By Michael Anthony

People of the Century

Vidia Naipaul Part 1

Express

Section 2

December 20, 2000

Pages 12, 13

A name that towers over those of most of the writers writing in English today is the name of this week’s person of the century – Vidia Naipaul. In the view of eminent critics all the world over, this is the stamp of excellence that Trinidad and Tobago has put upon the literary world.

Vidiaha Surajprasad Naipaul was born at Chaguanas on August 17, 1932. Alert from his earliest days he won a college exhibition to Queen’s Royal College in the opening months of 1944 when he was not quite 12.

Those were years when his father, Seepersad Naipaul, worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a journalist and as a would-be author, producing, interestingly enough, memorable little stories reflecting Trinidad life.

Of course, readers were not to know that from this source would flow the spring of the excellence mentioned before, that this quiet literary talent would blossom out through the son and flourish in the magnificent way that it has. All that one would have noticed, if one had followed the academic career of Vidia in his QRC days, was the consistently high level of work he turned out.

The academic excellence was but a step on the ladder of realising his secret dream, that of being a writer. In his fifth year at QRC (1949) he had the distinction of winning an Island Scholarship, which enabled him to enter Oxford University in 1950.

Naturally, choosing English Language as his discipline he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and from Oxford he went to the next logical place, the British Broadcasting Corporation in London, where he worked as joint editor of one of their programmes, “Caribbean Voices.”

(This was a programme of verse and prose broadcast from the BBC to the Caribbean as part of the segment: “Calling the West Indies.” As a matter of coincidence, the programme was directed by Henry Swanzy, who had greatly admired Seepersad Naipaul and had used his work on the programme.)

Although most writers seem to dream their dreams from childhood, there is not much evidence of Naipaul’s obsession with the craft until, without warning, he burst on the scene in 1957.

In fact, it appears that he had seriously launched into writing by 1955, and in 1956 he went to one of the new publishers in London with two novels. This publisher, Andre Deutsch, immediately recognised the great talent before him. Years later he told another of his writers: “I knew he had what it took to be a writer of distinction, and I felt that even if those two books did not make money for me, there would be other books to come which would do it because I knew that he had it.”

The first of these two books was published in 1957 and was called The Mystic Masseur. The second was published a year later and was called The Suffrage of Elvira.

These two books alone established Vidia Naipaul in Caribbean writing, and could be considered the springboard for the “unleashing” of so many exceptional books by this prolific writer.

His pen never rested, for although he had two novels published in two years – 1957 and 1958 – another was to come in 1959. This is the book of separate but interlocking stories set in one particular location: Miguel Street.

It was in 1960, however, that this already celebrated writer produced the novel that some people still cite as his best work. It was The House for Mr. Biswas, a tale of the life and times of a dedicated family man of Chaguanas, probably the most autobiographical novel that Naipaul has written.

Following A House for Mr. Biswas, Vidia showed his versatility by writing a hard-hitting work of non-fiction entitled The Middle Passage, and this has clearly been the most controversial West Indian book, stirring up the proverbial “hornet’s nest” of criticism.

The criticism was based largely on statements made by the author which were seen as being anti-Caribbean, and anti-Third World; a notion that the author could not see anything good coming from the West Indies.

Anyway, this was his first venture into non-fiction, and therefore the first time he was speaking through himself and not through fictional characters. Which meant he had to stand up by the opinions expressed, some of which were very unpopular.

The Middle Passage referred to in that book was the middle passage of the slave ships, and Naipaul, dealing with the society created by this event, analysed all the complexities resulting from the situation. As was said, his vision of it did not please everyone. Yet, even in this controversial book his critics saw a work of great accomplishment.

TOP

THE NAME OF LITERARY EXCELLENCE

VIDIA NAIPAUL PART II

Michael Anthony

People of the Century

Vidia Naipaul Part II

Express

December 27, 2000

Pages 28, 29

In 1963, Naipaul again broke new ground. This time the book was Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Companion, a book very unusual for a West Indian writer in that the setting and background was entirely English. The critics in the West Indies must have been taken aback by this because they did not say much about it, but this quiet, whimsical story of Mr. Stone was warmly praised by English critics and Naipaul received the Hawthornden Prize for this work..

If the Mr. Stone novel of 1963 was the case of a West Indian writing of the English scene, then in the year before that, one saw the writer move even further away: a West Indian living in England, writing of India, his ancestral land.

It was his ancestral land but he was not going to deal with it from a point of view of false loyalty and the expected sentiment. And he certainly was not going to see it through rose-coloured lenses. He had visited India on a sightseeing and fact-finding mission, and he was clearly disappointed and disillusioned. His assessment of the visit was summed up in the title he gave to the book: An Area of Darkness.

This book won Naipaul many more enemies than friends, and some looked upon him as a cold, diffident writer. In Trinidad, especially, many Indians saw him as one who betrayed the motherland. But as was seen, it was not the first time he had paid a high price for being honest and truthful according to his own vision.

Far from being intimidated he again hit out, this time through a work called “The Mimic Men”. It was interesting that what he was attacking was not far away, not a distant land, but the society right here at home.

This book, published in 1967, set out to show how people in this post-colonial society have been conditioned and condemned by their upbringing and experiences, to a life of mimicry. Although the book was criticized and repudiated by “patriotic” Trinidadians, it has always been recognised as touching the core of truth.

In the same year, 1967, this prolific author published a book of short stories called A Flag on the Island.

Two years later (1969), Vidia Naipaul made yet another departure. He went into the discipline of History for the first time, and the scope, the accuracy, and depth of his work surprised the critics. His story was the story of the fascination of the explorers of the “New World” with the legend of El Dorado, and the part El Dorado played as the focal point in the history of this region of the Americas. This book was the much appreciated, The Loss of El Dorado.

However, it was with the following book that Naipaul hit upon his most spectacular success up to that time. In financial terms it could be called “The Gain of El Dorado,” for it won him the $24,000 Booker’s Literary Prize. This was In a Free State, published in 1971.

After The Guerillas came India – a Wounded Civilization, in 1977; then The Return of Eva Peron, then A Bend in the River, in 1979.

Among the Believers, appeared in 1981, and Finding the Centre, in 1984.

He produced The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, A Turn in the South, in 1989, and to start the decade of the 1990s he published India – A Thousand Mutineies Now. Two of his other works of the 1990s were A Way in the World (1994) and Beyond Belief, (1998).

And it is almost beyond belief that this man of the century who began his career in 1957 with The Mystic Masseur, should have, in the span of 43 years, consistently produced the best works in West Indian writing – touching on history, philosophy, politics, and religion; apart from the books which came from the mainstream of his rich creative powers.

From a literary point of view, no tribute to Vidia Naipaul can border on the excessive, for he has enriched the literary world, thus given us a permanent place in the sun.

It seems to have taken a long time for a work of this master to be the subject of a motion picture, but now that The Mystic Masseur is about to be filmed, it enhances the success story.

And fittingly enough, this is the last in the series about the outstanding men and women of the 20^th Century in Trinidad and Tobago. This Wednesday column, which ends today, the last Wednesday of the century, was meant to act as an inspiration to the young, who have the shaping of our 21^st Century in their hands.

TOP