audience of close to 3,000 people at SPEC Auditorium and signed books. He was pleased.

The next morning at Mayaro, he looked at the ocean, chatted and ate just one piece of sada roti and tomato choka. He was relaxed, easy, but contemplative as he waited to board at Piarco. 2007 turned out to be his last visit.