HE WAS struck again and again by the wonder of being in his
own house, the audacity of it: to walk down a farm track in Wiltshire to his
own front gate, to close his doors and windows on his own space, privacy and
neatness, to walk on cream carpet through book-lined rooms where, still in a
towelling robe at noon, he could summon a wife to make coffee or take
dictation.
Outside, he could wander over lawns to the manor house, or a
lake where swans glided, or visit the small building that served as his wine
cellar. Vidia, his friends called him; he disliked his name, but liked the
derivation, from the Sanskrit for seeing and knowing. He looked hard, with his
eagle stare, and saw things as they were.
The house, which he rented, was paid for by his books, more
than 30 of them. He had not taken up writing to get rich or win awards; that
was a dreadful thought. Dreadful! To write was a vocation.
Nonetheless his fourth book, “A House for Mr Biswas”, based
on his father’s search for a settled place, had luckily propelled him to fame,
and in 2001 he had won the Nobel prize for literature. He had been knighted,
too, though he did not care to use the title. Hence the country cottage, as
well as a duplex in Chelsea. For, as Mr Biswas said, “how terrible it would
have been…to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion
of the earth.”
Which portion of the earth, though, was the question. Mr
Naipaul’s ancestors were Indian, but that part lay in darkness, pierced only by
his grandmother’s prayers and quaint rituals of eating.
Journeys to India later, which resulted in three books
excoriating the place, convinced him that this was not his home and never could
be. He was repelled by the slums, the open defecation (picking his fastidious
way through butts and twists of human excrement), and by the failure of Indian
civilisation to defend itself. His place of birth and growth was Trinidad,
principally Port of Spain, the humid, squalid, happy-go-lucky city, sticky with
mangoes and loud with the beat of rain on corrugated iron, that provided the
comedy in “Biswas” and “Miguel Street”.
But he had to leave. England was his lure, as for all bright
colonial boys who did not know their place, and his Trinidadian accent soon
vanished in high-class articulation; but Oxford was wretched and London
disappointing. He kept leaving, travelling, propelled by restlessness. Books
resulted, but not calm. Not calm.
Much of his agitation, even to tears, came from the urge to
write itself; what he was to write about, and in what form. The novel was exhausted.
Modernism was dead. Yet literature had taken hold of him, a noble purpose to
his life, the call of greatness.
He had moved slowly into writing, first fascinated by the
mere shapes of the letters, requesting pens, Waterman ink and ruled exercise
books to depict them; then intrigued by the stories his father read to him;
then, in London, banging out his first attempts on a BBC typewriter.
For a long time he failed to devise a story. Beginnings were
laborious, punctuation sacred: he filleted an American editor for removing his
semicolons, “with all their different shades of pause”. Once going, though, he
wrote at speed, hoping to reach that state of exaltation when he would
understand himself, as well as his subject.
Truth-telling, defying the darkness, was his purpose. His
travels through the post-colonial world, to India, Africa, the Caribbean and
South America, made him furious: furious that formerly colonised peoples were
content to lose their history and dignity, to be used and abandoned, and to
build no institutions of their own, like the Africans of “In a Free State”
squealing in their forest-language in the kitchens of tourist hotels.
He mourned the relics of colonial rule, the overgrown
gardens and collapsed polo pavilions, the mock-Tudor lodges and faded Victorian
bric-Ã -brac he saw in Bundi or Kampala; but even more than these, the loss of
human potential.
Many people were offended, and he cared not a whit whether
they were or not. It was his duty and his gift to describe things exactly:
whether the marbled endpaper of a dusty book, the stink of bed bugs and
kerosene, the way that purple jacaranda flowers shone against rocks after rain,
or the stupidity of most people. He resisted all editing, of writing or
opinions. Without apology, he also slapped his mistress once until his hand
hurt. Severity and pride came naturally to his all-seeing self.
To the plantation
The further purpose of writing was to give order to his
life. He carefully recorded all events, either in his memory for constant
replays or in small black notebooks consigned to his inside jacket pocket.
Converting these to prose imposed a shape on disorder; it provided a structure,
a shelter, protection.
His rootless autobiographical heroes often dreamed of such
calm places: a cottage on a hill, with a fire lit, approached at night through
rain; a room furnished all in white, looking towards the sea; or in “The Mimic
Men” the most alluring vision, an estate house on a Caribbean island among
cocoa groves and giant immortelle trees, whose yellow and orange flowers
floated down on the woods. Though he ended his days in Wiltshire, more or less
content, it was somebody else’s sun he saw there, and somebody else’s history.
His deep centre remained the place from which he had fled.
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